Truly Yours Contemporary Collection December 2014

by Joyce Livingston, Gail Sattler, Joyce Livingston

  Grace smiled with her lips pressed to the rim of her coffee mug, but as soon as she sipped the warm liquid, her smile turned to a grimace. “Yuk!” Grace moved the mug away from her face, stuck out her tongue, and then wiped her mouth on her sleeve. “I think I have your coffee. This has a ton of sugar in it.”

  She leaned forward and put the mug down on the coffee table to allow herself to stand up and trade mugs with him, but before she could raise herself, Phil hopped out of the recliner. He set the angel in the middle of the recliner and was in front of her with her errant mug in seconds flat. “Sorry,” he said as they traded mugs.

  “How can you drink that? How much sugar do you have in there?”

  “Only two spoons.”

  Grace shook her head at the thought of ingesting so much sugar in one cup. “That was awful. I don’t use any sugar in my coffee.”

  “I guess you’re sweeter than I am. I really need all that sugar.”

  Mug in hand, Phil returned to the recliner, but he didn’t sit down. “Hey! Your cat has made himself at home on the recliner, right next to Dale.”

  Grace grinned. “Usually Tiger claims that chair as his own. I’m surprised he wasn’t there in the first place, before you got there. But now that you’ve made it nice and warm, you’ve given him a reason to reclaim his territory and an open invitation to do so when you left the chair to come to me. I’m almost surprised he didn’t hop up on your lap when you first sat in his chair. I guess he figures that Dale is better company than you are.”

  “Forget it, Cat,” Phil grumbled as he set the coffee mug on the magazine stand. With both hands free, he picked up the angel with one hand and the cat with the other. “I got first dibs this time, and I’m bigger than you.” Phil lowered Tiger to the floor and reestablished his place in the recliner, still keeping the angel firmly secure in his hand.

  To Phil’s obvious dismay, Tiger was not ready to give up his favorite spot. The second he had a chance, Tiger leapt into Phil’s lap. Once there, and evidently confident he wasn’t going to be pushed off, Tiger curled around the angel atop Phil’s stomach and began to purr.

  Phil craned his neck back and stared at the party in his lap. “It’s pointless to argue with him, isn’t it?”

  “Yup.”

  “I don’t care about my T-shirt, but is he going to get hair all over Dale?”

  “Shouldn’t, but even if he loses a few hairs, it’s easy to pick them off. You’ve got to admit that it feels good to have him all cuddled up on top of you, doesn’t it?”

  Phil smiled as he stroked the fur behind Tiger’s ears. With Phil’s gentle ministrations, Tiger’s purring grew louder. “I suppose,” Phil mumbled. “I’m not much of a cat lover, but I don’t mind this. He’s not really much of a Tiger, is he?”

  “No, he’s not. I called him that because of his orange coloring, and he’s got a few stripes.”

  They chatted comfortably until Grace noticed the time and realized that, since she had to be at work early the next morning, it was past her bedtime. They mutually agreed on how fast the evening had gone, and Grace saw Phil to the door.

  She stepped out into the hall with him, but instead of walking toward the elevator, Phil turned around.

  He lowered his head and stared at the angel in his hands. “Grace, you’re wonderful. I know it ended up being easy to fix this time, but still, I didn’t know what to do. I wouldn’t have been able to do it without you. You saved my hide again. I had a really nice evening, too. Sorry to have overstayed my welcome on a work night. I owe you big time for this.”

  As he raised his head to look at her, Phil’s glowing smile and the warmth in his gorgeous gray eyes did funny things to Grace’s stomach.

  Grace’s breath caught in her throat. She had no right to be entranced with Phil’s smile. She was dating his best friend. What was happening was wrong.

  “It’s okay,” she mumbled. “You paid for my supper and hand-delivered it. That’s payment enough.”

  “I disagree, but I’ll deal with that another time. Good night, Grace.”

  Before she could respond, Phil turned and walked down the hall to the elevator.

  Rather than stand and watch him as he waited, the second he pushed the button, Grace shuffled backward into her apartment and closed the door behind her.

