Blessings of the Season

by Annie Jones

  Addie nodded. “You’ve given me a lot to think about, Mom.”

  Addie arrived at work to find that none of the people she had contacted about publicity for the promotion seemed interested in covering it. The only one she hadn’t heard from was the local paper, the Star City Satellite.

  She called, and someone there promised to call her back. She thought about what her mom had told her about attracting attention, about giving people something out of the ordinary, stylish and sentimental. That had given her an idea.

  “Hey! Maimie said I might find you over here.” Nate caught up with her by the elevator on the third floor offices that led to the unused warehouse side of the store.

  She had seen Nate every day for the last seven days straight, but they hadn’t been alone a minute of it. Maimie had always been there going over details, asking questions. Or Doc, telling stories. Or Jesse, just being Jesse.

  “And here I am.” She reached for the elevator button.

  He did the same, his hand coming down on top of hers.

  She jerked away, embarrassed at the flinching quickness of her reaction. She cleared her throat and pressed the button several more times, as if that would make the elevator arrive faster.

  “Did you need me for something?” she asked, her voice wavering slightly.

  “Nope.” He stood back and folded his arms over his pale blue shirt with a swordfish motif. The outfit only served to remind her that he would rather be anywhere but here. “Now that they’ve enrolled Jesse in a private Christian school, I have some time on my hands during school hours. I just wanted to see if I could help you out.”

  “Thanks.” She tugged her gray cardigan closed over her turtleneck and navy blue wool pants. “I’ve always been one of those ‘the more, the merrier’ types.”

  He smiled. “I don’t know how merry we’ll be, but I’m happy to help.”

  The elevator dinged to signal its arrival. For a split second Addie had second thoughts about walking into such close quarters with this man. The doors rattled open.

  “Happy is good,” she said softly as she turned her shoulders in order to slip easily past him. “So is help.”

  He got in.

  She took a deep breath and tried to act casual, as if she had not spent the last few days watching him, wondering how things might be different if he weren’t on his way out of Star City on December twenty-fourth and she weren’t going to stay here as long as she possibly could.

  Of course, that hinged on her being able to bring Goodwin’s back from the brink.

  As the door slid shut on the upper floor of the warehouse building, she said, “I thought we should go through the old Christmas displays. Doc says they’re scattered all around this building, but the oldest ones should be on the first floor, near what used to be the second set of windows.”

  “Cool.” He faced forward.

  She thought about making small talk, about asking him how Jesse liked the new school or when Darin Goodwin was expected to return from his honeymoon. But Doc had told her that Jesse loved the school and Darin would be back in a few days at least twice already.

  Just keep your mouth shut and your mind on the task at hand, she told herself. Then she stole a sideways peek at Nate.

  She thought of how great he was with Jesse, how patient and kind. And how, with just a few words or a wink, he could have stern Maimie Goodwin giggling like a schoolgirl. She thought of how it had felt to throw convention to the wind and kiss him the first day she’d ever laid eyes on him.

  That thought made her cheeks burn hot and her throat close up, but not so much that she didn’t manage to blurt something out in hopes of distracting him, and herself, from her discomfort. “So, if I can’t get any publicity for this publicity stunt, what do you think the Goodwins will do?”

  “You’ll get the publicity.” He sounded so sure.

  She wanted to believe him. The elevator dinged to say it had settled on the second floor, and the doors shambled open on a floor packed full of furniture, probably display models from over the years, and stacks of old household goods still in their boxes.

  “Is this an elevator or a time machine?” Nate wondered aloud.

  “I wish it were a time machine. I’d love to have seen this old store in its heyday. I don’t recall it as much different from the way it is today.” She sighed and pushed the button for the first floor.

  As the doors slid shut again, Nate looked at her with a kind but curious gaze. “You really do love this place, don’t you?”

  “Every bit as much or more than you want to get away from it,” she shot back, not meeting his eyes for fear he might see how sad the reminders made her of what Goodwin’s had once been and what he and she could never be.

  “I don’t want to get away from it,” he corrected her with a gentle power in his hushed tone.

  “You don’t?” Her hair fell over her shoulder as she swung her head to make eye contact with him at last.

  “I just don’t have any particular reason to stay.” His gaze did not waver as he added, quietly, “Unless…”

  The elevator dinged once again, and this time the door rolled open smoothly.

  “Unless what?” she wanted to scream but kept silent instead.

  “Guess this is our floor,” he said, extending his arm to encourage her to move ahead of him. “What are you looking for?”

  She gazed up into his eyes.

  “I’m looking for something that I’m not sure I’ll ever find,” she whispered enigmatically before she squared her shoulders and got back to work. “That is, anything that might date back to the original publicity stunt. Doc says they used the same signage for the first four years, so they had lots of duplicates.”

  She marched to the light switches and flipped them on. Bright light flooded the whole floor—not that they could easily have found anything light or no light.

  “Doc Goodwin does not want to close this store.” In an instant Nate summed up what Addie had suspected since she saw all the stuff stored in this building.

