The Carson Springs Trilogy: Stranger in Paradise, Taste of Honey, and Wish Come True (47 page)

On her way out, she dipped her fingers in the holy water and made the sign of the cross before stepping out into the cold. In the belfry above, the campanario bells were pealing. She glanced at Andie and Justin, their frosty breath punctuating the night air. Soon they would have to know. She would have to find a way to tell them. But first she needed to meet with Claire. At the thought, a small sharp tug like a pulled stitch caused her chest to tighten.

Suppose she doesn’t want to meet me?

By the time they reached the car, parked all the way over on El Paseo, she was chilled to the bone. Gerry wanted nothing more than to be curled up in front of the fire at Sam’s, but it would’ve been unthinkable to skip their annual stop at the People’s Tree. Even the kids didn’t complain when, a mile or so down the road, she turned off Willow onto Old River.

The tree, a towering Spanish cypress featured on postcards at Shickler’s Drugs and no doubt in Gayle Warrington’s brochures, stood smack in the center of Old River, a short distance from the junction where it met up with Highway 33. A number of years ago, when the road was going in, the town council had called an emergency meeting two weeks before Christmas to decide what to do about the tree. The obvious thing would have been to cut it down, since to jog around it would’ve meant either blasting into the steep embankment on one side or bringing the road down into the dry creek bed on the other. Yet to the people of Carson Springs, its venerable trees were just this side of sacred. The vote had been unanimous in favor of letting it stand, and the road was merely widened to allow access on either side. In honor of the decision, and because it was Christmas, after all, someone had anonymously hung an ornament. Soon other ornaments began to appear until the whole tree was covered. A tradition that, in the decades since, had become as deeply rooted as the tree itself.

They parked and got out. The road was deserted. Almost perfectly centered, the People’s Tree, decked in all its finery, rose tall and dark and majestic. Justin scampered up the ladder that had been set up alongside it, taking his time finding a branch for his ornament: a Styrofoam ball studded with colored pushpins that he’d made himself. After it was hung, he leaned back to admire it, a hooded silhouette against the starlit sky.

“It’s not the same without Dad.”

Andie sounded so wistful, Gerry’s heart went out to her. “I know,” she said, silently cursing her ex-husband.

“I’m not sorry, though. About Tahoe. I wouldn’t have wanted to go anyway.”

“I’m sure he would have asked if …” She let the sentence trail off. For her kids’ sake, she made a point of sticking up for him, but at that moment couldn’t think of a single valid excuse.

“Whatever,” Andie said with an elaborate shrug.

“There’ll be other trips,” Gerry said.

“No, there won’t. She doesn’t like me.”
She,
meaning Cindy.

Gerry was about to dish out the usual pap about Mike’s new wife’s adjusting to stepchildren, but thought better of it. “I wouldn’t take it personally. She doesn’t strike me as the motherly type.”

Cindy was clearly more interested in spending Mike’s money than in spending time with his kids. But she wasn’t the problem. Mike was the one with his head up his ass.

“Do you think they’ll ever have kids?” Andie asked with a note of trepidation.

“I doubt it.” Cindy was still young enough, in her mid-thirties, but far too self-absorbed.

Andie tilted her head to look up at Gerry. “Did you and Dad want more?”

It was as if Andie had somehow picked up her thoughts. Gerry could feel the folded envelope in her pocket glowing like a coal through the heavy wool of her coat.

“We talked about it.” She kept her voice light. “With kids as great as you two, how could we not?”

Andie’s face was a pale oval, her curly black hair barely visible in the surrounding darkness. The divorce had hit her hardest for some reason, maybe because. growing up, she’d always been Daddy’s little girl. “Why didn’t you?”

Gerry shrugged. “Things weren’t so great with us by then,” she said. “I guess we both knew another baby would’ve been the wrong way to try to fix things.”

Andie looked thoughtful, and Gerry had a sudden piercing image of the woman she would grow up to be—beautiful and strong and fearless. Then the moment passed and Andie was yelling up at her brother, “Come
on,
Justin. I’m freezing my buns off down here!”

Justin shouted back, “I’m coming, I’m coming!”

He was descending the ladder when he slipped, skidding down several rungs. Gerry’s heart bumped up into her throat, but before she could rush over to catch him, his foot found purchase and he pulled himself upright, the only casualty an ornament that caught the breeze and went sailing off into the dry creek bed below—a small paper cherub, its wings glimmering faintly in the spiny grasp of the Joshua tree in which it had landed.

