“He likes my apple pie better than his mother’s,” Iris said. “She doesn’t use cinnamon sugar on the crust.”
“But we’d never tell her that, right, Grandma?” Luke said. He turned back to Hannah. “So what have you been up to?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”
“She’s getting married,” Iris announced.
“Oh, no kidding,” Luke said, his expression changing. His posture changed, too, his back straightening, arms crossed. “Sometime soon?”
“This weekend,” Hannah said.
“Wow,” Luke said.
“You met him, Luke,” Iris said. “When you came to see me that summer. A few years ago.”
“I did?” Luke said.
“He did?” Hannah added, almost in unison. “I don’t remember seeing him.”
“You were out on a hike with your parents,” Iris said. “Trevor came in a little later, and he had some trouble with his car, as I remember.”
Luke’s eyes widened at the jog to his memory. “Oh,” he said. “That guy?”
Hannah nodded and smiled. “That guy,” she said.
“Well,” Luke said, clapping his hands. “Congratulations.”
Before Hannah could thank him, the front door swung open again.
This time it was Audrey, but her face was all wrong: her eyes bright with what looked like tears, and her mouth set in a determined line.
“Audrey?” Hannah asked. “Is everything all right?”
“It’s Jared,” Audrey said.
Hannah’s heart sank. Every time Jared was deployed, she felt a constant low-grade anxiety about his safety. It wasn’t anything like what Audrey must feel as his wife, but the fact that Jared might be in danger was never far from Hannah’s mind. Was this the call they had all been trying not to dread for so long? The day before her wedding? “Is he all right?” Hannah asked.
Audrey nodded, but as she did, tears slid down her face. “Yes,” she said. She wiped fiercely at the tears, stopping them midway in their tracks. “He’s fine. I guess I should just be grateful for that.”
Hannah went over and wrapped Audrey in a hug. “What happened?” she asked.
“He’s not going to make the wedding,” Audrey said. “It’s this storm. I guess it’s a lot worse than they thought it was going to be. He tried to get into Boston, and then New York, or even Philly, but they’re delaying and canceling flights left and right. He’s still trying to get whatever he can, but he’s stuck in San Diego and right now the closest he can get to the East Coast is Tulsa.” Her voice broke as she said it.
Hannah gave Audrey a tight squeeze. “I’m so sorry,” she said.
“Me too,” Audrey said, squeezing back.
“Luke,” Iris commanded from behind the front desk. “You take these girls’ luggage upstairs for them, so they can get some rest.”
As Hannah released Audrey, Jeanne slid a pair of keys across the varnished wood. “You’ll be in communicating rooms,” she said. “The Blue Jay and the Gold Finch.”
“That’s perfect,” Hannah said. “Those two rooms with the beautiful footed tub in the bathroom between them?”
“That’s right,” Jeanne said with a smile.
“And you still have those incredible bath salts?” Hannah asked.
Jeanne nodded. “Made them myself,” she said. “Eucalyptus and bergamot.”
“How does an amazing hot bath sound?” Hannah asked Audrey.
“I’m supposed to be taking care of you,” Audrey said.
“There’s plenty of time for that,” Hannah said, scooping up the keys to follow Luke, who had already somehow managed to pick up both their suitcases and the giant poufy garment bag that held her dress, and was bounding up the stairs with them.
“I’ll be up in a minute with some afternoon treats,” Jeanne said.
“Almond brittle?” Hannah asked. It was one of Jeanne’s signature delicacies, and Hannah had consumed it in epic portions ever since she was in middle school.
Jeanne smiled. “I might be able to find some of that around here,” she said.
At the top of the stairs, Luke stopped at the first door, letting the suitcases thud to the floor. “Okay,” he said. “Which is which?”
“This is Audrey’s room,” Hannah told him. “I’m down the hall.”
“That’s mine,” Audrey said, pointing to her bag.
