At the sound of Mac’s engine, Gil came out of the barn coiling a length of rope and grinning. “Mr. Mayor. Nice of you to drop on by. I had something to ask you after rehearsal tonight, but you beat me to the punch. What’s up?”
Mac cut the engine and walked toward the barn. “A few developments you ought to know about.”
“Sounds intriguing.” He nodded toward the tack room in the barn, where a pair of wooden chairs sat propped up against the wall. He flicked on the lights and the little space heater, then hung the rope up on a peg, and sat down. “Let’s hear it.”
“Well, you know Mary Thorpe used to live in Chicago,” Mac began as he sat down. “It seems her previous boss wasn’t too keen on seeing her go and might be applying a lot of pressure. She’s a bit of a surprise, our Mary.”
“Good thing you can be there for her.” Gil grinned. A wide teasing grin.
“Hey, cut that out.”
“I’m just saying you always seem to be around at the right moment. You might think God set it up or something.” Gil sat back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head in frustrating confidence. “So you like her and you want to make sure she’s okay. That’s a good thing. Civic, even.” He brought his hands back down and looked at Mac. “You do like her, don’t you?”
“Depends on who you ask. If you talk to Ma, we’re all but ring shopping.” Mac threw his hands up in exasperation. “Come on, Gil, you live here, you know the rumor mill. It’s impossible to see someone ‘casually’ in this town. Middleburg makes a couple go from zero to serious in under six seconds. And I’m not ready for serious. Not with her.”
“You just told me all the reasons why you shouldn’t like her, but that ain’t answering my question, is it?”
“She’s nice.” Mac wanted to whack his forehead for not being able to come up with anything more convincing than that. Gil’s expression told him “nice” had definitely not been convincing. “But that’s all.” Like that helped.
Truth was, he found her more than nice. But that was the trouble with small towns, there was no way to stay at “nice.” If he was found “out” with her alone again, the snowball of predictions and gossip would begin rolling and there’d be more drama than any campaign could ever generate. Mac knew all these reasonable objections, he could recite them on command, but it hadn’t stopped him from looking up at his office ceiling instead of working for many days now.
He’d bought a jazz violin CD when he was in a bookstore in Lexington the other day—a jazz violin CD—just because they’d been playing it over the store sound system and it sounded like her. Worse yet, he’d opened it and popped it into the car stereo before he even got home.
“Forget the rumor mill,” Gil advised. “You think I haven’t known you long enough to pick up on it? Do you realize you’ve talked about her every time we’ve seen each other? You stare at her. It’s kind of like the way you stare at a bridge that isn’t working right, and that’s kinda weird when you think about it, but you definitely stare. She gets to you. I think that’s the only way you’d ever parade onstage in a blue bathrobe. Take a chance and bring her to the party Friday.”
“Um…I already asked her.” Talk about the worst idea ever. Why had he gone and asked her?
“She seems very nice,” Gil conceded, still grinning. “A little more delicate that I would have picked for you, but it seems to bring out your hero tendencies. Snake-hunter. Actor. A regular renaissance mayor.”
Mac launched off his chair to pace the small room. “You can be a real jerk sometimes, you know that, Sorrent?”
“Emily says so, especially when I’m right.” He motioned for Mac to sit back down. “So she got to you. It was bound to happen sometime—why not now? You said you were feeling restless. Maybe it was more than just political unrest.”
“Why not now? Because this is the worst time ever. She’s not in the same place as me, faith-wise. And in the middle of this mayor thing? If I do bring Mary on Friday, it’ll just encourage Ma. She’s already more than a bit nutty about the thought of having a thirty-year-old still-bachelor son. She’d be all over this, knitting for grandbabies by Saturday morning.”
“It’s not like you’ve never dated before, Mac. You can handle your Ma and anyone else who jumps to conclusions. Bring her Friday.” His grin made Mac want to throw him in a horse stall. Headfirst.
“I have to, now. That was the stupidest thing to do. Seriously.”
Gil pulled a clipboard off the tack room wall and headed for the door. “Maybe not. You’re always talking about how no one in Middleburg is willing to explore the possibilities.”
Mac followed, glad to know this ridiculous conversation was coming to a close. “You want me to date her?”
“I want you to be happy. My baby deserves a happy godfather.”
“Like you’ve ever really cared about…” Mac stopped. “What did you just say?”
Gil turned with the strangest look Mac had ever seen on his face. “I said my baby deserves a happy godfather. Mayor or not, no miserable man gets to godfather my baby.”
Mac picked up his jaw off the floor. “Emily’s pregnant?”
“She is indeed.”
Gil was going to be a father. The guy he’d thrown into mud puddles in second grade was going to be a father. “You’re gonna be a dad.”
