BeBe sighed and shifted in her seat.
“You’re not going to just forget about her, are you? You’re going to make some desperate, well-intentioned, but totally futile attempt to track her down and patch her up. Aren’t you?”
I stared straight ahead.
“She’s not a stray kitten,” BeBe warned. “Weezie, these street people live that way because they want to, most of ‘em. They’re fiercely independent and they totally resent any efforts to change their lifestyle.”
I rolled my eyes.
“She’s a human being,” BeBe went on. “A complex and probably deeply screwed-up human being. You can’t fix her.”
“But it’s Christmas,” I blurted out. “Look, I know she’s not some house cat I can just feed a bowl of milk to and tie a ribbon around her collar. I know that. But I can’t help it. Yes, I’m worried about Annie. It’s not like her to completely miss picking up her present. Or to miss leaving one for me. I swear, I don’t want to fix her or adopt her. I just want to give her a lousy bag of soap and shampoo and some candy. Is that so awful?”
“Not if you’re able to just leave it at that,” BeBe said. “Anyway, if you want to give her something she can really use, you should have bought some of that rotgut buck-a-bottle wine back there in Hardeeville.”
“Screw you, Ebenezer.” I said it softly, mostly under my breath, but definitely loud enough to be heard.
We were just turning onto Charlton Street when BeBe finally spoke again.
“All right,” she said with a martyred sigh. “I give up. Where do we start looking for Apple Annie?”
“The women’s shelter,” I said promptly. “You check there. I’ll drive over to Reynolds Square, and then over to Franklin Square, where those homeless guys always hang out. If you find her, don’t talk to her. Just call me on my cell phone.”
She gave me a mock salute. “Aye-aye, captain.”
CHAPTER 17
I drove slowly around Reynolds Square, looking for Apple Annie. But the square was deserted. Not even a pigeon would have braved this cold and rain.
The thought occurred to me, as I headed north to Franklin Square—where do homeless people go in this kind of weather? It was too early for the shelters to open yet. And for that matter, where do pigeons go when the weather’s gruesome?
Franklin Square, which stood at the edge of Savannah’s revitalized City Market district, wasn’t any livelier than Reynolds Square. The homeless men who usually congregated on the park benches, playing checkers on upended buckets, had disappeared.
I sighed and headed slowly around the square. I spent the next hour cruising every downtown street and lane, looking for Annie.
Finally, when I was passing the soup kitchen at Emmaus House, on Abercorn Street, I noticed two shabbily dressed men crouching under the building’s overhang, trying to stay dry.
I parked the truck illegally in front of a fire hydrant, and splashed through the puddles toward them.
The men were both white, but their faces were so caked with grime and their shabby knitted caps pulled so low over their foreheads, it was impossible to guess their ages.
“Excuse me,” I said breathlessly. “I’m looking for a friend of mine. She’s an older lady who, uh, lives on the streets around here.”
“Yeah?” The shorter of the two men, whose cap was faded red, took his sock-covered hands out of his pockets and rubbed them together. “What’s she done?”
“Nothing!” I said. “I’ve, uh, got something I need to give her. But she’s not around. I wonder if either of you have seen her? Maybe here at the soup kitchen?”
The taller man, whose hat was olive drab, coughed roughly, and I jumped backward, instinctively.
He wiped his nose with his bare hand. “What’s this lady look like?”
That gave me pause. I’d actually only glimpsed Annie once, that night of the open house at Maisie’s Daisy.
“She’s a white lady,” I said hesitantly. “Probably in her sixties. Gray hair…”
“And?” Green Hat said impatiently, pulling a mangled half-smoked cigarette out of his pocket and lighting it with an orange plastic lighter.
Suddenly I remembered another, telling detail.
“She might be wearing a maroon BC letter sweater.”
Green Hat exhaled smoke in my face, then coughed again.
Cringing, I took another step backward.
“I’d remember better—” he said thoughtfully.
