Life on Christmas Eve Read online

  Advanced Praise for

  Life on Christmas Eve

  “A powerful story of love and grace wrapped in a festive, nostalgic tale.”

  —Bob Goff, New York Times bestselling author of Love Does and Dream Big

  A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

  ISBN: 978-1-64293-920-0

  ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-921-7

  Life on Christmas Eve:

  A Novel

  © 2021 by Nathan Nipper

  All Rights Reserved

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  Post Hill Press

  New York • Nashville

  posthillpress.com

  Published in the United States of America

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  About the Author

  For Finley Faith - my dream daughter.

  Chapter 1

  As Julie discovered, Christmas Eve in her hometown of Cedar Springs was an ideal time to do something odd in a public setting. With most folks preoccupied with family celebrations at home, the likelihood of one’s curious behavior garnering notice, let alone being questioned, drastically diminished. Julie counted on the streets being mostly deserted after dark because she could not adequately explain her current enterprise: sitting by herself in a collapsible camping chair at one end of the small town’s iconic steel truss bridge.

  It was 6:05 p.m., and snow descended in weighty clumps from the starless, black-matted sky. Julie knew she looked bizarre wrapped in a sleeping bag and blankets, a thermos of hot cocoa at her feet, like she was waiting for a parade to start or camping out in line for concert tickets. She felt entirely self-conscious and was the first to question her own sanity. She also felt inexplicably compelled to be there at that very moment, though the compulsion was not quite strong enough to chase away her potential embarrassment.

  As a few cars traversed the narrow two-lane bridge at a leisurely holiday pace, Julie tried burrowing deeper into the canvas seat of her camping chair, as if it might help conceal her from the glow of the headlight beams. Some motorists noticed her; others did not, or at least pretended not to. She was rather hard to miss in her prominent seated position on the sidewalk that ran alongside the decades-old bridge railing. One car slowed as it approached, and she tensed with fear the driver would stop to ask questions. It was not an unfounded fear. Julie loved her salt-of-the-earth fellow Cedar Springs citizens, but one less desirable common trait in the community was a tendency toward nosiness. Sometimes a gal just wanted to be left well enough alone. And there was never a greater such instance than the one in which she placed herself that evening. Julie instantly prepared a contingent reply to any inquiries. She would say she was “just enjoying the snow,” or something similarly lame, which would be truthful without divulging the actual reason for her visit to the bridge. She made a snap decision to smile and wave enthusiastically at the craned-neck driver, figuring that might better discourage questioning than if she sat motionless, hoping not to be noticed. Fortunately, the car continued on its way.

  Julie did not want to be interrogated because no rational explanation existed for why she sat by herself on the bridge in the freezing Christmas Eve air. The truth was that she was waiting for something to happen. She had no idea what, just the most persistent hunch it would be something important. The only similarly strong intuition she recalled having in her life was the time in fifth grade when she was almost certain she was going to get a full-size backyard trampoline for Christmas. Alas, no trampoline materialized.

  Just as she was about to laugh off her intuition incompetence and rejoin the sane world, something did happen.

  While Julie contemplated packing up her solo bridge-watch party, she began dozing. With the hot cocoa, the abundance of fleecy layers, and the soothing lull of the icy river cascading over the boulders directly below the bridge, her surroundings soon faded into a wintry fog. She resisted the first couple of head-bobs but quickly gave up the fight and drifted off.

  Julie was only asleep for a couple of minutes when a violent, metallic clatter jolted her awake, her left leg involuntarily flailing in the process. Her eyes fluttered open and she brushed the wet snowflakes from her face. She leaned forward in her chair, momentarily disoriented, and surprised to realize she had fallen asleep. Glancing cautiously back and forth, she hoped no further passersby had witnessed her conked out on the bridge like that, as it would be impossible to explain her way out of that one.

  Having regained her bearings, she peered straight ahead, squinting through the thickly falling snow across the bridge. She could make out a dingy blue and white pickup truck with its right front fender crumpled against the dense trunk of a majestic cedar tree, one of several such trees just off the shoulder of the road near the start of the bridge.

  Julie stood, trying to gather her senses and find her phone. She checked her coat pockets, the camping chair, and the snow-caked concrete around her to no avail. Perfect, she thought, figuring she left it at home. The unscathed driver’s side door of the crashed pickup truck slowly opened with a rusty, drawn-out squeal, interrupting Julie’s annoyance at forgetting her phone. As she watched, a haggard teenage girl tumbled out of the cab and fell to her knees in the snow. She lingered on the bitter cold ground for a moment, weeping loud enough for Julie to hear. The girl picked herself up and stumbled alongside the guardrail for several yards until she stepped onto the sidewalk of the bridge. Julie froze at the alarming scene unfolding in slow motion. In her sleepy stupor, Julie could not settle fast enough on the best course of action.

