The Mistletoe Promise (5 page)

“Elise, this is Ashley,” Nicholas said. “We used to work together.”

She smiled at me. “I was Nick’s legal secretary. It’s nice to meet you.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” I echoed. I took Nicholas’s hand, which she noticed.

“Where’s Hazel tonight?” Nicholas asked.

“With Grandma,” she said. “Kory and I needed a night out. Looks like you did too.” She turned to me. “Nick’s the best boss I’ve ever had, but an insatiable workaholic. I’m glad to see someone got him out of the office for a change.”

“This is the first time I’ve seen him without a tie,” I said.

“I can believe that. I’m pretty sure that he sleeps with one on.” She turned back to Nicholas. “It’s good to see you. You take care.” She leaned forward, and they hugged. Then she walked around to a section directly across the theater from ours.

“How long did she work for you?” I asked.

“Three, almost four years. A year ago she quit to have a baby.”

“She likes you.”

“We worked well together,” he said simply.

We sat back in our seats as the lights dimmed and the second half began. Near the end of the performance I heard a sniffle. I furtively glanced over at Nicholas as he wiped his eyes with a crumpled Kleenex.

After the show the cast came out to the lobby to shake hands with the audience. We thanked them for the performance before walking out into the cold night air.

“That was really good,” I said.

“I’m glad I finally got to see it.”

“It affected you.”

He nodded. “It’s about redemption and hope.” He looked me in the eyes. “Hope that we can be better than our mistakes.”

His words struck me to the core. It was as if he knew me intimately. It took me a moment to respond. “Thank you for taking me.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. When we got back to his car he asked, “Are you hungry?”

“Famished.”

“Do you like Thai food?”

“I’ve never had it. But I’d like to try it.”

“Good. I know a place.”

The restaurant was less than ten minutes from the theater. A young Thai woman seated us in a vacant corner of the
restaurant and handed us menus. I looked mine over. “I have no idea what to order.”

“How about I order a few dishes and we’ll share?”

I set down my menu. “Perfect.”

When our waitress came, Nicholas ordered a bunch of things I couldn’t even pronounce, then said, “You’ll love it.” Then added, “Maybe.”

A few minutes later the waitress set two bowls of white soup on the table in front of us. “What’s this?” I asked.

“Coconut milk soup.”

Our waitress returned with a large bowl of noodles, two platters of curry dishes, and a large bowl of sticky rice.

I dished up my plate with a little of everything. I liked it all, which wasn’t too surprising, since everything was sweet.

In the middle of our dinner Nicholas asked, “Have you lived in Salt Lake your whole life?”

“No. I was born in Arizona. I lived there until I was fourteen.”

“Where in Arizona?”

“Chino Valley. Near Prescott. Do you know Arizona?”

“A little,” he replied. “I’ve spent some time there. What brought you to Utah?”

“My father.”

“Work?”

“No. It’s more complicated than that.”

“How so?”

I hesitated. “My father was an interesting man.”

“By
interesting
do you mean, a ‘fascinating individual’ or a ‘living hell’?”

I laughed. “More of the latter,” I said. Nicholas continued looking at me in anticipation. “Are you sure you really want to hear this?”

“I love to hear people’s histories,” he said. “
Especially
the interesting ones.”

“All right,” I said. “My father was fanatical. Actually, that’s putting it mildly. He thought the world was going to hell, and since the ‘lunatic’ Californians were buying up all the land around us, he sold our farm and moved us to a little town in Utah of ninety-six people. We made it an even hundred.”

“What town?”

“You’ve never heard of it.”

“Try me.”

“Montezuma Creek.”

“You’re right,” he said. “Why there?”

“Because it was about as far from civilization as you could get. And, don’t laugh, because there was only one road into town and he could blow it up when the Russians invaded.”

“Really?”

“It’s true,” I said. “He had a whole shed of dynamite and black powder.” I shook my head. “The biggest thing that ever happened in Montezuma Creek was when the Harlem Globetrotters came through town. I don’t know what brought them to such a small town. I guess they weren’t that big anymore, but the whole town showed up. I think the whole county showed up.”

“What did your father do in Montezuma Creek? To provide?”