“—if we had some money,” his red-hatted friend said, finishing the idea.
“Oh.” I fished in my jacket pocket, then remembered, belatedly, Daniel’s advice about giving handouts to homeless men.
I brought out the granola bars I’d stashed in my pocket for breakfast.
“I’m kinda broke,” I said, flashing an apologetic grin. “But you can have these. They’re chocolate chip and peanut butter. Protein, you know?”
“No, thanks,” Red Hat snarled. “We’re trying to cut back on sweets.”
“Yeah,” the smoker said. “We gotta watch our girlish figures.”
I shrugged and started to turn away. “Sorry.”
“Too bad,” Red Hat said. He knocked on his forehead. “Aw, look. I forgot where I saw your lady friend. Earlier. Like maybe half an hour ago.”
“You saw her?” I turned back. “Where?”
“We forget,” the smoker said. He took a last drag on his cigarette and tossed the butt at my feet. It hit a puddle and sizzled a moment before dying out.
“That’s not very nice,” I said, giving them a reproachful look. “It’s Christmas, you know.”
“Yeah,” Red Hat said. “We know.”
“Well—” I sputtered, trying to think of a clever comeback. “Merry Christmas!”
The smoker stepped forward menacingly, and I turned and ran for the safety of the truck, locking the doors as soon as I slid onto the seat.
I was almost home before I noticed the white rectangle of paper stuck in the corner of my windshield.
“Damn,” I cried. “Another stinking parking ticket.”
It was past one by the time I pushed open the front door at Maisie’s Daisy.
Mary, the blond-haired UGA student who sometimes helped out around the shop when she was home from school, looked up from the magazine she was reading. “Hey, Weezie,” she called. “Wow. You’re soaked.”
“Pretty much,” I agreed. I shrugged out of my jacket and pulled off my equally sodden boots and headed for the back room to try to dry off.
“Anything going on around here?” I called to her.
“Not much. It’s been raining so hard, not a single person came in all morning.”
I emerged from the back room with a towel wrapped around my wet hair.
“Figures,” I said. “You can go on home if you want, Mary. I think I’ll close up early. Nobody with any sense is coming out in this mess.”
“Okay.” She hopped down from the wooden stool behind the counter, grabbed her purse, and headed for the door.
“Wait.” I opened the cash register drawer and took out a twenty, which I tried to hand her.
“Oh no,” she protested. “You don’t need to pay me. I didn’t do anything except read your magazines. The phone didn’t even ring.”
“I insist,” I said, pressing the bill into her hands. “So nobody came by at all? You didn’t happen to see a little homeless lady hanging around outside? Maybe wearing an old BC letter sweater?”
Her big blue eyes widened. “An old lady in a letter sweater? No, I didn’t see anybody like that.”
After Mary left, I wandered around the shop, doing some light dusting, straightening shelves, and making a list of merchandise I’d put on my After Christmas Clearance table.
The blue lights twinkled on the aluminum tree, and my retro Christmas tunes played away on the shop’s CD player, but I somehow couldn’t shake the melancholy that settled over me like a mist.
I kept a close watch on the sidewalk in
front of the shop, and a couple times even went to the back door to look out to the lane, which was just as quiet. It was futile, I knew, but I still hoped maybe Annie would reappear.
It was nearly four when my cell phone rang. I ran to answer it.
“No go on the women’s shelter,” BeBe reported. “And they’ve never even seen a woman who fits the description I gave them of Annie. They said most of their ‘guests’ are younger.”
“Okay,” I said with a sigh. “I didn’t find her either. I did find two guys in front of the soup kitchen at Emmaus House who tried to extort money from me in exchange for information. But they probably didn’t really know her.”
“Probably not,” BeBe agreed. She hesitated. “You’re not going to let this Apple Annie thing turn into a full-blown obsession, are you?”
“No. You’re probably right. I’m just going to forget about her.”
“I’m definitely right,” BeBe said. “Now go home and wrap some Christmas presents.”
