The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman (2 page)

“Kate!” Ashley flounced down the aisle in front of Kirk, who carried the brown sack of groceries. “I didn’t know you were in the store!” Her voice is all dramatic and different when she’s with Kirk. I never want to sound different than myself around any guy.

“Oh, hi, you guys.” I nodded at Kirk.

“Kirk and I are going to make Christmas cookies together.” Ashley slipped her arm through Kirk’s.

“
You’re
going to make them.
I’m
going to eat them.” Kirk wagged his tongue at her.

Ashley leaned into him with her lips. “You’ll love cooking. It’s a
sensuous
activity.”

I was pretty sure from the way Ashley said “sensuous” that the conversation was about more than just baking cookies. I felt as if they were performing for my benefit.

“Sounds like fun,” I said. “Save a cookie for me.”

Ashley turned Kirk around with a grand sweep of her arm. She was a different person entirely around Kirk. A looney tune.

“See you later,” Kirk said, looking back.

He didn’t gaze longingly into my amethyst eyes, so he obviously is not the hero in this novel.

At the end of the aisle Ashley shouted back, “Isn’t Christmas wonderful?”

What she really meant to say was, Isn’t Christmas wonderful when you’re going with someone like Kirk?

I forced a laugh for her and waved good-bye. “Have fun, Ash,” I called. Like I said, I was happy all the way to Sims Market, but now I felt let down a little. I actually sighed. I was jealous of Ashley and Kirk. A lot jealous, but I did not, as
The Romance Writer’s Phrase Book
says, “flounder in an agonizing maelstrom.” I’m too buoyant for that.

There weren’t any cinnamon sticks on the shelf.

“Mr. Sims.” I turned when I smelled the cigarette smoke. Mr. Sims is the last chain-smoker in Minnesota and completely ignores the Clean Air Act. “It’s my store,”
he says when customers complain. He’s known around the neighborhood as “that bastard.”

“Do you have any cinnamon sticks in the back? There’s none on the shelf.”

“If they’re not on the shelf, I don’t have any,” he said, bending over a broken sack of sugar.

I tried not to stare at his thick mustache when he looked up. It always had gunk in it.

“Won’t have any until next week.” Ashes fell from his cigarette into the open sugar bag.

“But that’s after Christmas.”

“So?” Mr. Sims lifted the broken sugar bag and blew smoke into my face.

I waved the smoke away. He was so rude. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Sims,” I said anyway.

He said something I couldn’t hear. Probably “bah humbug.” I didn’t care. I knew Mr. Sims would become a minor, flat character in my novel.

Outside, it was still a dark and stormy night: it snowed steadily, but the thunder had stopped. I pulled the hood of my parka up and tied it securely under my chin. Most of the stores in “the Park,” which is what the one commercial street in this old suburb of St. Paul is called, were still open. Pine bows, red ribbons, and tiny lights decorated the storefronts. That Christmas stuff made me feel festive, and I considered stopping at Bridgeman’s for hot chocolate with synthetic whipped cream on top, but then I saw Ashley and Kirk near there.

I crossed with the light and headed home. I can only stand so much hormonal happiness in one evening, especially someone else’s. I wondered if Mr. Sims had ever
been in love at Christmas. Had he ever been someone’s hero? There had been a Mrs. Sims years ago. Who could stand to kiss those nicotine-stained lips?

When I thought about it, climbing the long, sloping hill toward my house, I realized happiness at Christmas is hierarchical. People in love like Ashley and Kirk are the happiest Next come people like me, who have family and friends, and who, at least expect to be in love at some future Christmas. Last come people like Mr. Sims—the cantankerous ones—who are never happy, and no amount of external magic, even Christmas magic, can change that.

At the top of the hill I turned the corner. I was on my street now. Through the lighted window I saw the Chamberlain twins dropping toys from their bunk beds in their second-story bedroom. I still think of that house as the Bradshaw house, even though the Bradshaws moved to California years ago. I always pass it with a kind of “upsurge of devouring yearning,” as the phrase book says. But I don’t think it’s necessary to explain why, yet. All you need to know is that on that night I passed the house with an excess of yearning. The holidays bring on those hokey feelings.