With a flourish, Luke opened the door and carried the bag in, setting it up on the luggage stand as if it didn’t weigh anything more than a box of feathers.
Audrey sank down on the high queen bed, which was covered with a beautiful crazy quilt in shades of midnight and sky blue.
“Can I get you anything, honey?” Hannah asked.
“I just need a minute,” Audrey said. “I’ll be fine.”
“I know you will,” Hannah said.
“That’s rough,” Luke said as Hannah pulled the door shut behind them. “Being split up on the holidays.”
“She was so excited he was coming,” Hannah said.
“It’s a good problem, though,” Luke said. “That they want to be together. So many couples seem like they’re not even sure they like each other anymore.”
Hannah opened the door to her room and he carried her bag in, placing it at the foot of her bed.
“Thanks,” Hannah said.
“Anytime,” Luke said.
At the door, he turned back. “How are you doing?” he asked.
“Me?” Hannah said, taken aback. “I’m okay. A little nervous, I guess.”
“But not too nervous,” Luke said with a grin.
Hannah laughed, trying to ignore the hard knot in her stomach that had become her constant companion in the weeks leading up to the wedding. “No,” she said. “Not too nervous.”
“That’s good,” Luke said. He looked at her for just a moment longer, as if he was deciding whether to say something else. Then he ducked his head.
“Well,” he said. “I wish you both all the very best.”
“Thanks,” Hannah said. “You, too. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” Luke said, and pulled the door shut behind him.
Hannah dropped her coat on the chair by the door, hopped up on the bed, and let herself fall back into its velvet folds.
Just as she felt the stress begin to slide off her shoulders, and sink into the loft of the mattress, her phone began to ring in her coat pocket.
With effort, she managed to get herself upright and scramble over to the door to retrieve it before it stopped ringing, the selfie she’d taken of her and Trevor that summer—just after he’d proposed—displayed on the screen.
“Your timing is perfect,” she said. “Audrey just got into her room. How are you doing?”
“Good, good,” Trevor said.
Hannah breathed a sigh of relief. “I was afraid you were going to have trouble,” she said. “Audrey just heard from Jared, and he’s not going to make it in time for the wedding. This storm has all the airports in the Northeast shut down, so he’s stuck. Where are you?”
“Boston,” Trevor said.
“Boston?” Hannah repeated, her mind doing a quick calculation. “Weren’t you going to leave this morning? Is the traffic that bad?”
“I haven’t left yet,” Trevor said.
Hannah felt a deep annoyance rising in her. Trevor was always changing plans at the last minute. It drove her nuts, and he knew it. And now he was changing them on the weekend of their wedding.
“Why not?” she said. “When will you get here?”
“Hannah . . .” Trevor said.
Something in the tone of his voice turned her annoyance to cold fear.
“What?” she said.
At the other end of the line, she heard nothing but silence.
“Trevor?” she asked. “Are you there?”
“I’m not coming,” Trevor said.
“You’re not coming?” Hannah said, disbelief struggling with exasperation in her voice.
&nbs
p; “It’s just too much,” Trevor said. “It’s just too soon.”
“Too soon?” Hannah repeated. Every time she parroted his words, her voice seemed to rise another notch. “Trevor, we’ve been dating for six years.”
“Getting married is a lot different than dating,” Trevor said, with the patronizing gravitas of a relationship expert on a daytime television show. “It’s just all happening so fast.”
“Trevor, you were the one who wanted to get married this year,” Hannah reminded him.
“I know that,” Trevor said. “I thought that maybe once we got married, I wouldn’t feel so . . .”
“So what, Trevor?” Hannah asked.
“Scared,” Trevor said quietly.
Hannah said nothing for a long moment, taking it all in. “What exactly are you saying?”
“I’m just not sure you’re the woman I’m supposed to marry,” Trevor said.
“If that’s how you feel about me, then why did you ask me to marry you? Why did you take six years of my life?”
