Page 48 of Kiss Me at Christmas
The group had settled themselves at a pasting table in the cocktail lounge and were discussing Ebenezer Scrooge’s motivations and how he came to be so hard-hearted when James joined them.
“Could I have a quick word?” he asked, catching her eye.
“Of course.”
“Ooooh!” Carly said in a singsong voice.
“Old-person love is kind of cute,” said Leo, smiling.
Harriet shushed him as she stood to leave.Old-person love indeed!
They pushed through the saloon doors and out into the corridor, where a man wearing a Nike cap backward and over-ear headphones was expertly layering plaster onto the wall, while a woman in dungarees was painstakingly reconstructing a section of broken cornice.
“I’m sorry about Evaline,” he said, when they were out of earshot. “She speaks as she finds, and she generally finds a lot to speak about. She can be a bit much.”
That’s an understatement!
“As much as I hate to admit it, she’s got me pegged. She’s astute, I’ll give her that much. Thank you for, you know, not ratting me out to Evaline about Carly and Ricco’s little indiscretion. I assume you heard it all.”
“I got the gist,” he said. “Thankfully, Evaline had turned down her hearing aid because of all the building noise.”
“I guess I caught a break on that one.”
“I imagine Evaline would have strong views on recreational drug use, especially in her theater,” said James. “You would likely have lost any chance at a community space going forward. Unlike Ken, she doesn’t give second chances. She barely gives first chances.”
“I honestly don’t know how you tolerate her.”
“This may sound hard to believe, but she grows on you.” He pulled a face like even he couldn’t believe what he was saying.
“Like skin tags,” she deadpanned back, and he laughed.
“More like a wallpaper that at first you think you’ll never get used to until after a while you find you’ve grown quite fond of it.”
“Hmmm. I think it’ll be a long time before I feel any kind of fondness for Evaline Winter.”
“Well, anyway, I’m sorry that she gave you a hard time. If it’s any consolation, it means that she likes you. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t bother.”
“Tough love, huh?”
“I think tough is the only language she knows. This theater was her father’s whole world and there wasn’t much left over for his only daughter.”
“That’s sad.”
“He had no time for her when the theater was thriving, and then when things started to go downhill he became a recluse, shut himself away from everything and everyone.”
“Including Evaline,” Harriet guessed.
“He sent her away to school. It needn’t have ended in the way it did. The theater could have kept going on a smaller scale but he refused to open it up to local productions, preferring to have no show at all than what he deemed as beneath him. His snobbery was the death of the place, and eventually the death of him too. Evaline blames this place for ruining her father. She’s worked tirelessly to rebuild the Winter family fortunes and left the theater to rot.”
It was hard for Harriet to picture Evaline as a girl, desperately trying to get her father to notice her. “I guess letting a bunch of student dramatists loose in her dad’s hallowed theater is one way of giving her old man the bird.”
He laughed.
“You could be right. Fitz-William had a lot of offers for the building when the theater closed. He even had one from an Italian casino owner who wanted to extendhis empire and he felt Little Beck Foss was the place to do it.”
“Really? Here?” Harriet was incredulous.
“Las Vegas wasn’t much more than a dusty little railroad town before the casinos went up. Maybe this guy thought he could do the same here. It’s all academic anyway, because Fitz-William turned down the casino and all the other offers, even though Evaline begged him to sell up. This place is her own personal ghost.”
