“I’m a vegetarian,” she said, but she’d stopped shaking.
I smiled. “I’ll buy you a salad.”
Then I gave her a peck on the forehead and stepped into the light.
* * *
I’d behaved for thirty-one hours, shown restraint with Gracie, and had an intelligent conversation with her father. I’d found tablecloths to cover the legs of the waitresses-now-angels, persuaded Lee and Grant to put on wigs and robes (two of the Wise Men were stuck in traffic), and attached cotton balls to sawhorses to create sheep.
I’d wielded a glue gun to finish hemming Gracie’s costume—with no hit to my masculinity at all—and borrowed an eighth-grade gamer from the middle school choir to run lights. I’d untucked the robe from the back of an unaware shepherd’s pants, removed the Confederate caps from the horses-now-donkeys, and located Benadryl for a nervous stage mother.
Talk about your Christmas miracles. There was only one problem.
No Joseph.
“Did we make him mad?” I asked Gracie. We’d found the playbook, perfectly organized, but Shelby had disappeared. “Is this my fault, too?”
“No, he’s not that kind of guy.” She threw her hands up into the air. “We never dated, not even once. Something’s wrong.”
We didn’t have any extra bodies to stand in as Joseph. Gracie’s father was outside handling the tickets and the traffic, and … that would be gross, anyway. I couldn’t even pull an overgrown middle-schooler from the choir, because he was their only tenor.
I was at the end of my alternatives when Pastor Robinson reappeared. “We found Shelby,” he said. “Passed out under a pile of burlap. He’s running a high fever, and he’s delirious. Keeps talking about Democrats and New Jersey and kissing.”
“So we don’t have a Joseph.” Gracie kept her eyes on her father, but her hand moved to mine.
“No, we don’t.” He was very obviously not looking at me, either.
Oh, no.
“Come on.” I took a step back. “No way. No one in this town will buy me as Joseph. They’ll boo at the nativity. You can’t have people booing at the nativity. And I might be a troublemaker, but what I do is underhanded. Sneaky. I don’t like people looking at me. And people would have to look at me.” I was babbling, but the last thing I wanted to do was put on a robe and a fake beard and pretend to be the father of Jesus.
“It’s okay, Vaughn. You don’t have to do it.” Gracie squeezed my hand. “We have time to figure something out.”
“Ten minutes!” It was the eighth-grade gamer on the earpiece.
“We could use one of the Wise Men,” Gracie suggested. “Pull someone out of the crowd to take his place. All he has to do is stand there.”
Pastor Robinson nodded. “That could work. We might have to open the curtain a few minutes late—”
“I’ll do it.” Was that coming from me? It was. “I’ll be Joseph.”
“Son, you don’t have to. I promise,” Pastor Robinson said. He meant it, and not because he’d be ashamed for me to take the role. I could tell that he was thinking about me, my feelings. And he’d called me son. “Performing wasn’t a part of your deal.”
I looked from Gracie to her father, and all I saw on their faces was concern. Not judgment, not disappointment, not expectation. Nothing.
Just love.
“Directing the pageant wasn’t part of the deal, either,” I said.
“This is different,” Gracie said. “No one wants you to be uncomfortable—”
“I want to.” I held up my hand when Gracie started to argue. “No. I really want to.” I turned to her father. “The least I can do is put on a fake beard and stand up for what you believe in.”
Gracie was biting her lip. I might have seen tears in her eyes.
“Thank you,” Pastor Robinson said. And then he hugged me.
“Right.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “So where’s the beard?”
* * *
Gracie and I were alone on the stage, waiting for the curtain to rise, just a young couple from Nazareth on our way to Bethlehem to be counted in the census. Minus a donkey, but some things couldn’t be helped. Gracie told me the donkey thing wasn’t in the Bible anyway.
I was sweaty and nervous, but Gracie was smiling from ear to ear. It made the whole thing worth it.
“I’d say good luck.” I fiddled with a glue strip and slapped on the mustache. “But it’s ‘break a leg,’ right?” My beard flipped over. “Crap.”
Gracie laughed and reached out to fix it. Or so I thought.
“There are other things you can do for luck.” She stood on her tiptoes, lifted her chin, and placed a kiss on my lips. It was soft and sweet.
My knees went weak. Like, so weak I had to lean on her. “That was a surprise. Don’t get me wrong, a welcome surprise. But still.”
“I’m sorry. Did I take it too far?” she asked softly.
“No,” I said. The curtain began to rise. “You took it exactly far enough.”
If you do a search for “US cities named Christmas” (which, get a life, weirdo), you’ll get five main results. Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Michigan, and Mississippi each had someone who decided, “Hey, let’s name our city after Christmas, because then it’ll be Christmas all year round!”
If you ever stumble across one of their graves, you are obligated to spit on it, because honestly.
However, on the I-15, between the glittering cityscape of Barstow and the stunning metropolis of Baker, there’s a crumbling freeway exit that’s so small and depressing, even Google doesn’t know about it. And here, cradled in the bosom of the ugly brown desert, is my home: Christmas, California.
Technically, it’s not a city. It’s not even a town. It’s a “census-designated place.”
“Where are you from, Maria?” I’ll be asked someday, and I’ll be able to say with utter accuracy, “Just some place.”
Christmas is slipping into a pit of obsolescence. That pit would be the local boron mine, where fifty workers literally squeeze their living from rocks. Someday the boron will run out, and our census-designated place will finally be allowed to die.
As I sit in the passenger side of my mom’s boyfriend’s eighteen-year-old Chevy Nova, the December sunshine coldly brilliant, I pray that day comes soon. It’s a forty-five-minute drive from the nearest high school, which means I get an hour and a half of quality time with Rick every day.