“We had greenhouses. Big ones. We mostly grew tomatoes. We sold them to Safeway.”

“How did you end up in Salt Lake?”

“I just got out as fast as I could.”

“Didn’t like the small-town life?”

“I didn’t like my father,” I said softly. “He talked constantly about the end of days and the world being evil and corrupt, but the truth is,
he
was evil and corrupt. And violent and cruel. I lived in constant fear of him. I remember I was at our town’s little grocery store when a man I’d never met said to me, ‘I feel sorry for you.’ When I asked why, he said, ‘That you have that father. He is one awful man.’

“My father was always trying to prove that he was in control. Once I told him I was excited because we were going to have a dance lesson at school, so he made me stay home that day for no reason. Some days he would keep us home from school just to prove that the government couldn’t tell him what to do.

“He would rant that the police were just the henchmen of an Orwellian government conspiracy, and anytime one tried to pull him over, he’d try to outrun them. It was a perverse game with him. Sometimes he’d get away, sometimes they’d catch him, and they’d drag him out of the car and handcuff him, which only proved his point that the police were brutal. He lost his license, but that was irrelevant to him. He didn’t see that the government had any right to tell a person whether they could drive or not.

“I remember watching him being handcuffed and arrested, and I was afraid they were going to take me to jail too. I grew up terrified of police. Police and snakes.”

“Snakes?” Nicholas said.

I nodded. “My father used to think it was funny to chase me around the house with live rattlesnakes. I remember him holding one on a stick and it trying to strike at me.” I looked down. “I have a terrible phobia of snakes. I can’t even see a picture of one without being paralyzed with fear.”

“That’s abuse,” Nicholas said.

I nodded. “He was all about abuse. Only he didn’t see it that way. He saw us as property, and, if something is yours, you can do what you want to it. Property doesn’t have needs. Property only exists to suit to
your
needs.

“One time we had a problem with our truck. He said it was the carburetor, so he made my sister lie on the engine under the hood and pour gasoline into the carburetor while we drove. What kind of father puts his kid under the hood of a moving vehicle?”

“A deranged one,” Nicholas said. “What were his parents like?”

“That’s the strange part. My grandparents were sweet people. They used to apologize to me about him. Once my grandmother said, ‘We don’t know what happened to him, dear.’

“He considered reading for entertainment a waste of time. Once he found me in my room reading a Mary Higgins Clark book and he was furious. He called me lazy and said that if I had time to waste, he’d find something for me
to do. He made me go out and move the entire woodpile from one side of the house to the other. It took me four hours. And I was terrified the whole time, because snakes hid in the woodpile. Twice I found rattlesnakes when bringing in firewood.”

Nicholas looked sad. “I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks,” I said. “More than anything, I just wanted to be loved. In a small town like that, there aren’t a lot of romantic options. Once I told my father that a boy walked me home from school, and my father beat me and sent me to my room for the night. He called me a tramp. I believed him. I felt so guilty about it.”

“You couldn’t see that you’d done nothing wrong?”

I shook my head. “The thing is, when you grow up with crazy, you don’t know what sane is. You might suspect that there’s something better, but until you see reality, it’s impossible to comprehend.

“A year after I was married I caught my father with another woman. They were kissing. He lied about it at first, but when he saw that I didn’t believe him, he admitted that he was having an affair and told me not to tell my mother.”

“Did you?”

“No. But not because he said not to. My mother was kind of a doormat. It would have done nothing but humiliate her. She found out later on her own. It’s the only time I ever saw her yell at him. But she still didn’t leave him. He had alienated all of her family, so she really had no place to go.

“By the time I turned eighteen I couldn’t take it anymore. I left high school and got a job more than three hundred
miles away, at Bryce Canyon Lodge as a waitress. It was a good gig. They paid almost nothing, a dollar six an hour, but there was free food and lodging, and we got to keep all our tips. We just had to work two meals a day. The people at the lodge were really nice, and I made a lot of money in tips. Enough to pay for my first year of college.

