Christmas Bliss

by Mary Kay Andrews

  As befitting the holiday crush, service was agonizingly slow. But eventually the waiter brought us glasses of champagne and a three-tiered stand of dainty finger sandwiches, miniature elaborate frosted cakes and sweets, and jewel-colored fruits. As scenic as the food was, I was more impressed with the room itself. Enormous glittering crystal chandeliers lit the room, and overhead, the domed ceiling was made entirely of stained glass.

  “How on earth did you manage to get us in here?” I asked after I’d polished off two glasses of champagne and about a million calories worth of tea cakes.

  “Dumb luck,” Daniel said. “And BeBe. She texted me yesterday, asking if I’d taken you here yet. Everybody warned me that I’d never get a reservation—not this time of year. But I just kept calling, and right before I texted you, I managed to get through—and they’d had some cancellations for this afternoon. Probably because of the weather.”

  “This place is divine,” I said, trying to appear nonchalant while I leaned over and unzipped a boot, easing my blistered right foot out of the faux-leather casing.

  Daniel pointed at my tote bag. “What’s all that?”

  I told him about my junk jaunt and showed him one of the bottle-brush Christmas trees.

  “Are those to sell or to keep?”

  “I’m keeping all of them! They’ll be my souvenir of my first trip to New York, Christmas, everything.”

  “I’m glad the trip wasn’t a total bust,” he said, glancing down at his watch. It was past five.

  “You need to get back to the restaurant, right?” I tried not to let my disappointment show.

  “I’m worried about getting a cab in all this snow,” he admitted. “Traffic’s gonna be a bear.”

  He paid up and we made our way toward the lobby exit, where a huge throng of people were standing around, staring out the window—at a sea of white.

  “Damn,” Daniel said. “I can’t believe it’s snowing even harder than when I got here.”

  I clung to his hand as we made our way through the crowd. Stepping out of the overheated hotel lobby felt like stepping into a deep freezer. The temperature had continued dropping, and a bitter cold wind sent gusts of snow whirling through the darkened night, even under the covered hotel parapet.

  A quartet of scarlet-coated doormen stood out on the street, whistling ineffectively at the occasional cab that happened by on the oddly quiet street. But none stopped, and after ten minutes, we went back inside to get warm and regroup.

  Daniel pulled out his cell phone. “I’ll call the car service Carlotta uses. I’ll get a Town Car to drop me at the restaurant and then take you back to the apartment.”

  He listened without speaking, then hung up, his expression glum.

  “Nobody answering the phone,” he reported. “I got a recording saying they weren’t dispatching cars due to inclement weather.”

  “What do we do now?” I was starting to feel uneasy about all that snow. It had been a beautiful novelty earlier in the week, but now it seemed somehow ominous.

  He was already working the phone again. “Carlotta has a four-wheel-drive. Maybe she can come get us.”

  “Hi,” he said suddenly. “Look, we’re stuck at the Plaza. Cabs are nonexistent and the car service has shut down. Any chance?” He listened intently, shaking his head.

  “You’re kidding?

  “For real?

  “What about all the dinner bookings?”

  He nodded again.

  “Okay. Talk tomorrow. Good luck getting home.”

  “What?” I asked. “Bad news?”

  “The snow’s worse than we knew. The weather service is calling it a full-blown blizzard. None of the rest of the staff can get into work, so Carlotta closed down the restaurant an hour ago. She was trying to drive back to her place on the Upper East Side, but there were so many abandoned cars she just pulled over to the side of the street to walk the rest of the way home.”

  “Oh wow,” I said weakly. “A blizzard? What are we gonna do?”

  He looked around the lobby and spotted a small brocade-covered settee on the opposite side of the room. “Go stake us out a place on that couch. I’m gonna see about getting us a room here.”

  “For the night? At the Plaza? Can we afford that?”

  “I don’t think we have a whole lot of other choices,” Daniel said. “We’re snowed in.”

