Snowflakes and Silver Linings

Except, of course, for the gift, her secret plan to get her life back on track.

Now, here with her friends, cuddling her secret to her, Casey actually felt as if she might start humming, “It’s beginning to feel a lot like Christmas....”

“That sense of home doesn’t have a thing to do with looks,” she said, wanting to share what she was feeling with her friends.

Belonging.

She had never felt it with her own family. At school, she had been the outsider, the too-smart geek. Her work was engrossing, but largely solitary.

But being here with Emily and Andrea, the Gingerbread Girls all together again, Casey felt hope.

Even though, sadly, Melissa was not here. Why did it take a tragedy for people to understand that friendship was a gift to be cherished, and not taken for granted?

Casey and Andrea had spent two days together here early in December, Casey seeking the refuge of friendship to try and outrun her latest family fiasco. Really, any given year she might as well block out all of December on her calendar and write “crisis” on it.

But before her meeting with Andrea it had been far too long since she and her friends, who’d always called themselves “the Gingerbread Girls,” had been together.

After seeing Andrea, Casey had made her decision.

Now, she was loving the fact that they were as comfortable as if they had been together only yesterday. Sentences began with “Remember when...” and were followed by gales of laughter. The conversation flowed easily as they caught up on the details of one another’s lives.

“Speaking of looks, I can’t believe the way you look,” Emily told Casey for about the hundredth time. “I just can’t get over it.”

“You should be modeling,” Andrea agreed.

“Modeling?” Casey laughed. “I think models are usually a little taller than five foot five.”

“The world’s loss,” Andrea said with a giggle, and took a sip of her wine.

Casey sipped hers, as well. Emily, pregnant, her baby bump barely noticeable beneath her sweater, was glowing with happiness and was sipping sparkling fruit juice instead of wine.

Next year at this time, that could very well be me, Casey mused, and the thought made her giddy.

“How do you get your hair so straight?” Andrea asked. “You didn’t have it like that when I saw you earlier this month. Remember how those locks of yours were the bane of your existence? All those wild curls. No matter what you did, that head of hair refused to be tamed. Remember the time we tried ironing it? With a clothes iron?”

Would her baby have wild curls? Casey hoped not.

“I always loved it,” Emily said. “I was jealous.”

“Of my hair?” she asked, incredulous. She touched it self-consciously. She had a flat iron that was state-of-the-art, a world away from what they had tried that humid summer day.

Still, her curls surrendered to the highest setting with the utmost reluctance, and were held at bay with enough gel to slide a 747 off a runway. And yet as she touched her hair, it felt coiled, ready to spring.

“I thought you were quite exotic, compared to Andrea and me.”

“Really?”

“Why so surprised?”

Maybe it was her second glass of wine that made her admit it. “I always felt like the odd woman out. Here was this wonderful inn, out of an American dream, filled with all these wholesome families, like yours and Andrea’s. And then there was the Caravetta clan. A boisterous Italian family, always yelling and fighting and singing and crying and laughing, and whatever we were doing, we were doing it loudly. Next to you and Andrea, I felt like I was a little too much of everything.”

“But you weren’t like that,” Emily said. “You were always so quiet and contained. If you were too much of anything it was way too smart, Doc. Thinking all the time.”

Casey dismissed the comment with a wave of her hand. “I didn’t mean that. You were both tall, reed thin and fair, while I was short and plump, and had skin that came straight from the olive grove. You had well-behaved blond ponytails. I had dark tangles and coils that did whatever they wanted. You both have that all-American look, Emily, with your eyes like jade, and Andrea’s like sapphires.”

“There is nothing wrong with your eyes!” Andrea declared.

“Ha! My grandmother used to look at my eyes and say they were so dark she could see the devil in them. And then she’d cross herself.”

Would Casey’s baby have her eyes? Did she get to choose the eye color of the father? So much to learn!

“The devil? That’s ridiculous, especially given how studious you were. But still, I always thought you were unusually striking, and faintly mysterious,” Emily insisted.

“A model,” Andrea reiterated. “I think you should be a model.”

“A model,” Casey snorted. “Believe me, I’m quite happy doing research at the lab.”

“As noble as medical research is, Casey, isn’t that a tad dull?” Emily asked.

“I love it,” she said honestly. “I have such a sense of purpose to my days, a feeling I could make the world a better place.”

“Isn’t it a little, well, depressing? Childhood cancers?” Andrea pressed.

“My twin brother died of nasopharyngeal cancer when he was six,” Casey said. And so a family unravels.

“I’d forgotten,” Andrea said. “I’m so sorry.”

“It was long before I met you,” Casey said. “Don’t worry about it.” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Emily give her little baby bump a protective pat. “And don’t you worry about it, either. Childhood cancers are extremely rare,” she assured her pregnant friend.

Casey was aware she might have chosen her work in some effort to make right all that had gone wrong in her family. But regardless of her motives, the order of science, after the unfolding chaos in her family, appealed to her. The wine hadn’t, thankfully, loosened her tongue enough to tell them why she’d chosen the vow renewal over spending Christmas with her widowed mother.

“Maybe you could model on the side,” Andrea said hopefully.

“Why would I want to?” Casey asked. “Talk about dull. Good grief. Hours on hair—” well, okay, her hair took nearly that long, anyway “—and makeup? I’d expire of pure boredom.”

“Men,” Andrea said knowingly. “You’d meet a zillion guys. How many do you meet in your dusty old lab?”

No sense pointing out there was not a speck of dust anywhere in her lab!

“And then,” Andrea continued dreamily, “you could meet the right one. Look at how much Emily loves being married. Renewing her vows! And Rick and I will probably have a spring wedding. If you could find the perfect guy, all our kids could grow up together here in the summers, the same as we did.”

How quickly things could change! Just a few weeks ago Andrea had been as determined not to fall in love as Casey herself was. Her friend was no weakling, so Casey inadvertently shivered at how love could overpower the most sensible of plans.

Emily shot Andrea a warning look that clearly said, Careful, Casey is recovering from a broken heart—last year’s Christmas crisis. Then she tactfully tried to guide the conversation in a different direction. “Anyway, the inn is for sale.”

Andrea appeared pained for a minute, but then shrugged it off. “I don’t know. I’ve seen how Martin Johnson, the electrician, looks at Carol. I think he’s a man capable of restoring the Gingerbread Inn to its former glory. And it seems it would be a labor of love.”

“Carol is resisting him,” Emily said. “I’m afraid I overheard a bit of a shouting match between them.”