“Welcome, all,” he said. “We’ll be passing around the candles and holders while the choir sings. Once you have yours, come up to the tree, oldest of us to youngest, same as ever. And thanks to Brando and Brice for finding this beautiful tree and bringing it to us. Thanks to old friends and the new ones among us, to those returning and those who’ve gone. May the winter nights be mild and quickly gone, and may the summer days come soon to warm us.”
“May the summer days come soon,” everyone said at once, lifting their cups and glasses.
Cait watched Anna gently wipe chocolate and whipped cream from Moira’s upper lip, remembering her own mother doing the same. And though she’d never given much thought to having children of her own, the yearning to see her father hold her child, to see the next generation born, nearly doubled her over suddenly.
Not that that was likely to happen.
She tried to think of Brice as father material. Tried not to look at him.
Tried not to think of the two of them together at all—because they weren’t.
A kilted Iain Camm MacGregor stepped up to the platform beside Duncan and brought the reed of his bagpipes to his lips. The long wheeze of the initial notes gave way to the haunting melody of “Silent Night,” bringing goosebumps to Cait’s forearms, because the sound of the pipes, too, was something that she had missed in London. When the song was done, spry little Jenny Lawrence, a scarlet hat pulled low over her sparse white hair, raised her conductor’s baton and set the choir into singing “The Holly and the Ivy.”
The tray of clips and small white candles passed by Cait’s elbow. She took one of each, then waited her turn as each of the villagers lit their candles and carried them, hands cupped around wavering flames, over to the beautiful fir that Brando and Brice had cut in the woods earlier that day. And the fact that Brice had done that was yet another reminder that he had changed. Brando had been working hard for years to change his reputation in the glen. No job had been beneath him. Cait had taken his example a bit herself, but Brice had never bothered.
Climbing up onto the stepladder, she searched for a spot in the branches and stretched to clip her candle high up on the tree. She wobbled unexpectedly, and hands gripped her waist as someone steadied her. When she looked behind her, she wasn’t surprised to find Brice there.
“Careful, love,” he said.
It was a good reminder. One she needed.
Brice’s touch, his face, everything about him was at once dangerously familiar and unknown. It made her forget that everything was different. That she needed a miracle just to hold on to the little bit of familiarity, of family, that she had left.
But as she clipped her candle on the branch, the wavering flame of the candle steadied in the curious lack of wind that happened around the tree for the lighting each year. The flame slowly lengthened, burning with the others and forming stars of light in her stinging eyes.
Cait needed only to look at the tree, at all the unwavering candle flames burning like miniature beacons, for proof that miracles existed. In the glen, there were still wee bits of magic now and again to remind those who lived here that there was something much larger than any single person, than any single life.
She started to climb down the stepladder again, but Brice put his hands around her waist and lifted her, turning her around by the shoulders once her feet had touched the ground. Cait didn’t need to look up to be aware that they stood directly beneath the ball of mistletoe strung on the line that stretched above the courtyard. Her heart began to pound, as much in anticipation as from the feel of his arms around her. From the warmth of his eyes on hers as he slowly bent his head.
She wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn’t look away.
He didn’t kiss her, though. Instead, he only brushed her cheek with his lips and left her feeling cold and lonely.
Courting
“Maybe...you'll fall in love
with me all over again."
Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms
Cait was astonished at how her plans for the photographs galvanized the glen. News spread, and over the next two days, she had a stream of visitors both at the house and at the Tea Room. Women who had scarcely spoken ten words to Cait in her entire life drank tea at her kitchen table and entrusted her with photographs and paintings of the women in their families so that she could scan and print off copies to hang on the Tea Room walls.
They brought a story with every photograph, telling them with pride and tears and laughter. The stories were as varied as the one about a MacLaren great aunt who had saved her brother from drowning in the loch, or a MacGregor grandmother who’d put money by, a penny and a pound at a time, to see a grandson off to America for a better life. There were stories from the wars, and between the wars, women who farmed the land themselves, repaired roofs, raised children alone. Ran abusive husbands off with shotguns. Older stories went back as far as the time of the massacre of eighteen MacLaren men by MacGregor men—though how that story went varied depending on who told it. Then there were the women, like Rob Roy MacGregor’s wife Mary, who’d done their best to ward off cattle raids or English soldiers with nothing more than flintlock muskets and the valiant dog who tended their sheep and slept beside their hearths at night.
Life in the Highlands had always been harsh. The landscape was heavy with grief and history and appropriately overcast skies, soaked in the blood of those who died for their homes, their kin, or their beliefs. That made it a breeding ground for heroes, male and female. The thought fired Cait’s imagination. She’d never considered her home in those terms growing up, in spite of the romantic notions of the tourists gleaned from films and the stories of authors like Robert Louis Stephenson or Walter Scott. More and more, as she listened to the individual stories brought to her, she saw the history of the glen as a patchwork of small victories and defeats and not just part of the bigger picture. It made her realize there were heroes in every family, in every country around the world. Heroes forgotten because younger generations weren’t interested until the chance to hear the individual stories had long since passed.