  * * *

  Snowed in! How romantic. How terrifying. I was getting married in forty-eight hours. And I was scheduled to fly home in less than twenty-four. How would a blizzard affect the airlines?

  I stayed on hold with the airline for forty-five minutes, listening to a recorded voice tell me how very important my call was to them. Every once in a while I looked up, to see Daniel, working his way through the line of people standing in front of the hotel desk.

  Neither of us seemed to be making much progress.

  I was still on hold when he drifted back across the lobby, his dejected posture telling me the situation without words.

  “No luck?” I asked as he slumped down onto the settee beside me.

  He shook his head. “The hotel’s completely sold out. I tried to get on a waiting list, but the desk clerk just laughed and called it a ‘quaint notion.’ I called some other hotels nearby while I waited. No go. Everything in Manhattan is booked solid. Who are you on hold for?”

  “Delta. What if they start canceling flights?”

  “They already have,” he replied. “I thought about the same thing. There’s a notice on the website saying all flights out of LaGuardia are canceled.”

  “What about the other airports?” I asked. “JFK? And how far away is Newark?”

  “Everything in the tristate area is shut down,” Daniel said. He leaned his head against the back of the settee and tucked his arm around my shoulders. “Better get comfortable. I think we’re in for a long night.”

  I must have dozed off. When I awoke some time later, Daniel was standing over me, calling my name softly. He held out his hand to me.

  Groggily, I took it. “What’s happening? Where are we going?”

  He held out a large bronze key. “To our room. C’mon.”

  People were camped out in various stages of sleep all over the lobby. Elegant sofas meant to seat three or four held five and six people, with blankets spread across their laps. Those fur-coat-clad women we’d seen earlier in the Plaza Court were sleeping sitting up in wing chairs, their daughters resting on their laps, the coats serving as makeshift comforters.

  “How did you manage to get a room?” I asked, as Daniel led me toward the elevator.

  “Dumb luck once again,” he said wearily. “I went up to the concierge desk to ask if they had an extra charger for my phone, and I even offered my credit card to pay for the thing. The guy looked at my card and remembered me.”

  “You know the concierge here?” I was duly impressed.

  “Not really. But he knows the chefs at all the important restaurants in town. It’s his job. He sent one of their guests over the other night, without a reservation, and Carlotta gave the guy a good table. So he’s giving us a room.”

  “But they told you they were sold out.”

  “They always hold a few rooms back for emergencies. He swears this is the last one left in the joint.”

  The elevator doors slid open, and we were on the hotel’s top floor.

  “The penthouse? We’re staying in the penthouse at the Plaza?”

  “Don’t get yourself too worked up,” Daniel warned. “The concierge said it’s actually a maid’s room.”

  I trailed behind him down the long carpeted hallway. He stopped before a narrow door marked “Hotel Staff.”

  * * *

  “Wow. The maids in this hotel must all have been Munchkins,” I said, edging into the room behind Daniel. “Not that I’m complaining,” I added hastily. “I’m just grateful to have a room and a bed.”

  The bed, a double, was tucked under the sharply sloped ceiling and took up mo
st of the windowless room. There was a nightstand on one side of the bed, and a battered painted dresser that held a seventies-era television. Daniel opened a narrow door. “There’s a bathroom,” he reported. “Kinda.”

  I looked over his shoulder and saw an old-fashioned cast-iron claw-foot tub, a high-backed commode, and a sink smaller than the one in Daniel’s apartment.

  “A tub,” I said wearily. “An honest-to-God tub.”

  He reached into the jacket of his pocket and handed me a small zippered bag. “The desk clerk gave me this when he saw that we were stranded. Toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, shampoo. A razor for me.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, inching the door shut. “I think I have an appointment with this tub.”

  * * *

  The water was hot and the soap was some lovely scented stuff, and I laid back in the tub and soaked and felt the day’s tensions ebbing from my bones.

  The bathroom door opened. Daniel stood there, wearing nothing but a smile.

  “Got room for me?”

