Chapter 7
While Eli recuperated over the next few days, Cass spent most of her waking hours at his house. They got a lot done on his book and even wrote a clunky outline on the next one. “Really?” she said, staring befuddled at the notes. “This will really help you? It’s all backwards and inside out.”
“Of course it will. The writing itself is pretty linear—planning for it isn’t.”
She had a feeling it would be if she were the one writing the book. “I’ll bet when you were a kid, you were one of those who stood back and threw handfuls of tinsel at the branches, weren’t you?”
“I was.”
“Figures.”
They had finished working for the day and were decorating the huge tree (without a box of tinsel in sight) when the doorbell rang. Eli looked up from the box of ornaments Cass had dragged down from the attic. “It’s the pizza I ordered for dinner—it’s my night to cook. The money’s on the table there.” He looked at the clock and frowned. “It shouldn’t be here for at least a half hour.”
And it wasn’t. Chloe Wright and Ted Lincoln, both schoolmates of her children, stood on the porch.
Cass urged them inside and hugged them both. “Chloe, hello! And Ted—I haven’t seen you since Paul’s funeral. How’s the orchard doing? It wasn’t a good crop this year, was it?” She spoke over her shoulder. “Eli, it’s not the pizza.”
“So I see.” He came forward, offering his unbandaged left hand to each of them. “At the risk of sounding like a stuffy old man, to what do we owe the pleasure of your visit?”
Chloe spoke the thought that crossed Cass’s mind. “Actually, you sound more like Cyrus Wisdom than a stuffy old man, but it’s the pastor we’ve come to see, not the writer.”
Eli looked a little startled. Cass closed the door. “If you’d like to go into the living room to talk, I’ll make some coffee.”
After serving the fresh coffee and setting a plate of cookies on a side table, Cass prepared to leave the room, but Chloe asked her to stay. “We’d like you to know, too.” Her blue eyes sparkled as though she were lit from inside. “Teddy and I are getting married!”
“We are.” Ted nodded, joy lightening his serious features. “Even though she persists in calling me that.”
“I’m so happy for you!” Cass hugged them again, knowing their path to happiness hadn’t been an easy one. “When is the wedding?”
“Wednesday.”
Cass’s stepped back, feeling her eyes widen. “Wed—next Wednesday? That’s six days!”
“You know what December’s like in Christmas Town,” said Ted, “and we’re running the family’s apple booth at the mercantile—ask Chloe about her magic apples.” He stopped, his gaze moving to the young woman at his side, and it was as though he and Chloe were the only ones in the room. “We want to be together.”
“Sticking with my stuffy old man persona, I have spoken to them about undue haste.” Eli spoke pompously, but laughter rolled at the back of his voice, ruining the effect. “They have in turn spoken to me about minding my own business.”
“We’re getting married at Bells Are Ringing, my sister Marnie’s wedding chapel. We’re doing it on Wednesday because that’s the only day we have someone to cover for us at the booth.” Excitement threaded through Chloe’s voice—Cass thought even her curls bounced. “We want Pastor Eli to perform the ceremony.”
Cass wondered—for just a second—how Eli felt about that, but then she looked into his eyes and saw unabashed joy. And remembered what she’d said just a few days ago. You want to be—at least spiritually—a caregiver.
Sitting near the fire, laughing and talking with Eli and the young couple sitting on the loveseat with clasped hands and starlit eyes, Cass wondered what her next step was. She felt so at home here, in this big house and in the cottage in the woods behind it, and she’d felt at home in Eli’s arms, too. Wonderfully, excitedly at home.
But he was a man with a heart condition, a man whose calling in life was to care for others, whose attachment to her would forever take second place to the responsibility he felt for others.
She thought of her daughters, for whom she would give anything, up to and including her life. If it would keep them safe and healthy, she would sit at the bedsides of terminally ill people for-absolutely-ever. She would do it well and wholeheartedly, just as she had for Paul for her mother, though she hoped she never had to. But Eli would do it for anyone at all, no questions asked.
