Christmas Angels Read online

  That won’t cut it, Rose thought, before grabbing some makeup remover as well as some makeup remover towelettes. As she was scrubbing Jeri’s pink, round cheeks, her daughter said, “A rose is beautiful, Mommy. Just like you.”

  Rose’s lip quivered, and her eyes filled with tears.

  “You’re so sweet. Thank you. You’re going to make me cry.”

  “Don’t cry, Mommy,” Jeri said. “It’s a very big day.”

  Rose nodded, as she finished scrubbing her daughter’s face. “Yes, it is,” she agreed.

  She was putting on her lipstick when Jeri asked another question.

  “Are you nervous?”

  Rose stopped with her lipstick in midair, as if she were conducting an invisible orchestra. Her lip quivered again.

  “I am,” she said. “It’s a very big interview for me … for us.”

  “Wait here,” Jeri said, hopping off the little seat at the vanity. Rose could hear Jeri’s padded footsteps run into her bedroom. A few seconds later, her daughter was back, her tiny hands hiding something behind her back.

  Jeri’s face broke into a wide smile.

  “Here!” she said with conviction, handing her mom her favorite doll—a beat-up, hand-me-down Raggedy Ann cloth doll. “She was sleeping, but I woke her up. I think you need her more than I do today.”

  Rose smiled and, without thinking, hugged Jeri and the cloth doll tightly.

  “Thank you, sweetie,” she said.

  “I want you to take Ann with you on your … what’s it called again?” Jeri asked.

  “Interview,” Rose said.

  “Yeah, inner-blue,” Jeri said. “She’ll keep you company.”

  Rose smiled at her daughter, feeling calm for a split second, before she felt her nerves kick in again.

  I have no friends or family to watch Jeri today, Rose thought, and no extra money for a sitter. I’m a bad mother.

  “Remember, you’re going to have to babysit Ann in the car while I talk to the nice people for a few minutes today, okay?” Rose said to her daughter. “You’re going to have to be a very big girl today.”

  “I will! I promise!” Jeri said. “And you’re gonna have to be a big girl today, too!”

  Rose smiled and again hugged the doll, which smelled of her daughter.

  I can’t recall a time Ann hasn’t been part of my life, Rose thought.

  “I promise to be a big girl, too,” Rose said. “But now I have to find some big girl clothes to wear. We’ve got to hurry.”

  Rose and Jeri scurried over to the closet, and Rose began to scour through her clothes, tossing slacks, suit jackets, and blouses onto her bed.

  Jeri’s words—You’re gonna have to be a big girl today—ran through Rose’s head as she tried to pick out something to wear.

  Why do I still feel like such a little girl? Rose thought, still clutching the red-haired doll that looked so much like her and her daughter.

  Two

  February 2011

  Rose watched her baby daughter sleep, nuzzling her beloved doll, which was nestled into the curve of her chubby body.

  As Jeri slept, she unconsciously gummed the cloth doll’s hand, something Rose had done to the same doll as an infant, her mother had told her.

  Rose reached out to caress the downy reddish curls that swept like little waves over her daughter’s head, but stopped at the last moment, lowered her head, and wept.

  I have everything, Rose thought. I have nothing.

  In two short years, Rose’s life had turned upside down. She had quit school, married her boyfriend, gotten pregnant, gotten a divorce, had a baby, and lost her mother.

  In the distance, bells of the neighborhood church chimed. Rose thought of the day she married Ray Rhodes.

  “I don’t hear joyous church bells ringing today,” her mother had said the day of Rose’s wedding. “I only hear alarm bells.”

  She had been right, of course, Rose thought. About everything.

  The church bells echoed throughout Rose’s tiny home, making the old, wavy glass reverberate in the window panes of the house in which she had grown up. She looked around the nursery—once her bedroom—and watched tiny yellow ducks happily marching in rain boots around the border that lined the walls of the room.

  “Happy,” Rose thought, staring at their smiling beaks. What’s that?