  Chapter 27

  At some point I became aware of a persistent ringing from somewhere close by. I sat up in bed, totally disoriented. The room was pitch black. The ringing seemed to be coming from the other side of the bed.

  I lunged across my sleeping fiancée and scrabbled around in the dark for the phone. It kept ringing, but I couldn’t find it. I finally climbed over Daniel, turned on the lamp, and saw that my cell phone had fallen on the floor.

  “Hello?” I was out of breath.

  “Weezie!”

  Crap. It was Mama.

  “Where are you?” she demanded. “I have been frantic with worry. They’re saying it’s the biggest blizzard of the decade up there in New York, and that the airports are all snowed in. That can’t be right, can it?”

  I climbed back off Daniel’s back. He was motionless in the bed. I looked around the room, but there was no clock, and with no window, I had no idea whether it was day or night. “What time is it?” I asked.

  “It’s seven o’clock in the morning. I would have called earlier, but your daddy said you’d be fine and to stop worrying.”

  “I am fine. Daddy’s right. Stop worrying.”

  “So you’re at the airport right now?”

  “Not exactly,” I admitted. “To tell you the truth, I was asleep.”

  “How can you sleep at a time like this?” Mama wailed.

  “I was tired.” There was no way I was going to share with her that Daniel and I were stranded at the Plaza with no luggage—and no way to leave.

  “Well, what time are you heading to the airport?” she asked. “I thought you were supposed to be home by noon today. There’s still so much to do for the wedding, I’m just frantic with worry.”

  I yawned widely. “Last night they were saying all of today’s flights would probably be delayed. I was sound asleep when you called. I’ll call the airline and then I’ll call you back.”

  After I’d disconnected the phone, Daniel rolled onto his side and kissed my nose.

  “That was nice last night,” he said softly.

  “Very nice. We should get stranded in a blizzard more often.”

  “Just as long as it’s at the Plaza, with room service,” he agreed.

  “I’ve gotta call the airline and see about getting home,” I said regretfully. “Otherwise, Mama is totally going to fall to pieces. You won’t really have to work today, right? You can try to come home on the same flight as me?”

  “If there are any flights leaving LaGuardia, yes, I’ll try to fly home with you,” he agreed. “Can’t have Marian falling all to pieces this close to Christmas.”

  He sat up in bed, grabbed the remote, and switched on the television, flipping channels until we found the Today show, with Al Roker standing in front of an enormous snowdrift and dressed in a fur-lined parka that made him look like Nanook of the North.

  Al was holding a yardstick stuck in the drift, and only a couple inches of the stick protruded. “Record snows for New York City and surrounding areas,” he said, sounding absolutely delighted at the news. “Although the snow ceased around one this morning, officials at LaGuardia, JFK, and Newark airports have said flights can’t resume until plows get all the runways cleared.”

  * * *

  Daniel went downstairs to check on traffic conditions while I got dressed. He came back to the room with two cups of coffee, two toasted whole wheat bagels, and some moderately good news.

  “The doorman says most of the streets have been cleared and we should be able to get a cab. I called Carlotta and told her I was going to try and fly home with you this morning, and she agreed that makes sense.”

  He paused and then sat down on the bed beside me. “I also told her I won’t be coming back.”

  My eyes widened and I put my coffee down on the nightstand. “You did?”

  “Yeah. It’s a great opportunity, I know, and maybe I’m crazy to turn it down, but this week made me realize I’ll never really be happy working for somebody else again. I miss Guale. I miss driving my own damn truck and going where I want, when I want. New York’s fun. It’s exciting and I learned a hell of a lot working for Carlotta, but this isn’t the life I want for us.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Not unless you do,” he said. “Do you?”

  “No.” I took a sip of the coffee. They had great coffee at the Plaza.

  “Savannah’s home. I guess it always will be. I’m like you. I’ll never be happy working for somebody else after running my own shop. My family’s there. Your family’s there. BeBe and Harry are there, and I can’t wait for their baby to get born. And Mama? She’s a major pain in my butt, but she needs me, Daniel. She’s not gonna be able to deal with Daddy and his … issues by herself.”

