The Mistletoe Secret

  —LBH

  I took a deep breath. That’s for sure. I turned off my computer and got in the shower. I wondered what LBH was doing for Thanksgiving.

  I arrived at Nate’s house shortly before three. He opened the door before I rang the bell. “Alex, brother. Welcome.” We man-hugged. The sound of Mitch Miller’s Christmas music filled the home, along with the rich aromas of Thanksgiving baking.

  “I hope you came hungry. Ashley has outdone herself.”

  “I was born hungry. And I’m prepared to abuse my stomach for Ashley’s sake.”

  Nate slapped me on the back, which, incidentally, always hurt. “I like that. Always willing to take one for the team.”

  “How’d your turkey turn out?”

  “Great,” he said. “Just took it from the oven.”

  “I thought you were deep-frying the turkey.”

  “Yeah, Ashley vetoed that. She read about all these fools burning down their houses on Thanksgiving.”

  “I vetoed what?” Ashley said, emerging from the kitchen.

  “Deep-fried turkey.”

  “Yeah, can you imagine?” She kissed me on the cheek. “Hi, Alex.”

  “Hi, gorgeous.” Ashley was just about the opposite of Nate. As refined as she was beautiful, she was also petite, barely a hundred pounds. I was afraid that Nate would someday roll over in bed and crush her.

  “It smells wonderful,” I said to her.

  “Thank you. When Nate asked if he could invite you, I changed the menu a little. He told me how much you love pecan pie. So I made you one.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  Ashley shook her head. “No, one man’s enough. But I will send you home with the leftover pie.”

  “At least there’s a consolation prize,” I said.

  Ashley smiled, then said to Nate, “I’m just waiting for the rolls. We’ll be eating in about ten minutes. Stay close.”

  He turned to me. “C’mon, buddy. Let’s watch the Dolphins finish off Pittsburgh.”

  I followed Nate into his den, where the television was tuned to a Dolphins-Steelers game. It was the fourth quarter. The Dolphins led by a touchdown.

  “How’s your day?” Nate asked.

  “It’s been all right.”

  “Any online dating action?”

  “You keep asking. You got a bet going on this?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You and Dale bet on whether I’ll find someone online?”

  “No. We bet on whether or not you’ll marry someone you met online.”

  “I’m speechless.”

  He was quiet for a moment and then said, “He gave me ten-to-one odds. I’d be a fool to pass that up.”

  “That’s faith.”

  “For the record, I got a hundred on you that you will. Don’t let me down.”

  Ashley called for us a few minutes later. The three of us gathered around the dining room table, which held far more food than three people could eat. Even when one of them was the size of Nate.

  “I’ll say grace,” Nate said. “We are grateful this day for our great country and our great flag and ask thy blessings upon those who are in harm’s way, away from their families today, defending our freedoms. We are grateful for the abundance of our lives and especially, today, for this fine meal. We are grateful for friends, and ask you to bless lonely Alex to find a nice lady to soothe his loneliness. Maybe even his mystery blog lady. Amen.”

  I looked at him and shook my head. “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it,” he said. “I’ve got your back.”

  Ashley handed me a basket of rolls and asked, “Who’s this mystery blog lady?”

  “Alex has been stalking a woman on the Internet,” Nate said.

  “Really?”

  “It’s not as interesting as Nate makes it sound,” I replied.

  “It never is,” Ashley said. “Which is good, because it sounds really creepy.”

  “Thanks for making me sound creepy,” I said to Nate. “As well as pitiable.”

  “Those are not mutually exclusive traits.”

  “So what’s the story behind this Internet stalking?” Ashley asked. “That’s one thing about Nate’s tales: they may be crazy, but there’s always some basis in truth. It may be just one percent, but it’s always there.”

  “That’s because it’s beyond me to conjure something up out of thin air,” Nate said. “I simply have no imagination.”

  “I didn’t say that,” she said. “So who is this mystery lady, and what does my husband have to do with her?”

  “Nate talked me into signing up for an Internet dating service. While I was online, I came across a woman’s blog that caught my attention.”

  “A famous blogger?”

  “No. Her site seems pretty small.”

  “Have you contacted her?”

  “I would, except she doesn’t post any contact information.”

  “Which means she doesn’t want to be contacted.” Ashley turned to Nate. “You really sent him to an Internet dating site?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “You know why not. After what I went through.”

  “This sounds like a story,” I said.

  She looked at me, shaking her head. “You don’t know the half of it.”

  Nate shook his head. “You’re going to tell him about the eye doctor.”

  “The eye doctor?” I said.

  She nodded. “About two months before I met Nate, I met a guy online who was an optometrist. He wasn’t especially handsome, but he was a professional and he seemed nice enough. Besides, he was local, so we planned a date.

  “At dinner he told me which eyeglass store he worked at; coincidentally, I had been there just a few weeks earlier. I told him that when I was there I had seen some really cute sunglasses I wished I’d bought.