“I’ve only got two left to wrap,” I reminded her. “But I am going to close up early and start cooking for tomorrow night.”
“Thatta girl,” she said. “What time do you want us?”
“Dinner’s at eight. But you could come early and help keep Mama out of the kitchen.”
“Just as long as you don’t make me eat any of that fruitcake,” she promised.
I was standing at the front door, with my keys in hand, ready to lock up, when a tall woman in a rusty black ankle-length raincoat came dashing up out of nowhere.
“Don’t tell me you’re closed!” she wailed, spying the keys.
“Sorry.” I flashed her a regretful smile.
“Please?” She pushed a damp strand of graying red hair out of her eyes. “I left work early just to come over here. I walk by every night on my way home, but you’re always closed by then.”
She pointed toward the display window. “The record player. How much is it?”
“Sorry,” I repeated. “It’s actually just a display piece. It’s not for sale.”
“Oh no.” Her shoulders drooped.
“You can get very nice repro turntables at Restoration Hardware now,” I said helpfully. “Or you could probably buy one on eBay.”
“No time,” she said sorrowfully. “My bus leaves for Buffalo in a couple hours. I wanted it for my older sister,” she explained. “She’s got all these records, from when she was a teenager. They’re the old forty-fives, but she’s got nothing to play them on. Dad gave away her record player years ago, after my mom died and he sold the house.”
“Oh.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got some perfume for her, and a book. She likes mysteries. Nothing gory. She likes romance novels better, but her husband left this summer. Took off with his twenty-eight-year-old secretary. So I don’t want anything too sappy. Of course, everything makes her cry these days.”
“What kind of music does your sister like?” I asked, unlocking the door and holding it open.
“Huh?”
“Come on,” I said, shooing her inside. “If you’re going to take the turntable, you might as well take the records too. How about Elvis? Does she like Elvis?”
The woman stood in the doorway of the shop, rain streaming onto the floor.
“Are you kidding? She loves Elvis. Chuck Berry. The Platters. Tams, Temptations.”
I scooped the record player off the display bed in the window and took it and the records over to the cash register. I found a gift box under the counter, popped the record player inside it, and placed the records on top.
“Pick out your gift paper,” I instructed, pointing to the rack of papers behind me. “Pink poodles? Penguins? Christmas trees?”
“Linda would love the red plaid,” the woman said promptly. “She’s still got her old red plaid lunchbox from when we were kids.”
“To Linda,” I wrote the name on the card with a flourish. “From?”
“Nancy,” she said, reaching for her purse. “My name’s Nancy. This is so sweet of you. Really. I can’t thank you enough. How much?”
“It’s on me,” I said, feeling the melancholy melt away as quickly as it had come. I tied on a huge green velvet bow. “Merry Christmas.”
CHAPTER 18
Daniel let himself in the back door of my town house around midnight, right as I was taking the last two pies—a pecan and an apple—out of the oven.
“Hey,” I said, pleased and surprised to see him this early. Christmas business at the restaurant had been so hectic, he sometimes didn’t get in until two or three in the morning.
“Hey, yourself,” he said, touching a practiced fingertip to the crust of the already cooling lemon pound cake on a cake stand. He nodded approval.
Daniel kissed me briefly, then sat down at the counter, surveying my kitchen. All evening, I’d checked numerous times to see if Annie had shown up to collect her gift, my anxiety feeding a burst of nervous energy that I’d poured into chopping, stirring, and sautéing.
The counters were covered with cakes, pies, and casseroles, not to mention a big pan of oyster dressing and a giant bowl of navel oranges which I’d spent the last hour peeling and cutting up for ambrosia.
“What’s all this?” he asked, pouring himself a glass of red wine.
“Christmas dinner,” I said, holding out my own glass for a refill.
“Did you invite the whole street? I mean, there’s enough food here for Pharaoh’s army.”
“You know how I always overcook,” I said lightly. “Mama says it’s a sin to let a guest leave your table hungry.”
