Carrolls and Firrs: A Christmas Novella

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CARROLLS AND FIRRS

  A Christmas Novella

  Janice M. Whiteaker

  Copyright © 2017 by Janice M. Whiteaker

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  www.janicemwhiteaker.com

  First Printing, 2017

  For my Emma. I hope you don’t think this book sucks.

  CHAPTER ONE

  ELLIE LIFTED THE lever on the large decanter marked ‘regular’. She sniffed, wrinkling her nose at the opaque black liquid that resembled oil more than it did coffee.

  “It’s pretty stout.”

  She glanced at the man beside her, resisting the urge to do a double take at the dark eyes and deep dimples nearly a foot above the top of her head. She was not in the market. Not here anyway.

  “It just needs a little help.” He reached for her cup. “May I?”

  The half-full foam cup was in his hand before Ellie had the chance to protest. Not that she would have. This day was going to need all the help it could get and if dimples here thought he could turn that sludge into a palatable cup of coffee, she would let him have at it.

  Especially since he smelled as good as he looked.

  Her volunteer barista leaned in close to add a splash of hot water to her cup, making the air around her smell like fresh cut wood and leather instead of overly aged gas station coffee. He stepped further down the coffee counter, taking that sweet smell with him.

  Ellie followed close behind. Just because she wasn’t here to buy didn’t mean she couldn’t window shop, right?

  Her cell phone blasted loudly from her coat pocket. She silenced it with a quick press of her thumb as dimples held down the button on the French vanilla cappuccino machine. Sweet coffee wasn’t really her thing but she decided not to stop him. Anything was probably better than where she started.

  He glanced over his shoulder. “I know it seems crazy but this is the only way I’ve come up with to make it work.”

  She smiled at him because it was hard not to smile at him. “This place could use a good coffee shop.”

  His smile quirked and he gave her an odd look. “I’ve thought the same thing myself.” He popped a plastic lid on her cup and held it out. “Try it now.”

  Ellie took a tentative sip. “Holy cow.” She took another small sip of the scalding hot beverage enjoying the smooth, barely sweet flavor as it rolled across her tongue leaving a creamy coating in its wake. She looked up at dimples. “This is almost as good as what I got in the city.”

  He gave a self-deprecating shrug. “I don’t know about that.”

  Ellie’s phone started to ring. She gave him a forced smile. “Duty calls.” She pulled out her phone and silenced it once more. “Again.” She held up the coffee in her other hand. “Thank you.”

  Dimples started to say something but her phone began to ring again, cutting him off. He paused, nodding at her pocket. “You better go before they figure out how to track you.”

  ***

  “Where are all your Christmas decorations honey?” Ellie’s mother bumped her way through the truckload of tape-patched cardboard boxes scattered across the concrete floor of the dimly lit space, squinting at the words scrawled across the fronts. She tipped one back to look at the front and snorted. “Another box of clothes.”

  Ellie gritted her teeth and forced a smile. “I was a working professional. I had to have a wardrobe to match.” Never mind the fact that for the first time in her life she didn’t have anyone inspecting every stitch that covered her body questioning why it wasn’t covered in sparkles and holly.

  She’d taken advantage.

  “Well now you can get back to a normal life wearing normal clothes.” Her mother picked up a box labeled ‘jeans’ and picked her way past the small amount of furniture Ellie brought from the apartment she shared with three other girls in Brooklyn. The apartment she loved.

  The life she loved.

  Now everything she had left from that brief period living a life she chose was stacked in a two-car garage at the back of her family’s downtown store. Boxes of clothes. Her bed and nightstand. It wasn’t much, but everything there was chosen by her to fit in the life she wanted to live.

  And there was not a single Christmas decoration. Her mother was going to lose her mind.

  Ellie grabbed a box of shoes and followed her mother out into the cold November day to load it into the back of her beloved Jeep. She only felt a little bad admitting that the forest green SUV was what she missed most about home. It was her first and only car and unfortunately when she moved to the city it didn’t make sense to bring it along.

  But, like everything else about the life she left here in Bradbury, her parents kept it just as she left it, biding their time until the universe found a way to force her back into their tinsel covered world.

  Cris Carroll eyed her daughter as Ellie pulled down the back hatch, closing the Jeep’s rear with a solid kachunk. “I don’t know what you’re going to wear to work in the shop Noelle. Based on the lack of Christmas decorations I’m going to guess you don’t have any festive clothes in any of those boxes either.” Cris fingered one of the earrings peeking from under her light blonde pageboy, twisting the shiny red miniature ornament as she sized her daughter up. “If you hadn’t gotten so skinny your old clothes would still fit you.”

  “Mom please call me Ellie. Noelle is just so…” She searched for a word that might buy her the best chance at success. “Formal.”

  It wasn’t the word she wanted to use, but ‘stupid’ would only ensure Cris would call her Noelle with her dying breath. The odds weren’t in her favor no matter what word she used, but it was worth a shot. If there was only one thing she could bring home from her life in New York, her nickname would be it.