  Fortunately, she wouldn’t have to deal with seeing Phil until Sunday, nearly a week away.

  And, fortunately, that would be when she was at church with Neil, where she was safe.

  six

  “Honey, I’m ho–ome,” Phillip called out as he walked in the door.

  The drone of the hockey game accompanied Neil’s reply. “I guess she fixed it, judging by how long you were there.”

  Phillip didn’t want to mention that the angel only took minutes to fix. The other two hours he spent at Grace’s, the two of them simply yakked. Instead, he merely held the angel out for Neil to see, even though he knew Neil wasn’t really interested. “Yup.”

  “Looks good. Pass it! Pass it! Argh!”

  Phillip sighed, knowing he wasn’t going to get any good conversation out of Neil so close to the end of what was obviously a close game. “I think I’m going to go to bed. Catch you sometime tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, see ya. Hey! High-sticking! There better be a penalty coming! Whoa! He scores! All right! One more and we’ve got ’em! Less than a minute left! We can do it!”

  Phillip didn’t bother to comment. He placed the angel in the middle of the table. “Good night, Dale, Neil.”

  “Night,” Neil mumbled, too engrossed in the replay of the last goal to notice the mention of another name besides his own.

  Phillip crawled into bed but only ended up staring at the ceiling.

  As clear as the replay of the last goal to Neil, everything Phillip had said to Grace repeated over and over in his head. He couldn’t believe the things he’d admitted to her. He’d never talked about such things in his life, not even to Neil, his best friend. Not that men never thought about getting married, because he was sure other men did. He just wasn’t sure they ever talked about it seriously between themselves. Whenever his usual group of single friends discussed marriage, it was always griping and half-joking about the loss of personal freedom and being shouldered with financial responsibility and a nagging wife.

  Phillip knew it wasn’t so. Marriage was a partnership between two people who loved and needed each other. The time had come where Phillip wanted his life to have more meaning than simply going back and forth to work. More and more, Phillip felt an emptiness inside, and he wanted to fill the hole with a woman who could need him and be his partner in life. But so far, God had not answered his prayers.

  As much as he wondered what it would be like to be married, he couldn’t imagine it because he had no one to fill in the missing half of the equation. The best he could do was think of his cousin Trevor and his wife, Janice, who seemed to be very different, yet a perfect match. The bottom line was both were strong believers, which fortified a happy relationship.

  Likewise, Grace and Neil were both strong believers, which made Phillip wonder if one day they would announce a pending engagement. So far Phillip hadn’t seen them together often enough to imagine that happening. Yet, because Neil and Grace had been dating each other exclusively for the past year, Phillip had to consider one day such an announcement had to be a strong possibility.

  As to his own future wife, Phillip had no idea what kind of woman she would be, other than someone who shared his faith and someone who liked the great outdoors. He wasn’t asking God for the perfect wife, just one who would be perfect for him. Again, his words to Grace, that he was waiting for God to put the right woman in his path, echoed in his head.

  If he’d said the same thing to anyone else, Phillip wouldn’t have been surprised if, over the next month, he was suddenly swarmed with marriage-hungry women. With Grace, he knew his words would go no further. He’d never said so openly what was on his heart, yet with Grace, it ca
me naturally.

  He still couldn’t figure out what it was Neil had been referring to when Neil had referred to Grace as shy. Although Phillip wouldn’t have exactly called her talkative, conversation between them never lagged. He hadn’t known Grace long, but Phillip found Grace quite responsive to his comments and queries. In the few times there had been silences between them, it was never uncomfortable or strained. One thing he had noticed about Grace was that she tended to think everything through to the last possible conclusion before commenting. That didn’t make her shy. It simply made her thoughtful and a bit on the quiet side, and there was nothing wrong with that.

  In fact, rather than being bad, Phillip appreciated her tendency to think before she spoke. When someone took more time to think things through, that usually meant a person was less likely to jump to conclusions and more likely to weigh a situation fairly and of its own merit. Phillip knew he sometimes tended to react too quickly, and because of that, he often found himself in trouble. Because he knew he tended to be decisive and a bit aggressive, he’d never really developed a friendship with anyone whom he would call shy, as shy people tended to back away from him.

