December Wishes (A Year in Paradise Book 12)

by Hildred Billings

  Salama gave in, tearing apart the paper and enjoying the length and heft of the black box in her hand. Only a few pieces of tape separated her from Christmas destiny. When she ran her thumbnail between two pieces, the others gave way with a mere tug of the box’s lid.

  She pushed aside a layer of cloth. Her present awaited her.

  It was one of those kitschy brown nameplates that went on top of an important person’s desk. Only instead of saying “Manager” or “Salama Amari,” it quaintly said, “Badass Writer.”

  “Don’t tell me you can’t have cussing on your desk.” Heaven smiled. “I hear you say it allll the time.”

  “Only because you’re a terrible influence.” Salama held the nameplate closer to her face. “Did you find this? Or did you have it made?”

  “I had it made. I mean, it came from a website that does nothing but engraving plain stuff like that, but the ad I clicked on was using ‘Badass Musician’ as an example and it gave me the idea.” Was that blush touching Heaven’s cheeks? “Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, you’re a badass writer, and this must be acknowledged.”

  Salama held the nameplate up next to her face. “Where am I supposed to put this, huh? I don’t have an office.” She had a small table in her apartment, and this thing would get knocked over so many times…

  “You can keep it here, and I’ll put it on whatever table you’re using to write.”

  “You’re kidding! I would die of embarrassment!”

  Heaven took the nameplate back and placed it on the edge of the table, on prominent display to the rest of the café. “Done. Can’t be changed now.”

  Salama plucked it off the table. “You wanna try again?”

  “Next step? Moving the mistletoe to that spot right there.” Heaven pointed to the beam above Salama’s head.

  “Uh huh. Then what? Making me bake the cookies for Santa Claus?”

  “No way. I make the better cookies in this relationship.”

  Salama wasn’t arguing that.

  “You know I don’t have anything to give you back right now, yeah?” she asked. “You have to wait for Christmas to get your presents.” All two of them. Salama had gone all out that year!

  “Who says I need you to give me a present? Having you pretty up my café with your presence is enough for me.” Heaven got up and blew her girlfriend a kiss. “You coming by my place for dinner later? Or are you going to tell me that pizza is enough for you?”

  “Why would I have mediocre pizza when I could come by and have your cooking?” Salama held the nameplate against her forehead. “Did you miss the memo? I’m a badass writer, and I need to be treated as such!”

  “Yup. I’ve gone and done it. Opened Pandora’s Box to your ego.”

  “You love it!” Salama called after her. “You must have known what it would do!”

  She got one last wink before Heaven disappeared behind her counter and greeted the next customer to approach the register. Salama sat back and hid the smile attempting to break free from her lips.

  She may not have had many Christmases in her life, but she had a really good feeling about this one.

  Chapter 6

  FRANKIE & ELAINE

  “I have yet to convey what an idiot he was.” Frankie stacked the recently cleaned dishes before placing them in one of the cabinets. Beside her, Elaine diligently scrubbed and passed the clean dishes to her girlfriend, who regaled her with tales of what a blasted dummy Dominic had been earlier that day. “Like, you should have seen his face. Standing there with his mouth hanging open, catching flies and looking shocked. Shocked! What else did he think would happen when he wanted me to throw his wallet across the street?”

  Elaine couldn’t contain the laughter that made her smile like Frankie told the funniest joke in the world. She passed a cleaned spatula and added a little more soap to the mixing bowl collecting suds in the sink. “I’m sorry, this is the best thing I’ve heard about all day, and I first heard about it when Christina came running in after school to tattle on him.”

  “She would,” came a voice from behind them. Dominic sat at the dining table, laptop out and textbooks flipped open. “Ever since I told her she had pimples, she’s had it out for me.”

  “Gee, wonder why,” Frankie muttered. I must be the only person in this house who understands how stupid the whole thing was. She would never forget it. Dominic, motioning for her to throw him his wallet – across Main Street, no less! The boy had a few dumb ideas in his life, but Frankie had no idea what he thought they would accomplish from such a stupid stunt. To be fair, I enabled it. That stretch of Main Street was four lanes wide. What an idiot.

