Christmas Bliss

by Mary Kay Andrews

  The actual Carlotta Donatello was nobody’s nonna. She was probably in her mid-thirties, with a long lustrous mane of hair and huge, long-lashed doe eyes which, in the photograph, were fixed longingly on my fiancé. Also? She had a generous helping of cleavage pressed right against Daniel’s chest.

  I felt my face begin to burn.

  Julio noticed me noticing, of course. He reached out and ripped the clipping from the bulletin board, wadding it up in his hand. “Pay no attention,” he said. “Ella put this up. She’s from New York and she’s always reading those newspapers online.”

  “Umm-hmm,” I said. “Interesting.”

  He made clumsy small talk while I sorted through the mail, but I wasn’t paying attention. I couldn’t get that image of Carlotta Donatello out of my mind—the sexy cocktail dress, the pose—with her arms wrapped around Daniel. Daniel! In a tuxedo. As far as I knew, he’d never owned a tuxedo in his life. And a party? He’d never said a word to me about a party. In fact, I hadn’t actually talked to Daniel in two days. And now I knew why. He’d been a busy chef-about-town.

  My stomach roiled. Maybe it was all that rich food I’d just sampled. Or maybe it was the indigestible idea of my future husband locked in the sinewy embrace of a rich, glamorous “heiress-about-town.”

  Chapter 2

  I was still fuming when I left the restaurant, but there was really no time to sulk. My prewedding to-do list was set in stone.

  I was expecting a call from BeBe Loudermilk, my best friend and maid of honor, at any minute. It was BeBe who’d set me up with Daniel in the first place, right after she’d hired him as chef at Guale. For a hardcore matchmaker like BeBe, our upcoming wedding was the ultimate validation and demanded updates on every aspect of the ceremony.

  But in the meantime, I needed to check in at Babalu, the upscale gift shop Manny Alvarez and Cookie Parker run on the other side of Troup Square from my own antique shop.

  I was on a strict timetable. Or so I told myself until I spotted a hot pink poster tacked to an oak tree at the corner of Habersham and 45th, in Ardsley Park, one of my favorite Savannah neighborhoods for junking. The magic words—estate sale—jumped out at me like a twenty-foot neon billboard, even though they were actually only scrawled in Magic Marker on an eleven-by-fourteen sheet of poster board.

  I was almost through the intersection when I glimpsed the sign and the arrow pointing right. No time for a turn signal. I made a hard right onto East 45th and was rewarded with an angry blast of a horn from the car right behind me.

  Developed as Savannah’s first suburban neighborhood around the turn of the twentieth century, Ardsley Park homes ranged from impressive brick Georgian Revival mansions to chunky Craftsman bungalows to tidy 1940s and 1950s brick cottages. It’s primo antique territory. And this was an estate sale—not a yard sale or a moving sale—which meant dead people’s stuff—my favorite kind of acquisition for my antique shop.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, cruising slowly down the street in search of another sign directing me to the house where the sale was being held. Two blocks down, I spotted another pink “Estate Sale” sign planted in an overgrown yard.

  As soon as I pulled up to the house, my junk antennae went into overdrive and I knew the antique planets were in alliance. The house was a solidly built Colonial revival, but it had seen better days. The yard was weedy and overgrown, the windows cloudy with grime. A battered cardboard box rested at the curb, and spilling out of it were the sadly bent and tangled wire arms of a disassembled vintage aluminum Christmas tree.

  This was a good sign; in the junk game, neglect and decay usually signal treasure within.

  Jethro, an experienced junk sniffer who had himself been plucked from a curbside pile of debris, thumped his tail on the leather truck seat. I patted his head in approval. “Good boy. Stay here, buddy.”

  I got out of the truck and made a beeline for that aluminum Christmas tree. But when I picked up one of the branches, the brittle foil leaves disintegrated into glittering shards. Sad. I have an irrational affection for cheesy midcentury holiday décor, and aluminum trees are always at the top of my want list. But this one had obviously fallen victim to time and temperature—stored in a blazing hot Savannah attic over the decades.

