A Coldwater Warm Hearts Christmas Read online

  Still, something about the logo on his shirt niggled at her memory.

  Parker Construction.

  The company had just won the bid to build an addition to the high school. They were known for tackling big projects all over southeast Oklahoma with a reputation for delivering high quality and on time completion.

  Could this guy be that Parker? She doubted it. The strong, silent type had a lot to commend it, but this man spoke in monosyllables. How could he run a successful company?

  “Come on now.” He turned and headed for the door. When she didn’t follow, he stopped, and cocked his head at her. “You coming?”

  “I am not in the habit of going off with strange men.”

  “Nothing strange about me, miss. I’m common as an old shoe.” He opened the door and held it wide for her. “Meeting’s been moved to the courthouse. Like I said, Heather sent me for you.”

  So it wasn’t a setup. The Warm Hearts Club meeting had just been moved. Feeling foolish, Angie rose, and headed for the door. “Oh. You might have said so.”

  “Thought I did.”

  “Wait up, Teach!” Lester called after her. “Don’t you want your omelet?”

  “Sorry, Lester. I have to go.”

  “I’ll take it,” Tad Van Hook spoke up. “I need to eat and get out of here. Emma’s waffles are going to take forever.”

  Emma slumped a little in the booth, but Tad didn’t seem to notice.

  “I can put it in a to-go box for you, Teach,” Lester said.

  “No, that’s okay. Give it to Tad,” Angie said as she swept past Seth, who was still holding the door for her. At least, he was a well-trained Neanderthal.

  And no one deserves a Hypocrite’s Vegetarian Omelet more than Tad Van Hook.

  Chapter 2

  I’m a sucker for lost causes and damsels in distress.

  Someday, I’m gonna have to learn to say no.

  —Seth Parker, who wishes there was a blueprint that would help him figure out what’s going on in someone else’s head

  Heather Walker Evans, founding member of the Coldwater Warm Hearts Club, waved to them as Angie and Seth joined the group gathered on the courthouse steps. “I think we’re all here now.”

  Angie did a quick head count. Valentina Gomez, Marjorie Chubb, Ian Van Hook, Virgil Cooper, Charlie Bunn, and Junior Bugtussle stood in a semicircle around Heather. Now that she and Seth Parker were there, everyone was present and accounted for.

  “Let’s get started,” Heather said, opening the little notebook she always carried. Her husband Michael might be a techno-wizard, but Heather was old school. If she didn’t write it down, it wasn’t real.

  Angie sidestepped to position herself a little behind Mr. Bunn. She’d always hated the cold and she was sure the gregarious old man wouldn’t mind being used as a windbreak, even on such a blustery day.

  Plus, it moved her a bit farther from Seth Parker. The guy made something inside her quiver in a tingly, it’s-good-to-be-female sort of way, which was ridiculous. She liked polished, well-read, sophisticated men.

  Scratch Seth Parker on all counts.

  “Any reason we’re meeting on the courthouse steps instead of inside the Grill?” she asked, hoping her teeth wouldn’t chatter from the chill.

  “We’re gathered here because this is the site of our next group project,” Heather explained. Each Warm Heart had personal causes they supported. Ian Van Hook ran an anti-bullying campaign at the high school, for example. Heather regularly stepped in to spell a beleaguered caregiver. And Mr. Bunn organized the Royal Order of Chicken Pluckers to raise money for the Lutheran Ladies’ charity fund. Whatever their chosen cause, club members had discovered the great secret of pouring themselves into other people’s lives. Helping others wasn’t just about getting a warm glow in return for do-gooding. Putting someone else’s needs first for a bit brought their own lives into perspective and made them grateful.

  “Cheaper than therapy,” Heather had often said, “and someone else benefits, too. Win-win!”

  But along with individual acts of kindness perpetrated by the club, they sometimes joined hands to take on larger projects.

  “What’s the plan, Heather?” Ian asked. A freshman at Bates College, he was the youngest member of the group and, coincidently, first cousin to the Hypocrite’s-Omelet-eating Tad.

  “We are going to organize and present the annual community Christmas pageant,” Heather announced.

