The Noel Stranger Read online

  “Thank you,” I said again. “I’ll miss you.”

  She said, “Yeah. Don’t get sentimental on me. You know I hate that crap.”

  The waitress returned carrying our meals. She pretty much dropped the food on the table and ran. I watched in anticipation as Marge tried her soup. She took a second spoonful, so I knew we were safe. “When are you leaving?” I asked.

  “I put the house up for sale last Monday. It’s already under contract.”

  “You mean the kitchen?” I asked. Our company headquarters was an old home that Marge had converted into a commercial kitchen and bakery. She usually just called it “the house.”

  “No, not the kitchen. You’re going to need that. I meant my personal residence.”

  “That’s fast,” I said. “That’s good.”

  “It means I sold too cheap.” She shook her head. “What’s done is done. The buyers want to close by April third, so I’m flying to Arizona tomorrow to find a place. I’ll have Scott finish up the paperwork so we can legally transfer the company over before I leave. We’ll need to transfer all the bank accounts into your name. I’ll leave a cushion in there, but I doubt you’ll need it. We have six thousand in receivables. There’s at least fifty grand in equity on the kitchen.”

  “I’ll pay you back when I can,” I said.

  “I don’t want you paying me back. It’s a signing bonus. We already have more than a hundred thousand in contracts. You’ll do okay.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Just eat your salad,” she said.

  I saw Marge only once after that. She died of cancer just eighteen weeks later. I found out later that she’d had stage four uterine cancer when she had turned over the business. She never even told me. She hated pity. There were only three of us at her funeral. Tabitha didn’t even come.

  CHAPTER

  Five

  An anonymous woman posted her sympathy online for me, saying that she too had been “Clived.” In spite of my pain, I almost laughed. You never want to live to see your name become a verb.

  —Maggie Walther’s Diary

  I met Clive six months before I took over the company while we were catering a political soiree for the Salt Lake mayor’s race. The event was held at the National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers convention hall. The room was filled with suits and pantsuits—ambitious political types. Clive was there, younger than most, yet swimming through the crowd as effortlessly as a koi in a backyard pond. He was already in his second year of law school and was clerking at the firm he would eventually become a partner at.

  I thought he was handsome, though not in a way I was used to. Most of the guys I dated had long hair and tattoos. Clive looked perfectly arranged, from his flawlessly knotted tie to his expensive-looking shoes. His hair looked better cared for than mine. From my experience, those kinds of guys might give you a second look but never a second date. We shared eye contact as I came from the kitchen carrying a tray of hors d’oeuvres to the room.

  He immediately took a step toward me. “I’ll have one of those,” he said, lifting a bacon-wrapped chestnut from my tray.

  I might have been flirting. I don’t remember. “Just one?”

  “Let me see.” He popped the morsel into his mouth, ate it, then took another. “Did you make these?”

  “No.”

  “You just serve the food.”

  “No. I bake. I just made other things.”

  “What do you think of this party?”

  “I’m working,” I said.

  “We all are,” he replied. “The laughter is fake. Bunch of sycophants. Are you partisan?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m Pisces.”

  He burst out laughing. “That’s the best thing I’ve heard all night. I’m a Leo. King of the jungle.”

  “Which jungle?”

  “Whichever one will run when I roar,” he said, a slight smile bending his mouth. “Pisces and Leo. We’re compatible opposites.”

  “I need to get back to work,” I said.

  “What time do you get off work?”

  “Long after the party is over.”

  “Is that a brush-off?”

  “No. It’s a fact.”

  “May I have your phone number?”

  “You don’t even know my name.”

  “That would be helpful,” he said. “What’s your name?”

  “Maggie. What’s yours?”

  “Clive. Like Clive Davis.”

  “Your last name is Davis?”

  “No. Clive Davis is a famous record producer.”

  “Never heard of him,” I said.

  “He signed the greats. Janis Joplin, Aerosmith, Billy Joel, Bruce Springsteen, the Grateful Dead.”

  “All before my time, but yes.”

  “Yes, you’ve heard of them?”

  “Yes, you can have my phone number.”

  He pulled out his phone. “Go ahead.”

  “It’s 555-2412.”

  “That’s not a fake number, is it?”

  “Do women often give you fake numbers?” He didn’t answer. “If I didn’t want you to call me, I’d tell you.”

  “That’s refreshing,” he said. He typed something into his phone. “I just texted you.” I guessed he was testing me, waiting to see if something on me would buzz or ding. “Nothing.”

  “I’m not allowed to have my phone on while I work.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “I’m also not supposed to mingle with the guests. I’ve got to get back to work.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

  “I hope you do.”

  He smiled and walked away, disappearing back into the crowd. I replenished the table. When I got back to the kitchen, Marge said, “Who was that man you were talking to?”

  “No one.”

  “But you gave him your phone number.”

  “Yes.”

  “This is the last place I’d give anyone a phone number.”

  I should have listened to her. Clive called me early the next morning. I was still in bed. We hadn’t left the party until midnight, and I hadn’t gotten to bed until half past one.

