Page 25 of The Hockey Grump Saves Christmas

“Oh, Nat, it’s going to be amazing.” She rests her elbows on the table and cups her chin in her hands like she could swoon at just the mere thought of Gabe’s presence.

“Well, we’ll see. There’s only one week and six days, not that I’m panic-counting, to make all the changes and throw it together. So I’m meeting him at the theater tomorrow. He’s going to help me sort out what might be salvageable from the fire.”

Aunt Lou jumps to her feet. “Your skates,” she cries, as if she’s just discovered the answer to whether Shakespeare really did writehis own plays.

“Oh, I won’t be skating.”

“Yes. Yes, you will,” she says. “They’re in my storage locker in the basement. The ones you had in your last year of high school. The pink ones. You can show Gabe that amazing twirling thing you did.”

My skin crawls with mortification. “That was ten years ago. I doubt I could even stand upright now, never mind do anything even remotely resembling a twirling thing.”

“All right,” she says, refocusing her attention on the room like a woman on a mission. “We have twelve more sets of tables and chairs to put up. Then we need to arrange them with cloths and candles and coasters, then I’ll go down and dig out those skates.”

She scurries off to grab more furniture.

“Aunt Lou,” I call to her retreating form, “I’ve got no intention of doing any skating.”

“You never know,” she says, already on her way back with a folding chair dangling from each hand. “Maybe you’ll be the one to have Gabe Woods’s beautiful and incredibly talented babies.”

The cringeworthy shamefulness of the thought of skating in front of him pales into insignificance at the humiliating idea of Aunt Lou trying to set me up with him.

“What the hell is wrong with you? Of course I’m not going to have his babies. I don’t like him. And he thinks I’m the most irritating person he’s ever met. And he lives in New York, and I’m moving to New Orleans in a few weeks. And he’s a famous sports person, who I had never heard of, but apparently he’s quite well-known, and I’m just a small-town drama teacher who’s trying to shake her life up into meaning something by moving miles away to anew city. So, no. No. Put the idea totally out of your head. I will not ever be having Gabe Woods’s babies.”

Aunt Lou hands me a chair and gives me one of those glares. “And you clearly haven’t thought about it much.”

CHAPTER 9

GABE

I cannot believe I let myself get roped into this. I’m supposed to be lying on my incredibly comfy new sofa, watching whatever National Geographic wants to teach me about the animal kingdom, making myself whatever non-festive food I want for dinner, and talking to absolutely no one.

But here I am, standing on the half of the Warm Springs theater stage that still appears safe, aside from the hole that has orange cones on either side of it, surrounded by the scattered remnants of burned scenery, props and costumes.

“Oh my God,” Natalie says for the one-hundred-and-sixty-seventh time since I got here five minutes ago. “I can’t believe it.”

From a partially melted plastic bin she pulls out what looks like an old brown curtain and holds it up.

“The nobleman’s cloak,” she says. “Ruined.”

“Since you’ve said that about everything you’ve encountered so far, I’d expect you to be getting less surprised.”

She scrunches the cloak into a fist that she slams onto her hip as she sucks her teeth and stares at me. A chunk of the crisp fabric snaps off and floats to her feet.

“Also,” I add, “if it’s all useless, wouldn’t it be quicker to stop sorting through it and just trash everything and start from scratch? Certainly seems the most logical option to me.”

“It might be more logical, but a lot of people put a lot of time and effort into making these things, so if anything can be salvaged, I’m salvaging it.”

“Shame about the trees.” I poke my toe at the pile of half-burned cutout plywood trees that Nat was stacking up on the stage when I got here. “Someone sure made a fuck-ton of them.”

“That’s because this year I set it in a forest.”

“You set it in different places each time?”

“Yup. That’s one of the points of it. Telling the same story in a new and original way each year.”

“Where else have you set it?” Why the fuck am I asking? I couldn’t give a shit where this play’s been set—this year or any other. But I guess it might help to focus her on something other than freaking out about every individual ruined item.

Nat’s face lights up, like she’s suddenly forgotten we’re surrounded by the charred remains of her Christmas dreams. “My favorite was three years ago when we set it in the 1960s. We did itGrease-style. All greasers and girls with those full circle skirts.” She holds her arms out and swings her hips from side to side, presumably to demonstrate an action that is compulsory to make when wearingone. “It was very cool,” she says. “Two dads made the most brilliant wigs.”

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