Lakeshore Christmas

by Susan Wiggs

  “Sorry,” she said, seeming flustered as she untangled herself from him. “Between the heels and contact lenses, I’m setting myself up for a big fall. But what the heck. A girl can live dangerously, right?”

  Eddie couldn’t help staring. The contrast between the bathrobe-clad woman in her apartment and the one in front of him made him wonder just what was going on in her head. That was the thing about Maureen. She went layers deep, and just when he thought he had her all figured out, she showed him something new.

  “I liked you fine in fuzzy slippers,” he said.

  “Just so you know, they’re going right back on when I get home.”

  Ah, the old Maureen was alive and kicking. “Well, I really appreciate you coming, Moe.”

  “I’m here to listen to you play,” she reminded him. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  He grinned. “It’s a start. Come and say hi to everyone.” Following her to the corner table, he couldn’t keep his eyes off her. She really ought to wear tight jeans more often.

  She greeted Kim Crutcher and Noah’s wife, Sophie, who was enjoying a rare night out while her older kids watched the younger ones. Kim and Sophie took to her instantly, drawing her into their girl talk. It was interesting, the way Maureen’s personality shifted with the change of clothes. The shy librarian persona stepped aside, and this new Maureen was social. Almost confident. Bo set aside his bass and sidled over to the table and slid in next to his wife, who turned to him with her eyes brimming with love.

  “What would you give to have somebody look at you like that?” Ray asked him, indicating Bo and Kim. Still relative newlyweds, they couldn’t stay away from each other. “Your eyeteeth?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Who needs eyeteeth?”

  “Left nut?”

  “Ouch. Shut up and play, Tolley.”

  They pried Bo away from his wife and did a thirty-minute set for the small but enthusiastic crowd at the Hilltop, covering a few popular songs and performing a couple of their own. While he played, Eddie watched Maureen without seeming to be too obvious about it. Some guy, tanked up with a few beers, approached her, bent and said something in her ear. Eddie was poised to leap to her defense, but she seemed composed enough as she gave the guy the brush-off with a puzzled frown, leaning away and saying something that looked like “No, thank you.” It didn’t seem to register with her that the guy was hitting on her. Man, she was an odd duck.

  And he was crazy about her. What a world.

  At the break, he ordered a cup of coffee and took a seat next to her. “Well?”

  “You and your friends are great. And your original songs… You’re a wonderful songwriter. I mean, I already knew that, but listening to you just now, well…now I feel bad about asking you to write a song for the pageant.” She shifted uncomfortably in her seat.

  “I don’t get it. Why would you feel bad?”

  “I didn’t realize what I was asking. Your songs are your heart.”

  “Yeah? You think?”

  She nodded. “The one you sang at the library—it was wrong of me to criticize it.”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Seriously. That song was about you, not the Christmas program. I decided to work on something else for that.”

  She glanced around, a trapped expression on her face. “About me?”

  “Yep. Maureen—”

  “Eddie—” She looked as if she was about to bolt.

  He smiled at her, trying to put her at ease. “We don’t have to talk about this right now.”

  She slumped against the back of her seat. “Thank you.” Then she leaned forward and took a nervous sip of her drink.

  He raised his coffee mug in salute. “Cheers, then. To music and lyrics.”

  She clinked her glass against his mug. Her drink was something girly-looking, with a cherry in it. “Can I ask you something…kind of personal?”

  “You can ask. I can’t promise I’ll answer.”

  “Oh. Well, then—”

  “Kidding, Maureen.” He loved how earnest she was about everything. “Ask away. I got nothing to hide.”

  “I was just wondering if it bothers you to come into a bar, you know, since you’re a nondrinker.”

  “An alcoholic in recovery,” he clarified. “That’s a particular kind of nondrinker. And no, I don’t mind talking about it.” Staying sober had once felt like a daily battle to him, long ago. Not anymore, though. Now it felt like a daily gift—to wake up clearheaded and stay that way. Some people might take sobriety for granted, but not Eddie. He’d come too close to losing everything to put it all at risk again. “Hell, there’s a whole page about it online.”

