There's Something About Christmas

“I don’t want to quit. I’ve been waiting six months for Walt to offer me something more than funeral home notices.”

“Sleep on it,” Phoebe advised. “You’ve had a rough day. Everything will seem better in the morning.”

“You’re right,” she murmured. An ultimatum shouldn’t be made on the spur of the moment. Besides, it wasn’t the obituaries or even drumming up advertising dollars that depressed her the most.

It was Christmas.

Everywhere she went, there was holiday cheer. But not everyone in the world loved Christmas. She, for example, didn’t enjoy it at all. Christmas was for families and she didn’t have one. Yes, her father was alive, but that was of little comfort. Since her mother’s death, he always invited Emma to his house in California and she always took a certain grim satisfaction in refusing him.

Almost everyone she knew had family and shared the holidays with them. Emma was alone. But she’d rather be by herself than spend it with her father and his new wife. Last year she’d ignored the season entirely. On Christmas Day she’d gone to a movie and had buttered popcorn for dinner and that had suited her perfectly.

“You don’t want to quit just before Christmas,” Phoebe told her.

Emma sighed again. “No, you’re right. I don’t.” But she said it mostly to avoid upsetting Phoebe.

“You’re actually going to confront Walt?” Phoebe peered at Emma across The Dungeon aisle the next morning.

“Yes,” Emma murmured. She’d decided that after almost a year, she wasn’t any closer to writing feature articles than the day she was hired. It was time to face reality. She’d reached her limit; she was finished with working in the bowels of the drafty building, tired of spending half her week traipsing around Bonny Lake, Sumner and Puyallup searching for advertising dollars.

“What are you going to say to him?” Phoebe’s brown eyes regarded her carefully.

She didn’t know what she could say that she hadn’t already said a hundred times. If Walt refused to listen, she would simply hand in her notice. She wouldn’t leave until after Christmas; that was for strictly financial reasons. Where she’d apply next, however, was the question.

“Walt won’t want to lose you,” Phoebe said confidently.

“You mean when he isn’t yelling?”

“He has a lot on his mind.”

Emma narrowed her eyes. Phoebe’s infatuation with Walt blinded her to the truth.

It was now or never. Emma stood, squaring her shoulders. “Okay, I’m going to talk to Walt.” She motioned at the stairwell. “Do I have the look?” The one that said she was serious.

“Oh, yes!” Phoebe was nothing if not encouraging.

“You’ll be stuck writing all the obituaries,” Emma cautioned.

“I don’t mind,” her friend said.

“Okay, here goes.”

Emma marched up the stairs and toward the back of the first floor, where Walt’s luxurious office was situated. Well, perhaps it wasn’t as luxurious as all that, except when compared to the dank basement where Emma and Phoebe were relegated.

Walt glanced up, frowning, as she planted herself in the threshold to his office.

“Do you have a minute?” she asked politely.

His frown slowly transformed itself into a smile, and for the first time Emma noticed her employer had company. She opened her mouth to apologize, but Walt didn’t let her finish.

“I was just going to ask you to step into my office.” He waved her inside. “I believe you’ve met Oliver Hamilton.”

It was all she could do not to ask why he was here. “Hello again,” Emma managed to say as her stomach lurched. She should’ve known; Oliver wasn’t a man who took no for an answer.

He stood when Emma came into the office and extended his hand. “Good to see you again, too.”

Emma reluctantly exchanged handshakes, not fooled by his friendly demeanor, and avoided eye contact. A weary sensation came over her. The man was up to no good. At this point she didn’t know what he wanted, but she had a feeling she was about to find out—a sinking feeling, which was one of those clichés she’d learned to excise in journalism school.

“Sit down,” Walt instructed when she remained frozen to the spot.

She did, perching on the chair parallel to Oliver’s.

Walt leaned back in his seat and studied her. Despite the free and easy style typical of the office, Emma chose to dress as a professional, since that was the way she wanted to be perceived. Her hair was secured at the base of her neck with a gold clip. The impression she hoped to create was that of a working reporter with an edge. Today’s outfit was a classy black pinstripe suit with a straight skirt and formfitting jacket.

“You’ve been saying for some time that you’d be interested in writing something other than obituaries,” Walt began.

“Yes, I feel—”

“You say you want to write what you refer to as a ‘real story.’”

Emma nodded. She glanced out of the corner of her eye at Oliver. “However, if the story’s about planes and such, I don’t think—”

“It isn’t.” Her employer didn’t allow her to finish.

Emma relaxed. Not completely but enough so she could breathe normally.

“It’s about fruitcake.”

Emma was dying to write a human interest story and after months of pleading, Walt was finally giving her an assignment. He wanted her to write about fruitcake. Surely there was some mistake.

“Fruitcake?” she repeated just to be sure she’d heard him correctly. Emma didn’t even like fruitcake; in fact, she hated the stuff. She firmly believed that there were two kinds of people in the world—those who liked fruitcake and those who didn’t.

She’d once heard an anecdote about a fruitcake that was passed around a family for years. It was hard as a brick and the fruitcake shuffle finally ended when someone used it as an anchor for a fishing boat.

“Good Homemaking magazine ran a national fruitcake contest last month,” he went on to explain. “Amazingly, three of the twelve finalists are from the state of Washington.”

He paused—waiting for her to show awe or appreciation, she supposed.

“That’s quite a statistic, don’t you think?” Oliver inserted.

Still leery, Emma slowly nodded once more.

Walt smiled as if he’d gotten the response he wanted. “I’d like you to interview the three finalists and write an article about each of them.”

Okay, so maybe these articles weren’t going to put her in the running for a major writing award, but this was the chance she’d been hoping for. There had to be more to these three women than their interest in fruitcake. She’d write about their lives, about who they were. She had her first big break and she was grabbing hold of it with both hands.

The professional in her took over. “When would you like me to start?” she asked, trying not to sound too eager.

“As soon as you want,” Walt told her, grinning. Judging by the gleam in his eyes, he knew he had her. “The magazine’s going to announce the winner on their Website in three weeks, and then do a feature on her in their next issue. It could be one of our ladies. Flatter them,” Walt advised, “and get permission to print their recipes.”