Zack took a notebook and a stubby pencil from the table pushed against the wall. They sat on the floor and, with much argument and discussion, composed.
Dear Santa,
We have been good.
Zeke wanted to put in very good, but Zack, the conscience, rejected the idea.
We feed Zark and help Dad. We want a mom for Crissmas. A nice one who smells good and is not meen. She can smile a lot and have yello hair. She has to like little boys and big dogs. She wont mind dirt and bakes cookys. We want a pretty one who is smart and helps us with homework. We will take good care of her. We want biks a red one and a bloo one. You have lots of time to find the mom and make the biks so you can enjoi the hollidays. Thank you. Love, Zeke and Zack.
Chapter 1
Taylor’s Grove, population two thousand three hundred and forty. No, forty-one, Nell thought smugly, as she strolled into the high school auditorium. She’d only been in town for two months, but already she was feeling territorial. She loved the slow pace, the tidy yards and little shops. She loved the easy gossip of neighbors, the front-porch swings, the frost-heaved sidewalks.
If anyone had told her, even a year before, that she would be trading in Manhattan for a dot on the map in western Maryland, she would have thought them mad. But here she was, Taylor’s Grove High’s new music teacher, as snug and settled in as an old hound in front of a fire.
She’d needed the change, that was certain. In the past year she’d lost her roommate to marriage and inherited a staggering rent she simply wasn’t able to manage on her own. The replacement roommate, whom Nell had carefully interviewed, had moved out, as well. Taking everything of value out of the apartment. That nasty little adventure had led to the final, even nastier showdown with her almost-fiancé. When Bob berated her, called her stupid, naive and careless, Nell had decided it was time to cut her losses.
She’d hardly given Bob his walking papers when she received her own. The school where she had taught for three years was downsizing, as they had euphemistically put it. The position of music teacher had been eliminated, and so had Nell.
An apartment she could no longer afford, all but empty, a fiancé who had considered her optimistic nature a liability and the prospect of the unemployment line had taken the sheen off New York.
Once Nell decided to move, she’d decided to move big. The idea of teaching in a small town had sprung up fully rooted. An inspiration, she thought now, for she already felt as if she’d lived here for years.
Her rent was low enough that she could live alone and like it. Her apartment, the entire top floor of a remodeled old house, was a short, enjoyable walk from a campus that included elementary, middle and high schools.
Only two weeks after that first nervous day of school, she was feeling proprietary about her students and was looking forward to her first after-school session with her chorus.
She was determined to create a holiday program that would knock the town’s socks off.
The battered piano was center stage. She walked to it and sat. Her students would be filing in shortly, but she had a moment.
She limbered up her mind and her fingers with the blues, an old Muddy Waters tune. Old, scarred pianos were meant to play the blues, she thought, and enjoyed herself.
“Man, she’s so cool,” Holly Linstrom murmured to Kim as they slipped into the rear of the auditorium.
“Yeah.” Kim had a hand on the shoulder of each of her twin cousins, a firm grip that ordered quiet and promised reprisals. “Old Mr. Striker never played anything like that.”
“And her clothes are so, like, now.” Admiration and envy mixed as Holly scanned the pipe-stem pants, long overshirt and short striped vest Nell wore. “I don’t know why anybody from New York would come here. Did you see her earrings today? I bet she got them at some hot place on Fifth Avenue.”
Nell’s jewelry had already become legendary among the female students. She wore the unique and the unusual. Her taste in clothes; her dark gold hair, which fell just short of her shoulders and always seemed miraculously and expertly tousled; her quick, throaty laugh and her lack of formality had already gone a long way toward endearing her to her students.
“She’s got style, all right.” But, just then, Kim was more intrigued by the music than by the musician’s wardrobe. “Man, I wish I could play like that.”
“Man, I wish I could look like that,” Holly returned, and giggled.
Sensing an audience, Nell glanced back and grinned. “Come on in, girls. Free concert.”
“It sounds great, Miss Davis.” With her grip firm on her two charges, Kim started down the sloping aisle toward the stage. “What is it?”
“Muddy Waters. We’ll have to shoehorn a little blues education into the curriculum.” Sitting back, she studied the two sweet-faced boys on either side of Kim. There was a quick, odd surge of recognition that she didn’t understand. “Well, hi, guys.”
When they smiled back, identical dimples popped out on the left side of their mouths. “Can you play ‘Chopsticks’?” Zeke wanted to know.
Before Kim could express her humiliation at the question, Nell spun into a rousing rendition.
“How’s that?” she asked when she’d finished.
“That’s neat.”
