Christmas Music: A Romantic Holiday Story Read online

so… out the door I go.

  I can hear Dotty’s hoarse chuckling, and Grover’s easy laugh, two steps out the door. I see an old woman in a folding chair, alone, knitting. The Christmas music is louder out here, all sax, all the time, and now I see why: there is a guy, my age, maybe older, standing on his porch, back against the wall, foot up on a brick ledge, breathing softly into his saxophone so that the saddest rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” I’ve ever heard pours from his instrument.

  I get the chills despite the big grill crackling and spitting in the middle of the back courtyard. “Merry Christmas,” says Dotty, ever present cigarette in place, stuck to her bottom lip I don’t know how.

  “Merry Christmas,” I say, nodding toward she and Grover. Dotty is in her fifties, or sixties, or maybe even her seventies, though probably not really. She looks like she should be serving shots of whiskey down at some dive bar, and I should know; I’ve seen every dive bar up and down the east coast. “I hope… I hope I brought enough.”

  “Here,” Grover offers, taking the plastic basket. There is a picnic table set up on the lawn, a plastic snowman tablecloth flapping in the cool night air. There are bottles of soda and red and green plastic cups and he sets out the six-pack and the candy and takes the burgers, sliding them onto the grill with a practiced ease.

  “Okay if I take it from here?” he offers.

  I smile as our eyes meet, holding for just a little longer than usual. Then I hear the burgers spit on the searing grill and Dotty reaches for a green plastic cup, filling it with ice from a cooler in the grass.

  “Name your poison,” she croaks, ashes falling over her leather sandals.

  “I’ll just crack open one of these,” I say, reaching for my cheap sodas when she wags a finger.

  “No fun drinking what you actually brought,” she says, reaching for an orange soda. “Try this, it’s great.”

  I chuckle. “You are determined to break me out of my comfort zone this Christmas, aren’t you Dotty?”

  She laughs and laughs, until she coughs and coughs, but that doesn’t stop her from laughing some more. “That’s the general idea, yes,” she says as I pour the soda and watch it fizz. I sip it, gingerly, orange has never been my thing and, I gotta say… it’s damn good. Not champagne or even vodka, but as good as it’s going to get this holiday season.

  There are folding chairs set up around the grill and, as Grover flips the burgers and turns the dogs over and over, she kind of guides me toward two at the end.

  “I know we signed the lease and I gave you the keys last week and all,” she says, settling her bulky frame into the chair next to me gingerly, “but I was hoping this could be your official ‘Welcome to the Manchester Arms’ party.”

  I look down at my feet, and shake my head. No one’s gotten this close to me since rehab. “You… you don’t have to say that, Dotty.”

  “Why not?” she croaks, defensively, yet still kindly. “I mean it. It may not look like it, Grace, but the Manchester Arms is a very special place.”

  I nod toward the grill, Grover flipping burgers and turning hot dogs, the mournful sound of a saxophone drifting on the breeze, the old woman knitting all alone.

  Without irony I say, “I’m beginning to see that now…”

  She pats my knee and gets back up. “Time to help Grover with the grill. Three years and counting and, poor guy, he’s just not very good at this.”

  She turns, winks meaningfully, then shuffles away, thighs sliding together in her snowman pajama pants, and gruffly shoves Grover aside while grabbing the metal spatula from him in the same, dexterous motion.

  I chuckle and sip my soda as the lone saxophonist switches gears to a sad version of “Feliz Navidad.”

  Grover grabs a can of my soda, no cup, no ice, and replaces Dotty in her old chair.

  “Pushy,” he says, nodding toward her as she flips my burgers, then flips them again. “They’ll be overdone, mark my words.”

  I shrug, turning slightly toward him. “I’m not that hungry anyway,” I confess.

  His eyes widen. “What? You’re kidding me. I don’t eat a ton of red meat but they smell awesome…”

  I chuckle and nod toward the old woman across the way. She seems content, smiling, nodding to herself, quietly whispering, knitting all the while.

  “Who’s that?” I ask.

  He smirks. “That’s Mabel. She’s in #3.”

  “Next to you?” I ask.

  He nods. “She only talks to Dotty, but she’s nice enough.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why only to Dotty?”

