Bluegrass Christmas

by Allie Pleiter

  “Where is she anyway?” asked Sandy Burnside. “She’s supposed to be here. Has anyone checked on her?”

  “I just did,” Dinah answered, pulling open the sanctuary’s back doors. He hadn’t even noticed her leaving the room—he was so busy speechifying. Dinah stepped aside to reveal Mary standing behind her. “She was coming in as I went out. Just in time to hear someone’s big speech. And for once, I don’t mean Howard’s.”

  Every single eye in the room was on Mary. Her entrance into the room was as painful as she had expected—she couldn’t for the life of her tell if the crowd was ready to welcome her or what. Some man in one corner looked down and shook his head. Pastor Anderson stood up slowly, as did Emily. Howard looked like he’d have crossed his arms over his chest again if they weren’t already there. The sanctuary was excruciatingly silent.

  “Well,” acknowledged Sandy Burnside, “you’re here. ’Bout time, too. So I suppose there’s only one question worth asking now. Are you really the gal behind that troublesome little song?”

  Mary caught Mac’s eyes staring right at her. His eyes were a storm of fear, worry, regret, embarrassment—it surprised her that she could read his expression so clearly under such dire circumstances. Quite simply, he looked awful. Mary took a deep breath and stood up straighter. Some odd little part of her recognized she was about to finish off all the remaining circles in her Mac Five in one fell swoop. “Yes, I wrote the Bippo Bear jingle. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.”

  Tommy Lee Lockwood looked at her with an awed expression. “Cool.”

  She couldn’t help but smile. “Not really.”

  One older woman Mary recognized from the choir shook a finger at her. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

  Mary thought it would be horrible the first time she faced someone like that. It wasn’t as bad as she’d feared. “As a matter of fact, I am,” she replied, amazed at the steadiness of her voice. After all, there really wasn’t anything left to lose at this point. “I’m ashamed of whom I used to be. At what I used to think was important. But that’s the point of faith, I think.”

  “I could go into a big speech of that being the whole point behind the coming of the Christ child,” said Pastor Anderson, walking to the center of the room, “but I think we’ve heard enough speeches already.” He turned to Mac. “Do you admit that you’ve made a mistake and you’re willing to make up for it?”

  Mac nodded. “Already have admitted it, and I’ve already offered to do whatever I need to do to set things right.”

  “Mary,” continued Pastor Anderson, “do you admit it might have been wise to let us know what was going on in your professional life beforehand and that your fears and our alarm might have been avoided if we’d just talked about this earlier?”

  “I suppose I’ve come to realize that’s true, yes.”

  Pastor Anderson turned to Howard. “Do you admit to having an understandable reaction to some news but that you would be able to get past it, given a little time?”

  Howard unfolded his arms and shifted his weight a bit before admitting, “That’s a possibility.”

  Pastor Anderson swept his hands around the room. “Do all of you agree that maybe we’ve gotten our spirits out of joint here for any number of reasons? And that the only true solution to all of this is the Christ we’re supposed to be welcoming?”

  Janet stood up and crossed her hands over her chest. “It’s Christmas,” she declared in the take-charge voice of a stage manager. In fact, Janet had made an outstanding stage manager, and it didn’t look like she was going to stop now. “If we can’t find a way to get along at Christmas, then we should be ashamed of ourselves. Mary, I want us to rehearse. I’ve put too much into this to have it all go to pieces now. As far as I’m concerned, scene one starts in five minutes. Anybody else want to give it a try?”

  As awful as everything was, Mary felt a surge of blessing to have Dinah and Janet in her corner. Emily, too. She’d been wrong thinking everyone would reject her.

  She caught Mac’s gaze over the crowd, and felt her own emotions tangle up with the tumult in his eyes. Everyone had made so many mistakes. Mac had hurt her, but he’d made that mistake in the process of trying to help her. There was a powerful pull in that. If she could feel that pull, even now after what he’d done, then wasn’t there something important under all that human imperfection? Mary gave him the slightest of smiles, an “I’ll try” slip of a smile, and she watched that tiny piece of encouragement light a spark in the green of his eyes.

  Dress rehearsal went as well as could be expected under the circumstances: namely, a complete disaster. Cues were missed, baby Jesus, although now in possession of all his limbs, never made it onstage for the final scene so that Emily cradled a limp roll of cloth instead of the Almighty Savior. No one knew the Magi’s bottle of frankincense was real glass until the actor dropped it and it shattered, sending Audrey Lupine running for the church first aid kit to bandage Shepherd Number Three’s left hand. Howard and Mac were barely above useless, repeatedly forgetting lines in between mutual onstage “stare-downs” and a smattering of curt remarks. Mary found herself praying with all her might that the old adage “bad dress rehearsal, good opening night” was true.

  She closed up the costume closet with an exhausted sigh, happy to find Pastor Dave just behind her with a mug of hot chocolate—the man seemed to specialize in “comfort muggings” as he jokingly called them. “Think we’ll survive?” he asked, his tone a mix of humor and genuine concern.