In the worst way, she didn’t want to be selfish or self-involved or any of those other self-things. But the truth was that she didn’t want anything to do with caregiving, spiritual or otherwise.
~*~
Eli walked Cass home after sharing pizza with Ted and Chloe. He was enthusiastic about doing one of his all-time-favorite pastoral jobs for two young people he’d known and cared about all their lives and talked about it all the way through the woods. He didn’t notice how quiet she was until they stood together on her tiny porch, Maggie lying tiredly across their feet. He thought he knew why she’d gone still—it was something like the first time he’d walked out of his and Elnora’s bedroom wearing a clerical collar.
He grasped the ends of Cass’s scarf lightly, wanting her to feel celebratory because he did, but that wasn’t how relationships worked. Especially when it was way too soon to even use the word “relationship.”
Wasn’t it?
He and Elnora had dated most of the way through college, getting married the day they graduated. He wasn’t sure when he’d fallen in love with her, only that it had been strong and sure and had lasted until...until when? He couldn’t have said when the woman he’d loved and the marriage they’d shared had been tucked into his memory and he’d accepted that life truly did go on. He did know he’d fully expected to fall in love again, marry again, have a family. No one had been more surprised than he when it hadn’t happened.
But maybe it had, just later than he expected. He stared down into Cass’s eyes, more green than brown the way they always were when she had on her green coat and blue scarf. “You’re a Hoosier,” he said. “Have you ever read A Girl of the Limberlost?”
She nodded. “Sure. Our farm was close to the real Limberlost.”
“My wife’s maiden name was Comstock, so her mother named her Elnora after the girl in the book. When I met my Elnora in the first semester at Bowdoin, I read the book because I was crazy lovesick and it seemed like a good way to suck up. I liked it a lot.”
“Me, too. It was my favorite of Gene Stratton-Porter’s—well, that and Freckles.”
“Elnora, my wife, used to remind me that even though she was of course lovely and perfect, she wasn’t the girl in the book. We laughed about it.”
Cass nodded, looking puzzled even as she smiled. “I can’t sing a note, but Paul called me Mama Cass our entire marriage. He used to wake me in the morning bellowing ‘Monday, Monday’—he couldn’t carry a tune, either.”
“I’m E. W. Doherty, mystery writer.” He kept his voice gentle. “But I’m a pastor, too, whether I have a church or not. I really am both people, and I don’t see either one going away soon. I know you don’t want to be a caregiver anymore, and I don’t blame you. But is it okay with you that I am one, and probably always will be?” He tugged at each end of the scarf, trying to make the conversation lighter than it was. “I don’t get many emergencies or house calls like doctors do, but when I am called, I go. If the pizza gets cold, well, it just gets cold.”
It hadn’t tonight. Cass had served the six-item deluxe on the dining room table with a big salad and a bottle of wine and invited Ted and Chloe to join them. She’d had cookies for dessert—she was never going to have enough for tree-decorating because they kept getting eaten—and she’d joined the conversation about weddings, offering up a few memories from when she and Paul had married. “We were farm kids—it made sense to us to get married in the barn. Not to my mother or his, I might add, but my friends and I spent days decorating it an
d we liked it.”
Eli chuckled, and Cass’s expression turned from wary to questioning. “I was thinking of you getting married in a barn,” he said.
She smiled. “It ended up being a really nice wedding.”
“Like tonight’s dinner, having order-out pizza and grocery store wine with china and silverware and crystal. It didn’t have to be a party celebration, but you made it one.”
“It was fun to do. Easy.” She met and held his eyes. “Once. But don’t count on me to come up with nice, happy solutions on a continuing basis.” Her gaze slid away for a moment, and her hands came up to rest on his where he still held her scarf. “I’m fifty-something, Eli, and in all that time, it’s never been about me. I always had others to take care of for one reason or another, sometimes by choice and sometimes not. It doesn’t mean I’ve had a bad life or that there’s that much in it I’d change, other than losing Paul so young. What it does mean is that, for a while at least, I just want to concentrate on who I am and what I want. Is that unreasonable? Worse yet, is it unforgivably selfish?”
