The Perfect Christmas: The Perfect Christmas / Can This Be Christmas?

“Or maybe because he didn’t stick around.”

“Yeah, I guess. After the divorce, my mother was so down on marriage, the whole idea terrified me.”

“But it doesn’t anymore, does it?”

“No. I want a husband and I’d really like children.” She grinned. “The ironic thing is, my mother’s remarried.”

“Marriage seems to terrify your brother, too. Shawn should be married by now, don’t you think? He’s older than you are.”

“I’m not so sure about Shawn.” Cassie sometimes wondered if Angie might be interested in her brother. There was actually nothing to indicate that, but every once in a while Cassie had this feeling…?. “He travels so much that maintaining a long-term relationship would be difficult for him.”

“True,” Angie said.

Shawn was a well-known artist who painted murals all over the country. Brother and sister were close and kept in touch, calling each other two or three times a week. Currently Shawn was in Boca Raton, Florida, painting the side of a building that stood next to the freeway. He’d sent her photos of the mural from his cell phone—an ocean scene, which Cassie knew was his favorite. Whales rising up out of the crashing waves. Dolphins and sea turtles and all kinds of fish frolicked in the sparkling blue water. His murals made headlines wherever he went and huge crowds showed up to watch him paint.

“Shawn’s a different case,” Cassie said. In her opinion, that summed up the situation pretty accurately.

“But if you were married, I bet he’d show some interest in finding a wife,” Angie commented.

Cassie had never thought of their family dynamic in those terms. Perhaps, in some obscure way, Shawn was waiting for her to make the leap first. Angie might be right. It wasn’t that Shawn followed her lead—far from it. They’d both been traumatized by the divorce and by their mother’s reaction. Their father, who wanted his kids to call him Pete, had been in and out of their lives. Mostly out and yet…yet he’d had a powerful influence on his children, whom he rarely recognized as such.

“Shawn won’t feel marriage is safe until he sees you happily married,” Angie went on to say.

Cassie scowled at her friend. “What makes you so smart?”

“Just an observation,” Angie said. “I may not be correct, but it seems to me that you and Shawn are afraid of love.”

“Me afraid of love? Hardly.” Not if the longing in her heart was anything to go by. Like her friend Jill, she wanted it all.

“Whenever you meet a man—no matter how perfect he is—you find fault with him,” Angie said.

Now, that was categorically untrue. “Not so,” Cassie argued.

“Oh, it’s all wine and roses in the beginning, but then it’s over before you even have a chance to really know the guy.”

“How can you say that?”

“Well, mostly,” Angie told her softly, “I can say it because I’ve seen you do it again and again.”

“You’re not talking about me and Jess, are you? The man had no class. He scratched his private parts in public!”

“Not Jess.”

“Who do you mean, then?”

“Rod.”

Cassie cocked her head. “Rod? Rod who?”

“I don’t remember his last name. You went out with him a year ago.”

“Not Rod Showers? Good grief, he was so cheap I had to pay for my half of the meal and tip the valet because he refused to do it.”

“What about Charles…”

Cassie got the point quickly enough. “Okay, okay, so I have standards.”

“High standards.”

“Okay, fine. High standards.” Cassie had made the effort, though. “I’ve tried to meet men.”

“We both have.”

“I had hopes for that online dating service.” The advertisements had looked so promising. Cassie and Angie had signed up together and then waited expectantly to meet their perfect matches.

It didn’t happen.

“I had real hopes for that, too,” Angie returned sadly. “I thought for sure we’d meet really wonderful husbands.”

Cassie sighed. That had been an expensive venture. Her expectations had been great and her disappointment greater. Angie’s, too. In fact, Angie was the one who’d suggested trying the Internet.

“The church singles group was a good idea,” she said now.

“A great idea,” Cassie concurred, “if there’d been any men involved.” They’d gone there to discover the group consisted of thirty women and two men—both close to retirement age.

Angie nodded. “The pickings were few and far between.”

“We’ve read all the right books,” Cassie said. “Dating for Dummies. How to Find a Man in Five Easy Lessons. My personal favorite was Lasso Yourself a Husband and Other Ways to Make a Man Notice You.”

“The only thing we managed to lasso was a hundred-dollar credit-card bill for all those books.”

“Divided two ways,” Cassie reminded her.

“They did make for interesting reading.”

“They would’ve been a lot more interesting if we’d been able to make any of them work,” Cassie said in acerbic tones.

“Yeah…”

“We’ve tried everything.”

“I’m not giving up,” Angie insisted. “And I won’t let you give up, either.”

Cassie sighed.

She was close to it. The Christmas card from Jill and Tom was the final straw. For too long she’d been convinced that one day soon, she’d be mailing glossy Christmas cards to all her friends and relatives. She, too, would have a photograph that showed the perfect husband, the perfect children, a boy and a girl, all looking forward to the perfect Christmas. But year after year it was the same. No husband. No children. And each Christmas with her embittered mother more depressing than the one before.

The time had come to step forward and find a man, she decided with new resolve. Maybe she did need to lower her standards. She couldn’t allow another Christmas to pass without—