Merry's Christmas: A Love Story

To every heart

that hangs onto hope

in the miracle that is Christmas.

♥   
♥    ♥

contents

one

two

three

four

five

six
seven

eight

nine

ten

eleven

twelve

About the
Author

one

P
erhaps
it didn’t make sense to throw open the window and let the scant heat of a
drafty studio apartment escape into the brisk December air. But for Merry
Hopper, responding to the fullness of her heart trumped what made sense to most
other people on a regular basis.

No matter what anyone thought, said, or
did, and most especially on this particular morning, everything in Merry sang
out in celebration. This was the season—her season. She knew it, with a
conviction as dependable as the elevated train rumbling by hourly, as certain
as the rent she had no way to pay, and as insistent as the calico cat at her
feet, meowing for breakfast.

“There they are, Rudy!” she exuded,
scooping up the feline for a peek out the window. “Look. See? It’s already
starting.”

Indeed, just across the street, city
workers bustled about, festooning the eaves of the train station with
machine-wrought pine boughs and enormous extruded bows. Clearly, the
decorations had weathered many a year, but the sight of their return was still
a welcome reminder of the coming Yuletide season.

Even though Merry had been both born and
abandoned on Christmas day almost twenty-nine years prior; even though she’d
been bounced around the foster care system without ever having a family to call
her own, Christmas was a time when Merry liked to think that all the world was
celebrating her birthday, too. Jubilantly, she threw open the sash.

“Merry Christmas, Mr. Grabinski!” Merry
called out, the winter blast whipping through her well-worn pajamas.

Fastidious to a fault, the apartment
super barely looked up, compulsively sweeping balsam and pine bits into neat
little piles on the walk. “Merry Schmerry,” he groused. “I’m barely picked up
from Thanksgiving and already they got needles all over creation.”

Suddenly, Merry’s eyes widened
incredulously. It couldn’t be happening, but it was. Just beyond Mr. Grabinski,
a stocky, middle-aged man leaned over the business end of a tow truck. He was
well into hooking up a faded red Volkswagen Beetle.

To call the vintage Bug red was, at most,
a generous way of acknowledging what the color once was, long before the
oxidation and saltings of too many Chicago winters had had their way with the
paint. Still, it was Merry’s—almost paid for with her meager base as a
waitress. It would be all hers in just a couple of months, if holiday tipping
measured up to her hopes.

“No!” Merry cried. “No, no, hey that’s...
Wait!”

Merry ducked inside, disappearing from
the window, finally motivating Mr. Grabinski to peer up to her second story
walk-up, where tattered curtains billowed out of the abandoned portal.

“The window, Merry!” he bellowed. “I’m
not heating the whole free world!”

Hearing him, Merry circled back to close
the window, and then dashed through her humble dwelling. She scrambled to throw
on a coat that had seen far too many seasons, knocking an overflowing box of
decorations onto the floor in the process.

“Wait, wait, wait... I’m coming!” Merry
shouted, as she leapt over her calico cat, Rudy, and ran out of her apartment
door, down the stairs, and out the front door.

At curbside, the tow truck guy continued
to secure Merry’s Beetle to his rig, undeterred by her protests, which resumed
in earnest the moment she burst from the building.

“Mister, please, I’m good for it! I get
paid this afternoon!”

“Then, you can take it to the impound,”
he grunted.

“Come on, it’s Christmas time,” Merry
tried, “How am I supposed to get around?”

The expression on his face told Merry
that this guy had heard it all. What was worse, he refused to look at her.
“Sounds like the upside of living under a train,” he cracked, locking off the
car.

Merry was well accustomed to dealing with
grouchy men. She had a way of breaking through the even gruffest of hearts to
the soft, gooey center underneath. “Please,” she implored. “Okay, okay, just...
Come on, look at me like a human being in completely genuine need and don’t do
this.”

Finally, he turned to her. For a moment,
it seemed he might relent. “No, you look at me,” he barked. “I don’t take the
Bug, I don’t get paid, then I got nothin’ at all to put under the tree for my
kids this year.”

Merry stopped in her tracks. She had a
soft spot for kids, especially kids who had to do without, the way she’d had to
do for so many years. “But...” Merry continued, her conviction to fight for
herself waning as the man headed toward the cab of his truck. She followed him
as he plopped into the driver’s seat and stuck his keys in the ignition.
“Seriously? Kids, huh?”

“Five.”

Suddenly, everything in Merry
flip-flopped. She did look at the tow truck guy. She looked at him hard. He
didn’t seem nearly as heartless as he had at first. He wasn’t her enemy. He was
just a dad, working a thankless job in a tough economy to put food on the table
for his family.

“Just take it,” she sighed.

And take Merry’s car, he did. Without
another word, he started the truck and puttered away with Merry’s
not-so-very-red Beetle bouncing along in tow behind him.

Merry watched, defeated, as the only
thing of value she almost owned disappeared into the distance. It was like
losing a friend of sorts, and she promised herself that somehow she’d get it
back.

Merry turned, mortified that Mr.
Grabinski had observed the entire incident. “Monday’s the first,” he reminded.
“You got rent.”

Merry pulled her coat closed. “I know, I
know,” she assured.

Merry scurried back to her apartment and
closed the door, choking back tears. Her cat, Rudy, studied her. He was that
special kind of animal that seemed to understand when her life got to be
overwhelming.

Outside the vintage Downtown Diner,
Skeeter Jeffries held up a cardboard sign that read: “Will Work for Food. God
Bless You!” Merry kept an eye out for Skeeter through the plate glass window
while she worked. He was a daily reminder that there were those who faced
challenges even greater than hers.

Pedestrians routinely passed Skeeter by,
refusing so much as to make eye contact. But over time, Merry had watched
Skeeter as he’d developed something of an arms’ length relationship with the
diner’s regulars, and how they’d come to be good for bits of loose change after
they’d filled their own growling stomachs.

Merry had gotten to know Skeeter over the
four long years since he’d been laid off from his job with the city’s
Sanitation Department. A younger man might have found another position, she
realized. But Skeeter was near retirement age and had long since accepted his
lot in life. He had acclimated to making his way on the street and to the
cardboard box behind the diner that he had come to call home.

Inside the diner, Merry waited as the
barrel-bodied owner and short-order cook, Arthur Biddle, stacked freshly
grilled hotcakes onto a plate. Merry had known for a long time that Arthur
wasn’t one to do the niceties. There might have been an unrefined gruffness to
his exterior, but in Merry’s experience, Arthur had always been a stand-up guy.
He’d given her a job when she needed it and a helpful hand on more occasions
than she could count.
 

“My offer, it still stands,” Arthur
announced, scooping a dollop of butter onto the steaming stack of cakes.

As nonchalant as he was about it, one
would have thought Arthur was referring to an advance on Merry’s pay or an
arrangement for vacation time. But Merry knew exactly what offer Arthur meant
immediately. It wasn’t something they talked about. They hadn’t spoken a word
of it since the day Arthur had first flipped those Four Words onto the table.