Christmas Bliss

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Of course you should!” I cried. “That’s what I’ve been telling you! You’re unhappy, he’s lonely. It makes no sense for you not to go.”

  She shook her head. “This is crazy. Buying a plane ticket so late like this—and it being the holidays? I probably can’t even get a flight—and if I could, it’d probably be way too expensive. I hate to spend the money when we’re going to Paris in the spring.”

  But I was already out of my chair, retrieving my phone. I scrolled through my contacts until I found the number I wanted, and touched the icon.

  “What are you doing? BeBe—no! I’m not letting you do this.”

  I waved away her objections while I was on hold with the airline. “You can’t stop me. I’ve got enough Delta frequent-flier miles to fly around the world. Twice. I’m not buying you a ticket, I’m just loaning you my miles.”

  The operator came on in a surprisingly short amount of time. I made the reservation, gave the operator Weezie’s phone number and email address, and clicked off.

  “This is nuts,” Weezie started.

  “Hush! Listen. You’re on a direct flight to LaGuardia. You better go home right now and pack, because your plane leaves at six forty in the morning. I’ve got you returning at eight forty p.m. next Friday. Now. Clothes. You don’t actually own a real winter coat, do you?”

  “Just a sort of vintage car coat I bought at an estate sale. It’s black cashmere with dolman sleeves…”

  “Cashmere is not going to cut it in New York in December. Especially vintage cashmere, which probably has vintage moth holes to match. Am I right?”

  “Maybe a few. Just around the hem…”

  I sighed and handed her a room key. “You’ll have to go unlock unit six—the little studio efficiency? I’m using that as a closet until they finish with the new house. Take my long black camel-hair coat. There are some wool scarves on a hook near the door. My slacks will all be too short on you, but help yourself to some of my sweaters.”

  “I can’t just take off and fly to New York like this,” BeBe said. “You don’t understand. This is our busiest time at the shop…”

  “Which is why you’re going to call Courtney and tell her she can have all the extra hours she wants this week. You did say she was looking to make some extra money over the holidays, right? And what about those SCAD kids who’ve been working part-time? Why couldn’t they come in to help Courtney?”

  “Ellie and Alex did say they aren’t going home for Christmas this year,” I admitted. “But what about the wedding? Mama will want to do one more fitting for my dress, and I’m still not sure about the cake. I baked some more layers this morning, but I can’t decide on the frosting. I don’t even have a cake topper yet!”

  “Weezie! Stop with the excuses. You told me earlier your mama fitted the dress on you yesterday. She’s been sewing for you her whole life. The dress will be fine. And as for the cake, I don’t get why you have to bake your own cake when Daniel has an amazing pastry chef at Guale. You can pick up a cake topper in New York. They have stores there, in case you haven’t heard.”

  “I don’t know,” she repeated. “I want to go. I’m dying to go. But it’s so … irresponsible to just drop everything and take off at the last minute like this.” She gave me a long, searching look. “What about this thing with Richard? Plus I wouldn’t feel right, taking off so close to your due date. What if the baby comes early?”

  “I’ll call your uncle James first thing tomorrow. As for the baby, it might never come,” I said. “You know I want you right here when the time comes, don’t you?”

  “I’ll be right there, with a big ol’ thermos of frozen daiquiris, the minute that baby is safely delivered,” Weezie pledged.

  “Well, my time for sure isn’t going to come in the next five days.” I splayed my fingertips over my belly. “I swear it feels like I’ve got a bowling ball pressing down on my bladder.”

  “Call the airline and cancel that reservation,” Weezie said. “I mean it. What with Daddy acting all squirrelly and all the wedding stuff on my mind, I’ve got no business even considering a trip to New York.”

  “You are going,” I insisted. “I have weeks and weeks to go before Squirt gets here. You’ve got good help at the shop, and if you’re worried about the wedding stuff, just turn it all over to Cookie and Manny. Your daddy? Well, if he has dementia or Alzheimer’s or whatever, your mama is eventually going to have to deal with the reality of that.”

  She sighed. “I’m so conflicted.”

