A Dixie Christmas (14 page)

“It belonged to my grandmother. I called my office this morning and had my secretary take it out of the safety deposit box and mail it to me. If you don’t like it, we can buy a new one, whatever you want.” Clay was rambling on nervously while Annie continued to weep.

“It’s beautiful,” she sobbed.

“Will you marry me, love?”

“Of course, I’ll marry you,” she said and continued to sob.

“Here, let me put it on for you,” Clay urged, a tearful thread in his voice, too.

It was dazzling. Not too big. Not too modern. Ideal.

“Oh, Clay, I love you so much.”

“I love you, too. More than I ever thought possible.”

They kissed to seal their betrothal.

Then they sealed their betrothal in another way.

Troubled waters, for sure, and no bridge in sight…

“How soon before we can get married, do you think?” Clay asked much later. “I’ve got to get back to my office sometime soon, and I hate the thought of leaving you behind.”

“I don’t know. Aunt Liza will want to have a big wedding, but we can do something small, for family only.”

“Is that what you want?”

“I’m not sure. I always pictured myself walking down the aisle in a white gown
 . . .
the works. But now
 . . .
well, I want to be married to you as soon as possible.”

“We’ll have a big wedding, if that’s what you always wanted, Annie-love. But we’ll set a new time record for arranging a big wedding. Okay?”

She nodded, unable to stop staring at the beautiful ring on her finger.

“Will you be able to come back to Princeton with me for a while? Would that be too scandalous for Aunt Liza?”

Annie laughed. “Oh, I think we could convince her that your housekeeper is chaperon enough, but I couldn’t stay for more than a week. It’s too much to ask Chet and the others to take on my work for much more than that.”

“But, honey, at some point they’ll have to pick up your slack. When you move up north, they’ll have no choice but to—”

The small choked sound Annie made caught Clay mid-sentence.

“Annie
 . . .
Annie, what’s wrong?”

Stricken, she could only stare at him. “You think I’ll move to New Jersey, permanently?”

A frown creased Clay’s forehead. “Of course. You didn’t think I would be moving here, did you?”

“Yes,” she wailed. “You didn’t think I’d give up the farm, did you?”

“Yes.”

They were both gaping at each other with incredulity.

“How could you think that you and I would marry and live in that farmhouse? It’s too small for your family, as it is.”

Annie shrugged. “I guess I wasn’t thinking that far. At some point, Chet will probably marry Emmy Lou, once he gets his head together. And I would imagine they’ll live at the farmhouse. But we could always build a house somewhere else on our land. There’s plenty of acreage.”

“Annie, I’m not a farmer.”

“Well, I am,” she stormed, then softened her voice, putting a hand up to cup Clay’s rigid jaw, lovingly. “Clay, isn’t there any way you could do your work from Memphis?”

“Annie, my business has been operated from the same Manhattan office by three generations of Jessups. My family home has been in Princeton for almost a hundred years.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I am
not
moving to Memphis, and that’s final.” He pleaded with her to understand, “That farm of yours is a money drain, pure and simple. This afternoon, rather yesterday afternoon, I read some of the farm magazines sitting around your house. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that eventually you’ll have to sell off some land to developers or use hormones in your cattle feed. You’re about twenty years behind the times, babe.”

“How dare you
 . . .
how dare you presume to tell me how to run my farm? And you know nothing about me, at all, if you think I would ever sell off even a shovelful of Fallon land.”

“It’s an unwise financial decision, Annie. Believe me, this is what I do for a living. This is my expertise.”

“You can shove your expertise, Clay Jessup. And you can shove this, too,” she said, taking off the ring and handing it back to him. The whole time tears were streaming down her face.

“Annie, don’t. Oh, God, don’t leave like this,” he said, watching with horror as she snatched up her clothes and began to dress as quickly as possible. “Let’s talk about this. You’re not being rational.” He began to dress, as well.

“You’re not coming back to the farm with me.”

“I don’t want you driving alone in the middle of the night.”

“I’m a big girl, Clay. I’ve been doing it for a long time.”

Dressed now, she stared at him for a long moment. “Tell me one thing, Clay. Do you still intend to raze this hotel?”

“Of course. What would ever make you think otherwise?”

Annie tried, but couldn’t stifle the sob that rose through her tight throat. “Call me crazy, but I thought you were developing a heart.”

“You’re being unfair.”

“Life’s unfair, Clay.” She grabbed her shoulder bag and headed toward the door, anxious to be out of his sight now, before she broke down completely.

“I love you, Annie.”

Her only response was to slam the door in his face.

Clay gazed at the closed door with abject misery.

How could I have made such a mess of things? How will I survive without Annie? What should I do now?

And somewhere, whether it was the television or inside his head, Clay couldn’t tell for sure, Elvis gave him the answer, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

Truer words were never spoken.

And Clay was pretty sure this qualified as a God’s Big Toe stumble.

And then the other shoe dropped…

Two days later, on Wednesday, a despondent Clay stared out his hotel room window as Annie and her brothers dismantled their live Nativity Scene for the day. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve; so, it would probably be their last day on the site.