  “After dinner he said, ‘I’m a manager at the store. If you’re serious about those glasses, I can get you anything at cost—less than half price.’

  “I really wanted the glasses and I thought that sounded pretty good, so we went to the eye store. I should’ve realized that something was wrong when we went in through the back door and he told me to be quiet and not look into the security cameras. I asked him why, but he just mumbled something about company protocol, then said, ‘Don’t worry about it,’ which is when I should have started worrying.

  “We got in the store and he took me to the showcase with all their glasses, then he stepped into a back room. Neither of us was aware that we’d set off the silent alarm. So after I found the glasses I went to find him, and he’s in one of the examining rooms, sitting in a chair, totally naked.

  “I’m planning my escape when someone shouts, ‘Freeze! Put your hands up.’ It’s the police, and they’re pointing guns at us. I’m totally freaked out, because I think I’m either going to be shot or going to prison, and this nut I’m with is totally naked.

  “They took us aside, and after I stopped crying and explained the situation, they had a good laugh and let me go. One of the officers drove me home. My date was a different matter. They told him to put his clothes on, then they handcuffed him and took him away. As they were walking him out of the store, he shouted to me, ‘Call me.’ ” She looked at Nate. “That’s why you shouldn’t have suggested Internet dating.”

  I grinned. “Yeah, Nate didn’t share any of that with me.”

  “It wasn’t relevant,” Nate said. “The chances of Alex running into another naked eye doctor are next to nil.”

  After dinner, Nate and I did the dishes while Ashley spoke on the phone with her mother in Oklahoma. Then all three of us went into the den to eat pie and talk. After a half hour Ashley excused herself to take a nap. Ten minutes later Nate left me to join her. I got another piece of pecan pie and then drove home. Anot
her Thanksgiving bites the dust.

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  The weekend after Thanksgiving was basically a blur. The achiness I had felt Thanksgiving morning wasn’t just a passing thing; somehow I had caught a cold, so I spent the next day wiped out, staying mostly in bed or a steaming shower. Jill used to make fun of my “man-colds” as she called them, but she jests at sniffles who never felt a man-cold.

  Not that I was missing anything by staying inside—at least nothing that I didn’t want to miss. During my early years of marriage, Jill would drag me out of bed while it was still dark for Black Friday shopping. More surprising is that I let her. I hated every minute of it. The event was probably where the differences in our personalities were most keenly revealed. Jill thrived in the crush of holiday shopping chaos, soaking in the sounds, deals, and assault and battery, while I saw the experience more as a consumer’s version of Pamplona’s running of the bulls, dodging people, trying not to be gored by shopping carts.

  After three years of dutifully following her around, I finally admitted to not enjoying the excursion. To my surprise, she admitted to really wanting to shop with her girlfriends instead of me, both of us doing what we didn’t want to do because we thought it was what the other wanted—sort of a twisted “Gift of the Magi” thing. From then on, she shopped while I slept. Problem solved.

  This year, other than Nate and Dale, I had no one to shop for. As pathetic as it made me feel, and in spite of what Jill had done, I missed her. I wondered if she was out shopping. Of course she was. She had our 401k.

  Even though I was sick, I toyed with the idea of going out alone, for tradition’s sake, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it—not because of my cold so much as my heart. It’s an irony that nothing makes you feel more lonely than crowds of people you are not connected to.

  I had pretty much written off another wasted holiday until later that night when I went online. That’s when LBH wrote something that changed everything.

  Dear Universe,

  Another Thanksgiving alone. Why do you think it is that we feel our loneliness most keenly during the holidays? I have much to be thankful for. And, in spite of my loneliness, I am thankful. I’m healthy. I’m not rich but I have a roof over my head. I hope all my writing about loneliness doesn’t make me seem ungrateful. Sometimes I feel like a whiner. I write not to complain, but for the therapy of it all.

  Tomorrow everyone will head out en masse to the stores. Here, many will head to the larger towns. Everywhere there will be crowds, which is why I’ll stay in. It’s strange to me that I feel most lonely in crowds. Ironic I suppose.

  Every September, at a park near my home, this little town holds a Swiss Days festival. As I look out my window at all the people coming and going in their groups, I wonder where they all come from. Humans need to belong. Humans have always needed tribes. Today we find tribes in family or clubs or religion. What happens when we fall out of them? I suppose, in prehistoric times, it was fatal to be cast out of a tribe, to be exiled or excommunicated from the group, away from the people we love and need. Exile from the tribe is a form of execution.

  —LBH

  Swiss Days? What were Swiss Days? Finally she’d given me something I could go on. I typed “Swiss Days” into Google and three results came up—three different cities: Berne, Indiana; Midway, Utah; and Santa Clara, Utah. I had never heard of any of these places.

  I began searching online for information on the three towns. They were all small, with populations of around four thousand people—about 5 percent the size of Daytona Beach. This was good. The fewer people to sift through the better.

