Forever Christmas

by Robert Tate Miller

  When Beth approached the bandstand, she saw Andrew pacing like a caged cat. “Andy, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  Andrew wheeled on her, and she could see the pain and rage in his eyes.

  “I hate him, Beth. You hear me? I HATE him!” he said. “And I need you to hate him too.”

  “Andrew . . . ?”

  “Say it! Say that you hate him as much as I do. If you’re really my friend, say it.” Beth watched as hot tears rolled down Andrew’s face. His voice lowered and he struggled to choke back his sobs. “I need to know. Say you hate him, or we’re done.”

  Beth slowly shook her head. “I’m sorry, Andy. I don’t. I can’t. And if having to hate your dad is a condition of our friendship, then I’m sorry. I guess we can’t be friends anymore.”

  Andrew stared at her as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “I wish you the best, Andy,” Beth said. “I really do. And I’ll miss you.”

  Beth walked away quickly to hide her tears. She wanted to look back at him, to tell him that she loved him, but she knew that would be the wrong thing to do. She knew how much he was hurting, and she knew that she couldn’t help him until he was ready to help himself.

  They didn’t speak for two months. Then one rainy school morning Andrew was waiting for Beth when she came out of her house. He held an umbrella for her on the five-block walk to River Falls High while he let himself get soaked to the bone. That was Andrew’s way of saying he was sorry. He never mentioned their quarrel.

  Beth was happy to have her friend back, but she worried about her Andy, about the rage and grief he kept bottled up inside. He hated Henry Farmer for his betrayal, for not being there, and there was no talking him out of it.

  And she knew that someday the emotional bill would come due.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Beth could still hear her mother’s voice: “Beth, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll marry that boy. He’s a keeper.” Beth was only six when her mom began the campaign, but she took it to heart anyway. It just made sense. Andy Farmer was a nice boy, he was her best friend, and he was pretty darn cute to boot.

  By the time the childhood sweethearts reached their senior year at River Falls High, Andy and Beth had become best friends, confidants, and soul mates. On graduation night, just after the stroke of midnight, Andrew got down on one knee in the center of Town Square and took Beth’s hand.

  “I love you, Beth McCarthy. So marry me, and make me the happiest man on earth.” While Andrew nervously spoke the words he later told her he’d rehearsed time and again in the bathroom mirror, Beth gazed down at him, happy tears streaming down her face. He slipped his mother’s engagement ring on her finger. Beth was so overcome with emotion all she could do was nod up and down.

  Beth and Andrew decided that, hard as it might be, they should defer their wedding plans until after they graduated from college. So, two months after graduation, Andrew headed off to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Valedictorian Beth had received half a dozen scholarships to some of the best schools on the East Coast, but she had a plan. She would stay home and go to night school at River Falls College so she could start her own local charity.

  Beth’s experience volunteering at a local nursing home during high school opened her eyes to a pressing need. She found that many older people didn’t really need to be in the nursing home. They just needed a little help to be able to stay in their homes. They needed a little support, a little company. Beth wanted to give them both, so six months after high school graduation, she founded Best Buddies. The all-volunteer charity performed any number of useful services for seniors. Buddies would read to those who could no longer see so well, prepare and deliver meals for shut-ins, accompany their older buddies on walks, or just pop in for a cup of coffee and a chat.

  When the local paper interviewed her about her new enterprise, Beth said, “I just hate the idea of someone feeling alone.”

  Andrew teased her when he called from college. “Beth McCarthy, enemy of loneliness.” But he was proud of her. She was only eighteen and already making a difference.

  On June 7, 2002, dozens of family and friends gathered in the chapel on River Falls Town Square to witness the long-awaited wedding of Andrew Gerard Farmer and Elizabeth Anne McCarthy. She was twenty-two, he twenty-three, and both were recent college graduates.

  In his wedding toast to his bride, Andrew said, “Beth, I can’t even remember life before you. You have always been there for me, and come what may, I promise to always be there for you. As long as I’m around, you will never be alone.”