  I put the tree branch back in the box and studied the homemade sign. It was hurriedly written in black marker, and directed sale-goers to proceed around the corner to the lane running in back of the house. Homemade was good—it meant the sale was not being run by a pro. Furthermore, I hadn’t seen any ads for the sale in Craigslist or the Savannah Morning News or the PennySaver, which hopefully meant that my competition, other dealers, hadn’t already swooped in and scarfed up all the good stuff. And best of all, the sale had started only an hour earlier. Who starts an estate sale at three on Saturday afternoons? Amateurs, that’s who!

  I got back in the truck and drove around to the lane, where I spotted another excellent sign—an enormous pile of stuff stacked beside the trash cans. Old cardboard cartons, broken chairs, mounds of clothing still in yellowing plastic dry cleaner’s bags, the skeletons of broken aluminum lawn chairs, and yes—the best sign of all, a cast-off walker and a potty chair.

  Like a seasoned anthropologist, I quickly read this particular dig. From the age and water-soaked condition of the boxes, I could tell that somebody had excavated a leaky basement, attic, or garage and they were disposing of anything that looked old or worthless, including clothing. My nose was already twitching in happy anticipation. The folding lawn chairs were exactly like the kind of sixties-era chairs my parents still had in their garage.

  Best of all was the presence of the walker and the potty chair. And let’s not forget that ruined aluminum Christmas tree. This homeowner had likely been elderly, which meant their belongings were as vintage as the house. Jethro and I had stumbled across the holy grail, a true, grandma estate sale.

  He must have sensed my excitement, because his tail was thumping the leather passenger seat like a snare drum, and he was pawing at the door. “Good boy, Ro-Ro,” I said, giving him a chin scratch. “You stay here and be on the lookout for other dealers.”

  I picked my way carefully over a crumbling concrete walkway that lead through an overgrown thicket of privet and headed for the door of a ramshackle screened porch that looked like it had been tacked onto the back of the house some time in the seventies.

  An attractive woman dressed in a black Nike tracksuit and spotless pale pink Lanvin sneakers sat at a card table just inside the doorway. In her forties, with short dark hair and a deep tan, she was talking on her cell phone. The pear-shaped diamond on her left hand looked like at least three carats, and the diamond earrings twinkling from her ears were a good two carats apiece. If this was what she wore for tennis, I wondered what kind of jewelry she had for grocery shopping?

  “Go ahead on in,” she said, in a refined accent that bespoke a lifetime of sorority chapter meetings and cocktails on the veranda. She held the phone away from her face. “There’s stuff in every room, and prices are negotiable. I’ve got to get this dump emptied out by the end of the day. The contractor’s coming in Monday to start gutting it out.” She wrinkled her elegant nose. “You’ll have to excuse the mess. Bless her heart, my great-aunt Edith really wasn’t able to keep up with housekeeping these past few years.”

  I stepped into the house and into the 1960s. The kitchen was smallish, lined with rusting metal cabinets painted the same pale pink as the walls and the linoleum floor. Great-aunt Edith had a thing for pink. All the drawers and cupboard doors were ajar. I lifted a plate from a stack in the cupboard near the sink. It was a hugely popular pattern from the sixties, Franciscan’s Apple Blossom, featuring, of course, pink apple blossoms. There were ten plates in the stack, but each one was chipped. Pass.

  Nothing else in the kitchen caught my fancy, so I pushed through a swinging door into the dining room, hoping for better hunting.

  Sun shone weakly through the now-naked windows. The floors were bar
e, and my footsteps echoed in the high-ceilinged room. A dusty crystal chandelier was centered over the dining room table, but only one lightbulb was working.

  The dining room furniture was the predictable repro Empire, in predictable Grand Rapids mahogany. An array of dishes, crystal, and silver were spread across the table, which was covered with a heavy damask tablecloth. I snagged a pair of ornately decorated silverplated candlesticks with a masking-tape price tag of $5. In a sterling-loving town like Savannah, I probably couldn’t turn much of a profit on this pair, but I liked them, and that was enough.

  Great-aunt Edith’s “good” china was nice enough, with delicate pink roses and swirling gold edging, but I rarely buy or sell what I think of as fussy “tea party” porcelain and crystal, only because it just doesn’t float my boat.

