action figures to live on.
They made superheroes smaller these days. After he topped the basket off with them, he took his purchases to the counter.
“Whoa,” said the young guy waiting to check him out. “Big family?”
“Sort of. Can I leave these here and finish?”
“Sure.” He started unloading. “We’ll push them all to the end until you come back.”
Jason had one more thing he wanted to buy. He loved trains as much as Fleming did. His grandparents had given him one every year. He still had them packed away. Somewhere.
He chose a wooden one, like the one he loved best. The cars were hand painted. Each fitted neatly to its mate via wooden couplings. The train ran on a wooden track that made a neat series of wide turns, accommodating play for a young child not yet completely in charge of dexterity.
Shopping bags in hand, he went on to Mainly Merry Christmas, passing both a card store and a stationery shop that probably carried a wide selection of paper and ribbons.
Fleming looked up from her open laptop when the bells jingled above his head.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
He smiled at her. “Nice to see you, too.”
She grinned, her embarrassment kind of charming. “I meant, welcome. What can I do for you?”
“I need a few things.”
“You have a few things.” She pointed to the bag. “Getting to your Christmas shopping early?”
Her soft mockery left him a little tongue-tied. “I was thinking last night, while you were wrapping your gifts...”
Fleming came around the counter, her smile a welcome into her community the likes of which he’d never been offered. “You bought some things for the shelter?”
“I always ask my assistant to write a check or choose a charity, or even to buy gifts for those trees in the department stores.”
“Oh.”
“You made me feel ashamed last night,” he said.
“I doubt anyone cares how the gifts arrive.”
“Maybe not.” He lifted the bag onto the counter. “But I thought I could put in a little effort.”
“I like to see a rich guy trying to walk in normal shoes.”
“I’m not that rich.” But just for a second, he wasn’t himself. He wished he could offer some of his own money to ease the holiday suffering he was causing here in Bliss.
“Let me donate wrapping paper,” she said.
“Fleming, are you insane?” He walked so close to her that his breath stirred the red strands around her face. “You can’t afford to give me paper. I’ll buy enough to wrap these, and some bows and those little cards.”
She laughed, but then hurried around the counter to a tree, where she touched a shiny, hard plastic candy cane. “If you wanted, you could add a little ornament to the bows. Nothing breakable, but something a child might keep for her own home next year.”
He hardly heard because he was so busy taking in Fleming’s happy face. She might tempt a man to believe in magical holidays.
“You choose,” he said.
She shook her head, touching his arm with her fingertips. “I’ll help you.”
He wanted to cover her hand and pull it to his mouth, to feel her soft skin against his lips and learn what she would say if she knew how her happy warmth touched him.
Instead, he completed his purchases, took his bags and left, reminding her to read the refinancing paperwork he’d given her.
* * *
FLEMING CLOSED THE shop early after Jason left, barely managing not to press her face to the door and watch him walk away. He would not be staying, she reminded herself. He’d always walk away.
And she had to focus on her own work. Sadly, no one was fighting to come inside the shop. Maybe they’d seen her collaborating with the enemy and hadn’t wanted to join them.
She locked the back door behind her and walked to her car, shivering in the cold night air. What she wouldn’t give for one more of those years when she and her mother had held the doors open during the first post-Thanksgiving week until ten or eleven at night.
This year, with an über-efficient businessman putting fear in everyone who’d fallen behind on one of Paige’s loans, people seemed to have locked up their wallets. Her business was an easy luxury to cut.
Driving home, she took comfort from the decorations going up in the heart of town. Snowflakes on Victorian streetlamps. Wire-and-light Santas and snowmen waving from the corners. Eight tiny reindeer grazing on the grassy areas of the courthouse square.
Even as she plunged into the darkness of the country roads she passed signs of the coming holidays. The Hadleys’ fence sparkled with loops of twinkling red and green lights. Blue and white stars loomed on the Petersons’ iron gates. The Bradleys’ Christmas-tree farm was an oasis of holiday decor, inviting passersby to stop in and choose a tree of their own.
Fleming pushed her anxiety to arm’s length. She’d read the refinancing contracts. She hadn’t called her mother during what was essentially a honeymoon. She had to refinance or give up the store, and that wasn’t a choice.
All her anxiety had given her a plan for the pages she needed to write tonight, a scene that cried out for the emotion she was fighting so hard not to feel in real life.
She turned in at her driveway, pausing to collect the mail from the black metal box that still bore the dents from an unfortunate mailbox-baseball incident on Halloween. She should replace it, but every little penny...
* * *
ON THURSDAY MORNING, Fleming waited outside Jason’s office, uncertain whether she was more anxious about seeing him or dealing with the loan.
Voices rose loudly inside the office. Instantly concerned that someone else might be attacking Jason, Fleming glanced at Hilda, who grimaced and stared at her phone. “I have 911 on speed dial now,” the woman said.
“I’m sorry you have to. It’s just a bad time of year for this to happen.”
Hilda scrunched up her eyebrows. “But if he’d waited, some people would have lost their homes and businesses.”
“I’m one of them,” Fleming said without thinking.
“What a mess.”
The office door opened and Jason came out, his arm across the shoulders of a man in coveralls. Fred Limber, who owned a tire shop a few blocks from the square.
“So don’t worry. I’ll send you the terms. I don’t see any reason you can’t meet this obligation, Fred,
