A Stone Creek Christmas

Meg, blond like her husband and son, tilted her head to one side and gave Olivia a humorously pensive once-over. “Are you okay?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” Olivia said, too quickly. Mac was gravitating toward his playpen, where he had a pile of toys, and Meg took him and gently set him inside it. She turned back to Olivia.

Just then Brad blew in on a chilly November wind. Bent to pat Ginger and Willie.

“Rudolph is snug in his stall,” Brad said. “Having some oats.”

“Rudolph?” Meg asked, momentarily distracted.

Olivia was relieved. She and Meg were very good friends, as well as family, but Meg was half again too perceptive. She’d figured out that something was bothering Olivia, and in another moment she’d have insisted on finding out what was up. Considering that Olivia didn’t know that herself, the conversation would have been pointless.

“Liv will be here for Thanksgiving,” Brad told Meg, pulling his wife against his side and planting a kiss on the top of her head.

“Of course she will,” Meg said, surprised that there’d ever been any question. Her gaze lingered on Olivia, and there was concern in it.

Suddenly Olivia was anxious to go.

“I have two million things to do,” she said, bending over the playpen to tickle Mac, who was kicking both feet and waving his arms, before heading to the front door and beckoning for Ginger.

“We’ll see you tomorrow at the ground-breaking ceremony,” Meg said, smiling and giving Brad an affectionate jab with one elbow. “We’re expecting a big crowd, thanks to Mr. Country Music here.”

Olivia laughed at the face Brad made, but then she recalled that Tanner Quinn would be there, too, and that unsettled feeling was back again. “The ground’s pretty hard, thanks to the weather,” she said, to cover the momentary lapse. “Let’s hope Mr. Country Music still has the muscle to drive a shovel through six inches of snow and a layer of ice.”

Brad showed off a respectable biceps, Popeye-style, and everybody laughed again.

“I’ll walk you to the truck,” he said, when Olivia would have ducked out without further ado.

He opened the driver’s door of the Suburban, and Ginger made the leap, scrabbling across to the passenger seat. Olivia looked at her in surprise, since she usually wasn’t that agile, but Brad reclaimed her attention soon enough.

“Is everything okay with you, Livie?” he asked. He and the twins were the only people in the world, now that Big John was gone, who called her Livie. It seemed right, coming from her big brother or her sisters, but it also made her ache for her grandfather. He’d loved Thanksgiving even better than Christmas, saying he figured the O’Ballivans had a great deal to be grateful for.

“Everything’s fine,” Olivia said. “Why does everybody keep asking me if I’m okay? Meg did—now you.”

“You just seem—I don’t know—kind of sad.”

Olivia didn’t trust herself to speak, and suddenly her eyes burned with moisture.

Brad took her gently by the shoulders and kissed her on the forehead. “I miss Big John, too,” he said. Then he waited while she climbed onto the running board and then the driver’s seat. He shut the door and waved when she went to turn around, and when she glanced into the rearview mirror, he was still standing there with Willie, both of them staring after her.

Chapter Three

Although Brad liked to downplay his success, especially now that he didn’t go out on tour anymore, he was clearly still a very big deal. When Olivia arrived at the building site on the outskirts of Stone Creek at nine forty-five the next morning, the windswept clearing was jammed with TV news trucks and stringers from various tabloids. Of course the townspeople had turned out, too, happy that work was about to begin on the new animal shelter—and proud of their hometown boy.

Olivia’s feelings about Brad’s fame were mixed—he’d been away playing star when Big John needed him most, and she wasn’t over that—but seeing him up there on the hastily assembled plank stage gave her a jolt of joy. She worked her way through the crowd to stand next to Meg, Ashley and Melissa, who were grouped in a little cluster up front, fussing over Mac. The baby’s blue snowsuit was so bulky that he resembled the Michelin man.

Ashley turned to smile at Olivia, taking in her trim, tailored black pantsuit—a holdover from her job interview at the veterinary clinic right after she’d finished graduate school. She’d ferreted through boxes until she’d found it, gone over the outfit with a lint roller to get rid of the ubiquitous pet hair, and hoped for the best.

“I guess you couldn’t quite manage a dress,” Ashley said without sarcasm. She was tall and blond, clad in a long skirt, elegant boots and a colorful patchwork jacket she’d probably whipped up on her sewing machine. She was also stubbornly old-fashioned—no cell phone, no Internet connection, no MP3 player—and Olivia had often thought, secretly of course, that her younger sister should have been born in the Victorian era, rather than modern times. She would have fit right into the 1890s, been completely comfortable cooking on a woodburning stove, reading by gaslight and directing a contingent of maids in ruffly aprons and scalloped white caps.