  “There wasn’t too much damage, though, right?” Elaine dried her hands on a towel Frankie handed to her. “Did the car, like, crack your cards in half?”

  “It was a bit more squished than usual, yeah.”

  Frankie snorted. Her brother had one of those impossibly tiny wallets that held him up wherever he went, because he had to sift through every loyalty and rewards card to find the one debit card he had from their credit union. Then he had to go back and find his punch card for Heaven’s. He must have had five in there, because whenever he gave up, he started a new one.

  “Surprised the coins didn’t puncture the tires,” Frankie said. “Seriously, did the cards crack?” Dominic better get them replaced if he wanted to see new ones before Christmas.

  “Cards are not busted, but I’m thinking of getting it replaced, anyway. I’m about due a new pin number. Let’s revamp the whole shebang.”

  Frankie had to chew on that for a bit. A new pin number… She had the same pin number from when she opened her account ten years ago. How often did people change those? Sounded like a pain in the butt.

  “Can you believe him?” Frankie turned to Elaine. “So lackadaisical! If that happened to me, I’d be steaming mad.”

  “We know,” both Dominic and Elaine said at the same time. “But,” Elaine continued, “you’d look like you were chill on the outside.”

  “You saying I stew?”

  “I’m saying we can tell when you’re mad, but you’re good at hiding it from others.”

  “Whatever.” Frankie headed toward the bathroom. “Let it be known that I’m never throwing a wallet across the street again.”

  Her brother’s voice followed her into the bathroom. “You never did it to begin with! To throw something across the street, it has to actually end up on the other side, not on the yellow line!” Elaine’s laughter punctuated those final words as Frankie latched the door.

  There were better things to do that night, anyway. Before coming home to make dinner, Frankie and Elaine had closed up their respective shops and went out to pick up a small tree from the farm outside of town. The place was already picked pretty clean, but they found a nice little tree that wasn’t too hard to strap to the roof of the car and get home before the frost settled on the highway. Dominic had already brought the two boxes of ornaments out of the closet, and jumped in to help his sister and future sister-in-law set up the tree in the corner of the living room. It required relocating a coat rack to the hallway, where Frankie almost knocked it over every time she tried to go to her bedroom, but whatever. They went through this every year!

  Elaine admitted she hadn’t decorated a tree in a few years, which was sacrilege to Frankie, who annually put aside her Grinchy Grumpiness for the privilege of decorating her home and deli. The deli got the usual snowflakes on the windows and some plastic garlands around the interior, but her house? Besides the tree, she put out a nativity set, brought out the Christmas themed dishes, and hung tinsel from every window. When Dominic came along, so did the colorful lights around the front of the house. Frankie cut herself short of putting a fat Santa and some reindeer in her yard, much to Dominic’s relief. Who am I kidding? He’d love that now, but when he was in high school? Never!

  “What in the…” Elaine held up a giant gold star cut out of construction paper. The glitter had fal
len off over the years, but a respectable sheen remained. Inside the middle of the star was a large, Polaroid picture of a young boy with a giant fro and a gap in his front teeth. He was apparently so proud of losing his two front teeth that he stuck the gap right up in the camera. “Dare I ask?”

  She said that to Dominic, who grinned to see his first grade creation. “You have to put that up toward the top! Spot of honor! I mean, look how cute I was!”

  “He brought that down from Olympia when he moved here,” Frankie muttered to her girlfriend. “He straight up raided our parents’ Christmas box to bring that ornament down when we moved.”

  “I can hear you!” Dominic waved his arms behind them. “Why wouldn’t I bring it? Like I said, I’m a beautiful young man in that picture! So cute. So full of childhood vigor. You can look through the gap and see my pure soul. Besides.” He stuck his hand deep into the box. It didn’t come back up again until he had a hold on what he searched for, which was a white ornament bigger than his. Sure enough, in the center of a circle, was an old photo of a five-year-old Frankie staring wide-eyed into the camera. “I had to bring this down, too. We have to go down together. It’s the way of the world.”

  “Awww!” Elaine grabbed the ornament and held it above her head. “Look at you, Fran! You’re the cutest girl I’ve ever seen!”

