Merry's Christmas: A Love Story Read online

  MERRY’S CHRISTMAS: a love story

  Written by Susan Rohrer

  Adapted from Rohrer’s original screenplay

  Kindly direct all professional inquiries about screenplay or novel to:

  [email protected]

  Readers may contact author at:

  shelfari.com/susanrohrer

  Excepting brief excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form without prior written permission from the author.

  Excerpts from the lyrics of “O Christmas Tree” and “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”

  are in the public domain.

  This novel is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are drawn from the public record and used in a wholly harmless and fictitious way. Any resemblance of this fictional work to actual locations, events, organizations, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or publisher.

  Cover Image: Courtesy of Indigo Valley Photography

  Author photo by Jean-Louis Darville (with permission)

  Copyright © 2012, Susan Rohrer, all rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America

  First Edition 2012

  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

  Perhaps 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 ro
utinely 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.

  He hadn’t gotten down on one knee. There had been no candlelight dinner or romantic stroll on the waterfront. Merry knew that, with Arthur, there was no pretense. He was a no-frills guy. You saw exactly what you got. He had said those Four Words a woman longs to hear in the kitchen of the diner, his forearms shiny with grease, in the process of yanking the giblets out of a turkey’s hind parts.

  Taken off guard, Merry had brushed it off, as if Arthur must have been kidding. She’d tap danced her way around really answering back then, not wanting to hurt his feelings or to make things too awkward at this job she so desperately needed. But this time around, as casual as Merry tried to keep things, she knew she owed the man an actual answer.

  “Arthur, you know I adore you—”

  Arthur shook his head. “Yeah, I can hear that but rolling up. But. But this, but that. That’s what you’re gonna say, am I right?”

  “I’m gonna say that, I just—I’m in this crazy-making situation and—I’m not going to marry to solve a problem, Arthur. I kind of want to marry for love.”

  “Who says love ain’t a problem?” Arthur asked. The man was way smarter than he looked.

  ♥ ♥ ♥

  Far across town in a decidedly upscale bistro, Daniel Bell leaned over the remains of Eggs Benedict to kiss his date, Catherine Strong, goodbye. As he pulled away, she lingered.

  “You know what your problem is, Daniel? You’re pathologically responsible, that’s all.”

  Daniel straightened up congenially and signed to cover the check. As beautiful as Catherine was, he found her coy wit to be every bit as appealing as her pale blue eyes and her lithe, feminine form. Rising, he stroked Catherine’s arm affectionately. “Much as I hate to tear myself away, I’m sure your father would appreciate it. ‘Tis the season, you know.”

  As Daniel rose to leave, Catherine checked her lipstick. “Daddy shouldn’t work you so hard,” she pouted.

  “I do believe he’s testing me.”

  “Grooming you,” Catherine corrected. “There’s a difference. He’s been hinting about retiring.”

  Daniel had supposed as much.

  At seventy, Catherine’s father had been dialing back time spent at the office gradually. The president of the bank that had stayed in his family for generations, Catherine was his sole heir and the apple of his eye. A shrewd man, he’d begun to entrust more and more responsibility to Daniel, with a not so subtle approving nod toward the developing relationship between his star vice president and his one-time jet-setting daughter.

  It had seemed strange at first to Daniel. As a widower of almost three years, Daniel hadn’t dated or even desired to for such a very long time. It had been all he could do to function after losing his wife. Suddenly a single parent, he had thrown himself into his work, which was precisely where he’d eventually met Catherine, fresh off a break-up and ready to keep her feet on the ground for a while. Finally, the cloud of grief had lifted for Daniel, and his lonesome heart had found a way to move on again.

  “Would you be up for an early dinner?” Daniel inquired.

  “I believe I could swing that. Could we try someplace new?”

  Daniel smiled knowingly. He steeled himself to take the plunge. “Actually, I was thinking my place. It’s time you met the children.”

  ♥ ♥ ♥

  Arthur dished up an order of hash and scooted it up on the counter for Merry. “I’m just saying.”

  Merry wiped something sticky off her hands. “And I appreciate it, Arthur, but—”

  “Your point is that I ain’t ‘It’.”