Up the street I passed the Midgely house, where Midgely, who is younger than my father, was dying of pancreatic cancer. He had already lived two years longer than the doctors said he would. It had been weeks since I had seen his jaundiced, sunken face. There is nothing in
The Romance Writer’s Phrase Book
to help me describe that face. He used to be the tennis coach at the high school, and was also my junior-year English teacher, but had to
quit this year because of the cancer. Whenever I think of Midgely now, I think of that Dylan Thomas poem “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.” Midgely was a devoted Dylan Thomas fan. We spent weeks on Dylan Thomas. Was Midgely happy at Christmastime?

Why this grim reflecting in a romance novel? Have I lost control of the writing? Or is it possible that all that yearning for the Bradshaws has turned my brain to Cheerios?

Moving right along: my house had changed since I had been at Sims. More windows were lit, for one thing. Even my bedroom light was on upstairs. Not my doing either. I take after my father that way, economical and practical. My mother and Bjorn leave lights blazing all over the place, but Bjorn was in Palo Alto, two thousand miles away, with his new bride, Trish. Mother had been in the basement when I left, wrapping pots of forced tulips in dark green shiny paper and red ribbon as Christmas gifts for neighbors. Weird. The house looked like a shimmering spaceship freshly landed from some exotic star. And I’m not quoting the phrase book either.

On the porch, brushing the snow from my collar and stomping my boots, I noticed a green Volvo station wagon parked in the driveway. Company. Company changed a house.

Light, warm air and my brother’s voice spilled through the widening crack in the front door when I opened it: “We couldn’t stand another snowless Christmas this year, and when you said there was already two feet of snow on the ground, we decided to come.”

“Is that you, Bjorn Bjorkman?” I yelled, pushing the front door shut with my behind. We collided between the hall and the dining room.

“Boo, it’s good to see you,” he said. We hugged. He still wore his parka.

“You’re here!” was all I could say. I just couldn’t believe it. I pulled back to see his face. My glasses were partially fogged, as they always are when I come in from the cold. I pinched his arm. “It’s like magic to have you here,” I said.

“It took three whole days to drive here; that’s not magic.” Trish appeared behind his shoulder, and I broke loose to hug my sister-in-law.

“I’m so glad to see you,” I said.

“Kate, you look wonderful. I like your new frames.”

“Thanks.” I know I mentioned my height—six feet—but did I mention the glasses? It’s a rhetorical question. I didn’t mention them on purpose, because I wanted you to imagine me looking like Cindy Crawford. I have worn glasses since I was three years old, and even when I have cool Giorgio Armani frames, my eyes are magnified about three times their size with these plate-glass lenses. I can’t wear contact lenses because I have congenital cataracts. It’s a complex condition, but the bottom line is I have to wear glasses or be legally blind. I know this is a disappointment in someone who is supposed to be the romantic heroine of this book, but unless you’re one of those really shallow readers, you’ll continue.

Bjorn insisted that Trish call me Boo. “That’s her name,” he said. We had been through all this before and he still wouldn’t let go.

“Kate fits her better than Boo,” Trish said.

I liked Trish. “No one calls me Boo except Bjorn and his ape friends,” I said.

“You mean me?” Richard Bradshaw filled the doorway.

Okay, a flourish of trumpets here. The hero has arrived. And because he was my hero long before I began writing this novel, ever since I can remember, in fact, my face grew hot. He was four years older now, of course, and
shorter
than I remembered, but I wasn’t six feet tall four years ago either. His eyes—I need the help of
The Romance Writer’s Phrase Book
to describe those eyes:

—
unfathomable in their murky depths?

No!

—
shades of amber and green?

Maybe.

—
dark gray-green-flecked eyes?

I don’t know. Maybe.

—
hooded like those of a hawk?

Absolutely not! The hell with it. They were warm eyes. They were Richard’s eyes. I wouldn’t care if they were cone-shaped. Richard Bradshaw was standing in the doorway of the dining room. “Hi,” I said and stepped forward to shake hands, when I tripped on the edge of the oriental carpet and lurched into him, elbows first. It wasn’t a pretty picture. He made a sound like “oomph” because my elbow caught him in the diaphragm. He was too incapacitated for me to fall gracefully into his arms. Instead, I was caught by a drop-dead-beautiful young woman standing at Richard’s shoulder.

