My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories(79)

“I’m of the opinion,” she said, tucking her arm around mine, “that if you let a single life event define you, then all you need to change things—if you want them to change—is another.”

I stared at her arm on mine. And then, when I looked up, she was staring at me.

A loud commotion erupted around Pastor Robinson.

Gracie turned her attention to him. “What now?”

Mrs. Armstrong had slipped on a set of icy stairs, and she was on her way to the hospital with a broken foot. The pageant had lost its director.

“How about that,” Gracie murmured. “Double-booked venue, freak snowstorm, trapped animals. And now no director. Things are getting worse by the second.” She clucked her tongue. “It would be easy to give up. No one would blame us. Or…”

“Or…?”

She let go of my arm, practically bouncing. “You know how to make things go wrong. You excel at it.” From anyone else, I’d have taken that personally. “Tell me you can’t figure out how to make tonight happen.”

“Are you trying to find a way to make your father accept me or something?” I didn’t think so, but I had to ask. “Are you trying to fix me?”

“Why? Are you broken?”

Gracie tilted her head.

Parts of me were. I felt like Gracie could see every single torn-up edge. I shrugged.

“You said you were trying to change,” she reminded me.

“I said maybe.”

I was glad she wasn’t holding my hand. My palms were a rain forest.

“You’re so blinded by negative expectations that you can’t see the truth. Pranks, jokes—they don’t make you bad.” She angled her body toward me. “They make you you. You have a lot to offer, Vaughn. And Christmas is about new beginnings.”

“What about you, Gracie? Since I have so much to offer, would you be willing to start something with me? Or are you afraid I’ll ruin your reputation?”

“What makes you think that I won’t ruin yours?”

I choked on my own spit.

Gracie gestured toward the chaos onstage. “So?”

I counted the people backstage, the props. Thought about the possibilities “Let’s make it happen.”

“Hell, yeah!”

“Another dollar,” Pastor Robinson hollered, before returning to his phone call.

I laughed. “Isn’t that one in the Bible, too?”

“He’s not been very forgiving lately,” she said through her smile, as she gave her father the thumbs-up. “I think he’s aiming for Hawaii next summer.”

I had a flash of Gracie in a bikini, followed by one of Pastor Robinson in Speedos. I shook my head in a reflex action to push both pictures out of my brain. “You should get into costume. Where’s your foam child?”

“One of the baby angels is using it for a pillow.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me toward her father. “Hey, Dad! Vaughn has an idea.”

*

Pastor Robinson agreed to go forward.

The traffic reports from the north of town were growing worse by the second. Things to the south weren’t much better, but the traffic was moving. Pastor Robinson’s phone lit up with calls from stranded cast members. Gracie and her dad were trying to figure out exactly which cast members were missing.

I was listening, but I was also thinking. Crazy-Sherlock thinking. Looking from the Civil War soldiers to the nativity costumes, from the arena to the stage.

Gracie watched me. “You’re doing it again, aren’t you? You’re doing your brain thing. Right now.”

I ignored her. “If the pageant is going to be short of players, and the Rebel Yell is, too, we could make a hybrid.”

Pastor Robinson frowned. “You mean like General Grant and General Lee and Santa should give the presents to the Christ child?”

I hadn’t meant that at all, but I stopped for a moment to picture it.

“No, Dad, the Wise Men costumes are here,” Gracie explained. “We could just get someone from the Rebel Yell to put them on.”

“That could work,” he said.

“And,” I was rolling now, “if both casts are down by half, maybe the audiences will be, too. We could combine the shows. And since your congregation can’t barrel race”—I looked to him for confirmation, and he shook his head—“then maybe we can get the Rebel Yell employees to volunteer for us.”

“I like that idea. I like it a lot. Let me feel them out.”

I didn’t mention that I was pretty sure I’d have to recruit waitresses to fill in for the missing angels. The baby angels. The waitresses would look more like prostitutes in their costumes.

At least we had shepherd’s hooks. If things got too scandalous, we could always pull them off the stage.

Gracie didn’t say I had to make a classy pageant happen. Just a pageant.

“Okay, what else?” She had a clipboard and a pencil. It was nice to see her taking my success so seriously, but the clipboard reminded me of a bigger problem.

“The playbook.” It still sat on the director’s stool, in complete disarray, pages sticking out everywhere. “We don’t know what order to put things in. The Rebel Yell people will need markers to know where to go.”