  Oblivious to Julie’s presence, the girl’s deep, sorrowful crying persisted as she trudged aimlessly through the ankle-deep snow of the bridge’s sidewalk. Julie noted the girl wore only a sweatshirt and jeans, which had to be scant protection against the night’s biting cold. The teen stopped near the middle of the bridge and leaned over the railing, prompting Julie to shift forward uneasily in her chair. Beneath the bridge, the churning dark river surged over and around large, smooth boulders on its way toward the falls. The girl’s shoulders convulsed with her breathless sobs. From Julie’s vantage point, she assumed the girl must be feeling sick.

  Julie looked around, suddenly hoping for a crowd. But the streets were empty and quiet, as if the town was taking a deep breath, finally about to allow itself a respite from all the frenetic Christmas preparations. Julie and the teenage girl remained the only two souls on the bridge.

  Finally, Julie’s habitual compassion overruled her hesitation. With a deep breath of her own, she stood, unfurled herself from the blankets, unzipped her sleeping bag, and piled them on the camping chair. Then, she cautiously appro
ached the grieving stranger. Between the din of the rushing river and her own weeping, the girl did not hear the crunch of snow underfoot as Julie crossed the bridge toward her…

  Chapter 2

  Julie’s descent into bridge-stalking could be traced back four and a half weeks to Thanksgiving Day. She blamed leftovers and the movie It’s a Wonderful Life.

  Julie’s alarm woke her at six o’clock on Thanksgiving morning. She always set her alarm to WPVS, the small town’s only radio station, where Cal Stevens was the primary DJ. They had gone to high school together, though he was a couple of grades ahead of her. When Julie’s alarm sounded, Cal was in the middle of a mini-monologue about the dearth of Thanksgiving-specific songs, and how, because of that, he liked to use the occasion to kick off the Christmas season. Thus, Andy Williams’s It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year dutifully ensued. As much as she loved the Christmas season, Julie did not necessarily concur with Cal’s choice. She felt one should at least wait until Friday to roll out Christmas tunes, since Thanksgiving was continually swamped in the ever-growing Christmas tidal wave.

  Julie’s respect for Thanksgiving resulted from her parents’ cultivation. They prioritized celebrating Thanksgiving with the warmth, gratitude, and sincerity it was designed for. That is why she did not mind dragging herself out of bed at 6:00 a.m. on one of her few days off—that plus the fact they had to finish preparing Thanksgiving dinner for fifty guests from the local nursing home.

  Julie Shelly was thirty-one years old. She had dark brown eyes and hair that her mother had always reassured her was “a lovely chestnut,” but which Julie labeled “bland brown” or worse. She usually wore her hair in a hastily assembled ponytail, less out of any stylistic statement and more out of pragmatism. She worked at her family’s bakery-café, which meant she rose at 4:30 a.m. every weekday and did not budget hair-coiffing time into her minimalist morning routine.

  She was five feet, eight inches tall, with a slightly athletic build that she often lamented had been in perpetual decline since her graduation from college. She hypothesized that with each additional year of life beyond age twenty-two, regular exercise became exponentially more difficult to maintain. This nominal fact did not sit well with her. Another lamentable fact of life was her fair complexion. She was sure her mother single-handedly kept sunscreen makers in business during the summers of Julie’s youth, considering the gallons lovingly slathered on her daughter each time she ventured outdoors.

  Julie threw on her gray wool coat, which she had owned for at least a decade, as the holes in the pocket interiors attested. She wrapped a red wool scarf around her neck and exited the small apartment where she lived over her parents’ detached garage. It was a cozy flat with recessed lighting, one bedroom, a bathroom, and a combination living room/kitchenette. It looked like something out of an IKEA catalog because that was where she purchased most of the furnishings. It took her several years of parental loans and savings acrobatics to do so, but the end result was worth it, no matter how many Swedish jokes resulted, courtesy of her dad and older brother, Hugh.

  The reason Julie resided in the space over the garage, even though she could have her old bedroom in her parents’ photogenic Victorian house, was as a result of a brief but intense rebellious period during her junior year of high school. She craved independence at the time, accusing her parents of having given Hugh much more liberty during his high school sojourn than they afforded her. Though it embarrassed her to recall it now, she stubbornly made an issue out of it to the point that she threatened to go live with friends (even though, secretly, she had no viable offers on the table). Her dad’s patience-of-Job conflict resolution was to let her help him finish out the garage apartment, a project on which he had been tinkering for years. If she put in the work, she could be the apartment’s first and only tenant. She leapt at the chance, and by the end of the summer before her senior year, the father-daughter combo fashioned a livable space. Though it pained her mom to see Julie move out of the house and across the driveway into the garage apartment, she knew it was decidedly better than the alternative.

  The garage apartment solution had the desired effect on seventeen-year-old Julie, creating some semblance of separation and independence. She continued living there after high school graduation, commuting to the University of North Carolina at Asheville over the next six years while working nearly full-time at the family’s bakery-café. Ironically, though Julie craved separation as an angst-ridden teen, she was still living in the garage apartment at thirty-one. Her original plan was to leave Cedar Springs when she finished her college degree six years ago. But seasons change, plans alter, and before she knew it, her thirty-first birthday was in the rearview mirror.