  “I’ve never felt less in control of anything in my entire life,” Mary stated and leaned back against the wall, clutching the mug with both hands. “I’ve told God eleven times in the past thirty minutes alone that this is way beyond me. That only He can pull this off tomorrow night.” She looked at the older pastor, amazed that he could be so calm when the world seemed to be spinning out of control. “I should be panicked out of my skin, but you know, I’m not. Maybe I’m just too tired to know I ought to be panicking.”

  Pastor Anderson chuckled and leaned back against the wall opposite her in the hallway. “Maybe God’s getting through to you that it was His job to pull it off all along. We’re stubborn folk this side of heaven. Sometimes I find God has to rip the control out of our hands to make us recognize we never had control in the first place. That place where you are? The place where it feels like, unless God shows up, you’re sunk? Well, I find that’s the place where God usually shows up. In big ways. Doing things no one expected.”

  “Oh,” Mary said and sighed, “that would definitely be now.”

  “How do you feel now,” Pastor Dave continued as they started walking back up the stairs toward the sanctuary, “now that everyone knows?”

  “Okay. Not okay. It’s nice to know not everyone blames me. But I’ve gotten my share of dirty looks today—some people really do blame me. Except for Tommy Lee Lockwood. He’s asked me four times if I can get him a bear.”

  “For his sister?”

  “No, actually,” Mary replied with an amused whisper. “He told me he could get twice what they’re worth through some Internet site.”

  “Tommy Lee Lockwood’s too young to think Kentucky has a black market,” Pastor Dave observed and then laughed.

  “Tommy Lee’s too young for lots of the things he thinks and does if you ask me.”

  Pastor Dave stopped at the top of the stairs. “Vern Murphy tells me folks used to say that about young Joseph MacCarthy. Mac had a talent for trouble, but I think he turned out okay. He’ll turn out okay when all this is over, too. It’s the man who doesn’t learn from his mistakes that you need to watch out for.”

  Mary didn’t have a reply. She just nodded and sipped her cocoa again as they pushed open the sanctuary doors where her coat and script still lay along with a box of props that needed mending.

  The sanctuary was dark except for a handful of small lights and the moonlight coming in through the stained glass windows, but it wasn’t empty. A single fi
gure sat at the front of the pews, head resting on one hand, shoulders hunched. Mac.

  “Like I said,” Pastor Dave whispered, turning back toward the hallway that led to the parking lot, “God shows up.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Mary felt a dozen different emotions as she walked up the aisle toward Mac. He turned and looked at her calmly, as if he’d been waiting. The expression in his eyes unwound something deep in her chest. Did she really have the capacity to forgive him? Or was she just too exhausted to be angry anymore? She sat down in the same pew, and for a moment they both looked at the rebuilt silver star that now hung in the top of the sanctuary. She remembered the time in the steeple, when they went to look for that star.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Mac said in a hoarse voice, “how to apologize to you, but everything I come up with falls short. What I did was awful. I should be able to say something meaningful, you know, eloquent, to make up for it. But all I keep thinking is that my run-on mouth is what got me into this to begin with.” He looked up at her, his green eyes piercing the darkness. “I never meant to hurt you. Not in a million years. But I did, and I’m beyond sorry.”

  “Did you mean what you said earlier? That you first thought about telling your story to help me?”

  “Yeah,” he conceded. “Twisted as it was.” He managed a weak laugh. “It didn’t quite turn out the way I planned.”

  “Thanks. For trying to help, I mean.” She surveyed the sanctuary, imagining the crowd of people who’d been in here earlier. “Everybody knows now and I’m still alive. I suppose in some respects you were right—it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. I’d turned it into some kind of horrible thing in my mind.”

  “We can do that, you know. Twist things up in our minds. God can give us a good idea and we can foul it up something fierce.” He paused for a moment before he leaned back in the pew and looked up at the ceiling. “Like running for mayor,” he said softly. “I know God wanted me to run, but I thought it was so that I could be a big shot, the guy who could take on Howard.”

  “And now?”

  “Now I know God wanted me to run so I could clean up my own house.”

  Mary wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that. She leaned over to try and decipher the feelings exposed on his face, but the shadows hid his features. “How so?”

  He turned toward her, and Mary felt her heart jolt at the sight of his expression. The man before her had been stripped of his bravado, of his clever words and fancy plans. This is what it felt like to look into someone’s soul—unedited, unprotected, exposed. “I’m not ready to run for mayor. Maybe someday, but I’ve got a load of work to do on the inside before I try and change the world. I’ll be thirty in seven days and I’ve never felt less grown up. I let one guy goad me into hurting someone I…someone I’ve come to care a whole lot about. That’s not a guy who should be mayor.”

  Mary thought it would be a long, hard process, but it wasn’t. It was a single, clear moment that swept across her like a breeze. “I forgive you,” she said, amazed how the words felt both large and effortless at the same time.

