10 Never Mess with Mistletoe Read online

  “Our club has submitted a house to the regional committee every year since 1978,” Frances went on. “And we know, because our historian, Sue, looked it up. And not once has one of our own been chosen! But these Flying Maples,” she said derisively, “turn in their very first submission, and it is accepted! Have you ever heard of anything so ridiculous? Until fourteen months ago, they weren’t even affiliated!”

  Frances reached the second floor landing and jerked open the door to the linen closet. “We had a spy go to one of their meetings once, just to see if they were doing anything untoward, you know. We had to know… it’s important for the sanctity of the brand! And we couldn’t believe some of the things she reported. When those women conduct their meetings—” Frances whirled around and made a point of holding Leigh’s gaze. Her voice dropped to a guilty whisper again. “Why, they don’t even follow Robert’s Rules of Order!”

  The puce cast to Frances’s face looked so unhealthy, Leigh managed to stifle her first response. “You don’t say?” she choked out instead.

  “It’s true,” Frances continued, handing Leigh several dust cloths and a spray bottle. “We believe the only reason they submitted an entry to the Holiday Tour in the first place was to irritate us! It’s an obsession they have, you know. Preoccupied with what we’re doing.” She made a scooting gesture urging Leigh towards the master bedroom.

  “Mom,” Leigh attempted again. “I still don’t understand why—”

  “You dust. I’ll talk,” Frances ordered. She picked up a tray of cleansers and disappeared into the bathroom.

  Leigh moved into her parents’ bedroom with a sigh. There was, naturally, not a speck of dust in sight. She squatted down to the nearest section of baseboard and ran a fingertip along the perfectly smooth, shiny surface. Nothing.

  “By the time the black mold was discovered, you see,” Frances called out, “the Flying Maples’ house had already been included in all the advertisements and the printed program maps. So Olympia had the most wonderful idea: why not give the committee an alternative right down the road? That way, we could do a last-minute switch just by handing out fliers at the door! But there was a catch.”

  Leigh looked around for some other surface she could claim to have wiped down. “What catch?” she asked.

  “The theme of the tour this year is ‘A Century of Christmas.’ They have a house that was built a hundred years ago and an enormous brand new mansion out in Franklin Park. Then there’s a lovely house in the city from the late thirties that they’re fixing up like it’s Christmas of 1945, and some other place I can’t remember that was built at the turn of the millennium. That cheap little mold incubator of Judy Marsh’s — she’s the president of the Flying Maples, you know — was supposed to represent the seventies.”

  Leigh paused in confusion. No way was the house in which they were standing built in the seventies. Leigh had grown up in the seventies and the neighborhood had seemed old then. “When was this house built?”

  “1930,” Frances called back. “I don’t understand it, either. But as soon as we got the news, Olympia insisted the chapter nominate this house. She said it was ‘absolutely perfect.’ When I asked her why she thought that, she stared back at me as if she didn’t understand the question! I thought the woman had lost her mind — she is a bit odd, you know — but then she called me back and said the regionals were coming!”

  Leigh’s brow wrinkled in thought as she pulled back the bedspread and leaned down to run her dust rag in the groove between the mattress and the support rail. She’d gotten in trouble for missing that spot before. She pulled the cloth back up and examined it.

  Nothing.

  Leigh gave up. She looked around the room again with a sigh. Her parents’ full-sized bed had been covered with the same flowered spread and crocheted throw blanket for as long as Leigh could remember. On the wall by the door hung a metal clock shaped like the sun. At the foot of the bed was a bench with a cushion upholstered in burnt orange. The walls were papered with stripes of giant gold fleurs-de-lis.

  Wait a minute.

  “Be right back!” Leigh called as she ducked out of the bedroom and made her way down the stairs again. She reached the living room and did her best to set aside a lifetime of habituation and look at the house through unbiased eyes.

  Woah.