  And with a pair of “I dos,” their wedded life began.

  As they slow danced cheek to cheek to Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable,” Beth looked into her new husband’s eyes and felt a sudden twinge of sadness.

  She wondered if this was as good as it was ever going to get.

  “Beth, I want to move to New York.”

  It was a mere four months after their wedding that the restless Andrew broached the subject. Beth was surprised to find that he already had a ten-year plan all laid out—a plan he hadn’t even bothered to run by his new bride. “I talked to one of my old English profs at Carnegie,” Andrew said. “He thinks he can get me a job in the mail room of a literary agency.”

  “You want to be an agent?” Beth said.

  “No, I’m going to be a novelist. A famous novelist. The agency’s a way for us to make ends meet, and when I’m done with my book, I can slip it to one of the agents at the firm. I’ll already have a leg up.”

  Beth felt her heart sink as she watched her husband’s eyes dance with excitement. She had hoped they could build a life there in River Falls, the place she loved most of all. But Andrew had his sights set on a life of adventure. His dreams were far too big for a little town in northwest Pennsylvania. So when he pressed her for an answer, Beth simply smiled and said, “Sounds wonderful.”

  Late in the spring of 2003, Beth and Andrew Farmer found a new home in an eclectic little neighborhood in New York’s East Village. Beth spent her final months in River Falls training a volunteer staff of six to take over Best Buddies. She agreed to stay on as a consultant and would call in twice a week to make sure everything was running smoothly.

  Their first apartment was only one room, about the size of a very large closet. It was a far cry from River Falls, but Beth determined she was going to make it work, that she was going to be happy in their new environs. She decided she was going to become a “city girl” come what may.

  Beth always looked back fondly on those early years of marriage. Resources were meager, but there was lots of love and fun. They had “date night,” “movie night,” and “breakfast night,” and, for a while anyway, they kept to the schedule faithfully.

  While Andrew was off sorting mail and dreaming of bigger things, Beth shuffled from job to job. She worked at a record store, a flower shop, and a grocery. When Hector the flower vendor confided that his eight-year-old daughter, Rosa, was struggling with her schoolwork, Beth offered to tutor her for free.

  Beth loved the work, and Hector noticed how quickly Rosa progressed from a C to an A student. He recommended that Beth put her tutoring skills to wider use.

  “You should open a tutoring center,” the flower vendor said. “Once I tell people what you did for my Rosa, they’ll be lining up at your door.”

  Beth loved tutoring Rosa, loved the satisfaction and fulfillment it gave her, loved especially the “aha moment” when the girl finally understood and her pretty brown eyes would light up.

  She loved teaching, but she wanted to do it on her own terms. The more she thought about it, the more she concluded that Hector might be right. The idea of opening her own tutoring center excited her every bit as much as her vision for Best Buddies.

  “You’ll never make it work,” Andrew said. “Why would a parent pay you for something they get for free at public school?”

  Beth forced herself to push aside Andrew’s doubts a
nd gave it a go. She printed up flyers and spread them throughout the neighborhood. At first, it looked as if Andrew might be right. Nobody responded. Then one day the phone started ringing, and before long, she was tutoring two students, then three, then half a dozen.

  Beth held her sessions three afternoons a week in a study room at the public library. She worked with her students on math, history, and English.

  Beth’s little enterprise was up and running, but at the cost of quality time with her husband. By the time she got home, Andrew had already eaten and would be sprawled out on the couch watching television or reading author submissions for his boss.

  Not that he complained; she was doing something she loved, he said, and he wanted her to be happy. And the tutoring income, meager as it was, helped make ends meet.

  Still, something told her it was a step in the wrong direction.

  If weekdays were busy, at least the weekends were cherished. Every Saturday morning Andrew and Beth rode the subway to 72nd and Central Park West. They’d spend a few hours walking in the park, picnicking, or people watching.

