The White Christmas Inn

by Colleen Wright

  “Someone who loves his family,” Hannah said. “Someone who likes the simple things. Just, simple pleasures. Nothing so fancy or complicated. Someone who knows how to do stuff.”

  She felt her face burning a bit as she said it, not just from the chill, but from the recognition that she was describing Luke, and the embarrassment of whether he’d realize it as well.

  But instead of making the moment awkward, he just looked at her with the same teasing expression she’d known ever since they were kids. “Huh,” he said, feigning ignorance. “Do you know anyone like that?”

  Hannah smiled.

  “Tell you what,” Luke said, smiling back. “If I think of anyone, I’ll let you know.”

  “THOSE LOOK PERFECT,” JEANNE said, glancing down at the chestnuts that Iris had been chopping into fine chunks.

  “You think so?” Godwin said with a slightly incredulous tone.

  Jeanne looked at him, trying to mask her exasperation. When she’d asked Iris to help her in the kitchen a few hours ago, Godwin, who had been chatting with Iris at the front desk, had followed the two of them into the kitchen as if he’d been invited, too. And since then, he’d kept up a steady stream of editorializing.

  “She’s the chef,” Iris said tartly. “Not you.”

  Earlier in the hour, Jeanne had braced herself when Iris talked back to their cranky guest, expecting a blast of ill temper from him in response.

  But by now she had learned that Iris seemed to know exactly how to handle him. Instead of snapping, he just settled back into his stool by the counter as Iris swept the last chopped chestnuts into a small silver mixing bowl.

  “Where do you want them?” Iris asked.

  Jeanne pointed toward the pot of broth, butter, and herbs she was preparing, to make the chestnut stuffing.

  “In there,” she said. “Let’s give them a chance to soak up some of the flavoring.”

  Iris wiped her hands on the pale blue gingham half apron she had tied on when she’d come into the kitchen about an hour ago, at Jeanne’s request, to help.

  Jeanne didn’t usually press Iris into service in the kitchen, but dinner tonight was a scheduled seating, on Christmas Eve: everyone at the inn, sitting down together at the same time, for a multicourse meal. That was quite a different prospect from sending out a handful of waffles at a time as people trickled down for breakfast, or sending out stacks of pressed sandwiches and ladling out potato leek soup for lunch.

  “Anything else?” Iris asked, glancing around the kitchen like a curious bird, ready to help in any way she could.

  Jeanne scanned the place along with her. Hiram’s beef was roasting in the oven, giving off tempting aromas of garlic, rosemary, and butter. She had potatoes and onions cut and covered with water, ready to become mashed potatoes. Iris had already washed and dried an epic amount of greens for salads. And although the pies weren’t done yet, Jeanne always liked to do those on her own. For some reason, when she baked, a kind of primal instinct took over, and if she had to explain to anyone else what she was doing, she was liable to make mistakes.

  Not only that, but if she let Iris go, she was pretty sure Godwin would exit with her.

  “I think we’re good,” Jeanne said, giving Iris a hug. “Thank you so much. I know it was above and beyond.”

  “I’ll say,” Godwin said. “You’re doing more than double duty, running this hotel and serving in the kitchen.”

  Iris just shook her head at him, then turned back to Jeanne. “Oh, honey,” Iris said. “I was cooking in this kitchen before you were born. It’s a pleasure to spend some more time in it. I think I only ate about half the filling for those cinnamon rolls.”

  “Worth it!” Jeanne said. “You’ve been such a help.”

  “Okay,” Iris said, waving as she went out the door. “See you at dinner.”

  To Jeanne’s immense relief, Godwin followed Iris out.

  Cassie, who had been lounging by the fire, leapt up as they went, and bounded after them.

  When the door closed, leaving Jeanne alone in the kitchen, she sighed, feeling the irritation she’d been battling all afternoon rising up in her again.

  To fend it off, she picked up one of the apples from the coral-colored ceramic bowl beside the sink, one of her favorite local thrift-store finds, and began to peel.