  The long, low squarish sofa that dominated the Koslow living room was the exact same shade of burnt orange as the bedroom bench. The wingchair by the window was olive green. Her dad’s reading chair was beige with a brown pattern of windmills and covered bridges. Every stick of furniture was the same furniture Leigh had been looking at her entire life. How could it be?

  Leigh knew how. Her parents had slowly and gradually collected a whole houseful of furniture during their first decade of marriage, and although they had never bought extravagantly, Frances did know quality craftsmanship from junk. And while most families eventually wore out their living room sets, most families did not include Frances Koslow.

  The whole time Leigh was growing up, every upholstered piece of furniture in the house had been encased in plastic. Leigh remembered well, because visiting any house where she didn’t sit down and stick had made her feel like royalty. Frances had abandoned the covers only after they had turned yellow with age and replacements were no longer manufactured. Frances being Frances, however, she had managed to keep her furniture in pristine condition even without the plastic. The burnt orange sofa looked as “cheerful” today as it ever had, and the olive-green seat cushions on the dining room chairs denied ever having been touched by carbohydrate. Throw pillows in various shades of harvest gold, many of them embroidered with birds, bees, and sequins, lay in the same assigned locations as always, and the walls were still papered with a raised pattern that was fuzzy to the touch.

  Deep in Leigh’s imagination, strains of Carpenters’ music began to play.

  “What on earth are you doing?” Frances called down. “Is something wrong?”

  “Um, no,” Leigh answered, turning around and starting back up the steps. She got it, now. She understood all too well. The question was, did Frances? “So, what you’re saying is that this house will be decorated by the garden club like it’s Christmas in the nineteen seventies, and—”

  “Oh, don’t say it!” Frances interrupted. “Nothing’s been decided. We mustn’t get ahead of ourselves. Do you have any idea how important this is?”

  Frances’s expression was half panic, half euphoria. Leigh decided to hold her tongue. For her mother, showing off the fruit of forty-some-odd years’ worth of hard labor to every garden club in Pittsburgh as well as any interested member of the public would indeed be a dream come true. Despite the accidental nature of the situation, Frances’s retro tastes would truly — and finally — be appreciated. Leigh should be happy for her.

  And yet…

  A sense of doom percolated deep in her gut. Somehow, she couldn’t shake the feeling that inviting huge numbers of people to eat, drink, and be merry in the epicenter of team Koslow was akin to flipping one’s middle finger at fate.

  Did she have any grounds to back that up? Or was she still freaking out over the stupid fortune cookie?

  She decided it must be the latter. There was nothing wrong here. Everything would be fine. Her mother was certainly happy enough, and lately, that was saying something.

  “You’re not done already, are you?” Frances asked skeptically. “Have you popped open the windows and cleaned the ridges of the sills?”

  “I was getting to that.” Leigh tried to shrug off her concern as she headed back into the bedroom. Surely she was being ridiculous. She herself might have bad karma — okay, when it came to her personal proximity to other people’s “end-of-life transitions,” she had really, really bad karma — but that curse had no bearing on her mother. Frances Koslow’s participation in the Holiday House Tour was not Leigh’s affair. Never mind that Leigh would rather be boiled in oil than have hundreds of people tromping through
the Harmon family home — this was what Frances wanted. What right did Leigh have to naysay, based on nothing but a nebulous feeling of impending disaster brought on by a poorly translated fortune cookie?

  She popped open the window and began to clean the sill.

  “Do take this seriously, dear!” Frances called from inside the bathroom again. Her words were barely audible over a vigorous scrubbing sound. “You have no idea how important this is to the Floribundas. We simply must make a success of it!”

  Leigh breathed deeply of the cold air that poured into the room. She still felt anxious.

  “It’s a matter of life and death!” Frances finished.

  Leigh dropped the cloth out the window. The still-spotless dust rag drifted down and away, then snagged on a naked limb. Leigh reached out to try and grab it, but the cloth was just out of reach. Its corners fluttered in the breeze, mocking her.

  Frances really should know better than to use that word.

