“Sure.” Mac smiled, nodded and hit some button on his key chain that turned on his zippy orange sports car without him even being inside the thing. He smirked as behind him in the parking space outside his office, the coupe’s lights and engine roared to life.
“You’re a show-off,” she teased him.
“Guilty,” he said as he turned and opened the car door. “Curly had to learn it somewhere.”
Friday night, Mac was nervous. Actually nervous. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt nervous about a woman, which made it worse. He felt an attraction to her, true, but also wanted to protect her from the small-town talk that would surely be the result of their appearance tonight. Even though the threat of gossip wouldn’t have bugged him before, he felt differently about subjecting Mary to any of it. He wanted tonight to be about all the good things a small town could be. To give her a shred of that old-fashioned Christmas she seemed to want so badly. After all, she was new to her faith and this Christmas would be special for her. Mac had to tread carefully, though. If she was so drawn to old-fashioned charm, she was probably the kind of woman eager to settle down—and he was not that kind of man. And this was feeling a little too much like that kind of date.
She was buttoning up her jacket as she came down the stairs, and he caught a glimpse of her pale neck above a mint-green sweater. The sweater was the fuzzy kind, with little silver sparkles woven into it. It looked elegant, but festive, and it made the creamy-white-blonde of her hair nearly glow. She’d put on lipstick and wore little sparkly snowflake earrings that kept absconding with his attention even when he tried to look elsewhere.
She caught him looking at her and blushed. “You said we had to wear red or green. This was the closest thing to Christmas green I had.”
“It’s fine,” he said earnestly. She did look fine, very fine. He opened the car door and let her step in.
“What do you think?” he asked as he slid into the driver’s seat. Even parked, a Nissan 350Z was an impressive little roadster, and he knew it.
She grinned. “Very snazzy. It suits you. You don’t strike me as the truck type, anyway.”
“Oh, I own one, back at the house. For yard stuff and all.” He patted the dash of the two-seater convertible with admiration. “You’d never catch me loading bags of mulch into this baby.”
She laughed and looked around. “They wouldn’t fit anyway.”
“It’s more fun with the top down, but we’d freeze.”
“I’ll wait till spring, thanks.”
They made small talk for the short drive out to Gil’s farm, commenting on the blanket of Christmas lights Emily had set up outside. He’d seen the inside yesterday, and it rivaled a department store window. Emily had claimed she wasn’t half done, and it already had twice the decorations he’d seen on any other home. It was going to be fun watching Mary take it all in.
It was. “Wow,” she noted, accepting a cup of spiced cider after they’d done a quick tour of the house. “Gil wasn’t kidding.”
Mac could barely contain his laughter when Gil, man of the daily flannel shirt, appeared in a red striped sweater. Sure he couldn’t say anything without cracking up, Mac just gave Gil a sharp look and a nod, to which Gil raised an eyebrow that broadcast, “You wanna make something of it?” The image of Gil making goo-goo faces at an infant invaded his brain with a shock. Gil’s going to be a father. The world is shifting, Lord.
“Emily’s gone bananas,” Gil muttered. “Each horse has its own wreath up on the stalls. She gave the guys Santa hats to wear, but they refused. The horses have their own tree, for crying out loud.”
“This I gotta see,” Mac declared, nodding in the direction of the barn behind the house. “Want to come?”
“You two go,” Gil declined. “I’d best stay with Emily before she starts hanging mistletoe everywhere. That woman’s dangerous in her condition.”
Mary laughed and without thinking, Mac took her hand and led her to the back door, where he grabbed a thick red blanket off a bench and wrapped it around her as they dashed across the yard to the horse barn.
“Oh, my,” Mary observed, pulling the blanket closer as they walked down the aisle separating the horse stalls in Gil’s barn. Sure enough, each stall had its own wreath, and each wreath had the horse’s name spelled out in glitter on a red velvet bow. “He wasn’t kidding.”
Mac couldn’t help but laugh. Gil must be reaching the edge of his endurance with all of Emily’s decorations. “That woman takes ‘deck the halls’ a bit too seriously.”
