Sophia held up her hands. “No. Your money’s no good here, Santa.”
“Thank you.” He smiled at her and something flashed in his eyes, a full blown twinkle so unexpected she took a step backwards in shock. “Believe the way you believed when you were a little girl, and watch the magic happen. Lots of magic around, especially this time of year.” Then he winked, turned and walked away.
Sophie—Sophia—stared at the batwing doors long after he’d gone through them. She didn’t quite know what to make of the Santa who maybe believed a little too much. And yet she couldn’t get what he’d said out of her mind.
What if her life hadn’t just disintegrated by chance, or bad luck, or because fate had it in for her? What if there was a reason? And how the heck did he know she was from New York?
Small town grapevine. Had to be.
Her three cousins, the hunks she referred to as the McIntyre men, showed up to open the Long Branch for the evening, and she fell into the rhythm of pouring, stirring, blending. She used to be very good at this job, and in no time, it was all coming back to her. She could flip a bottle in the air, spin around, catch it and pour it, all in one move. She started having fun. People were fond of her uncle Bobby Joe, who’d built this saloon, and the family he’d married into, the Brands. He and his wife since last Christmas, Vidalia, came in to watch her work and made a big fuss about how good she was at the job. They’d insisted she stay in their guest room while she was in town. They made her feel welcome. Wanted. They acted like hosting her for the holidays was a gift to them.
A warm feeling started to settle over her. A comfortable feeling. A feeling of…home. She hadn’t had that feeling since she’d left her own small town all those years ago, after her mom had died. She hadn’t even known how much she’d missed that feeling of home, of family.
Maybe that crazy old Santa had a point. Maybe she needed to keep an open mind.
* * * * *
When she got back to the farmhouse, it was late. She hadn’t expected to find anyone awake, and went in quietly, so she wouldn’t wake anyone up. The place was illuminated by the Christmas lights that twinkled from a huge Douglas fir in the living room and the soft glow of the fireplace. The smell of freshly baked cookies made the air almost taste of chocolate. As she tiptoed through the living room, she spotted Aunt Vidalia in a rocking chair in front of the fire. She was sealing an envelope and she looked up, smiling when she saw her. “Oh, good, you’re home,” she said. “I saved you a cookie. It’s probably still warm.” She nodded toward a plate that held a giant cookie. It was on an end table right beside a giant, soft easy chair.
Unable to resist, Sophia sank into that chair. “You’re going to spoil me so much I’ll never want to leave,” she said. The fire crackled and the tree twinkled. She inhaled the mingled scents of evergreen and burning wood, and a hint of peppermint from somewhere.
“That’s the plan.” Vidalia got up and set her envelope on the mantle.
Sophia couldn’t help but notice the name scrawled across the front. Santa. She frowned, looking at her aunt again.
Vidalia shrugged. “I write to him every year. Leave the letter on the mantle. On Christmas Eve, put out some cookies and milk. And you know, throughout the coming year, most of the things I put in the letter come to me.”
Sophia smiled and said, “Like…a new set of cookie sheets, or a pretty new nightgown?”
“Oh, sweetie, I wouldn’t waste my letter to Santa on such trivial things. No, I’m talking about big things. Healthy grandbabies, happy daughters, the love of my life.” Smiling wistfully, she crossed the room, picking up her pad of candy cane bordered stationary and her red ink pen on the way, and then she offered them both to Sophia. “You should give it a try.”
“What is it with this town and Santa Claus?” she muttered.
Vidalia crooked a dark brow. “You have a problem with Santa Claus?” Sophia grinned at the intensity in her aunt’s eyes. “Not on your life. Gimme that pen and pad.”
She took both, said good night to Vidalia, and nibbled on her cookie. And then she sat there, alone in the living room in front of the giant, twinkling Christmas tree, and she did something she hadn’t done in twenty years. She wrote a letter to Santa Claus.
Dear Santa,
If it’s true what you told me, then that would be…amazing. So amazing that I think I have to give it a try. I’m going to hope that maybe everything that’s happening to me is for a reason and that it’s sending me toward the life I want. I’m going to hope. What do I have to lose? And I figure I need to get clear on what to hope for. So, Santa Claus, here’s the life I want. I want….
There she paused as a million things ran through her mind. What did she want? She wanted her ex-fiancé Skyler in jail. But that was already a given. He’d been convicted of using her prescription pad to obtain OxyContin and then selling it to addicts. He was only free until his sentencing right after the holidays. The problem was he wouldn’t leave her alone. She wasn’t afraid of him. But he kept calling and when she changed her number, emailing, and when she blocked his email, coming over to her duplex and pounding on her door and not leaving until she called the police. After the third time, she’d stopped sleeping at night.
It was the pounding on the door part that had made her decide to leave New York. She didn’t want anything more to do with Skyler. She just wanted peace.
Nodding, Sophia picked up her pen and wrote, I want such a peaceful, serene life that I sleep like a baby every night.
That was a good start. What else, what else?
I want my good name cleared, the investigation closed, the police to believe I had nothing to do with any of it. And I want the Medical Review Board to find the same thing. Vindication, that’s what I want.
