A Christmas Miracle

by Anna Adams

  Balancing her coffee cup and saucer, Sue perched herself on a stool in front of the wrapping station. She was sipping coffee and swinging her legs like a happy child when Fleming brought the ornaments out.

  “Tell me about this Jason.” Sue reached out to one of the tubes of paper. “I like this one with the bells.”

  “I don’t know a lot about him,” Fleming said. What she did know she didn’t plan to spread as gossip. “He hasn’t said anything about politics, if the mayor’s worried about that.”

  Sue laughed. “I love that everyone in this town assumes my husband is always thinking how he’s going to attain his next public office. He wants your banker to join the city council. He and the rest of the members spoke to Jason last night.” She stopped, placing one finger over her mouth. “I wonder if I was supposed to say that to anyone? Well, you won’t spread it around, will you?”

  Fleming shook her head, trying to imagine what Jason, a successful consultant who’d made his reputation and living by moving job to job, state to state and even country to country, had said to the offer of a steady commitment in a place that clearly wasn’t a happy memory for his family. “That’s an easy promise to keep.”

  “Good. I knew I could count on you. Anyway, Tim has also noticed you spend a lot of time with Jason, and we both wondered if you might try to exert your influence. Maybe if he understood how much this town needs a go-getter like him...”

  “He has a job, Sue. He likes to travel. I don’t think he’s interested in a position that would require him to stay put.”

  “See? You know his preferences. You’re the perfect person to persuade him this could be a good deal. And it would round out his résumé.”

  “His résumé?” Fleming’s hands stilled on the package she was wrapping. “You’ve read it? He applied for this appointment?”

  Sue shook her head and glanced toward the shelves, flustered. “He didn’t apply, but I have seen his CV. You’d be amazed at the things you can find online. My husband showed it to me when he asked me to speak to you.”

  “I have no influence with Jason.”

  Sue arched one eyebrow, but her attempt to look knowing was more sweet than upsetting. “Everyone has seen the two of you together.”

  Fleming couldn’t help laughing.

  Sue smiled as well, but halfheartedly. “There’s been talk, is what I’m trying to tell you.”

  “I got that. I’m not surprised that our good neighbors managed to work up the will to gossip, but they’re off base with me.”

  “And Jason,” Sue added.

  “There is no Jason and me.”

  “But you’ll speak to him?”

  Fleming stared at the seven ornaments on the counter in front of her. “You’re being more relentless than usual, Sue.”

  “I don’t usually have to try so hard when I’m asking you to help with a toy drive or a knitting circle or the children’s Halloween festival.”

  “You aren’t trying to influence me by buying all these?”

  “I’d buy seven more if that would work. Tim’s being a bit relentless about this, as well. Jason got his start in banking, but Tim has seen what his work has done to save other companies, and he believes he can take on our community as if it were an ailing business.”

  “Do we need saving?”

  “The council worries every time there’s a dip in the tourism dollar. ‘Banking is only one arrow in Jason Fleming’s quiver.’” Sue rolled her eyes. “I’m quoting my husband. He said to tell you Jason wouldn’t have to stay here year-round. He’d just have to commit to a certain number of hours, which they could negotiate.”

  “But wouldn’t the council prefer someone who’s committed to Bliss?”

  “They want someone with his proven skills.”

  Fleming tried to keep the flicker of her own hope at a low burn, though it was battling to turn into a flame. “I’ll suggest it’s a good idea.” It would give him more time to look into his own family’s past. There must be people here who remembered the Maclands before they’d surfed the wave of banking wealth all the way to New York.

  “That’s all I can ask for,” Sue said with relief. She reached for an ornament. “Pass me that paper. I’ll help you with this.”

  “I thought you didn’t like wrapping.”

  “I don’t, but I didn’t expect you to put up such a fight, and now I’m concerned you’ll want a favor of equal value in return.”

  Fleming passed the paper across. “Not sure that’s possible.”

  * * *

  AT FIRST, FLEMING thought she’d wait for Jason to come around again before she dared to ask him about the council position. Or, she could bring it up if she ran into him at carol practice, but she couldn’t be sure he’d appear after missing last time.

  But it weighed on her mind. She worried about coming across like his parents, as if she were trying to manipulate him.

  Funny that going to his office required courage.

  But it did. Because she wanted to see him. She liked the sound of his voice, and the warmth she sometimes saw in his eyes that made him seem as if he kind of liked her. She even liked that he made her look inside herself with his own troubling questions.

  She dressed the morning after Mrs. Mayor’s visit with more care than she normally put into choosing clothing. A little black dress, black tights, pumps and a white sweater looked cute, businesslike and comfortable.

  But then she was running later than she wanted because she couldn’t open the store until after she visited the bank. She hopped in the car and headed down the mountain.

  The benefit of going into town early was bountiful parking and hardly any of her fellow citizens to comment on her visit.

  She hurried through the lobby at the bank, her heels tapping for once as if she was a woman with places to go—or as if she was a woman on a mission to get in and out of the building as quickly as possible.

