Bluegrass Christmas

“Yes.”

“Is it cordless?”

“Uh-huh.” Her shoulders softened the smallest amount.

He looked her straight in the eye, giving her his best remain calm, things are under control voice. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Go get your phone, and we’ll call Janet at the hardware store to bring over a snake catcher. She’s thirty seconds away, so we’ll have whatever it is out of your kitchen in ten minutes flat.”

Mary nodded.

“So now you need to go get the phone.”

That snapped her out of her shock. She came back with the phone and a roll of duct tape. When he raised his eyebrow at the second item, she explained “Maybe we can seal him in there until Jane gets here.”

Mac allowed himself a small chuckle. “It’s Janet, and I don’t think the duct tape will be necessary.” He gave her the phone number, and she put the handset in speaker mode while she dialed.

“Bishop Hardware.”

“Hey there, Vern, it’s Mac. Is Janet around?” he conversed in a friendly voice. Vern would have a field day with a situation like this, especially given his flair for the dramatic. He’d probably play it up, making Mary think a Komodo dragon was gnawing away the woodwork under her sink, hatching little ones who would feast on Mary in her sleep. No, this was definitely a situation that called for Janet’s calm female touch. His call was right on the money, and Janet promised to be there within three minutes with the necessary equipment.

“Got a flashlight?” Mac asked, thinking Mary needed a bit of distraction while they waited.

“Um…I think so.” Her voice was still a good octave higher than normal. “Why?” she inquired from the other room.

He thought that was obvious. “We need to see who we’re dealing with here.”

She shot back into the room, flashlight in hand. “Don’t you open that door.” Just then she noticed Curly perched on the back of her kitchen chair—she’d been oblivious to his presence until then. “Hi, Curly.” She said it calmly, as if Curly’s intruder status had been stripped—he was a friend now compared to the new invader in her home.

“Hello,” Curly responded amiably.

“Mary,” Mac began, “we can’t get him out without opening the door. It could just be a tiny little mouse making all that noise.” He didn’t really think that, but it sounded better than “It will go more smoothly if I can see how many feet long the big nasty snake is before we kill it.” Said villainous creature chose that moment to push a little against the cabinet door, making Mac gulp and Mary shriek.

“Don’t you dare open that door.”

“Okay, the door stays shut until Janet gets here. No peeking.” After a tense moment, he added, “You know, you could just take Curly down to the bakery and both get a cracker or something while we take care of your little guest here.” Mac doubted the vision of a snake twitching on the end of a stick would do much for her nerves, even if he was transporting the harmless creature downstairs to release him outside unharmed as Janet would insist he do.

“I’m staying,” she countered, the bravado in her voice was a good, if unconvincing, attempt. “But over here.” She kept the kitchen table between herself and the sink.

“You know Morse code?” Mac noted, hitting on a diversionary topic while the door thumped against his shin again. Okay, maybe it was a slightly large animal in there.

“Just the important words,” she indicated, staring directly at the cabinet door. “You know, yes, no, help, SOS, pizza.”

“Pizza?”

“Sergeant Sam’s gave you four dollars off your pizza if you ordered in Morse code. College.”

Mac laughed. She didn’t look like the kind to inhale pizza—definitely more the Brie-and-salad type. “And they say our educational system is in crisis.”

“Well, before today, I thought that was a piece of useless trivia.”

“Hello?” came Janet’s voice from the still-open front door of Mary’s apartment. “Animal rescue here!”

Mac bought Mary a second cup of coffee as they sat at the little table in Dinah’s bakery. “The snake wasn’t that big.”

Mary shot him a look. “Any snake is too big in my book. Any snake in my kitchen, that is. I’m not against them in general. God’s creatures and all. I’m sure they serve a very important link in the food chain. Just as long as that food chain stays out of my apartment.”

Mac hoisted his coffee and swallowed a laugh. “You were very brave. Even Janet was twitching a bit when we finally got that thing out of there—he was a feisty one. But totally harmless. Really. He posed more danger to Curly than to you or me.”

She doubted that. All snakes had teeth, venomous or not. She wasn’t in any hurry to add “snakebite” to her list of thrilling new experiences. “How is Curly, by the way?” she asked as she changed the subject to a different species. “Expanding his playlist?”