  “Hello,” I said groggily.

  “Rise and shine, princess,” he said.

  I rubbed my eyes. “Who is this?”

  “Clive, from the party last night. May I take you to breakfast?”

  “What time is it?”

  “Seven.”

  “I was asleep. Who calls at seven?”

  “Apparently I do. I couldn’t get you off my mind.”

  “I don’t know if I should be flattered or scared.”

  “I think you need more sleep,” he said. “Tell you what, why don’t I pick you up at noon and I’ll take you to La Caille for brunch.” La Caille was an expensive French restaurant tucked away in the canyons.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’ll see you then.”

  “Wait. You don’t know where I live.”

  “Actually, I do. I’ll see you at noon.”

  He hung up the phone.

  How does he know where I live? I was too tired to think. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

  Clive showed up on time. I had brunch with him, then dinner, then breakfast. We dated for only two months before he asked me to marry him. I said yes.

  CHAPTER

  Six

  Some days it’s just best not to leave the bunker.

  —Maggie Walther’s Diary

  On the drive home I thought about what Carina had said—at least when I wasn’t worrying about sliding off the road and dying in a car accident. She was right. I knew that I needed to do something to get out of my funk. Or at least my bedroom. An undeniable part of me longed for normalcy. The idea of changing my environment and embracing Christmas made sense. The thing was, I loved Christmas. I always had.

  This was one place where Clive and I were in sync. Clive was also big on Christmas. (Why can’t I say big without thinking bigamy?)
Typical Clive, he went overboard. Our house wasn’t just dressed for the season, it was custom-decorated by the local commercial display company. I knew it had gotten too extreme when people began stopping in front of our house to take pictures. Our electric bill tripled during the season.

  Every year got worse, and I fully expected our home to someday evolve into a Macy’s-like Christmas attraction with window displays and long lines of spectators and pretzel carts.

  All this attention to the season wasn’t really for us. It was for Clive’s schmoozers—my word, not his—who came to our parties. Clive was big on parties and he kept long lists of attendees, each carefully arranged and cross-checked against each other to keep the wrong people from attending the same party. He even invited his enemies to our parties, following the admonition to keep your friends close but your enemies closer.

  With the exception of the other attorneys’ wives, whom I superficially knew, I didn’t know any of the people at the parties. Our home was basically another catering job, except I was also the hostess, smiling prettily as I told people where the bathrooms were, took their coats, and put coasters under their drinks.

  In a moment of weakness, I had imagined what Clive’s other wife’s home looked like at Christmas. The thought of it made my stomach hurt.

  When I got home, my front walk and driveway, like the rest of the world, were covered with snow. I pulled into my garage, grabbed a snow shovel, and spent the next hour shoveling the driveway and sidewalk until my back hurt.

  As I was finishing up, it started to snow again. First in wispy, pretty flakes, then increasing in density until the sky seemed to be more snow than not. Within minutes the concrete I’d cleared was covered again. Defeated, I went back inside the house and curled up in bed. This was not a day to be out. The world had it in for me.

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  The storm just keeps on coming—literally and figuratively.

  —Maggie Walther’s Diary

  The storm got worse. Wondering if the world had slipped into an ice age that I hadn’t been warned about, I actually turned on the local news. I say “actually” because it was the first time in a long time. For obvious reasons I had been avoiding the news, but I really wanted to see what they had to say about the weather. According to the annoyingly spunky weatherwoman, the storm wasn’t slackening anytime soon. Worst case, it was supposed to shut down the city. I didn’t really care. At least it made my isolation excusable.

  After the news, I watched some show about a crazy woman who had killed her husband, then tried to dispose of the body by feeding it to her neighbor’s pigs. That’s the kind of mood I was in.

  Around ten o’clock the power went out. I used my cell phone as a flashlight to walk around the house. I found some candles, which I lit in the kitchen. I hadn’t eaten anything all day and I was feeling it. I made myself a turkey and cheddar cheese sandwich, which even by candlelight wasn’t romantic in the least.

  Then I just lay on the couch waiting for the lights to come back on. They didn’t. After an hour the power was still out and though the house was warmed by natural gas, the heater’s controls ran on electronics, so the house kept getting colder.

  I raised a blind to look outside. Even though it was nearly midnight, it was eerily light out, as the blizzardscape was illuminated by a full moon. The snow on the ground was already at least two feet deep.

  I began to worry about the cold. One of the problems with isolation is that your imagination begins to create its own reality. I pictured myself being the subject of one of those stories the papers always run after a major storm, where a home’s heat was shut off and the occupant is found, days later, frozen to death.

  In the basement, we had an antique-looking wood-burning stove that we rarely used. Actually, never used. It had come with the house, and we had thought of it only as decoration: the polished copper firewood tub next to it had never been emptied of carefully stacked logs. Briefly, I wondered if the logs were still good or if they’d expired, which might have been the dumbest thing I’d ever thought—with the exception of believing that my husband loved only me.