“Every now and then celebrities would come through. I met Robert Redford once. He was really nice. He told me that I smelled like lilacs. I met people from all over. That’s when I knew that I wanted to travel and see the world. But I think it was probably more that I wanted to get as far away from Montezuma Creek as I could. I wanted to get as far away from my father as I could.” I forced a smile. “I didn’t get too far, I guess. I carried a lot of it with me.”

“It’s hard to leave some things behind,” Nicholas said. “So how did you turn out so lovely?”

I just looked at him. Suddenly my eyes welled up with tears. He reached over and took my hand. When I could speak I said, “Thank you.”

“Is your father still alive?”

“No. He died of cancer. Both of my parents did. They both grew up near the Nevada Proving Ground, where the government tested nuclear weapons. For dates they used to go out and watch them detonate atom bombs. Crazy, huh? They didn’t know better.”

Nicholas just shook his head. “He was a downwinder.”

“You’re familiar with that?”

“Intimately. Our firm handled a massive lawsuit against the federal government involving downwinders.”

“Well, I’m sure my father was part of it.” I sighed. “I remember going back and seeing him before he died. He was so frail and weak. I thought,
Is this really the man who filled me with such terror, who towered over my past?
He was nothing. His meanness drained out. He was like a snake without venom. He was nothing but a hollow shell.”

Nicholas looked at me, then said, “They that see thee shall narrowly look upon thee, and consider thee, saying, Is this the man that made the earth to tremble, that did shake kingdoms? Isaiah 14:16.”

“You read the Bible,” I said.

“At times,” he replied. “So you went to college in Salt Lake?”

“No. I went to Snow College. My best friend from Montezuma Creek asked if I wanted to be her roommate, so I took her up on it.”

“Snow College,” he said. “Isn’t that in Manti?”

“It’s the town next to it,” I said. “Ephraim. The one with all the turkey farms. Sometimes turkey dander would settle over the school. I was horribly allergic to it.”

“To turkey dander?” he asked.

I nodded. “That’s where I met my ex-husband, Dan.” I paused. “Dan. Dan-der. I never made that connection before.”

Nicholas laughed. “Dander. I like that.”

“Dan was from Salt Lake. He was doing his general ed at Snow because it was cheaper than the University of Utah. He was ambitious back then. He promised to show me the world. Then he left college to sell water purifiers. Dan
wasn’t very nice, but that’s what I was used to. The truth was, he was my way out. A counselor once told me that Dan was my ‘vehicle of emancipation.’ I think she was right. I followed Dan to Salt Lake, and we got married. We were married for eight years before he divorced me.”

“Why did he divorce you?”

I looked at Nicholas and said, “Wasn’t there a clause in our contract about deep and probing questions?”

“You’re right. I crossed the line.”

“Well, technically, we crossed the line about ten minutes ago,” I said. “It’s okay. Dan divorced me because he was cheating on me with my best friend.”

“Your college roommate?”

“Yes. He’s now married to her.”

“Remarkable,” Nicholas said. “What was your divorce settlement like?”

“Not good. It’s not like Dan had much money, but I didn’t get anything.”

“Sounds like you had a poor attorney.”

“No, he had a poor client.”

“Why?”

I looked down. “Some people are born thinking they’re pretty important. Some aren’t.”

Nicholas nodded slowly as if he understood.

I took a deep breath. “So now that I’ve spilled all my secrets, let’s talk about you.”

“That’s a nonstarter,” he said.

“Really? After I just shared my entire life history, you’re holding out on me?”

“I’m only saving you from boredom.”

“I think there are some answers that might interest me.”

“Such as?”

“To begin with, why aren’t you married?”

He looked at me for a moment, then said, “Isn’t that why I asked for this contract? So I didn’t have to answer that question?”

“I still want to know.”

He looked at me thoughtfully and after a moment said, “A lot of people aren’t married. A lot of people are married who shouldn’t be.”

“You’re evading the question.”

“It’s complicated,” he said.

“Is that all I get?”

“For now,” he said.

“Then tell me about your childhood.”

He frowned. “It’s nowhere near as exciting as yours. I was born and raised in the Sugar House area. My parents were quiet, conservative Mormons. I went to church until I was sixteen, until . . .” He stopped and a shadow fell over his face. “Until things changed.”