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CINNAMON ROLLS ARE supposed to make the house smell good. Everybody with even the slightest hint of holiday spirit has cinnamon rolls around Christmastime because they make the house smell all festive. Which was probably why my house currently smelled like a cross between potpourri and charcoal.
The biggest window above the kitchen sink was standing open, and I was using one of the kitschy towels I brought out for the season to desperately wave the smoke out into the fresh, sharply cold winter air outside. The towel was one of the things I found in the box my grandmother left behind in this sprawling place. I was sure the little white ruffle on the bottom of the red towel and the row of tiny black buttons along the front were supposed to be adorable.
I personally thought it looked like shrunken Mrs. Claus was decapitated, flattened, and dangled by a loop from the oven door. Somewhat different aesthetics happening there.
The smoke trickling out of the slightly open oven was fighting back, and I was waving with extra vigor to get it all out into the frosty morning rather than letting it get to the smoke alarm when I heard knocking on the front door.
From somewhere upstairs, a little boy’s voice gave an excited yell.
“Santa!”
This was the third time the six-year-old had decided he was so important Santa Claus was going to set aside all his other holiday season obligations and visit him personally. His family had arrived two days before.
I heard Gregory’s footsteps scurrying down the hallway and starting down the steps. Muttering a few choice phrases that were most definitely not the refrain of “Jingle Bells,” I closed the oven door. I performed a few more frantic flaps of the kitchen towel toward the window, then tossed the towel aside and headed for the door.
Gregory was already there. His little hand reached for the handle on the door and pulled it open. His face immediately dropped when he saw Hank the Handyman standing there on the front porch with a bright grin on his face.
I probably would have thought his name was a joke if I hadn’t grown up in Snowflake Hollow when his father Harry the Handyman was all the rage in the home improvement scene. Now, Hank was here to carry on the family legacy. Speaking mystically, of course. He was here—here being the massive gray Victorian-era house set on the small hill on a large plot of land—to help get me out of a festive season bind.
There was a stack of plastic totes behind him and a ladder leaned against the wraparound front porch that I was fairly certain weren’t there when I got up that morning. So, I figured he was geared up for hanging my Christmas lights.
Well, not exactly my lights. Not technically, anyway. They were what was filling up all those totes behind him. They also weren’t really mine because it wasn’t like they were going on just my house. It was my house, technically, considering I lived there. But I didn’t have the space to myself. That was because the big house I didn’t even know my grandmother owned until she left it to me was actually a bed-and-breakfast.
That’s right. I took my absolutely no knowledge of the hospitality industry, my questionable cooking skills, and a name I would always be just a little bitter toward my father for, and threw up a shingle as an innkeeper. Holly White, entrepreneur.
Right then, I was Holly White, frazzled, frustrated, and far from festive.
Fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-fuck all this nonsense.
The thing was, if I didn’t own a bed-and-breakfast and was just hanging out in my own house, Hank the Handyman wouldn’t be standing on my front porch waiting to deck the halls or anything else. There would be no lights. No wreath. No inflatables or bows or jingly anything. Nothing cheerful or seasonal. Nothing to remind me that Jack Frost was nipping at my nose and Christmas was nipping at my ass.
I was not a fan. There, I said it. The deep, dark secret that ranked right up there with murder in the town where I grew up. I just didn’t like the holiday season as a whole. I’d much rather have my feet kicked up on a beach somewhere with the big green guy himself, drinking something fruity and tropical and eating nothing that involved cinnamon or peppermint.
Unfortunately for me and my sentiments, I was born and raised in the Christmassy-est place on Earth. And further unfortunately for me, I got swept up in my family loyalty after my grandmother’s death and decided it would be a fantastic idea to open up a bed-and-breakfast just a few months before it was time to start welcoming guests for the holiday season.
It really did sound great at the time. Of course, “at the time” was in the summer when the snow was gone, there wasn’t a twinkle light to be seen, and the closest thing to Santa I was dealing with was a caricature of him surfing across a window downtown for the Christmas in July sale. I was all sun-drunk and basking in the smell of hamburgers cooking on the grill and baseball playing on the TV. The idea of the holidays coming back and people actually coming to stay at the bed-and-breakfast seemed far in the distance.
And now here I was with less than a month to go, and none of the holiday season prep was done. Including decorating. Enter Hank the Handyman and his seasonal services.
“Thank you for coming,” I said. “I know you’re probably really busy this time of year.”