  He shrugs, sipping half his soda at a clip. “I dunno, just always been that way since I moved in.”

  “But you’re her neighbor.”

  “I know that,” he chuckles, making me laugh. “You don’t think I know that?”

  I nudge his knee with mine. “You know what I mean. Why do you think she only talks to Dotty?”

  “You know Dotty—”

  “No I don’t,” I interrupt. “I just got here, remember?”

  He looks at me a little more carefully. “Well, she knows you. Or you wouldn’t be here.”

  I stop my cup halfway to my mouth and turn toward him. “What’s that supposed to mean? She’s my landlord. There was a vacancy, I filled out an application, paid my deposit, and here I am…”

  He chuckles softly. “Look at this place, Grace…” He waves his long hand along the backyard for emphasis. “River at our back, the ocean across the street, $800 a month for two bedrooms… you know how many applications Dotty gets every time there’s a vacancy.”

  I smirk. “Yeah, it did sound a little too good to be true.”

  “I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s not the Ritz, but… for folks like us, it’s not half bad.”

  “What folks like us?” I flare. “Who ‘us’?”

  “Relax,” he says, turning back toward me, big hands in the air to wave me down. “Chill. I meant… well, look at us. Look at this table, not a drop of alcohol in sight. On Christmas?”

  I nod. “You mean, everyone here…?”

  I scan the sad little party quickly: Dotty taking the meat off the grill, Mabel knitting merrily, chatting to herself, the Sax Man chilling on a slow version of “Jingle Bells,” nobody drinking, nobody shouting, punching, hitting, fighting…

  “You’re saying she handpicked me to come live here?”

  “Well, I mean… where did you see the ad for this place?”

  I picture the bulletin board at Sunnybrook Pines, the rehab facility down in West Palm Beach. “Rehab, right?” he asks, nodding, before I can answer. “Same as me.”

  “But why?”

  “Why do you think?” he asks, nodding toward her again. “She went through it, came out the other end and now she’s helping us.”

  I listen to the Sax Man, the crackling of the fire pit, Dotty calling for us to join her at the table. Grover leaps up, lean, handsome, hungry, antsy, for some reason. He’s usually so laid back and cool, I wonder what’s gotten into him.

  He makes two plates, and I kind of blush, thinking one’s for me, when instead he takes them, both heaping, to the Sax Man. I sigh and get up, joining Dotty at the table.

  “This looks great,” I say, staring at the burgers and dogs, the toasted buns and sweating condiments. “Really great.”

  “Who we kidding?” Dotty croaks, dumping baked beans from a crock pot on both plates in front of her. “It’s food, right? One day, maybe, filet mignon but for now, a roof over our heads, blood in our veins instead of vodka, a warm bed and hot eats, life’s good, right?”

  I sigh, working through the lump in my throat. “Life’s good,” I agree, as if trying to convince myself. “Life is good.”

  “So make a plate,” she says, hovering like a den mother in the world’s saddest sorority house. “Eat up.”

  I shrug and grab a hot dog, a bun, some chips, a few thin mints. “There you go,
” she encourages as I slide some beans onto my plate, just to be polite.

  I pick up my plate and return to my seat, figuring she’ll follow, but instead she walks over to Mabel and styles her up. I watch them, talking, as I slump deeper into my lawn chair.

  Sax Man is still playing, but Grover has taken a seat in one of the Adirondack chairs on his small cement porch. “Winter Wonderland” pours from his saxophone, soft but heavy, and I’ve never thought of it as a sad song before but somehow, he makes it so.

  “Tragic,” says Dotty, slumping down next to me with a heavy sigh and much creaking of folding lawn chair.

  “The burgers?” I ask, noting the charred hockey pucks between her buns.

  “What? God no, these are great!” She chomps into one, smearing ketchup all over her chin, for good measure. “I meant Arturo over there.”

  “Sax Man?” I ask, following where she’s pointing with her ketchup-covered napkin.

  “That’s what you call him?” she asks, mouth full. “I like that.”

  She eats some more, with gusto, so that I have to clear my throat and remind her, “You were saying something about… tragic?”

  She nods, swallowing, sipping her own orange soda, out of a can. “Arturo used to be in a