“That’s not the only thing I feel,” Trevor said.
Hannah shook her head in disbelief. “What else do you feel?” she demanded.
As usual, once she got heated, Trevor started to turn into a rock, encased in an iceberg.
“Never mind—”
“I deserve an explanation. You don’t get to run away and hide without—” Her voice cracked.
“Look,” he said, “clearly you’re upset.”
“You’re very observant,” Hannah said.
“I don’t think talking is a good idea with you in this mood,” he said.
“Mood?” Hannah said, rage bubbling up in her. “Trevor, you just broke our engagement. Two days before our wedding. I never pushed you into any of this. You wanted to get married. If you were having second thoughts, you should’ve told me weeks ago, before the caterers and flowers and plans. This is just—” Her voice gave in as the tears started stinging down her cheeks. “The most selfish thing, the most cowardly thing, you’ve ever done.”
“Well,” Trevor said, his tone weary and removed, “was there anything else you wanted to say?”
Hannah looked down at the picture of Trevor’s beaming face on her phone, but so many thoughts and feelings crowded her mind that she couldn’t put any of them to words.
“No,” she said.
“Okay,” Trevor said, with just enough mild smugness to let her know he thought he’d won this argument. “Well, I guess I should let you go, then.”
“I guess you should,” Hannah said.
But she hung on the line until he disconnected the call.
Then she threw the phone down on the bed and walked to the window.
She pressed both her palms to the cool glass to steady herself, and she tried to look down at the yard outside, to get some kind of different perspective, but it was snowing so hard now that she couldn’t see anything at all.
BOB WAS RIDING SHOTGUN, but as the mild storm the weatherman predicted had grown in force to something that seemed much more akin to a full blizzard, Stacy could tell he’d gotten more and more anxious.
“Why don’t you pull over and let me drive,” he had suggested, as Stacy made the executive decision to leave the freeway. It was always a tricky calculation in bad conditions. Was it better to stay on the main roads, which were more likely to be cleared, but also more full of traffic? Or would it be safer on a less-traveled road, where they could move at their own pace, with fewer tractor trailers to deal with?
For the first hour of the blizzard, Bob had made a strong case for sticking to the main roads. But even as the traffic slowed to a crawl, wrecks kept piling up. And when they passed a jackknifed truck, Stacy had had enough. The country roads might not be as clear, but they knew them, from all the time they’d spent at the little inn that had become their family’s home away from home. She was pretty sure that they’d be virtually deserted, under the conditions. And she wasn’t about to let a careless driver on the interstate keep them from getting to their only daughter’s wedding.
So she’d taken the next exit, which let them out onto a winding Vermont country road that she could only see a few yards down, even with her lights on, in what should have been broad daylight.
“I don’t know where it’d be safe to stop, honey,” she said, in answer to Bob’s offer to drive. “I’m not even sure where the side of the road is now. If we stop, I don’t know if anyone else will be able to see us. And we’re almost there.”
Bob put his hand on her leg and gave it a squeeze. “I just wish there were something I could do,” he said.
“You do plenty,” Stacy said, touched by the note of longing in his voice, because she knew he wasn’t just talking about the drive through the snow. “For everyone.”
Her own hands ached to reach over and comfort him in return, but it was impossible to take either one of them off the wheel under the conditions.
Out of the corner of her eye, though, she could see Bob shaking his head.
“You wouldn’t have to be making this drive,” he said, “if I’d been able to afford to fly us all to Aruba.”
By nature, Bob was a jokester, but this joke was too serious to make Stacy smile. Instead, she felt a little flare of anger in her heart, which she quickly tried to squash out. She didn’t want to walk into her daughter’s wedding weekend with any negative emotions, but Bob wasn’t the only one who wished that things were different.
Hannah, their daughter, had been dating her boyfriend Trevor for so long that Stacy and Bob had started to wonder privately if he would ever get around to popping the question. But when he finally did, for some reason, he was in a tremendous hurry to tie the knot. He and Hannah had only gotten engaged a few months ago, but he’d insisted on having the wedding before the end of the year.