“Eloise?” Daniel put down his wineglass. There were two bright spots of red on his cheeks. “Just how many people did you invite over for dinner?”
“Not that many,” I said, busily grating coconut into the cut-glass bowl for the ambrosia. “Just family and a couple friends.”
“Whose family? The Osmonds? This is a serious shitload of food here. And I seem to remember that you’re an only child.”
“Yes, but besides you and me and Mama and Daddy, there’ll be Uncle James and Jonathan, of course, and Miss Sudie. And BeBe and Harry are coming, and Derek and Eric—”
“Whoa,” he said sternly. “You invited my brothers for Christmas dinner without consulting me?”
“And their wives and kids,” I said quickly, getting it out of the way.
“That’s not a family dinner,” he said. “It’s a traveling freak show.”
“It’s Christmas. I just thought it would be nice to have both our families for dinner. Is that a crime? Our families have never met.”
“Why do they have to meet? Ever?”
Quietly I set the coconut down on a clean plate. I wiped my hands on a dish towel. I took a deep breath.
“Our families need to meet each other because you and I are in a serious, committed relationship. Aren’t we?”
“So far.”
I ignored that.
“This will be my first Christmas cooking dinner in my own house. Every other year my mother has cooked. And before that, in the bad old days, when I was married to Tal, his mother cooked Christmas dinner.” I shuddered involuntarily at the memory of those silent, chilly dinners in the Evans family dining room.
“Finger bowls,” I said suddenly.
“Huh?”
“Tal’s mother used to set the table as though the duke and duchess of Windsor were expected. Right down to finger bowls. Crystal knife rests, place cards. Four different forks, two knives, and three wineglasses. It was grotesque. I could never eat a bite without worrying she’d catch me using the wrong fork, or dropping peas on her Aubusson carpet.”
I took another deep breath. “This year, I wanted to do something special. I know how you feel about Christmas. I know it has all kinds of bitter associations for you. And I want to change that. I want to make a beautiful holiday dinner for the person I love most in the world. For you. You’re my family. And your family
is my family.”
I felt a little weak-kneed after finally giving my big speech, the one I’d been practicing in my head for days now.
“All right,” he said finally. “If this means so much to you, I guess I can go along with it.”
I leaned over and kissed his cheek.
“It won’t be so bad. I promise. It’ll be fun!”
“Like a root canal.”
“Daniel!”
“Look. Eric’s kids won’t eat anything except dinner rolls, white rice, and vanilla ice cream,” he said. “Their mother, Ellen, caters to this absurd behavior. And Derek’s wife, Sondra, is diabetic. Not to mention a practicing vegan.”
I smiled serenely. “I know all about your family’s dietary peculiarities. Sondra faxed over a list of foods that are acceptable to her. I just left the butter and cream out of a couple dishes, and I fixed some pumpkin bars that are made with applesauce, instead of eggs. Also Eric volunteered to bring his kids’ favorite rice dish, as well as the ice cream. See? I have everything under control.”
“You wish,” he said. “Did Sondra happen to mention that she and Ellen haven’t spoken to each other since last Christmas, when Ellen had too much eggnog and told Sondra she needed to gain some weight because she was starting to look like an anorexic crack whore?”
I swallowed hard. “Uh, no. That didn’t come up.”
He gave me an evil grin. “It will. You might want to think about writing up some place cards of your own, to keep those two from having a catfight.”
He poured himself another glass of wine, topped off my glass, then stood up and took me by the hand.
“Come on, Eloise Foley. It’s getting late. Let’s go sit by the fire in front of that Christmas tree of yours and see if you can’t put me in the holiday mood.”
“Be right there,” I promised. “Save me a seat. I just need to run out to the truck and check on something.”
“In the truck?” He frowned. “At this time of night?”
“I had my arms full of groceries when I came in,” I fibbed. “And I left the last bag in the front seat.”
“I’ll get it,” he said, turning toward the kitchen door.
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