  He looked at her with a startled amazement. “I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t. I’m such a jerk—I think God allowed me to believe I was helping you because I’d have never ’fessed up on my own.”

  “Maybe God fixed it so you told because I’d have chickened out of telling on my own. I don’t suppose that really matters at this point.” She sighed. “Now what? The town’s in worse shape than when I started.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe this wasn’t one of those things you could fix creatively. We had to tackle it up front, out in the open, ugly and all.” Mac let his head fall back against the pew. “I think down deep we all still like each other. We’ve just got to find our way back to that.”

  That was it, wasn’t it? Could she find her way back to the affection she felt for Mac after what he’d done? He’d said it himself, that his original intent had been to help. His failings had gotten in the way of his intent. Could she say much differently? Hadn’t her original intent to do a good job been hampered by her own faults?

  “I want to find a way back,” she proclaimed, turning to him. A way back for Middleburg, and maybe even a way back for the two of them.

  “Hanged if I know how,” he admitted, more to the empty room than to her.

  “Actually,” Mary revealed, sitting up, “I think maybe I do.”

  “Oh,” groaned Mac, “you’re not talking about the potluck, are you?”

  “Oh, I am. Besides,” she concluded, amazed she could find it within herself to smile, “now you have to come.”

  This is my Christmas gift to myself. Mary took a deep breath, grabbed her phone and dialed the number the following morning.

  “Mary, darling!” Thornton’s overly dramatic greeting was too loud and too cavalier. He was almost shouting; she could hear the noises of a city bar in full swing behind him. “I just knew I’d be hearing from you today. How are you out in the middle of nowhere, wherever you are?”

  It would be hard to pack more untruths into three short sentences: Mary was by no means his “darling,” he had no right whatsoever to expect to hear from her ever again—much less on Christmas Eve—she doubted he cared one bit how she was doing and he knew exactly where she was. It surprised her, at just that moment, how she’d allowed this man to hold such power over her. The time for that was over, and she was ready to end it.

  “I’m great actually. Very happy.”

  “No kidding.” Thornton’s voice dripped with doubt. “And here I was sure you were calling to ask for your old job back for Christmas. You can have it, you know.” His tone implied that he’d be the big man and forgive her the terrible sin of leaving him.

  “No thanks, Thornton. I just wanted to call and say Merry Christmas. This will be our last phone conversation. And there will be no more mail. No more communication. I’m done, and I just wanted to tell you myself.”

  He didn’t speak for a moment; Mary heard only the yelling and revelry from wherever he was. People trying too hard to be happy. It sounded so empty.

  “Come on now…” he finally said in the fumbling way of someone who can’t think of anything better to say.

  “No, really. You can tell whoever asks that I wrote the song, but you ought to also tell them that I’m not inclined to give interviews. And if I catch you giving out this number to anyone, I won’t be nice about it. I mean it, Thornton.”

  She heard glasses clinking, as if he’d just taken a swig of a drink. “No, you don’t.”

  “Oh, I do.”

  Thornton let out a string of the colorful adjectives for which he was famous. Actually, she’d expected to be called far worse—Thornton wasn’t at all used to people cutting him off. The language fell sharp and repulsive on her ears. “Be that way,” he snapped at the end of the off-color diatribe.

  “I’m happy where I am, Thornton. Leave me alone now.”

  “No problem,” he practically shouted in her ear. “You just dropped off the radar, sweetheart.”

  “I really do wish you a Merry Christmas, Thornton. The Bippo Bear campaign looks like it was everything you wanted it to be. Enjoy your success.”

  “What’s with the holier-than-thou attitude?”

  She could just imagine him, pacing the hallway of some posh Chicago bar, tie loosened, drink spilling out of one hand.

  “You know what, doll? I’m glad you’re gone. Everyone’s replaceable. I got people lining up for your job, and none of them will spout sermons at me. You’re gone.”

  With that pronouncement, Thornton hung up on her. And she didn’t mind.

  She was gone. Long gone, and glad of it. Mary wondered, as she hit the disconnect button on her phone, how she’d ever been so afraid of that man. With a flourish, she deleted his contact information from her cell phone. It didn’t matter who knew what she’d been, because she knew now who she was. And Whose she was.

  Emily’s shop smelled fabu
lous when Mary pushed open the door half an hour later. The cinnamon-pine-berry scent of whatever potpourri she had set out—and Emily always had something fragrant and wonderful set out—filled Mary’s head with visions of a Dickens Christmas. She could almost imagine a pie baking somewhere behind Emily’s counter. Music-box versions of Christmas carols filled the air. Mary placed a small wrapped gift on the counter just as Emily came out from the stock room in the back of her shop. “Oh,” Emily said with a bright smile, coming around the counter in a welcoming rush, “it’s you. I’m so glad to see you this morning.” She wrapped Mary in an enormous hug. “Merry Christmas Eve. How are you? I mean really, after yesterday and all, how are you? I’ve been sending up prayers for you all night.”