“Derek?” She dips a brush into the paint can and edges the color along the white door molding.
“Yeah, I need another guy here before Brooke gets me in the kitchen with oven mitts on, helping make dinner.”
“Ha! Is it really Derek you want here, or the pizza he’s picking up for me?”
“It’s always about the food, Vee,” Brooke reminds her. “Don’t ever forget that. If you guys ever fight, or don’t see eye to eye, or whatever. Just bring on the food and you’ll work it out.”
When there’s a knock at the side door, Vera rushes through the kitchen. “The natives are restless,” she tells Derek while holding the door open as he carries in two large pizza boxes, kissing her hello on the way. A cold wind blows in right with him and she quickly shuts the door. “I opened a folding table in the dining room for Brett. As long as he can eat and paint at the same time, we’ll keep him happy.”
Derek puts down the pizza, then checks out the paint color while rolling up his olive-plaid flannel shirt cuffs. “Hm. Something’s missing.”
“Really?” Vera asks. “You don’t like the color?”
“I love the color. Hang on, let me get something from my truck.”
“All right!” Brett tells him a few minutes later. “Tunes.”
“Yup. Can’t paint without the right atmosphere.”
Derek takes off his down vest and plugs in an old construction site radio covered in paint splatters, the antenna slightly bent. The tuning dial is a little loose, too, but all that matters is the sound. Vera sees that as soon as the music begins: Paintbrushes are dipped with more finesse, Brett brings a little style to rolling gold on the far wall, and Brooke gets artistic, doing a two-step with her technique.
“Nice,” Vera tells her when she finishes painting a gold heart around her and Brett’s names on the wall between two large windows. “I think I’ll leave that right there.”
“Hey, anyone delivering pizza up here?” Derek asks from the top of the ladder while painting around the crown molding.
“I’m on it, special delivery just for you.” Vera hands him a plate loaded with a sausage and pepperoni slice.
He sets his brush across the top of the paint can on the ladder tray and bites into the pizza. “This is a great room, Vera, those are some cool built-ins,” he says, pointing to a china cabinet along the wall.
Brett walks into the room carrying two bottles of beer. “Hey guy, how about a brew?”
“Definitely,” Derek says, taking one from him and setting it on the top of the ladder. “I remember when Abby helped me paint the house one time.”
“Man, you let a kid paint your house?” Brett asks.
“Shit, she was out there for hours, her little arm painting away.”
“Aw, that’s cute.” Brooke stops to listen. “Daddy’s helper?”
“I was up on the ladder just like this, and she was down below helping me out.” He takes a drink of the beer and says over his shoulder to Brett, “With her own paintbrush and a bucket of water.”
“Well, that’s different then,” Brett answers while rolling paint. “Saved you from doing any touch-up, anyway.”
And Vera sees how he’s purely in the memory, and it’s okay. Because that’s the kind of easy night it is.
The music plays on, a classic rock number bridging Vera’s historic house to the present and what she pictures is this: a parlor party from more than a hundred years back, maybe with guests in formal clothes, long dresses and such, listening to phonograph records on a crank-up Victrola. That happens sometimes—when she steps into a musty closet, or when she beat the old oriental rug outside on the clothesline, the dust rising from it, or when she hears a step on the staircase creak—she envisions what life was like in this big house many, many years ago.
Brooke pours more of the gold paint into her tray. “Uh-oh. Jingles, scat!” She shoos the cat as it sniffs the paint, leaving a dot of gold clinging to a whisker. “Move along, kitty.” He sits for a second surveying the paint mess in the room before walking to the pizza table and settling in beneath it. “That’s right, you supervise from over there.”
And if that’s the case, if Jingles is supervising, Vera thinks he does a pretty good job of it. Because doesn’t her house take on a new life as the dining room walls are covered with their gold hue, a few drinks and hearty laughs spicing up the color and bringing an easy cheer to the big old room. If only echoes of this night would ring into any dinner served here in the days and months to come, she’d love it. And when they’re done painting, and eating, and okay dabbing paint strokes onto each other’s jeans in an impromptu game of Got You Last, either the magic of the music or the magic of people who know you best kicks in when Brooke moves aside the ladder and scoops up the drop cloths.