“It generally works that way, yes.”
Mac grabbed his friend and pulled him into a quick hug. Gil and Emily were going to start a family. It was one of the best shocks he’d ever had. “Congratulations. Wow. When?”
“Sometime in June.” We haven’t told too many people yet. Emily’s had a few complications and we thought it better to keep it private for a little while longer. The Mary role is a big deal for her, and now you know why. But you need to keep this under your hat for a while, especially on Friday. Consider it your first duty as godfather. You will, won’t you? ”
“Godfather? Of course. And sure, I’ll keep quiet. But man, that’s amazing news. Are you excited?”
Gil actually looked jittery, which was saying something on his usually stoic features. “Excited, freaked out, worried, amazed, running out of ways to cope with that herd of hormones putting up a Christmas tree in my kitchen…I’m all sorts of things. Just not sane.”
His kitchen? Gil’d been married for how long and still thought of it as “his kitchen”? He could just imagine how well that was going. Gil had been surrounded by men—farmers, foremen, the teenagers and twenty-something men whose lives he had helped rebuild—just a little bit too long. Mac slapped Gil on the shoulder. “You’ve been raising great big kids for five years. How much harder can one tiny guy be?”
“If it’s a guy.” Gil practically gulped the sentiment.
The thought of what Gil’s frilly, vintage-loving wife would do with a baby girl made Mac break into an amused grin. He imagined Gil holding a frothy bundle of pink lace in those great big farmer hands, and broke out laughing. “Now who’s in more trouble? You or me?”
Pastor Dave came to Mary’s office door early in the afternoon, as she was marking lighting cues on a script. The high school had lent the church two spotlights, both of which had a selection of color choices, so she had the chance to add a few small-scale special effects to her production. Now, when Mary and Joseph walked through the Bethlehem night, it could actually look like night onstage. Progress in inches, she thought. “Mary?” Pastor said as he knocked on the open door. He’d brought her a cup of coffee. People were always bringing each other coffee in this town.
“Oh, I could sure use that. Thanks.” She rose and took the steaming mug, coming around her desk so they could sit on the pair of chairs in front. She had an office, with actual chairs, instead of her cubicle at the ad agency and her locker at the symphony hall. That felt so good.
“You’re doing a great job. They can be an unruly bunch, even on their best days.” He sighed. “Tonight, they may be at their worst.”
Evidently the coffee was for fortification. “What’s up?”
“I just got off the phone with Sandy Burnside. Evidently Mac and Howard got in a bit of a row at the dime store this afternoon. The store started offering a ten percent discount to Epson supporters. Which made the car wash across the street offer a ten percent discount to MacCarthy voters. Mac and Howard ended up shouting at each other with the store owners in the middle of the street until a policeman had to ask everyone to leave. Quite a row, evidently. They’ve been civil so far, but things are clearly getting out of hand.” He shook his head. “I don’t know what’s gotten into folks.”
Mary had visions of a cowboy saloon fight, with dusty buckaroos being thrown out swinging shutter doors by a star-studded sheriff. “Voting discounts? That’s ridiculous.”
“Once people start taking sides, it doesn’t take much to get things out of hand.” He set his coffee down. “They’ll show up tonight, but they’ll be prickly, that’s for sure. You have your work cut out for you.”
“Oh, boy,” she murmured over a gulp of her coffee.
“It’s tough.” Dave nodded. “But this is exactly why you’re here. Folks need a place to put aside their differences for a common goal.” He rose from the chair. “You just hang onto the reins tonight, and don’t let ’em start up again. Forewarned is forearmed.”
“Well, tonight’s the night they all have to have their lines memorized. Fortunately, that tends to put people in their place very quickly.”
“You want me to come? Watch over things?”
While it was an attractive idea, Mary thought it best to hold onto what little ground she had. “Well, keep your cell phone on and I’ll have you on my speed dial.”
Pastor Dave laughed. “Pastoral 9–1–1? Good enough. Sandy’ll be there, too, and Gil, and those two could wrangle just about anyone if you need backup.”
“Sounds like I’ll need every heavenly host I can get my hands on.”
Mary did keep them in line, but only barely. The tension in the church hall was thick enough to cut with a hatchet, much less a knife. Howard said nothing all evening—except his lines of course, and bristled with annoyance and discomfort. Mostly he just frowned and made a point of sitting as physically far from Mac as possible.
Mac, on the other hand, was openly prickly. More than once she’d had to “shush” him from a cutting comment or other whispered comeback to something someone else said. She’d spent half the rehearsal wondering whether or not to follow the policeman’s lead and just dismiss the two, but it was equally clear that dozens of other people would take up the argument in their absence. She pretended she hadn’t heard about the fiasco, hoping a feigned ignorance would save her from having to take sides.
