carols;
Peter viewed Christmas as an opportunity to ease the collective guilt our culture had accumulated throughout the year. If people were really as kindhearted as they pretended to be at Christmas, then he thought food pantries and soup kitchens should be stocked and staffed year-round at consistent levels. If people hadn’t kept in touch with their friends for eleven of the year’s months, then they used the twelfth one to make up for it, clogging the postal system with holiday-themed junk mail. If companies hadn’t paid their employees a fair wage, then they distributed a Christmas bonus to make themselves look like heroes instead of misers. Poor man. He wasn’t as churlish as his rhetoric made him sound.
Peter and I had talked about the religious heritage of Christmas. I had asked him, just for the sake of argument, what was so wrong about humanity’s desire to communicate with heaven. And, for the sake of argument, we’d had an argument about Christianity’s exclusiveness and other religions’ tolerance. But the argument had ended when he reminded me that not only didn’t he place faith in any God, but he also didn’t even believe a God existed. I’d never before stopped to consider how very great a distance there was between believing in something and believing nothing. There may have been less of a culture clash had I been married to a Hindu or Muslim. At least we both would have been approaching life with the idea that there was some sort of higher purpose for it all.
There was a profound difference in our attitudes toward others. Peter wanted to review the financial statements of any nonprofit he was contemplating donating funds to. I was much more spontaneous. If I glimpsed TV coverage of a disaster, if I were stopped on the street by some collegian canvassing for rights in Third World countries, I always gave what I could. I figured if situations were reversed, I would be the one benefiting from the kindness of strangers. Peter could never understand that. The “there but for the grace of God…” argument was never able to sway him. And it was that age-old wisdom that said it all: the grace of God. I believed in it, and he did not. The people he gave to needed to be deserving of his help. The people I gave to sometimes didn’t deserve my help at all.
The idea of a Creator reaching down toward his people didn’t make any conceptual sense to Peter, didn’t evoke any sentiment, didn’t inform any of his decisions. Say nothing else of my parents, at least they introduced me to that idea. For even on the chance that it didn’t have any eternal importance, it made a great difference in terms of human spirit. Love made my world go around. To this day, I can’t say for sure what made Peter’s.
Maybe faith complicated ambition. Maybe his linear analyst’s mind couldn’t handle the divergent thoughts that faith must have thrown in his direction. But if that was so, I had discovered that I was disappointed in him. I’d thought him courageous. I’d thought him intelligent. And now I had decided that an atheist’s proclamation is neither. It’s a cowardly rejection of all that adds color and life and meaning to the world.
Which was not to say that I had made my own peace with God or decided that I should climb back into his boat.
If anything about Cranwell held any attraction for me, besides his physical appearance and in spite of his relationship with Severine, it would have to be his claim of conversion. For a man in his position with power, influence, and money to have turned his attention toward faith proclaimed to me his intellectual honesty.
But only, of course, if it were true.
So, I’d gone from holidays as part of a crowd, to holidays as part of a couple, to no holidays at all. And now I’d have to negotiate what sort of role they would play in my life. Because it was clear I would no longer be able to ignore them. At least not with Cranwell in the house.
I had exchanged my chef’s outfit for a pair of brown suede pants, cognac leather heels, and a navy long-sleeve shirt with an extended placket and horn buttons that I thought were particularly flattering. For some unknown reason, I took an extra moment to smooth on lip gloss and smudge eyeliner around my eyes. When I stepped back to look at myself, I realized the eyeliner made my pale lashes fade, so I had to swipe on mascara. And after the addition of mascara, my eyes had become such a focal point that my skin looked dull. I rooted around the bathroom for blush, as I reminded myself why I rarely wore makeup. I rolled my eyes at my reflection before I left the room.
In the kitchen, I discovered Cranwell typing like a maniac. The distraction of Christmas decorating must have set him behind schedule. Mistletoe was the farthest thing from my mind as I set the table and puttered around the kitchen.
“Ready for dinner?”
“Hmm?”
“Dinner?”
Cranwell turned around to look at me.
“Are you hungry?” I prompted.
“Oh. Sure.”
He uncorked the wine and poured glasses while I divided marinated leeks between three plates. I left Severine’s on the counter and took ours to the island.
“Bread?”
“Please.”
I began to saw off a chunk for Cranwell, but I made the mistake of looking into his eyes. They roved across my face, and I knew he was taking in the lip gloss, the eyeliner, and the mascara.
By that time, my natural ability to flush tomato-red had overcome the demure rose-colored blusher I’d stained my cheeks with. I felt Cranwell’s hand wrap around my wrist as an electric tingle vibrated through my body. It must have been the magnetic force of those russet eyes which drew my body across the island toward him.
I’ve never been known to have trouble swallowing, but at that moment, I did. I licked my lips in an effort to provide them with some moisture.
It only succeeded in drawing Cranwell’s attention like a beacon.
My eyes fluttered down toward the countertop, and when I looked back up, Cranwell had nearly met up with me halfway across the counter. He was so close that I could feel his breath fan my hair.
“Mistletoe.”
“What?” I was intercepting such loud messages from his eyes that I couldn’t hear what he was saying. That didn’t stop me from being fascinated by the way his lips had formed that one word. I wrested my eyes from them and tried to pay attention to what he had said.
“Mistletoe.” It looked as if his eyes were having trouble straying from my lips, but he directed them to a spot in the air above our heads.
It was at that point, when I looked up, that my weight shifted to the outside heel of my right shoe. It was enough to cause it to slip, slide forward, and pitch me backward onto the floor. I ended up at a perfect angle to view the ball of mistletoe he’d cleverly suspended from the middle of the iron pot rack.
“Freddie?”
I saw Cranwell’s head appear over the edge of the counter.
“I’m fine.” Of course, I would have been better had the floor swallowed me whole.
“Let me…” I heard him push back his stool and start around the island.
“I’m fine.” The edge in my voice must have stopped him.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” Now I remembered the reason I hadn’t worn those shoes for a while: they were prone to slipping at the worst possible moments. As I lay there, I began to get angry. Not only because my tailbone was throbbing, but also because Cranwell, Mr. Christianity himself, thought he could string me along while he was doing who-knows-what with Severine. That was not going to happen.
There was an awkward moment when I scrambled to my knees and pushed myself off the floor, but I managed to rise to my feet gracefully, with my back toward Cranwell.
“Do-”
I held up a hand to stave off any comments. After looking at the stove, the sink, the countertop and realizing that there was nothing that needed to be done-that the leeks, the wine, the bread were waiting for us at the table-I