  Phillip rolled over and pulled the blanket up to his chin. Not only was Grace not backing away from him, he found her easy to talk to. And, once he really talked to her, he’d discovered a playful sense of humor that caught him completely by surprise. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed so hard as when Grace made her silly little comment about naming the angel Spot.

  With that in mind, Phillip saw great potential in Grace. Neil may have considered her shy, but Phillip didn’t think it would take much prodding to make her un-shy and really shine in a crowd.

  As sleep finally started to take him, Phillip grinned and pressed his face into his pillow. The next time he saw Grace would be on Sunday, in church, where it was crowded.

  And he could hardly wait.

  ❧

  “Come on up, Phil.”

  At the buzz, Phillip pulled the apartment-building door open and headed through the lobby for the elevator. Like every other time, by the time the elevator door opened on Grace’s floor, she was waiting for him in the hall.

  “How did it go last night?” he asked as he followed her inside and closed the door behind him.

  “Great! Thank you so much for letting me borrow Dale for the day. I didn’t expect your granny to come, what with her moving in a couple of weeks, but she was there. She said she came to Craft Night because she needed the break from looking at all those boxes. She also said she wanted to give away some of her craft supplies to people who would use and appreciate them. You should see all the knitting needles she gave me. Your granny is so nice. Did you know your granny made Dale when she was only twenty years old? She was really pleased that you let me borrow Dale to show all the ladies. I think that was the encouragement many of them needed to try to learn to crochet. Of course, I didn’t tell your granny about the name, I just called her—” Grace emphasized the female pronoun “—your Christmas angel. We can keep the name Dale as our little secret.”

  Phillip didn’t care about the ladies’ craft group passing the angel around to check out how such things were made. But, the thought of his granny looking closely at Dale made him feel faint.

  He lowered himself into the kitchen chair and picked Dale up from the middle of Grace’s table. “Did she say anything?” he asked as he turned the angel over, trying to remember if anything had been changed from the way Granny had shaped the angel before the washing and reshaping fiasco.

  “She did seem a little surprised at how nicely Dale had stayed so bright over the years. I suggested that maybe Dale just seemed brighter because of the new natural-light fluorescent bulbs. You know the room we use for our craft meetings. It’s the one the preschool uses during the daytime. Since it’s in the basement and there aren’t any windows, Pastor suggested the special full-spectrum lighting at the last general meeting. It turned out to be a wise choice.”

  “Yeah,” he mumbled as he set the angel down, much more interested in Thursday evening’s craft meeting than the decisions made by the church’s budget committee last spring. “Did she say anything else?”

  “No, she didn’t. We must have done a good job in positioning the arms and wings in the shape and position they were in before, because after commenting on the whiteness, she got right into showing everyone basic crocheting, and then gave the more experienced crocheters some wonderful tips.”

  Phillip felt himself sag with the relief of knowing their efforts had been successful. If Granny hadn’t noticed a change in front of the other ladies, she certainly wouldn’t notice Christmas morning amidst all the activity, when the focus was on the family, not the ornaments.

  He started to lean back into the chair, but all movement stopped when he looked at Grace, who was now also sitting. Leaning slightly forward, her elbows rested on the table. She cupped her chin in her palms, and she was looking straight at him with a dreamy smile that froze him on the spot.

  “I know how you feel,” she said with an airy sigh. “I was so nervous that she was going to ask me if something was wrong, but so many people complimented her on Dale, she forgot all about the nice white color. She tried to tell everyone that making such a thing wasn’t as hard as it looked. Of course I know better. Making a crocheted tree topper is definitely as hard as it looks.”

  Phillip cleared his throat. “Don’t ask me. All I know is that he—” Phillip emphasized the male pronoun “—looks great on top of the Christmas tree every year.”

  Suddenly, Grace jumped to her feet. “I’m sorry! I made coffee in case you wanted some, but, then again, you probably have better things to do with yourself than sit here with me on a Friday night.”

