by Ruthie Knox
“Julie!”
Over the top of a hundred grayed and graying heads, he found hers. Hair the color of wheat in October. Blue-purple eyes, and an expression that shifted from annoyance to surprise to a kind of soft, hopeful awe.
He stood there, stunned, dressed all wrong, and tried to remember how to breathe.
A cacophony of whispers broke out. The pastor cleared her throat.
Julie got to her feet and turned all the way around to face him.
She smiled, and Carson’s heart broke open.
After that, everything happened fast. He stalked to the front of the church and forced his way down the pew where she was sitting, stepping on toes and almost landing in Mrs. Miller’s lap, until he finally collided with Julie, who’d worked her way toward him from the opposite end. Two of her tourists slid to either side and cleared a space, and he had her in her arms, picked her up off the floor. She smelled like cinnamon and looked like Christmas, all red and green and gold, with tears in her eyes.
He kissed them away, kissed the corners of her mouth, kissed her nose and her chin and her lips, and he smoothed his hands over her temples and her hair, held her head, and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Jules. I’m so sorry.” He just kept saying it, over and over again, until she silenced him with a kiss that banished his panic and set something at ease inside him that had been wounded and dark and restless for a long time.
She laughed and clutched his shoulders when he kissed her neck. Her jaw. Her cheeks. She didn’t stop crying, but she laughed.
“What happened to Dubai?” she asked.
“They can find somebody else. I’m staying. I promise.”
“For how long?”
“For good. Forever, if you’ll have me, and even if you won’t, I guess, my dad— But Christ, I hope you’ll have me, Jules.”
She beamed and touched him, a tentative sweep of her cupped fingers over his face as if she couldn’t quite believe he had reappeared. “I decided I won’t.”
But he could see all her teeth, gleaming, and the dimple in her cheek. Gold earrings glinted in the candlelight, her eyes were wide and wet, full of emotion, and everything about her said Yes, I’ll have you.
“Change your mind one last time.”
Her lips pursed. He caught the mischief in her expression before she said, “I’m not sure I should.”
That’s when he picked her up and stood her on the pew, so everybody in the church could see her. Because this wasn’t just about Julie, this declaration he was about to make. It was about him, about Potter Falls, about the rest of his life. He caught sight of his father, standing a few pews away, watching him.
Martin winked.
Carson took Julie’s hand, cupped it in his, and caught her laughing eyes again.
The rustles and whispers died down, and the church filled with a silence so complete, it felt like a sacrament.
“Julia Marie Long, I love you.”
Off to the side somewhere, a woman gasped.
“I’ve loved you forever, but I’ve done a rotten job of it. You made a sacrifice for my family, and I left you for it. You took care of my parents, took care of my town, and I never thanked you.”
She opened her mouth to interrupt, but he kept talking. “Whatever you’re going to say, shut it. I’m only giving this speech once. I don’t deserve you, but I love you, and I’ve got thirty or forty years left, I hope. There’s no point to them without you. Being with you, loving you—Julie, that’s the point. That’s the whole fucking point.”
“Language,” someone said, and he realized what he’d done. Swearing in a church. His dad was going to have his head on a platter.
Carson dropped to one knee. “Jules, will you marry me?”
Another gasp. Julie trembled, and a cold horror crept through his veins, anchoring him to the earth. He was doing this all wrong. She would say no.
“You can think about it,” he offered. “I understand that this might seem, uh … hasty.”
She laughed, a slightly panicked sound, and ran her finger along his forehead, right below the band of his stocking cap.
“Is all this actually happening?” she asked.
Carson nodded.
“Did I really just get proposed to by a hobo-lumberjack who crashed Christmas so he could grovel in front of everybody in Potter Falls?”
She addressed this question a bit more to the crowd than to Carson. Which made his cheeks hot, but he figured he deserved it.
“Not everybody,” the pastor said. “He’ll have to take you over to the Catholic Church and do it again if he really wants to get everybody.”
“String him along, Julie,” a voice hollered from the other side of the church. “He’s made you wait long enough.”
And then there was a chorus of comments, shouted witticisms from all directions, and Carson held Julie’s hands and watched her face.
She didn’t believe him.
He dug around in his pocket for the key Leo had given him and held it up to her. “This is for you. For Christmas.”
Julie took the key and turned it over in her palm, bewildered.
“What’s it open?”
“The shoe factory. I’m giving it to you. Or, I guess actually, Leo is giving it to you. But only because I told him to.”
She frowned. “How generous.”
“I’m going to stay and fix it up. You can keep it or give it to a nonprofit or turn it into a cooperative—whatever you want—and I’ll run the construction site. It’s going to be great.”
The frown became the scowl. “You’re staying for a project.”
“I’m staying for you. And when this project’s over, I’ll find another one, or you can just keep giving me work at the house. I love your house. I love fixing it up for you. Whatever I need to do—”
Carson stopped, frustrated because she still didn’t look like she believed him. She looked like she hated him.
Abruptly, he pulled her down off the pew and against his body. He kissed her, hard, putting all the certainty he’d found into it. Wanting her to feel it.
