breakfast.
Because the bar association had put Portland in charge of getting something suitable for us, we now owned a wonderful hand-thrown greenish gray bowl about eighteen inches in diameter and six inches deep. She had commissioned it from Jugtown Pottery over in Moore County and it was signed on the bottom by Vernon Owens. In the future, it would hold nuts or fruit or maybe even enough coleslaw to feed all my brothers and their families at our next pig-picking. Right now, it was piled high with Christmas ornaments.
Portland had asked each attendee to bring something for our first tree together, and my colleagues had responded so enthusiastically that the bowl couldn’t hold them all. A few of them were merely fancy glass balls; the rest were figurals that were meant to bring a laugh or to zing us. Judge Longmire had used a permanent marker on a shiny gold star so that it now looked like a deputy’s badge and was labeled “Colleton County Sheriff’s Department.” Kaye Barley, an attorney from Makely, had contributed a sleek little black sports car that was meant to evoke the Firebird I’d wrecked up in the mountains this past October, and Julie Walsh, an ADA in Doug’s office, gave us a comic Justice peeking from under her blindfold. A sorrowful-looking plastic beagle might have started life in its natural brown-and-white coat, but an ardent Republican judge had sprayed it yellow. An equally ardent Democrat gave us a donkey wearing a Santa Claus hat.
A particularly elegant gold-and-white angel came with a gift card signed by John Claude and Reid. John Claude may have chosen the angel, but I’m sure he never noticed Reid’s embellishments. At least, I assume it was Reid who had doctored the tiny open hymnal the angel was singing from. In almost microscopic lettering, the hymnal was now titled
Yeah, that would definitely be Reid.
I’d about strangled on my coffee when Dwight pointed it out to me last night.
“Want me to build us a tree?” Dwight asked now, pouring us each a mug of fragrant coffee as I shifted the fragile ornaments over to the buffet counter next to his new beer tap.
“My goodness, Major Bryant.” I fluttered my eyelashes at him in my best Scarlett O’Hara manner. “You can build trees?”
“Yeah, well, I’m not crazy about those bought ones. I’d rather just go out and cut us a pine. You mind?”
“A pine?” I quit fluttering and looked at him dubiously. A thick and bushy cedar I could understand, but our scrub pines aren’t very thick and I do like a full tree.
“That’s what we used to have when I was a kid after Dad died and Mama went back to school to get her teaching certificate.”
I knew things had been tight for Miss Emily. Widowed. Four young children. Of course there wouldn’t have been money for store-bought trees, and so many people used to go out foraging for Christmas trees back then that wild cedars were just about eradicated in our area. I remember hearing my own mother complain that there were no decent-shaped ones left on the farm. Nowadays, between artificial trees from Kmart and picture-perfect fresh firs at every grocery store, cedars are making a comeback along our hedgerows.
Daddy used to grumble about the foolishness of paying good money for a tree that was going to wind up on a New Year’s Eve bonfire, but Mother could argue him down every time. Her store-bought trees always filled the front corner of the living room, nearly touching the ten-foot ceiling of the old farmhouse, ablaze with lights and shimmering with strands of silvery tinsel.
I hadn’t realized that Dwight’s childhood trees were different from mine, but if a skimpy Charlie Brown pine was what he wanted, I could certainly play Linus.
“Why don’t you wait and let Cal help you cut it?” I suggested.
His brown eyes lit up with pure happiness. “Good idea.”
“And we’ll need a stand that holds water.”
“No problem. I’ll ask Mama if she still has our old iron one. She only puts up a little artificial tree these days.”
He glanced at his watch. “What time’s Cyl coming?”
“I told her eight-thirty. That’ll give us a couple of hours before she has to make preaching services at Mount Zion.”
“I’m going to clear out for a while, then. You don’t want me here if y’all are going to do catch-up. I’ve scheduled a briefing this morning anyhow, so I’ll go in early. Start on Tracy’s office. See what they’ve got for me so far.”
I reminded him that we were due to take lunch with Aunt Zell and Uncle Ash at one o’clock. “Jane and Brix Junior will be there, too.”
He scowled. “Does that mean a jacket and tie?”
“’Fraid so.”
I set a cast-iron skillet on one of the burners, turned the flame on under it, and took out several pieces of the link sausage Maidie had sent over from hog-killing the week before. Dwight went off to get dressed but came back almost immediately, wearing nothing except shorts and socks, with a dark wool shirt in one hand and two knitted ties in the other. “Which tie you like better with this shirt?”
When I hesitated, I got another scowl. “You saying I’ve got to wear a white shirt, too?”
“It doesn’t have to be white, but dress shirts are really sexy,” I murmured.
He grinned. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Too bad, shug. My only clean ones are back in my apartment.”
“Which is only a few blocks from the courthouse,” I said sweetly as I stood on tiptoes to nuzzle his ear.
“I’m still going to look like a cop,” he warned, doing a little nuzzling of his own.