  Chapter 2

  “We have six minutes!” Frances reported as she finished peeling off her protective gear. “You’d best be leaving now, dear. Unless you want to meet the officials?”

  Leigh’s already elevated pulse rate increased. No, she did not want to meet the officials. She was quite sure that there were many garden clubs in many places filled with lovely, wonderful, friendly women who enjoyed horticultural pursuits, worked well together for the common good, and were perfectly sane. The Floribundas were not among them.

  The Floribundas were a flock of loons.

  To be fair, Leigh had never met Olympia. The club’s newest president had only joined within the past few months after moving into the area from New York State. But every other member had been a part of the group since avocado-colored toilets were in style. Over the course of the club’s history many other women had come and gone, women of all ages and stripes, women who were nice, women who were normal. But in the last decade or so all of Frances’s less eccentric fellow Floribundas had slowly but surely fallen away from the fold.

  The eight that remained did nothing for Darwin’s theory.

  Perhaps Leigh was being uncharitable. As far as she knew, all of the women in question did manage to lead semi-normal lives. As her always-diplomatic Aunt Lydie once put it, “There’s nothing pathological about any of them. They simply have personality traits that stretch the boundaries of social acceptability.”

  That said, Lydie herself had quit in the nineties.

  “I’ll leave,” Leigh announced, pulling off her apron and handing it back to her mother. “Who exactly is coming? How many people?”

  “Two, besides Olympia. The chair of the Holiday House Tour committee and the Regional Coordinator,” Frances said with reverence. She put the apron away, then darted into the powder room to fluff her hair.

  “No other Floribundas? No Flying Maples?” Leigh asked with relief. Her mother had never been prone to violence, but Leigh did not trust the rest of the Floribundas as far as she could throw them, never mind that a third of them were over eighty. The additional backstory Leigh had learned over the last half hour wasn’t pretty. The “upstart” Flying Maples could be a bunch of nutcases every bit as diabolical as the Floribundas believed them to be, or they could be normal women whose only crime was wanting a garden club that was whack-job free. Either way, Leigh didn’t want the warring chapters to wind up facing each other in the Koslows’ living room. Certainly not unless all the glassware was removed first.

  Frances sniffed. “It’s not a local decision.”

  “Well, good luck,” Leigh offered, slipping on her coat. “I’ll head out the back.”

  “Oh!” Frances jumped out again. “You came in the front door, didn’t you? Heavens! You’ll have left prints on the knob!” She scurried back into the kitchen and returned with a wipe. “Would you mind polishing that up on your way out?”

  Leigh took the wipe without comment. She reached out to open the door.

  Frances tut-tutted.

  Leigh bit back a sigh as she polished the inside knob, then twisted it open with the wipe still beneath her fingers. Leave no trace, Frances had lectured her as a child. Leigh had always thought her mother would make an excellent burglar.

  She swung open the door to repeat the process on the outside knob. Three women in winter coats smiled back at her.

  Uh-oh.

  “Well, hello!” the tallest of the three said loudly. “You must be Frances’s daughter, Leigh! My goodness, don’t you look just like her!”

  Leigh stared back at the stranger, mute, as Frances popped up at her side. Leigh and her mother were both average height and pear-shaped, but the resemblance ended there. Frances’s now snow-white hair had been cut short and molded into its proper matronly form since her twenty-third birthday, and her posture and bearing were straight out of illustrations from the Ladies Home Journal. Leigh’s shoulder-length brown hair had always been allowed to roam free, and she had a bad habit of crossing her arms over her chest and slouching. She didn’t think she looked like either of her parents in the face, but when pressed, most people said she looked more like her dad.

  “Thanks,” Leigh and her mother said together, glumly.

  The tall woman tittered with laughter, and her companions on either side tittered too.

  Leigh plastered on a fake smile. How soon could she get out of this?

  Frances swept the front door open, and Leigh stepped back into the house. Other than running the trio over, she had no choice.

  “Welcome! Welcome!” Frances began, shifting into full hostess mode. The women commenced with introductions all around, and Leigh kept up the fake smiling.

