The Holly Herald’s staff party was in full swing, and Rosemary Charles had to admit the guys hadn’t done a half-bad job planning it. As it turned out, Bruno’s Sports Bar did have a tree they could put their white elephant game presents under—a gigantic fiber optics number that sat parked in a corner of the bar. Under it lay a pile of gag gifts. A few were wrapped in Christmas paper or nestled in gift bags, but most (the men’s) had come wrapped man-style in brown paper or plastic bags. The newspaper’s Web guy, Dustin, had actually used red ribbon to tie his bag shut. But Dustin was new. Next year would probably be another story. The party food consisted of Bruno’s buffalo wings and miniburgers, and some bowls of nuts, but there was plenty of beer so nobody seemed to care. Country music kept a steady beat going under the clack of balls on the pool tables and bursts of laughter, and right now some country singer was belting out a number that had Santa driving a 747.
Jonathan Hawkins, their publisher, strolled among the tables, chatting with the reporters and secretaries who weren’t bellied up to the bar. Their editor, Walt, was ordering fresh drinks and joking with a cute bartender in a Santa hat. Rick, who was playing pool with Rosemary, Martha, the food editor, and another reporter, stood waiting his turn and stuffing his face with nachos.
“They don’t even miss my red velvet cake,” Martha lamented to Rosemary as she chalked her cue stick.
Rosemary leaned on hers and watched as Rick set down his nachos and prepared to take his shot. “Oh, well. Your baking skills are wasted on these guys, anyway. Pearls before swine, girl.”
Rick sank his ball and positioned himself for another shot.
Martha sighed. “Why do we bother? No one would miss it if we all stopped doing what we do. We just proved it.”
Rosemary thought of how her dad rubbed his hands together in anticipation before sitting down to eat Christmas dinner, how he always managed to find where her mom hid the snowball cookies and snarf down every one before anyone else could get a chance. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I think a lot of guys appreciate it.” Then she thought of how pooped her mom always looked by Christmas Day. “But I don’t think women need to do as much as they do. And maybe they shouldn’t be such martyrs. They should recruit more help.”
And speaking of help, those snowball cookies weren’t that hard to make. Maybe she’d bake a batch tomorrow and drop some off for her dad. Give Mom a break.
Rick made another shot, smacking a ball into a side pocket.
“You could save some for the rest of us,” Rosemary complained.
He walked past her and waggled his eyebrows. “I’m good. What can I say?”
“Something modest?” she suggested.
He ignored her, bending over and setting up for his next shot. He had a nice butt. And great aim. He made that shot, too.
“Beginner’s luck,” she goaded.
“In pool, there’s no such thing as luck,” he informed her. “You need a precision eye and a steady hand. And I’ve got great hands,” he added as he sauntered by her.
“And a fat head.”
Walt came over and handed Rosemary a bottle of Red Hook. He looked around like a king surveying his kingdom. “Well, we pulled it off.” “We” meaning Rick, who had gotten volunteered army-style to find a place for the party. “You women make too big a deal out of everything. Those women didn’t need to go on strike. They just needed to delegate.”
“You’d have sold a lot less papers if they had,” Rosemary teased.
Walt made a face. “Got an answer for everything, don’tcha?”
“Pretty much.”
He took a swig of beer. “Well, kid, it’s been a fun ride. Nice bit on the smaller turnout at the Hollydays arts and crafts fair, and announcing the winners of this year’s tree-decorating contest will make a good twist. After that I think we’ll have about milked this thing for all we can. We’ll get a picture of the contest winners in the paper Christmas Day and call it quits with that.”
“There’s still Christmas Day itself,” Rosemary reminded him.
He shrugged. “That’ll be pretty much of a snooze. Stories about people opening presents don’t sell papers. No, I think just about everything interesting that’s going to happen during this strike has happened.”
She supposed he was right. What else could happen that would be newsworthy between now and Christmas?
“It’s sick, that’s what it is,” Sharon snapped. From the look on her face, Joy decided it was a good thing she’d suggested a Sunday afternoon walk and gotten Sharon out of her house and into the crisp winter air. Otherwise the steam coming out of Sharon’s ears might have scalded her husband.
They were on their second lap around Sharon’s neighborhood, which had been dubbed Candy Cane Lane because of the extravagant holiday decorating the people all did on their houses.
“I think your tree looks adorable with all those little toy cars and tinsel,” Joy said.
“Who’d have thought it would win the tree-decorating contest! He’s going to frame the picture,” Sharon grumbled. “I’ll never live this down.”
They walked past a lawn with a huge crèche. “At least Pete’s involved now,” Joy pointed out.
Sharon sniffed. “Yes, and from now on everything will be messy and sloppy and—”
“And you’ll all share the celebration,” Joy said, cutting her off. “Isn’t that the most important thing? Isn’t that what you really wanted? Isn’t that why you went on strike in the first place, so you wouldn’t have to do it all alone?”