Mary touched one of the wreaths. “Romeo. Lady Macbeth. All the horses have names from Shakespeare.”
“Yep. For all his rough exterior, Gil’s a well-educated guy. Both book smarts and the school of hard knocks. I’m glad to see him so happy.”
“They are, aren’t they? Emily’s so excited to be expecting.”
“I’m the godfather, you know. Gil asked me the other day.” He was busting-his-buttons proud but since they hadn’t revealed the pregnancy to anyone, he’d had to keep it to himself. She knew, though, so he was glad to be able to talk about it to someone.
“In deference to your humble spirit, no doubt,” she teased, her blue eyes glinting under that fringe of bangs. “Or is it to curry political favor with the next mayor of Middleburg?”
“Curry favor’?” He gave her a challenging look. “Let’s put those hundred-dollar city words of yours on a horse for ten minutes and see how well you ride.” He broadened his Kentucky twang and swaggered over to her. “Don’t pick a fight with a horseman in a barn unlessen you can hold your own.”
“It just so happens that I can ride horses. Just the kind that go up and down on poles, that’s all. I have also ridden lions and unicorns, for that matter.”
There it was again. A glimpse of that amazing spunk. What had beaten the fight out of her in Chicago? He looked at her, his engineering mind trying to solve the logical puzzle of her but getting lost in the definitely illogical allure of her eyes. The way she tucked her hair behind her ears. He wondered if that freshness, that sense of newness in her expression, was there for him when he first came to faith. It seemed almost too long ago to remember, even though it had been just under a decade. She struck him as both jaded and innocent—another illogical impression. She was a paradox, which is a very dangerous and irresistible thing to throw at an engineer.
Suddenly—and then again, maybe not so suddenly—alone in the barn seemed a dangerous and irresistible place to be with her. Mac felt them teetering on the edge of a place where they shouldn’t go.
She must have felt it, too, for Mary shivered and declared, “We should get back. It’s freezing out here.”
They wandered in and out of the party, sometimes moving through the large farmhouse’s many rooms together, other times being swept into different conversational groups. He kept “half an eye” on her as Pa always said, half listening for her voice or occasionally glancing her way to see where she was when they weren’t together. Just as he expected, people were welcoming Mary warmly; she got the stuffing hugged out of her from Sandy Burnside, and Emily pulled her all around the room making introductions to any Middleburgian she hadn’t yet met. He caught Mary laughing uproariously in the kitchen with Dinah and Janet one minute, and getting a demonstration of Gil’s monstrous flat-screen television from one of the farm’s teenage boys the next. She was fitting in just fine, looking more comfortable as the evening went on. As he took to the piano the way he always did at parties, even Howard pulled her into a song or two with no hint of the tension everyone had seen at rehearsal. For a split second, he thought he should have asked Mary to bring her violin, remembering the jazzy number he’d heard in the choir loft. She could probably pick up a bit of bluegrass twang with little or no effort and be a hit in no time.
Things seemed to be going wonderfully until the same teen burst into the living room with the television remote still in his hand. “Mr. Gil,” he interrupted far too loudly, “you gotta
see this. These people are nuts!”
Like everyone else within earshot, Mac followed Gil and the crowd into the den. And gulped.
There, in high-definition clarity, was a live news shot of a knockdown, drag-out fight taking place at a nearby mall. Something close to a riot had broken out at a discount chain store, and the cameras were getting spectacular shots of one man throwing punches at another man. A man who protected a Bippo Bear box behind his back. “Bippo Bear Brawl” flashed under the shot as the camera cut to a disgusted-looking newswoman. “’Tis the season,” she began singing in the Bippo Bear melody, “to misbehave, even if Santa is watching.” Mac silently berated the television as he scanned the crowd for Mary. “The mad craze to get Bippo Bears took a turn for the worse today,” the newswoman went on, “as two men let the stress of the holiday and the craving for those stuffed blue bears get the better of them….”