  “I told you, I don’t look at things like that,” she said.

  Another thing to like about her. She was loyal. She had integrity. “Thanks, Moe. I wish the bozos who wrote the online article were more like you.” The Internet offered a compilation of bare facts and tabloidlike material that skirted the edge of truth. There were links to articles of questionable veracity, pictures of him, past girlfriends and his family. As Maureen put it, the existence of such a resource on the Internet felt intrusive. Seeing the stark facts spelled out on a computer screen robbed the humanity from a person’s story. Haven was involved in a drunk driving incident that resulted in court-ordered community service…. It made him cringe to read stuff out of context in a way that made him seem like a total loser.

  “After all this time,” he told Maureen, “it’s simply a nonissue. It’s like walking into a store that doesn’t sell a single thing I’m tempted to buy.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously.”

  She subjected him to a long, searching look.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You should be proud of yourself, Eddie.”

  “For saving my own life? Not such a feat, considering the alternative.”

  “I think you’re making it sound easier than it was. I bet your parents are proud of you, too.”

  At that, he gave a shrug. “They never seemed to want to talk about it. I suspect because it hits a little too close to home. They partied hard in their day, and having a son in recovery is probably an unwelcome reminder.”

  Maureen regarded him aghast. “Did they tell you that?”

  “Nope, just a guess.”

  “Well. Clearly you need to talk to them about it.”

  He couldn’t help smiling. “Everything’s so simple to you, Moe.”

  “Talk to them. You’ll have a better sense of where you’re going if you know where you’ve been.”

  “You’re a philosopher tonight.”

  She swirled the cherry in her drink around by its stem. “I read that in a book somewhere. There’s this thing I sometimes do with books—” She stopped and waved her hand. “Never mind. You’ll think I’m silly.”

  “I could use a little silly right about now,” he said, happy to dispense with the topic of his family.

  “Okay, sometimes I close my eyes and randomly pick out a line in a book, and I let it guide me. It’s a little game, is all.” Her cheeks flushed, and she lifted her cherry to her lips, nibbling at it, then finally drawing it into her mouth. When she noticed him staring, her cheeks flushed even deeper.

  “Another drink?” he offered.

  “Sure.”

  “What are you having?”

  “It’s, um, a Shirley Temple.”

  “Shirley Temple,” Eddie called to Maggie Lynn. “Two cherries.”

  “Thank you,” said Maureen. There was something both guileless and charming about the way she regarded him. No, not just charming. Undeniably sexy.

  Damn. He hadn’t felt this way about a woman since…ever. He’d never felt this way about anyone. Not even girls he’d said I love you to, not even the woman he’d proposed to.

  What were the chances? he wondered. The town librarian, of all people.

  He was falling in love with the town librarian, and he had no idea why.

  “I can’t imagine tha
t it’s easy,” she said, “yet you make it look easy.”

  Eddie corrected himself. He did know why he was falling in love with her.

  Maureen stood at the door to her building, wishing she’d had something stronger than Shirley Temples to drink at the bar. No, she didn’t wish that. It didn’t feel right, having a stiff drink when Eddie worked so hard to stay sober. Still, she felt horrendously nervous. At the end of the evening, he’d insisted on following her home, overriding her protests.

  “I don’t need anyone to see me home,” she’d insisted.

  “I know that. I want to,” he’d said.

  And now they faced each other on the top step of the brownstone, and she was a bundle of nerves. “Well,” she said, “thanks.”

  “Invite me up,” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t think—”

  “Good plan. Let’s not think. Just invite me up and we’ll see what happens.”