More spiritually mature, hm? Who’d say that based on how you just behaved tonight?
Mac hung back after rehearsal, recognizing how he’d behaved and wanting to apologize for the jerk he’d been this evening. Actually, he’d been a jerk most of the day. With the discount stunt, Mac felt like Howard’s supporters were out to get him, and it was pretty clear Howard felt equally threatened. How had it eroded into this bickering? Mac didn’t run to create scenes like this, and he doubted Howard found them useful, either. He did his best to put it behind him for the rehearsal, but he hadn’t done a very good job.
Mary wasn’t exactly scowling when she gathered up her coat, but she was close. “Are you two going to be able to get this under control?” she asked in a tone that was way too teacher-ish.
“I’m sorry,” Mac said in a tone that was way too much like a third-grade ruffian. “Things got out of hand today.”
“You can say that again. I’m glad Pastor Dave warned me, or I’d have been blindsided.”
Great. Pastor Dave had found it necessary to warn her. It was the grown-up version of having the principal send a note home to your mother. He pushed the wave of annoyance back down into his gut and deliberately unclenched his fists as he pulled open the church door for her. “You didn’t deserve to get pulled into this.”
She looked at him. “Actually, when you think about it, maybe I did. I’m supposed to be the distraction from all that. It’d be foolish to think it wouldn’t find its way into rehearsal now and then. It’s actually kind of amusing, from where I sit anyway. Discounts. You all are acting like children. Stomping and snorting around each other like angry bulls.”
“No cow metaphors, please, this is horse country.”
She laughed. “Actually, when Pastor Dave told me the police broke up your fighting in the street, that’s just what I pictured. The whole cowboy-burst-through-the-swinging-doors-of-the-saloon thing. So is that a cow metaphor, or a horse metaphor?”
That made him laugh. “That question doesn’t even merit an answer.” The western-movie vision hit him anyway: him standing in a dusty alley, hand twitching over his holster, ready to shoot it out with Howard at the O.K. Corral. He laughed harder.
“That’s better.” She pulled on her gloves and they walked in silence past the huge lit Christmas tree in the park. After a pause, she asked “Is it worth it? All this bickering?”
“You mean am I sorry I ran? No.” He tucked his own hands into his pockets; the evening had turned cold and damp. “I’m sorry it gets messy like that, but this is a small town and people are all up in each other’s business all the time here. If we cut out just because we argued, we’d never do anything. Howard and I will be fine after this is over.” He turned to look at her. “Maybe not right after all this is over, but fine eventually.”
“I find that hard to believe. Isn’t this the part of the country where families feud for generations? Hatfields and McCoys and all that?”
“Oh, please. A woman as smart as you should know better than to buy into a stereotype like that. Short of the occasional ‘y’all,’ have you seen anything that would make you believe that?”
A wry grin crept across her face. “Were you in the same church I was tonight?”
“Okay, above and beyond the normal human bickering factor.”
The grin didn’t let up. She was sparring with him, and he was enjoying it. “Is there a normal human bickering factor?”
Mac shrugged deeper into his coat, pretending at an annoyance he no longer felt. “I thought we were discussing my call to civil service.”
She mimicked his formality, the grin now a full-fledged smile. “Oh, yes, of course. Expound, please.”
That made him raise an eyebrow. “Expound? Quite a ‘hundred-dollar word’ as Sandy would say.”
“I do have an advanced education. I’m only two years and a eighty-page thesis away from a doctorate.”
He chuckled. “And you write jingles. Wrote jingles. Or will you continue to sell blue bears on the side? I doubt the Christmas Drama Coordinator pays much of a living wage.”
Now she played at annoyance. It satisfied him, on some level, that they’d reached the ability to joke—even lightly—about Bippo Bears. His dad always said you never really conquered something until you could laugh at it. “I believe we were discussing your call to civil service.”
He nodded. “And I can’t miss my chance to expound now, can I?” They stopped to admire a shop window done up for the holiday, all full of snow globes and an elegant crèche.
“Howard’s missing the point on too many things. Things that are going to be crucial for Middleburg in the next couple of years. We need more compromises if we’re going to survive. Howard thinks the way to stay charming and quaint is to make sure nothing changes. I think Middleburg can keep what makes it Middleburg and still walk into the future. It’s ‘change or die’ these days, and I don’t want to see my town die. A change of mayor, or even just the idea of a choice of mayor, is a good place to start.” He shrugged his shoulders, aware that he’d given her quite a speech. “I’ll get off my soapbox now,” he said, motioning for them to continue walking. “But I’ve got a question for you first.”