Happily Ever After This Christmas

by C. K. Martin

  ‘I need to make her see that.’

  ‘Look, I get that you’re going to have doubts about your new job and everything. Hold on.’ Another drilling sound, this was significantly longer. Then Maddy continued without any further explanation. ‘I mean, it’s not like it’s your dream job or anything. But think of how many we looked at online. You want to be able to live with your dad? Then this is the job you need to have.’

  ‘I thought you were all about following your passion?’ Maddy was the kind of woman who lived completely in the moment, whether that was when it came to her job or her women.

  ‘Right now, your passion is looking after your dad. Besides, from everything you’ve said about her, you’re not going to win her over. You just want her to see that you’re not a terrible person so she’ll date you.’

  ‘Is there something wrong with that?’

  ‘Faulty logic. You might be a nice person, but that doesn’t guarantee she’ll want to date you.’

  ‘Now you really are just being mean.’

  ‘Maybe. But you need to snap out of it. This job is going to make you do things you don’t like all the time. That’s life kiddo. Now stop stalking her on Facebook and get some work done. I want you to be able to sneak away early one night and come back here for a Christmas drink or five. We all miss you.’

  ‘I miss you guys too. It feels like being banished to the wilderness out here.’

  ‘How is he doing?’

  ‘It’s slow. I don’t think he’s ever going to be quite the man he was. He’s hit a limit on how much he can do now. Physically at least. Mentally he’s still the same funny old bastard he always was.’

  ‘That’s good. Focus on that. I gotta go. I’m getting funny looks from the boss.’

  ‘Yeah, I should probably get some actual work done as well. Thanks for listening.’

  ‘Hey, what are friends for?’

  ‘Well, usually they give some sympathy as well, but with you, I’ll settle for listening. Take care.’

  ‘Catch you later.’ The phone went dead and Jo looked at it for a few seconds before putting it down on the desk. Maddy had been right of course. A lot of the guilt had originally come from ruining her chances with the only attractive woman she had met since she came back. But now, the guilt was much, much worse. A real solid thing that felt like lead on her shoulders.

  She put her forehead back on the desk and resumed the gentle banging of frustration. The paperwork could wait for another five minutes.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Kayleigh called it the two-thirty slump. In the same way as carbs, there was a sudden descent into apathy that came at the same time each day for her book trade. Too soon for parents to be passing on their way to get the kids from school, too late for the morning tourist trade who were now all sitting down to lunch.

  Some days, she relished that quiet time. When it had been an especially busy morning, it gave her a chance to get out from behind the cash register and walk the shelves. People were generally well behaved, but after a few hundred hands working their way over the same set of books, the displays started to look tired and out of shape. For some reason that completely escaped her, the autobiography of a reality TV fishing star was a hit this year, and her first task had been to restock in advance of the afternoon rush. She didn’t know what confused her more; that there was even such a thing as a reality fishing show, or that this one particular individual had captured the hearts and minds of the general public. The one thing she did know for sure was that the book was an autobiography in the very loosest sense of the word. Industry gossip was that he had only the faintest grasp of the English language in its non-colloquial form and that they’d churned through four ghost writers before one of them could pull something vaguely publishable from the man’s lips.

  Taking advantage of the low footfall and in lieu of a proper lunch break, Kayleigh had unwrapped the cheese and ham sandwich she had made the night before and picked up the phone to Rob. More like a brother than a best friend these days, he answered after two rings. She needed someone to talk to and he was the only one who would listen and make the appropriate noises. ‘It’s only me,’ she mumbled through a mouthful of cheese.

  ‘Hello only you. Thank goodness you called. I was starting to go out of my mind.’

  ‘You’re going out of your mind? Wait until I tell you about my day yesterday.’

  ‘Yes I’m going out of my mind. But please, feel free to make it about you. What’s up?’

  ‘Sorry, but when you hear, you’ll understand.’

  ‘That’s okay, I was only going to moan about being bored anyway. No one ever wants to get a mortgage this time of year. There are only so many times I can pretend to be sorting out the files so that I don’t have to go back behind the counters and help there.’ Rob was one of the few people in the village of her generation who had decided that this was the place they wanted to be. Leaving had never crossed his mind either, not even as an adult when things got slow. Instead, he was the most popular mortgage broker in town, having made his way up from behind the cashier’s desk when he first left school. He had helped her with so many things over the years, especially when things had been tough in the shop. The inheritance from her parents hadn’t been much, but Emily and Jack had both taken out significant life insurance policies before they had died. Tainted money, in some ways, but Kayleigh had a duty to make sure that the bulk of it went to Emily’s care, somehow leaving enough behind that she would also emerge into the world of adulthood with as many choices still available to her as possible. Rob had been instrumental in making sure she did the very best with what she had.

  ‘Let’s just say, the Christmas spirit is not alive and well in here today.’ She looked over at the display, the occasional glint of a decoration in virtual darkness. The warning sign and roped off area made it more suited to Halloween than its true purpose.

  ‘Slow day?’

  ‘It’s more than that. The actual Grinch came in and stole Christmas yesterday.’