  My eyes alighted on a large, yellowing cardboard box with familiar green graphics on the sides, and I felt the familiar thrill of discovery. The ruined Christmas tree at the curb had raised my hopes for this sale—maybe, just maybe, I’d find some vintage ornaments.

  The vintage gods were with me. The box was an old Shiny-Brite ornament box, with twelve corrugated compartments for glass ornaments. But it was heaped with probably three dozen ornaments, all tossed casually into the fragile cardboard carton.

  I marveled at their beautiful pastel colors and intricate designs as I carefully lifted each ornament for inspection. They were figural ornaments, grinning snowmen, Santa Clauses, angels, and reindeer. There were ovoid and teardrop-shaped mercury glass indents in my favorite shades of dusty pink, turquoise, seafoam, and faded gold, and an entire orchestra of miniature gold glass instruments.

  The ornaments had obviously been long used and well loved. Some were missing the small metal cap that would have accommodated a hook to hang on the tree, a couple of the silver and gold ones had tarnished finish, and at least one reindeer was missing its antlers. But I didn’t care. It was an enchanting collection. The masking-tape tag read “Antique Ornaments. Very Rare. $40.”

  One of the dining room chairs held a tall stack of neatly starched and ironed table linens. I rifled through the stack and set aside a dozen damask banquet-sized napkins, another dozen linen cocktail napkins with perky red and yellow embroidered roosters on the corners, and an adorable set of embroidered “day of the week” dish towels, each with a different vintage forties-era design.

  Miss Edith’s niece obviously knew nothing about vintage linens. She’d marked the bundle of dinner napkins at $2 and the cocktail napkins at $1, probably because they were yellowed and rust-spotted with age. But I knew a good soaking in OxiClean and some determined spot-cleaning would leave the beautiful old fabric as snowy as the day they’d been sold. And then they’d be worth ten times the price that I’d pay for them. Not that I intended to sell them. I have such a soft spot for old linens that my best friend BeBe calls me a linen slut.

  As for the kitchen towels, I’d sold a similar set on eBay two months earlier, for $40. The masking-tape price on this set was $1. Score!

  I was loading the linens into my tote bag when I noticed, for the first time, that everything was monogrammed with a large, elaborate S.

  I sighed happily. I’d never changed my name to Tal’s during that marriage, which was a source of endless disappointment to Tal’s mother and mine. And now that I was marrying Daniel Stipanek, in my middle-thirties, I intended to keep my maiden name. But I was tradition-loving enough to appreciate the idea of setting a table for a dinner party with linens emblazoned with my new husband’s initial.

  The mahogany china cabinet taking up the far wall of the dining room was loaded with dozens and dozens of collectible Boehm porcelain birds, but I deliberately avoided them, as well as the stacks of Bradford Exchange plates and Precious Moments figurines, all of them coated in dust.

  Instead, I opened one of the cabinet’s shallow drawers, more from idle curiosity than anything else. Nestled inside the top drawer’s felt-lined compartments was a large cache of flatware. The silver was blackened with decades of tarnish, decorated with a pattern of baroque curlicues and flourishes, and engraved with a large S on each piece. I picked up a fork and weighed it in my hand, turned it over and grinned. This was sterling silver. Heavy, gorgeous old sterling. I counted all the pieces. There were eleven place settings, complete down to old-fashioned pieces like demitasse spoons, fruit knives, and fish forks.

  I opened the second drawer and found it equally crammed with matching serving pieces, like ice tongs, a carving set, and slotted spoons.

  None of it was priced. I felt my heart thumping in my chest. Just as I was counting out all the serving pieces, I felt the cell phone I’d tucked in the pocket of my jacket buzz with an incoming text. Finally—Daniel must have finished up with the lunch crowd and snatched a moment of privacy.

  I pulled out the phone and sighed. The text was from Cookie. Again.

  WHERE ARE U? THE TULIPS ARE WILTING!

  I dumped all the silver from the second drawer into the top drawer, hefted my tote onto my shoulder and sped back to the porch to the cashier statement.

