Chapter 4
Noah Parker clicked a few more things on his phone, sent a message to the group chat reminding everyone of the town meeting that evening, and then turned his phone off and set it down on the counter.
He glanced over beside his workbench, where a parade of instruments sat waiting for him to get enough time in his schedule to fix and refurbish them.
Only one had an actual owner who was paying him to fix it.
The others had been donated or found by himself or other people, for him to fix when he had time.
That wasn't really his first love, but sometimes it did pay the bills. He found that he could sell them online and make decent money as long as he didn't buy them for too much.
A broken instrument wasn't worth a whole lot, so he was usually able to get them at a pretty good price.
He pushed back away from the workbench and shoved his phone in his pocket.
He glanced in the back room, where students came for lessons, and where he had various instruments sitting on shelves for students to rent. He had an agreement with the Mistletoe school district that he provide instruments for their students at a reasonable cost.
He didn't make a whole lot of money on that either.
He sighed. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of money anywhere in owning a music store, but somehow his parents had made it work.
Of course, forty years ago, music was a part of everyone's life, and typically they made that music themselves.
Things had changed, everything had gone digital, and a person could play pretty much anything on any instrument from their electronics.
Fewer and fewer people were learning to play an actual instrument.
He wondered, sometimes, if it was going to be a lost art.
After all, what was the point in learning to play an instrument if a person could just imitate the sound on an electronic device and have no need to put in the hours and hours and hours of work that it took.
There was no point in writing new music either, since a computer could do that just as well as a person also.
As was his custom, he went to the front door of his shop, but before he flipped the sign over, he turned around, bowed his head, and knelt down.
Lord God, thank you for this new day you've given me. Thank you for the music shop that my parents started forty years ago. Thank you that it has supported me and allowed me to raise my five siblings after my parents went to be with you.
Help me to be more like Jesus today than I was yesterday, Lord, and help people to see Jesus when they look at me. Bless my business, please, and help me to be a light in the darkness here in Mistletoe Meadows. Amen.
He kept his head bowed for just a few more moments. He never felt like he had enough time to tell God everything he wanted to. But, that was the most important thing, trying to be more like Jesus, so people could look at him and he would point them to the Savior.
That was more important than making sure that his shop remained solvent, more important than following his dreams, or doing what he had always hoped he would be able to do. He'd pretty much shelved all of those ideas and realized that his life really wasn't about him, it was about Jesus.
He pushed to his feet and turned around, flipping the sign so that it said "Open," and then standing and watching the traffic on the street.
He loved this town, loved living in Mistletoe Meadows, loved being in charge of the Christmas festival, and loved that he had been able to keep his family together after his parents had died.
Unfortunately, now that he had raised his siblings, and the last one had graduated from college, his job was over.
He went back to the counter where the cash register was and opened the drawer to get the cash box out.
His hand brushed a newspaper clipping that was old and yellowed with time. He stopped for a moment and stared at it. The title of the article was "Local Teen Wins State Competition," and underneath, the article ran down the side of a picture of him with his violin.
Funny that that article had managed to stay in this drawer all of those years. With the kids running in and out, and him working every day, taking the cashbox in and out.
That was probably Emma, making sure that the article stayed right there. She was the archaeologist in the family and was always trying to figure out what their ancestors were like.
He didn't reach back to the very end of the drawer, but he knew the unopened letter from the music conservatory in New York City was back there.
He didn't know whether he had been accepted or not, because at that point in time, his parents had passed away, and he knew that there was no way he was going.
Still, he'd never brought himself to throw the letter away. After all, at that point he’d already turned down the offer from Juilliard.
Pulling the cash box out, he shut the drawer with his hip and put it in the cash register as his phone buzzed several times.
Once he had everything organized and was ready for customers, he picked up his phone.
There were a bunch of messages on the family group text chat, and he opened it up. It started out with his younger sister Mia answering the question that he'd posed last night—who is coming to Christmas dinner, and what should he plan.
Can't make it home for Christmas, sorry!
She didn't offer any reasons why, but he figured that the fact that she just started her new job in California probably had a lot to do with it.
His brother Jake said, New job demands crazy hours. Maybe next year?
He was going to text back that he was glad that Jake finally got his dream job, flying commercial airliners for a major US airline.