The grin stayed firmly on his face as he shook his head. “Not really. Most everybody already has all their decorating done for the season. You’re my first decorating job in two weeks.”
“Of course I am.”
“Besides, I’m excited to tackle this old place. I’ve been eyeing it since even before your gran bought it. There’s so much potential. Do you have any particular vision for what you want it to look like? A theme or a style?”
“Christmas?” He laughed like he thought I was joking. Which was kind of adorable and sad at the same time. “Just go ahead and put the lights on however you think they’re going to look best.”
As I was saying this, the mail delivery truck showed up. I could already see a stack of packages on the seat and knew that meant there were even more tucked down beside her and possibly in the back as well.
“I’m going to get started,” Hank said. “I’ll let you know if I have any questions.”
“Thank you,” I said, starting down to help the mail carrier.
There was no need for her to try to juggle the entire assortment on her own. Especially considering how much lifting and delivering she was going to have to be doing over the next few weeks. I could only imagine how good of shape she was in by the time the holidays were over. If I was her, I’d probably admire it for a day or two, then blow it all on a couple of days locked in the house with milk and cookies.
That’s one place Santa and I saw eye to eye.
They would definitely have to come from the bakery, though, because I wasn’t the kind of woman whose kitchen transformed into a cookie factory as the clock struck midnight after Thanksgiving. Not in any kind of social commentary sort of way. Just in a lack of basic understanding of baking sort of way.
Which would be why as I climbed up the steps, unable to see over the stack of packages in my arms, I could hear the smoke alarm going off. Apparently, my smoke-waving efforts did not pay off fully.
I rushed into the foyer and resisted the urge to just drop the packages. There was no telling how many different ways these things could be breakable, so I lowered them carefully, then took off toward the kitchen. Bursting through the door, I found Mrs. Greene, a guest who had been with me for a few days by then, standing in the kitchen and staring at the oven door.
She was the age that made me absolutely positive she knew her way around one of these, and yet, she was staring at the glass front of the door like she thought it might take off like a spaceship at any moment. Which I could almost understand considering the glow of flame visible through the front.
Not only had she closed the door again, but she’d turned the heat back on, reigniting the already burned rolls.
“Thank you so much, Mrs. Greene,” I said, trying my hardest to keep my voice calm and friendly. “I can take it from here. Why don’t you go on out and keep working on those Christmas cards you’ve been signing the last couple of days? Yesterday you said you were just about done.”
“Just twenty more,” she said.
I nodded. “Go get ’em.”
I kept grinning as she walked out of the kitchen. That woman’s tongue was going to fall off when it came to stamp-licking time. Maybe I should cut up one of the extra kitchen sponges under the sink and soak it with water for her. On the other hand, she did have kind of a rhythm going. Stopping her from licking the stamps might ruin the whole Christmas card process. And she was responsible for further incinerating the rolls.
She smiled at me and gave a determined nod like I’d just given her the pep talk before the big game. Considering the massive stack of cards I’d already seen her sign and address since arriving, the one activity she had actually done, I thought the comparison was apt.
As soon as the door closed behind her, I turned off the oven, opened the door, and jumped back to avoid getting taken out by the billow of smoke that poured out. The flames weren’t nearly as big once I opened the door as I thought they were upon first glance. Which, granted, was still not a positive thing when talking about a kitchen appliance, but at least I wasn’t in the middle of a recreation of Backdraft.
A few stiff smacks with the kitchen towel put out the small fire, and then it was all about handling the smoke.
The window was still mercifully open, so I was able to start wafting the smoke toward it the best I could. But this was going to call for more extreme measures. I rushed past the oven and through the door that led into the pantry. At the end was the back door, and I threw it open. Going back into the kitchen, I grabbed the headless Mrs. Claus towel and an oven mitt and started waving for all I was worth.
I had just found the groove in my smoke-removal flail when I heard a thud quickly followed by a shout. I paused. The smoke stung my eyes a little bit, but I was far more concerned about the second shout that followed quickly after the other, just after a decidedly metallic clang. That could not be a good thing.
I tossed the towel and oven mitt aside and ran through the back door, then around the side of the house to the front. The shouting was now groaning, and I followed it to Hank lying on the ground tangled in a strand of big multicolored light bulbs. His ladder was beside him. And his leg was at an angle no leg should ever be.
When the old poem talked about that clatter that arose out on the roof, this wasn’t what they had in mind.
On the first day of Christmas, the Universe gave to me... a broken handyman and an insurance claim.