It was that thought that drove her to type the stories frantically with her imagination working overtime. It drove her, too, back to the sitting room to sit with her father as often as she could, no matter how much he protested. Between visitors and sorting her mother’s things in the attic and repainting in the Tea Room, she told him about what she was doing, told him about her plans, told him the stories she was hearing. Coaxing him to talk was even harder than trying to keep her distance from Brice, though. Increasingly worried, she spoke to the doctor again several times, but while he urged her to get her father back to his office, he didn’t offer much help in suggesting how to accomplish that. Or how to force her father to have a procedure he didn’t want. Apart from giving her the contact information for the Depression Alliance, he didn’t offer much at all. Cait dragged her own bed into her father’s bedroom, threw the shades open and washed the windows both there and downstairs to try and let in some of the weak winter sunshine, and she brewed St. John’s Wort with his tea to lift his mood. She played Whist and Cribbage with him in between his naps when he was willing. None of which seemed to help.
“He’s like a hibernating bear,” she told Brice out of pure frustration when they were both working at the Tea Room on Friday afternoon. “Curled up and waiting for something. Waiting for death to come. I don’t know what to do with him. He said more to me in any single phone conversation we had this past year than he’s said to me the whole time since I’ve been home. Even last week he was chatting on the phone to me for twenty minutes at a stretch. I’ve been over those conversations in my head a hundred times trying to figure out what I missed.”
Brice pulled a finished shelf off the sawhorses and gestured for Cait to take the opposite end so they could carry it to the wall and she could hold it steady while he screwed the bracket in. “It’s easy to put in an effort for twenty minutes. He proba
bly can’t face the idea of having to do it all day long.”
“He can’t seem to face anything. I try to tell him what I’m doing with the Tea Room, and he doesn’t care. He’s not interested in what I feed him or what I do. The only time I get any kind of a reaction out of him is when I try to turn the telly off. Oh, and when I mentioned bringing something down from the attic, he bit my head off. I know he’s in pain, and it’s not that I want to make him live with that. But the pain will only get worse, from what the doctor says, and it doesn’t need to. Dad refuses to discuss any of that. He pretends to sleep just so I’ll stop talking.”
“So stop talking, then,” Brice said, raising an eyebrow at her as she held a shelf level for him to screw in place. “Wait him out.”
“Every day we wait gives the cancer more of a chance to take hold. And it isn’t as though I’m nagging at him. I’ve been trying to be careful about that when it comes to anything but eating. He’s like you in that way, the more I bring something up, the more he’ll do the opposite.”
Grinning, Brice drove the screw into the bracket with the electric drill. “Sweetheart, if that’s not the pot accusing the kettle, I’ll take a swim in the loch come Christmas morning.”
Cait stuck her tongue out at him as he tested the bracket to make sure it didn’t wiggle. Then, slowly, he walked down the length of the shelf to where she stood and stopped so close every nerve in her body awoke. The look in his eye made her catch her breath.
He had only to look at her and she caught fire; that much had never changed. These past two days, though, he’d refused to do more than that, as if he knew that it would drive her mad.
“What ever happened to your idea of courting me, by the way?” she asked. “I hope this isn’t the best you can do?”
He grinned again and winked at her. Then he pulled the other bracket from the pocket of his jeans and positioned it beneath her end of the shelf. The drill’s motor whined as he fastened it in, one screw and then the other, sending up a faint whiff of fresh paint and sawdust. Only when he’d finished did he look at her again.
“If you’re not sure whether I’m courting you, mo chridhe, you haven’t been paying attention,” he said.
“Or maybe you’re not working hard enough.” She stepped a little closer. “Maybe you’re not doing it right.”
He reached for her finally, slowly. But his hand stopped before it reached her face and only brushed a bit of sawdust from her shoulder. His eyes were dancing with amusement. “Courting’s not all about sex and kissing, or haven’t you heard? Maybe that’s the whole point I’m making. It’s never been the physical side that’s been a problem between us.”
“True,” she said, her voice coming out too thin and strangled until she cleared her throat and tried again. “So what are you doing, then? What are we doing?”
“We’re getting to know each other. Learning to trust each other all over again.”
She bit her lip and stared down at the distorted shadows the two of them were casting on the floor. It was impossible to keep looking at him directly. “How long do you suppose that will take?”
His expression sobered into something that was serious with a wistful edge. “Maybe you’ll tell me when you’re ready. When you know me. When you know yourself. For my part, I’ve known all I need to know about you since I was ten.”
Her eyes darted back to his, but he gave her no clue how to answer. In the end, she realized she was still standing there like an idiot, holding up a shelf that was now fully supported by brackets on both ends. He’d stepped back and stood watching her, so she only nodded and went back over to pick up the paintbrush and the wall stencil she had made from cutout cardboard, climbed up on her stepladder, and resumed her painting.