He had been working his way up to that for years, and now had a route that took him from the United States to Europe to Australia, and every once in a while, he stopped off in Asia.
He was definitely a globetrotter, although he'd been in the Air Force for years and had been stationed all over as well.
It wasn't exactly new that Jake wasn't going to make it home.
He'd probably only been home two or three times since he graduated from high school almost fifteen years ago.
From Emma: You know I'm not coming. I’m trekking down through Mexico and I’ll be out of service for a while. Then I'll be thinking about you from the Caribbean.
Noah let the phone fall gently to the counter as he stared unseeing out the window.
He was pretty sure Cami wasn't going to come, since she was busy doing her residency in Houston, and from what he understood, the newer doctors got the worst hours. She probably wasn't going to get a single day off in the entire month of December and half of January.
And then of course, Cody wouldn't be home either, for whatever reason.
I'm definitely jealous of the Caribbean. Enjoy yourself! He hit send.
Maybe you'll be in Australia over Christmas, and wouldn't that be fun to have Christmas in the summer?
He hit send again.
Let me know how the new job is going. He sent that one off and then allowed his phone to fall back down to the counter again.
No one would be home. He'd spent the last twenty years raising his siblings, and not a single one of them would be home for Christmas this year.
Was this how parents felt after their children had all flown the nest? This was the empty nest that so many adults dealt with, only he'd never been married. He'd been so busy raising his siblings that he hadn't even dated.
Not much anyway. The few times he'd tried, he'd scared his potential girlfriend away by talking too much about his siblings and what they were doing. That was his life though. That and the music store.
Well, he had one other thing he did, but no one other than his siblings knew about it. And even they didn't understand the extent that it mattered to him.
Typically, he didn't have a whole lot of business first thing in the morning, so he grabbed the window cleaner and a rag and walked over, squirting some on the big showroom window that allowed passersby on the street to look in and see the arrangement that he'd made with musical instruments and Christmas decorations.
He wasn't much of an artist, but he thought it looked pretty good.
He squirted some and began to wipe it off. Back when his siblings were home, each one of them had chores that they had to do in the morning, and for a lot of years, he hadn't washed the windows at all because it had been someone else’s job.
But since Mia, his younger sister, had gone off to college, he'd been pretty much doing everything himself. He’d gotten used to only seeing his siblings sporadically, and the work of the music store sat on his shoulders alone.
How long was he going to be able to stay open?
He stopped wiping, and his eyes caught on the Victorian house on the corner.
Vivian Dempsey was a lovely lady, and she had decorated her house beautifully, but that's not what caught his eye.
There was a beautiful woman with long, dark hair washing the outside of Vivian's big picture window.
The one with the Christmas town twinkling from inside.
The woman’s hair shimmered in the morning sun, and as he watched, she finished wiping, stood back, and then turned around slowly and seemed to look right at the music store.
She had a graceful way of moving, and even from this distance, he could see that her hands and fingers were long and slender. Perfect piano-playing hands. Definitely musician's fingers.
He tried to think about who the woman could be. Maybe Vivian had hired a house cleaner, but he thought he'd heard something through the town grapevine about her niece coming.
Grace. He was pretty sure her name was Grace.
He vaguely remembered his parents giving her music lessons several summers in a row back when they were small.
She was a little younger than he was, but Vivian would walk her to the store, and his mom would take her to the back, where the piano was, and simple music would flow out for the next half an hour or forty-five minutes.
He'd not seen her often over the years, but... On a whim, he set his rag down and pulled out his phone.
He typed "Grace Dempsey" into the search bar, although he wasn't quite sure that was her last name. That was Vivian's last name, but maybe they didn't have the same one.
He waited for the page to populate, and then his stomach dropped as he read some of the headlines.
Musician Cancels December Concerts.
What Happened to Grace Dempsey?
Mysterious Illness Sidelines World's Greatest Classical Pianist.
He stared at them for a while, and then looked back at the woman who had turned around and walked into the house, carrying her window cleaning supplies.
That long dark hair was pretty distinctive, and it matched the pictures that had come up for Grace Dempsey.
What was she doing in Mistletoe Meadows?
He shrugged it off, picked up his own window cleaning supplies, and walked out the door.