  “I get that,” he said. He pulled me to my feet.

  “C’mon, Weezie Foley, let’s get on home and get ourselves hitched.”

  Chapter 28

  BeBe

  Saturday morning, I unlocked the door of the Breeze Inn unit we’d been using as storage for all the furniture destined for the new house. I’d spent the previous night alone, secretly glad when Harry called to ask how I felt about him staying out overnight with his charter client. I still wasn’t getting a lot of rest, and there was no sense in both of us having a sleepless night. Besides, I had plans for today, plans he probably wouldn’t endorse.

  “If the fish are biting, you should stay out there fishing,” I’d assured him. “I’m fine. The checkup with Michael was good, nothing exciting to report, except he was bitching at me to take it easy. Which I did. The boys and I had pizza for dinner, then sat by the fireplace and totally vegged out last night.”

  It wasn’t really a lie, not telling him about my elevated blood pressure—more like a tiny little sin of omission. No need for him to worry.

  “The boys?” Harry sounded confused.

  “Jeeves and Jethro. They’re best friends now. Jeeves stays on what’s left of my lap; Jethro has commandeered the spot under the coffee table. All I ask is that you call me when you’re on the way home tomorrow. Don’t forget, we’ve got Weezie’s wedding tomorrow, and I’m sure she’ll have a bunch of errands she needs me to run.”

  “I’ll be home before dark,” Harry promised. “Take care of yourself—and do what Michael says. Just take it easy, BeBe. I know you’re antsy to get the nursery set up, but I can start moving furniture over to the house tomorrow morning, no problem.”

  I really did mean to take it easy and follow the doctor’s orders. But I’d been obsessing about the nursery for days now. Every time the baby kicked, it was a reminder that time was running out. Hadn’t Michael warned me first babies come when they want?

  What was the harm in moving a few light items over to the nursery? I could hang some pictures, put down the rug, no heavy lifting necessary. Now I eyed the white Jenny Lind crib longingly, running my fingers over the satin finish on the headboard, but I knew that even if I managed to get it out of the r
oom, there was no way I could lug it up the stairs by myself.

  Just then I heard a loud banging and chugging noise coming from the construction site. I knew that racket. It was Benny the tile guy, driving up in his rattletrap 1970s Vista Cruiser station wagon. Benny was scrawny-looking, but looks could be deceiving. All week I’d watched him effortlessly toting fifty-pound sacks of mortar mix and heavy boxes of tile up and down the stairs of the new house.

  I met him out in the parking lot. “Good morning, Benny,” I said, treating him to my most Madonna-and-child smile.”Is that the replacement penny tile for the guest bath?”

  “Yes ma’am.” He blushed and looked away. “I feel pretty bad about that mistake.”

  “No need for more apologies. But if you wanted to make it up to me, I could use one little favor before you get started with the tiling…”

  * * *

  By lunchtime, we’d gotten all the furniture in place in the nursery. And when I say we, I mean, he. As in Benny. The crib was set up, the dresser and bookshelf were in place, the antique toy box Weezie had found at an estate sale was in a corner, and the wicker rocking chair and hassock that had been another gift from her was placed near the window.

  I’d even managed to sweet-talk Benny into hanging my curtain rods and toting over all the cartons of children’s books and toys I’d been hoarding.

  “Is that all?” Benny whined. “I really need to get to my tiling. I promised my old lady, I mean, my wife, I’d be back this afternoon to put up our Christmas tree.”

  “That is absolutely all. For now.” I thanked him and shooed him back to his tile chores. I sat in the rocker and admired our handiwork. It would all be perfect—if I just had those drapes hung. And the bedding for the crib. I knew Marian Foley had finished sewing weeks ago and handed everything off to Weezie.

  My cell phone rang. Providence was with me again. It was Weezie.

  “Hey. How’s the snow?” I asked. “I saw about the storm on the news last night. Are you guys going to make it home in time?”