  “Go. Your uncle James is only five minutes away if something comes up with your daddy. I can help out in the shop if the girls need an extra hand. So why are you hanging around here when you’ve got so much to do before morning?”

  “I guess there’s no good arguing, since you put it like that.” She stood up and gave me a hug. “Which unit did you say the coat is stashed in?”

  * * *

  Five minutes later she was back with an armful of clothes. “I just remembered—what do I do about Jethro? I can’t ask Mama to take him, not with Daddy like he is. And Cookie and Manny have enough to deal with with Ruthie.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Okay, he can stay with me. I’ll pick him up in the morning. Now get out of here before I change my mind.”

  * * *

  Six o’clock came and went. My phone calls to Harry went directly to voice mail. I tried not to worry, telling myself the weather was perfectly normal. It had been a warm, positively balmy day in Savannah, and the temperature had dipped down into the sixties only after sunset. At seven, I clicked on the weather radio we keep in the office, but all the forecasts were good. Seas were calm, it wasn’t too windy.

  I wondered how many thousands of other wives and sweethearts of fishermen all over the world were doing what I was doing tonight; pacing the floor, worrying about their mates out on the deep blue sea.

  Harry Sorrentino was an experienced charter boat captain. He’d grown up fishing these waters, bought his first flats boat at the age of fourteen, and gotten his captain’s license at eighteen. He’d taken charters as far north as Cape Hatteras in North Carolina and as far south as the Florida Keys. At one point in his life, he’d actually gotten a law degree, but he’d never really practiced law.

  We’d met at a low point in both our lives. Two consecutive years of bad fishing and high fuel and repair costs had resulted in his ex-wife repossessing his beloved boat, the Jitterbug, so he’d taken the only job he could get at the time, as maintenance man and manager of the Breeze Inn. My plight wasn’t any better, after Reddy took off with not just my own money but my grandparents’ life savings as well, I was penniless and homeless.

  But together, with Weezie and even Granddad along for the ride, we’d tailed Reddy all the way down to Fort Lauderdale, and managed to con a con and eventually recover most of my fortune. Along the way, Harry and I had fallen hard for each other. We’ve been together ever since.

  And we would stay together, I promised myself, no matter what. Tomorrow I would call James Foley and enlist his help to untangle my marital mess.

  Jeeves was standing expectantly by the door. I was exhausted, but dogs don’t care. I snapped on his leash and we went for our evening walk. When we got back, I picked up my phone, expecting to see that Harry had called. Instead, there was a message from Otis, our plumber. I recognized his high, nasal voice even before he identified himself.

  “Miz Loudermilk? This is Otis Bembry. Listen, uh, about that old beat-up kitchen sink your friend wants to put in the new house. I been studying that thing, and I just don’t think I can make that work. You’d have to send off clear to Atlanta to get the right drainpipe. But don’t you worry. I went over to the Home Depot and got you a brand spanking new one, nice and shiny white, and it didn’t cost but ninety-eight dollars.”

  “No, no, no.” I slapped my own forehead in frustration. Because the “new” house was actually a wood-frame cottage built around 1914, Weezie had found an original porcelain-over-cast-iron
farm sink at a local architectural salvage yard. She’d designed our kitchen around the sink. Otis’s cheap shiny white sink would ruin the whole effect.

  The next message on the Inn’s machine was also about the house.

  “Hey, uh, Miz Loudermilk? Henry here. Me and the crew were supposed to be over to your place in the morning, but uh, Lamar and Junior, my helpers? They, uh, got in kind of a jam down in Jacksonville Saturday night. Junior, he’s got a busted right hand, and Lamar thinks maybe he’s got a couple cracked ribs. Anyway, we’ll probably see you around the middle of the week. Okay?”

  “Not okay,” I muttered, setting the phone down. Henry was our roofer, and he was already a week late. The only real roof we had on the house right now was a big blue tarp. And the forecast for the coming week was rain and more rain.

  It was no good my calling him back and threatening to fire him. I’d already fired Henry once and had to rehire him, because I couldn’t find another roofer on such short notice.