  Frankie gritted her teeth. “I should kick your butt,” she said to her brother. “This is inhumane.”

  “Fun fact,” Dominic said, ignoring her. “Same set of genetics.” He slung his arm around his sister’s shoulders. “Can you tell we’re related? Because I sure can’t.”

  Giggling, Elaine said, “I can tell! You both have the same nose!”

  “Ah, yes, the French noses.” Dominic pushed his up like a pig’s and did a stereotypically French laugh. Frankie hated to admit it, but it always made her chuckle.

  They were only halfway through decorating the tree when Dominic not-so-subtly hung up a sprig of mistletoe in the hallway entrance. He winked at his sister and shot two finger-guns in her direction before retreating to his room. Frankie wanted to die, but only because her brother continued to know things that were none of his business.

  In this case, he knew that Frankie and Elaine still had yet to kiss.

  “What’s up?” Elaine asked, after coming out from behind the tree. Does she know she has needles on her front? A more daring girlfriend would go over and brush them off her, but Frankie wasn’t comfortable with that quite yet. It took more than a month of kinda-sorta dating to have her comfortable with Elaine showing up at the door with dinner in her hand. Sometimes, it was planned!

  “My brother went and put up some mistletoe. Don’t know who he thinks is coming over to kiss him.”

  “I didn’t realize he was the only person around here worth kissing.”

  “Are you saying you want to kiss my brother? He’s a bit young for you.”

  Elaine placed her hands on her hips. “Yes, that is totally what I said. Yup.”

  Frankie insisted on putting the star up by herself. When she hopped off the step stool and turned around to take it to the kitchen, she encountered a sight she should have anticipated – but could have never, not in a million years, realistically expected.

  There was Elaine, holding the sprig of mistletoe over her head.

  “Oh, no,” Frankie said with an awkward laugh. “What are you doing? We need to finish putting up the decorations, so I know which to take to the deli in the…”

  Elaine stepped forward, mistletoe still above her head. “You don’t have to kiss me on the lips. You could, like, kiss me on the cheek.”

  Frankie hadn’t done that yet. “I’m not really good at the whole kissing thing,” she admitted. “You know how nerve wracking it is?”

  The mistletoe appeared over Frankie’s head. “I’ve got a pretty good idea. I’ve been around you long enough, anyway.”

  “So what are you…”

  Frankie didn’t have the chance to think about mistletoe when Elaine went ahead and ripped off their mutual Band-Aid. Boom. Lips on Frankie’s. While there was no chance for tongue in that tight-lipped embrace, Frankie definitely felt the brunt of Elaine’s intentions.

  Kiss me already…

  Frankie softened beneath Elaine’s touch. “Sorry.” A girlish giggle came from places Frankie didn’t know she had. “I’m… I’m shy, you know.”

  “Oh, I know.” Elaine chuckled, lowering the mistletoe. “Which means you know we’re closer than you ever imagined.”

  “It takes a bit for me to open up…”

  “Honey, I’m just giving you a kiss. I’m not asking you to take me to bed right now.”

  Frankie nearly fainted.

  “We would need a way bigger sprig of mistletoe for that!”

  To the sounds of Elaine’s cackles, Frankie flung herself down on the couch. She refused to explain to Dominic what had happened when he came back out of his room, but he could probably figure it out from the absence of mistletoe in the hallway. The kid was smart, after all. Way too smart for his own meddling good.

  Bless his heart.

  Chapter 7

  SKYLAR

  For some ungodly reason, Skylar was subjected to a Bossa Nova version of “Auld Lang Syne,” probably because she hadn’t been to church in ten years and the Big Man upstairs wanted to passive-aggressively torture her into finding the nearest confession booth.

  Nobody had control over the radio station that played in Paradise Pizza, though. That included John the manager, who had been running the place for the better part of a decade, knew how to change the station, let alone possibly skip a song. It was one of those mysteries that used to gnaw at Skylar, but only now made her feel more sorry for the middle-aged man who had “manager of a pizza parlor” as the crowning achievement of his résumé.

