Charming Christmas Read Free

asked.
    â€œIt doesn’t have to be Mer-Mer.” Lenny shrugged. “So we hire an actress.”
    â€œI was just thinking we should send it to the new store in Baltimore,” Meredith suggested. “They’re opening next week and it might be fun to advertise a special visitor in their Santaland.” In addition, she suspected it wouldn’t hurt to have that suit thousands of miles away—remove it from sight and take away the family pressure to follow so closely in her mother’s footsteps.
    â€œOf course! Excellent idea,” Lenny agreed, flipping open his cell phone. “I’ll notify the store manager. They’ll be thrilled, I’m sure.”
    â€œI’m sure,” Daniel added sardonically.
    Evelyn shook out the garment, then refolded it with expert precision. “I’m so glad you found it, Rahiella,” she said, tucking the lid on gently.
    Karl checked his watch. “We need to get this wrapped quickly if we want to overnight it to Baltimore.”
    â€œOvernight?” Lenny barked, lowering his cell phone. “That’ll cost a fortune. Make sure it goes by two-day express. Such a savings.”
    Inside the silver cardboard box, the fabric glowed, rich dark red, ready to warm the heart of its next occupant . . .

The Nutcracker
    Olivia
    Â 
    Â 
    Baltimore, November 2003

1
    A fter my involvement with Bobby, I understood why certain species of females devoured the males after the nuptials.
    As a kid, I’d found that practice disgusting, barbaric . . . “Gross!” Bonnie and I had said at the same time, our freckled noses scrunched up in horror at the detailed lives of arachnids unfolding on the TV screen. As a teenybopper and dedicated reader of Tiger Beat magazine, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want to have sex, let alone kill their mate.
    But after Bobby, it became clear that the female spider wasn’t just killing the male; she was putting an end to the madness, chewing him up before he had a chance to go off and mock her personal foibles with his spider buddies, before he could mate with her friends and suddenly find success and fortune to spend on someone else, before he landed a ten-minute interview on prime-time TV, during which he looked fabulous in the cashmere sweater she’d given him to wear at their engagement party.
    Not that spiders wear cashmere or watch television, but the female spider’s motivation is now clear to me: eat the sucker before he betrays you big-time.
    â€œI don’t know why you’re taking this all so personally,” my friend Lanessa had told me one night when she and I narrowly missed running into Bobby and his crew after they’d just finished taping a segment at the Wharf Rat, a smoky, dark saloon in Fells Point. “The guy is writing and producing a show. It’s what he does. He was a producer when you were together, right?”
    â€œAn unemployed producer,” I said, gripping the shiny wood lip of the hundred-year-old bar. Talk of Bobby did that to me—sent me clenching surfaces with my fingertips or gritting my teeth. “Always out of work, chasing down deals, sticking me with the check.”
    â€œSo be glad that’s over and let him do his job. You moved on, can’t he go where opportunity takes him, even if that’s Baltimore?”
    â€œI moved back home to Baltimore to save some money and regroup.” It seemed like an appropriate distance away from Bobby, who was into the L.A. scene back then. But I wasn’t back three weeks when I flipped through the trades and read that he was back in Baltimore, filming a show. “It’s bad enough that he came back at the same time, but he’s filming here, right in my own backyard. And by the way, why are you defending him?”
    â€œMan’s got a right to earn a wage,” Lanessa said, in that judicious inside-the-Capital-Beltway voice. “It’s the town he