  ‘Um? I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Some woman came in from the council and shut us down.’

  ‘What? She closed the shop? Why?’ The actual panic in Rob’s voice came through loud and clear. He knew how much the bookstore meant to her. Not just in terms of livelihood either.

  ‘No. Relax. Not the whole store. Just part of it.’

  ‘Can you even close part of a shop?’

  ‘Apparently so. Unfortunately, it’s the bit with the Christmas display. No one is allowed to go near it and it’s in total darkness.’

  ‘Why, what did you do?’

  ‘I have no idea. She just came in, intent on finding something to ruin my life.’

  ‘Take a deep breath. That seems a bit extreme. I’m sure she didn’t come in solely for that purpose.’

  ‘Really? She’d got herself a clipboard and everything. All dressed up in a smart suit and one of those heavy winter wool coats that serious people wear.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I mean, she can’t have been any older than me. In fact, I think she might even have been a few years younger. She looked it.’

  ‘I’m not sure what—’

  ‘And she was really cool and standoffish. Like she thought she was better than me because she worked for the council and I just run a really old bookstore. Not that she’s necessarily any cleverer than me. A couple of times I asked her a question and you could see her brain try to start to work before her mouth began to move. I mean, do you know how hard it is to just keep your mouth shut when someone like that is ticking boxes?’

  ‘Ticking boxes?’

  ‘Yes. Ticking boxes. Every little tick another part of my life on hold until Christmas. I have spent my morning on the phone to just about everyone in a fifty mile radius and do you think I can get anyone to come out and fix the problem she’s made for me?’

  ‘Well, no. Mainly because you’ve told me more about this woman than the actual pro
blem.’

  ‘Can you blame me? She’s the one who came in here yesterday. Sweeping through the door and destroying everything.’

  ‘You make her sound more Evil Queen than Grinch, to be fair.’

  ‘Why are you being so flippant about this?’ Kayleigh looked at the shadowed outline of the tree again. It seemed to be mocking her. Just talking about Jo Pearmain was enough to get her blood pressure through the roof.

  ‘I’m not being flippant. It’s just that you haven’t told me what the actual problem is and for some reason you seem to think that it’s her.

  ‘Well without her, there wouldn’t be a problem.’

  ‘How old was she again?’

  ‘About my age.’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘I don’t know. A little bit taller than me. Brown hair, just below her shoulders. She looked dressed for the office, which is why I noticed her coming through the door. We don’t get many people at that time of day come in dressed like that. Her accent was strange, like it might have been from round here once, but I couldn’t really place it. Why?’ Rob had begun to laugh on the other end of the line. She squinted with suspicion. ‘Rob?’

  ‘You know I love you. But you have to admit, you’ve gone through a bit of a dry spell of late.’

  ‘A dry spell?’ She knew what he meant, of course. But understanding the words and accepting the meaning behind them were two very different things. ‘What on earth has that got to do with all of this?’

  ‘You know what they say. There’s a thin line between love and hate.’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’

  ‘Come on, listen to yourself. Something has happened that means you have half your shop closed down in the busiest run up to Christmas. Any normal person would be calling me in case one of my clients could do whatever it is you need doing. I say whatever it is because you haven’t actually told me yet what that might be.’

  ‘I was getting round to that.’ Kayleigh swallowed. Whatever Rob was trying to say, he was wrong. So very, very wrong.

  ‘Really, because all I heard was you going on and on about some strange woman who came into the bookshop yesterday and turned your life upside down.’

  ‘You made that sound completely different to what actually happened and you know it.’

  ‘Do I? You know there hasn’t been anyone since—’

  ‘Please Rob. Don’t. Not today. This is serious.’ Rob could be like a dog with a bone once he got an idea into his head. He had spent the past year trying to get her to dip her toe back into the dating world.

  Which sounded like a nice idea. But she had no clue what the dating world actually was for her anymore.

  She was too busy to be lonely. Not only did she say it, she believed it. Rob was the only person still in her life who would even raise the possibility that she was attracted to this woman. Which she most definitely wasn’t. Not that she was in the closet. She’d just never really had the chance to come out of it with any kind of style. When something as significant as having Emily arrive in her life happened, then people tended to make that the focal point of her world. Not that she could complain. She had done exactly the same thing.

  Rob had nursed her through her first real relationship break up. It had been a hugely rocky road for six months and the separation had come as a surprise to no one. Perhaps if Kayleigh had been braver, she would never have got herself involved with a woman she was so completely incompatible with in the first place. But she’d been attracted to her and for someone exploring their fledgling sexuality, that had made Kayleigh grateful enough to act on it. She’d thrown herself headlong into the new experience, never thinking to ask the right questions. Then it had all crashed and burned in a spectacular fashion, leaving her to nurse her wounds. When the time arrived that she could contemplate taking those first small steps back into the dating world, she had been blindsided by the death of her sister.

  Being a surrogate parent to Emily was more important to her than having a woman to warm her bed at night. Rob knew that. So he was wrong. Completely wrong about this woman.

  ‘Okay,’ Rob said, his sigh deliberately audible in her ear. ‘If you’re determined not to admit that this woman seems to have got under your skin, then at least tell me what she did. If she stepped over the line, then perhaps we can do something about it.’