Her only crime, she thought, had been being a little too naive. A little too hopeful. A little too trusting. She’d had everything she’d ever wanted. A seemingly-decent man who wanted to marry her. A respectable position in an elite hospital’s oncology department. A crazy salary.
But even with all that, she hadn’t been happy. She’d been beating herself up for it, too, berating herself for what seemed illogical. Why not be happy when she had everything she’d ever wanted? What was wrong with her?
Nodding hard, she realized that despite feeling she should be happy, she truly hadn’t been. And she wanted to be. So she wrote, I want happiness, true, deep, lasting joy in my life.
Nodding, she decided this felt really good, this exercise in hope. And she thought maybe she shouldn’t have been so hard on herself before. How could she have been happy in the state she’d been in back then? Even before Skyler’s arrest and the subsequent revelations. Her job was stressful and depressing. She’d been tied up in knots all the time and hadn’t even known it. Not until those knots had started to untie themselves.
The drive back to Oklahoma had been like a full-body massage. Her tight muscles felt looser and looser the closer she got. And when she’d stepped out of the car at Bobby Joe and Vidalia’s farmhouse just outside of town, she’d been compelled to heel off her shoes and sink her feet into the grass. She’d taken a deep breath and felt a thousand pounds just ease off her shoulders.
That certainly lent credence to Santa’s theory that she belonged here.
Her career was back in New York, true enough. But she did not want to return to the tension she’d been living, unaware. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do.
Nodding, she bent over her letter and added, I want clarity. I want to know what it is I’m supposed to be doing with my life and I want it to be something that I love, using my skills, but without all the stress and tension I had before.
This was good. Her letter was coming along beautifully. But there was one last thing, the obvious one, and the most difficult. She wanted love. She wanted the kind of love she saw between Bobby Joe and Vidalia. Uncle Bobby Joe was more relaxed and happier than she’d ever seen him. He looked ten years younger. Vidalia, a raven-haired be
auty of Mexican descent, who had cheekbones to die for, obviously adored him. She had five grown daughters and would make Sophia number six if she’d let her. She was the living proof that fifty-something was the new thirty-something. Sophia had loved her on sight.
The two of them together were…it just was amazing to watch. They interacted like cogs in a wheel, like they were sharing a brain, and they were a unit that was far more than the sum of its parts. It was supernatural, the power of what was between them. Damn, she wanted that.
To think she’d been about to settle for something that wasn’t even close. What a narrow escape!
Nodding, she added it to her letter.
“I want love,” she whispered as she wrote the words down. “I want true, deep, crazy, passionate, beautiful, heart-racing, soul-filling, breathtaking love, Santa. And you know what else? I really don’t want to go through the holidays without someone special to share them with.” And then she wrote a little more. I’m going to try hoping this really works, just like you said, Santa. And if it doesn’t, you’re never getting free cocoa from the Long Branch again.
And then she signed it. Love, Sophie.
Frowning, she looked down at what she’d written, surprised to find that she’d written Sophie, and not Sophia. She started to try to make the e into an a, but something made her stop. She put the pen down. Then picked it up again and added, PS. Just kidding about the free cocoa.
Then she folded the letter and tucked it into a plain white envelope. But she didn’t leave it on the mantle or seal the envelope. There were a couple of days until Christmas, and she might just need to edit it.
She held her letter to her chest, closed her eyes and said, “Okay, Santa. Here goes nothing. I really, really hope this works. Ball’s in your court, big guy. Bring on the magic.”
Find Oklahoma Christmas Blues on Smashwords.
The Brands Who Came For Christmas
Maya
Most people in Big Falls, Oklahoma, thought it must have been a case of immaculate conception when they saw me, Maya Brand—eldest of the notorious Vidalia Brand’s illegitimate brood—with my belly swollen and my ring finger naked.
Personally, I thought it was more like fate playing a cruel joke. See, all my life, I had struggled to be the one respectable member of my outrageous family. I went to church on Sundays. I volunteered at the nursing home. I wore sensible shoes, for heaven’s sake! I never aspired to notoriety. I just wanted to be normal.
You know. Normal. I wanted a husband, a home, a family. I wanted to be one of those women who make pot roast for Sunday dinner, and vacuum in pearls while it simmers. I wanted a little log cabin on the hillside behind my family’s farm, with a fenced-in backyard for the kids, and a big front porch. I wanted to sit down in one of the pews on Sunday and not have the three women beside me automatically slide their butts to the other end.
And it had been starting to happen—before the big disaster blew into town. Bit by bit, I’d felt it happening. The PTA moms and church ladies in town had been slowly, reluctantly, beginning to accept me. To see me as an individual, rather than just another daughter of a bigamist and a barmaid. And it wasn’t that I didn’t love my mother dearly, because I did. I do! I just didn’t want to be like her. I wanted to be like those other women—the ones who were always asked to bake for the church picnic, who did their grocery shopping in heels, and who drove the car pools. The ones who slow-danced with their handsome husbands on anniversaries and holidays, and who took golf or tennis lessons with groups of their friends. They have minivans and housekeepers, manicured lawns and manicured nails, those women.
