Christmas in Bed

by Bridget Snow

  “I can’t—”

  “Read it,” he said, refusing to take the book back from her and rushing back inside where it was warm.

  With a deep sigh, Mel walked back to her empty mansion and set the book down on the coffee table in the living room. She hadn’t cleaned this furniture yet. The mantle had cobwebs, the fireplace needed a scrub, and the windows still had a glazed look from a decade’s worth of unattended-to dust.

  She picked up the phone and selected from her recent outgoing calls. It only rang once.

  “Harvey Towle speaking.”

  “Harvey, this is Mel, from the Hansen House.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “Listen, I don’t have anyone lined up yet, it’s only been a day.”

  “I know,” she said. “But I uncovered some furniture and I put up a tree. I just thought some updated pictures might help.”

  “Send them over.”

  Mel kept him on the phone while she started snapping photos. She covered the foyer, dining room, and kitchen before Harvey stopped her.

  “Sweetie, I told you to deck the halls, not just one hall. Have you ever been to one of those dumpy little museums that’s only historic because a founding father lived there for like, two years with his first wife who promptly died of dysentery? That’s what this looks like. With a tree in the middle.”

  “So what are you saying?” she asked.

  “The foyer looks like a nice effort, but I need more green. More red. More tinsel. Do the whole house.”

  “That’s so much work,” she said. “And if it doesn’t sell?”

  “There’s always next Christmas.”

  “But the taxes…” she said.

  “Listen, I have to go, I have a luxury condo open house getting started.”

  “In Billings?”

  “Yes, of course in Billings. Bye!”

  The screen went dark in Mel’s hand. Feeling a little lost and a lot in-over-her-head, she placed one more call.

  “Lorna,” Mel said, tears of frustration burning in the corners of her eyes. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. This house is unsellable and I have this terrible feeling that Craig was right; I don’t belong here.”

  “Whoa,” Lorna said. “If you think Craig was right about something, you’re nuts. Say the word, I won’t even put in for time off, I’ll just come right to Montana and give you a hug, or a slap in the face, or both. Whatever you need.”

  “No, but thank you. I’ve just had a little wake-up call about small town life. There’s nothing here. Why would anyone buy a house in a dying, empty town?”

  “You were giddy about finding a nice big man in a cozy, quiet village. I thought you’d never come back!”

  “Mason is amazing,” she said. “I barely know him, but the chemistry is off the charts. I have butterflies in my stomach just thinking about him. The way his lips move down my body, he’s like a harmonica player.”

  “And you’re his harmonica,” Lorna said. “Let’s skip past the part where you put out on the first date, which I’m proud of you for, by the way.”

  “It didn’t feel like a first date, it felt kismet. And I know he felt it too.”

  “I fail to see the problem,” Lorna said.

  “The problem is everything else. Pine Corner has one café and coffee is the worst thing on their menu. I couldn’t get Casey a decent present because the only children’s store for miles is like a 1950’s Santa’s workshop but the elves are just rosy-cheeked Pine Corner lifers. The only hair salon is a men’s barber, and the women are all okay with that. But I’m not. And I have yet to find a dry cleaner, so I can probably just kiss my cocoa-stained blouse goodbye.

  “It’s like the Island of Misfit Toys out here, and they all know it. They won’t admit it, but they wish they were in Billings, because cities are where people thrive. Cities have creature comforts and modern conveniences.

  “This old house is a mansion, but it has no air conditioning and it’s miles away from civilization. Real people don’t live like this.

  “They say location is everything. Here, the location is nothing. I hate to feel like I’m just giving up, but what can I do? I’m coming home early, after all.”

  “Craig strikes again,” Lorna said. “I heard.”

  “Exactly. I just need more time to figure out what everyone else here seems to know. What makes Pine Corner a place they love so much? That’s the selling point, that’s what I have to find a way to show people.