  Marjorie Chubb, captain of the Methodist prayer chain, scowled at this news. “But Shirley Evans has been running that show for years.”

  She didn’t add “with an iron fist,” but they were all thinking it. Mrs. Evans was a stickler for detail, and everything about the pageant had to be just so.

  “Well, if we’re doing the pageant ourselves, that suits me better than possum pie for supper. She nagged me half to death last year because I didn’t spread the straw to suit her,” Junior Bugtussle said. “Not that I didn’t lay down enough, mind you, but that I didn’t make the straw look the way she wanted it to. Don’t that beat all?”

  “Say what you will, Shirley Evans could herd cats if she had to,” Seth Parker finally put in. “We’ll miss her ability to organize.”

  Surprise, surprise. The man can speak in complete sentences.

  Angie knew she was being snippy, even if it was only in her own head, but just being near this Parker guy irritated her. It wasn’t that he looked like Peter. Her first love had been a golden Adonis, blond with vibrant green eyes, and Peter was well aware of his striking looks. Seth didn’t seem the sort to trouble with combing his hair if he could cover it with a ball cap instead, let alone primp for hours the way Peter had. But Seth was still attractive in a rough sort of way.

  And after Peter, attractive men activated Angie’s self-protective radar.

  That must be why my insides are pegging out the “heartache-on-the-horizon-o-meter.”

  “Seth is Shirley Evans’s nephew, on his mother’s side.” Mr. Bunn leaned toward Angie and stage-whispered this bit of intelligence as if it were a state secret. “His father married Delcie Higginbottom—that’s Shirley Evans’s maiden name, you know. Delcie was Shirley’s sister. Of course, if you go back far enough, everybody’s related to everyone around here.”

  Since Coldwater Cove was her first teaching job straight out of grad school, Angie had only lived there for a few years. She was still trying to untangle the “who’s related to whom” web, so she appreciated the heads-up from Mr. Bunn.

  “You can’t sling a dead cat ’round these parts without it hittin’ kin to somebody or other,” Junior pronounced loudly enough for everyone to hear. To those who missed Mr. Bunn’s whisper, Junior’s comment must have seemed totally unrelated to the general discussion and unexpectedly gross. To cat lovers, like Angie, it was just plain offensive. When Angie glared at him, Junior added, “Not that I’d be slingin’ no cats anyhow.”

  “Why can’t Shirley do the pageant?” Valentina, the dispatcher for the sheriff’s department, asked. She helped find work for recently released cons in her spare time. Usually at Mr. Cooper’s Hardware. “I hope it’s not because of a health problem.”

  Everyone knew that last year, Shirley Evans had been diagnosed and treated for breast cancer. She’d tackled the disease as she did everything.

  “Like she was killing snakes,” her husband George had said.

  After a lumpectomy, Shirley opted to take radiation and chemo treatments at the same time, all while still managing to organize her daughter Lacy’s wedding to Jake Tyler.

  Of course, when Lacy and Jake eloped at the last minute, the ceremony had turned into a surprise wedding for her son Michael and Heather Walker, Angie’s friend. But from the over-the-top decorations to the bridesmaids’ dresses that were such a violent pink they’d make a flamingo blush, the event bore Shirley Evans’s stamp of approval. The fact that the bride and groom could be changed ten minutes before the ceremony began, without another single alteration
to the proceedings, bore witness to Shirley’s masterful command of details.

  One might question her taste or her methods, but no one could argue with the results. Shirley Evans flat out got things done. Every time.

  No wonder it’ll take the whole Warm Hearts Club to replace her running the Christmas pageant.

  “Shirley’s health is all right,” Seth said to put Valentina’s mind at ease. “She got a good handle on that cancer scare. All her follow-up tests come back great, she says.”

  “Then why would she give up the pageant?” Marjorie asked. If pressed, Marjorie would undoubtedly say she wanted to know because she wondered if there was a problem she ought to pass along to her fellow “prayer warriors.”

  Angie suspected she was just nosy by nature.

  “I don’t think we should be gossiping about Mrs. Evans’s reasons,” Angie said.