“No.” He let go of the soft yarn and drew her to him, relieved when she didn’t pull away. “It means we need to”—he hesitated, forcing out a chuckle that stuck in the disappointment crowding his throat—“heed my stuffy old man warning about undue haste.” He bent his head and kissed her. Deep, tenderly, and for a long time, feeling the warmth flow between them like a slow-moving river of hope.
Lyrics to an old, well-loved song played in his mind and he knew from somewhere inside him—he thought it was the same place that housed his faith—that if loving Cass Logan was wrong, he didn’t have any interest in being right.
Chapter 8
Cass asked Chloe how she could help with the wedding and was handed a list. “Can you call people? Even ones whose numbers I don’t have? We’ll be so grateful. Lia says you must have been a bail bondsman in another life because you can find anything on the Internet.”
It was a task Cass delighted in, and she was completely successful so that Marnie Wright’s pretty little wedding chapel was even more packed than the bride and groom expected for the Wednesday afternoon wedding. The guests, along with the groom and his attendants, stood outside, waiting for the sleigh that brought Santa Claus to town every afternoon between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. It arrived at the chapel at three o’clock on the nose. Santa got out first, turning with a flourish and a smile to hand out Chloe’s bridesmaids and, finally, the bride herself.
Cass, standing between Amy and Lia, thought the whole crowd sighed in unison at the beauty of the moment as they separated to form an aisle for the young women. “We need to change the name of the town to ‘Wedding Town.’ A single person’s not safe here,” murmured Amy, and Cass raised an eyebrow in her direction.
“No pressure, but going into my golden years with grandkids would be—”
Both girls hushed her, so she subsided, grinning at them.
Eli, looking extraordinarily handsome in a black suit complete with a clerical collar on his shirt, met her eyes from where he stood beside Ted. He smiled at her, and the warmth of his expression made her think she didn’t really need the cape she wore over her sparkly green dress.
“So, you and the preacher have a date after the reception?” Lia said, her voice low. “Do we need to be asking him his intentions?”
“Yes, we do and no, you do not.” Cass put her arms around her daughters as they moved with the crowd into the chapel. “Friends. We’re going to be friends.” She wasn’t convincing herself, but she hoped the girls bought into it.
The wedding was beautiful. The traditional vows spoken between two people who loved each other seemed never to lose their power. Eli’s voice was warm and inviting and added to the power of the words he used.
The word “date” danced through her nerves like the spray from a lawn sprinkler, leaving no part of her untouched. Her last date had been Paul, and between farming and college, there hadn’t been much actual “dating” to it.
“Tell us a story about you and Dad were young.”
They were sitting at the reception at Esther’s House, and Lia had spoken. It wasn’t a new request, although it had been years since one of the girls had made it. Cass supposed the talk of dating had brought it on.
“I helped your father pull a calf on one date night.” The memory made her shake her head. “There I was in the satin dress I’d saved six months of babysitting money to buy. It ended up with unspeakable gunk all over it. You girls came by your affinity for animals honestly—your dad never met one he couldn’t connect with.”
Lia snickered. “That was Dad. Not only a workaholic but a real romantic.”
Eli came to the table. He greeted Amy and Lia, but his attention was on Cass. Admiration gleamed from his eyes, and she felt the sprinkler sensation again. “What do you think? A walk around the green before dinner? Or are you wearing walk-prohibitive shoes?”
“This is the first week of December in Maine, remember?” she said dryly. “My boots are in the car.”
“So where are you taking Mom for dinner?” Amy beamed at him. “Or where’s she taking you, since you can’t drive yet?”
Eli grinned back at her, and Cass relaxed. It was good knowing he liked her daughters and that the feeling was reciprocal. “It’s a secret. I’m not going to blindfold her, no matter how adventurous I want to convince her I am, but she doesn’t know where she’s driving us.”