  The tall woman was Olympia Pepper, the president of the Floribundas. She stooped a little, as if attempting to shave off a few inches of her six feet of height, but otherwise her bearing was self-assured. Her arms and legs were bony and angular, without an ounce of fat. She showed a little too much gum when she smiled, and her orthodontia had been sorely neglected. But her blondish-gray hair was cut neatly into a short bob, and her beige suit was crisp and professional. According to Frances, Olympia was in her early sixties, newly retired from her career as a tax attorney, and flush with both time and energy.

  As yet, Leigh didn’t know what was wrong with her. But the fact that she had assumed the presidency of the club within a month of joining did not lobby in favor of normalcy.

  “Frances is one of our most decorated members,” Olympia bragged. “She’s been a past president of the chapter, and she’s even won awards at the state level! And,” she turned to Leigh. “I understand that her daughter here is a master rose gardener!”

  Say what? Leigh shot a questioning glance at her mother. The only roses Leigh had ever planted either turned black with mold or were nibbled into oblivion by aphids. Why would Frances tell Olympia such a thing?

  Frances’s wide eyes were blinking nervously. Her face had gone pale.

  Leigh pulled herself together and faced Olympia’s companions. “My talents are grossly overstated,” she said smoothly. “My mother is the gardener in the family.”

  The other women smiled back, and some of Frances’s color returned.

  “Oh, that’s true, too!” Olympia gushed, animating her words with grand hand gestures. “If only you were here in spring! Frances’s azaleas are simply to die for!”

  Leigh watched as her mother’s face went pale again. The burning question had been answered even sooner than Leigh expected, seeing as how the only shrubs around the Koslow home were boxwoods and holly.

  Evidently, Olympia Pepper was a congenital liar.

  Fabulous.

  “Can I take your coats?” Leigh asked after a moment, concerned that her mother had yet to make the offer. Frances seemed nearly frozen with anxiety. Leigh gathered the other women’s things and hung them.

  “We have to be honest with you both,” Leigh heard the Regional Coordinator say grimly, “we’re not at all sure that making a substitution at this late hour is a good i
dea. Particularly when it would mean having two houses from the nineteen thirties.”

  Leigh looked over her shoulder to see her mother’s face go from stricken to crestfallen. Did Frances really want her home on the tour that badly?

  Yep.

  Leigh shrugged off her own coat and replaced it on the rack. She wasn’t in the advertising business for nothing. “Ah, but the construction of a house is about architecture,” she said pleasantly. “A configuration of bricks and mortar representing a single point in time. Creating a mood with one’s decor, on the other hand, is a living art. An art that everyday American families have practiced in every era, making use of whatever space they’re given. And this space…” She swept her arms out over the room. “This space lives and breathes with the seventies. Can’t you feel it?”

  She would give anything to have a Barry Manilow ballad cued up.

  “Oooh, Yes!” Olympia agreed happily. “Can’t you, though? Frances has done an amazing job. Her expertise in retro fashion is simply exceptional. She has people all across the country begging for her advice!”

  “Oh, but it is marvelous, isn’t it?” cooed the petite, mousy woman who had been introduced as the chair of the tour committee. “Just look at that vintage windmill pattern on the upholstery! And the colors! And… and this!” She moved around the furniture and stopped in front of a metal lamp whose painted base and paper shade were the same ghastly orange as the sofa. “My father used to have one just like this in his study!”

  Leigh watched as the Regional Coordinator, an impeccably dressed woman in three-inch heels who looked like she should be a lawyer, surveyed the room. “You do have a point,” she said thoughtfully. She turned to Frances. “Wherever did you find so many original pieces?”

  Frances looked confused, and Leigh tensed. Her mother had never quite grasped the concept that her furniture was out of style. The idea that it was now so out that it was technically back in was beyond her comprehension. To Frances, good-quality furniture was good-quality furniture. Being a slave to ever-changing fashions was wasteful and imprudent.