Room at the Inn

She wrapped her arms around her stomach to hold in a fierce surge of emotion, and it took her a minute to figure out why.

He looked settled.

At some point in the last few months, Carson had lost his forward tilt. He’d stopped looking like he was on his way out of town, out of her life, out into the bigger, more fascinating world.

He’d started looking at her like she was the bigger, more fascinating world that he’d been missing all along.

“You came home,” she said, wonderingly.

And he must have caught her meaning, captured it from her face, because his expression turned somber and his eyes full of feeling, and he said, “I did. For you, I did.”

Acknowledgments

The beating heart of this novella is the small town in Upstate New York where my not-at-all-curmudgeonly father grew up. Dolgeville, I miss you. Thanks for letting me play fast and loose with your past and present in order to write the story I wanted to write.

Carson, Julie, and Leo owe a lot to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, a movie I’ve seen dozens of times and for which I have an abiding but conflicted love. It saddens me that George never gets to leave Bedford Falls, and it irritates me when we learn that if George had never been born, Mary would have become a cringing spinster librarian. This story began with my attempt to imagine what might have happened if George really did shake the dust of his crummy little hometown off his feet and see the world.

I’m grateful to my mother-in-law, Joyce, for collecting Julie and Glory’s story and handing it to me. “I have something you need to put in a book,” she said. So I did.

Huge thanks to Serena Bell for her head-patting and incisive comments as I wrote this novella. Serena is the sort of friend who knows how to say, “This is magnificent! You’re going to have to do it all over again.” Every writer needs one of those. Anna Cowan, Elisabeth Barrett, and Amber Lin all read the story and pointed out different flaws. I’m grateful for their honest criticism and hopeful that the final product is better for all the revising I did in response. Thanks, too, to Faye and Emily, for the encouragement, and to my editor, Sue, for giving me this project in the first place. I never thought I’d write a Christmas story—and now I have.

Read on for an excerpt from Ruthie Knox’s Along Came Trouble

Chapter One

“Get out of my yard!” Ellen shouted.

The weasel-faced photographer ignored her, too busy snapping photos of the house next door to pay her any mind.

No surprise there. This was the fifth time in as many days that a man with a camera had violated her property lines. By now, she knew the drill.

They trespassed. She yelled. They pretended she didn’t exist. She called the police.

Ellen was thoroughly sick of it. She couldn’t carry on this way, watching from the safety of the side porch and clutching her glass of iced tea like an outraged Southern belle.

It was all very well for Jamie to tell her to stay put and let the professionals deal with it. Her pop-star brother was safe at home in California, nursing his wounds. And anyway, this kind of attention was the lot he’d chosen in life. He’d decided to be a celebrity, then he’d made the choice to get involved with Ellen’s neighbor, Carly. The consequences ought to be his to deal with.

Ellen hadn’t invited the paparazzi to descend. She’d made different choices, and they’d led her to college, law school, marriage, divorce, motherhood. They’d led her to this quiet cul-de-sac in Camelot, Ohio, surrounded by woods.

Her choices had also made her the kind of woman who couldn’t easily stand by as some skeevy guy crushed her plants and invaded Carly’s privacy for the umpteenth time since last Friday.

Enough, she thought. Enough.

But until Weasel Face crushed the life out of her favorite hosta—her mascot hosta—with his giant brown boot, she didn’t actually intend to act on the thought.

Raised in Chicago, Ellen had grown up ignorant of p

erennials. When she first moved to Camelot, a new wife in a strange land, she did her best to adapt to the local ways of lawn-mowing and shade-garden cultivation, but during the three years her marriage lasted, she’d killed every plant she put in the ground.

It was only after her divorce that things started to grow. In the winter after she kicked Richard out for being a philandering dickhead, their son had sprouted from a pea-sized nothing to a solid presence inside her womb, breathing and alive. That spring, the first furled shoots of the hosta poked through the mulch, proving that Ellen was not incompetent, as Richard had so often implied. She and the baby were, in fact, perfectly capable of surviving, even thriving, without anyone’s help.

Two more springs had come and gone, and the hosta kept returning, bigger every year. It became her horticultural buddy. Triumph in plant form.

So Ellen took it personally when Weasel Face stepped on it. Possibly a bit too personally. Swept up in a delicious tide of righteousness, she crossed the lawn and upended her glass of iced tea over the back of his head.

It felt good. It felt great, actually—the coiled-spring snap of temper, the clean confidence that came with striking a blow for justice. For the few seconds it lasted, she basked in it. It was such an improvement over standing around.

One more confirmation that powerlessness was for suckers.