“Of course not,” Tom said. “It won’t happen again. Let’s get right to those reports. Mary Vaughn, how are you coming with contacting the church choirs?”
“We have commitments from the First Baptist Church and the Methodists,” she reported. “I know we’ve never asked the choir at Main Street Baptist to participate before, but I think it’s time that changed. This is a new era and the whole community should be represented.”
Tom nodded approvingly. “I totally agree. Howard, do you foresee any problems with that?”
Howard looked taken aback at first, then shook his head. “To tell you the truth, I thought they’d been invited in the past and turned us down.”
“You know that’s not so,” Mary Vaughn contradicted. “You and everybody always tiptoed around it, but the truth is, nobody wanted to take the chance of stirring up trouble. We ought to be long past such discrimination in Serenity, if you ask me.”
“For whatever it’s worth, I agree,” Ronnie said. “They have an excellent choir and they ought to be included. Race shouldn’t even be an issue in this.”
“That’s settled then,” Tom said. “Mary Vaughn, you’ll speak to their choir director and report back next week.”
She smiled at him. “I’ll call you or stop by and let you know as soon as I’ve spoken to her,” she told him.
“Okay, then. Ronnie, what have you found out about decorations?”
For the next hour they looked at pictures of a variety of options, from lighted snowflakes to banners for light poles. From Tom’s perspective, it was much ado about nothing, but Howard and Mary Vaughn carried on as if the entire success of the festival hinged on the selection.
“Budget, people,” Tom said at last. “I’ve only been able to find a very small discretionary fund we can use for this. We can’t afford to go overboard.”
“If we decide on the snowflakes, I can negotiate a discount,” Ronnie offered. “I stock a lot of merchandise from this supplier. I think he’ll cut me a deal.”
“Then it’s decided,” Howard said, looking pleased. “We’ll have snowflakes lit up all over downtown, along with twinkle lights in the oaks and palmettos, plus the town Christmas tree we’ll light on the first night of the festival. Ronnie, you’ll supervise a town crew getting everything in place, right?”
“I can do that,” Ronnie agreed.
Tom covered his vendor report in under a minute, then adjourned the meeting. As the others were leaving, he beckoned Ronnie to follow him into his office.
“Where’s Jeanette?” he asked.
Ronnie gave him a sympathetic look. “No idea. You must really have ticked her off last night for her to blow off a commitment she made to Maddie to serve on this committee. What’d you do?”
“I have no idea. How am I supposed to fix a problem if I don’t know what it is?” He was frustrated by the situation and by the fact that Jeanette’s behavior mattered at all. He’d been so careful all these years to avoid romantic entanglements for precisely this reason. They were an unnecessary distraction. And yet he couldn’t seem to let go of his fascination with Jeanette. Lust was certainly part of it, no question about it, but there was more. She touched him on some level no other woman ever had.
“You could ask her why she’s upset,” Ronnie suggested. “Or you could just start groveling and see how it goes.”
“I’ve never groveled in my life,” Tom protested, then winced at the implied arrogance in the comment.
“You ever have a woman as mad at you as Jeanette seems to be?”
“More than likely,” Tom admitted ruefully. “It’s just never been this important before.” He had zero experience with a woman capable of twisting his insides into a knot the way this one did.
“Well, if you want my opinion, a man’s never too old to learn all the ways to apologize to a woman. Believe me, I had plenty of practice with Dana Sue.” He slapped Tom on the back. “And look at us now. We couldn’t be happier.”
Tom nodded. “Flowers or candy?”
“Jeanette strikes me as a hard sell. You’ll need to be more inventive than that.”
“I’ll work on it,” Tom said.
* * *
For the rest of the morning, Tom wrestled with the town’s budget and with possible ways he could make amends with Jeanette. He was so distracted by the latter that Teresa finally called him on it.
“You aren’t paying a bit of attention to anything I say,” she accused, taking a seat across from him. “Not that that’s anything new, but would you mind telling me what’s more important than your job?”
“It’s a personal matter,” Tom said.
“Must have something to do with that argument you and Jeanette had over at Helen and Erik’s last night.”
He stared at her incredulously. “How on earth do you know about that? None of her friends would be out spreading rumors first thing this morning.”
Teresa regarded him benevolently. “You have a lot to learn about Serenity. Grace Wharton’s cousin lives next door. She saw Jeanette storming out of there and you not far behind. She put two and two together and told Grace, who’s probably told everyone who stopped by to have breakfast at Wharton’s this morning.”
“And you heard it from one of these people?”
“No, I heard it from Grace herself. I have a bowl of oatmeal at Wharton’s every morning so I know the latest on what’s going on around town. Nothing much gets past Grace or me.”
“Does this town even need the weekly newspaper?”
“Not really, though I will say the reporters over there tend to stick with the facts and don’t put a lot of interpretation on ’em. At least, not since they tried to spin what was going on between Maddie and Cal at the spa before that place opened. Once they’d stirred up that hornets’ nest, things changed. Now it’s pretty dull reading.”
“Well, thank heaven for that,” he muttered.
“So, is that what’s on your mind?” Teresa asked. “Because it seems to me
