Yet Mike persisted. “You all know that this group got its name from Jeremiah 29:11-14, right? God has plans for you, but there’s absolutely nothing wrong with helping Him along and making the most of the talents He gave you. That’s what Abbey is here to talk to you about—maximizing your time and your talents. Let’s welcome her.”
Some lackluster applause accompanied Abbey as she faced the group again. She knew her first instincts had been right. She shouldn’t be here. What on earth had she been thinking of? What kind of insanity had overtaken her when she agreed to do it?
I need some help here. If there was ever a good time for prayer, this was it.
The sea of faces swam into focus. One by one, she looked directly at each young woman and saw them as individuals, not a homogenous group of blasО girls. Their eyes met hers, and in that moment of contact, each teenager let Abbey see past the artifice. She saw the fear of rejection behind the bravado, the hurt behind the mask of boredom.
The words she had so carefully prepared vanished from her mind, and suddenly they were replaced by words from her heart. The group quit shifting in their seats and focused their attention on her. The young women watched her, transfixed, and her speech gained power. She talked about finding her talent and making the most of it, and the satisfaction of knowing that she was doing what she was meant to do, and doing it well.
The teenagers rarely looked away as she talked. And finally, she realized she was through. Her energy reservoirs were totally depleted, and she felt as limp as cooked spaghetti.
Mike stood and shook her hand. “That was wonderful. Thank you so much for coming today and sharing your expertise with us. Abbey will stay for a few minutes if you want to talk to her some more. I’m sure she won’t mind answering any extra questions you might have.”
There was a moment of silence before the worldly cloaks fell back over their eyes and they retreated to their faНade of coolness. Yet as soon as Mike left the podium and the session was clearly over, in one wave of movement, the young women stood and came forward to surround Abbey.
❧
Mike sighed with relief. Abbey had done extremely well to get this kind of reaction from them. He offered up a quick prayer of thanksgiving for the success of her talk. Not only did the girls need it, he sensed, but Abbey did too.
Finally the last teenager drifted away, and Mike moved over to where she was standing. “You must have been quite the success,” he said. “These girls may be anywhere from fourteen to eighteen in chronological age, but in street years, they’re much older. They’re usually so blasО that we’re lucky they’re not doing their nails during the presentation. And you were worried!”
To his amazement, she sat down and put her head in her hands.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Are you ready for this? They all had the same question.” Abbey shook her head in amazement, but she didn’t look up.
“Really? What was it? Did they want details on how to find career counseling or something like that?”
“No.” Her shoulders began to shake.
Mike ran his fingers through his hair. Why was she crying? He never knew what to do when adults cried.
“Did they have educational concerns, like where to find a school?”
“Not exactly.”
“They were intrigued by a career in retail?”
“Um, sort of,” she hedged. She raised her eyes, and he realized that she had not been crying. She was laughing. “They wanted to know where I got my vest.”
They looked at each other, and together they howled with laughter. It was getting to be a habit with them, this roaring into uncontrollable laughter over the most inane things. But it was a nice habit.
“It’s so absurd,” Abbey said at last. “All of that emotion, that worry, that preparation, and all they wanted to know is where I got my stupid vest.”
“It’s good advertising for Trends,” Mike said.
“No, it isn’t.” Abbey couldn’t avoid the absurdity of the situation. “I got it at the discount store at the other mall about four years ago. I had no idea what to tell them, so I just said I’d had it for ages.”
“Do you feel bad that you put so much work into the presentation only to have it turn out this way?” Mike asked gently.
It was a legitimate question, and Abbey’s response was a bit surprising to her. “I’ve got to admit it would have been a lot simpler if I could have had them come over to my house and go through my closet, if that’s what you mean. But yes, it’s a bit distressing. All that planning, only to find out I’d been preparing for the wrong thing. Go figure.”