Mac made a face. This was obviously not an improvement in topics. “Not by a long shot.” He ran a hand through his head full of unruly sandy-colored hair. “He likes whatever it is you gave him—I have a copy on order, by the way, so you can have yours back soon—and I suppose that means he may take up something from it one of these days, but…”

“But…” she prompted as if she didn’t know what was coming.

His bottle-green eyes took on a teasing expression. “Let’s just say the Three Tenors haven’t made it to a quartet.”

“Still drowning in The Marriage of Figaro?” Mary laughed at the thought of that odd bird’s fascination with operatic tenors. “Maybe we can teach him a Christmas carol and put him in the play.”

“Only if you include one of Howard’s horses, too. He’ll want equal time.”

Mary put down her cup. “Have you always been a thorn in Howard’s side?”

Mac sat back in the chair. He wasn’t an enormous man, more of a strong, lean build, but he looked too big for the bakery’s delicate chairs. He legs refused to fit under the small round table. He flexed his fingers, putting his answer together in his head. Mac’s broad, tawny hands looked as though they divided their time between paperwork and oil changes. The kind of man who could tinker with a spreadsheet just as easily as he could an engine. Evidently she’d asked a delicate question.

“’Spose I have. We go back a bit, you could say. And yeah, Howard and I clash on a regular basis. We see things differently. But I’m not out to get him, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Does he think you are? Out to get him, I mean?”

Mac kicked his legs out, and Mary felt like they extended into the center of the room. The man took up space—literally and figuratively—and he was comfortable with it. “I quit trying to figure out what Howard’s thinking a long time ago. Still, I reckon Howard would’ve gotten his dander up at anyone who took him on, even if it wasn’t someone like me. That’s one of the reasons I felt I ought to be the one to run. That kind of heat don’t bother me much.”

That kind of heat. Meaning all that attention. Mary had learned a while back that men who liked attention didn’t much care if it was positive or negative attention. Her former boss, Thornton Maxwell, didn’t care if the business columns praised him or bashed him, as long as they discussed him. What was that old saying? “All press is good press.” Still, Mary wasn’t sure it was right to paint all extroverts with the same sinister brush as Thornton. Just because a guy took the lead didn’t mean he was ready to squash everyone in his path. And it needed saying that not one of Mary’s artsy advertising colleagues or cerebral music composition classmates could have dispatched that snake so calmly. Mac looked like an alligator would have posed an amusing challenge, or maybe some antlered forest beast would have ended up mounted to the hood of his truck.

If he owned one. Mary had never seen him drive anything but the shiny orange sports car that pulled into the spot in front of MacCarthy Engineering every morning. She still couldn’t quite see how that tall man folded into that zippy little car.

“So why’d you do it?” Mary prodded.

“Run?”

“Yeah. Why not just wait until he retired?”

“Howard? Retire? Doubt he would. Not that you shouldn’t like your job, but Howard loves his a bit too much. I’m not even sure he consciously knows he projects the ‘mayor for life’ thing, but I don’t think he can see himself not in charge. He doesn’t know how to follow. The man’s in charge of stuff he’s not even in charge of.” Mac finished off his coffee and pointed at her. “And you ought to keep that in mind. Your newcomer status may be the only thing keeping him from taking over the Christmas drama. And he still might. I saw him in the diner earlier—he’s just warming up on you. I give it two weeks before you’re knee-deep in Howard.”

Mary raised an eyebrow. Mac wasn’t looking humble himself at the moment, either. “Knee-deep in Howard’?”

“Okay, that sounded a bit ridiculous. But you know what I mean.”

She shot him a look.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t think Howard’s all bad. His motives are good. He believes he’s got the town’s best interests at heart.” Mac wiped his hands down his face, as if he still hadn’t found the words to explain what he was trying to say. “I love it here, but I get so annoyed with people for being so…predictable. People here fall into life by default. No one’s run against Howard because everybody is so used to Howard as mayor. But Howard’s so stuck in how everything’s always been that he can’t see the possibilities. I don’t want Middleburg to die off just because it’s the path of least resistance. Life should never be the path of least resistance, the expected thing.”