  Phillip shrugged his shoulders. “Not really. I didn’t have any plans. As you know, Neil had to go do something with his parents, so he won’t be home until late. It’s started snowing again, so I was just going to go home and shovel the driveway, watch a bit of television, and go to bed. Having coffee with you is much more fun than shoveling snow.”

  “Flatterer.”

  Phillip grinned as he rose and walked to join Grace at the coffeepot on the counter, not wanting her to serve him. “Yeah, that’s me. Mr. Charm. Tall, dark, and handsome, too.”

  “Oh, puh–leeze.”

  He stood to the side as she filled both mugs. “Seriously, though, I have to admit I was pretty nervous when Granny phoned me Thursday morning to ask if the craft ladies could borrow Dale for the night. It’s a good thing we got him all fixed in time.”

  Grace nodded, then grimaced as she made a big show out of dumping two spoonfuls of sugar into Phillip’s coffee mug. “I know. We’d planned to have Mrs. Capstan show the group how to make a Thanksgiving centerpiece, but something else came up at the last minute. The monthly Thursday night craft meetings are a ministry to the neighborhood ladies, as well as for our own church members. Your granny was so sweet to come up with such a charming idea on short notice. You should have seen her up at the front, demonstrating.”

  Phillip stepped away from Grace to get the cream out of her fridge. When he turned back to face her, he froze. All he could do was stare as Grace grinned from ear to ear while describing his granny’s impromptu demonstration.

  Twice in one day, Grace’s adorable smile left him feeling like he’d just been poleaxed.

  He wished he could make her smile like that. Phillip wondered if he could find out from Neil other things that made Grace smile. He also wondered if Neil was as enamored with Grace’s smile as he was.

  At the thought, the cream carton nearly fell from his hand.

  Of course he liked her—Grace was his best friend’s girlfriend, and it was only to be expected that he’d like her to some degree. Since both of them shared a relationship with Neil, it seemed natural that they could be friends, too.

  Phillip shook his head to get his thoughts back to where they should have been in the first place. As Grac
e continued to expound on his granny’s performance, she snickered while she made some kind of hand motions to imitate what his granny had done in front of the roomful of women.

  Finally starting to pay attention to what she was saying rather than how she said it, Phillip listened to the tail end of Grace’s description of his granny in action.

  He cleared his throat. “Speaking of finishing up making stuff like that, I’ve always wondered about the hair.” He added cream to both coffee mugs and returned the cream container to the fridge, thankfully without incident. But instead of picking up his mug, he picked up the angel. “The hair has fascinated me since I was a kid. Look at it.” To emphasize his point, Phillip ran his fingers through the angel’s golden locks. “It looks so real. I wonder what it’s made of.”

  Grace took one sip of coffee from her mug, rested it on the counter beside Phillip’s mug, and reached over to remove the angel from his hands. “Way back in the olden days, they did actually use real hair for stuff like this.”

  Phillip couldn’t hold back a shudder. “Gross,” he muttered as he released the angel to her.

  “Don’t worry. This is synthetic hair. It’s not very good in comparison to what they use now, but it’s the same thing they used for doll hair around the late forties, which is when she would have made this. See?”

  Grace moved her free hand toward the angel’s head, but before she actually touched the hair, her movement stopped. Abruptly, she picked off a number of cat hairs from the wings.

  “I’m so sorry, Phil. Because she’s so pretty, I put Dale on display on the coffee table while I was at work. When I got home, I found Tiger on the coffee table, too, curled around her. I don’t know why Tiger has taken such a liking to something like this. Part of me wants to make one for Tiger, since he likes it so much, but I’m certainly not going to go through all that work just so it can be used as a cat toy.”

  After she picked off the last of the offending cat hairs, Grace slid her fingers into the angel’s fine hair and separated it at the roots. “On plastic dolls, the hair comes through holes in the doll’s head, but in this case, your granny pulled the hair through a porous fabric, which she clipped and sewed to make round, then stitched it onto Dale’s head, almost like a mini wig. See?”