A Cherry Cola Christmas (14 page)

16

Pamela Linwood

L
ocke Linwood had just taken his place at the podium. Dressed in his three-piece gray suit with silver tie, his skin a healthy pink and his full head of white hair meticulously brushed in place, he looked as bright and shiny as tinsel on a Christmas tree. Only when Miss Voncille nodded his way, however, did he open the small brown journal he had brought with him for his inspirational presentation.

“Ladies and gentlemen, tonight I am going to read a selection from my late wife's diary that she kept from the day she was diagnosed with breast cancer to a few days before she left me. I never really knew just how strong Pamela was until she entrusted me with these writings and I finally worked up the courage to read them all. It took me a while to let her leaving really sink in. But once I began reading, I was sorry I hadn't done so sooner. I think you'll see why when I proudly share the following passages with you.”

Locke closed the journal and nodded graciously. “And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the contribution of Pamela Alden Linwood to our little gathering here tonight. Her words are her presence, and I feel it strongly.”

“And I feel it, too,” Miss Voncille added, her voice as soft and soothing as anyone had ever heard. “I'll always be eternally grateful to this remarkable woman for helping Locke let go by showing us how she was going to do it herself.”

The emotion clearly registered in Locke's face as he made his way back to his seat to the applause of the group. “Thank you, one and all,” he managed as he and Miss Voncille hugged warmly.

“Oh, my,” Maura Beth said, returning to the podium and fanning her face quickly a few times as a beauty pageant contestant who had just won it all might have. “I do believe we're getting our money's worth tonight. These presentations are just what the doctor ordered. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm feeling better about our problems here in Cherico already. I knew there would be strength in numbers.”

17

Charles Durden Sparks—Step Three

T
he little round yellow Valium tablets Councilman Sparks had stolen from Evie's medicine cabinet were burning a hole in his shirt pocket as he sat soaked in scotch, feeling sorry for himself. He put down his crystal tumbler on a nearby end table and retrieved them, one by one, until he had all five of them in the palm of his hand. As he had done before with the bottle of scotch, he began speaking to his wife's drug of choice as if they were old friends.

“And now . . . you little high-dosage devils will do your job.”

Then he realized he had completely drained his last drink and had nothing to use as a chaser. So he rose, this time even more unsteady on his feet, made his way to the wet bar with his glass, and poured a small amount of soda into it. Just enough to swallow the pills.

He didn't swallow them all together. Instead, he made an elaborate ritual of downing them one at a time. He placed each pill on the tip of his tongue and let it linger there for a few seconds. He decided to count to ten silently before bringing the soda into play. Wasn't this a countdown?

When the last little devil had been sent to his stomach, he decided to pick up the note he had written to Evie and read it one last time. While he still could. But he didn't start at the beginning. Instead, his eyes landed on certain phrases:

Oddly, as his faculties began to fade, one particular insight stuck out. Miss Voncille had been right about him all along. She had as much as told him that he was a different kind of bully, lording it over people intellectually and not wanting them to have even a brief second of the limelight in the classroom. She had finally taken him aside one afternoon after the bell had rung, and her harsh words were still branded on his brain as if she had spoken them to him yesterday.

“There are many other students sitting around you, Durden Sparks. You have no sense of fairness the way you fret and fume and squint at me. I simply can't call on you every time your hand goes up, and you should know that by now. You'd better learn it right now—the universe doesn't revolve around you!”

He had called her a bitch mentally, and then as soon as he was out in the hallway, he had actually uttered the word several times over with ferocity: “Bitch, bitch, bitch!”

A couple of students walking by had even turned their heads and wondered what in the world could be bothering the school's most accomplished student so much that he would have such a public tantrum.

But Miss Voncille had nailed it. He wanted to shine every second, and he knew even then that he would be capable of doing anything to make sure that happened. What kind of legacy was that? Oh, sure, his name would be on that library Maura Beth and Nora Duddney had forced him to build, and he had taken full credit for it. But he still didn't believe in libraries, even though he had recently told Maura Beth something along those lines. He had also told her that she was now a member of his team. But he was lying both times. He wanted to get rid of her, or conquer her, or subdue her, but he had been unable to do any of those things. She was her own woman, and he just didn't know what to do with someone like that.