  Her irritation wasn’t at Iris, who had been a dream in the kitchen, or even at Godwin, whose barbs were too broad to take very seriously. It was at Tim. When she’d realized that she was swamped, sometime shortly after lunch, her first thought had been simply to press him into service. They’d started the inn, in part, because they loved doing culinary experiments themselves at home so much. He was her favorite sous chef, and the only one she could trust to do things just the way she wanted them done.

  She didn’t typically ask him to help out in the kitchen at the inn, because she usually had paid help for bigger events, and because there was so much to do around the place.

  But today, she’d found herself almost nostalgic to work with him—and she seriously needed help from somebody.

  It would have been the perfect cap to their wild ride the night before, to collect the ingredients for the day’s meals, to prepare the last one with him. And since things seemed to have thawed a bit between them, part of her felt something she hadn’t felt about him in quite some time: she missed just having him around.

  So at first, she’d tried to get as far on the meal as she could herself, thinking that she’d ask him to join and help the next time he came into the kitchen—which couldn’t be long, because what in the world could possibly need doing in the yard, with everything buried under at least two feet of snow?

  But as the afternoon ground on, hour after hour, he didn’t show. She called his cell phone to find that it was cradled in the charging dock on the far counter. As her anxiety mounted, she’d actually done a quick search of the inn and their own quarters for him. And by the time she discovered he wasn’t anywhere inside, but must be out somewhere, roaming around, yet again, she was so out of patience that she no longer felt like working with him.

  On her way back into the kitchen, she’d corralled Iris as her helper, thinking that once she got through the pre-dinner crush, maybe she’d feel a bit more generous toward Tim, wherever he was.

  But she didn’t. She felt even more irritated than before, because now he’d been gone, without any explanation, for even longer. And because it felt just like it had so many other times when she’d needed him for something, and he’d been out on his own, doing whatever he felt like doing, without consulting her.

  She even felt an ache in her heart when she thought back on their sleigh ride the night before. It had felt like they were drawing closer then, but had it all been just an illusion? Had she been fooled by the situation into thinking things might actually change between them, when in fact, here she was, waiting and wondering again, just the same as it had always been?

  By the time Tim finally did come in, she had put the finishing touches on half a dozen apple pies, topped with intricate layers of individually cut leaves made from the flaky crust, all arranged in a slightly different pattern, and just popped the first batch into their big oven.

  “Hey, what smells good?” Tim said, grinning as he came through the back door, tromping snow everywhere and carrying some giant, unwieldy piece of plywood covered by one of his flannel shirts.

  “All of it,” Jeanne shot back, but without any welcome in her voice. By this time, she was less than thrilled to see him. “Dinner’s ready,” she said, in a tone of voice that added, with no help from you.

  But, as so often happened, Tim didn’t seem to pick up on her dissatisfaction.

  He laid the dirty plywood in the middle of the counter she’d just cleaned and kissed her cheek, giving her a chill from his cold skin.

  “You’re amazing, honey,” he said. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  Then he caught sight of the pies beyond the oven glass. “How many pies did
you make?” he said with a grin. “One for everyone?”

  Jeanne’s face darkened. As usual, he was picking on how generous she was with the food for the guests. “We’ve got almost twenty people here for dinner,” she began. “Six is—”

  Tim shook his head, raising his hands in surrender. “All right, all right,” he said. Then he grinned. “Just as long as one of them’s for me.”

  Jeanne’s brow furrowed, as she was baffled by his unflappable mood. Had he just decided to pretend everything was fine between them now? Because everything was not fine with her.

  “Honey,” he said, glancing over at her. “Do you have a minute?”

  Despite herself, Jeanne felt a jolt of nervousness. Why did Tim, who never seemed to want to talk, suddenly want to talk? She didn’t want to fight, not on Christmas Eve, not before the big dinner. But she couldn’t think of any topic right now that wouldn’t wind up as a fight, if they really tried to talk about it.