  She forged ahead, working her way through the stacks of boxes and store counters and display units still positioned where they had been placed many years ago. “Unfortunately, I don’t think his son wants to take responsibility for it.”

  “Or anything,” Nate muttered as he followed close behind her.

  “You’re worried about Jesse.” She had almost reached the front of the store. She began to work her way toward a stash of tall, flat cardboard boxes marked Christmas and Goodlife that were propped against the brown paper covering the front window.

  “He’s a great kid who hasn’t gotten a lot of great breaks in life.” Nate reached the boxes, and seeming to know she wanted to get a peek inside them, he began moving away the things hemming them in. “I wish I could do more for him. Even the school they have him in is struggling.”

  “I know. My church sponsors it. I recommended it to the Goodwins because I knew there were so many good people trying to make it work.” She, too, began to move objects, starting with a stack of plastic chairs, which she had to remove one by one. “But enrollment is down, and some of the teachers and administrators are talking about having to find other jobs.”

  “The place I’m interviewing in L.A. has so much money coming in, and yet apparently they are always holding fundraisers and raking in more.” He paused with the last box still in his hands and asked, “You don’t think we can talk Maimie into putting a donation box up in the store, do you?”

  Before Addie could comment on that, she had set aside the last chair and turned to find him freeing the tall box.

  “What exactly are we looking for here?” he asked.

  “I’m not too picky. I’ve already seen some items I think we can haul over to set the fifties mood in the windows. But I’d love to find promo items with that classic retro style or—”

  “Or the biggest relic of all, a happy nuclear family?”

  She twisted in the spot where she stood and looked
at all the stuff around them and laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an actual family living in all this, totally untouched by time.”

  “Well, it’s not an actual family, but say hello to our counterparts.” He came to her side, plopped his arm around her shoulder and turned her toward the box he had just opened.

  There stood a life-sized photographic cardboard cutout of a mom, dad, kid and dog frozen in time circa 1959. The father wore a green sweater over a white shirt and rust-colored tie. The mother had her requisite high heels and pearls, naturally, but she also had a perfect figure and wore a holiday hostess apron over her perfectly fitting dress.

  “The little boy could be Jesse,” Nate observed. “Or Opie from The Andy Griffith Show.”

  “No, definitely Jesse,” Addie said as the image tugged at her heartstrings. She was finding it hard to catch her breath standing there and with Nate’s arm around her staring at the family she and Nate were expected to portray. “We aren’t really the spitting images of the couple, though, huh?”

  “It’s not exactly like looking in a mirror.” He laughed, then let go of her. “Or like looking at any family Christmas I have ever been a part of.”

  “We always had a big celebration at Christmas,” she said. “Even the year my dad was dying.”

  He stopped midreach in his efforts to get the sign free and looked at her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay. I was young, but my mom and dad handled it so well. I was sad, and I miss him to this day, but I also got a chance to see real faith in action.” Her eyes grew moist, but she did not cry.

  He listened intently.

  “Dad was so brave, right up until the end. Since then my mom has always…” Addie stopped to think of her mom and their discussion this morning. She could practically hear the hum of all the lights and motors from their front-lawn display as she fought back a wave of embarrassment at how hard she had always been about her mother’s Christmas antics and said, “She always made a point to celebrate big at Christmas after that.”

  “So you doing this promo is probably making her very happy?”

  In that moment she felt at least a little comforted about her years of trying to distance herself from her mom’s displays. “Yes, I guess, it—”

  “Addie McCoy, phone call on line one.” The voice of the lady from the customer-service counter echoed through the building.

  “I better take that. It might be the Star City Satellite.” She excused herself and hurried to the phone attached to a column behind an empty sales counter.

  Moments later she found herself listening to the editor of the Satellite telling her he didn’t see any value in doing a story on Goodwin’s Christmas promotion. “It’s just not newsworthy. If they want to pay for an ad, I’d be happy to talk.”

  Addie stiffened. Everything she had worked so hard to achieve these last few days came down to this. Goodwin’s needed publicity. She was in charge of marketing, and if this editor hung up now, she would have failed to get any advance word out. She wasn’t sure what to do. Her gaze fell on the cardboard cutout, then on Nate. She thought of what he had said about Jesse and his school, then about her mom loving all this. She recalled what she had learned about the Web cam, the contest and how to give people what they wanted.

  There was also the idea that something could compel Nate to perhaps want to stay in Star City, but not if he left because the promotion got cancelled.

  “All right, you want newsworthy?” She took a deep breath and gripped the phone receiver tightly. “How about this? In a matter of days, Goodwin’s Department Store is going to go back in time and around the world. We are going to give people something to feel sentimental about, something to cheer for and something to help them show their commitment to Christmas and help children in the process. If that’s newsworthy enough for you, show up here Thursday morning and bring your camera.”