More importantly, she had rejected him—the first woman to do so in his life of conquests. How could she have failed to fall for his charms? She obviously took her idealism to heart. He had abandoned his a long time ago, if he had ever had any to begin with. Perhaps it was missing from his DNA.

He thought of Nora's father, Layton Duddney, propped up in bed out at the nursing home, essentially waiting to die. But Layton was not forcing the issue. He was simply waiting patiently for the inevitable.

Step Three was now complete. Charles Durden Sparks put the note down on the end table next to his glass and closed his eyes.

18

James Hannigan

E
veryone's favorite grocer briskly stepped to the podium and scanned the library gathering with flushed, pudgy cheeks and a warm smile. His Cherico Market continued to be a mainstay of the town, and James Patrick Hannigan—Mr. Hannigan to his many customers—was the main reason for it. While other businesses were moving away or had failed outright—including one of the big, impersonal, national grocery chains out on the bypass—The Cherico Market was
the
place to shop, meet up with friends for a chat, and post notices and flyers on the cork bulletin board.

Yes, it was true that everyone had to buy groceries, but Mr. Hannigan went the extra mile and treated his customers as family, and he had helped Maura Beth immeasurably by making announcements over the PA system during her petition campaign to keep the library open. He had provided her with an enormous chunk of signatures that had kept Councilman Sparks and his machinations at bay.

“I believe I know every single one of you in the audience tonight,” Mr. Hannigan began. “I see y'all in the store at least once a week. Some of you, maybe more. Hey, you know what kinda diet you're on better'n I do.”

Heads nodded as a wave of polite laughter erupted.

“I had thought I'd maybe start off tonight with a little anecdote about me trying to wrestle the communion chalice away from Father O'Beirne at St. Mary's down in Natchez where I grew up,” he continued. “But I realized there wasn't much to the story—I just loved the taste of that wine so much, I wanted more than what everybody else was getting. That little sip just wasn't enough. Father was okay with it in the end, but my mother grounded me for two whole weeks and made me say about a thousand Hail Marys.”

There was more laughter, and then Mr. Hannigan's face grew solemn as he took a deep breath. “What I really wanted to tell y'all about was something that happened to me after my mother died a few years back, and I'd been living up here in Cherico for over twenty years. First, a little background for those of you who may not know: I am the youngest of six brothers, and we were and still are a close-knit, Irish Catholic family. My mother, Theresa, was very strict with all of us, and she needed to be. We were a rowdy bunch, and she really had her hands full. But we knew she loved us, and we all loved her in return.

“The summer she died unexpectedly in her sleep shortly after Maura Beth took over the library here, I hadn't seen Mother in several years. It was one of those things where you have every intention of visiting, but something always comes up that gets in the way. Of course, I'd sent birthday and Christmas cards and talked on the phone now and then, but I hadn't taken the time to visit her face-to-face. My brothers all got married and had loads of grands to show off, plus they stayed to make a living in Natchez. Me, I set off on my own and just never found anyone, and my mother was always on me to find a nice Catholic girl like all my brothers had—”

He broke off and appeared to be smirking about something. “Do any of you know of a catalog where I can order one?”

This time, it took a while for the laughter to die down.

“Well, Mother was almost that bad about it. I don't know—maybe I was tired of every visit being dominated by why I hadn't gotten married yet. But anyhow, she died in her sleep, and no one got to say good-bye the way we'd all like to when a loved one leaves us. Even my brothers. But at least they had all seen and talked to her recently. I was the odd man out and completely without closure. I can relate to what Miss Voncille said earlier. It's tough to make your peace when you don't have it.”

“Amen,” Miss Voncille called out, smiling at him affectionately.

“I remember that Maura Beth helped me find some books on grief at the library, and I read them all. They did give me some comfort. But I'm now going to share something I've never told anyone before. I was—well, I was afraid of ridicule and that people would say I'd just made it all up because I was hurting so much. I changed my mind when Maura Beth came up with this exchange of inspirational stories.