  She swung forward in her rocker and gently eased the Raggedy Ann doll from the crook of her daughter’s body.

  I must look like the Grinch when he stole all of the Whoville children’s Christmas gifts, Rose thought, slinking the doll out of the crib without waking Jeri.

  Rose wrapped her arms around the tiny doll and hugged it. Raggedy Ann had faded from years of play and washes, her red triangle nose, string hair, gingham top, and striped legs now more pink in color.

  “Life sure puts us through the wringer, doesn’t it?” Rose whispered to the doll. With Rose’s coaxing, Raggedy Ann nodded her head in agreement.

  Rose looked into the doll’s eyes. Ann had two mismatched button eyes, one the original large black circle, the other a small blue button from …

  A sob emerged from the depths of Rose, and she covered her mouth to stop herself from waking Jeri.

  Oh, Mom, she thought. I miss you.

  I hate cancer, Rose said to the doll, who had lost its original eye when Rose—overcome with grief—had nervously twisted it off and then lost it during her mother’s illness. She had plucked the new button off the back of her mother’s blue Easter dress when she picked it for the funeral, and added it to the doll as a way to keep a part of her mother with her forever.

  Cancer has taken both my parents and both of Jeri’s grandparents. I’m too young to have no family.

  “I love blue!” her mother had chirped every Easter as she walked to the stone church on the hill in Saugatuck, rain or shine or snow. “Blue spring skies, bluebirds, blooming blue bells, and blue moon ice cream. Blue is hope, Rose. Sunny skies ahead!”

  Rose would always laugh at her mother’s optimism because Easter weather in Michigan was iffy, at best. But, no matter the weather, Rose’s mother made her feel safe, happy, hopeful.

  “I have no future without you, Mom,” Rose told Dora in her final days, when all her mom wanted to do was hold her newborn granddaughter and sleep.

  “No,” Dora responded one morning, before she fell into a coma from which she wouldn’t wake, “you just won’t have any backup plan anymore.”

  That morning, Dora patted the edge of the hospital bed for her daughter to come and sit. “You’re such a wonderful mother and daughter. And you take such great care of me. You are neither helpless nor hopeless. You’re just scared.”

  She continued with a sense of purpose: “Take some of my strength moving forward, and some of your daughter’s strength. You should be a nurse. It’s your calling. Go back to school.”

  Dora had stopped and kissed the top of Jeri’s head. “And never forget,” she said, her voice shaking, “that the world is always full of hope and possibility simply because this precious angel is now in it.”

  The February wind rattled the window frames and Rose from her thoughts. She looked outside. It was ten in the morning, but it might as well have been midnight: The Saugatuck skies were black, and lake-effect snow was coming down in heavy bursts every half hour. Right now, Rose couldn’t even make out the silhouette of a tree in her neighbor’s yard. The little house moaned in the storm.

  Rose shivered. It was a day just like this when she had moved out of this house.

  “You’re not taking that thing, too, are you?” Ray Rhodes had asked his new wife, as Rose clutched the doll against her pregnant stomach and looked over at her mother. “We got a tiny apartment.”

  “Yes! She’s taking the doll,” said Dora. “It was mine as a little girl, Rose’s as a little girl, and one day they will belong to your little girl.”

  “Dolls.” Ray had snorted. “Girls.”

  “Mom,” Rose said sweetly. “Plea
se. Don’t.”

  “I’m paying for that place,” Dora said, her words as icy as the winter weather roaring outside. “I think there’s room for the doll and three girls—don’t you?—considering I’ll be there all the time.”

  Ray roared out of the Hoffs’ house and into the swirling snow outside.

  Why didn’t I listen? Rose thought. Why did I believe he would change? Ray and Rose Rhodes. I thought we fit perfectly. Why was I such an idiot?

  Rose shivered, and realized she was still sitting in her daughter’s nursery. She stood and checked the thermostat.

  Sixty degrees. And the heat was running nonstop.