  “It’s not gossip if you intend to pray over it later,” Marjorie said with a firm nod. “Besides, the pageant won’t be the same without her.”

  “I don’t mind tellin’ you, I’m kinda counting on that.” Junior Bugtussle beamed. At least someone was happy to hear that Shirley Evans’s holiday reign of terror was coming to an end. “She took a whole lot of pleasure outta bossing me around—I mean, runnin’ the pageant. Sorta makes a body wonder why she wouldn’t want to do it again this year.”

  “I can’t say,” Seth said.

  “You mean you won’t say.” Marjorie pursed her lips.

  Seth shrugged. “Guess Shirley will fill you in when she’s ready.”

  Angie shoved her hands into the pockets of her cardigan and wished she’d put on a jacket that morning. They could have just as easily had this discussion tucked into the corner booth at the Green Apple. She’d kill for a warm cup of coffee between her palms. “I still don’t understand why we changed the club meeting place.”

  “I thought being here would give us inspiration,” Heather said. Normally, the pageant consisted of a live nativity with the Methodist Church choir singing alongside. Of course, Shirley made a few tweaks to it from year to year. Like last Christmas, when she decided they needed snow, and Mother Nature refused to cooperate. She costumed Charlie Bunn in solid black, which according to Shirley rendered him nigh invisible, and had him stand on a ladder behind Ike Warboy, who was playing Joseph. Then Mr. Bunn was instructed to toss handfuls of borax soap into the air so the flakes could drift down onto the Holy Family.

  Lucinda Warboy, who regularly took the role of the Blessed Virgin, claimed it took the kink right out of her naturally curly hair for weeks.

  On the plus side, the courthouse steps had never been so clean.

  But whatever other changes were made to the pageant each year, Shirley Evans always staged it on the courthouse steps. And on Christmas Eve, the whole town turned out to see what new twist Shirley would wrap around the old story.

  It was a Coldwater tradition Angie wasn’t sure they should mess with.

  With which we should mess, she mentally corrected.

  “I’m hoping we can do things differently this year,” Heather said.

  “Like how?” Valentina asked cautiously. She evidently remembered the borax snow, too.

  “Well, for starters,” Heather said, “Seth has agreed to build a manger for us on the courthouse lawn, so the main event will already be moved a bit.”

  “The mayor will be relieved not to have to tromp through straw all December,” Marjorie said with a sidelong glance at Junior.

  “That weren’t my fault,” he said. “I wanted to heap the straw off to the side, but Mrs. Evans said to spread it around. If a little is good, she’d always say, a lot is a whole bunch better.”

  “The Evans family motto.” Heather sighed. “There’s no arguing with it.”

  Since marrying Shirley Evans’s son, Heather had evidently tried.

  “Another thing we ought to change is the cast. I’ve been a wise man for the last ten years,” said Mr. Cooper, owner of the local hardware store. “It’s high time somebody else had to haul around that trunk full of gold.”

  As with everything else, Shirley Evans believed in excess when it came to pageant props. Why present the Christ Child with a small cask of painted poker chips when you could offer the holy infant a steamer trunk full of them?

  “While we’re on the subject of the cast,” Marjorie said, “don’t you all think Lucinda Warboy is getting a little long in the tooth to be the Virgin Mary? I mean, just because she can usually provide a real baby to be the Christ Child, that doesn’t mean she ought to keep being Mary every year.”

  Lucinda and her husband Ike produced infants on an astonishingly regular schedule. In fact, if all their children had been boys, they’d only be a couple of kids shy of fielding their own football team.

  “The cast is something for the new director to decide,” Heather said. “We’ll all be involved in this project as needed, but you know how it is when something is supposed to be done by committee. If it’s everybody’s job, nobody gets around to doing it. We need a leader, someone to spearhead the pageant.” She paused and met Angie’s gaze.

  No. Don’t you dare.

  “I nominate Angela Holloway.”

  Angie swallowed hard. It was one thing to direct the high school kids in bad renditions of Macbeth. It was quite another to take on the annual production that had become a town legend. She wished Heather was trying to set her up on another bad date instead.

