Do Not Open 'Til Christmas

by Sierra Donovan

  Bret saw indignation flash in her gray-green eyes, saw the defiant thrust of her chin. And saw the set of her jaw as she tamped down her reaction. She had an impressive amount of self-control, even if she wasn’t good at hiding her reactions.

  He hadn’t made her angry intentionally. But watching her temper flare, then watching her pull it back in, was a sight to behold.

  “Okay,” she conceded at last. She returned to her tamales, but he could tell she was far from blissful now. “Bret?”

  He took another bite. “Hmm?”

  “You don’t think Mandy was telling a tall tale. Do you?”

  “Mandy? No.” His tone softened. “I know she really believes—whatever it was she saw.”

  Chloe’s eyes locked on his, as if she were measuring him. “You like her.”

  “Of course.” He blinked in surprise. “I never said I didn’t. Everybody likes Mandy. In fact, between you and me, she and Jake are two of my favorite people.” He frowned. “Just don’t quote me on that.”

  “Why?”

  “Journalistic objectivity. It’s my job to be impartial.” He inclined his head. “You ask a lot of questions.”

  “Journalistic training. It’s my job to ask questions, right?”

  “Yeah, but you can’t interview me. That would be unethical.”

  Besides, I’m the guy who asks the questions. Having the shoe on the other foot felt more than a little uncomfortable. Why did she keep trying to get under his hide?

  Chloe Davenport just needed to learn about professional boundaries.

  One little thing needled at him. He had a question of his own. “Chloe?”

  Uncharacteristically, her eyes were on her plate. “Hmm?”

  “You know Mandy didn’t see Santa Claus, right?”

  She hesitated long enough to make him wish he hadn’t asked. No. No. No. This was the Tall Pine Gazette, an island of rationality in this sentimental town. Until Chloe walked in, with her bright smile and her Christmas decorations, at his toughest time of the year.

  “I don’t think so,” she said finally. “But it’s nice to think about.”

  It wasn’t the reassurance he’d hoped for.

  Chapter 9

  Chloe finished her lunch in silence, trying to savor the treat, wondering why she repeatedly felt the urge to knock her head into the brick wall that was Bret.

  Something about Christmas really bothered him, and it wasn’t some childhood experience in a shoe-blacking factory.

  Not my problem.

  Do the job.

  Be a turtle.

  When she stood to clear their plates, Bret surprised her by taking her plate from her hand as he picked his up, too. “I’ll get it.”

  Nice manners. But if he wanted to get on her good side, he should just let her write the darned Santa story.

  Instead, he said, “Before you go, there’s something I’ve been meaning to run by you.”

  Warily, she eased back into her chair as Bret discarded their empty plates in his trash can, then set the trash can away behind him. “What?” she asked.

  “A story assignment. If you’re up to it. But it’s a hundred and eighty degrees from what we were just talking about.”

  Aside from press releases, he’d never suggested a story to her. Chloe waited.

  “Someone e-mailed me a lead this morning,” he said. “We have a twenty-year-old local veteran. He came home about four months ago with his left leg amputated at the knee.”

  Chloe scraped up the name. “Aaron McNamara.” She’d heard about it at the Pine ’n’ Dine.

  “That’s right. Someone you know?”

  “No, I just heard about it.” Chloe hesitated. She shouldn’t hesitate. She should be up for anything. “And you want me to ask him what it’s like living with half a leg?”

  “There’s a little more to it. He’s had some hassles with the Veterans Administration. Bureaucratic red tape. They still haven’t worked out the approval on funding for a prosthetic leg.”

  Chloe winced inside. She knew she shouldn’t hem and haw. But he’d caught her completely off guard. “Does he even want to be interviewed?”

  “Don’t know yet. That’s where you come in. Start by talking to his old high school advisor. She’s the one who sent the e-mail. I’ll forward it to you.” Bret gave her a challenging look. “If you’re up to it.”

  He’d said that already. This time, it sounded like a double-dog-dare.