  “I’m starting to see it, a little bit. Lucy’s coffee is a cardinal sin, but her pie is like pumpkin-spiced crack. The women all go to a barber, but maybe there’s just less pressure to look a certain way as long as your heart is beautiful. So far, these are the most gorgeous hearts I’ve ever met.”

  “Ahem.”

  “Aside from you and Casey. You girls are golden.

  “Then I think about coming home to New York, and for what? A shoebox apartment I’ll never own? A bank account that barely outpaces my grocery bill? I feel like Montana is reaching through time and trying to pull me back to my ancestral roots.” With big firm hands and a single day’s worth of blond scruff on his chin that scratches against my inner thighs when he—

  “Have I lost my senses, Lorna? I want to stay and ride this out.”

  “You want to ride Mason out,” she said.

  Mel smiled. “I certainly do. But first, I have to start on dinner before his shift at the tree farm ends. That’s right, he’s a tree farmer, on a farm he owns, and a man that size needs his fuel for the night I have planned.”

  Chapter Seven

  Mason

  Mason climbed the steps to Mel’s house slowly. His body ached from hauling trees and setting them up for customers to browse, but in the end, they only sold a few trees all day. And those were all older, left to grow an extra year or two so the lot had a variety of sizes available. The newest crop — and the most plentiful — were a hopeless pile of dead weight. Everything planted that year had grown deformities.

  The one mercy all afternoon was that Kyle took pity on his exhausted ass and sent him home early. Mason was too eager to see Mel to bother acting macho about it. Too eager to taste her again. He sped all the way from Two Archers Farm, and now his hand grazed the doorknob to Hansen House.

  That’s when he heard his name. A grin climbed up his face and he paused to listen.

  She thinks I’m ‘amazing.’ I’d better keep living up to that if I’ll get her to stay.

  Mel’s voice was partly muffled, and he guessed from the short pauses that she was on the phone, gabbing to a friend about him.

  Girl talk. I shouldn’t eavesdrop, but it’s about me. No, I should just ring the bell and scoop her off her feet. Bury my face between her legs and really give her something to gab about.

  That’s when his heart started to drop.

  “It’s like the Island of Misfit Toys out here, and they all know it,” Mel said.

  Mason leaned nearer to the door, keeping his ear close to the glass.

  “They wish they were in Billings,” she continued, “because cities are where people thrive. Cities have creature comforts and modern conveniences.

  “This old house is a mansion, but it has no air conditioning and it’s miles away from civilization.”

  His heart was in freefall now, like Mel had been dangling it over a cliff and suddenly decided to let go.

  “Real people don’t live like this.” Her voice was a distant echo now. “They say location is everything. Here, the location is nothing. I hate to feel like I’m just giving up, but what can I do?”

  Then, the final blow:

  “I’m coming home early, after all.”

  Thump. He felt it in his core, the impact of a heart hitting the ground right before getting stomped on.

  Once a big city girl, always a big city girl, and she couldn’t get away fast enough.

  Mason turned away and trod lightly down the steps to avoid drawing Mel’s attention. His fists clenched tight and h
is anger boiled over. He would not stick around just to be abandoned later, discarded like a pretty piece of wrapping paper once the holiday was over.

  He punched the old Hansen House sign dead center on the way to his truck, sending the wooden plank spinning on its hinges. He had parked down the block so his engine’s hum wouldn’t give him away. He had planned on surprising her with an early arrival. Now he slammed the door shut, happy the distance masked his volume.

  He picked up the phone. “Kyle,” he said. “You still need someone to haul those ugly trees to Billings? I’ll do it. I’ll sell every last one, no matter how long it takes. Start filling the trailer. I’ll be there as soon as I pack a bag.”

  Chapter Eight

  Melody

  Ten o’clock turned into eleven, and then midnight. Mel had wrapped up Mason’s dinner and placed it in the fridge, impatient for him to come home, but knowing this was life’s way of testing her.