“You know,” Mike said, standing and reaching for their coats, “the verse in Jeremiah applies to you too. We don’t know what God’s plans are for us. We can only trust that He won’t do anything too rash to set things in motion. Maybe one of these teenagers has had her life changed today by that woman in the dynamite vest. It could be that’s why you wore it today.”
She remembered the many changes of clothes before she’d decided on this particular outfit, how often she’d tossed aside an outfit simply because it didn’t “feel right.” Could he be onto something? She’d heard that there were no true accidents.
Mike continued as they left the little church, “And who knows, you may very well have touched someone’s heart here today in a way you can’t know.”
She’d touched a heart, all right, he acknowledged, but God, did it have to be mine?
ten
Abbey was still chuckling over the incident the next day. She was telling Selma about it when suddenly a man dressed in a Keystone Kops outfit, complete with a rounded helmet and a billy club, invaded her store.
“Officer Oliver P. Torkelson here. I have a warrant for Abbey Jensen,” he said loudly. “I’ve come to arrest you!” His handlebar moustache tilted forward dangerously, and he shoved it back into place.
“What on earth?” Abbey asked. She’d never seen anything like this. “You must have the wrong place, or at least the wrong person.”
“You’re under arrest, young lady. The charge is—wait a second, let me check.” He pulled a folded sheet of paper from his shirt pocket with great ceremony and proceeded to read: “Abbey Jensen is hereby placed under arrest for being a Holiday Hooligan.”
“A Holiday Hooligan? What is that? This is crazy!”
“Got the warrant right here. All written out proper-like. You’d better come with me.”
“I’m not coming with you,” Abbey protested. “I have no idea what this is all about.”
“Sorry, Ma’am.” Torkelson produced gigantic red plastic handcuffs. “Resisting arrest means I’ll have to use these.”
A strangled sound from behind her made Abbey turn her head. Selma was overcome with giggles. “Do you know anything about this?” Abbey asked her employee warily. “You do, don’t you?”
Selma shook her head wordlessly.
“Mike. Mike had something to do with it,” Abbey accused. “And from that grin on your face, you do too know what’s going on.”
Officer Torkelson cleared his throat loudly. “Enough chitchat. You’d better come with me to the Candy Cane Calaboose.”
“The Candy Cane Calaboose?” Abbey repeated. “What is that?”
The policeman tsked and wrote something on the warrant. “I’m going to have to add Failure to Read Merry Mall Mail to the complaint.”
“Merry Mall Mail?” Abbey couldn’t believe her ears. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
“That’s because you never read your Merry Mall Mail,” Officer Torkelson said logically. “If you’d have read it, you’d know what it was.”
Abbey covered her face with her hands. “This is unreal. I never heard of Merry Mall Mail. I don’t know what the Candy Cane Calabash is.”
“Calaboose,” Selma corrected. “A calaboose is a jail. A calabash is a gourd.”
“Calabash, calaboose. This is insane.”
Officer Torkelson
stroked his moustache reflectively. “Trying to cop an insanity plea, eh? Are you insane? Do I need to get a straightjacket?”
“No, I’m not insane. They’re insane, whoever ‘they’ are. And I certainly don’t need a straightjacket.” She paused as she realized what was transpiring. “Oh, for crying out loud. This is what the other managers were talking about down at the mailboxes, isn’t it? Please tell me this isn’t the brainchild of the mall management.”
The policeman’s moustache twitched dangerously.
She knew she had no choice except to go. Selma would watch the store, and besides, it would probably be just a few minutes. Even the mall administration wouldn’t be as silly as to take people off the selling floor during the busiest season of the year for any extended period of time.
“This won’t take long,” she told Selma grimly as she left in the custody of Officer Torkelson. “And if it gets busy, call the mall office. This is their idea, so they might as well reap the results of it.”
She’d walked by the Candy Cane Calaboose, but she hadn’t paid much attention to it other than to note that it was another way of making use of every inch of the mall’s space. The wooden structure was clearly modeled after an old-fashioned jail but with one crucial exception: the bars on the cells were painted in red and white spirals.