  “Why me?”

  “It’s not exactly rescuing kittens from trees, is it?”

  He held her gaze, unflinching. Was this some kind of a test?

  Of course it was. Because apparently she still hadn’t proven herself. This was a job, she reminded herself. She couldn’t take it personally.

  It’s his ball, her father’s voice echoed. Learn to play the game his way.

  And stop thinking you’ll ever be buddies, she added on her own. The camaraderie they’d been enjoying a few minutes ago was a fluke. It showed up now and then, but she had to give up and regard it as a passing phenomenon. Like Halley’s Comet, but not nearly as reliable.

  Meanwhile, Bret’s inscrutable dark gaze across the desk waited for an answer.

  “Okay,” she said. “Shoot me the e-mail. I’ll start right away.”

  Having taken up the gauntlet, she stood. She didn’t know why this sounded so much harder than talking to grieving families, but she didn’t dare back down. She just had no idea how she was going to go about it. As Chloe left Bret’s office, she knew only one thing.

  She was going to write the hell out of this piece.

  * * *

  Aaron McNamara shifted in his wheelchair. “I’m luckier than a lot of people,” he said. “Some guys who step on one of our own explosive devices don’t live to tell about it. At least I got to come home.”

  They sounded like words he’d repeated to himself often. Chloe bit her lip as she scribbled on her pad, keeping her eyes on Aaron as much as possible. They’d been talking for nearly two hours, and it had taken half that time for him to forget he was being interviewed.

  The guy was four years younger than Chloe, two years younger than her brother Joel, and his life would never be the same. The girlfriend who’d waited for him through his deployment had, bit by bit, stopped coming around after he came home with the injury. Thanks to a computer spelling error, the processing on his doctor’s request for a prosthetic leg was still tied up in red tape.

  And their living room was decorated with Christmas lights and pine branches, and his mom had brought in milk and cookies. It all felt so wrong.

  “I hope the claim gets worked out soon,” she said awkwardly.

  “It will eventually.” Aaron’s long fingers rubbed the head of his golden retriever, who hadn’t budged from his spot alongside his master’s wheelchair. “I’ve spent a lot of time on the phone, and everybody wants to help, but it’s the humans versus the computers. We keep going in circles.” Aaron shrugged, and a swatch of sandy brown hair fell over his eyebrow. His mother had apologized—actually apologized—for his hair when Ned arrived at the beginning of the interview to shoot the photo. She said they’d been meaning to get it trimmed for weeks, but simple errands had gotten a lot more complicated.

  Everything about him seemed so ordinary. If Aaron hadn’t enlisted, Chloe knew exactly who he would have been: one of a group of guys at the Pine ’n’ Dine, killing time before or after work, maybe flirting with her as they ordered. Skiing at Mount Douglas in the winter, driving down to the beach in the summer.

  All that had changed now. Maybe there’d be skiing eventually, once they got the prosthetic leg worked out. She didn’t know if he’d ever want to go to the beach.

  Chloe wished she could tell him anything was possible, but advice and platitudes meant nothing coming from her, because she hadn’t walked in his shoes. Shoes. She winced at how easy it was to stumble on the wrong word.

  “I’m still not sure why I’m going to be in the paper,” he
said.

  For that, at least, Chloe had an answer. “This is your town,” she said. “What happened to you matters to people. Even people who only knew you a little bit.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I wish a few more of them would drop by.”

  Through the interview, he’d maintained awry, upbeat attitude. Occasionally a glimpse of sadness got through, but mostly he’d kept his game face on. This was the first time she’d heard an edge of actual bitterness.

  And Chloe recognized the truth of it. People wanted to be a step removed from things that were tragic, things that were uncomfortable, things that couldn’t be fixed. People mean well, she almost said, and that might be the worst platitude of all.

  “People don’t know what to say,” she said softly. The pen was in her hand, but the interview was over.

  “I get that, too,” Aaron said. His head lifted slightly, his sportsmanlike veneer back in place. “I don’t know if I would have been coming around, either, if it happened to someone else. It’s just—different from this side.”