  I struggled with starting the fire for more than twenty minutes before shouting out, “I hate being alone!” I’m not entirely sure what being alone had to do with starting a fire, but my loneliness suddenly felt as heavy and cold as the air around me. I realized something. Marriage had changed me. I had once insisted on my alone time. Now I feared it.

  As for the fire, I finally just filled the whole stove with newspapers, covered them with wood, then doused the whole thing in some lighter fluid I found in the garage. (Clive prided himself on being a barbecue “purist” and used one of those old charcoal-burning, wire-grilled barbecues.) The stove almost exploded, but the fire was going.

  I got my pillow and a quilt from upstairs, then lay down on the couch in front of the crackling fire. As I watched the flickering flames, I remembered what Carina had said at the coffee shop about starting a fire when you’re lost in the wilderness. I was lost in an emotional wilderness, and I needed all the help I could get.

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  Why do I still miss him? Or is it just the myth of him that I miss? How much of each relationship is based on reality versus what we hope to believe about who the other person is?

  —Maggie Walther’s Diary

  I woke sometime around three in the morning when the power came back on and the lights and television with it. I hadn’t bothered to turn the lights on downstairs, so the room was lit only by the lamp in the stairwell and the glowing orange embers in the stove.

  I went upstairs, blew out the candles, then turned off all the lights and the television. I checked the thermostat. The temperature had fallen to sixty-three degrees but the furnace had finally kicked on. I climbed in between the cold sheets of my bed and closed my eyes. As angry and betrayed as I felt about Clive, I missed him next to me—the warmth of his body, the soothing sound of his breathing. Three questions bounced around inside my skull, each taking its turn to inflict its pain like tag team wrestlers: Why did he betray me? What’s wrong with me? Why wasn’t I enough?

  CHAPTER

  Nine

  Lynch mobs never went away. They just migrated to the Internet.

  —Maggie Walther’s Diary

  That night I had a peculiar dream. I was following Clive, barefoot, through a snowy forest. I asked him where we were going. “Nowhere,” he replied. “Then why are we walking?” I asked. He turned around. He was wearing a mask. I asked him to take it off. He said, “Are you sure?” I said yes. He lifted the mask. There was nothing there.

  I woke, my heart pounding fiercely. The sun was projecting its bright rays through the partially open wooden slats of my window blinds. I could hear the neighborhood snowblower brigade, their machines’ engines whining and chugging beneath the weight of the night’s snow. A reminder that outside my shuttered world, life was carrying on as usual.

  My body ached nearly as much as my heart. I forced myself out of bed and walked over and lifted the blinds. The light was intense, the morning sun reflecting off the newly laid crystalline blanket. The sky was bright blue and the storm was gone, but it had left behind nearly thirty inches. My neighbor’s Volkswagen, which had been parked in the street, looked more like an igloo than a car.

  Now I really was snowed in and my back still ached from the few inches of snow I’d shoveled the night before. I didn’t want to go out in public, but I needed to. I needed to prove to myself that the world wasn’t laughing at me. I know that sounds paranoid, but there’s a reason. After Clive’s story broke, I made the mistake of reading the comments people posted online about the newspaper story. Many of them were directed at me, some mocking me, some blaming me. I was astounded to see such viciousness from people I didn’t know and who didn’t know me.

  I once read that people, when cloaked in anonymity, would do things they wouldn’t otherwise do—hence the invention of the masquerade part
y. When did society get so mean?

  CHAPTER

  Ten

  Sometimes the simplicity of a kind act is inversely proportionate to the power of its effect.

  —Maggie Walther’s Diary

  I walked to my front door to see just how snowed in I was. As I opened the door, the freezing air on my face felt bracing. In the bright light, it took me a moment to understand what I was seeing. Someone had plowed my driveway, sidewalk, and walkway. On my doorstep was a red glass candle with a note taped to it. I stooped to pick it up.

  Dear Maggie,

  My husband and I wanted you to know how sorry we are for what you are going through. You’re in our prayers. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do.

  Sincerely,

  Bryan and Leisa Stephens

  Even though I’d lived across the street from them for more than three years, I hardly knew them. I saw them out walking their dog now and then—a miniature Maltese poodle—but our interactions had been scarcely more than a wave.

  I looked across the street at their house. It looked dark. I wanted to show them my appreciation, so I decided to do what I did best. Bake. One of my most popular Christmas confections was thumbprint cookies—small, silver dollar–sized sugar cookies. I would press each with my thumb, then fill the indentation with a spoonful of jam.

  I decided I should at least make myself presentable enough to not scare them. I showered, put on makeup, and did my hair. For the first time in weeks, I looked human again.

  I went out to the kitchen and preset the oven, then started mixing ingredients. Thumbprint cookies are easy to make, a simple recipe of flour, baking powder, butter, sugar, eggs, and vanilla. Simple or not, I found myself enjoying the feeling of being absorbed in something other than my problems.

  I scooped out balls of dough with a small ice cream scoop and pressed my thumb into each ball, flattening it and leaving an indentation, before adding the jam. After they baked, I filled a plate with the cookies, covered it with plastic wrap, and wrote a short note: