“Move over, laddies, you’re blocking this old lady’s view.”
Several youths in dark-gray and green plaid jackets stood huddled in front of the row of elderly women and men. It was five to seven and it looked like everyone in town had come trooping through traffic and frigid temperatures for the show. Which wasn’t surprising, as the Christmas parade was one of the local highlights of the year.
One of the boys cocked a brow at Donna Gene then slowly started to move. They weren’t moving fast enough, evidently, because she—seated in a lawn chair—picked up her umbrella from the ground and began prodding them.
“Okay, Ms. Donna Gene. That’s good, I think they’re moving along.” Cassie grasped the tip of the umbrella and lowered the weapon.
With their combined powers, Girls Haven Leadership Club had managed to secure an excellent block for the event, and with twelve lawn chairs and wheelchairs in place for their elderly patrons, the girls had grabbed their plastic bags and dispersed among them. Most of the Leadership Club service projects were thought up by the girls themselves, demonstrating creative planning, budgeting, leadership, and logistics, but this one—gathering a list of shut-ins from Cassie’s church and chauffeuring them to the most beloved community event of the year—was hers.
Cassie felt the tug on her collar and looked down to the honorary teen-club member in her arms. Kennedy, who had picked out her own winter wear, was a Pepto-Bismol commercial in her thick pink coat, pink snow pants, pink boots, pink mittens, and pink hat. One arm wrapped around her empty pink basket. “Where’s the candy?”
“It’s coming soon. See?” Cassie pointed to the two high school girls bouncing in their short-skirted dance uniforms, each holding up one side of the Gatlinburg Christmas parade sign. “They’ll be throwing candy any minute.”
“Here, sugar. Take one of these to hold you over.” Donna Gene put her hand out, holding up a peppermint.
Cassie hesitated, having experienced the condition of Donna Gene’s home when they helped the woman and her elderly friend out to the van this evening. Still, Kennedy’s face blossomed at the sight of it, and there was no going back now.
“That’s very kind. Can you say thank you, Kennedy?”
Kennedy, with great difficulty from her bulging coat and mittens, took the candy between both mittens. “Thank you.” She opened her mouth wide as Cassie tore open the wrapper and popped the mint in for her.
Trumpets and drums sounded together, and Donna Gene smiled and turned her face to the oncoming band. “It’s no problem. I must’ve had that swimming in the bottom of my purse for years. Oh, look.” Her plump hand dug into what appeared to be a black snakeskin purse straight from the 1950s. “I found another.”
Cassie alternated Kennedy, who was already sucking away at her mint, to the other hip. “Oh no, no. This is just enough. Thank you.”
Everybody watched in anticipation as flutists marched past and groups of ten-year-old ballerinas danced heartily across the road. Clowns in white-and-red faces passed candy out to eagerly awaiting hands and bags. Antique cars and waving homecoming queens. Floats, whether of the duct-tape-and-stringed-lights-on-a-truck-bed variety or robust themes of the Grinch sponsored by a large electric company, played jingles loudly through speakers.
With a pound of peppermints, Tootsie Rolls, bubblegum, and church flyers with attached candy canes in their baskets, Kennedy and Deidre hung on to a street lamp and leaned out with their baskets as far as they could as kids from the YMCA passed. A girl not much older than Deidre poured a handful of Hershey’s Kisses in both baskets.
Then, finally, her new favorite vehicle came into view, and for once it wasn’t sounding the sirens. “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree” played loudly through the crowd, the electric guitar echoing cheerfully back from brick buildings. String-lit garland draped across ladders the width of the fire engines, and firemen dressed in bunker gear waved heartily to the crowds.
Cassie’s heart momentarily paused as Jett—with arm hanging out of the front passenger seat—spotted her. Lifting his Santa hat off his head, he waved it and winked at her. She felt her cheeks heat as she waved back.
Both Donna Gene and her elderly neighbor turned in their chairs.
“Why, do you know that man, Patsy?”
“If I’m not mistaken, I’d say he was sweet on you.” Mrs. Kolak crossed her frail arms across the blanket on her lap, and it was hard to tell just then if that was a compliment or criticism.
Cassie tugged on the red scarf wound around her throat. “My name’s Cassie. And yes, Ms. Donna Gene, I’ve just started seeing him, actually.”
The wrinkles on her forehead shoved up as she lifted her brows and looked at Cassie as if it was the first time she was really seeing her. “Why, that’s a fine piece of man right there, I daresay.”
“Anybody would be lucky to have ’im,” added Mrs. Kolak tartly, facing straight as an arrow ahead while a group of accordion players passed.
“Don’t mind Edie,” Donna Gene said, patting her neighbor’s lap. “She’s just mad the boys don’t trip over themselves to light her cigarette anymore.”
“They used to too,” Mrs. Kolak muttered.
Donna Gene pushed her bags off an empty lawn chair. “Anyway, indulge us. Tell us all about you two.”
Both women seemed to have forgotten completely about the parade. Instead, they watched her as though she were now the man riding the oversized unicycle.
With traces of warmth still on her cheeks, Cassie glanced at the retreating fire engine well down the block. In her line of work, this type of nosiness was standard. In fact, she kind of preferred it.
Day and night she had been focused on the kids’ needs, trying desperately to tiptoe around potentially disruptive conversation topics, trying to make them feel happy and at ease. It was exhausting work, physically and mentally. Frankly, besides sitting down with Jett himself, there was nothing she’d rather do at that moment than talk about him—even if it was with two odd ladies. Not to mention, being a friend to a shut-in was the point of the Leadership Club’s outing tonight. If she had to talk about him, she had to talk about him.