Cass hugged the girls and the bride and groom, then left with Eli. Her car was at the chapel, so she stopped to put on her boots, regretting that they didn’t look nearly as nice with her dress as her blingy black heels did.
“We’re approaching what is euphemistically called the golden years. What do you want to do?” Eli let go of her hand and wrapped his arm around her shoulders as they walked past the gazebo on the green.
More sprinkly feelings. Ones that had as much bling as her shoes. She laughed, startled by both the sensation and the use of the same term she’d used such a short time ago. “I just mentioned golden years to the girls, not that they listened, since I mentioned grandchildren, too. Great minds run together sometimes.”
He nodded, his chin brushing lightly against the side of her head. “They do.”
“I don’t know what I want to do,” she said.
What a lie that was. She did know, even if it was far too soon to be so sure, that she wanted to be with Eli Welcome. She wanted to share her days with him and Maggie, to live in his wonderful house with him.
To share her nights with him, too.
But she didn’t want to share him with the public at large, and that was exactly what life would be. It would be pulling proverbial calves on date nights.
“What about you?” She forced the words past the lump that rose to her throat and tried to add a teasing note. “After all, you’re even older than I am.”
“Only by a year or so.” He fell into comfortable silence, though his arm tightened on her shoulders.
She was aware of his strength and warmth and the niceness that never left even when anger or grief grayed the blue of his eyes. She loved the sound of his voice and his laughter and the way they made her feel like dancing even when she wore snow boots. She liked the way his clerical collar looked. It wasn’t tight on his neck—it just looked like it belonged there. When he was E. W. Doherty, needing a haircut and wearing a flannel shirt while doing a magazine interview via Skype, he was comfortable then, too.
“I guess I just want what is,” he said finally. “I’d like to spend the rest of my days in Christmas Town. Griping about the cold and the snow and loving every single sledding, skiing, snowboarding minute of it.” He stopped walking and looked down into her face. “I’d like—”
His phone rang from the pocket of his coat, and he shook his head, scrabbling for it. “In some ways, life was nicer before cell phones.” He had to hold it with his left hand, and it was awkward—he still held the phone to his right ear. “Pas—hello?�
� He listened in silence, nodding as though the caller could hear him. “All right. Ten minutes.”
She turned before he disconnected, walking as fast as she could on the snowy path toward her car. “Where do you need to go?” she asked, fishing her keys out of her pocket.
“Christmas County Memorial. Someone’s ill.”
She wanted to ask him who “someone” was, but of course he wouldn’t tell her. He was the pastor now, not the friend she was afraid she loved or the mystery writer who was her boss. He would protect the privacy of the patient as judiciously as a doctor or nurse would.
They reached the E.R. entrance within minutes. “You can go home if you like,” said Eli, unbuckling his seatbelt when she pulled under the canopy, “or back to the reception. The girls are probably still there. I don’t know how long I’ll be.” He captured her chin, looking into her eyes. “I’m sorry about dinner.”
She was, too. She felt like throwing a tantrum, but didn’t think it would do either of them any good. She smiled instead. “Next time.”
He kissed her quickly, then slid out of the car. “Be careful. I’ll get home all right. Take Maggie with you when you go back to the cottage—you know she thinks she’s a watchdog.” He closed the door and turned to go into the hospital. Watching him stride through the automatic doors, Cass knew she’d already been forgotten.
She drove out from under the canopy and into the street. She made it halfway back to Esther’s house before pulling to the side and staring at the green with its myriad of lights and activity. At the cheerful storefronts—even the empty ones were decorated. Santa and his Clydesdales were still at the green. Esther had hot cider at the ready and the coffee and tea never ran low at Posey’s and The Tea Pot. This town, this beautiful, wonderful, special Christmas Town—it was all made up of caregivers. For the heart. The body. The spirit. What could be better than to be one of them?
A Heartwarming Christmas: A Boxed Set of Twelve Sweet Holiday Romances Page 65