  Cris fisted her hands on her hips, knuckles pushing into the heavy felt of her red wool coat. “Noelle Carroll I did not go through fifty-two hours of labor to have you change the name your father and I gave you.”

  Ellie bit back the urge to suggest her mother’s labor would have been shorter if she didn’t insist on being induced a week early so Noelle could be born on Christmas day. It hadn’t even worked.

  “I’m not changing it. It’s a part of my name. I just want to use something simpler.” Ellie fished the keys to the Jeep out of her jeans pocket. “I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. You do the same darn thing.”

  The sass was past her lips before she could stop it. As always, her mother latched right on.

  “I do it for the good of our family. We are the Carrolls. We are the Christmas family. Roberta Cristine Carroll just doesn’t fit the bill.” She laid a hand over her heart and her brows came together. “Are you ashamed of your family Noelle?”

  Ten years ago, her mother’s performance would have worked. Heck, five years ago it would have made Ellie feel like a
complete heel. Not now. Now she’d experienced enough life away from her parents to realize they’d played her like a fiddle her whole life.

  Unfortunately, that realization did little to help her figure out how to actually deal with them leaving her to fall back on what she knew. Agreement. “No mother, I am not ashamed of my family.”

  Her mother’s face immediately brightened, all sign of her earlier distress gone in the blink of an eye. “Good. Then tomorrow we can order you some new tops before you start back to work.”

  Ellie nodded and opened the driver's door to the Jeep, sliding in feeling more like the eighteen-year-old girl who drove out of Bradbury than the twenty-four-year-old woman who drove a moving van back in.

  This was her worst nightmare and her nightmares were very different from other people’s. Hers smelled like cinnamon and candy canes.

  She barely made it five-hundred feet down Main Street before her cell phone began to ring. Ellie glanced at the screen. It was her mother.

  Of course it was.

  “Noelle I forgot to tell you, I set up a lunch date for you and Betsy Meyers—well used to be Wilcox, at the Koffee Kup on Monday.” Ellie could hear Carol of the Bells playing in the background. “I figured you couldn’t wait to see her.”

  When she voluntarily left her job at a startup Ellie told herself everything would be okay. She could find another job in the city. Maybe even a better one. Nothing had to change.

  She’d underestimated the hold her parents still obviously had on her.

  “Sure mom. That’s fine.” It was just like old times. Old, miserable times.

  Ellie disconnected the phone and tried not to strangle the steering wheel. How had this happened?

  Her phone rang again.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Ellie answered her mother’s second call in under five minutes. “Yes mother.”

  “I was thinking you should probably start at the shop as soon as possible. Maybe you could run that load home and change into something at least a little festive and head right back.”

  Ellie was exhausted already. Less than twenty-four hours back in town and her parents were acting as if nothing had changed. As if she hadn’t changed.

  “I have a couple appointments this afternoon mom. I was planning on getting started first thing Monday.” Ellie held her breath hoping her mother wouldn’t ask, but knowing she would.

  “What in the world kind of appointments do you have on a Saturday?”

  Ellie pulled into the narrow driveway of her parents historic two-story in the heart of downtown. She stopped the Jeep and took a deep breath. “I am looking at some apartments in town.” Maybe it would help mentioning they were local. That she wasn’t immediately planning her escape. Of course she would leave out the fact she was only looking into places that offered short term leases.

  Cris scoffed into the phone. “Oh Noelle don’t be silly. You are here to get back on your feet. You need to be saving your money. You will stay at home honey.”

  Ellie swallowed hard. Scheduling lunch dates and ordering shirts was one thing but her mother just went a step too far. Insinuating that a few weeks without a job would have been enough to knock Ellie’s financial feet out from under her was a hot poker to her pride. What kind of business major couldn’t manage their own finances? Certainly not one you would guilt trip into moving back to help fix your own flailing business. “No. I am here to help you and dad get the store back on track.”

  “And I can’t wait.” Her mom snorted into the phone. “The easiest way would be to put those Firrs out of business. Take back all our customers”

  Ellie let her head drop to the steering wheel. This was still going on? “Mom, the Firrs have a tree business. I don’t understand how you think—”

  “I don’t think Noelle, I know. You haven’t even seen what they went and did while you were gone.” An electric bell dinged in the background. “Honey I have to go. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

  Ellie stared down at her lap, forehead still pushed against the wheel.

  Maybe even a short term lease would be too long. This was going to be a fix it fast and get the heck outta dodge kind of situation. Hopefully her parents hadn’t run the business too deep into the ground. Ellie shuddered in spite of the warm air blowing from the Jeep’s vents from each side.

  No. This business would be saved. She would get it back to its heyday in record time and be out from under her overbearing parents and back to her normal life. One where she made the decisions and no one made her feel guilty about it.