“You’ve got the perfect hardwood floors to christen this room with a dance, Vee.” She looks at Brett. “Maestro?”
Brett flips through the stations on Derek’s paint-spattered radio until he finds the right country music, cranks it up and then moves beside Brooke. On just the right beat, they revisit their wedding night and glide right into the Electric Slide, clapping and stomping through the first steps with happy ease.
Vera watches them from the arched doorway, her arms crossed in front of her, grinning at it all until she looks over to see Derek silently point first to her, then to himself. And she doesn’t know if there ever was a happier sound in her historic Dutch Colonial. Heck, she’s not even sure the sea captain’s boots walking through the heavy front door after a long voyage could top the sound of Brett’s and Derek’s work boots on the wood floor, along with Brooke’s heel tapping cowboy boots and Vera’s blue lace-up sneakers, all dancing up a storm on hundred-year-old planks of oak beneath them, tapping, kicking and spinning the room right into present day.
* * *
Derek grabs another slice of pizza and walks into the living room to see Brett holding a marshmallow over the fireplace flame, drinking a beer as he does, while Brooke waits beside him with her graham cracker and piece of chocolate.
“Here you go,” Brett tells her as he sets the melting marshmallow on her cracker.
“All right!” Brooke whispers. “Love these.” She takes a bite of the S’mores and closes her eyes. “Heaven on a cracker. Want some?” she asks around the food, holding it out for Brett to sample.
Derek finishes the pizza and sits on the couch. “Let me get that,” he says a moment later, starting to stand when Vera carefully slides a beanbag chair down her staircase.
“No, sit, sit! I’m good. Listen, I don’t have too much furniture yet, guys.” She pushes the chair over near the TV, then sinks on the sofa beside him. “So if someone wants to get comfortable on this, be my guest.”
“Here.” Brooke hands her a S’mores of her own. “They’re delicious.”
Vera holds it up to Derek and when he takes a bite, he sees. He sees how life goes on, and how easy it is to not realize it, especially when tragedy takes hold. But it does go on, and the only way to know it is to step out of the tragedy, and it feels like pushing open a heavy, mysterious curtain and walking right into the rest of the world. Head on.
“Hey, Lauren called me today, Brooke,” Vera says. “She got the article I’d sent along, and we got to talking. I guess she spent a lot of time at Stony Point last summer, and I was thinking—”
“Wait! Let me guess,” Brooke interrupts. “We should rent a cottage together?”
Vera laughs. “Yes! Gosh, it’s been so long since we’ve been to the beach. Would you guys be game?”
“I could go for some fun in the sun,” Brett answers, finishing his beer and getting comfortable in the beanbag chair. “But it’s impossible to even believe it’ll be summer again the way that wind is howling tonight.”
Derek puts his arm around Vera’s shoulder and watches the fire crackling in the big brick fireplace, taking it all in. Talk and easy food and summer plans. Really, at this one moment it seems like just enough.
> “And you’re coming, too,” Vera whispers to him.
He kisses the side of her head and at the same time his cell phone rings. “It’s Kevin,” he says when he checks it. “Let me take this, it’s about the boats.” He stands and heads into the dining room, talking briefly with Kevin about a friend who wants to join the procession. They estimate details on boat size and type, and where it’ll fit in the lineup. “Want to clean up these paint trays now?” he calls out when he’s done.
“No!” Brooke and Vera insist together.
“We’re starting the Christmas movie marathon. Get back in here and have a marshmallow. Or pizza,” Vera says. And when he walks back into the room, watching her, she adds, “Or just sit with me.”
And he does. He just sits and lets time unfold on Vera starting the movie and setting the remote down on the coffee table. Unfold on Brooke fussing with another S’mores while Brett starts dozing on the beanbag chair. The room is warm, the lights are dim, the firewood sparks and snaps. And right when the movie starts, Jingles walks quietly in.