  Julie descended the flight of stairs from her apartment and quietly unlocked the side door to her parents’ house, which opened into the laundry room. She slipped into the kitchen and set two cards in envelopes on either side of the small breakfast nook table where her parents began each day with their bibles and coffee. Julie was a dedicated card person. When she was in college, she began making her own cards of all types—holidays, birthdays, graduations, thank-yous—and it blossomed into a minor hobby. People seemed to appreciate the personal touch she put into her cards, and that was her favorite part—making people feel special with a card they wouldn’t find in any store. The cards she left on the table for her parents were relatively simple ones, letting them know how thankful she was for them. They were already aware of this fact, but she enjoyed reminding them anyway.

  Light snow fluttered in the air as Julie walked the half-mile into downtown Cedar Springs. She did not always walk to work but decided the first snowfall of the year was too invigorating an occasion to miss with a car ride. It was unusual to see snow that early on the calendar in Cedar Springs, and she loved it. The colder the weather, the merrier as far as she was concerned, as the holiday season would not be the same without coats, scarves, and hot drinks. She could not fathom how Floridians coped at Christmastime.

  Cedar Springs, North Carolina, population 7,203, was unabashedly quaint. It seemed designed for Christmas cards with its old-fashioned globe streetlamps, churches with steeples, picket fences, and manicured Main Street storefronts. An arched, steel truss bridge that was painted a warm red stretched over a narrow off-shoot of the French Broad River that flowed into a gorge on the edge of downtown. The town was a tourist trap in the best sense of the words. It thrived on tourist expenditures without the stereotypical gaudiness. Through the decades, the town’s savvy zoning kept most chain restaurants and mass retailers on the northern edge of the city limits, preserving the historic buildings and local businesses of downtown. Cedar Springs was perfectly situated as a gateway town to the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, so vacationers funneled through the tidy village in a spending mood. This enabled many downtown small businesses, shops, and eateries to thrive where they often would not have in most similar-sized towns. Though Julie frequently felt restless and fatigued with the familiar small-town culture, deep down she knew Cedar Springs was an idyllic place to make a decent living, and it was the only place she had ever called home.

  The Shelly family’s slice of the Cedar Springs economic pie was Shelly’s Boulangerie & Café, a bakery and coffee establishment founded by Julie’s late grandfather in 1946. The family often referred to it as the “SB&C,” while most of the townsfolk simply called it “Shelly’s.” Julie had worked there over half her life—part-time starting when she was fourteen, mostly full-time since she was nineteen. She barely knew what it was like to sleep past 4:30 a.m. anymore, which was the very latest she could wake up and still make it to the SB&C by 5:00, to help ensure everything was shipshape for opening at 7:00 a.m. sharp. For Julie, waking at six o’clock on Thanksgiving felt luxurious.

  Julie turned left off the Main Street sidewalk, striding around to the rear of the SB&C. She unlocked the back door, which led into the kitchen. She switched on th
e lights and began warming the ovens. From there, she entered the café proper, turning on additional lights and igniting the gas fire in the brick fireplace situated on the back wall of the dining area. The SB&C’s interior featured the original exposed brick walls, dark hardwood floors, rustic oak tables and chairs, a long pastry case, cappuccino machines, and two casual sitting areas with couches and overstuffed chairs. The cozy ambience was a beloved gathering place for Cedar Springs citizens of all stripes. Farmers in overalls and hipsters in AirPods felt equally at home at Shelly’s.

  By 6:30 a.m., Julie’s parents, Bev and Perry, and her aunt, Bonnie, arrived at the café, accelerating the Thanksgiving feast preparation. Bev and Perry both turned sixty-five in September, though their spry energy made them seem a decade younger. They still walked or rode their bicycles nearly every day, just as they had for all forty years of their marriage (they seemed to be exceptions to Julie’s adult exercise hypothesis). Their unwavering devotions in life were their Christian faith, each other, their family, laughter, and work, in that order. These comprised their base formula for a rich, contented life. It was not effortless, though Julie thought they mostly made it look so. Julie admired them and envied their vitality. She often felt guilty on many dark winter mornings when it required every muscle fiber in her body to pry herself from her bed. Only to arrive at the bakery to find her dad already there, his blue eyes bright with life, a smile on his gently wrinkled face, his silver hair impeccably coiffed, tall and strong in his khaki slacks and crisp button-down Oxford. His sleeves would be precisely rolled up to the elbows, his apron already dusted in flour, toiling away as if he’d been up for hours. Her mom was no less a vision of neatness, efficiency, and positivity. Bev was petite, especially when standing near the six-foot-five Perry. She had light brown eyes and gray hair, worn in the same short style she’d adopted at least twenty years ago by Julie’s accounting.