  She wanted to. It made no sense, it was foolish in the extreme, but she wanted to more than she wanted another breath of air. Before she lost her nerve, she stabbed her key into the lock and led the way to her apartment. The cats swirled around their ankles in greeting. Everything was just as she’d left it, dashing out for her speed-make-over on the way to the Hilltop. There was her book, still propped open on the kitchen table. Dishes in the sink, TV dinner in the trash. She’d left with no notion that the apartment would soon be a scene for seduction.

  “I like your place,” Eddie said, shrugging out of his parka and slinging it over a chair. He helped her off with her coat. “I like you. I think I’m starting to love you.”

  Her breath stopped, until she realized she was holding it and forced herself to exhale. Somehow, she found her voice. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said, turning her in his arms and bending down to kiss her. “Really.”

  She tried to tell herself it was foolish to believe him, and yet she did. He took her by the hand, and like a ninny, she let him lead her to the bedroom. The reading lamp was on, and he frowned at its glare. “Too bright,” he muttered.

  “I read myself to sleep every night,” she explained.

  “Not tonight, you don’t.”

  The tone of his voice filled her with a yearning heat. “Eddie—”

  “Wait there,” he said. “Don’t move.” He went and got a string of Christmas lights from the front window, and returned to the bedroom. “Stand back,” he instructed her. “I’m a professional.” He plugged in the light string and draped it across the headboard, plunging the room into a dim, multicolored glow. “Better,” he said, and slipped out of his jeans as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  She stared at him. “Are those…Santa boxers?” She started to giggle until his kisses turned humor to passion, a passion that burned through the last of her apprehension, turning her pliant with need. Then he undressed her with a leisurely eroticism that drained every brain cell from her head. He laid her back on the bed, the Christmas lights bathing them in a rainbow glimmer. She reached for him in a moment of delicious, willing surrender. He was everything she’d imagined in her most secret dreams—gentle and slow, considerate, utterly comfortable, as if making love to her was his greatest goal in life.

  Oh, he showed her things—the power of a perfectly placed kiss, the irresistible warm pressure of his hands skimming down her body, the intoxicating suggestion of a whisper in her ear. The explosive joy of pent-up wanting, finally and exuberantly released. He asked nothing of her, yet she gave him everything, the passion that hid inside her in a place no one but Eddie had ever bothered to find. And she was good. She knew it, because he told her again and again as the moments drifted by, turning into an hour…two hours, longer….

  “A tattoo,” he said with a chuckle, bending to trace his fingers over the small of her back. “The librarian has a tattoo. God, Maureen, that’s…God.”

  “Well, if I’d known it was called a ‘tramp stamp,’ I never would have gotten it,” she said. She couldn’t believe what they’d just done, couldn’t believe she’d left the Hilltop and brought him home with her, couldn’t believe they’d just made love until she nearly wept.

  Wait, she could believe it, because they were about to do it again.

  They both had to get up at the crack of dawn the next morning, Eddie to go on the radio and Maureen to catch an early train. There was that morning-after awkwardness—on Maureen’s part, anyway. She tried to behave as if waking up next to a warm, attractive man was something she could take in stride. Eddie seemed completely natural, stretching luxuriously, groaning with reluctance as she slipped from the bed and grabbed her bathrobe.

  “I have to go,” she said. “It’s our annual holiday meeting.” She briefly contemplated unplugging the Christmas lights around the bed, but decided to leave them burning. Heck, why not?

  “Can’t you skip it?” he asked.

  “No, especially not this year. I might be looking for a job soon, so I need to stay in touch with people.”

  “Still hedging your bets.” He stood there in his Santa boxers, looking so appealing she actually thought about canceling everything and staying right here with him.

  “I need to be realistic,” she told him. “I know we’re doing everything we can for the library, but time’s running out, and we’re not even close to raising the money we need.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s not over ’til it’s over. Stay here.” He grabbed her and gently pressed her against the wall, bending to nibble her neck. “I’ll tell the girls at the station to play a canned show this morning.”

  She nearly succumbed, getting the hot shivers from his beard stubble. “I have to go,” she repeated, ducking down and slipping from his grasp. “It’s being held in Seaview this year.” She regarded him with knowing eyes.