  But she also couldn’t think of a good excuse to give him. “Okay,” she said warily.

  “Okay,” Tim said, steering her over toward the grimy plywood. “I have to tell you something.”

  “What?” Jeanne demanded, but Tim, as usual, would not be rushed.

  When he got her where he apparently wanted her to stand, dead in front of whatever he’d just dragged in from the barn, he stopped and looked into her eyes.

  “I know I don’t always give you what you need,” he said.

  Jeanne watched him, waiting for the “but . . .” she was sure was coming, but he just dropped his eyes to the floor.

  “I’ve never been good with words,” he said. “And I know I get too focused on whatever’s in front of me.”

  Jeanne agreed heartily with both those statements. But something in the humble, gentle way he said them took the will to fight out of her.

  “I probably shouldn’t have done this,” Tim said, looking down.

  Jeanne’s throat tightened as he said this. What had he done? Taken out some crazy loan to try to save the place? Gotten a new apartment, so he could move out on his own?

  Then she realized that he was looking down at the flannel that covered the lumpy plywood.

  “I get the impression you would have liked to have me around instead of out there in the barn, working on this,” Tim said. “But by the time I realized that, I was almost done making it.”

  He pulled back the flannel.

  Underneath was a delicate model of a handful of small buildings perched on the top of a hill, surrounded by carefully placed model pines.

  It took Jeanne a minute to recognize it all: the circle drive, the barn, the sloping drive to the road, the inn itself, all arranged in absolutely perfect detail, down to the wreath of blue blossoms on the front door, the very first thing she had made herself when they first came to the inn so many years ago.

  A breath she didn’t know she’d been holding escaped from her lips.

  “It’s our place,” she said, threading her arm around his waist and leaning her head against his chest in wonder. “Did you make all this?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Tim said. “I’m sorry I left you alone so much. But I wanted . . .”

  When he clammed up, Jeanne looked at him and saw that his eyes were bright with tears.

  He shook his head, trying to smile them away. “I wanted you to have something of this place,” he said, drawing a breath to collect himself, “that they couldn’t take away. It’s all made out of scrap wood from around here, our own pine needles and twigs, and leftover paint I found . . .”

  Jeanne put both arms around him now, and squeezed. “It’s beautiful,” she said, her eyes soaking in every detail of the gorgeous model—and all the work it must have taken him. “Thank you.”

  Gratefully, Tim wrapped his arms around her.

  “No matter what happens next,” he said, bowing his head over hers, “we’ll always have this to remember it by.”

  MOLLY HADN’T BEEN THRILLED to climb the steps back up to her room.

  But when she and Marcus had tramped in the front door together, and she’d finally managed to peel off the damp snow pants and extra layers of wool socks, he’d suddenly turned distant again.

  “Well,” he said, standing in the front hall in a pair of thick pink wool socks that Molly was almost certain one of the girls had picked out for him, “I’ve probably kept you from your writing for too long.”

  “Oh,” Iris said from behind her desk. “A little fresh air never hurt anyone.” She smiled at Molly. “Clears the cobwebs, doesn’t it?” she said. “The Vermont air’s especially good for that.”

  Molly did her best to meet Iris’s bright smile with one of her own, but in reality, Molly felt like begging Marcus to keep her from her writing for at least twice as long—not only because she’d enjoyed their walk so much, but because no part of her wanted to go back to that room, and the blank paper waiting for her there.

  But when she got back to her room, something had changed.

  At first, she couldn’t tell what it was. She glanced around, trying to figure it out. She wondered if someone had just been in to clean. She had a sudden, quick hope that perhaps another goodie basket had been delivered in her absence.

  Then she realized what it actually was: there was a story waiting for her. Maybe it had been there all along, and going for the walk had just knocked something loose in her, so that she could finally recognize it. Or maybe it had arrived while she was gone.

  But in any case, this time, she didn’t hesitate.