  Merry put her towel down, leaning closer in earnest. The last thing she ever wanted to do was to hurt Arthur, but she didn’t have an insincere bone in her body. “No, no, you’re undeniably It. Your Itness is legend. I mean, you’re fabulously It for somebody. And you’re way It as a friend for me, but—”

  Arthur gestured toward the waiting order. “Hash ain’t getting any hotter.”

  Merry grabbed the plate and delivered it to a man at the counter as fellow waitress Kiki Stone sidled up to her. African-American and in her early forties, Kiki had a winning way of diving straight for the bottom line. “How much you short?”

  Merry waved her friend off. “Keep it, Kiki. You’re feeding your boys by yourself. I’ll figure it out.”

  Undaunted, Kiki cheerily emptied the tips from her pockets. “Not gonna deprive me of my blessing. Nuh-uh. Mama always said, ‘Give and it shall be given to you, pressed down, shaken together, running all over the place.’ So, you best take what I got, get that whole Christmas ball rolling.”

  Leaving no room for Merry to protest, Kiki picked up a pitcher of ice water and sashayed back out to the floor. Merry glanced at the pile of cash. Kiki had a knack for racking up tips and this particular morning had been no exception.

  “Go on, there’s more where that come from,” Kiki waved, already across the diner. Gratefully, Merry collected Kiki’s earnings and stuffed them into her apron.

  Later that day, Merry spun through the revolving door of Strong Bank & Trust. There was something about revolving doors that left her a little off balance, even after she’d escaped one’s orbit. Regaining her equilibrium, she scanned the vaulted ceilings and the elegantly appointed lobby, suddenly self-conscious about her uniform. Not far from the entrance, she saw a man, apparently in his late thirties, shaking the hand of an impeccably dressed elderly socialite. A uniformed driver stood at the woman’s side.

  “I’m Daniel Bell,” the man said. “It’ll be my pleasure to handle your accounts, Mrs. Rockingham. Here’s my card.”

  It’s not that Merry noticed every man who crossed her path, but for some reason there was something about this Daniel Bell that caught her attention. Maybe it was just overhearing his name, she thought. Maybe it was the pleasantness of his voice. It might have been how professional he looked in his perfectly tailored suit. Whatever it was, Merry reasoned, he seemed like someone who could help her.

  As Merry waited, she glanced down at the coffee cup in her hand. She kicked herself for not throwing it away in the trashcan on the street corner. It’s not that it was empty. It’s just that a paper cup seemed incongruous in this place, so she checked around for a place to toss it. As Mrs. Rockingham grandly passed to exit, Merry turned to clear the woman’s path to the door.

  There were times it seemed that Merry’s timing was impeccable. This wasn’t one of them. As it was, when she backed farther into the lobby, she smacke
d right into Daniel. Startled, she whirled and, to make matters worse, coffee from the aforementioned coffee cup sloshed onto Daniel’s charcoal suit.

  “Oh!” Merry gasped. “Oh, no, I... Let me—” Flustered, Merry quickly used her napkin to blot Daniel’s jacket.

  “It’s fine,” he assured. “Really. I’ve got it.”

  As Daniel took over the wiping, Merry couldn’t help but notice how congenial he was being about her gaffe, or how very handsome he looked in his freshly stained jacket.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Could I get that cleaned?”

  Daniel smiled, putting a hand up in polite refusal. “No, no. Needed it anyway. Is there something I can do for you?”

  Chagrined, Merry piped up. “You wouldn’t know where I could get a loan application, would you?”

  Night had long since fallen and, with it, the Downtown Diner had closed its doors for the evening. Skeeter cozied up to a heating vent just outside the front plate glass window.

  Inside, Arthur put chairs up on tables while Merry sat, studying the paperwork from the bank. With all its blank lines gaping at her, the form was more than a little intimidating. Merry had always done her best to pay her bills on time. A time or two she’d cut it close. Never before, though, had she had a repossession that she would have to declare.

  Not until that morning.

  The voice Merry didn’t like to listen to sorely tempted her to leave the smudge off her application. It was a voice she’d heard more than once in her life, enough to recognize the grimy pit of its origins. It rationalized omitting the humiliating truth that, try as she might, she’d failed to make her November payment. It taunted her to worry what that nice man at the bank would think of her when he saw what a deadbeat she was.