  ‘Well, yes.’ That Rob might have some kind of righteous indignation that Jo had done something illegal hadn’t really crossed her mind. ‘She said the display wasn’t safe.’

  ‘When I came in last week it looked the same as it did last year. Maybe one or two more things on it. Perhaps.’

  ‘You noticed that handmade reindeer decoration from Mrs Cardwell too huh?’

  ‘It was hard to miss, if I’m honest.’

  ‘What could I say? She’s joined the local craft club and it’s giving her something to look forward to every week. She’s not been the same since the death of her son.’

  ‘I appreciate that everyone needs an outlet for their grief, but couldn’t she have taken up baking instead? I’m glad you’ve told me it was a reindeer though. I mean, I’d assumed, but it was hard to be sure.’

  ‘Stop it. She’s lovely. If I’d said no it would have broken her heart.’

  ‘I suppose. But I’m not sure that the council can close down a Christmas display because the artwork isn’t up to scratch?’

  ‘I wish it was just the decorations that were the problem. I could fix that, even if it did mean offending one or two of the locals. There were a couple of problems really. I’d always just walked over and got any of the books myself if people came in for something in that section.’

  ‘That makes sense. I thought it was all the old crap that no one wanted to read in the back there anyway.’

  ‘Philistine. There are loads of great books back there. I can’t help it if you have no taste in literature.’

  ‘Me and everyone else who sets foot in the place. So I don’t see what the problem is. You just have to be the one to have the tree fall on top of you.’

  ‘The problem is that I’ve got no one who works here full time to tell people that they can’t go there and get one of the books themselves. Which means if the store is busy, someone could go ahead and end up with a tree on top of them.’

  ‘I suppose that does make sense.’

  ‘I know. But you have no idea how shitty she made me feel when she warned me that a child could get seriously injured if it fell on them. As if I wouldn’t know what that felt like. As if I wouldn’t care if I was responsible for something like that happening.’

  ‘Ouch. She didn’t know Kay. She wouldn’t have said something like that if she did. You said you didn’t recognise her. She’s probably from out of town, just being a bitch. No one gets that kind of job because they’re a nice person. Like that cow who goes around the supermarket car park and actually slaps fines on people who are there for more than two hours. She got me again the other day.’

  ‘You park on there for work sometimes. What do you expect?’

  ‘I think those of us who have chosen to stay and contribute to village life rather than taking our many skills to the big city should get some kind of free pass.’

  ‘She only does it once a month as a reminder. Haven’t you noticed?’

  ‘Does she? It feels like every week. Anyway, surely you can fix that problem? You were making it sound like an absolute nightmare. Bit of signage, perhaps a cordon, like they have on the red carpet? Doesn’t seem like it’s worth shutting half the shop down for.’

  ‘And there may or may not be a small issue with the wiring,’ she finished with a wince.

  ‘Wait. What?’

  ‘It’s more Grandpa’s fault than my own.’

  ‘I loved the old bugger, but he’s been dead for quite a while now. Are you telling me you have a poltergeist in the electrics?’

  ‘I might as well have. He exploited a minor technicality years ago when he had the place redone.’

/>   ‘That sounds dodgy. Did you know about it?’

  ‘Perhaps?’

  ‘That means yes. Seriously Kayleigh, why didn’t you get this sorted?’

  ‘It was on the to do list. It just kept getting dropped to the bottom. I didn’t have time to close down half of the shop while it got done. Not with Emily. Thank goodness Ms Pearmain didn’t come in when Emily was sitting down behind the counter with me. She’d probably do me for child labour then as well.’

  ‘Oooh, she has a name.’

  ‘Stop it. This isn’t about her, remember?’

  ‘If you say so. But the electrics thing sounds pretty serious. Do you know what you need to do to get it sorted?’

  ‘Not really. I’ve been ringing around every spare moment this morning, but no one will actually tell me what has to be done, they just tell me they can’t do it.’

  ‘Not a single one?’

  ‘Two have said they’d come and take a look, but then they started talking prices. They know I’m stuck for time if I want to have any chance of having it back up and running before Christmas. The amount they both quoted without even asking for any real detail was enough to wipe out any funds raised for the centre. I wish I could take it out of my savings, but there isn’t enough to cover something like that. Not when I know that in the New Year I would be able to get it done for half the price. Or perhaps even less.’

  ‘Isn’t having half the shop roped off going to hit the business?’

  ‘Like you said, it is only one of the locals who would want something out of that section. Most of the people coming in are looking for gifts. The tourists want to buy something regional and festive. I’ve got all the big hitters out at the front when they come in through the door. Some people might comment on it, but I don’t think the profits are going to be hit too badly.’

  ‘I suppose that’s a small mercy then.’

  ‘It doesn’t feel the same. I’m worried.’

  ‘Worried?’

  ‘At this time of year, it’s having the bookstore feel special that gets me through. Raising the money for a charity that has done so much for us both gives me a reason to focus. I’m worried that without it, I’m just going to keep thinking about what happened.’