  It took ten minutes to haul the boxes from her Jeep upstairs to her childhood room. A four-foot synthetic tree glowed in the corner beside her beloved childhood dollhouse. It reminded her of an old victorian-esque building just down from her parent’s shop. Ellie flopped onto the red and green quilt covering her queen sized bed and stared at the tree. Every ornament she’d ever made in school was hanging from the plastic-y evergreen branches. Popsicle stick frames were painted brightly and glued to her smiling second grade face. A clear globe was filled with tiny scraps of paper where she’d written wishes for the future.

  She could guarantee not a single one mentioned moving back in with her parents.

  This was already worse than she’d imagined it would be and that was saying something. In less than a day’s time her mother already managed to take over her wardrobe, her social life and her living arrangements.

  Ellie jumped off the bed and yanked the glass ornament from its branch and chucked it at the wall. It shattered into fine shards and the slim papers fell toward the ground like snow.

  The air left her lungs in one quick puff. That felt good. Really good. Good enough that it was worth having to sweep up all trace of the offense before leaving the house. Once all the glass shining up from her deep green carpet was vacuumed up and the canister was emptied in the outside garbage can, Ellie jumped back in her Jeep and turned out of the driveway toward her parent’s downtown Christmas shop.

  Ellie felt a little lighter, the air moving in and out much easier than just a few minutes ago. Unfortunately, throwing breakables against a wall every time her parents aggravated her wasn’t going to be a viable option. She was going to have to come up with some sort of way she could keep her sanity and herself until she could get back to the life she’d worked so hard to build.

  The house was exactly eight minutes from the shop and even driving slow, just to bide a little more time, Ellie was walking through the aerosol snow sprayed glass door in eight-and-a-half minutes. The bell dinged as she entered, all but masking the gentle toll of the antique sleigh bells tied to the back handle.

  The smell of the holidays smacked her in the face like a wall of fake festivity. Ellie sneezed at the thick, overwhelming smell of cinnamon that permeated the lining of her nose.

  “Noelle honey, is that you?” Cris peeked in from the bakery attached to the side of the shop. “Oh thank goodness. I need help in here with a batch of cookies.”

  Ellie rubbed at her watering eyes, doing her best to keep the mascara she swiped on this morning intact. Whatever was making that smell was going to be the first thing to go.

  Luckily, it appeared to be mostly confined to the shop. The bakery smelled… Ellie sniffed the air. Maybe the assault of cinnamon overloaded her sense of smell because the bakery, which should smell like all the baked goodness of the holiday season, smelled like a whole lot of nothing.

  Cris was wearing the same Santa hat she’d sported for the past twenty years and an apron covered with gingerbread men tied over her green sweater and blue jeans. Her mother sang along with jingle bells, her back to Ellie as she walked into the kitchen of the bakery. “Grab another bucket of cranberry cookies from the fridge honey.”

  “A bucket of cookies?” Ellie opened the large silver industrial refrigerator and sure enough, plastic lidded buckets were stacked inside.

  “Oh honey they’re so much easier than baking them from scratch and no one can tell a difference.�
�� Her mother stood at the stainless steel island with a small ice cream scoop, digging into a bucket-o-cookies, dropping wads onto a large baking sheet.

  Ellie found the bucket her mother wanted and set it on the counter. She peeled back the fitted plastic lid and poked at the dough inside with her pointer finger. An odd oily sheen covered the dough’s surface and coated her finger. She sniffed the open container. It smelled just like the bakery.

  Nothing.

  “Here honey.” Her mother handed her a scooper that matched the one in her own hand. “Just drop them by the scoop onto the sheet.” Cris slid a baking sheet across the island to rest in front of Ellie.

  Each scoop of dough hit the metal sheet with a heavy plop. Ellie squinted down at the rows of pale supposed cookie dough. Only occasionally were they flecked with a dull crimson cranberry or a stray white chocolate chip. “Are you sure these are just as good as homemade?”

  Cris looked over at Ellie’s sheet. “You’ve got to smash them down.” She reached out with a gloved hand and started smashing her way across the lines of cookies. “They won’t spread on their own.”

  This was insane.

  On the plus side, she’d been in the store less than fifteen minutes and Ellie knew at least two of the reasons her parent’s business was in the pooper.

  “I am so glad you are finally home honey.” Ellie’s mom opened the large oven and slid in the sheets of cookies that were probably as real as the noxious cinnamon filling the air next door.

  A good daughter would have said ‘me too’ but all Ellie could manage was a weak smile. She wasn’t happy to be home, not here anyway. Home was in the city, living her own life. This was where she used to live. Where she visited.

  She would be glad to finally be home. Only this wasn’t it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “I LIKE THIS one.” Doug stepped back and looked up and down the tree he just finished tagging. The short needles were tight and deep green with little shoots of brighter green new growth touching the tips. “I might keep this one and set it up in the café.” He turned to the Gator where his dad was tucked under a heavy cotton blanket in the passenger seat, a black knit toboggan tucked over his head. “What do you think?”