Snow Angels (17 page)

“True,” said Andy.

“And look at their faces! They don’t care that they’re meeting in a tent, that there’s no heat or lights or organ accompaniment. They don’t care that the microphone made your voice sound like you were talking through the bottom of a tin can. They just wanted to be here, to be together. To hear a message of hope, to know that peace is possible, and that goodwill and faith are real. Why didn’t I see it before? This is Christmas, isn’t it, Andy? This is what matters!”

Andy grinned and raised his coffee cup to toast the younger man.

“Merry Christmas, Riley.”

“Merry Christmas, Andy.”

Dear Reading Friend,

I hope you enjoyed your trip to Maple Grove. Those of you who read my first Maple Grove story, “A High Kicking Christmas,” in the holiday anthology COMFORT AND JOY, already know that I’m a big fan of all things Vermont, especially Vermont maple syrup, an ingredient that finds its way into many of my favorite family recipes.

That’s why I’m offering my Reading Friends a few of the recipes included in “The Presents of Angels,” including Grandma Sugarman’s Apple Walnut Stuffing, White and Sweet Potato Au Gratin, Maple Almond Squash Medley, and Maple Mousse Pie, along with a few of my best tips for delicious and low-stress holiday cooking.

To get them, just go to my Web site, www.mariebostwick.com, click on the box on the left that says, “Become a Reading Friend…” and fill in the registration information, which I never share with anyone. As a registered Reading Friend, you’ll have access to the “For Reading Friends” area where you can download the recipes, and have access to other goodies including a free quilt pattern, automatic entry in my monthly Readers’ contests, the opportunity to receive my quarterly e-newsletter, and more!

If you don’t have access to a computer and would like the recipes, drop me a note. Please send your request and
a self-addressed stamped business-sized envelope
to
:

Marie Bostwick
PO Box 488
Thomaston, CT 06787

I hope you’ll be on the lookout for my other books, especially the books in my Cobbled Court series: A SINGLE THREAD and A THREAD OF TRUTH. Set in the fictional village of New Bern, Connecticut,
New York Times
bestselling author Susan Wiggs described A SINGLE THREAD as a book “filled with wit and wisdom,” and advises readers to “sit back and enjoy this big-hearted novel and then pass it on to your best girlfriend.” I hope you’ll do exactly that!

Thank you for joining me on this armchair journey to Maple Grove. I hope you enjoyed the trip as much as I did. May your holidays be filled with joy!

Blessings,
Marie Bostwick

J
ANNA
M
C
M
AHAN

When you’re an ordinary person, you don’t expect extraordinary things to happen to you. Of course, if you’re an ordinary person, what you consider extraordinary may be tame by other people’s standards. If anyone had ever said to me, “Michelle Duncan, your life is about to change in a big way,” I most likely would have freaked out. I like safe. I like knowing what’s going to happen next. Drama is definitely not my thing.

But changes can sneak up on you. They can come in such incremental ways that you’re not really aware things are changing at all. Or changes can come on hard and strong and knock you silly. That’s what has happened to me in the last year. My life went from run-of-the-mill to bizarre in no time at all.

When I say I’m ordinary you might think I’m being modest, but I’m not. My life decisions have never been monumental or exciting or strange. Take for instance my marriage. I married Randy Duncan after dating only a few months. It wasn’t like love at first sight or anything earth-shattering like that.

We met when my car slid off the road during one of Asheville’s famous fat-flaked snowstorms. My little car didn’t have much traction. I should have had my dad put chains on my tires, but I’d been in a hurry to get to work. When I started to slide I remembered to tap my brakes like you’re supposed to do, but that didn’t help at all. So everything I’d ever learned about driving in slick snow flew right out of my head and I locked up my brakes and in a second I’d veered off the road.

My Toyota bumped up against the guardrail, then raked along until there was no more metal holding me on the road. I could see the end coming, literally. When my car groaned to a stop just short of a nosedive off the mountainside I had my eyes closed and my foot smashing the brake so hard my leg was quivering. The engine turned over and died and I just sat there with cold creeping into the car, my breath swirling in rapid curls. I don’t know how long I sat there before a knock on the window startled me. I hadn’t even heard the truck pull up. I must have been in a sort of shock.

I snapped to and cranked the window down.

“Are you okay?” the guy asked. He was hunched over with his hands shoved into his jacket pockets. His face was down close to my window and the wind whipped his shaggy white blond hair.