  At the elevator, she punched Jason’s floor number and sent up a silent thanks at being the car’s only passenger. She stepped out into the reception area when the doors opened. No one was manning the desk, so she went to Jason’s door and knocked.

  “I’ve told you that you don’t have to knock, Hilda,” he said from inside.

  Fleming opened the door and put her head inside the office. “I’m not Hilda. Do you have a minute?”

  Jason dropped his pen and stood. “What are you doing here?”

  “Is that like, ‘Yes, come inside’?”

  “That’s exactly what it’s like.” He smiled, but with the clear suspicion that she was up to something. “What’s up?”

  “What do you mean?” She hadn’t expected a glowing welcome, but an indulgent glance might have been nice, at least.

  “You don’t drop by for visits.”

  “Except when I was working on ways to avoid losing my livelihood.”

  “Okay.”

  He was the man who might have made her homeless. Neither of them needed that reminder.

  Fleming sat down in the chair in front of his desk, even though he hadn’t asked her. Sitting would make this easier. She felt unnerved now. She didn’t get the sense she was welcome in his office, so how was she supposed to be persuasive about asking him if he’d take the council job? Especially when it felt like none of her business.

  Jason sat as well, and took up his pen again.

  “Do you know Sue Bradford?” Fleming asked. No need to work up to it. She shouldn’t have come, anyway.

  “Sue?” he asked. “No, I don’t think so—any relation to the mayor?”

  “His wife. She stopped by my shop yesterday, to buy a couple of this year’s ornaments.” Rambling. That was always persuasive. “While I was wrapping her purchases, she mentioned that the mayor had suggested you join the town c
ouncil.”

  “And you came to tell me to stay out?”

  Fleming blinked. His leap to the wrong conclusion silenced her.

  He tapped his pen on the desktop. “I already told him I didn’t want the job. It couldn’t work with my travel schedule anyway, and I realize not everyone in this town would see me as a good candidate.”

  “I was going to ask you to consider taking it,” Fleming said. “You don’t give us enough credit. I didn’t realize Mr. Paige had given me terms that wouldn’t work. I didn’t even realize the kind of trouble we were in. But all of it was my fault, not yours. I may not like that you’re the one who had to give me the bad news, but I’m grateful someone did before I lost the store entirely.”

  Jason sat back. “You really feel that way?”

  “I can’t be the only one who’s seen sense.”

  “You’d be surprised,” he said. “I’ve had to look into the faces of people in serious financial trouble. I doubt I’ve enjoyed it any more than they have.”

  “But now you know these people. You’ve tried to help all of us. That’s what you’d be doing with the council, too. And Sue asked me to remind you that you only have to commit to a certain number of agreed-upon hours.”

  “If I were staying,” he said. “But I’m not. I have another job lined up for the first of February, and they’d be happy to have me come earlier if I can make it.” He glanced at his computer screen. “I think I can.”

  His simple statement had a painfully complicated effect on Fleming. She felt as if she’d been hit by something hard and shocking. Not one ounce of regret was evident in his face or in his tone. He was just moving on, as if no one here had any hold on him.

  She hadn’t realized she’d wanted to have a hold, or that not having one could hurt so much. She’d truly started to care for Jason Macland.

  How could she have let that happen, knowing the kind of man he was? Not a bad man or a cruel one. But a guy who moved on.

  This might be the lesson she needed to learn in life. It wasn’t the first time she’d realized she cared about something too late to do anything about it. She’d let her father go when she should have taken a chance on getting to know him. She’d let herself feel too much for Jason when she should have known he was just a friend.

  He was only ever going to be just a friend.

  “I have to go.” She stood and turned with less poise than she would have liked. “The store is still closed. I have to pick up...some things...before I open it. You should think about the job,” she said, hoping to mask her distress.

  She’d had it wrong. He didn’t care for her the way she wanted him to. She was in this alone.

  “Thanks, Fleming.”

  “Sure,” she said, without a backward glance.

  “Maybe I’ll stop by for one of those special ornaments.”

  “I’ll send one over, if you’d like.”

  As if she was in the habit of hiring a courier for deliveries around the square. She just didn’t want to see Jason Macland face-to-face again until she had herself under control.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “GLAD TO SEE YOU, Fleming,” Lyle Benjamin said. “Are you staying to enjoy our Sunday dinner special?”

  She looked up. A week before Christmas the snow was falling in the blue blackness of the night outside the window behind Lyle’s head. She lifted her sandwich. “You make the best pimento cheese in town. I just don’t get how it’s a holiday tradition.”

  As the sign outside on the sidewalk had proclaimed.

  “It is in my family,” he said. “My dad loved pimento cheese. We had it every day during Christmas vacation when he was home with my brothers and me.”

  Fleming nodded. “Makes sense.” Every family had its traditions. Hers and her mother’s had fallen apart since her graduation, but she wasn’t a child any longer. It was more than time her mother began making traditions with Hugh.

  And Fleming made her own.

  “You don’t come around much anymore. Did you and Jason have a falling out?”