He leaned down and spoke in her ear. “I was afraid, Jules. When my mom was sick, and you were so weak after the operation, and my dad fell apart … I was afraid of losing you, and I felt like I had to pick between what was pulling me out into the world and this … this panic I felt whenever I looked at you. I did the easy thing and left, and even that was harder than it should have been.” He straightened and looked into her eyes. They were wet, full of unshed tears.
“I love my parents, Jules, but I couldn’t stay away from here because I couldn’t keep away from you. Not for long. So I just kept coming back, and it kept getting worse—until this time.” He squeezed her hands, hard. “My job isn’t what makes me happy. You’re what makes me happy, and I’m not afraid anymore. If I lose everything, it won’t be worse than leaving you again. I need you. I love you. I want to make it up to you, every way I can think of.”
He wiped his thumbs across her cheekbones, catching the moisture there.
“Believe me,” he said. “This time, I’m a good bet.”
He saw it in her eyes when she rose on her toes to bring her mouth to his. Her faith. A fragile trust. She kissed him gently, sinking her fingers into his hair, and said, “I do.”
The relief made his knees weak, and he kissed her hard to hide it. Kissed her through the polite applause, a few whoops, some catcalling, an earsplitting whistle. Carson kissed her until he knew in his bones that this was real, and it was right.
When he broke the kiss, she whispered against his mouth, “You jackass.”
Epilogue
“Don’t forget about the roof.” Julie handed him a mug of coffee, admiring the way his damp hair fell over his forehead.
“Thank you. What about the roof?”
“The pop-out part over the Sarasota room is leaking. You told me you’d look at it.”
“I did?”
“Last night. While we were getting ready f
or bed.”
“Did you have a shirt on?”
“I don’t know. No?”
He caught her as she tried to walk by with a basket of warm muffins. With his free hand, he stole a muffin. At the same time, he stole a kiss.
Warm, soft, wet. Sexy as sin.
Carson Vance. The best thing that had ever happened to her.
“This is something you need to know if we’re going to stay married,” he said. “If you tell me something while you’re not wearing a shirt, I’m not going to remember it.”
“But you agreed!”
“I would agree to eat dirt in order to get you naked. That doesn’t mean I’m actually going to remember later, or that I’ll eat the dirt.”
“Duly noted. So will you go up on the roof today and look at the pop-out over the Sarasota room?”
“Sure. It’s supposed to rain later on, so I’ll get up there after I meet with Leo this morning.”
Carson and Leo had made a lot of headway on the shoe factory over the winter. If everything went the way it was supposed to, Carson would start shoring up the foundation in the fall, handle the renovations on the interior over the long winter, and wrap up cosmetic improvements in the spring. By this time next year, the place might have tenants, all of them part owners with an investment in the community. Leo’s girlfriend, Samantha, was talking about opening a second location of her successful Albany restaurant, and there was talk of studio and gallery space for local artists.
“Are you on the dome at all today?”
“No, I have to give that test patch a few weeks to see what it does in the weather. I’m supposed to take the historical-society ladies up to look at it next Friday, and if they approve, the bank will let me finish the restoration.”
“I can’t believe they’re being so fussy. It’s not like it looks good now. How much worse do they think it will look if you screw it up?”
“I’m not going to screw it up.”
“I know that.” She kissed him. “But not everybody has as much faith in you as I do.”
“They should when it comes to this kind of stuff.”
“They should when it comes to every kind of stuff.”
He gave her a crooked smile. “I’m glad you think so.”
His hands fell to her hips, and he tugged her between his legs on the barstool and kissed her again, soft for a moment, then more seriously as one hand smoothed over her butt. More urgently as he began to stir in his jeans, hardening in time with the throbbing between her legs.
“I bought you a present last time I went to New York.” He nipped her ear.
“What kind of present?”
“The kind we have to keep on the top shelf of the closet where the kids can’t find it.”
They didn’t have any kids, but she got his drift.
He thumbed her nipple through her bra. “What’s your day look like? Got an hour for me?”
She had fifteen people eating breakfast and waiting for her to bring out muffins and butter. Not to mention that Martin could walk in at any moment. He treated her kitchen like his own.
She had rooms to clean and guests to talk to, a delivery of donated baby layettes to take to the hospital, and leftover fudge and brownies that she was supposed to drop off at the VFW.
She had an insanely hot husband who had bought her a sex toy.
A woman as busy as Julie knew how to set priorities.
“Two o’clock.”
“Sooner.”
“Your meeting—?”
“It’s not ’til ten thirty. Come upstairs at nine.”
“All right.”
When she stepped back and away from him, lest he talk her into sneaking upstairs and abandoning the guests midbreakfast, something about the posture he settled into caught her eye.
He had both feet hooked in the rung of the stool. One elbow sitting on the countertop, his hand resting under his chin. He was smiling at her, and he looked gorgeous and familiar and deeply, astonishingly dear.
But that wasn’t it.
She wrapped her arms around her stomach to hold in a fierce surge of emotion, and it took her a minute to figure out why.
He looked settled.
