“Uh-oh,” I said.
“Uh-oh, what?” Gracie peeked around me, putting her hand on the small of my back. I focused on standing up straight and wondered where putting my arm around her would fall on the awkward scale.
“Why are they here?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” I leaned forward, trying to catch the tone of their conversation.
After a brief and heated discussion—during which Gracie’s delicate hand never left my back—her father climbed the stage steps. He was smiling, but it wasn’t a real smile. I sensed panic.
“The Rebel Yell has a show tonight,” he said.
Gracie handed me her pages and stepped into his line of vision. “We have a show tonight,” she disagreed.
“Mr. Baron never removed tonight’s Rebel Yell performance from the website, so people were still buying tickets online.” Pastor Robinson gestured for us to follow him, and we made a beeline for the box office. After a brief discussion with the attendant, he turned around. “Not only are we double booked, but the Rebel Yell is sold out. And every single ticket for the nativity was distributed last Sunday. I … I don’t know what to do. The show is supposed to start in two hours. What a catastrophe.” Pastor Robinson ran his hand over his face. He looked so defeated and only twenty minutes ago, he’d been laughing.
Guilt swallowed me whole. But it was followed by a chaser of hope.
“Sir?” I stepped closer to him, clutching the playbook in both hands. My voice was the pitch of a tiny, wide-eyed Disney mammal. “I think I can help.”
“Really?” he asked. “How?”
“Catastrophes are my specialty.”
* * *
“I can’t believe you did that.” Gracie’s awe could have powered me through a triathlon. “What now? You’re just gonna throw stuff out there and hope something takes?”
“Pretty much. It’s like that spaghetti thing—throwing it at the wall to see if it sticks.”
“I wonder if that’s real,” she mused, tapping her finger against her chin. “Like, do you think the Olive Garden has a spaghetti wall? Do you think the wait staff has to draw straws to see who has to peel it off at the end of the night?”
I grinned. “Get to work.”
Gracie made a list of the traditional media outlets, and I drafted an announcement for the social ones. “I’ll call the radio stations first,” she said. “HOTT FM is playing Christmas carols, so I’ll start with them.” She winked at me before she turned away.
They’d played nothing but Christmas carols since the day after Halloween, and I predicted most of the population had retreated to gangster rap to escape the merriment. But I didn’t contradict her. She looked so hopeful.
A voice interrupted my thoughts. “We can manage the crowd, but the parking is another story.”
Pastor Robinson was beside me, and I hadn’t even noticed. I was thankful Gracie was still wearing the purple bathrobe, or he’d have caught me checking out her departure.
“We’ll have to round up someone to direct traffic,” he said. “Maybe there are some orange cones … we could make signs for entrance and exits…” He trailed off as his eyes scoured the junk backstage, seeking solutions.
“You work all the time, don’t you, Pastor Robinson?” I asked.
“Dan. You can call me Dan,” he said.
No, I couldn’t.
Then he frowned. “I don’t have office hours on Friday or Saturday.”
“I mean … you’re always on. Things don’t filter through your brain by going in one ear and out the other. There’s always something to process.”
I could see him doing some processing right now. After a moment, he nodded thoughtfully. And then he gave me the kind of answer that adults usually avoid. An honest one. “I do quite a bit of reading, studying, counseling. Lots of speaking. I can put those things out of my mind, especially when it comes to Gracie. But you’re right. There are always people who need caring for, and I can never turn that off.”
I wanted to thank him for leaving it on for me, but I didn’t know how. “Gracie said you believe in what you do.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“That’s … cool.” We looked at each other like we didn’t know where to take the conversation next.
I had questions, but I couldn’t drum up the nerve to ask them. Why had he chosen to be so kind to me after I’d screwed up his whole December? What made him arrange my second chance? Why did he have such an amazing daughter?
“Pastor Robinson!” The voice carried over the mayhem of the crowd. Rebel Yell versus Main Street Methodist. What were the odds? A woman holding three sets of angel wings and a fake golden brick waggled her foot in front of him to draw his attention. “We have a situation. It’s bad news/bad news.”
“Can we just pretend I know?” He rubbed his temples and closed his eyes. “Do you have to tell me?”
“Yep. Even though you can’t do anything about it. This one will need to be handled divinely.”
He opened his eyes. “Go ahead.”
“It’s snowing.”
There was a flurry of activity by the stage door, and it opened wide. Our town looked like a snow globe being shaken by a toddler. The flakes whirled in circles and spirals, but they were making solid landings. A layer of sparkling, icy white covered everything, including the road, and it was growing deeper by the second.
Winter had come early this year, and it had been unseasonably cold, but no one in our town had expected snow. The only time anyone worried about that kind of weather was if they were traveling. If this kept up, no one would move for days.
There wasn’t even time to hoard bread and milk. Or toilet paper.
“Hopefully … it will stop … soon,” Pastor Robinson said. He looked like he might face-plant at any moment.
“I don’t think so.” Gracie entered, sans womb, with her bathrobe open over her street clothes. “One hundred percent chance. Some sort of vortex situation. The meteorologists are ecstatic—you know how they love weather drama—and the kids are all mad since they’re already out of school.”
I felt a little giddy myself. As rare as it was, snow definitely created drama.
Kids in our town spent their childhoods perpetually frustrated by the pink radar line on weather forecasts that never dipped far enough south to bring snow, yet always included us in tornado warnings. I wasn’t far enough away from “kid” to subdue all my excitement, but I tried, thanks to the current situation.