“Best I could do on short notice,” Olivia chimed in, exchanging a hello grin with Meg and giving Mac’s mittened hand a little squeeze. His plump little cheek felt smooth and cold as she kissed him.

“Since when is a year ‘short notice’?” Melissa put in, grinning. She and Ashley were fraternal twins, but except for their deep blue eyes, they bore no noticeable resemblance to each other. Melissa was small, an inch shorter than Olivia, and wore her fine chestnut-colored hair in a bob. Having left the law office where she worked to attend the ceremony, she was clad in her usual getup of high heels, pencil-straight skirt, fitted blazer and prim white blouse.

Up on stage, Brad tapped lightly on the microphone.

Everybody fell silent, as though the whole gathering had taken a single, indrawn breath all at the same time. The air was charged with excitement and civic pride and the welcome prospect of construction jobs to tide over the laid-off workers from the sawmill.

Meg’s eyes shone as she gazed up at her husband. “Isn’t he something?” she marveled, giving Olivia a little poke with one elbow as she shifted Mac to her other hip.

Olivia smiled but didn’t reply.

“Sing!” someone shouted, somewhere in the surging throng. Any moment now, Olivia thought, they’d all be holding up disposable lights in a flickering-flame salute.

Brad shook his head. “Not today,” he said.

A collective groan rose from the crowd.

Brad put up both hands to silence them.

“He’ll sing,” Melissa said in a loud and certain whisper. She and Ashley, being the youngest, barely knew Brad. He’d been trying to remedy that ever since he’d moved back from Nashville, but it was slow going. They admired him, they were grateful to him, but it seemed to Olivia that her sisters were still in awe of their big brother, too, and therefore a strange shyness possessed them whenever he was around.

Brad asked Olivia and Tanner to join him on stage.

Even though Olivia had expected that, she wished she didn’t have to go up there. She was a behind-the-scenes kind of person, uncomfortable at the center of attention. When Tanner appeared from behind her, took her arm and hustled her toward the wooden steps, she caught her breath. Stone Creekers raised an uproarious cheer, and Olivia flushed with embarrassment, but Tanner seemed untroubled.

He wore too-new, too-expensive boots, probably custommade, to match his too-new hat, along with jeans, a black silk shirt and a denim jacket. He seemed as at home getting up in front of all those people as Brad did—his grin dazzled, and his eyes were bright with enjoyment.

Drugstore cowboy, Olivia thought, but she couldn’t work up any rancor. Tanner Quinn might be laying on the Western bit a little thick, but he did look good. Way, way too good for Olivia’s comfort.

Brad introduced them both: Tanner as the builder, and Olivia—“You all know my kid sister, the horse doctor”—as the driving force behind the project. Without her, he said, none of this would be happening.

Never having thought of herself as a driving force behind anything in particular, Olivia grew even more flustered as Brad went on about how she’d be heading up the shelter when it opened around that time next year.

More applause followed, the good-natured, hometown kind, indulgent and laced with chuckles.

Let this be over, Olivia thought.

“Sing!” someone yelled. The whole audience soon took up the chant.

“Here’s where we make a run for it,” Tanner whispered to Olivia, and the two of them left the stage. Tanner vanished, and Olivia went back to stand with her sisters and Meg.

Brad grinned, shaking his head a little as one of his buddies handed up a guitar. “One,” he said firmly. After strumming a few riffs and turning the tuning keys this way and that, he eased into “Meg’s Song,” a ballad he’d written for his wife.

Holding Mac and looking up at Brad with an expression of rapt delight, Meg seemed to glow from the inside. A sweet, strange alchemy made it seem as though only Brad, Meg and Mac were really there during those magical minutes, on that blustery day, with the snow crusting hard around everybody’s feet. The rest of them might have been hovering in an adjacent dimension, like actors waiting to go on.

When the song ended, the audience clamored for more, but Brad didn’t give in. Photographers and reporters shoved in close as he handed off the guitar again, descended from the stage and picked up a brand-new shovel with a blue ribbon on the handle. The ribbon, Olivia knew, was Ashley’s handiwork; she was an expert with bows, where Olivia always got them tangled up, fiddling with them until they were grubby.

“Are you making a comeback?” one reporter demanded.