  She could only nod. She tried to think of a way to end their meeting on a positive note. Thanks to her, he’d spent the last two hours reliving what he’d gone through, and she didn’t want to leave him feeling worse off than he had before she arrived. How could anyone keep from getting emotionally involved in a story like this? But she knew it wasn’t her job to change the story, or help him resolve it. Only to write it.

  And that killed her.

  As if on cue, Aaron’s mother came back into the room, ostensibly to clear the plates from their milk and cookies. Wherever Mrs. McNamara had come from, Chloe suspected she’d stayed close enough to hear when it sounded like the interview had come to an end.

  “Well, I won’t take up any more of your time.” Chloe rose, hating the false bright tone in her voice. She tried to make up for it by meeting Aaron’s eyes with as much frankness as she could muster. She extended her hand, glad when he took it. “Thank you.”

  She made it to her car, made it out of the driveway, made it around the corner, before she pulled over to the curb and let the tears go.

  * * *

  She stayed up late to write the article. She handed it in the next morning.

  An hour later, Bret called her into his office, told her to cut the story in half, and to contact the veterans’ office for their version of the story. “We have to report both sides,” he reminded her.

  Chloe set her jaw, didn’t argue, and got to work on it.

  When she filed the revised story the next morning, he called her into his office again. “You’re closer,” he said. “But you’ve got to cut it down before it can run. It’s still over forty inches long. Get it down to thirty.”

  “The hospice piece was longer.”

  “Which may have kept it from being read. One thing that’ll help you? Drop the adjectives. Don’t tell me how to feel. Make me feel it.”

  “But—”

  “No adjectives.”

  * * *

  Chloe shoved her way through the heavy glass door of the Pine ’n’ Dine and headed straight for the booth by the corner window. Usually she sat on the side facing the other tables. Today she faced the wall.

  “Pie?” Sherry’s voice reached her as she sat with her fingers pressed over her eyes.

  Chloe didn’t take her hands down. “Apple,” she said, her voice muffled by her hands. Her eyes felt hot. She wasn’t sleeping a lot these days, but that wasn’t the only reason.

  She’d tried so hard. The story couldn’t be maudlin, couldn’t feel like a call for pity. She’d weighed every word. She thought she’d gotten it right. Twice.

  And now she had to do it again.

  You go write a story about a twenty-year-old amputee, she wanted to tell him. But in point of fact, Bret had done stories every bit as hard. She knew, because she’d searched the paper’s database to see how he did them. Bret wrote them eloquently, sparely, letting the facts speak for themselves. The guy was freaking Hemingway.

  I can’t do that. She’d tried.

  And it wasn’t enough.

  She fought the tears. She didn’t cry over work. Ever. Not when tourists were rude to her. Not when Hal yelled at her for breaking dishes. She was never going to please Bret, and for some reason Bret’s opinion mattered way, way too much.

  She heard a plate slide onto the table in front of her, followed by the quiet sound of a coffee cup being set beside it.

  Then she heard another sound: a person settling into the booth across from her. Quickly, she blinked hard and lowered her hands to see Sherry. Who else had she expected?

  Who else indeed? You dope.

  “What’s wrong?” Sherry asked.

  Chloe took in her surroundings for the first time. At eleven a.m., most of the tables were empty. “I’m going to kill Bret. If he doesn’t kill me first.”

  Sherry frowned. “You had a fight?”

  “No, it’s not like that.” Chloe slumped against the upholstered booth. She had to stop whining to people. After this. “I’m just tired. And there’s no pleasing him. Every time I think I’m on the right track he shoots me down.” She rubbed her eyes, feeling them start to swell again. “Every. Damn. Time.”

  “Bret’s not so bad.”

  Sherry’s voice held an odd note. Chloe raised her head and tried to fathom her friend’s enigmatic expression. “How would you know?”

  Sherry shrugged. “We went out for a while. Back in high school.”