She continued, but Mac didn’t hear the rest of it. He darted through the crowd gathering in Gil’s den, hoping to head off Mary before she caught a glimpse of this. The brawl might serve as conversation, entertainment even, for the rest of the partygoers, but it would hurt Mary to the core.
He was too late. Just as he cleared the edge of the crowd, he saw her, standing in the hallway with a clear shot at the television, her face a mix of horror and guilt. Speeding up his steps, he caught her elbow and tried to drag her out of the den as the camera showed a close-up of the two grown men hurling insults and actual punches at each other. It was like one of those ridiculous tabloid talk shows, only it was happening less than twenty miles from where they stood. “C’mon, Mary, you don’t need to see this.”
“See this?” she whispered harshly, “I did this. Did you hear her? She was singing my song.”
“There’s no point in watching this.” This was the excruciating moment when the crowd in the den began talking among themselves about the evils of Christmas toy marketing. He had to get her out of here—which wouldn’t be hard, because she looked like she was going to bolt any minute.
“It’s an abomination,” Howard asserted as his voice rose above the rest while Mac pulled Mary through the hall toward the other end of the house. “Don’t those toy people know better?”
“Don’t those grown men know better?” came Sandy’s voice in reply. “What fools put this nonsense on the television anyway?”
“Mary…” Mac began, not even sure what to say.
“Don’t!” She objected sharply, putting her forehead against the hallway wall. “Don’t even try to make this better. I knew I couldn’t run from this. I knew I’d have to pay for what I’d done.”
Mac started to say something about taking the drama a bit too far, but he bit back his comment. “You didn’t do that,” he argued, even though he doubted it would have any effect.
“Didn’t I? My directives were to create a song kids could bug their parents with. To drive parents to the kind of shopping frenzy we just saw.” She glared at him. “How can you say I didn’t do that? I did just that.”
Months of worry, and stress she hadn’t even realized had built up, boiled over into an unreasonable panic that grabbed hold of Mary and wouldn’t let go. “I’m sorry I ever did any of it,” Mary blurted out for the hundredth time.
Mac shifted his weight. “Don’t you think you’re taking this a bit far?”
Easy for him to say. Mary flung one hand in the direction of the talking behind them. “People—parents—are behaving like animals and I started the feeding frenzy. They’ll hate me once they know.” The world worked the same everywhere. You were only as good—or as bad—as your latest accomplishment. This news would overshadow whatever brief history she’d had with these people, and parents were likely to run her out of town once they knew.
“I know. I don’t hate you. The question is, do you hate you?”
What a pointless question. She simply scowled at him. This was not the kind of situation that could be placated by a simple “Jesus loves you.” Actions—consequences—mattered.
“Did you tell them to behave like that? Does it say ‘hit each other’ anywhere in that song?”
“Don’t oversimplify this. It was my job to ‘create the craving’ as Thornton always put it. I did my job exceptionally well, don’t you think? I really should get an award for this one.”
“I’ve got a thing for Dinah’s snickerdoodles. She intentionally leaves the bakery door open when she bakes them because the smell is so good. And I get it full force, right next door. When I smell those cookies, I want ’em. Bad. But it wouldn’t be Dinah’s fault if I held up the bakery to get them.”
“It’s not the same.” Why was he trying to reason with her?
“Of course it’s the same. You just won’t see it that way. Look, Howard’s a good fifty pounds overweight, mostly thanks to Gina Deacon’s pies. He knows it, Gina knows it. Howard doesn’t hate Gina. As a matter of fact, he’s mighty fond of her. They’ve been friends for twenty-five years.” Mac leaned up along the wall beside her. “I know you feel bad about what you did, but feeling bad isn’t the same thing as being guilty. You’re not guilty of anything. In fact, you did something most people wouldn’t have had the nerve to do—you walked away from all that. You’ve got this blown way out of proportion in your head. The only person who thinks Bippo Bears are your crime is you.”
“You don’t know that.”
