A Carol Christmas (6 page)

I glared at her. “You should have told me Gabe was your agent. That was just plain sneaky.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was manipulative.”

“It was bad.”

Keira held a hand in front of her and slapped it. “Bad Keira. Okay. You feel better?”

“I’ll feel better after you’re both gone.”

“Oh, come on. Don’t be small.”

“I’m not being small,” I informed her. “I just don’t want to spend the day with Gabe Knightly.”

“You’re still mad, after all this time, that I went out with him.”

“I am not,” I lied. “I just think he’s a twit.”

Keira went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “I can’t believe it. I told you nothing happened. We never, like, slept together or anything.”

Neither did we, I thought, but it wasn’t for lack of trying on Gabe’s part. I’m sure he got what he wanted from Ashleigh Home after he took her to the prom.

Well, senior proms are overrated. Anyway, I could have gone if I’d wanted. Andy Klein asked me. He’s now president of Computech Software, and a multimillionaire. I hear he married Ashleigh. Life is strange, isn’t it?

Keira was in my face now. “So, what is your problem, Andie?”

“I told you. I just don’t want to spend the day with Gabe Knightly.”

Keira grabbed my arm. “Well, get over it. You promised to spend the day with me.”

She began to tug. I dug in my heels and gritted my teeth.

Someone cleared their throat. I looked up to find the door open and Gabe standing in the doorway, one eyebrow raised. “Ready?”

He said it like a challenge. What did he think, I was afraid to be with him?

I stuffed my cell phone in my purse and raised my chin. “Any time you are.”

He smiled. That smile hadn’t lost its golden glow. In fact, if anything, it was brighter.

Well, all that glittered wasn’t gold. I followed Keira out of the bedroom and brushed past Mr. Date Every Chick in Town. There was a time when even standing near him practically gave me an electric shock. No shocks now, just an angry flare like what you get when you catch something greasy on fire.

Keira hurried across the lawn to Gabe’s Lexus, anxious to spend Spencer’s money. Before either of us got there, she’d opened the backseat door and climbed in.

Oh, cute. I supposed she thought that meant I’d have to take the front seat. I went around to the other side and got in back.

Gabe got into the driver’s seat and Keira glared at me like I was a stupid thirteen-year-old who had foiled a big, romantic plan.

“I guess I’m chauffeur today,” he said lightly.

“Home, James,” quipped Keira. “Or in this case, homes. What have you got for me?”

“I’ve got a Dutch Colonial, a Greek Revival, a Victorian . . . ”

And a partridge in a pear tree
. Good grief, I thought. We’d be out playing house all day at this rate.

“. . . a rambler, and a split level in Carol Estates,” Gabe finished.

“Forget the rambler,” Keira said.

“Okay, scratch the rambler.”

Good, I thought. One less house to wander through. That whittled down the torture by at least half an hour.

“What else?”

“Got a couple of really nice places in the new development.”

“Oooh, Dream Land,” Keira said. “That’s almost as good as getting something out on Lake Carol.”

“There’s at least one you can probably swing,” he told her. “Not at the lake, but in the development,” he added quickly.

“There’s a new development?” I asked.

Gabe shrugged. “It’s not New York, but the town is growing.”

“It’s called Fairhaven,” added Keira. They’re putting in a golf course there.”

“Golf club membership comes with the deal,” Gabe informed her.

“Spencer would like that,” Keira said. “Let’s go there first. We may as well start at the top.”

Gabe nodded and turned the car west. “So, how do you like New York?” he asked me.

“I love it,” I said. “Museums, fabulous restaurants, the theater.”

“Got somebody to go with to the theater?” he asked. He made it sound casual, like he didn’t really care. Maybe he didn’t. I didn’t care if he cared or not.

“You can always find somebody to go places with,” I said. No need to tell him I didn’t happen to have anyone to go with at the moment. I caught sight of his eyes studying me in the rear view mirror. I raised my eyebrows.
So what do you think of that?

“A lot of crime in that city,” he observed.

I shrugged. “There’s crime in every city.”

“Not Carol.”

“Carol doesn’t qualify as a city,” I said. “It doesn’t qualify as exciting, either.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It can get pretty exciting around here sometimes, can’t it, Keira?”