Cassie glanced around to her charges: the fourteen teens seated beside their companions, Deidre and Kennedy circling the lamppost. She sat down.
Donna Gene, looking pleased, patted her knee.
“Well,” Cassie began awkwardly, crossing her boots at the ankles, “his name is Jett. He’s twenty-nine—a little younger than me, I admit—and works with the fire department.”
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Edie chirped. She sprayed hand sanitizer in front of her face.
“Of course he’s a fireman, she means. He was sitting in the truck.” Donna Gene laughed and gave Edie a hearty, slightly startling slap on her frail shoulder. “Anyways. What else?”
“Why do you think you deserve him?” Edie added.
Cassie laughed. “Well, given I deserted him on the first date and almost deserted him on the second, I’d say I don’t deserve him, really.”
“Oh?” Evidently this was more what Edie wanted to hear. With perked ears she leaned forward while Cassie, with their prodding, went into full details of their meeting, of his relentless pursuing, and where they finally were today.
“And what about those two?” Donna Gene pointed her umbrella at the girls jumping at the finale of the parade, Santa aboard his luminescent sleigh, perched atop a float carried by Billy’s Tow Services. “They yours?”
Cassie hesitated. It was the first time anyone had asked. “They’re . . . with me. Yes.”
“And how’s he taken to them?”
“There’s three of them, actually,” Cassie said. “And he doesn’t know.”
“Tell him after the wedding.” Edie was nodding, the sequins of the belt buckle around her wool hat jostling. “I did the same thing, and I was married forty-two years.”
“The same thing? What do you mean the same thing—”
“Take it from Edie.” Donna Gene waggled her finger. “As Dr. Bob says, we must learn from the experienced, or we’ll never find our way. She was happily married—”
“Married. I never said it was happily.” Edie sprayed the air again.
“And her marriage lasted half a century—”
“Forty-two years. Not a day longer.”
“And you do want to marry him, Patsy, don’t you?” Donna Gene unwrapped a Tootsie Roll. “Now I haven’t talked official with Edie yet, but on her behalf and mine, I’d like to offer our little patch of earth for the ceremony. It’s not much, what we have up there, but there’s a nice good space in the woods that would make for a marvelous backdrop with the snow.”
If Donna Gene wasn’t gripping Cassie’s hand, she would’ve stumbled out of her chair. “Whoa, now. I think we’re getting a little ahead of ourselves here.”
“You thinkin’ spring?” Donna Gene replied. “Well, you’ll have to hide the children that much longer, but if that’s what you want to do, I suppose you could keep them in the basement—”
“That’s what I always did.” Edie primly popped a mint in her mouth.
“And just eyeballing it here, I’d say you’re a size 6? Or 8?”
They were talking dresses now? And harboring children in basements? Cassie stood abruptly, the conversation sixty miles beyond the point of control. “Oh look, there went Santa. Parade’s over. Girls! Deidre! Kennedy!” Cassie beckoned them over, and with baskets overflowing, they readily jumped to her side. She then called to the teen leaders, “Haven teens, let’s assist all our new friends to the bus.”
Cassie tried her best to delegate any tasks related to the two women to the teens, and between gathering thirty people and packing them into the borrowed church bus, she had just about succeeded in avoiding Donna Gene and Edie the rest of the evening. They dropped every man and woman off one at a time, Donna Gene and Edie seated in the row farthest back. Star and Bailey sat in the row ahead of them like angelic guards at the entrance of Eden.
But as Cassie turned the steering wheel onto Rattlesnake Hollow, she heard the squirt of sanitizer behind her and felt the distinct smell of disinfectant tickle her nose. She looked into the wide, overhead mirror and jumped at the sudden figures seated behind her. So much for them being elderly.
Edie readjusted her vintage hat.
“Now, where were we?” With hovering pen, Donna Gene lay the crumpled back of a receipt across the top of the bus seat as though it were a doctor’s legal pad. “You’ll need flowers, of course. You can’t have a good wedding without flowers.”
Cassie checked the mirror for the back seats. Were her teens alive?
“And we’ll need a cake.” Donna Gene pointed her pen in her partner’s direction. “Edie, I trust you can take care of that. She’s a wonderful cook. Watches Cake or Steak regular, don’t you?”
Edie lifted her chin. “Fondant or funfetti?”
“Ladies, thank you so much for wanting to coordinate my—” (unscheduled and absurdly forecasted) “—wedding. But I’ve only been seeing Jett two and a half weeks. Barely two and a half weeks. And that’s counting a date that lasted all of five minutes.”
Edie sniffed. “I had Frank at the altar in twelve hours.”
“And yours is . . . quite the example. But I’m going to need more time. Who knows what he’ll think after I tell the man who hates kids that I just added three? He’ll probably run for the hills.”
Donna Gene watched Cassie closely, then patted her shoulder. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about it anymore. You just leave it up to us. We’ll see that everything gets sorted out.”
Leave it up to them?
“No, really, that’s not necessary,” Cassie started to say, but when she looked in the mirror, the seat behind her was empty, only the scent of alcohol disinfectant lingering in the air. Inching her chin down, Cassie saw both women securely back in the farthest row, looking as though they’d never moved a muscle.