“Uh, yeah. I think so.”

“You sure? You want to get out and shake it off?”

I stepped out and sort of patted myself and looked around as if I’d just lost my keys rather than had a near-death experience.

“You got close to the edge,” he said. “Look, if you’re okay, then I’ll pull you out.” He motioned to a big red truck behind us. “Why don’t you get in before you freeze?”

I sat in the cab with my hands up to the heater’s vent while he hooked a clunky chain up to my bumper. The winch squealed as it cinched the slack and then smoothly pulled my little car off the soggy shoulder and back onto the road. I got out and shuffled to where he stood.

“You’ve got to be more careful,” he said. “Where you headed?”

“To work. At Mountaintop Mulch.”

“That’s not too far. Want to follow me?”

An odd sense of gratitude swept over me. I can’t explain it exactly. Maybe I have a thing about being rescued, I don’t know, but Randy was so nice and he had such sparkly blue eyes and a cute crooked grin.

“What?” he said as if he had no idea what I was thinking, but now I know that he was thinking the same thing.

“Nothing,” I said and before spring thaw we were walking down the aisle.

It was a short aisle, just a stroll between two rows of folding chairs in my parents’ backyard and we were one. We went on our honeymoon to Gatlinburg where we tried out skydiving in one of those big padded cylinder rooms with an enormous fan in the floor. I’ve always been athletic. Played softball in high school. Ran track. But it was hard for me to balance myself against that enormous updraft. I kept flipping off and slamming into the sides, which made Randy laugh more than I thought he should have.

We saw a couple of country music shows, but nobody important. We couldn’t get tickets to see Dolly. We stayed in a ski chalet, but it was late spring by then and the Smoky Mountains were a fierce green. We drank dark sour wine and made love every single day. Sometimes we did it twice in one day because we both knew we wouldn’t be getting it nearly as much once we moved in with my parents.

After the honeymoon we lived with them under the agreement that it was just temporary. We’d sneak out and do it in the truck like we were teenagers. Lying there against each other on the bench seat, the windows all fogged, we’d dream about our future. Randy would say how he’d always wanted a log cabin. So we went to the company that sold those log cabin kits and picked out a floor plan. A month later a semi pulled up and unloaded our building materials. I had a hard time imagining how that pile of logs could be a house, it just looked like a stack of Lincoln Logs I had when I was a kid.

It was unusually dry that year and the water around us was running so low that the rafting businesses that fed off local rivers were practically shut down. Randy paid a bunch of his kayaking buddies to help with construction and they threw our house up in a summer of weekends. It took a while to get it plumbed and the electricity running, but we were in before Thanksgiving.

Our new house was on property Randy inherited from an uncle. It wasn’t a great piece of property since it snugged right up to a straight section in the highway. It was a dangerous spot where cars zoomed around lumber trucks they’d been stuck behind for miles on the twisting mountain roads. This was probably the reason nobody else in the family stepped up to claim the lot, but Randy and I were glad to have it. Randy made us a half-circle drive so we would never have to back out into traffic.

So we settled into our new house and life became comfortable and routine. Randy liked to spend weekends with his white-water buddies. They were mostly local boys who lived in dormitories provided by the outfitters along the rivers that snaked through the Blue Ridge Mountains. These fellows slept in bunk beds and ate in mess halls and lived to take Boy Scouts, middle-aged women, and overly-stressed business executives down the Chattooga or Ocohee or French Broad. Randy had done it himself a number of times to pick up a little extra money, but mostly he waited for the weekends when he and his friends could slide their colorful kayaks into the river and just play.

Early on Randy took me camping with him. I always loved to see the crew carrying their boats down to the river’s edge, the tops of their neoprene wetsuits flopping down around their waists in the cooler months, their shoes squeaking with their steps. They looked like a bunch of aliens that landed in the middle of all that nature in their bright puffy life vests.

Their kayaks were scarred from rough encounters with rocks. They were so fearless that it made my heart stop. They’d plunge over waterfalls into recirculating pools and peal out into eddies to rest. They played in the rapids, surfing the waves, leaning upriver to press their boats against the current.

Randy took me rafting a couple of times, but that’s not the sort of thing I find relaxing and fun. To be honest, I was scared to death. What I liked to do was hang out in the woods, so I’d spend the weekends in camp while Randy boated. I’d read novels and wait all day until I knew they were getting near Bull Sluice at the end of their run.