“There’s plenty of excitement here,” my sister agreed.

Yeah, and my family created half of it. I looked out the window and watched as houses with quiet lawns slipped by. It was like getting stuck in a time warp and finding yourself on Beaver Cleaver’s street.

Rain began to spatter the car, and Gabe flipped on his windshield wipers. Watching the rain sluice down my window, I could almost imagine myself in a car wash, going nowhere slowly.

I thought of New York, its press of people pumping along its streets like blood through an artery. The place was alive, full of energy. Carol was a town of sleepwalkers, and even the New Year’s Eve fireworks couldn’t wake it up. I was glad I’d left. I wanted to live, really live, do something exciting with my life, make an impact.

Like anyone could make an impact on New York? Well, if they were mayor. The rest of us just kept rushing around the streets, pumping, pumping, keeping the city alive. I frowned. That didn’t quite sound right.

Now we were going through downtown again. I watched out the window. No human corpuscles here, just people strolling along under umbrellas. No one strolled along in New York. No one had time. That was because they had a purpose. Here people only marked time. I looked at a trio of residents standing in front of Handy’s Hardware—a couple and a man, decked out in Eddie Bauer specials. The woman had on a knitted cap, probably handmade. She stood with her arm linked through her man’s. The other man said something and she laughed.

Further down, two women walked side by side, talking animatedly as they ducked inside Flora’s Flower Shoppe. The bakery was full of morning customers, its tables along the front window crowded with people chatting, sipping lattes and mochas and downing Mrs. Swenson’s Christmas scones.

It was like looking at one of those lighted Christmas villages, suddenly come to life. It gave me an odd and unexpected tightness deep in my chest. I closed my eyes and thought of skating at Rockefeller Center, of shopping at Macy’s. Ah, that was better.
Those little town blues are drizzling away
… or however that old song went.

Keira already had her cell phone out and was reporting in to Spencer on our destination. Or, at least to his receptionist. “Tell him we’re on our way to Fairhaven. I’ll call him when we get there.”

I thought of the cell phone sitting inside my purse and willed it to ring. Here was Keira, blabbing away about nothing while I, who had something vital and urgent to discuss, sat with a stubbornly silent phone in my purse. It would be a miracle if I heard from Beryl.

“You enjoying your stay so far?” Gabe asked me.

A visit to the emergency room, a breakfast business consultation with Lucy and Ethel, the Next Generation, and now a ride around town with an old boyfriend courtesy of my meddling sister. What was there not to enjoy?

“Oh, yeah,” I lied.

“A lot slower pace here,” he said.

Not so far
. “Mmm hmmm.”

“Lots of movers and shakers in New York,” he observed. “Are you one of them?”

That sounded like a dare.
Go ahead, Andie, just try to prove that you 're better than the rest of us
.

I wasn’t out to prove I was better. I was just out to do something with my life. There was nothing wrong with that.

And I was doing something with my life. I was about to help promote a really nutritious bread and help people get over their carb fear. That was a good thing. Did it count as moving and shaking?

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. Sometimes there were a lot of things I didn’t know. This morning was shaping up to be one of those times. “So, how did you end up in real estate?” I asked.

It was all I could do not to add, “What happened?” Everyone assumed Gabe Knightly, man most likely to succeed, would go on to do great things: become president (if not of the country, at least of a major corporation), end world hunger, turn himself into a millionaire overnight. But here he was, a small-town real estate agent. Not that there was anything wrong with being a small-town real estate agent. It just didn’t match my expectations for Gabe. And he appeared perfectly content with it. Somehow, it didn’t seem right, like he’d set out on the road to success and had taken a wrong turn somewhere. Probably dating every woman in town had gotten him sidetracked.

“Real estate looked like a good thing to do with a business degree,” he said. “I guess you could say I’m playing my own version of Monopoly. Of course, I’m no Donald Trump,” he added modestly.

“Money isn't everything,” I said. "Neither is winning at Monopoly."

A slightly uncomfortable silence took over.

We were now in the ’burbs of Carol. Actually, all of Carol looked a little like the ’burbs, but that was beside the point.