That meant that almost any venue Hannah or Stacy had ever dreamed of was already booked up. But that was a secondary concern to the major problem, which was that Bob’s business as a contractor had been struggling for several years, after a big company had pulled its headquarters out of the small town where he built homes, leaving a huge glut in the housing market. He was both well loved and well respected in town, so he’d managed to hang on while other contractors folded or packed up to seek brighter prospects. And it looked like the market was finally turning. But in the meantime, he didn’t have anything like the kind of cash he would have liked to have on hand to throw his daughter a wedding. In fact, he was struggling to climb out of debts he’d had to take on to save the business, and the jobs of the twenty people who worked for him.
After a few weeks of false starts, Stacy and Hannah had come up with what seemed like the perfect solution: holding the wedding at the inn in Vermont where the family had spent summers and a handful of holidays ever since Hannah was a little girl. Miraculously, it wasn’t booked up yet over the Christmas holiday. And it was just big enough to host a tiny wedding with a handful of guests from each family, which was all that Bob and Stacy could afford.
Over the course of the planning, both Stacy and Hannah had gotten excited about holding the intimate event at the beloved inn—and grateful that they didn’t have a giant guest list that required Excel spreadsheets to keep track of, or hand-making favors for hundreds of guests.
But part of Stacy still had to fight to keep from resenting Trevor’s big rush. She couldn’t disagree with his choice of bride, and she guessed that it was good that he was so eager to start life with Hannah. But she wished they’d had more time, so they could have the opportunity to give their only daughter the best.
“It’s going to be wonderful,” Stacy said, trying to ease the sting of it for him now. “In those big weddings, nobody really gets to talk to the bride and groom, and if they do, the bride and groom are so overwhelmed they don’t even remember it. This way we’ll all get to know each other. It’ll be personal. No professional photographer, just Audrey snapping pictures.”
“Except she’s a way better photograph
er than any of our other friends,” Bob said.
Stacy was grateful to hear the smile in his voice.
“Yep,” she said. “We’re lucky in a lot of ways. And it’s never the wedding that’s important. It’s marrying the right person.”
“I know I’m lucky I married the right girl,” Bob said.
This time, when he squeezed her knee, she laid her own hand over his, just for a moment.
Then, at the sound of a roar behind them, she snatched her hand back, gripping the wheel tightly. She couldn’t see anything but white in the rearview mirror as the roar grew louder and louder. But from the sound of it, she could tell it was approaching at a far higher speed than their little car was moving.
“What in the world?” Bob asked, twisting to look back.
As he did, the glare of two bright lights appeared in the whiteout of the rearview, high up: a tractor trailer.
It gained on them at a sickening speed, while Stacy did her best to hold her own. She still couldn’t see far enough ahead to jam on the gas herself, and even if she did, it would only delay the moment of collision for an instant, at the rate this truck was gaining on them. The only hope was that the driver would see them in time—which wasn’t at all a given in these conditions.
As Stacy’s fingers clenched around the wheel, the grille of the truck broke out of the snow, bearing down on them until she couldn’t even see the lights on either side anymore.
Then, in a rush, the roar passed to the left of them, crossing over into the oncoming lane of the little two-lane road. A huge clod of dirty ice hit their window, completely blotting out even the limited view Stacy had had of the road. She drove blind for three or four swipes of the windshield wipers, until they managed to fling off enough of the slush and mud to clear the window again. Which did nothing to improve the visibility on the road itself. Now she couldn’t even see a few yards ahead. It was more like a few feet. And most of that was full of thick snow.
“What is this clown doing on the side roads?” Bob asked. “Did they close the freeway?”
When Stacy didn’t answer, he looked at her. “How are you doing?” he asked.
The White Christmas Inn Page 3