At some point in the last few months, Carson had lost his forward tilt. He’d stopped looking like he was on his way out of town, out of her life, out into the bigger, more fascinating world.
He’d started looking at her like she was the bigger, more fascinating world that he’d been missing all along.
“You came home,” she said, wonderingly.
And he must have caught her meaning, captured it from her face, because his expression turned somber and his eyes full of feeling, and he said, “I did. For you, I did.”
Acknowledgments
The beating heart of this novella is the small town in Upstate New York where my not-at-all-curmudgeonly father grew up. Dolgeville, I miss you. Thanks for letting me play fast and loose with your past and present in order to write the story I wanted to write.
Carson, Julie, and Leo owe a lot to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a movie I’ve seen dozens of times and for which I have an abiding but conflicted love. It saddens me that George never gets to leave Bedford Falls, and it irritates me when we learn that if George had never been born, Mary would have become a cringing spinster librarian. This story began with my attempt to imagine what might have happened if George really did shake the dust of his crummy little hometown off his feet and see the world.
I’m grateful to my mother-in-law, Joyce, for collecting Julie and Glory’s story and handing it to me. “I have something you need to put in a book,” she said. So I did.
Huge thanks to Serena Bell for her head-patting and incisive comments as I wrote this novella. Serena is the sort of friend who knows how to say, “This is magnificent! You’re going to have to do it all over again.” Every writer needs one of those. Anna Cowan, Elisabeth Barrett, and Amber Lin all read the story and pointed out different flaws. I’m grateful for their honest criticism and hopeful that the final product is better for all the revising I did in response. Thanks, too, to Faye and Emily, for the encouragement, and to my editor, Sue, for giving me this project in the first place. I never thought I’d write a Christmas story—and now I have.
Read on for an excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s Along Came Trouble
Chapter One
“Get out of my yard!” Ellen shouted.
The weasel-faced photographer ignored her, too busy snapping photos of the house next door to pay her any mind.
No surprise there. This was the fifth time in as many days that a man with a camera had violated her property lines. By now, she knew the drill.
They trespassed. She yelled. They pretended she didn’t exist. She called the police.
Ellen was thoroughly sick of it. She couldn’t carry on this way, watching from the safety of the side porch and clutching her glass of iced tea like an outraged Southern belle.
It was all very well for Jamie to tell her to stay put and let the professionals deal with it. Her pop-star brother was safe at home in California, nursing his wounds. And anyway, this kind of attention was the lot he’d chosen in life. He’d decided to be a celebrity, then he’d made the choice to get involved with Ellen’s neighbor, Carly. The consequences ought to be his to deal with.
Ellen hadn’t invited the paparazzi to descend. She’d made different choices, and they’d led her to college, law school, marriage, divorce, motherhood. They’d led her to this quiet cul-de-sac in Camelot, Ohio, surrounded by woods.
Her choices had also made her the kind of woman who couldn’t easily stand by as some skeevy guy crushed her plants and invaded Carly’s privacy for the umpteenth time since last Friday.
Enough, she thought. Enough.
But until Weasel Face crushed the life out of her favorite hosta—her mascot hosta—with his giant brown boot, she didn’t actually intend to act on the thought.
Raised in Chicago, Ellen had grown up ignorant of p
erennials. When she first moved to Camelot, a new wife in a strange land, she did her best to adapt to the local ways of lawn-mowing and shade-garden cultivation, but during the three years her marriage lasted, she’d killed every plant she put in the ground.
It was only after her divorce that things started to grow. In the winter after she kicked Richard out for being a philandering dickhead, their son had sprouted from a pea-sized nothing to a solid presence inside her womb, breathing and alive. That spring, the first furled shoots of the hosta poked through the mulch, proving that Ellen was not incompetent, as Richard had so often implied. She and the baby were, in fact, perfectly capable of surviving, even thriving, without anyone’s help.
Two more springs had come and gone, and the hosta kept returning, bigger every year. It became her horticultural buddy. Triumph in plant form.
So Ellen took it personally when Weasel Face stepped on it. Possibly a bit too personally. Swept up in a delicious tide of righteousness, she crossed the lawn and upended her glass of iced tea over the back of his head.
It felt good. It felt great, actually—the coiled-spring snap of temper, the clean confidence that came with striking a blow for justice. For the few seconds it lasted, she basked in it. It was such an improvement over standing around.
One more confirmation that powerlessness was for suckers.
But then it was over, and she wondered why she’d wasted the tea, because Weasel Face didn’t so much as flinch. Seemingly unbothered by the dunking, the ice cubes, or the sludgy sugar on the back of his neck, he aimed his camera at Carly’s house and held down the shutter release, capturing photo after photo as an SUV rolled to a stop in the neighboring driveway.
“Get out of my yard,” Ellen insisted, shoving the man’s shoulder for emphasis. His only response was to reach up, adjust his lens, and carry on.
Now what? Assault-by-beverage was unfamiliar territory for her. Usually, she stuck with verbal attack. Always, the people she engaged in battle acknowledged her presence on the field. How infuriating to be ignored by the enemy.