  She walked straight over to the desk, sat down, and immediately began to scrawl a few lines on the blank piece of paper that had been waiting there for her for days. Then she filled the rest of the page with a bright sketch, set that page aside, picked up another piece of blank paper, and began to scrawl again.

  When she looked up, hours later, the sun had dropped nearly to the horizon, and she didn’t just have the few sheets of a respectable beginning, she had a serious stack of pages of a story that ran all the way from beginning to end.

  Somewhere downstairs, a bell was ringing.

  Had Iris said something about a dinner bell when she checked in?

  In any case, she was more than ready to leave the room—and to have a bite to eat, especially now that she’d returned to noticing the signs of daily life around her, and could smell the incredible scents drifting up from the kitchen, both savory and sweet.

  But she wasn’t ready to leave the manuscript behind. It had taken her so long to find the story, and it had come so fast, that she was half afraid that if she didn’t take it with her, she’d come back upstairs later to discover the whole afternoon had just been some kind of daydream, and the proof of it had vanished.

  So she scooped the pages up between the wings of a red leather manuscript portfolio, tucked it under her arm, and went downstairs.

  When she reached the ground floor, it seemed that everyone else in the inn had already gotten the memo.

  She tried to hide the portfolio as much as possible as she came downstairs, sure that Iris would catch sight of it with her eagle eye and begin to ask questions Molly wasn’t sure she was ready to answer.

  But to her surprise, Iris wasn’t seated behind the desk.

  And everyone was crowded together into the lobby and lounge areas, snacking on canapés and swigging what looked to be a spiced cranberry punch.

  “Is it dinner? I heard a bell,” she asked the first people she saw, a pair of older couples who had been swapping stories of Christmas in the 1960s, when one of the women had apparently gotten a Barbie for which she’d sewn a business suit, because she wanted her daughter to know she could be a businesswoman, not just a fashion model.

  “In half an hour,” one of the women told her. “It’s just a warning bell.”

  “Not that we needed any encouragement,” the other woman said, laying her hand on the arm of the man next to her. “Frank’s been down here for an hour, lurking outside the kitchen like a puppy
waiting for crumbs.”

  “I would trade a puppy for some of Jeanne’s crumbs,” Frank said.

  Molly smiled and moved on, heading for a table stacked with appetizers, where she discovered Iris, explaining the hors d’oeuvres to Godwin, the grouchy old Brit.

  “You’ll want to try that,” Iris told him, then looked over at Molly with a smile, to include her in the conversation. “It’s cheddar, with a wonderful kick of horseradish.”

  “I’ve had cheddar horseradish spread before,” Godwin said in a dismissive tone.

  Iris just handed him one of Jeanne’s handmade crackers, topped with a healthy smear of the spread. “Not like this,” she said.

  When Godwin couldn’t seem to find a way to contradict Iris after munching down the cracker, Molly decided to take her advice and try the cheddar spread, too, along with other tasty-looking foods from the buffet. The simple bites of sausage were so delicious that as soon as she tasted it, Molly immediately understood why it had been served plain.

  But as she filled her plate, she felt a tug on the back of her pant leg.

  “Molly!” Bailey said. “Molly! Come sit with us!”

  Molly turned around to see Bailey and Addison, both standing at attention like a pair of sheepdogs ready to herd her home. Nearby sat Marcus, at the bench along the fireplace with two half-empty plates next to him.

  She hesitated, not sure whether or not she was really welcome, but at Marcus’s smile, she allowed the girls to lead her over, and sat down in the warmth cast by the dancing glow of the flames, balancing the folder on her knees.

  “What’s that?” Bailey asked immediately.

  “Oh,” Molly said, pulling it a little closer. “It’s just a manuscript folder.”

  She could see interest light in Marcus’s eyes, but before he could say anything, Bailey tugged on his sleeve and demanded, “What’s a manuscript?”

  “It’s like a book,” Addison said quickly, jumping in to make sure everyone knew she had the answer without having to be told.

  But Bailey was no intellectual slouch herself. As soon as she had this bit of information, she had no trouble at all putting the pieces together.