He regarded her with surprise. “You do?”
She nodded. “Weird, isn’t it?”
He covered her hand with his. “Not so weird. I miss that, too, Mary Vaughn. Only trouble is, there’s a whole lot of baggage that goes along with that. Most of the time it’s hard to see past the way things ended.”
“I know,” she admitted. Because there was nothing to be gained by looking back, she said, “What are we going to do about Christmas?”
“Celebrate it?” he asked, looking bewildered.
She shook her head, exasperated. “Why did I think you’d be any help with this?”
“Come on, Mary Vaughn. I’m no good at planning this kind of thing. You were always in charge of the holidays. I just went along for the ride. What do you think it’s going to take to make Rory Sue happy? I could finally give her that new convertible she’s been wanting.”
“Absolutely not,” Mary Vaughn said at once. “This isn’t about buying her off. We’d agreed that you’d give her the convertible when she graduates from college. The car she has will do just fine until then.”
He shrugged, but didn’t argue. “Then I’m at a loss.”
“I know what she wants more than anything,” Mary Vaughn ventured at last. “She wants us to be together the way we used to be.”
Sonny frowned. “What the devil are you suggesting, Mary Vaughn? That we get married again just to make our daughter happy even if it makes us miserable?”
She flushed at his immediate and insulting reaction. “No, of course not,” she said defensively. “I’m just saying that maybe we could all put aside our differences and do things together for the holidays.”
His expression relaxed. “What kind of things?”
She thought of the committee’s plan to go hunting for the town tree. “We could go out and chop down a Christmas tree together,” she suggested. “Remember how much Rory Sue always loved that? She said it was the best part of Christmas.”
“I suppose,” he said doubtfully. “You think that’ll do it?”
“No, of course not,” she said impatiently. “But it’s a start. Maybe we can go to Charleston shopping one day. The stores will be all decorated and festive.”
“And crowded,” Sonny predicted direly.
“Oh, stop being such a grouch. That’s part of the fun. We can stop at Lydia’s Bakery on the way home and have hot chocolate and sugar cookies the way we used to when Rory Sue was little.” She gave him a wistful look. “Don’t you wish she was still young enough to want to see Santa? Sometimes I take out all those pictures we have of her back then. She was the prettiest little girl in the whole wide world, wasn’t she?”
“She was,” Sonny agreed. “Still is, for that matter.”
Since he was starting to sound more nostalgic and agreeable, she smiled at him. “If you’ll go along with the shopping trip, you can carry all the packages and I’ll pay for them. How’s that for fair?”
He shook his head. “You have a strange notion about what’s fair, you know that, don’t you?” he said, but there was a hint of tolerant amusement in his eyes. “Any other big ideas?”
She thought back to the holiday celebrations in the past and what had made them special. “We should go to church together on Christmas Eve, have a big Christmas dinner at my place, then go caroling over at the nursing home the way we used to. Would that interfere with anything you have planned?”
“No,” he admitted, though he didn’t seem all that enthralled by the plan. “You including my dad in this?”
“Of course. Rory Sue would expect him to be with us. With your mom gone and your brothers scattered across the country, it’ll be good for him to have a real family Christmas again, too. Don’t you think so?”
“I suppose,” Sonny said. He gave her a skeptical look. “And you honestly think that a few days of faking it will make Rory Sue happy?”
“We don’t have to fake it,” she said. “We used to have fun together, Sonny. I can remember when we laughed all the time. Surely we can make an effort to get along for a few days.”
“I don’t know, Mary Vaughn,” he said, looking worried. “What if it gives Rory Sue the wrong idea? You know how she is. Every time I see her she asks me when I’m going to give you another chance. What if she thinks I’m doing that and gets her hopes up?”
“I’ll make sure she knows this is something we’re doing to make sure she has a good Christmas,” Mary Vaughn promised. “Maybe we should plan an open house, too. That was one of our traditions.” Suddenly she was filled with nostalgia. “I loved those, the house smelling like pine and cookies, lights glittering inside and out, and everyone we knew stopping by. I miss that.”
He regarded her with surprise. “Why’d you stop doing it?”
“It wouldn’t have been the same without you there,” she admitted. Moreover, she’d been scared to death that no one would come, that most of the people who’d chosen sides after the divorce had taken Sonny’s. A lot of people had thought that she was the one who’d ended their marriage and Sonny had let them believe that. She supposed it had been his gallant way of letting her save face. Ironically, though, it had turned a lot of people who adored Sonny against her. She wondered if it would have been any different if they’d known the truth—that he was the one who’d walked out.
She looked up to see Sonny studying her with a frown.
“Mary Vaughn, you’re happy, aren’t you?”
“Well, of course I am,” she lied. Because she didn’t want to dwell on the depressingly lonely state of her life, she beamed at him. “I am starved, though. Let’s order. I’m thinking about the pork chops. What about you?”
“Pork chops sound good,” he said, though he