“Here, put this on.” A woman dressed in a skirt and blouse printed with tiny candy canes handed her a bundle. “These are your jail coveralls.”
Abbey shook them out. They were striped, like the prisoner outfits of the old movies, but instead of black and white, these were red and white, like candy canes.
“I can’t put these on,” Abbey objected. “I’m wearing a skirt, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Just pull them on top,” the woman instructed her. “By the way, I’m the warden here, so don’t get snippy with me.” She shook the large key that hung around her neck, which was apparently used with the oversized heart-shaped lock on the cell door. The twinkle in her eyes softened her words, and she added in a whisper, “It could have been a lot worse. They started out with this being a dunking tank, so count your blessings.”
Abbey shuddered at the thought of what havoc that idea would have wrought. “The mall management has had some nutso ideas,” she muttered as she pulled the coveralls over her clothes, “but this takes the cake.”
Her skirt bunched up around her hips under the coverall, and she was sure she looked as if she had the world’s biggest caboose. The Candy Cane Caboose, she told herself.
“Did you see that you have company?” the woman added, pointing to a second chair in the cell.
Abbey had almost missed him, but how, she couldn’t have said. Mike was also garbed in the candy-striped coverall.
“You look ridiculous,” she said, plopping into the vacant chair. “Kind of like an oversized after-dinner mint.”
“They don’t call me Sweet for nothing,” he quipped.
“Fill me in on this, please,” she said. “Apparently I didn’t read my Merry Mall Mail—whatever that is—but I have no idea who ratted on me. And I was certainly never aware that it was an offense that was going to get me arrested.”
He chuckled. “Here’s the scoop. Anybody at the mall—employees, customers, competitors, whatever—can pay to have you put in the slammer, er, calaboose. And there you stay until someone bails you out. All the money goes to charity.”
“A noble goal,” she grumbled. “So what you’re saying is that somebody, some rat fink, paid to have me put here?” She glowered at him suspiciously.
“First of all, I don’t believe I’ve heard someone actually say ‘rat fink’ in the past decade, and secondly, don’t glare at me. I thought you were responsible for me being here, but since you are clueless about this whole Candy Cane Calaboose thing, I guess I have to blame one of my employees.”
She recalled Selma’s bout with hysterics when Abbey was “arrested.” “I think I know who the culprit is. . .at least for me being stuck in here. Selma.”
A sudden thought struck her. Selma was a one-person fan club for romance; it wouldn’t be too hard to imagine her putting both Abbey and Mike in the Candy Cane Calaboose at the same time.
Mike leaned back and hummed along with the public address system, which boomed non-stop Christmas carols at top volume. Abbey craned her neck and noticed that they were positioned directly under a circular speaker embedded in the wall.
“I used to love those songs,” she mused. “But somewhere around November tenth, they lost their appeal.”
“You’re kidding!” Mike seemed genuinely surprised. “I love the whole Christmas scene. Carols, trees, presents, the whole nine yards.”
Abbey motioned at the mall outside their cell. “But look at this. ‘Gaudy’ doesn’t even begin to describe it. They’ve added another scene. A purple plaster seal wearing a wreath around its neck. Isn’t that charming?”
“The seal is inexplicable. I don’t know what that’s doing here.” Mike cocked his head and studied the statue. “No, I can’t say as I see any reason for it to be here. It’s ludicrous at best.”
“Well, that’s my point. What does it have to do with Christmas?”
He leaned forward earnestly. “That isn’t Christmas. That’s profit margins, pure and simple—if there is anything pure or simple about profit margins. The seal has more to do with the mall manager and his exquisite artistic taste than the future of a major world religion. Christmas is about the birth of hope. It’s the first day of our salvation.”
“You sound like my aunt Luellen.” The conversation made Abbey uneasy, but at the same time she craved talking about her confused feelings. And oddly, having this discussion about Jesus in the midst of this crazy Candy Cane Calaboose made it easier.