He threw the next shelf on the sawhorses and started going over it with the sander, whistling cheerfully. Feeling entirely wrong-footed and off balance, she wished she’d never brought up the subject of courting at all. How had he managed to change the rules of flirting? The whole dynamic between them?
Then again, he was changing everything. And there was truth, too, in what he’d said.
She couldn’t deny that anymore. She had never for a moment fallen out of love with Brice; she doubted she ever could. Loving someone and being able to live with them, on the other hand, being able to keep that love from turning the corner into hate and disappointment, that was something else. The Brice she had left in the glen had been exciting, thrilling. He’d been kind and intelligent, clever in many different ways. But he had never been the sort of man that she would have been able to count on for the day to day of fifty or sixty years.
That was the biggest change of all. Each morning when she came to work in the Tea Room, he was here working already, or he’d already been and gone. Before she had even been able to tell him not to bother with the paint, he’d driven down to Edinburgh and brought it back for her, en route to getting back nearly all the library books that he’d left there for consignment, which he’d had to rent a truck and bring back in two trips. He’d even found her an entire crate of old wooden picture frames in a variety of styles and shapes and sizes that she knew would look wonderful on the walls with the copied photos of women from around the glen. He’d been the one to find the scanner and printer for her, too, as a loan from Anna MacGregor who’d gotten them in for her work managing events for Brando’s restaurant and hotel. All of this Brice had done without a fuss or fanfare, which was another change from the old Brice she’d known. That younger Brice had done plenty of lovely, thoughtful things for her through the years they’d been together, but he’d expected acknowledgment and praise for them all.
Respect
“If you want to be respected by others,
the great thing is to respect yourself.”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Insulted and Humiliated
Cait tried so hard to mask her frustration that Brice couldn’t help hoping his plan was working. She had to come to him on her own, to decide she wanted to come to him. He couldn’t be the one to chase her.
The logic was sound. From what he’d seen, Cait had yet to even question why she had chosen to give up on him so easily, why she had left the glen. As focused as she was on her father now, he couldn’t know whether she was looking at Brice as a diversion, or something familiar, a crutch. He was happy to be all those things, but he didn’t want her to regret it. He didn’t want for her to leave again.
The one thing he knew for certain was that their old relationship had been based on patterns and feelings they’d established when he and Cait had both been too young, too troubled. Those sorts of patterns couldn’t form the basis for a solid relationship, not the kind of relationship that would be healthy and satisfying now. Which meant that the relationship had to change.
Still, even knowing that, having Cait here beside him without touching her was harder than he’d imagined. Having her back again was still a constant surprise, one that brought a surge of joy every time he saw her. He wanted to hold her, itched to brush the dark silk of her hair away from her face, ached to kiss the lips she wanted him to kiss. Aye, and he felt her wanting that, too. He knew her well enough to be sure of that.
But patience was another way in which he’d changed. He’d lived without Cait for fifteen long months. A few days—a few months, if need be—more would be worth the wait.
In the meantime, he’d been taking pleasure in helping her in the Tea Room. That was something he could do. After the first room where they’d done it out of sequence and had to paint the walls around the shelves, now he was waiting until Cait had the base color back on the walls in each room the way she wanted before he fastened the new bookshelves in place. He helped with the paint as well, though he took care to make sure she didn’t know it. She’d always been brilliant at detail, like the beautiful wall stencils she had cut out of cardboard and was painting around the ceilings, windows, and door frames in all the rooms, but when it came to the less showy work of creating a
smooth surface on the walls themselves, of laying a foundation instead of creating the embellishments, she didn’t have the patience. He waited until she’d gone home each night and came back and touched up the mottled spots where she hadn’t laid the paint down evenly and corrected the places where she’d gotten color on the ceiling or the trim.
He’d learned to appreciate the slow work of painting more and more himself. In fact, he realized on the morning of Christmas Eve as he watched his client inspect the finished DB5, it was work itself that he’d come to appreciate, the opportunity to do every aspect of a project well.
The client, a balding Edinburgh banker in his forties with more money than he knew how to spend, stood beside Brice and peered down into the engine, then closed the bonnet and ran a hand over the silk smooth paint that Brice had painstakingly laid down in the booth layer by layer. There wasn’t a single thing on the car that called attention, only the beauty of the whole. Maybe relationships were like that, too, Brice thought. Not about one person or the other, but about what they could become together.
He buffed out the trace of engine grease the man had left on the silver paint then handed the man the faded red rag to wipe his hands. “You like it?”
“It’s even better than I’d hoped,” the client said, running the rag across his fingertips. “To be frank, I wasn’t entirely sure you could pull it off, but you don’t see many of these come up for sale. I had to take the chance. You’re still willing to do the XJ220 for me?”
“If I can find one,” Brice said. “I’ll start looking after Christmas.”
The client dug a folded cashier’s check out of his wallet and handed it over. Brice refrained from examining it there and then, pretended that his mouth hadn’t gone dry and his heart wasn’t pounding. The keys were in the ignition already, so he only opened the door so the client could slide in behind the wheel and pull away, followed by his bored looking wife in a far less flashy Bentley.
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