  There would be no freaking out like a crazy person tonight. Mason had two jobs and a struggling farm. The first time he said he’d come back for her, he did exactly that. No reason not to trust an honest man the second time around.

  She turned off the lights one by one — slowly, on purpose, hoping that Mason would arrive before she fully gave up for the night. Eventually, she reached the master bedroom on the third floor and the house was locked and dark. She slid out of her lacey Christmas thong and slipped into something better suited for sleep.

  He had her number. If he came back late, she was sure he’d call.

  ***

  The next day was harder. She had no missed calls or texts from Mason. He stood her up, and now he was going to ghost her. It was a familiar script, as if men everywhere had a secret playbook that was one page long. One sentence long: “Wait until they trust you before running away.”

  Mel did what any woman with a missing man, an ancient house, and a lack of cable movie channels would do. She got to work.

  For two days, Mel scrubbed the house’s bathrooms until the faucets gleamed, cleaned the grime off old fixtures, de-gunked the outer shell of the boiler, and polished the wooden furniture. A broom, a mop, a vacuum cleaner, an army of sponges and rags — every implement went into full service as she turned that house into an immaculate specimen.

  She could do nothing about the dining table and chairs, badly in need of a sanding and refinishing. The wallpaper was lacking a little TLC, and the floorboards had damage in a few spots. She wasn’t capable of making repairs, but she sure as heck could clean.

  Late on the third morning, when the linens were all fresh and pressed and the stovetop was gleaming, she had officially run out of tasks to keep her mind off Mason.

  Not that cleaning had been 100% effective at that. His hands unlocked something deep inside her, a place that knew his touch and now it begged for more. His mouth was a language all its own; now that she learned his tongue, it was all she wanted to speak. Any time she stopped moving, she started to squirm, her body craving his attention with no way of getting it.

  And then there were the cars.

  This wasn’t a busy street, and it wasn’t a busy town, so every time the low hum of an engine grew to a loud growl outside her house, her heart skipped a beat and her breath caught in her lungs. She’d freeze in place and wait for the sound of footsteps toward her door, but there were none. Just the occasional passerby, and then the growl would whimper into the distance.

  She hated herself for hoping it was him, back again and with a good excuse.

  A good excuse for what, vanishing for three full days and not even the decency of a phone call? No, there was no such thing.

  All she could hope for now was to sell the house and cut her losses — financial and emotional.

  It was that morning, as she wandered the halls of Grandpa George’s once-upon-a-home that she remembered the old history book the town barber had given her. It may not be a cheesy feel-good made-for-TV movie, but it was better than nothing.

  What she quickly discovered, however, was that it was better than everything.

  Page after page, she flipped through summaries of historic events in Montana’s history, and everything that started in Billings seemed to wander toward Pine Corner, like the two were cosmically linked. And it all started with one young woman intent on building a life on her own terms.

  In 1910, back when Pine Corner was an uninhabited patch of virgin land thick with evergreens and black bears, Ruth M. Hansen bought a five-acre plot for forty-one cents. It was the only place she could afford to build, at a time when few women owned any property at all.

  Life was uncertain amidst the wilderness, but she was young and determined. She spent her nights in the basement kitchen of a Billings boarding house, baking honey-butter biscuits by the hundreds. By morning, she walked the train tracks, selling food with a smile to the men that built the Billings railway.

  On Sundays, she rented an old horse and rode east to supervise construction on the first plot to break ground in a town that had yet to earn its name. Other home-hunters quickly followed, settling for cheap labor and simple construction plans that yielded houses much faster than Ms. Hansen’s, but she stuck to her guns. Eight bedrooms, and a private bath for every one.

  “Can’t go wrong with honey butter,” Mel said. She read each page closely, like the words were a gift she unwrapped with care. Some pages told of the house’s construction in great technical detail. Others explored the implications of a house so large in a community so small. None of this, it seemed, was wasted on the house’s first owner.