“I need to backtrack just a tad bit, though. When my brothers and I were very young, Mother and our aunt Margaret came up with a delightful little trick to keep the magic in our lives. Or at least that's what they told us later on. What they did was to buy two large, silver-plated birds with long tails, but we weren't told there were two of them. Mother kept one on the fireplace mantel, and Aunt Margaret did the same at her house. Mother called it The Magic Bird and told us that it was capable of coming to life and flying to Aunt Margaret's house to greet us when we got there. And that's what we believed had happened when we saw The Magic Bird on Aunt Margaret's mantel. Eventually, both of the birds got broken and couldn't be repaired. But the fond memories continued and—”

“What an adorable story!” Miss Voncille interrupted.

“Thank you, but I haven't quite gotten to the point yet, Miss Voncille.”

“There's more? Well, how delightful!”

“Yes, well, now comes the part that I've never told anyone about before, and it involves this matter of closure. I was beside myself at the funeral, even though everyone did everything they could to console me. But then, something happened to give me that closure, and it involved the idea of The Magic Bird coming to life. I wasn't looking forward to Christmas that year, but I dutifully decorated the house as I always had. I put up a tree in the living room, put a wreath on the front door, and was in the midst of stringing some small white lights throughout the azaleas that lined the walk leading up to my front porch.

“And that's when something remarkable happened. I heard a knocking noise coming from behind me as I faced the street with my lights. When I turned around, a large bird with a long tail was pecking at one of my front window panes. I immediately dropped the lights and approached this bird—if that was indeed what it was. Finally, I was less than six inches away, but the bird did not take flight as I would have expected it to do. Instead, it hopped down from the window, and without even thinking about it, I said, ‘Mother?'

“The bird followed me halfway down the path to where I had dropped the lights and stood there watching me string them. I continued to talk to it. ‘You see? I'm going to have Christmas just like I always have.'

“That bird did not fly away until I had completed all of my yard decorations, but when it finally did, I knew I had closure. I don't pretend to understand exactly what happened that day, but I can tell you that I fully recovered that childhood sense of magic Mother and Aunt Margaret gave to us when they created The Magic Bird. Was this Mother's way of letting me know everything was fine so that I could go on with my life? I know there are those who will say that I was just guilty of wishful thinking and that there had to be a scientific explanation for what happened. Maybe there was, but I don't care. All I know is that I definitely had the closure I desperately needed, and the beliefs I was brought up with were only strengthened in a quiet, internal way. I was content with those, but it didn't matter if no one else in the world understood. That bird was meant for me, and the message was received.”

Connie McShay raised her hand. “Did you ever see the bird again?”

“Never. Just that once. But that was all I needed. I guess you could say—mission accomplished.”

“Well, anyway, I'm glad you chose to share the story with us tonight,” Connie continued. “We take a lot of things on faith in this life, but the notion that birds can be messengers of some kind is not out of left field to me. I don't think we fully understand the role that some animals can play in our lives. Do they see and hear versions of reality that we don't? Do they share their special gifts with us? As our pets, it's well-documented that they cheer us up and even warn us from time to time. Is it so unreasonable to think that they know things we don't know?”

Mr. Hannigan seemed relieved and nodded with a grateful smile. “Thank you for saying that, and I hope my story helps all of you in some way.” And with that, he returned to his seat to the applause of the club.

“I'm convinced my cats hold the secrets to the universe,” Audra Neely said, subtly waving her hand. “I wish I could tap into their brains. Maybe they could tell me how to keep my store open.” She paused for a little giggle as she stood up in the front row and turned to face the group. “I'm only kidding about my cats, of course, but I would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. I've loved being here in Cherico and making so many good friends.”

“Will you stay in touch with us after you get settled?” Maura Beth added.

“Of course I will. You're all exceptional people.”

“Audra, I'll miss your special lobster orders every now and then,” Mr. Hannigan said.

“What can I say? I have extravagant tastes, but I guess you could say my antique store wasn't keeping me in lobsters.”

Everyone laughed, and then Maura Beth resumed her duties as moderator. “All I can say is that each new story seems to top the previous one. Now, who would like to go next?”

Connie raised her hand again. “I would, if you don't mind. In a strange way I think my story and Mr. Hannigan's might be first cousins in the take-it-on-faith department; and it has something in common with the moving words Locke read from his late wife's journal.”

Maura Beth smiled and gestured to her invitingly. “Then by all means, come on up and don't keep us in suspense.”