  Chapter Six

  If anyone at the temp agency would have warned him when he took this assignment that there was even the slightest chance that twelve days before Christmas he’d be still in Star City, dressed like a dad straight out of a 1950s family sitcom, Nate would have turned the job down cold.

  But if he hadn’t taken the job caring for Jesse Goodwin, he’d have missed out on so much. First and foremost, of course, getting to know a great kid and being able to make a difference in his life, however fleeting. Next, he’d have missed meeting all the great people of Star City, from the Goodwins to the parents and teachers at Jesse’s school to Addie McCoy.

  He stood back and folded his arms over his gray suit jacket, courtesy of the costume department of the Star City Community Theater, to watch his counterpart at work. Somehow in the last five days she had managed to take the Christmas promotion in hand and spin it off in a whole new direction. With Web cams streaming live directly from inside Goodwin’s on a Web site set to go live in a matter of minutes, she’d already garnered attention from all over. It helped that she had found a way to connect the whole stunt to a worthy cause—raising money for Jesse’s school—and to get people engaged by turning the whole thing into a competition.

  He took a leisurely stroll the length of the windows. At the far ends of each, Addie had hung signs that read His and Hers. Each side had been furnished with the trappings people associated with the life and times of a husband or wife circa 1959. “His” featured a desk and office furnishings. “Hers” had a kitchen complete with a sink, stove, fridge—a set also courtesy of the community theater—and a chrome-and-Formica table she’d brought from her own home. In a stroke of what he considered genius on Addie’s part, she had also arranged a sofa, an old television, a faux fireplace and a spot to set up a Christmas tree in the entryway just inside the store. It was a place that could be viewed from the door or, if you craned your neck just so, from the windows but was best seen by coming into Goodwin’s.

  And that’s just what people were doing. Sales were up, though not breaking any records, but Maimie reported that foot traffic had almost doubled, and now that the promotion was going into full swing they expected that to grow considerably. Anyone looking at the goings-on today would think that the Goodwins themselves were responsible for all this. They were the ones front and center, and Maimie was going to be the one presenting everything at the launch and in any subsequent media contacts.

  All of this made Nate smile. In part because he had believed Addie capable of all of this from the moment she rallied her nerve and kissed him that morning under the mistletoe. But he also couldn’t keep from celebrating privately because he knew that Addie had gotten what she wanted: success for Goodwin’s and a meaningful job behind the scenes and as part of a team.

  He turned away from the small but energetic crowd gathering outside the still-closed doors of the old department store in time to see Addie walking toward him.

  “Well, if it isn’t the little woman,” he said, smiling so big his cheeks hurt as she walked up to him in those simple heels she’d worn the day they met and one of the dresses she had found at a vintage-clothing store over in Gatlinburg. “I have to say, it looks good on you.”

  “This old thing?” She swished the full, gathered skirt one way then another, giving a half turn, then dipping her chin and batting her eyes just like a starlet straight out of the 1950s.

  “Not the outfit,” he said, coming to her side so that they could present a united front when the store doors opened. “All of this.” He extended his arm to indicate everything surrounding them. “The enthusiasm of the public, the appreciation of the Goodwins, the cooperation of the press. Success. Success looks good on you, Addie.”

  “Thank you, Nate.” She practically beamed like a lighted angel on the top of a Christmas tree, but one quick look at him top to toes and it was like somebody pulled the plug. “You don’t really look all that different.”

  “I tucked my hair behind my ears,” he protested, though not convincingly because she hadn’t told him anything he hadn’t alre
ady thought himself.

  “Oh, it’s okay. Don’t worry about it.” She gave his arm a pat. “It will give me an instant edge in the voting for who is making the transition to life in the fifties better.”

  He hadn’t thought of that. Even though all the money collected would end up benefiting Jesse’s school, Nate had just enough of a competitive nature to want plenty of that money to have come from his supporters. If he had to go old school—literally—to accomplish that? He opened his mouth to tell her not to get too comfy in that assumption, but just then Maimie and Doc stepped up to the front door.

  Addie fluffed her hair, smoothed down her skirt, squared her shoulders, wet her lips and through a perfect smile said, “Showtime!”

  “Ladies and gentlemen.” Maimie raised her hands, commanding all eyes outside and in. “Welcome to Goodwin’s Department Store. Home for the next twelve days, excluding Sundays, of course, of Nathan and Adelaide Goodlife.”

  As the small group applauded politely, Nate turned to his counterpart and whispered, “You know I’ve been so involved in taking care of Jesse and pitching in around here when I can, I never thought about the actual event. What are we going to do all day long?”

  Outside Maimie raised her hands again, and the group, which had drifted from applause to foot-shuffling and mumbling, quieted.

  Addie froze. “I’ve been so focused on the Web stuff and getting the word out that when Maimie said she’d take care of all of that, I left it to her.”

  Nate’s stomach lurched as if it had actually taken a dive from the height of his admiration for Addie to the depths of his good-natured frustration in dealing with the formidable Mrs. Goodwin.