“There it is,” Keira said, pointing to a massive gated entrance. Etched into one of the brick walls in a barely legible script was the word
Fairhaven
. Translation:
Snob haven
. Behind it rose the kingdom of Self-Importance, still under construction.

Since when did we need a gated community in Carol? I wondered. Obviously, since now.

The gate wasn’t up yet, and we drove right through. “Oooh,” said Keira. If drool had a sound, her voice was it.

I felt a little drooly, myself. Many of the houses were still only framed-in shells, waiting to be completed, but even in their unfinished state they were impressive. These weren’t houses we were rolling past, they were mansions. You could probably fit three families in each one and still have room for servants. Even though they were big, it was still a housing development, I told myself. Tract mansions, I added scornfully.

The likes of which you’ll never live in
.

True. If I stayed in New York, I’d probably spend the rest of my days in an apartment. Well, there was nothing wrong with that. Less to clean.

“Here we are,” Gabe said, and pulled up in front of one of the smaller mammoth structures. This house was completed. And gorgeous. It was two stories, with a three-car garage. Brick trim everywhere, huge brick porch running along the front of the house with fat brick steps layering up to it. A double-door entry. Enough windows to suck in every ounce of sunlight the Carol sky could produce. And, speaking of sunlight, the rain had already stopped and a burst of winter sun was now making the structure glow like a prize in some gigantic cosmic Happy Meal. The house had no landscaping yet, but the yard was the size of Texas.

Tara, I thought, and the theme from the old movie
Gone With the Wind
started running through my head.

Keira got out of the car, staring at the house like she was Dorothy seeing Oz for the first time.
We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto
.

I didn’t feel like we were in Carol anymore either.

Keira started up the walkway, awed reverence in every step.

Good grief
, I thought,
it’s just a house
.

“Nice, isn’t it?” Gabe said at my elbow.

I told myself the zing that just shot through my chest had nothing to do with chemistry. He’d startled me, that was all. “If you like overblown and pretentious,” I said.

“So, you wouldn’t want to live here?”

I supposed most people would want to live in a gorgeous, huge, new house. But . . . “Not in a housing development,” I said. “I’d want a place with some land, woods, and maybe . . .”

“A pond,” he finished with me.

That jerked my head around to stare at him. I loved New York, but sometimes I still had visions of an old, rambling house on a wooded chunk of land.

“We talked about what kind of place we’d want to live in once,” Gabe said softly. “Before you broke up with me,” he added, putting teeth into the reminiscence.

Oh, no. We weren’t going to play Blame Andie. He hadn’t mourned all that long after we broke up. In fact, he hadn’t even given me time to reconsider before he went out and found a new woman. And he hadn’t exactly pined away for me after I went to college either.

I scowled at him. “Do you really want to go down that road? If you do, I could refresh your memory on a few things.”

He sighed. “Andie . . . ”

He didn’t get to finish his sentence. Keira was already at the front door and complaining. “Hey, there’s a lock box on it.”

“That’s to keep the riffraff out,” I informed her, and stepped away from Gabe.

“Ha, ha. Come on, Gabe. Open this. I’m dying to go inside.”

He remembered he was supposed to be working, not thrashing around in the stickers of Memory Lane, and went to unlock the front door. I followed at a leisurely pace, feeling the kind of righteous satisfaction you can suck out of verbal one-upmanship.

Gabe opened the door, then stepped aside to let us enter. My jaw dropped as we walked in. Slate entryway. Oak stairs with a carpet runner leading to the second story, off to the right the living room. I leaned against the archway and took it in. You could probably fit the entire Mormon Tabernacle Choir in there, and with those vaulted ceilings I supposed the acoustics would be great. (Not that I knew anything about acoustics, or even music. My brother got all the talent in that area.) I looked lustfully at the huge fireplace with its elaborate mantel and the built-in bookcases flanking it. Oh, I could have fun filling those with books and pictures and cut-glass vases with dried flowers. (They’d have to be dried. I’m not much of a gardener.)

“Ooh, this is gorgeous,” breathed Keira. She whipped out her phone and took a picture. “Look at that fireplace. I can already see the mantel with candles and holly and stockings hanging from it.”