“Mom, no,” Andie squealed.

But Gerry was already slipping her shoes off and scrambling down the rocky embankment. Twigs and small sharp stones dug into the tender soles of her feet. Why was she doing this? She couldn’t have said. When she reached the creek bed, glittering white in the starlight with a thin rind of frost, she saw that the Joshua tree was taller than it had looked from the road, the cherub snared in its highest branch. She searched amid the weeds along the embankment, ignoring the small voice in the back of her mind warning of rattlesnakes and other small creatures of the night, until she found a stick long enough to knock it loose.

“Mom, leave it,” Andie called. Justin joined in, “Hey, it’s no big deal!”

But she couldn’t leave it. For some reason the thought of that cherub stranded far from its brethren was too much to bear. She swung at it with the stick, reminded of when she used to swat at piñatas as a child and feeling a little foolish dancing about under the stars in her bare feet. It took several tries, but she finally managed to free it.

Moments later, her children watched in silence as she climbed to the top of the ladder and secured it to a branch alongside a lumpy angel fashioned from pipe cleaners and tinfoil.

“You’re not like other mothers, you know,” Justin observed as they were making their way to Sam’s in Gerry’s Toyota Corolla that had nearly 180,000 miles on it and was due for either an overhaul or the junkyard. His voice was tinged with admiration.

“What he means is, you’re weird,” Andie said helpfully.

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” Gerry smiled.

They bumped and lurched along the unlit, potholed road, the People’s Tree in the rearview mirror glimmering faintly like something more imagined than real. It was Christmas Eve, her children safe and sound. What more could she ask?

Sam had done more than bake a cake. They arrived to find plates of homemade cookies, a bowl of buttered popcorn, and enough hot cocoa to have warmed Washington’s troops at Valley Forge. Her little house in the Flats glowed inside and out. A fire blazed in the hearth, and the Christmas tree, decked with antique ornaments passed down through generations of Delarosas, sparkled with dozens upon dozens of white pinpoint lights.

“Either you’ve gone stir-crazy or I’ve stumbled onto the set of a Kathie Lee Gifford Christmas special,” Gerry teased.

“The former, I hope,” Sam replied with a laugh. She’d changed out of her church clothes into a forest-green velour caftan that made her look queenly as she moved about in her graceful, if slightly swaybacked, waddle. “I just hope this baby comes before I run out of projects. Promise me one thing: If I take up needlepoint, you’ll have me committed.”

“Deal.” They shook on it.

“Speaking of projects, wait till you see what Ian’s done with the nursery.”

They left Andie and Justin with Ian, who was showing them a new computer game, and Sam ushered her down the hall. Gerry stepped inside the nursery to find the antique spool crib trimmed in calico bunting, and the white wicker changing table neatly arrayed with supplies. But it was the wall across from the crib that caught her attention and made her gasp. It was covered in an elaborate mural depicting a host of nursery-tale figures. Ian had to have been working on it for months.

Gerry whistled in admiration. “You should charge admission.”

“Not a bad idea. We could use the money.” Sam didn’t sound worried. With the rent from Isla Verde and the commissions Ian earned, they did all right. “On the other hand, money isn’t everything.”

Gerry felt a pang of envy. She had no wish for a late-in-life child, nor did she have any desire to settle down—one marriage had been more than enough—but the look on Sam’s face as she gazed at Ian’s labor of love made her think how nice it would be to feel that way about someone in her own life. The thought of Aubrey once again flashed across her mind, but they were friends—okay,
intimate
friends—and nothing more was ever going to come of it.

“Damn straight. Two weddings and a baby. Some would say your cup runneth over.” Sam’s youngest, Alice, had gotten married last summer—to Ian’s father. And Laura’s wedding was little more than a month away.

“Either that, or there’s something in the water.” Sam gave a little laugh as she adjusted a lampshade tilted askew. “Which reminds me, Laura wants to know if you’re bringing Aubrey.”

Gerry felt herself flush. “And here I thought we were being so discreet.”

Sam arched an eyebrow, her green eyes dancing. “Are you kidding? The most famous conductor in the world moves into our little neck of the woods—into
my
house, for heaven’s sake—and you think half the town isn’t going to know you’re sleeping with him?”