  “Home of the Havens,” he said in a radio-announcer voice. “I don’t really think my folks are library patrons.”

  “Maybe I’ll drop in and see them, invite them up for Christmas.”

  He laughed. “Right. They’d love that. Nope, trust me, honey, they have other plans.”

  “Have you ever invited them?”

  “I think their Christmas program days are over and they like it that way.”

  “But you’ve never invited them.”

  “I know what they’d say.”

  “They might surprise you.”

  “Moe, I hear what you’re saying,” he said, pulling her into his arms. “And I appreciate your concern. But believe me, I don’t need to be with my folks at Christmas, and they sure as hell don’t need to be with me. We tried that when I was a kid, and it didn’t work out so hot.”

  He gave her a delicious kiss, sweet as candy. “In case you haven’t noticed, I got something better to do at Christmas.”

  Part Five

  Christmas Eve was a night of song that wrapped itself about you like a shawl. But it warmed more than your body. It warmed your heart…filled it, too, with a melody that would last forever.

  —Bess Streeter Aldrich (1881-1954), American author, in “Song of Years”

  Nineteen

  Eddie was dreaming of the angel…yet again. This time was different, though. Unlike all the other dreams, made up of half-formed memories and wishful thinking, the images in his head, teasing him awake, were as clear as a cloudless winter night. The first part of the dream was the same as ever—he lay nearly buried in a snowbank after the crash, mute with pain and shock, about to freeze to death, unnoticed by the people who had poured out of the church…until the angel showed up. The thing that was different about this dream was that he saw the angel’s face.

  He sat up, fully awake, walked straight to his guitar and wrote his song for the Christmas program. Just like that—no hesitation, no groping around for meaning or melody. In his life, he’d composed hundreds of songs for all kinds of reasons, but never had he written with such clarity and conviction. He couldn’t wait to sing it for Maureen, offering it to her like a gift. A promise.

&n
bsp; Unfortunately, he’d have to wait. She’d gone away overnight for some library meeting on Long Island. The twenty-four hours without her dragged. When she returned, he promised himself he’d devote every free minute to her. He’d embark on a campaign to get her to fall in love with him. Maybe he’d take her to the Apple Tree Inn and…no. The place still had some bad associations for him. Okay, maybe he’d bring her home, then, to his place by the lake. Hell, maybe he’d even make dinner. He’d definitely make love to her again. From the very start, she had surprised him, but never more than when he took her to bed. She was sweet and not afraid to be vulnerable, and she drew from him a tenderness he didn’t know he had.

  In other areas of his life, she challenged him, too, never making things easy. She wasn’t after his surface charm like an autograph seeker, but what lay beneath. And for the first time in a long time, that didn’t scare him.

  He burst into action, straightening up. The place wasn’t a disaster, but he wanted her to like it here. He wanted to play her a song on his Gibson guitar, the one his grandfather had given him, signed by Les Paul. He wanted to tell her stuff that was sappy but true, stuff that would make her smile. He wanted to give her a gift, but the only thing she wished for was something he couldn’t give her—a way for the library to survive. Damn. If he could make that happen, if he could give her that….

  He turned the problem over and over in his mind. Made a call to his entertainment lawyer. If the silver anniversary DVD was selling as well as the trades said, maybe Eddie could at least buy the library some time. Or hell, according to the lawyer, the clips on the Internet were getting a zillion views per hour; surely he could parlay the renewed popularity into something. Eddie didn’t want to be famous again, but maybe he could use his popularity to help out the library. Maureen would love that.

  He listened to the new Drive-By Truckers album and sang along while putting clean sheets on the bed. No harm in being optimistic.

  In the pause between songs, he heard the insistent sound of a doorbell.

  “Sorry,” he yelled. “Coming.” He wasn’t expecting anyone. Maybe it was Maureen. Maybe she was thinking the same thing he was.