Charming Christmas Read Free Page B

only been engaged when we broke up. “And don’t pin the PR of an entire city on me.” Feeling shades of the novel You Can’t Go Home Again, I felt a certain revulsion at having landed in the city of my youth after an injury curtailed my dancing career in New York last March. As far as I was concerned, Baltimore was just a pit stop, a transitional home, a place to hole up while my leg healed and my bank account recovered from a few months of unemployment. Not to mention that I’d thought it best to be close to Mom for a while.
    The best laid plans . . .

    My leg was healing, the scars from the surgery almost invisible and my gait getting more and more even. Physical therapy had helped, and I’d done my special exercises religiously, two, sometimes three times a day. I figured that right now, my job was to whip this leg back into shape and get back to that March afternoon when my life had abruptly been interrupted. If you could see my life as a timeline, imagine mine dropping off sharply on an icy March day, where you’d see a huge dip, rising again in January when I would get back on track.
    My plan was to restart my life in the new year, after the surgeon gave me the green light. In the meantime, I had seen an unusual job listed in the Sun , the chance to play a department-store elf, and since the timing worked for me and the role could pump up my résumé a little, I was going to give it a shot.
    Heading down the stairs, I was hit by a draft leaking through the hole in the plaster wall. Baltimore Novembers can bring anything from humid tropics to snow, and as I stepped out onto the porch that morning I noticed frost on the leaves of the petunias in Mrs. Scholinsky’s planter. The steps were iced with frost and framed by an elaborate network of green and orange electrical cords crisscrossing their way down the marble slab steps.
    My landlady had put out her Christmas decorations during the night—a sleigh of toys fashioned out of colored rope lights, an array of cellophane-wrapped lollipops, a skeletal white sparkle-light reindeer with a mechanical nodding head, and a molded plastic Mr. and Mrs. Claus who smiled at each other with knowing grins. A ghoulish ode to Christmas, still glowing in the rising light of morning.
    Above me, a window slid open. “Watch your step now, sweetheart. Jack Frost came through last night.”
    Carefully I maneuvered my way down the stoop, then glanced up to face Mrs. Scholinsky’s crooked-tooth grin. Her hair was pinned in tight curls, a scarf covering the top. I suspected she slept that way, an image that brought to mind blunt-needled acupuncture to the head. No wonder she suffered from insomnia.
    â€œLooks like a Christmas elf came through, too,” I said, sounding more cheerful than I felt, having to catch a bus on this cold morning. “You’re the first one on the block, Mrs. S.”
    â€œThe sooner the better, I always say. Got me that new reindeer at Costco and I was dying to set it up.”
    Olivia the New Yorker would have commented crisply on the fact that her landlady had time and money for Christmas decorations while so many house repairs went untended, but that was the old me. Olivia the Baltimorean just picked her way carefully over the cables and cracks in the sidewalk.
    â€œI like my Christmas, Olivia,” she went on. “You’ll see. One year I left the Clauses out till Memorial Day.”
    Something to look forward to, I thought as I wobbled slightly on my new shoes. Maybe Dolce & Gabbana heels weren’t the best choice when you were auditioning to be an elf, but the shoes were a recent purchase, a gift to myself when the physical therapist deemed my leg healed enough to move beyond my collection of rubber-soled Nikes and Pumas. Although when she made that call, I don’t think she was picturing three-inch stiletto heels.
    â€œWhere’re you off to so early?” Mrs. Scholinsky asked.