That got his dander up. “No, I do know that. You think this is such a black mark on you. Haven’t you figured it out yet, Mary? Every one of us has got a black mark.” Now it was his turn to glare at her. “It’s the whole point of Christmas. Bippo Bears weren’t the first Christmas craze, and they won’t be the last. So how about you use all your talents—the ones you think have been so bad—to focus people on the real point of Christmas. You’re doing it. You’re proving to be just as good at this job as you were at the other one. People won’t stop liking you if they know. Why can’t you see that?”
He was Middleburg’s favorite son, running for mayor, for crying out loud. A model citizen even if he did have a touch of the renegade in him. “And how on earth would you know?”
Chapter Twelve
He didn’t know. Mary was right. He wouldn’t know if Middleburg was as forgiving as he said because he hadn’t given them the chance to forgive his big black mark, either. That’s why he couldn’t sleep. He’d figured out why Mary’s predicament seemed to bother him so much. Some part of him had known for months that his “senior prank” had to come to light, he just kept convincing himself it no longer mattered.
It mattered. Now that he was running for mayor, against Howard, it mattered more than ever.
And it mattered because he couldn’t tell Mary one thing while he was doing just the opposite. She’d asked that he take her home almost immediately after the fiasco, saying she didn’t feel well. It didn’t help that everyone seemed to think they were just trying to steal a moment alone. Every time he dismissed her fear as illogical and out of proportion, his own came barreling back to him. God’s final blow came when he opened his Bible for guidance and found himself smack at the verse about “the log in your own eye.”
How dare he judge her for thinking her secret loomed so gigantic and harmful that she couldn’t bear the thought of telling people? Hadn’t he done just the same? He’d managed to dismiss it over the years as the unfortunate centerpiece of a large collection of high school pranks—some less harmless than others, dismissing it as a “small sin.” But it wasn’t small, it wasn’t harmless, and if he really was the kind of man who could lead Middleburg, he needed to be the kind of man who could own up to this.
And not just for him. Mac couldn’t sit there and assure Mary that Middleburg wouldn’t lynch her for writing the Bippo Bear song if he believed Middleburg wouldn’t forgive him for what he’d done.
God had made it abundantly clear that Mary Thorpe needed to hear his secret. From him. And it couldn’t stop there: Howard and all of Middleburg would have to hear it from him
, as well.
I hate this character-building business, Lord, Mac complained as he wandered the church looking for her the next afternoon. You ask such hard things. He had to walk past the manger setting, bearing the quiet message of all the hard things God had asked of His Son, and felt his throat constrict.
He found her in the back of the sanctuary, fumbling with a very industrial-looking key chain. “Just the guy I need,” she said, trying to sound natural even though there was tension between them. “I need to see if there’s a prop stored upstairs. Pastor Dave said there was a huge star used in a Christmas concert a couple of years back, and he thinks it’s still all the way up in the steeple.”
The steeple. God had cornered him, and he knew it. For the first time since high school, Mac felt his palms sweat.
“I’ve never been up in a steeple before,” she continued as they started up the church stairs toward the choir loft where the hatchway to the steeple was.
“It’s not very exciting,” Mac stated, thinking his voice had gone up six notes from the tension. “It’s not like it has windows and you can see out over the town or anything.”
“You’ve been up there before?”
He didn’t want to answer that. “I’ve been all over every corner of this church. When I was in the seventh grade, our youth pastor’s favorite game was something called Sardines.”’
“Oh, I’ve played that. Sort of like Hide and Seek, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, only more troublesome.” He gestured for her to go first up the steep narrow stairway to the choir loft. He noticed, as she passed him, that her hair smelled good. He felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, and tried to casually wipe his palms on his pant legs as he started up the stairs behind her.
His memory of that night in the steeple loomed like a grown-up monster in the closet. As much as he didn’t want to tell her about it, he knew that if he didn’t, this feeling would only get worse. When she wrestled the padlock off the small hatch door, he went first, like diving into a cold lake to get the shock over with fast.
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