Clay had no idea if he’d ever see Annie again after that.

Oh, he’d tried to reconcile their differences, but Annie wouldn’t budge.

“Are you still selling the hotel?” she’d demanded to know yesterday when he’d confronted her in the hotel coffee shop. She and her family had managed to deflect all his phone calls before that. She’d even threatened to give up their live Nativity Scene yesterday, despite her family’s need for money, if he didn’t stop coming out and “bothering” her. “Well, answer me. Are you still selling the hotel?”

“Yes, but it has nothing to do with us, Annie. It’s a business decision.”

She’d made a harrumphing sound of disgust. “Would you move to Memphis?”

“Well, maybe we could live here part of the time
 . . .
have homes in New Jersey and Tennessee.”
See, I can compromise. Why can’t you, Annie?
“Would you be willing to promise to never
 . . .
uh
 . . .
to never stick your arm up a cow’s butt again?”

Annie had looked surprised at that request. Then she’d shaken her head sadly. “Clay, Clay, Clay. You just don’t get it, do you? I’ve bred a hundred cows in my lifetime. I’ll breed hundreds more before I die. If you think cow breeding is gross, you ought to see me butcher a pig. Or wring a chicken’s neck, cut off its head, de-gut and de-feather it, all in time for dinner. Believe me, cow breeding is no big deal.”

It is to me. And I refuse to picture Annie with a dead chicken, or cow. She’s just kidding. She must be.
“Don’t you love me, Annie?” He’d hated the pathetic tone his voice had taken on then, but the question had needed to be asked.

“Yes, but I’m hoping I’ll get over it.”

No!
his mind had screamed.
Don’t get over it. You can’t get over it. I won’t. I can’t.

That had been the last conversation he’d had with the woman he loved and had lost, all in the space of a few lousy days in Memphis. Then today he’d discovered a card table in the lobby with the sign “Blue Suede Suites Employee Fund.” Apparently, Annie and her family had donated two hundred dollars of their hard-earned money to start a fund for hotel employees who would soon be out of work,
due to him
. Annie had found a way, after all, to make him, albeit indirectly, the recipient of the Fallon Family Christmas Good Deed of the Year. And it didn’t matter one damn bit to anyone that he’d dropped five hundred dollars in the box. Not that he’d told anyone.

A knock on the door jarred him from his daydream. It was the elderly bellhop. “Mr. and Mrs. Bloom said to tell you the lawyers’ll be here any minute. Best you come down to the office to go over some last minute details for the sale.”

The bellhop glared at him, then turned on his heels and stomped away, not even waiting for Clay to accompany him. Hell, the entire hotel staff, except for the Blooms, had put him on their freeze list. You’d think he was Simon Lagree. Or Scrooge.

Minutes later, Clay was in the manager’s office, doing a last read-through of the legal documents. The attorneys hadn’t arrived yet, and David had gone out front to register a guest.

“Mr. Jessup, I have some things that belongs to you
 . . .
well, they belonged to your mother, but I guess that means they belong to you now.”

“What?” Clay glanced up to see Marion lifting a cardboard box from a closet shelf.

“When the fire occurred at the photography studio next door, all those years ago, I was on duty. I managed to save a few scraps of things from the fire,” she explained nervously.

“Why didn’t you send them to my father?”

“I tried to give them to him when he came to Memphis to bury your mother, but he refused to take them
 . . .
said he wanted nothing to remind him of her. It was the grief speaking, of course.”

No, it wasn’t the grief speaking. That’s how my father regarded my mother his entire life.

Hesitantly he opened the box. On top was an eight-by-ten photograph, brown on the edges.

“It was their wedding picture,” Mrs. Bloom informed him.

Clay felt as if he’d been kicked in the gut. His father—a much younger, carefree version than he’d ever witnessed—was dressed in a dark suit with a flower in the label, gazing with adoration at the woman standing at his side carrying a small bouquet of roses. Their arms were linked around each other’s waists. She wore a stylish white suit with matching high heels, and she was staring at her new husband with pure, seemingly heartfelt love. They were standing on the steps in front of a church.

“How could two people who appear to have loved each other so much have fallen out of love so quickly?”

Marion gasped. “Whatever are you talking about? They never stopped loving each other.”

Clay cut her with a sharp glower. “My mother abandoned me and my father.”

“She never did so!” Marion snapped indignantly. “Clare came here to tie up some loose ends with her business, and to give her and your father some breathing room over their differences. But they never stopped loving each other.”

He started to speak, but Marion put up a hand to halt his words. “You have to understand that there’s something about the air that comes off the Mississippi. It gets in a Memphian’s soul. Your mother was Memphis born and bred. She had trouble adjusting to life in Princeton, and your father was a stubborn, unbending man. I think he feared the pull of this city on your mother
 . . .
jealousy, in a way, but not because of those foolish, unfounded Elvis rumors
 . . .
and so he became dogmatic, unwilling to be flexible.”

“She left my father,” Clay gritted out.