  Harry did most of his own mechanical work on the Jitterbug, but maybe something had gone wrong. He could have blown an engine or sheared off a propeller. His radio might have been disabled, or his GPS navigational system could have been knocked off. Or … my God! I’d read about rogue waves, three, four, five stories high, engulfing boats …

  Between worrying about my marital status with Richard and annoyances at our contractors and my fears for what could happen to Harry, by the time I heard the crunch of tires in the Breeze Inn’s parking lot, I’d managed to work myself into a full-blown panic attack.

  Chapter 9

  Harry strode into the apartment, grinning ear to ear. His face was windburned and his hair was stiff with salt spray. Jeeves was flinging himself at his legs, in a delirium of joy.

  Me? I burst into tears.

  “Hey,” he said softly, stopping a few feet short of me. “What’s all this about?”

  “I thought you were dead!” I said accusingly. “When you didn’t call at six like you usually do, I started imagining all the things that could go wrong. That the boat broke down or your nav system quit working. And then I started thinking about rogue waves and sharks and…”

  “Damn!” he said, reaching into the pocket of his fleece-lined Windbreaker. He held up his cell phone. “Dead as a doornail. I’m so sorry, babe. We were out at the snapper banks, and the fish were biting like crazy. Snapper, grouper, sea bass, we were pulling them in so fast, I guess I lost all track of time. My client said it was the single best fishing day of his life.”

  His hand went back in his pocket and he brought out a wad of cash. “Look at this! A five-hundred-dollar tip. And that’s not all. I’ve probably got a couple hundred pounds of fish out in my cooler. I’ll sell ’em to the seafood wholesale house in the morning and probably end up clearing close to a thousand bucks for one day’s worth of fishing. Not bad, huh?”

  Tears were running down my face, and I was powerless to stop them. “The money’s great, but I was so worried. What if something really had gone wrong?”

  He gathered me into his arms and held me close. “Nothing’s gonna go wrong. I’ve been doing this my whole life. I just overhauled the boat last month. She’s running great. The seas are calm, the weather is perfect. My guy wanted to stay out overnight and fish again in the morning, but I told him nothing doing, I had to get home to you.”

  He placed his right hand on my belly. “How’s the baby? Everything good? Was the shower fun? Looks like we got a lot of presents, huh?”

  “The baby’s fine. The shower was fine.” I sniffed and took a step away from Harry. “You smell like the bottom of a bait bucket.”

  He cupped my chin with his hand and kissed the tip of my nose. “Sorry about that too. I’ll hit the shower, than we can talk, okay?”

  “I guess.”

  * * *

  By the time Harry was out of the shower, I’d managed to compose myself. A little.

  He walked out of the bedroom, barefoot, in a clean T-shirt and his oldest, most worn pair of jeans. His deeply tanned face and arms were in stark contrast to the white shirt, and his damp hair still wore comb tracks.

  “Better now?” he asked, putting his arms around what was left of my waist.

  I buried my nose in his shoulder, inhaling the scent of the bleached-out shirt and his soap. His hands, resting lightly on the skin of my back, felt warm and strong. And I felt safe and loved. Being in his arms made me feel safe and good, and finally, for the first time in my adult life, I knew I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

  We stood like that for maybe five minutes, not talking, just leaning into each other. I sniffed again and took a half step backwards.

  “Did you get something to eat?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said carelessly. “I stopped at the Publix on Wilmington Island on the way home. I actually sort of thought you might already be asleep.”

  “No way.” I shook my head. “Is your phone working okay now?”

  “I plugged it in and it’s recharging right now. It was just the battery.”

  Damn it, I felt tears welling up in my eyes again. “Get a new battery, please. In fact, get a new phone. I can’t stand to worry about you like this.”

  “My phone is fine,” Harry said, his voice serious. “Come on, let’s go sit down. You’ve got yourself all worked up over nothing.”

  I let him lead me to the sofa by the hand, like a naughty child. I sank uneasily into the deep cushions and he settled at the opposite end of the sofa.

  “How are your feet?” he asked. “Want me to rub ’em?”