Sharon frowned and kicked at a little mound of snow on the edge of the yard. “I suppose. But now I’m doomed to snoring Santas and singing reindeer all over the house. Honey, that’s no improvement.”
“Well, you could always confine them to the family room and put out your fancy decorations in the living room,” Joy suggested. “Maybe you could put up your own tree in your bedroom. That would be romantic.”
A smile grew on Sharon’s face. “Now, that idea has possibilities.”
“And at least your husband has changed,” Joy added, feeling a little jealous. “You’ve accomplished something with your strike.”
Sadly, it was more than she could say. And Christmas was almost here.
Sharon walked back into her house, determined to look on the bright side like Joy had suggested and see how everyone had benefited from her loosening the holiday reins. And then she caught the whiff of burned cookies and followed her nose to the kitchen, where she saw the disaster. Flour dusted the whole work island. Every available counter space was scattered with dirty bowls, measuring cups, and bags of sugar and flour and other baking ingredients. Someone had dropped an egg on the floor and failed to wipe it all up. And that was just the kitchen. All her boys looked like they’d been in a food fight.
“Oh, my stars and little catfishes!” she cried and pressed a hand to her chest. “What is going on here?”
“Hey, Mom,” called James. “We’re making gingerbread boys.”
“Is that what you’re making?” she said. “It looks more like a mess to me.”
“We’ll clean it up,” Pete assured her. “Why don’t you join us? Oh, yeah, you can’t. You’re on strike.”
His words sounded more like a taunt than a regret, and that irked her.
“Mom, we could use some help. This dough tastes kind of funny,” said Pete Junior.
It was all the excuse she needed. “Well, let me see.” She shed her coat and gloves and went to take a pinch of the dough. “Did y’all remember to add the sugar?”
“Who was supposed to put in the sugar?” Pete asked, and their middle son, Tommy Joe, blushed and raised a timid hand.
“Well, let’s just dump this out and start again,” Sharon said.
“You’re gonna help us?” asked Pete Junior. “I thought you couldn’t do anything.”
“Yeah,” put in James, “or you’d get a scab.”
“I’d be a scab,” Sharon corrected him. She looked at Pete.
He was watching her, his eyes asking, “What are you going to say to your kids now?”
That was a hard question. “I guess I can be a scab sometimes, even when there’s not a strike,” she admitted. Maybe Pete was right. Perhaps she was just a teensy bit of a Yulezilla.
He shook his head and slapped an ear. “Whoa, my hearing must be going. I thought you said—”
“Never mind what you thought I said, Pete Benedict. And this doesn’t mean I’m ending the strike. I’m just…taking a day off from it to supervise you boys.” She started washing her hands. “Okay, now. Let’s get all the ingredients lined up here on the counter and we’ll put each one away after we’ve added it. That way you’ll know everything is in the bowl that should be.”
For the next hour they played together in the kitchen, making not only gingerbread boys but gingerbread trees, pumpkins, and bunnies, and any other shape that James pulled out of Sharon’s basket of cookie cutters and fancied. Her oldest son decided to make an anatomically correct gingerbread boy, which got his brothers and his father laughing hysterically. Sharon decided to let it go. Maybe that particular boy would have a sad accident coming off the cookie sheet.
At last they were done and the kitchen was restored to order.
“I’m pooped,” Pete declared. “Let’s go out for pizza.”
“Good idea,” Sharon agreed. “I don’t want this kitchen all messed up again now that it’s clean. Boys, you all go change. We’re not taking you out looking like a bunch of ragamuffins.”
The boys stampeded out of the kitchen with noisy whoops, leaving Sharon and Pete alone.
He leaned against the counter and pulled her up to him. “I should have taken a picture of you crossing the picket line. I’ll bet someone at the Holly Herald would have paid big money for that.”
“I wasn’t really crossing the picket line. I was just keeping you and the boys from demolishing my kitchen.”
“Uh-huh.” His mouth turned up in a crooked grin. “You miss doing all this, don’t you? It’s killing you not to be doing it.”
She gave his chest a poke. “Let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk about you. How does it feel to have to finally do something? All these years you’ve been like a big ol’ blister, not showing up until the work’s done.”
He gave her a slow smile. “Well, Tex, if everything didn’t always have to be done exactly your way, maybe you’d get more help.”
Pete’s statement hit her right between the eyes, making her drop her gaze. It was true. Deep down she knew it. “Don’t you dare call me Yulezilla,” she said, trying to keep some fire in her voice.
“Things haven’t gotten done exactly your way this year and we all survived just fine. Didn’t we?”
“I suppose we have,” she muttered.
“In fact, I think I’ve done pretty good so far this season and I should get some kind of reward.” He began to rub his hands up and down her back.