“I guess they’re tired of gossiping about you and Ian.”

They shared a laugh reminiscent of when they’d been girls together, primping for dates—Sam, with her straight chestnut hair in curlers and Gerry attempting to iron her unruly black mane flat, the two as different as night and day but somehow more closely attuned than most sisters. Lately, Gerry had been thinking a lot about those days.

She was silent, gazing at the mural. After a moment Sam placed a hand on her arm. “Hey, are you okay?”

“I heard back from Web Horner the other day,” Gerry said.

“The private investigator?”

“As if there could be more than one guy with that name.”

“What did he say?”

“He found her.” Even saying it aloud, it didn’t seem real. “Her name is Claire Brewster. She lives up the coast, in Miramonte.” That doppelgänger feeling was back: a whole other life that might have been hers being lived out on parallel tracks.

“Oh, Gerry.” Sam’s face glowed. “That’s wonderful.”

“Is it?”

Sam said firmly,
“Yes.
It is.”

“Then why do I feel like I’m about to make the second biggest mistake of my life?”

“I gather you still haven’t told the kids.”

“I haven’t even talked to Claire.”

“Maybe it’s time you did.”

“I’ve waited this long. What’s a few more days?”
Or weeks.

Sam’s expression grew steely. “Is this the same woman who forced Father Kinney into rehab when everyone else was turning a blind eye?”

“It’s easier when you know you’re in the right.”

Gerry looked around her, at the padded oak rocker over which a delicate crocheted blanket was draped, its squares of blue and pink and white as pale as a misty dawn, and at the lamp on the table by the crib with its little train that chugged around the base when switched on.

“It’s funny how things hardly ever turn out the way you expect. Six months ago I couldn’t have imagined having a baby …” Sam’s voice was soft. “But now I can’t imagine
not
having it.” She squeezed Gerry’s arm. “Promise you’ll call her.”

“I promise I’ll think about it.”

Gerry glanced at her watch as they were heading back down the hall. “We can’t stay. My mom’s waiting for me to pick her up.”

“You just got here! Besides, you’re not leaving me with all this food.”

“You didn’t tell me you’d baked enough to feed the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.” Gerry sank onto the sofa in front of the fire. She was halfway through her second cup of cocoa when she remembered to glance once more at her watch. It was half past nine. How had it gotten to be so late? Reluctantly, she hauled herself to her feet. “Come on, guys,” she called to Andie and Justin. “We’d better get a move on. Grandma’s going to wonder what’s keeping us.”

Sam retrieved their coats from the closet, throwing a jacket over her own shoulders and slipping on a pair of shoes. She walked with them outside, murmuring to Gerry as she was kissing her good-bye, “Don’t wait too long. Only fools and kings have that luxury.”

“Oh, how lovely!” Mavis held up the scarf she’d unwrapped. “It’ll go perfectly with my navy suit.” She leaned down to hug Andie, cross-legged on the floor by the sofa. “Thank you, darling girl. You couldn’t have picked a more perfect gift.”

Some things never change, Gerry thought. Mavis had murmured the proper appreciation for
her
gift, a pink cashmere sweater from Nordstrom’s that had cost far more than Gerry could afford, but hadn’t lit up like she was now. It wasn’t that her mother didn’t love or appreciate her, she knew, just that they always seemed to miss the mark somehow. Like the glossy cookbook Mavis had given her this year. Gerry had no doubt she’d meant well, but it only served to remind her of what a lousy cook she was.

She sipped her coffee, one of the few things she could do well. The sense of possibility to which she’d awakened only hours ago seemed to have dwindled along with the pile of presents under the tree.

“It’s a hundred percent silk. Look, it says so on the label,” Andie pointed out.

Mavis fished a pair of reading glasses from her baggy green cardigan and bent to peer at it, her once-red hair, now the color of old pennies, nestled against Andie’s glossy dark curls. “So it does.” She smiled and straightened. “I have something for you, too.” She handed Andie a small box so clumsily wrapped it pained Gerry to look at it. Her mother’s hands, bunched with arthritis, made even the simplest tasks a Herculean effort.

Andie opened it, and gave a gasp of delight. Nestled inside was an antique amethyst brooch set in a filigree of yellow gold—one that Gerry recalled her mother wearing on special occasions. “Oh, Grandma. It’s beautiful.” She glanced up with a look of uncertainty. “Are you sure?”