  Ruth M. Hansen ran for mayor twice, losing both times to the man she would eventually marry: Tobias Lane. In a decision that scandalized the town, she declined to take Tobias’s last name even as she bore him a single child.

  “So we are related,” Mel said. “Great Grandma Ruth.” She flipped ahead to an insert of glossy pages holding photographs of the house and its inhabitants.

  There he was. Grandpa George.

  Mel’s fingers grazed the page, sweeping over the glossy reproduction of a sepia-toned photograph. Her grandfather was a boy, in a neat little scouting uniform, looking terrified of the camera. Everyone did, back in those days. No one bothered to fake a smile. The caption listed out his full name, George Tobias Lane.

  As she squinted, she realized another name was written in full, for the first time in all those pages: Ruth Melody Hansen.

  The ‘M’ stands for Melody!, she thought. This is too much.

  She continued reading about this woman’s life, and how the town grew and changed. The house changed too, put to many purposes over the years as its owner saw the opportunity to pivot between uses. Children were raised here, taught here, healed here. The house was a political hotspot, a social hub, and the venue for weddings and funeral services. It turned a profit in some endeavors, and gave it away as a charity in others, but it was always exactly what this town needed in its time. It took, and it gave, and the town thrived.

  Everyone seemed to have a connection to the Hansen House back in its heyday. Just when one endeavor stopped being profitable, Ruth Melody Hansen shifted gears and turned her mansion into a whole new thing.

  Her genius was her adaptability. It was time for Mel to find out if the same genius ran in her own blood. The era of Hansen House’s lonely emptiness was over. That was a useless endeavor, and Hansen House wasn’t built for useless endeavors.

  It was time Mel shed her own era of lonely emptiness, too. No more waiting for Mason to explain his long, inexcusable absence. Like a true Hansen, Mel would set out on her own terms.

  She took out her phone and searched for the address of Two Archers Farm.

  It was time to call herself a cab.

  Chapter Nine

  Melody

  “Wait here,” Mel said, instructing the driver on her way out of the cab. The sign on a high wooden gate welcomed her to “Two Archers Farm,” and she passed beneath it, following a path of dirt and pine debris on her way toward a small
shed. Pine trees stood in rows along that path, each with a single color-coded ribbon to indicate its size.

  There were a few taller trees with majestic boughs and beautiful conical shapes, but most were shorter and less picturesque. They were strapped tight to their bases to keep their slanted forms from tipping over, and many had patches that were either brown or completely bald.

  Oh, Mason, she thought. Pity for those poor trees had softened her sense of indignation at his long absence. His whole year was spent growing trees for this season, and they were the sickliest-looking trees she had ever seen.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” a man asked, swinging the storm door open from the wooden shack at the tree lot’s edge.

  “I hope so,” she said. “My name is Mel.”

  “Mel.” The man paused for a second’s thought, then laughed. “You have a real Big Apple look about you. You must be Mason’s girl. I’m his brother Kyle.”

  “I’m no one’s girl.”

  “Fine, his woman. His lady. His foxy momma.”

  “If I’m really his foxy momma, maybe you won’t mind telling me where he’s been the last three days.”

  “Billings,” he said, his expression morphing from curiosity to realization. “Oh, he never told you.”

  “That you sent him all the way to Billings just to sell trees?”

  “It’s where the people are,” Kyle said. “And I didn’t send him. Nobody sends Mason anywhere, he’s a stubborn one. No, he volunteered. All of a sudden, really. His voice all growly and serious. You two lovebirds have a fight?”

  “No,” she said. “He was going to come over for dinner, and then he just vanished.”

  “He better not pull that with me,” Kyle said. “He’s got all my trees. Well, not all of them.”

  Kyle gestured toward the area behind the small shed, which looked like a very well-ordered forest. “We plant hundreds of trees each year, and harvest them seven to ten years out for sale. If we can make it to next year we should recover. I just don’t know what our prospects of that are.