  “No,” she said, in a knee-jerk reaction, hoping to quell that rumor before the hotel owner could spread it too far. “I don’t have help at the store right now so I can’t get away often.” She looked at her sandwich for the perfect mouthful. A piece of cheddar was grilled into both sides, and the filling leaked out over her fingers with each bite. Combined with collard greens, it was a dinner fit for royalty, even if it didn’t suggest Santa and decking the halls. “But I do love your traditional pimento.”

  “You know Jason’s been working on that house of his.”

  Lyle looked at her as if he assumed she knew what he meant. She hesitated, but what the heck? “I didn’t know he was talking about that place.”

  “You thought you were keeping a secret for him by not mentioning it? I enjoy that idea.” It seemed Lyle had caught the matchmaking bug. “He borrowed some of my tools. He said he needed to repair the porch steps so that he and his contractor could enter the house safely.”

  “He’s hired a contractor?”

  “Owen Gage. The clinic he’s been working on will be finished soon. Owen’s done good work on that.”

  She almost asked what Jason planned to do with the house, but just in time remembered it was none of her business. Then she started to ask if he was rethinking the council’s open seat, but she managed to quash that, too.

  She should get out of here before she gave away everything she knew about Jason Macland. “I have to get going, Lyle. Thanks for a delicious dinner.”

  “Glad to see you back in my dining room again. Don’t stay away. We business owners need to support each other in this town.”

  Wondering how long she’d remain one of the town’s business owners, Fleming dug into her purse for money to pay her bill. She left it beside her plate as Lyle topped off coffee cups for the couple at the table next to hers.

  “Say hello to Jason for me,” Lyle said.

  She stopped for a second, trying to come up with a fitting response. “Shh, someone will hear you” seemed a little paranoid, so she held that inside, too.

  She hadn’t seen Jason in several days. She’d even wondered if he might have gone. He had no obligation to tell her he was leaving, but she’d missed him.

  She’d miss any friend she hadn’t seen in a while. She wanted to know what was on his mind. They were close enough that they could talk about his plans without a conversation having to mean anything more intimate.

  He came by her store all the time, and he’d even surprised her at home that one time. There was no reason she couldn’t drop in on him.

  “Lyle,” she said, “I’ll have one of your Christmas pimento cheese sandwich dinners to go.”

  “Coming right up.”

  She was soon on her way. Jason’s car wasn’t at the bank or in the hotel lot, but there was one other place she thought she might find him. She began to lose her nerve as she drove up the mountain. Until she turned onto Jason’s road, she wasn’t sure if she would manage to stop in or drive past.

  After all, pimento cheese leftovers for her own lunch tomorrow would be no hardship.

  But she wouldn’t be eating those leftovers. She made the several sharp turns that led to the Macland property. As she parked behind Jason’s car, she spied him by the light of lights hanging from his porch roof, banging away at fresh wood on newly framed steps. He straightened, a power hammer in one hand. He pressed the other hand into the small of his back.

  She couldn’t help smiling. When had he last done manual labor?

  He turned toward her, but she couldn’t read his expression. She suddenly wanted to stay in her car and drive home.

  She didn’t.

  “I didn’t expect you,” he said, as she exited the driver’s seat.

 
“What are you doing?”

  He held up the nail gun. His work was sort of obvious. “Fixing the porch. You remember almost falling through?”

  “But why, Jason?” She reached back into the car for the bag containing his sandwich and collard greens and a side of Parmesan fries. A true carb load. “You don’t like it here,” she said. “You don’t want to stay.”

  “I never said I didn’t like it here.”

  She wasn’t willing to argue. The last thing she wanted was for him to see what she’d discovered in his office—that she cared what he decided about his future in Bliss.

  Or his lack of a future here. That was the more likely possibility, and she needed to brace herself for it.

  “I brought you dinner,” she said. “Lyle’s holiday special.”

  “That pimento cheese thing?” Jason shook his head. “I don’t get it. A cheese sandwich as a special in the Christmas season.”

  “I asked him the same question. It was his father’s favorite. Have you ever tried it?”

  He shook his head again. “Not here. I had one when I went to the Masters in Augusta once.”

  “Fancy. I like golf. I’m terrible at it, but I like it. How did you get tickets to the Masters?”

  “A client invited me.”

  She nodded. Clients here brought him collard greens and a sandwich. “I should have grabbed some paper plates.”

  He set down the nail gun and took the bag from her, but when he opened it, he looked surprised. “You didn’t bring enough for both of us?”

  “I already ate.” She shivered, hunching her shoulders in the cold wind that whistled around the higher elevations. “I’m not sure why you’re working out here in the dark, but should we try to find a spot inside?

  “Sure.” He helped her over the spaces between the safer steps. “We’ll try the kitchen.”

  “You don’t suppose there are any animals inside?” she asked, hanging back. “When I was a kid, my friends and I went into an abandoned house that used to be near the square. It’s a yarn shop now. But when we were looking in the upstairs bedroom, a possum came slithering out from under the bed.”