A Little Country Christmas - Carolyn Brown Page 0,123

on. A musician doesn’t give up music, even when he decides it’s not going to be his vocation.”

“She isn’t a patient.”

“I know. She’s a neighbor.”

“Stay out of it. And don’t go putting on rose-colored glasses either. Your optimism about people is often misplaced.”

Jim swallowed back his argument. Dylan had not grown up to be an optimistic person. He tended to see the bad side of every situation and often missed the important things that patients didn’t say. He had much to learn about human nature if he was ever to become a really good family doctor.

“Well,” Dylan said a moment later, his tone as exasperated as his words, “if we can’t have a chorale performance, and we don’t want to do a talent show, what do you suggest?”

“I’m going to give Brenda a day to think about it.”

“Dad. I just said—”

Jim arrived at his office door and waved at Lessie, his receptionist. He headed down the hall and popped his head into Dylan’s office as he disconnected the line.

“I’ve heard all your arguments, Dylan,” he said. “But my plan is to let Brenda think about it for a day. And I also need to talk to her mother and figure out why she’s so angry about Christmas.”

“She’s a scrooge, and you’ll soon discover that,” Dylan said.

Dylan was thirty years old now—the same age Julianne had been when she’d passed away. To this day, it took his breath away sometimes when Dylan would look up like he was doing now. He was so much like Julianne, with the same sandy brown hair, the same unruly curl that dipped over his forehead. Oh, what would his mother have to say about him now? Would she be as worried as Jim was about the boy’s glass-is-half-empty view of the world?

“We need to make a decision on this,” Dylan said. “We can’t keep the members of the chorale hanging.”

“We can. For just a couple of days more.”

Dylan rolled his eyes. “Dad…people are not as nice as you think they are.”

Jim turned away and headed down the hall to his own office, worried about the man Dylan was becoming.

* * *

Later that day, Louella sent Brenda to the back room to check inventory, but since Brenda had done a full inventory at the beginning of the week, this banishment was either punishment for being late this morning or, more likely, a ploy to get her off the sales floor, where customers had been coming in all afternoon to give her the stink eye.

Doc Killough, who knew everyone in town, had purposefully uncorked the evil gossip genie. What was he trying to do? Shame her into helping out?

Probably.

She was in a truly awful mood when her phone buzzed around three in the afternoon. She stopped counting skeins of baby yak yarn and glanced at the caller ID.

Momma. That was predictable.

Her mother had been pushing her ever since she could remember. First it had been to earn a scholarship to the Juilliard School, then it had been to ditch Keith and come home, then it had been about Ella. The fact that Momma had been right about everything was irritating as hell.

Momma might be soft-spoken but she was pushy as hell.

Brenda connected the call. “Yes, Momma, I did refuse to help Doc Killough.”

“Of course you did,” Momma said in her infernally measured tones. Momma never raised her voice.

“So, are you calling to tell me that I’m being stupid, or emotional, or what?”

“I’m not the enemy,” Momma said. “I understand why this time of year is hard for you. But honey, if you’d let just a tiny bit of Christmas joy into your heart, maybe…” Her words trailed off into a sigh.

Brenda had heard this speech for decades. Ever since the night of the Christmas Blizzard back in 1989, when she’d been sixteen. She would never forget that morning, two days before Christmas, when Chief Cuthbert had knocked on their door, grim-faced and red-eyed, to tell them that Daddy, a volunteer with the Magnolia Harbor rescue squad, had been killed in a freak car accident as he was trying to help someone out of a snowdrift.

Brenda pushed the skeins of yak yarn back into their shipping box. If only she could push that horrible memory to the back of her mind where she could forget it forever.

“I understand, you know,” Momma said into the silence.

No, she didn’t. Momma may have overcome the loss of her husband, but that didn’t make her an authority on Brenda’s grief. And besides,