Page 10 of Carpenter's Christmas Bride

As he walked past the other shops in town, he noticed all the Christmas displays and decorations. He and his siblings had been really into it when they were kids, getting excited every time another storefront was newly decorated.

As an adult, he couldn’t help thinking about all the time and effort that went into it, and the cost, too.

“Well, hello there, young fella,” Joe Cassidy said with a twinkly-eyed smile. The older man was leaning against the wall outside of Mario’s Pizza, clearly waiting for someone.

“Hi, Mr. Cassidy,” Aidan said. “Good to see you.”

“You too, son,” Joe said, turning to the door of the shop. It opened, and Joe’s teenaged grandson, Wyatt, stepped out with a few friends, carrying a stack of pizza boxes.

Aidan kept moving, trying not to think about the fact that one day Walt would be ordering a stack of pizzas and having parties with friends, sometimes not even at his own house.

I need to have a nice place by then, Aidan thought to himself grimly. A house that’s big enough and cool enough that all the parties happen where I can keep an eye on them.

Satisfied with this solution to his imaginary dilemma, he reached the corner of Park Avenue and glanced into Gabriel’s Drugstore. Amazingly, the old drugstore was pretty much the same as he remembered it from high school. Lacy snowflakes had been painted on the big windows to celebrate the holidays.

He turned left onto Ambler Road, and a moment later he was stepping into the toy store. An incredible display celebrated the holiday in the front window, including a tiny toy sleigh pulled by reindeer that had been suspended in the air on nearly invisible wire.

Nearly…

Aidan stopped for a moment, thinking of a better way to do it. He studied the set up for a moment, calculating in his mind…

“Thanks for stopping in,” a friendly voice chirped. “Are you interested in the reindeer set? They come with a sleigh and a little Santa Claus, of course.”

“No, thanks,” he said, turning around and taking in the lady, who was decked out in pink from head to toe. “I was, uh, looking for blocks.”

“What kind of blocks?” she asked, tilting her head slightly in a way that made him think of a big pink bird.

He wasn’t really sure what she meant. Blocks were blocks.

“My son and I are in from the city for a while,” he explained. “My aunt and uncle used to have some of the old toys from when I was a kid, but my uncle used all the Tinkertoys making bird feeders and the Bristle Blocks melted when someone left them on the radiator.”

“Aidan Webb,” the woman said, smiling and shaking her head. “I don’t know why I didn’t recognize you at first.”

He looked at her more closely. She looked sort of familiar from high school. Was this the girl Levi Williams always had a thing for?

“Lily?” he guessed.

“Yes,” she said, laughing. “You really seem different, Aidan.”

“How did you figure it out then?” he asked.

“Oh, there’s only one guy around here who builds enough bird feeders to run out of Tinkertoys,” she said. “From there, I just had to figure out which of the Webb cousins you were.”

“You sure you aren’t a police detective or something?” he joked.

She laughed and shook her head politely at his joke.

“So how old is your son?” she asked.

“He’s four,” he told her.

“Okay,” she said. “I think he would actually love Magna-Tiles. I have a couple up front if you want to play with them and see what you think.”

He trailed after her, amazed at the idea that she would guess he wanted to play with the new blocks before committing to them. She directed him to a pile of colorful, more or less flat shapes that looked almost like the pieces of a stained-glass window.

“They’re magnetic,” she told him, grabbing a few. “So you can build with them and take them apart again in a snap. They’ll stand up if you get the angles right. It’s really fun.”

He watched as she built a little box that snapped itself into place, and then picked up a few pieces himself and began to build.

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