What they do not have are mothers who own the local saloon, or sisters who ride motorcycles or pose for fashion magazines in their underwear.
Still, I was certain my background was something that I could overcome with effort. And, as I said, my efforts had actually been working. Once or twice, one of those other women had smiled back at me in church. The ladies on the pew hadn’t moved so far away, nor quite as quickly, and one of them had even returned my persistent “good morning” one Sunday.
Things had been going so well! Until that night….
That night. He ruined everything! Made me into the biggest (literally) and most scandalous member of my entire family! The good people of Big Falls have stopped gossiping about Kara being a jinx—then again, none of her boyfriends have wound up in the hospital from any freak accidents lately, either. They’ve stopped whispering about Edie, who found the success she chased to L.A. when she became a lingerie model for the Vanessa’s Whisper catalogue. Mom just about had kittens over that one. The locals used to speculate on Selene, because of her oddball customs and beliefs. Vegetarianism and Zen and dancing around outdoors when the moon was full, were not big in Big Falls. And Mel used to generate gossip for being too tough for any man, with her motorcycle and her unofficial job as bouncer at the OK Corral. That’s our family’s saloon; the OK Corral. Because we live in Oklahoma. Cute, huh?
But the point is, no matter how much I wished that my sisters would conform, or that my mother would suddenly cut that wild black hair of hers to a style more fitting for a woman her age, and maybe convert the saloon into a restaurant like that nice Haggerty family a town away—none of their antics did as much damage to my standing in the community as that one night of insanity with that man. That drifter with the eyes that seemed to look right through my clothes. Right through my skin.
I suppose, if I’m going to tell you about all this, I should probably start with him, and that night.
See it all started just short of nine months ago….
* * * * *
Caleb
How was I to know that one night of insanity would change my life forever? I mean, I was respectable, responsible, highly thought of. The Montgomerys of Oklahoma were known far and wide. We had money, and we had power. The name Cain Caleb Montgomery had a long and proud history. My father, Cain Caleb Montgomery II, served two terms as a U.S. senator. His father, Cain Caleb Montgomery I, served five.
I am, as you have probably guessed by now, Cain Caleb Montgomery III. And already my political career was well underway. I had just stepped down from my second term as mayor of a medium-sized city. On the day all this insanity began, my entire future was being planned for me. My father and grandfather, and a half dozen other men—men whose faces you would recognize—sat around a large table plotting my run for the U.S. Senate.
They discussed when and how I would declare my candidacy nine months from now, just a little before New Year’s Day. They discussed what I was going to stand for and what I was going to stand against. They didn’t discuss these things with me, mind you. They discussed them with each other. I was an onlooker. A bystander. They went on, telling me what I was going to wear, eat, and do on my vacations, as I sat there, listening, nodding, and growing more and more uneasy.
And then they went too far. There we all were, in my father’s drawing room. Eight three-piece suits—seven of them straining at the middle—seated around a long cherry wood table that gleamed like a mirror. The place reeked of expensive leather, expensive whiskey and cigars of questionable origin. And all of a sudden, one of the men said, “Of course, there will be a Mrs. Montgomery by then.”
“Of course there will!” my father agreed, smiling ear to ear.
And I sat there with my jaw hanging.
“Got anyone in mind, son?” A big hand slammed me on the back, and a wrinkled eye winked from behind gold-framed glasses. “No? Great. Even better this way, in fact. We can start from scratch, then.”
And suddenly they were all talking at once, growing more and more excited all the time.
“She should be blond. The latest analysis shows that blondes hold a slight edge over brunettes or redheads in public opinion polls.”
“Of course, there’s always dye.”
“Medium height. Not too tall.”
“Yes, and not too short, or she’ll have to wear heels all the time.”
<
br /> “And of course, she has to be attractive.”
“But not too attractive. We don’t want any backlash.”
“Educated. Not quite as well as you, though, but that goes without saying.”
“Well versed. She should have a good voice, nice rich tones. None of those squeaky ones. And no gigglers.”
“Oh, definitely no gigglers!”
“Sterling reputation. We can’t have any scandals in the family. That’s probably most important of all.”
“Absolutely. No scandals.”
“We can run background checks, of course. Just to be sure. And—”
“Wait a minute.”
They all fell silent when I finally spoke. Maybe it was because of the tone of my voice, which sounded odd even to me. I placed both my palms on the table and got slowly to my feet. And for the first time in my entire adult life, I let myself wonder if this was what I really wanted. It had been expected of me, planned for me, even from before I was born. Everything all laid out, private school, prep school, college, law school. And I’d gone along with it because, frankly, it had never occurred to me to do otherwise. But was it what I wanted?
It shocked me to realize I wasn’t sure anymore. I just…wasn’t sure. Giving my head a shake, I just turned and walked out. They all called after me, shouting my name, asking if I was all right. I kept on going. I felt disoriented—as if, for just one instant there, a corner of my world had peeled back, revealing a truth I hadn’t wanted to see or even consider. The fact that there might be more for me out there. Something different. Another choice.
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