“Wait,” Vera whispers while squinting at the cat. “No way.” She leans forward on the couch and stares at the floor over in the direction he came from. “Jingles!” she calls out while jumping quickly to her feet.
Derek looks; they all do, actually. Even Brett sits up at the sound of Vera’s exasperated voice. And they all see it at the same time, too. They see the trail of wet, gold paw-prints crossing the dining room wood floor, fading to a lighter gold as the cat sauntered into the living room before scampering out to the kitchen.
Chapter Fourteen
VERA LIFTS THE TABLETOP CAROUSEL from the box in the storage room and gasps at her find. How many Decembers did her mother bring her to the Christmas Barn all those years ago? The family tradition was to find a new ornament for their tree; but for Vera, it was to visit these magical Christmas swans. She’d walk through the big old barn with all its festive holiday décor until she found them. Because she’d seen swans before, in the salt marsh at Stony Point, and loved to watch them. That’s why these birds drew her, the glimmering, sparkling carousel swans spinning slowly around a painted scene of three ships. One swan would slide past, then another, each neck gracefully arched with a small balsam wreath and red bow decorating them elegantly.
And that’s where she’d stay until she felt her mother’s touch on her back, felt her breath as she bent low to tell Vera how pretty the carousel birds were, that the white sparkles looked like snow on their feathers. And they’d watch the swans together until her mother took her mittened hand and finally led her through the store to leave, holding a red shopping bag with a new ornament inside.
Memories, life, they’re one and the same. Because Vera holds the carousel up now and what she remembers is this: Being that young girl with silky blonde hair falling across her blue wool coat, her head turned back, her eyes still watching the swans peacefully swimming, swimming, around and around and around the sea, forever beautiful, forever suggesting something she didn’t know then, but maybe sensed, about the eternal rhythms of the sea, and of life.
She opens a slip of paper tucked in with the carousel. Not For Sale is handwritten across it, underlined twice. For Children’s Display Only! So the previous owner understood how important the swans were. If she’d kept it just for Vera, she’ll never know. But looking at them now brings her again to the edge of the sea, to a simple peace conveyed by the white birds.
Until a loud jangling bell reminds her exactly where she actually is and what she’s doing as Jingles knocks over a small box from a tabletop, jumps down and soccer-pats a sleigh bell across the wide barn board floor. He’s a blur of soft, fluffy motion that nearly trips her sister when she walks in with two large boxes tied closed with a thin piece of string.
“Oh! Jingles, you rascal!” Brooke says to the cat. “You scared the daylights out of me.”
Vera picks up the swan carousel and gently sets it back in its box.
“Yoo-hoo!” Brooke calls out. “Vera?”
“Back here,” Vera answers, walking out of the storage room.
Brooke sets her boxes on the old checkout countertop near the door and begins opening them. “I’m glad I caught you. The library bake sale is this weekend and you have to sample these and tell me which ones to make.”
Vera looks into the boxes laden with jam-filled coffee cake muffins, some strawberry, some raspberry, blueberry, and peach. “For the love of muffins, why oh why are you tempting me like this? I’ll put on ten pounds.”
“Well, don’t have them all at once.” She sets out a couple muffins on a napkin on the counter. “I wanted to drop them off for you on my way to work. Maybe you can bring some to Mom’s later on?”
“I’m really pressed for time, Brooke, so I can’t promise anything. I’m working on an extended profile piece and have to interview the Fire Marshal.”
“Another article? That’s good news, Vera!”
“Except there’s lots of research with this one, keeping me super busy. I can maybe swing by Mom’s after the interview, for a few minutes anyway.” Temptation gets the best of her, convincing her to pick up an overloaded muffin and take a big bite. “Mmh, these are sinful,” she says, wiping a smear of jam from the corner of her mouth. “I swear, if you’d bring these in to Tom’s, you know, and sell them in the reception area, your boss would be the most popular lawyer in Addison.”