  Beth loved those quiet days. They had long talks, dreamed together about the future, about starting a family, about making enough money to flee the city and buy a farmhouse in some Norman Rockwellian Vermont town.

  Beth wanted kids more than anything in the world. She couldn’t picture the farmhouse without imagining their children running around in the front yard. She was ready to start a family, just like they’d always talked about.

  But Andrew wanted to wait. Whenever she brought the subject up, he would always say, “When we’re ready. When we’re ready.” When they celebrated their fifth anniversary still childless, Beth wondered if “ready” would ever arrive.

  After three years working in the mail room by day and on his literary masterpiece by night, Andrew was promoted to an agent’s assistant. This meant a little more pay, but more importantly, it opened Andrew’s eyes to his true career purpose.

  “Beth, I no longer want to write novels. I want to sell them. Lots of them.”

  By this time he’d come to the conclusion that while he was only an average writer, he had a real knack for what would sell. “Don’t smell it, sell it,” agency founder Frank Townsend had inscribed on a plaque in his penthouse office. Andrew took that dictum to heart. He soon learned that good writing and salable writing didn’t necessarily go hand in hand. As a matter of fact, they were often two very different animals, as Beth could well attest. She sometimes read the author submissions Andrew brought home and turned up her nose.

  “Honey, this is terrible. How can you even consider representing this garbage?”

  “Don’t smell it, sell it,” Andrew said. “A novel doesn’t have to be good to make a boatload of money.”

  Andrew’s knack for taking hackneyed stories from middling writers and turning out bestsellers quickly made him the new wunderkind at Townsend Literary. He soon leapfrogged more experienced assistants to become a full-fledged agent.

  “You have the gift, Farmer,” Townsend said to Andrew the morning he kicked him upstairs. “You understand that it’s not about prose, it’s about perception.”

  Agency clients loved Andrew and were soon jockeying to have him represent their latest masterpiece. His salary tripled overnight, and he and Beth were able to abandon their cramped Village walk-up for a tiny apartment in the upscale Carnegie Hill neighborhood. They were now just two blocks from Central Park.

  Beth was thrilled for her husband’s success, but a part of her missed their old East Village neighborhood. She had managed to make it her own and had grown to love every nuance, eccentricity, nook, and cranny. She missed the corner market. She missed Pedro, the guy she bought a latte from every morning, and Sully, the chatty mail carrier. She missed Hector, the flower guy. They all knew Beth, and she knew all about them. She knew their kids’ names and what grade they were in, their birthdays, their hopes and dreams.

  Andrew couldn’t understand how Beth could miss the dingy, cramped apartment or the low-rent neighborhood. He had been so focused on getting out he hadn’t stopped to take a good look around. While everybody on the block knew Beth, nobody knew Andrew Farmer.

  “I don’t get why you aren’t as stoked about the move as I am, Beth,” Andrew said. “This is the brass ring. We’ve arrived!”

  Beth didn’t know how to tell her husband that her “brass ring” had nothing to do with square footage or real estate value or prestige. She just wanted to live in a neighborhood where people knew and liked each other. She wanted to be a part of a family that extended beyond her own stoop.

  Beth had a hard time making friends in Carnegie Hill. Most of the new neighbors seemed too busy or preoccupied to respond to her friendly overtures. The only neighbor who spoke more than two words to her was old Mrs. Applebee, who lived on the same floor a few doors down.

  Upward of ninety, Dora Applebee had been a widow for nearly half a century and had lived in the building since the end of World War II. Her dog, Lulu, was her “baby.” The spoiled, yappy little Westie loved giving her elderly owner the slip from time to time. She’d take advantage of Mrs. A’s forgetfulness and dart out the door and down the stairs. If the dog was lucky, somebody would be coming through the front door, and she could slip out into the wilds of Manhattan for a little romp.

  Beth was summoned to fetch the little vagabond on any number of occasions, and Mrs. Applebee loved her for it.