  Valentina jumped in with, “I second.”

  “All in favor signify by saying—”

  “Aye,” they all said in chorus with no prompting at all.

  This may not be a date, but it’s definitely a setup.

  “If there are no objections—”

  Angie’s hand shot up. “I object.”

  “Duly noted, but ignored. You’ve been drafted so you might as well make the best of it,” Heather went on with a grin. “That’s settled then. Now, we don’t expect you to do it all alone, so Seth will be your assistant.”

  “Her what?” he said gruffly.

  And the man’s back to incomplete sentences.

  “Or codirector, if that’s how you two decide you want to put it. You’ve already agreed to build whatever sets we need, Seth, and since you’re Shirley’s nephew, I thought you could introduce Angie to her. I’m certain Shirley will want to make suggestions.”

  “That’s guaranteed.” Seth frowned. “Why can’t you introduce her to Shirley? She’s your mother-in-law.”

  “True,” Heather admitted. “But if there are going to be major changes to the pageant this year, and I hope there will be, in the interest of family harmony, it’s best if I take a back seat.”

  “Coward.”

  Heather raised both hands. “Guilty, but still not telling Shirley we’re changing the pageant.”

  “I’ll pray for you,” Marjorie said piously to Seth. “Not that you’ll need it. After all, you and Shirley are kin.”

  “We’ll need it. Being a nephew doesn’t offer that much protection.” Seth grimaced.

  “Don’t worry,” Mr. Bunn whispered. “Blood really is thicker than water. Family first.”

  Angie didn’t know much about that. She had none of her own.

  The carillon in the bell tower at tiny Bates College started to chime. The morning was slipping away and most of the club members had jobs or classes to get to.

  To which to get. No, that’s silly. Even I can’t like my syntax that tortured.

  The group dissipated, leaving only Angie and Seth standing on the courthouse steps.

  “Well, that’s it,” Heather called over her shoulder. “Call if you need something, Angie.”

  How about a new life? danced on her tongue but she swallowed it back. It sounded whiny, and she wasn’t a whiner.

  She liked her job. Mostly. Working with teenagers was a challenge, because they all seemed to be afflicted with the world-revolves-around-me syndrome. But every now and then, she found a student who really caugh
t a spark of what she was trying to convey and they blazed up like a house afire. It was thrilling when literature opened a window to a wider world for a young mind in this insulated place.

  Not that Coldwater Cove wasn’t a fine place to live. Angie was beyond grateful that she didn’t have to deal with the violence or drug problems facing some of her old classmates who taught in big cities.

  But sometimes, she felt as if she were living out her last name. Literally.

  She was trudging along a “hollow way.”

  When Heather wasn’t trying to fix her up with a date, she was promising that if Angie took being a Warm Heart seriously and gave some of herself away by helping others, it would make her own life easier.

  So far, there was no joy in that department.

  Of course, it wasn’t Heather’s fault that Peter had already taught her she couldn’t trust her heart to others.

  It’s pretty hard to give yourself away when you know you need to hold back.

  Still, it was zero fun to go home to an empty apartment each day. Even the Siamese cat she’d inherited from the previous tenant didn’t fill the void. Angie loved cats, but Effie was more a calamity waiting to happen than a comfort. It was a little ironic that Angie was taking over the Christmas pageant from Shirley Evans, because she’d sublet her apartment from Shirley’s daughter Lacy, who’d moved to Boston. At the time, Angie and Lacy had agreed that the Siamese wouldn’t move well. After all, Effie had been in the apartment when Lacy first leased it, too.

  An Evans apartment, an Evans cat, an Evans Christmas pageant—it seemed her whole life was filled with leftovers from the Evans family. Including the tall, lean, nearly nonverbal Evans nephew standing beside her.

  “May as well get it over with,” Seth said.

  “Get what over with?” Oh, my gosh, it’s contagious. Incomplete sentence. Preposition dangling at the end. I’m starting to sound like a Neanderthal, too.

  “Meeting my aunt Shirley. Why? You got someplace else you need to be?”