you didn’t even wish us a Merry Christmas.”
His refusal to do so left her with a nasty taste in her mouth. A small gesture it might have been, but its absence was so blatant she couldn’t let it go.
“That’s because I don’t celebrate Christmas.”
“Don’t celebrate Christmas?” Kate choked.
“No. Now, give me the number.”
Dumbstruck, Kate’s brain didn’t quite possess the processing power to say anything as she gave him the number. The cogs in her mind were too busy trying to puzzle out his declaration. But once he had the number, he was gone, leaving her with nothing but questions. There was no goodbye. No, “for what it’s worth, I’m sorry.” Just a curt “thanks,” as he walked away dialing. Kate stood alone on the sidewalk for only the briefest of seconds before a hand touched her shoulder. She didn’t turn around or tear her gaze from the spot where Clark stood just a moment ago; she knew who would be there.
“How’d it go, dear?”
The pity in Miss Carolyn’s question stung. Kate hadn’t even realized tears were forming in her eyes until they left cold tracks down her flushed cheeks. She failed. She tried to save her town, and she failed. With a weak shrug, she decided a little gallows humor was probably for the best.
“Do you know if any places are hiring?”
Chapter Two
Christmas Eve
Kate Buckner was on a roll, as far as rants went. Since arriving almost thirty minutes ago, she’d yammered nonstop, flooding her companion and the empty restaurant with her every stray thought. The faster she spoke, the faster they came, leaving her to race to catch up.
“But you know what I really can’t stand?”
It was 7:15 on the morning of Christmas Eve, and for the first time since she was seven years old, Kate wasn’t ironing a petticoat or setting up trays of mince pies. For once, she sat at the end of the bar at Mel’s Diner, drinking a steaming cup of coffee and relishing the hearty scents of bacon and maple syrup. On a regular morning in, say, March, the old diner was the greatest breakfast joint in the known universe.
But this Christmastime? She hated it. Mel’s was a staple of the Miller’s Point diet and she came in here at least once a week, but that was part of the problem. Without the festival, this felt like just another Tuesday. Bing Crosby’s holiday standards on the old jukebox just weren’t enough to convince her this was actually Christmas Eve.
“What can’t you stand?”
Michael Newman, her breakfast companion and best friend since they were cast as Fred and Fred’s wife in high school, couldn’t have been more different than Clark Woodward. Where the out-of-towner played perpetual poker, Michael slapped himself open and let you read every page of him. He was the all-American type, dark-skinned with a smile that could light up a football stadium on its own, the exact image of a small-town golden boy. She always assumed he’d be mayor one day, but now she wasn’t sure if the town would be around long enough for him to make the leap from ranch medic to political mastermind. For a long time, town gossip had it that the two of them, the town’s two favorite children, would end up married, but she could never imagine it. They were like two trees planted too close together. Their branches intertwined and they shared the same soil, but they’d never become one. She only thought of him as a friend.
“What I really can’t stand is that he has the audacity to stand there and mansplain to me about economics. Of course the festival doesn’t make money for them, but it makes money for us, and that helps keep the town—the town where his business is, I’ll remind you—afloat. What’s he gonna do about workers when they all move to Fort Worth or something because there’s not enough money circulating here? Huh?”
“I don’t know, Kate.”
The diner was completely empty, perhaps because it wasn’t meant to be open. It closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, usually because Mel, a rotund, redheaded man with a missing front tooth, always played The Ghost of Christmas Present, but this morning Kate showed up at his front door with a determined knock and Michael in tow, ready to pay top dollar for black coffee and as many pancakes as it was humanly possible to consume in one sitting. She couldn’t fathom sitting alone in her tiny apartment above the town’s solitary bookstore for another minute, looking out onto the empty town square; the loneliness would have consumed her.
Now, all that consumed her was the frustration she’d been venting to herself all night. Saying these things out loud helped slightly, but as usual, Michael wasn’t content to nod his head and agree with her. He just had to be difficult. The man never knew when to quit, an admirable quality he and Kate shared.
“And who doesn’t celebrate Christmas? Christmas!” She exclaimed, waving her hands in her usual manner, the kind that almost always ended in her accidentally knocking over a salt shaker or a full glass of Diet Coke.
“Off the top of my head? Jewish people, Muslims, Jehovah’s Witnesses, some other sects of Christianity, some atheists—”
The sass earned him a withering look.
“I don’t know, Kate. Maybe he just doesn’t like…” Michael picked at his biscuits and gravy, the first course of the six he’d ordered immediately upon sitting down at the bar. After half a lifetime of friendship, Kate had taught him these moods of hers meant he would need to be settled in for a long, long time. “I don’t know. Trees. Maybe he’s allergic to Christmas trees.”
“He could get a fake one.”
“Or he gets paper cuts from wrapping presents.”
“He could use gift bags.”
“What about eggnog? Maybe he’s vegan.”
“Then he needs to move out of Texas.”
On some level, Kate knew she was being useless. Sitting in this diner complaining about the impossibility and injustice of it all seemed like a perfect way to get absolutely nothing done. On another level, the impossibility and injustice almost gave her permission to whine. Nothing could be done. Why shouldn’t she just moan and groan and commiserate with her friend? She dropped her head into her hands.
“I don’t want to be that guy,” Michael said through a mouth full of biscuit, “but you don’t look so good.”
“I don’t know why. I got a solid four hours of sleep last night. That’s a full hour longer than usual.”
Kate knew full well how she looked. Besides her daily uniform of jeans, a red flannel, her reliable pair of sturdy-heeled boots and her dirty blonde hair tied away from her face in a sensible braid, heavy bags dragged her hazel eyes down and her splotchy skin spoke of a restless night. Michael was more of a solid eight hours of sleep kind of guy, so his surprise was understandable.
“What were you doing up that late?”
Kate brightened up. Her ideas may have been half-baked, but at least she had them. And even if it would never happen, she liked feeling useful.
“Brainstorming.