  Diamond Lil was still on her cell phone, chatting away. She put the phone down and looked at the drawer in my arms. “The dining room suite is two thousand dollars. It’s solid mahogany and the table has three leaves. It’s a great buy, but you’ll have to bring somebody to help you load. It’s ungodly heavy.”

  “I’m actually only interested in this flatware,” I said. “How much?”

  “Where’d you find this stuff? I’ve never seen it before, and I’ve been through this house with a fine-toothed comb.”

  “It was in the china cabinet. Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’ve had a family emergency and I need to leave right now.” I set the drawer on her card table and gestured at my tote bag. “I’ve got a bunch of napkins and some candlesticks here, and that comes to fourteen dollars. What would you want for all the flatware? There are eleven place settings and nine or ten serving pieces.”

  “God. Aunt Edith had stuff stashed everywhere. And I guess you can tell her taste wasn’t really all that great. She was a schoolteacher for thirty-five years, so I guess she bought what she could afford on what they paid teachers at Blessed Sacrament.”

  “She taught at Blessed Sacrament? That’s where I went to school.”

  Lil’s eyes flickered over my underwhelming attire—the tattered jeans and the vintage Kool and The Gang concert T-shirt worn with unlaced red Chuck Ts. “Hmm. My sisters and I went to Savannah Country Day.”

  “What was your aunt’s name?”

  “Edith Shanahan. I think she mostly taught sixth grade.”

  “Mrs. Shanahan taught me sixth grade!” I cried. “She was your aunt? She was so wonderful! She took our class on field trips to the Telfair Museum and camping on Cumberland Island, and she wrote and produced our class musical. We all adored your aunt.”

  “Yeah, she was kinda cool, I guess,” Lil said. She looked down at the silver, picked up a spoon, then put it back down again. “It’s nice silver,” she said, suddenly warming up to her late aunt’s questionable taste.

  “It really is,” I said, holding my breath. I didn’t want to offer a price, because if I offered too little I might offend her. Too much and I’d tip her off that the silver was actually worth something.

  She picked up a pocket calculator and began punching in numbers. “Let’s see. Five pieces in a place setting, times eleven, that’s fifty-five. And you said there are like, what? Twelve serving pieces?”

  “Something like that.”

  “We’ll round it up to seventy pieces, shall we?”

  “Okay.”

  “Hmm. Well, it has been kind of slow, and I’ve never seen this pattern before. Edith probably got it with her S&H Green Stamps or something.” Her nose wrinkled at the thought. “I couldn’t possibly take less than one-fifty. And I’ll have to ask you for cash.”

  “Of course,” I said sweetly, fishing three fifties and a twenty from my junking cash stash a
nd placing it on the card table.

  “Almost forgot,” I said, handing her two more twenties. “I’ve got the vintage Christmas ornaments too. Forty dollars, right?”

  “Right.”

  Her cell phone rang and she picked it up and began chatting, at the same time sliding the bills into a metal cash box—without offering me the six dollars in change I should have had coming.

  She also didn’t offer to help me get the silver out of the drawer, so I grabbed an empty cardboard box beside the card table and dumped all the silver inside. Lil shot me an annoyed look for all the racket I made, but I put the empty silver drawer back on the table and high-tailed it out of there. I was humming “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” under my breath as I trotted toward the truck.

  Under normal circumstances, I might have felt a strong pang of repressed Catholic guilt over scoring such a huge bargain on the sterling flatware. But not today. Diamond Lil might not have thought much of her late aunt Edith—or her middle-class taste—but I was thrilled to have bought something with a connection to my beloved teacher.

  Chapter 3

  I heard the music just as I was rounding Troup Square. Tubas! Half a dozen of them, blooping and bleating something that bore only the faintest resemblance to … “Silver Bells”?

  Sure enough, there, clustered on the sidewalk in front of Babalu were a squadron of tuba players, adorned in smart matching navy wool band uniforms, their elephantine brass instruments raised heavenward. Dozens of people stood around watching, some of them singing along.

  Jethro’s ears pricked up and he leaned across my lap to scout out the cause of the cacophony.