  “Beth, you’re such a sweet girl. If my grandson wasn’t such a schmuck, I’d introduce you.”

  “That’s all right, Mrs. Applebee. I’m already married. Remember?”

  Old Mrs. Applebee knew well enough that Beth was married, but she only reluctantly admitted to Andrew’s existence. Beth found this humorous; Andrew found it annoying.

  “I ordered my steak medium rare, not medium well. You do know the difference, don’t you?”

  Beth remembered all too vividly how Andrew reprimanded the waiter across a candlelit table at Chianti’s, her favorite restaurant in Little Italy. It was her birthday, and Andrew had taken her out for dinner. But instead of having an enjoyable night out, he seemed agitated and tense, and spent most of the evening talking about work and returning phone calls.

  She hated to admit it, but this had become the norm. And watching what a little success had done to her husband made Beth long even more for days gone by.

  She chalked it up to the pressures of his new job, but it was more than that. Andrew had begun to believe his own notices, the pats on the back and “attaboys” soaking into his psyche. Most disconcerting, Beth sensed that he believed he was outgrowing her. He often talked down to her or harped about how she couldn’t comprehend what his career demanded of him. “Of course, you don’t have a real job,” he said. “So how could you possibly understand?”

  Despite what Andrew thought, Beth did have a real job. Her tutoring enterprise had grown into a full-fledged educational center. By the time the Farmers moved to Carnegie Hill, the Little Red Schoolhouse Tutoring Center was thriving, catering specifically to children with special needs. She had six employees and rented a cozy storefront on Lexington Avenue with a bright red awning.

  In addition, Beth kept in contact with her Best Buddies staff back in River Falls, but she was always careful to avoid mentioning that to Andrew. She had made that mistake once.

  “Stop living in the past, Beth,” he said. “Most women would kill for your life.”

  Most women, maybe. But not Beth Farmer. As much as she’d grown to love certain aspects of big-city life, home was still home and never far from her heart. She often wondered what their lives would have been like if they’d settled down in the little town where they grew up. But she knew better than to voice her doubts.

  Of one thing she was certain. The dream they’d shared as teenagers had vanished. Their history, their memories, their shared experiences. The future they’d planned together. The two kids—a boy and a girl, Andrew always insisted. “A little yo
u and a little me.”

  Gone. All of it sucked into the black hole of Andrew’s ambition. His precious career. The money. The accolades. The self-absorption.

  And now their marriage, too, on shaky ground.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  By the time his plane touched down at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, Andrew had already had three drinks too many. Kimberly suggested they go straight to dinner to prep for the next day’s writer meeting.

  They dined at the Chicago Cut Steakhouse and reviewed strategy for wooing the rumored-to-be-headstrong writer Jackie de Wulf. Kimberly asked that she be allowed to soften her up before Andrew swooped in to close the deal. Kimberly watched him closely as she cut into her porterhouse. “So how are things on the home front?”

  “Fine,” Andrew said. “Why wouldn’t they be?”

  Kimberly shrugged. “I don’t know. You just seem a little distracted.”

  “Just thinking about the client.”

  “Oh. Too bad.” Kimberly smiled coyly and glanced down at her low-cut neckline. “I was hoping I might be the cause of your distraction.”

  Andrew looked away, at a loss for how to respond.

  Kimberly seemed to sense she’d raised his temperature. “Andrew, just know that . . . if you ever need someone to talk to, I have pretty good ears.”

  Andrew struggled with an uneasy mixture of flattery and guilt. He shouldn’t be having this conversation.

  Kimberly smiled warmly, raised her wineglass. “To success.”

  They touched glasses, and Kimberly’s eyes lingered on Andrew until he was forced to look away.

  Andrew and Kimberly arrived at the Peninsula Hotel by taxi just after ten and checked in. As they exited the elevator on the seventh floor, Kimberly invited him to her room for a nightcap and to review their strategy for the next day’s meeting. “Come on, it’s still early.”