“Is that so?” she teased, and slipped her arms around his neck.
He was looking at her mouth now. “Yeah, that’s so.” He gave her a big, juicy kiss and slipped a hand up her sweater.
“Dad! We’re ready,” said James, bounding into the room.
Sharon pulled away, quickly straightening her sweater. “I guess you’ll just have to wait for your reward,” she told Pete.
“Don’t make me wait too long. All this Christmas stuff is killing me.” Before she could say anything he held up a silencing hand. “I know, I know. That’s what it’s like for you every year. But don’t worry. It’s going to be different from now on.”
She wasn’t quite sure she liked the way he said that. “Now, don’t you go thinking that just because you got away with tacky decorations all over the house this year that you’ve set some kind of precedent.”
He grinned and sauntered out of the kitchen, humming the redneck version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”
The man was still a barbarian. And Lord, how she loved him.
It was now December 23, 6:00 P.M., and snowing heavily. Glen had skidded his way through downtown and was halfway home before a lady in an out-of-control SUV finally skated into him and pushed his commuter car into a ditch. He plodded the rest of the way home through six inches of snow, ruining his shoes and freezing his butt off. His only consolation was that Laura had called him on his cell earlier to report that she’d made it home okay. That was one less thing to worry about.
And Glen had plenty to worry about these days, like where all the stuff he’d ordered through that on-line shopper was. Bad enough he still had to figure out everything to buy for the big Christmas Eve turkey dinner and how to cook all that crap (naturally, he’d missed the deadline for ordering the precooked turkey with all the trimmings from Town and Country by one day), but to have to worry about the presents arriving on top of it, it was too much to ask a guy.
The stuff should have been here by now. He’d used the Contact Us option on the Web site earlier in the day and had only gotten a form reply telling him that his merchandise was on the way and would be delivered in five to ten working days—the same thing it had said six days before.
Glen turned the corner to his street, dread chilling him more than the icy snowflakes slipping past his coat collar. He’d ordered everything from that site, from Laura’s gift to the kids’ presents from Santa. All he needed was some nasty hiccup with the delivery. He picked up his pace, anxious to get home and see if there was a pile of Fed Ex packages in the front hall.
Some of the neighbor kids were racing back and forth across the lawns, having a snowball fight. One of them came darting past him and whoever was after the kid landed a zinger on the back of Glen’s head, zapping him with cold and rattling his overworked brain.
“Sorry, Mr. Fredericks,” called the kid with the bad aim. “I was trying to get John.”
“No problem,” Glen muttered. “Hit me again. I can take it. Hell, I’m just a human punching bag these days anyway.”
The streetlights cast glitter on the snow-covered shrubs and houses, making the neighborhood look like it belonged in a Robert Kincaid painting. Glen’s yard sported a lopsided snowman with a carrot nose and a couple of branches for arms. The kids had obviously been out having fun. At least someone was having fun this season.
He opened the front door and looked for a pile of packages. Nothing. Hope began to leak out of him. Maybe Laura had put them under the tree for him. Ha! In his dreams. He looked in the living room anyway. No packages under the tree. The last bit of hope rushed out, leaving him feeling like a deflated balloon.
Laura came around the corner. “Oh, I didn’t hear you come in.”
“No packages?” he asked.
She shook her head solemnly.
“I don’t understand it. I ordered in plenty of time.”
“You might want to do some shopping tomorrow, babe,” Laura said. “It doesn’t look like they’re coming.”
At least she had the consideration not to gloat. Still, this sucked. Was he the only guy this was happening to? “I wonder if Bob Robertson got his,” he mused.
After dinner he decided to call and see. He got only the answering machine. “Uh, Bob. This is Glen Fredericks. My wife is striking with yours. I shopped that personal shopper site you recommended in your article, and none of my stuff has come yet. I’m just wondering if you got yours.”
He hung up, feeling unsatisfied. What had he been expecting Robertson to do, anyway? It looked like tomorrow he’d be at the mall, doing the last minute race for presents.
Bob stood listening to Fredericks’s message and feeling once again that miserable ache in his gut like he’d been sucker-punched. This was the third call he’d gotten in two days. It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that something was very wrong here in Holly. He went into his office and shut the door, then booted up his computer. He typed in the Web site address for U Shop Till I Drop again, determined to make something happen. He’d e-mail them one last time, threaten to call the authorities if they didn’t come through. It was probably already too late to get his presents or anybody else’s, but it made him feel better to try.
The computer screen blinked, then brought him up a big, empty, white page, telling him that the page couldn’t be located.
What? He went back and tried again. He had to have typed the address incorrectly, had to have made a mistake. The same empty page greeted him, and he knew he’d made a mistake all right, and it had nothing to do with what he had or hadn’t typed. He’d been conned, and so had half the men in Holly.
He dropped his head into his hands. “I’m a dead man.”