Page 5 of The Christmas Box

From where she’s measuring cocoa powder into the hot chocolate machine, she tilts her antlers. “Should I know him? Is he related to Wally and Tom?”

“No. And yes. He’s Tom’s son and he left Winterberry right after he high school—we graduated in the same class.” I explain what I’ve learned about Tom’s imminent passing and why his son has returned home.

“That’s really sad,” she says, now filling a water pitcher at an old sink we left installed near the bar. “But on the up side, he looks like he could make your Christmas merry.”

I balk. “MyChristmas? No thank you.”

She’s taken aback at my vehemence. “Sheesh—what did he ever do toyou? Stand you up for a date in high school or something?”

I turn to face her. “Yes.”

She flinches, her green gaze widening, the little diamond in her nose glittering beneath the lights. “I was kidding.” She turns off the faucet just before the pitcher overflows.

“Well, I’m not. Though it wasn’texactlya date. But it was…an obligation on his part.” As the word leaves me, I’m reminded how much he seems to resent obligations. “One that left me humiliated.”

“Spill the tea, girl,” she demands.

I let out a sigh at having to remember this twice in the same morning when I haven’t thought about it in years. “In senior year, we were elected to represent our homeroom at the Winterberry Christmas Ball.”

“Wow,” she says. “I wasneverelected for anything like that.”

“Neither was I, until then. I was just that quiet girl no one usually noticed,” I explain since she was five years behind me in school, our friendship starting later. “So it came as a shock, and a nice one. It was a big deal to me. My grandma worked so hard making me a gorgeous emerald green gown.”

“And then?”

“Well, you remember the tradition with the laurels.”

She nods, looking a little resentful. “I wanted one of those things so bad.” Despite the time between my graduation and hers, apparently the envy surrounding the laurels endured.

School tradition was that the guy went to the Holly Leaf Florist, just north of Winterberry in Holly Ridge, and ordered a custom head wreath, in Christmas colors, which he presented to the girl he was accompanying before the ceremony. The girls wore their wreaths as they were escorted across the gym floor, the bleachers filled with onlookers, and the one elected queen would place her wreath on the head of a favorite teacher before she was crowned. Cheesy, maybe, but every girl secretly wanted one of those pretty holiday laurels. And my time had finally come.

Except that it actually hadn’t. “Well,” I tell Dara, “Istillnever got one because Travis Hutchins stood me up. He just plain didn’t come. I was the only girl walking by herself, and without a wreath.”

“Ugh,” Dara says. “That sucks.”

“It was pretty humiliating,” I go on. “Kids made fun of me, yelling across the gym,‘Guess he didn’t want to be seen with you.’ ‘Must’ve gotten a better offer.’”I use my best fake nasty bully voice.

Looking back as an adult, it hardly mattered. But as an insecure high-schooler who thought I was having a special night, it was devastating. “And get ready for the cherry on top. When Wendy Acara was elected queen, instead of giving her wreath to a teacher, she gave it tomeinstead.” A lovely gesture from a popular girl who didn’t have to be nice to me—but somehow it only seemed to shine a light on my embarrassment.

“Oh no,” Dara says, her face etched with revulsion. “A pity laurel.”

“Exactly. In front of the whole school.”

And what made it worse was—maybe I developed a crush on him somewhere between the homeroom vote and the ball two months later. We barely spoke before, and we never spoke after—he never acknowledged not showing, and I never confronted him. But for a brief period of time, I suffered a niggling attraction that was, in the end, rewarded only with getting dissed.

I relocked the front door after he left earlier, and now, as opening time draws near, I head back up front. About to flip the lock again, I spot him working in the storefront across the street, surrounded by sawhorses, a big electric saw, and lots of wood. Done filling the cocoa machine, Dara steps up beside me. “A shame you have a bad history with him I love a man who’s good with his hands.”

“Then maybe I can fixyouup with him the next time he comes in for coffee,” I offer.

Her head darts around. “He came in for coffee?”

“Helen’s fault. He asked where he could get some, and she sent himhere. “

“The horror,” Dara teases. “How dare she bring you business!”

“Well, he’s not exactly who I wanted my first customer to be.”

“Was he nice? Did he remember the Christmas dance that never was?”

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