  Rose briefly considered cranking it up a notch but stopped, thinking of all the bills that were due.

  Ray wouldn’t help, she thought, even if I knew where he was and had two nickels to rub together.

  Rose was happy to have her mom’s house—and to have retaken her family name after her divorce. Now, she needed a job to pay the remaining mortgage, the utilities, and taxes. Her parents’ tiny inheritance was already dwindling.

  I have a baby, Rose thought. I can’t just go back to school. I need an income.

  Jeri began to squirm, and Rose walked back into the nursery, grabbing a throw and pulling it over her shoulders, still holding the doll.

  Out the window, a sliver of blue sky—an oddity of the lake-effect snow machine appeared. It can be a virtual whiteout and still sunny.

  Mom? Rose thought. Are you trying to tell me something?

  She walked over to an old chest of drawers. The paint was peeling and the dresser top was crammed with a mix of Rose’s past and present: high school trophies and ribbons scattered amongst bottles and bibs.

  Rose’s ribbons were all “honorable mention” or team manager ribbons. One trophy from the basketball team read, “Best Sixth Man,” while another from FHA read, “Always Gives It Her All.”

  Rose opened a creaky drawer in the old chest. She rifled through a pile of baby clothes, searching for a book. She gasped when she pulled out her senior yearbook. Rose opened it and began to read what her friends had written: “To the nicest girl ever”; “You were always there for me”; “To the sweetest girl in school.”

  Rose flipped through the yearbook, stopping at “Senior Superlatives.” There was a color picture of Rose outside, smiling while embracing the trunk of a pine tree, the sun beaming through her red hair, making it look as if it were on fire.

  “Most Likely to Give A Hug When You Need It—Rose Hoffs,” hers read.

  Rose gave her shoulders a hopeless shrug.

  What did being nice ever get me? Rose thought.

  Rose dug her hand back into the drawer and pulled out another book.

  Ah, here it is, she thought. The Raggedy Ann Stories by Johnny Gruelle.

  Rose opened the book and smiled. Her mother used to read it to her when she was little. Rose turned to the preface. The yellowed page was still bent at the corner, and she hugged her doll even more tightly.

  “What lessons of kindness and fortitude you might teach could you but talk … No wonder Rag Dolls are the best beloved!… The more you become torn, tattered and loose-jointed, Rag Dolls, the more you are loved by children.”

  Rose smiled as her daughter began to coo.

  I’m a walking Raggedy Ann, she thought, looking at the little doll and then at her little girl.

  Rose walked over and pulled her waking baby into her arms, and Jeri clutched at the little doll’s arms, before falling asleep again almost instantaneously.

  Rose took a seat in her rocker and watched Jeri sleep. A ray of light pierced the darkness and illuminated the pink cheeks of her daughter and of the doll.

  Blue skies ahead, Rose thought, thinking of her mom, her Easter dress, Raggedy Ann, and how the simplest of moments are often the most beautiful.

  She tenderly kissed the top of her daughter’s head. Maybe things look up when you least expect it.

  Also by Viola Shipman

  The Charm Bracelet

  The Hope Chest

  About the Author

  VIOLA SHIPMAN, author of The Charm Bracelet and the forthcoming novel The Hope Chest, is a pen name for Wade Rouse. Rouse chose his grandmother’s name, Viola Shipman, to honor the woman whose stories inspired him. Rouse lives in Michigan and writes regularly for People and Coastal Living, among others, and is a contributor to All Things Considered. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Chapter One: The Tree Topper

  Chapter Two: The Holiday Pin

  Chapter Three: The Snow Angel

  Chapter Four: The Holiday Cookie Cutter

  Chapter Five: The Tree Topper

  Preview of The Hope Chest

  Also by Viola Shipman

  About the Author

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  CHRISTMAS ANGELS. Copyright © 2016 by Viola Shipman. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  Cover photograh © Shutterstock

  e-ISBN 9781250128560

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  First Edition: October 2016