“Your aunt Luellen is pretty smart.”
“My aunt Luellen is a kook. She’s the reason we’re even having this talk. If it weren’t for her getting those packages mixed up, we’d still be going on with our lives. . . separately. And I wouldn’t even be thinking about Jesus or God or anything except my own profit margins.”
“Like I said,” Mike said, so softly she had to crane to hear his words, “your aunt Luellen is a very smart person.”
Abbey snorted in derision. “How can you say that? That would mean that Aunt Luellen would have done this. . .on purpose,” she ended slowly as the realization of what he was saying dawned on her.
There comes a moment in love when time stands still—or wishes it could. And just as frequently, that instant is pushed away in the flurry of life.
She liked him, she told herself. That was all. He was a nice guy. Okay, he was a nice guy with very nice eyes and a very nice smile and a very nice way of approaching life. But she didn’t love him. Love meant—well, she couldn’t define it, not here in a makeshift jail in the midst of a busy mall filled with curious shoppers. She’d have to think about it. But the fact was that she was pretty sure she’d know if she was in love. At least there would be—or should be—fireworks and volcanoes and shooting stars. She didn’t feel any of that when she saw Mike. What she felt was a pleasant warmth, like the good basic meal they had at Ginger’s the other night. Nothing fancy. Plain home cooking didn’t equal love.
The food analogy made her hungry.
She looked at him covertly. He was a bit pinker than usual. Was it possible? Was Mike Tucker blushing? Or was it only the reflection of his candy-striped jail coveralls?
She had to change the subject, and fast. “I wonder if they feed us in this Candy Cane Calaboose,” she said. “I’m starving.”
Mike seemed as equally grateful for the switch in the direction their conversation was taking. “Even a candy cane would be welcome. I think that woman who’s supposed to be our warden probably has some. Want me to get one for you?”
Abbey shook her head. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to look a candy cane in the eye again.”
Mike hooted with laughter. “I didn’t know candy canes had eyes, but I g
et your point.”
“How can you be so cheerful about this shenanigan?” she asked crossly, but before he could answer, a voice hailed them from the mall corridor.
“Yoo-hoo, Candy Cane captives!” Selma was approaching them, and obviously enjoying their predicament entirely too much. “Ready to get out?” She waved a ten-dollar bill at them.
“Am I ever!” Abbey stood up. “Pay my bail, and let’s go. Say, if you’re here, who’s watching the store?”
“I closed it.”
“You what?” Abbey thundered.
“Oh, I’m just kidding. Brianna came in.” Selma walked around and studied the jail from the outside. “This isn’t too bad. I’ve lived in worse places.”
Mike grinned. “It’s about the size of my apartment, now that you mention it. Are you springing both of us, or just Abbey?”
“Both of you. You two ready to go?”
As Abbey sprang to her feet, Mike touched her arm. “It hasn’t been that bad, has it?”
The sharp retort that sprang to her lips died, and the truth—in a single word—replaced it. “No.”
❧
That evening, as Mike said his nightly prayers, he asked for reassurance. It wasn’t something he often did, usually choosing instead to trust in his Father’s leadership.
I’m trying, Lord. Every time I think I’ve taken a step closer, though, she steps back. This would be a lot easier if she’d just stay still. Am I doing this right? And, by the way, God, am I supposed to be falling in love with her?
❧
And across town, a young woman found herself in an unusual position, her head bent and her heart open. “Tell me what to do about the way I feel,” she said quietly, although who she was speaking to, she couldn’t have said.
eleven
Abbey leaped out of bed, horrified at the bright light that shone in through her window. Clearly she had overslept. A quick glance at the clock beside her bed verified it. It was nearly eight. She pulled back the curtain and peeked outside. Already the first round of rush hour was underway, with the late-to-work drivers stretching the speed limit.
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