  That dried up her tears. Her mind was too busy reeling, trying to re-imagine a universe where Bret and Sherry ever would have dated.

  “How did that happen?” Chloe stared at her friend unabashedly, but she still saw the same Sherry. Compassionate brown eyes, standard pink Pine ’n’ Dine uniform, hair tugged up into the obligatory waitress’s bun, currently dyed a deep shade of wine red. A different hair color every month. Sherry and Bret?

  “It was a long time ago,” Sherry said. “The point is—”

  The front door opened with its familiar chime. Sherry broke off and stood as if ejected by the booth’s cushions. Eyes on the door, she fished her pad out of her pocket and pantomimed writing on it. “Can I get you anything else?”

  Something flickered in Sherry’s eyes as they looked past Chloe to follow the newcomer’s progress into the restaurant.

  Chloe didn’t turn around. Voice lowered, she said, “Bret just walked in, didn’t he?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Sherry scribbled on her pad, tore off a ticket, and slapped it on the table at Chloe’s elbow. With the polite friendliness waitresses used on total strangers, she said, “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  * * *

  “This isn’t your station,” Bret said as Sherry walked up.

  “Yeah, well, your usual table’s taken.”

  “I noticed.” Bret saw the back of a blond head in the coveted corner booth, facing away from the rest of the room. Unless someone else had the seat across from you, it ran contrary to human nature to sit with your back to a restaurant. “She’s not back there crying, is she?”

  “No.” Sherry widened her eyes. “Why would you think that?”

  “Because I’m trying to turn her into a journalist.”

  “And that involves what? Floggings?”

  He should have stayed in his office, as usual. But the latest revision session with Chloe had left him unsettled. He was putting her through the wringer and he knew it. But the story had to be good. So good it couldn’t be missed by even the laziest reader.

  He glared at Sherry. “Constructive criticism.”

  “Your constructive criticism never made me cry.”

  “Yeah, maybe that’s why you only got a C plus in English composition.”

  “It was all I needed.”

  And that, Bret concluded, was one of many reasons he and Sherry remained on good terms but could never have been soul mates. Settling for good enough, especially when words were involved, was beyond his comprehension. But Sherry
had more horse sense than most people he knew, one of many reasons he was glad to count her as a friend.

  Most of the time, anyway.

  Sherry cocked a hand on her hip. “Is there the slightest possibility you’re being too rough on her?”

  Enough was enough. “What happened to taking a guy’s order around here?”

  From the corner of his eye, he saw Tiffany approach the table, get halfway across the room, and wheel back around. Tiffany was Chloe’s roommate, he’d sat in her station, and now his long-ex-girlfriend was taking his order. Could Tall Pine get any more interconnected?

  Sherry held her notepad poised, looking over it with a reproachful stare.

  “Coffee,” he said. “Lots of cream.”

  “Want to pay for Chloe’s pie?”

  “Sherry.” He did his best to send daggers from his eyes. “Let it go.”

  She spun away and went back to Chloe’s table.

  It was Tiffany who brought his coffee.

  * * *

  After the week she’d had, Chloe didn’t even want to look at the Gazette that weekend, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  The Aaron McNamara story ran on Sunday’s front page. Not the front of the “B” section. The very front page.

  Chloe shut herself in the bathroom of the apartment, although Tiffany and Kate weren’t up yet. Half afraid to look, she read the article to see how much of her third revision had survived Bret’s final edits. Like all of her stories, she practically knew it by heart. This time it had been through so many revisions, it was hard to tell. But hadn’t she deleted that paragraph?

  She read it again. Every word was hers. But two of the paragraphs she’d sacrificed on the last go-round were restored. He’d even put a few of her adjectives back.

  She sagged against the bathroom door with relief. But she wasn’t prepared for what waited for her when she went out.

  “Chloe,” the grocery checker said when she went out for milk. “When did you start writing for the paper?”

  She passed her old volleyball coach in the parking lot. “Great article. Congratulations.”