  I answered by stretching out full-length. He took my right foot and began kneading the toes.

  “Tell me about the baby shower,” he said. “Was it fun?”

  “I guess.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “They played a little game to guess how big around my waist is.”

  He winced.

  “And Karen Turner filled me in on just how miserable I can expect these next six weeks to be. Among other things, she mentioned her episiotomy disaster.”

  “Ouch.”

  I raised my head and looked at him. “And did you know we were supposed to have a birth plan?”

  “We do have a birth plan,” he said, in that rational voice of his that makes me crazy. “We have a doctor and a hospital. We’ve been to birthing classes. That’s a plan, right?”

  “Not according to Stephanie Gardner.”

  He just rolled his eyes. “What else?”

  “Grandmama wants me to make an honest man out of you.”

  “I love that old lady.”

  “And she loves you. She told me so. But we’ve been over this a million times, right?”

  “If you say so.”

  I could sense the direction this conversation was headed in, so I deliberately switched gears. “Otis called.”

  “The plumber? What’s he want?”

  “He doesn’t think Weezie’s sink is going to work. So he took it upon himself to buy us a ‘shiny new sink’ at Home Depot. For ninety-eight dollars.”

  “Shit.” He rubbed his eyes wearily. “I’ll call him in the morning and tell him to take the new sink back. Anything else?”

  “Henry’s two helpers are banged up from a bar fight. His message said maybe he’d see us on Wednesday. Harry, it’s supposed to rain this week—and if it does, and the wind picks up, which it will, we’re screwed. That tarp will blow off and the oak floors we just refinished will be ruined.” I blinked back a fresh set of tears.

  He kneaded my toes with his strong hands for a minute, watching my face. “BeBe?” He gently pulled me up to a sitting position and gazed into my eyes. “I’ll install the sink myself. And we’ll find another roofer. What else can I fix?”

  “Me,” I said, looking away from his searching glance. “I wish you could fix me.”

  “You?” He was incredulous. “You’re the strongest, smartest woman I know.” He gestured around the room. “You took this dump and
turned it into a moneymaking machine in three months. You bought and sold real estate, ran a successful restaurant, manage your grandparents’ finances. You don’t need fixing, just a little rest, that’s all.”

  “It’s not that I’m tired. And it’s not the hormones making me cry. It’s me.

  “I’m so scared,” I whispered. “What if I can’t do this? Be a mom? I don’t know anything about babies. I never even babysat. And I can’t ask my own mom because she’s gone. I wish you’d met her, Harry. And I wish she could meet you. She was so good at being mom. All those kids, and I never remember her being flustered or overwhelmed. She made it look so easy. Maybe that’s what made me think I could do it. I want this baby, I really, really do. But I’m terrified I’ll mess it up.”

  “You won’t mess it up,” he assured me, gathering me into his arms again. “You are a loving, caring, giving woman. Anyway, there’s two of us, remember?”

  “You’re as inexperienced as me! Like, you didn’t even know we were supposed to have a birth plan. I bet you didn’t even know we needed a baby wipe warmer. But apparently we do, because we got two as gifts today.”

  “It can’t be that hard,” Harry insisted. “You feed ’em, burp ’em, change ’em, and love ’em. You don’t need a plan for that. And you sure as hell don’t need warm baby wipes.”

  I clutched his hand. “See? That’s why I was so panicked when you didn’t call today. I can’t do this without you.”

  “You won’t have to. I’m here. And I’m not going anywhere.” He looked around the room, at the blinking white lights on the Christmas tree in the corner, and then back at me.

  “I’ve been thinking about this, BeBe. I think probably it’s time I give up fishing and stay home and get a real job. Something reliable so I can be around for our kid. Not like my old man, who’d be gone weeks at a time, shrimping as far away as Mexico some seasons.”

  For a minute, I was too stunned to speak. Since the day we’d met, Harry had made it clear to me that being a charter boat captain was the only career he’d ever wanted. He’d tended bar, worked construction, and run a marina over the years, but as far as he was concerned, those were only temporary assignments, something to put gas in his boat and food on the table.