This would be a better story if I’d just lie, but I want
truth in romance. And the truth is that the first time I saw Richard Bradshaw after four years of separation, I knocked the wind out of him and was saved from falling on my face by his girlfriend.

Chapter
Two
of a romance novel is where the antagonist is introduced. You know, the character who is going to get under the craw of the protagonist, in this case me. The antagonist’s job is to try her provoking best to keep the heroine and hero from getting together and providing the reader with a happy ending too quickly. A novel, after all, must have at least a hundred pages of blessed tension. Heroine and hero must be conspired against.

Like I said,
she
was drop-dead beautiful. “Are you hurt?” she asked in a voice that could melt a fifteen-year-old cheese.

I could have sworn she dropped her postvocalic “r.” It was subtle.

“Those fruit boots are death in the house,” my father said. Had he heard it too? He and Mother were the last to step into the dining room from the kitchen.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered. I couldn’t help gazing into the young woman’s face. The face of an angel.

“She’s all right,” Bjorn said. “She’s used to knocking around in the house.”

“Take those boots off, honey,” Mother said.

Richard pounded a fist against his chest as if to correct whatever I had injured. “It’s nice to see you again, Boo.” He used my thirteen-year-old name, but he smiled, and we glanced briefly at each other—our eyes didn’t lock or anything—but it was easy to forgive him. Then, as if he had forgotten himself, he said, “Oh, this is my friend
Fleur St. Germaine
.”

I swear to god, that was her real name. Fleur St. Germaine. Would I make up a name like that?

“Richard hasn’t been to Minnesota since his folks moved to California,” Bjorn said.

I knew that.

“So we invited him to come out with us—besides, his car worked, and ours didn’t.” Bjorn grinned. “He’s in the comp. lit. program too.”

I knew that.

“Fleur is in comp. lit. too.”

Ducky. I couldn’t help staring at her. It was her hair, a mane of California blond, combined with a soft tan and those clear green eyes. “Hi,” I said. She was his
friend
. What did that mean exactly? Her beautiful tanned skin made me feel like a marshmallow.

“I’m so glad you all decided to come,” my mother said. And I could see that it was true. Her energy level had risen since I’d left earlier. She liked having Bjorn in the house again. “It was going to be such a lonely Christmas with just the three of us.”

That was overstating it. The three of us have never been lonely in our lives.

“We really should have called,” Trish apologized, “but Bjorn wanted to surprise you.”

Fleur pulled her coat tightly around her neck. “If you don’t have room in the house, I could stay in a hotel,” she offered.

Her diphthong in “house” was a little slow, I thought. A halo of blond wisps floated around her delicate face.

“We both could,” Richard cut in. Was there eagerness in his voice or was that my paranoia? In the same hotel room? In the same bed? Possibly. Depressing images of the two of them, loins and limbs entangled, floated through my head.

Bjorn shook his head as if that were the dumbest idea he’d ever heard, and Mother’s hands fluttered up, shooing away their doubts. “No, no, no, there’s more than enough room,” she insisted.

I couldn’t help noticing what a thoroughly stunning romance-novel couple Fleur and Richard made. She was compact and petite, the top of her head barely reaching his shoulder. He was a few inches taller than I was, if that I felt like a giant praying mantis in fruit boots—boots with treads the size of truck tires.

Mother was asking them if they were hungry, but they said they’d had dinner on the road a couple of hours before. “How about something hot to drink then?”

“Russian tea, I hope,” Bjorn said.

Mother nodded and turned to go back into the kitchen. “Kate, I need your help for a few minutes,” she said to me.

Dad offered to help with the luggage, and they all moved toward the front door. I wanted to follow them
out to the driveway and be inches away from Richard Bradshaw, whom I hadn’t seen in four years, and see if he ever looked my way, if he was feeling anything like I was feeling, but my mother had saved me from myself.

“Bjorn hasn’t changed a bit,” she said when I entered the kitchen. “He’s still a pied piper, bringing all of California home for Christmas without warning.” She opened the refrigerator. “Throw this in the can, will you?” She handed me a brown chunk of lettuce. “You should have seen him; he ran all through the house first thing.” Her head disappeared back into the fridge. “I don’t think there are sheets on the bed in the guest room—just the spread.”