  Berne, Indiana, is a town thirty-five miles south of Fort Wayne, settled in 1852 by Mennonite immigrants who came from Switzerland and named their new home after Switzerland’s capital city. From the pictures online, it didn’t look much like the original Berne.

  Santa Clara, Utah, is a southern Utah town near the Arizona border and in the late nineteenth century was largely inhabited by converted Mormon immigrants from Switzerland. It was a desert town and looked mostly flat, though there were distant mountains visible in some images of the city I found.

  Of the three towns, Midway looked the most like Switzerland in geography and architecture. It was a lush, hilly area discovered by fur trappers and later settled by Mormon Swiss immigrants. Many of its present-day buildings, including what I assumed was the town hall, were designed after Swiss architectural styles. It was also known for its abundance of natural hot springs.

  According to a previous blog entry, the town LBH lived in had mountains and a lot of snow. While all three locales had mountains or hills, only two received any significant amount of snowfall, Midway and Berne. Berne averaged twenty-seven inches of snow a year, and Midway got more than a hundred. Though Santa Clara was also in Utah, it was nearly three hundred miles south of Midway and averaged less than three inches of snow a year. LBH had written that she was expecting several feet of snow in one night, which disqualified Santa Clara and was improbable for Berne, though it was still a possibility.

  Then I looked up the dates of each of the towns’ Swiss Days festivals to see which ones were held in September. Berne held their event near the end of July. Santa Clara and Midway held their events in September. Only one of the towns met all the criteria. LBH lived in Midway, Utah.

  Wherever the devil that was.

  CHAPTER

  Nine

  Since my clients were government bureaucrats, the end of the year was always a manic time for sales as city, county, and state officials scrambled to spend their annual budgets lest they find them reduced by their state legislatures the next fiscal year. This trend usually continued at a feverish pace until the end of the second week of December, which was when everything shut down as abruptly as if someone had turned off a faucet. This was why the Traffix management always held our company party on the evening of the second Saturday of December. It’s also why nothing got done after that.

  Even though our official company break began on December 22, for all intents and purposes, we were closed for business the last half of the month. This was the first year that I wasn’t looking forward to all that time off. If Thanksgiving was any indication, it wasn’t going to be much of a holiday. Still, it had to be better than the previous December. That’s when Jill had left me.

  LBH posted blog entries on the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday after Thanksgiving.

  Dear Universe,

  I took a quiz on loneliness last night. I was doing one of my late-night Internet searches and I found a quiz from a psychology magazine titled “How Lonely Are You?” Even though I already knew the answer, I went through the whole quiz, answering things like “How often do you feel that you have no one to talk to?” and “How often do you feel overwhelmed by your loneliness?” I answered ­OFTEN to every question, except one: “How often do you find yourself waiting for someone to call or write?” That one I responded to with NEVER. There’s no one out there who thinks about me enough to call or write. I guess it comes as no surprise that the quiz categorized me as “Extremely Lonely.” I didn’t need a quiz to tell me that.

  —LBH

  Dear Universe,

  My last few posts have been pretty heavy so I wanted to lighten the mood by posting some jokes about loneliness:

  Question: Why didn’t the skeleton go to the dance?

  Answer: He had no body to go with.

  Terrible, I know. Not even worthy of being on a bubblegum wrapper. How about this one?

  There was a man who desperately wanted to be alone, so he built himself a house on top of a mountain. One day there was knock on the door. When he went to answer it, there was no one there but a snail.

  The man, angry that his solitude had been disturbed, picked up the snail and threw it as far as he could.

  One year later there was another knock on the door and the man opened
it to see the snail again. “What did you do that for?” the snail asked.

  For the record, I would have let the snail in.

  —LBH

  Dear Universe,

  There’s a famous painting by Edward Hopper called Nighthawks. It’s a very iconic image. You’ve probably seen it. The painting is of a downtown diner at night, something I especially relate to. Through the windows you see a man and a woman sitting on one side of the counter, a second man sitting across from them, and a third working behind the bar.

  That painting has always struck me as being intensely lonely. Maybe it’s because as the viewer you are put in the position of being on the outside, looking in. But even the people on the inside look lonely. When asked about it, Hopper said, “Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”

  Unfortunately, large cities don’t have a monopoly on loneliness. It can be found in small towns as well. Loneliness can be found everywhere there are people.

  That last sentence seems horribly ironic.

  —LBH

  Monday morning I flew out to Seattle to meet with the city’s Traffic Engineering Department, and then, two days later, continued on to Portland to meet with the Oregon Department of Transportation. My meetings went well, though my Seattle clients decided to push back implementation of our product until the new year, something that would shift some of my year-end bonus to next year. I didn’t care. I might be lonely, but I was doing well financially, at least.

  On my way home from Portland I changed planes in Salt Lake City. I had a window seat and I looked out the window as we prepared to land. Salt Lake City and its surrounding suburbs were white as a bedsheet. It was as if someone had taken a giant can of white spray frost to it. The Rocky Mountains encircling the city were always majestic, but in winter they rose like great heaping banks of snow pushed to the side.