“I wish. But unfortunately in the real world, I’m a paralegal, not a baker.” Brooke takes a raspberry muffin covered with drizzles of raspberry jam and bites into it, saying around the food, “But let me tell you, if I could find a way to bake like this all the time …” She glances around the space filling up with artificial Christmas trees and snow villages and eight sparkling reindeer and twinkling lights winding up the bannister to the loft where a mechanical, life-size pair of carolers stands, their mouths in a permanent O-shape as they look from sheet music in their hands and then up to the heavens in imagined song. “Well, baking full-time would feel like Christmas, all the time.” She sighs and stuffs the rest of her muffin in her mouth. “Got to run,” she says then. “I’m so late for work.”
“Here, take a couple of these. That way Tom won’t be mad.”
“Good thinking.” Brooke closes up one of the boxes just as Jingles runs across the floor after a sliding bell. She pulls her car keys from her purse, glancing after the cat, then surveying the whole barn. “It’s amazing how festive this place is looking.”
Vera knows exactly what her sister means. Because what she’d been thinking lately is that the barn, filled with its Christmas displays, looks fitting more to the North Pole, or Santa’s workshop, than a tag sale. Ornaments hang on the trees, wreaths line the wall behind the checkout counter, silver spray-painted pinecones fill crystal vases. Then she looks at the muffins set out on the counter, sitting on pretty scalloped napkins.
“You know, Brooke, would you ever think of selling coffee cakes at my tag sale? Christmas coffee cakes, maybe? I’ll bet they’d go over really well.”
Brooke eyes Vera, eyes her bakery box, then looks out at the Christmas wonderland taking shape in the barn. “Now that’s not a bad idea.”
Chapter Fifteen
CONNECTICUT WAS THE FIRST NEW England state to make Christmas a legal holiday. And from the crowd here, I can see why,” Santa Claus calls into a microphone near the unlit tree. “Addison’s Christmas spirit just fills me with joy. Ho, ho, ho!”
Derek keeps an eye out for Vera, meeting him here after he closed up the store. The maple tree trunks and branches along the edge of The Green are wrapped in white twinkling lights, casting a soft glow in the dark night. They light up smiling faces and brightly colored caps and scarves and mittened hands cupping hot drinks. Finally he sees her waving to him from across the lawn.
“You know who that Santa is, don’t you?” Derek says into Vera’s ear, leaning down close.
Vera looks out at the Santa Claus standing beside the high school b
and tuning up for a Christmas concert. “No.”
She looks up at Derek, and he can’t help it. He gently brushes a strand of hair off her face, his hand touching her fluffy earmuffs, then reaches behind her neck as he gives her a quick kiss. “Don’t let on to any of the kids here. It’s my father.”
“No way!”
Vera walks closer to the tree lighting festivities, squeezing through the crowd until they have a front-row view. People bundled in warm coats press close around them and Derek stands behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist.
“Christmas trees take about seven to ten years to mature,” Santa continues to the crowd. “Judging from the size of this grand tree,” he continues, leaning back and looking up toward the top of a dark unlit tree looking like only a shadow in the night, “I’d say Addison knows how to grow ‘em, regardless of how many years it’s been here!”
Applause breaks out from the families all looking up at the towering pine tree.
“Cold?” Derek asks over her shoulder when he feels Vera shiver in her red buffalo-plaid pea coat and white mittens covered with sequined snowflakes, cupping a steaming hot chocolate.
“A little.” She takes a sip of the drink. “Want some?” He takes the cup for a quick taste. “Your dad makes a great Santa,” she says while he does.
In front of them, his father leads the crowd in a verse of Jingle Bells. “They’re playing your cat’s theme song,” he tells Vera, and she laughs, swaying slightly to the music.
A man beside Derek lifts his young daughter onto his shoulders to give her a better view of Santa and the hardware store sleigh brought in for the festivities. The sleigh is filled with wrapped presents next to a long line of children waiting to have their picture taken on it with Santa.
“Hey, is that your sleigh?” Vera asks him over her shoulder.
Derek nods. “Dad always loved playing Santa on Christmas Eve,” he says when his father sits in the sleigh and a young girl climbs up to have her picture taken. “He’d come over to the house in full costume and Abby never suspected it was him.”
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