At Bull Sluice, the river narrowed and forced itself between giant boulders. The falls dropped twenty feet, down two shelves before crashing into a churning, foamy mess. It was one of the most dangerous holes on the river and every year somebody lost their life there. A crowd always gathered to watch the action at Bull Sluice and onlookers kept ready with rescue ropes coiled in nylon bags to throw to luckless people who got tossed out of their boats. As they threw the bags, the rope would trail out and settle into the river, washing into frantic grasps.

When Randy and his friends had had enough time to make it down the river I’d pack up and take my book to a spot on the boulders where I could keep an eye upriver for them. The rocks were always warm from the sun, even in the fall. Girlfriends and wives sunned, their hair twisted up in alligator clips, their glasses flashing. I had a hot orange bikini that Randy liked. I’d squeeze lemon juice into my hair to streak it blond and rub baby oil on my legs.

When Randy’s group appeared around a bend I’d hold my breath until they had whooped their way over Bull Sluice. Sometimes they would port their boats up over the boulders and go down again. Kayakers are crazy.

Once Randy was over the falls he’d pull his boat on shore and come sit next to me to warm up. The mountain-fed river was cold, even in summer. Randy would pop open a beer from our cooler and watch other boats come down. Instead of a farmer’s tan, Randy kept a boater’s tan, his ropey arms dark and smooth, while his legs stayed pale from being hidden under his boat’s skirt. He’d try to sun his legs, but they would never achieve the golden brown of his face and arms.

So that was our life most weekends. During the week I worked for Mountaintop Mulch. I’d had that job since I graduated from Western Carolina. I earned a degree in English, but I never wanted to leave my hometown of Black Knob, so I went back to school for basic accounting and over the years I got promoted up to office manager. While I wasn’t the general manager, I should have been. I could work about any aspect of the business.

It was a fun job in a lot of ways. It was dirty some days, but I liked being outside. I didn’t have to worry about my appearance. Lots of days I’d go in without makeup. I’d wear jeans, hiking boots, and a ball cap with my ponytail sprouting from the back, T-shirts in summer and down jackets the rest of the year. Some days I’d travel around to different mills to gauge the quality of their raw material, the bark stripped off lumber. I’d coordinate transportation to our processing plant where truckloads of bark would be screened for debris, washed, and processed into a consistent chip size. It would then be bagged and sold through our retail store or I’d ship wholesale loads to other dealers, golf courses, landscape contractors, and developers.

Most people never think of where their landscaping materials originate, but we put a lot of thought into making an attractive, quality product. Over the years, we developed chips that wouldn’t wash away with heavy rain and we produced mulch in a variety of colors. Mulch was important and I knew the sales pitch by heart—erosion control, weed suppression, root system protection, moisture retention. Landscaping would be in dire straights without mulch to smooth out the edges, add depth to design, and protect precious plants.

But Mountaintop Mulch was family-owned and even though I felt I was key to the business, I knew I’d climbed as high up that ladder as I could. I wasn’t all that ambitious anyway and with Randy’s good job, we were fat and happy. Randy worked for Duke Power putting in lines for new construction in summer and repairing damaged lines hit by ice storms in the winter months. Between the two of us we made decent money and we didn’t want for much, that was, except a baby.

It has always been hard for me to accept that I can’t have children. I had endometriosis in my early twenties. The doctor said I was cured, that I should have no problem getting pregnant, but in our fifteen-year marriage Randy and I never used birth control, yet we hadn’t had the slightest opportunity for hope. Randy never expressed it, but I know he blamed me, as if I somehow had control over this part of our lives.

Maybe if we’d had children we wouldn’t have grown apart like we did. But after a decade of trying for a family, sex became less fun and more work than we wanted. I must admit that it was painful for me emotionally since I couldn’t ever do it without hoping that I would get pregnant. People gave us all sorts of advice. Try not to think about. Just relax everybody said, and it will happen. But I couldn’t relax.

We got used to it just being the two of us and we fell into our ordinary routine of work, dinner, television. Randy boated and hunted and fished. I stopped going to the river with him and instead I stayed home and read and gardened. I made jam. I redecorated our master bedroom.

I’d always been content with my simple life. I was into easy, which was probably one reason Randy appealed to me. With Randy, you always knew what you were going to get. Or at least that’s what I thought.

But then my father crumbled out of a church pew with a heart attack. That’s when my comfortable life suddenly turned complicated and Randy showed his true colors.