  Like she was any better off…

  Obviously, it was the owner who controlled everything, from the temperature to the holiday music pumping through the speakers as soon as Thanksgiving turned into Black Friday. An owner Skylar had only seen once, since he no longer lived in Paradise Valley but kept an eye on things through the security cameras and phone calls from John. The owner should sell the place to John. Not that John could afford it. This was a man who claimed frugality as the reason behind his old 1993 Ford Fiesta, although it was rougher than sandpaper and sounded like it drove through the bowels of hell. While Skylar saw the sense in paying cash for a car until it gave up the ghost, there came a point when a man had to admit he was broke and nothing more.

  It was a slow Friday night when Skylar wanted to bang her head against the hot case. Carrie mentioned that most of her classmates were out of town for Christmas shopping and early visits to grandma’s house, and the adults around town likewise took off early for their holiday vacations or decided to cook hot soup for dinner. Honestly, Skylar hadn’t seen such a slow Friday night since June, when school got out and kids packed their bags for summer vacation.

  “Got any good plans for Christmas?” Carrie asked, filling the silent void with small talk. “My aunt and uncle spent the better part of this week decking out the house. They say they want a ‘normal’ Christmas for my cousin. I’m not sure what he’s done to deserve any kind of Christmas. I know what my aunt bought him, you know. Bunch of video games he can play offline. I don’t get it. If I had been caught doing what he does, my parents would have left me to rot in juvie. Never mind getting Christmas presents.”

  Weren’t you caught doing something yourself? Skylar didn’t have all the details, but word on the street – and from Carrie’s lips – was that she had done something “hell no” in Alabama and had to get out before her family’s reputation was in the toilet. Skylar was pretty sure it was something to do with an inappropriate relationship, and knowing how well Carrie fit into the world of Paradise Valley, it was probably gay.

  What’s it like to be a kid and know you’re gay? Carrie claimed to have known since fifth grade. In fifth grade, Skylar was still p
laying with dolls and holding back the urge to eat paste. She wouldn’t call herself a late bloomer, though. Can you be a late bloomer if you start puberty at 11? Her first boyfriend was in eighth grade and lasted two weeks. They had done nothing more than hold hands and go to the movies a couple of times. The whole “sex” thing hadn’t come into play until she was an upperclassman in high school, but when she attempted to make up for lost time in college, she stalled at the thought of doing it with “just” any guy.

  Then you meet women like Mik, who seemed to do it with any ol’ girl. That had been Skylar’s first real exposure to a lesbian who was as unapologetically promiscuous as a lot of guys. Of course, it turned out that Mik was using women to continuously get over her old relationship with her ex Ariana, but back then, Skylar saw someone who knew what she wanted and went after it.

  She had never been like that. Skylar was pretty enough that she attracted attention at clubs and with online dating, but everything was so shallow. She never knew if a guy liked her for her or because she was a potential, forgettable lay. Learning that hard lesson a few years before had brought her love life to a crashing halt. The only relationship she had since then was a long-distance disaster with a guy in Seattle. While he was rich enough to come down to Portland on the weekends or invite her up on Amtrak, his demeanor and high expectations of any woman expecting to be his tech-wife had been a huge impetus for Skylar finally cutting ties with her old life in PDX and joining Mik on her excursion.

  Here she was again, in dire need of a change.

  “Ladies!” John called from the counter. “We’ve got a nice big delivery to make out at Waterlily House. Guess their oven fritzed out at some party they’re having and they opted to write some pizzas off their taxes. Who wants it?”

  Skylar’s hand shot in the air. She’d brave the twenty-degree wind chill if it meant getting out of this place for a few minutes.

  Carrie muttered that she would like the opportunity to see her girlfriend, who volunteered at Waterlily House and was probably at the party that night, but Skylar pulled her seniority points in the end. Besides, Carrie usually made the deliveries since joining the pizza force, so Skylar sweetly said this was a way to “give Carrie a break.” Yeah, right. I simply can’t stand to smell this place for another ten minutes. By the time the pizzas were boxed and loaded into her car, Skylar was practically giddy for reasons that only depressed her later.