Mrs. Dawson's Christmas

By CB Walsh

Christmas is a time for fun and food and family. It is a festive time of year when the gathering of friends and the sharing of treats are enjoyed. Mrs. Dawson knows how Christmas should be celebrated. She also knows the answer to that age-old question of whether Santa Claus brings you what you need or what you want. Come and spend the holidays at her house and share Mrs. Dawson’s Christmas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 23, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640273566

Book preview

cover.jpg

Mrs. Dawson’s Christmas

CB Walsh

Copyright © 2017 CB Walsh

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2017

ISBN 978-1-64027-355-9 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64027-354-2 (Hard Cover)

ISBN 978-1-64027-356-6 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter One

Mrs. Dawson sat with an oomph. She knew that it wasn’t polite to sit with an oomph, but she was an old woman and lived alone, so it didn’t matter to anyone but herself. She could hear her mother saying, Ladies do not plop into a chair. Ladies sit softly and straight.

But Mrs. Dawson had no care for sitting softly today. She simply wanted a nice cup of hot tea so she could collect her thoughts and consider what had just occurred. It didn’t often happen that she got rattled or upset, but today both had happened, and she certainly didn’t like the feeling. It was too emotional for her; she who was used to a passive and uneventful life.

Mrs. Dawson poured her tea from the same teapot that her grandmother had given to her as a child. She had always loved and admired the bone china teapot with its matching cups, and her grandmother, bless her soul, had given the set to her on her tenth birthday, with the admonition to care of it. And care for it she did still to this day, using it only once a week or on special occasions, which was what marked today’s usage.

Anna Rose Dawson, who had been born a Fredrickson, sipped her Tetley tea, savoring the aroma and relaxing her shoulders. Children, she thought to herself, were noisy little things prone to sudden bursts of energy and wicked intentions. She and Mr. Dawson, bless his soul, had not had a family due to her early bout with scarlet fever, which had left her incapable of bearing children. Lewis Dawson had not cared that she could not reproduce and loved her enough to overcome family worries about leaving his name behind him. Lewis had eleven siblings who would carry on the name and therefore did not concern himself with the matter.

Anna Dawson gazed at the fading photo of her now-deceased husband of thirty years, missing him to this day and remembering to this day how much his walrus mustache tickled her whenever he grazed her cheek with a passing kiss. It was Lewis who had been her strength as well as companion for most of her life, and there were times, like today, when she yearned for his wise council. Lewis had been gone for five years but was never out of her thoughts.

Perhaps she had made a mistake in admitting Alicia to the apartment complex. Perhaps she had let her romantic view of widowhood cloud her judgment. Whatever the reason, Anna, as manager of the complex, had the final say on applicants for any vacancies in the fourplex. Anna had the front, left suite, and Mrs. Matilda Jefferson had just vacated the right front rooms, which allowed the remaining two sets of tenants the choice of remaining in their location or moving to Mrs. Jefferson’s empty apartment. So Daniel and Marybeth Kendall, with their son, Dylan, took the front apartment with its bay window looking north onto the street; and Alicia Thomas, with her three young children, moved into the vacant rooms above Anna.

The two engineering students had opted out of moving because they didn’t really care about having a bay window and they were, frankly, too preoccupied to pack up and trundle their stuff down the stairs. They had the rooms above the now Kendall place and had been there two years already. Two young men who were good friends, with common interests, and studied hard in their chosen fields, Jeff and Mark kept regular hours and were no bother to anyone else in the building because they met their friends at a local pub and sowed their wild oats elsewhere. If they had any visitors, it was for study purposes only, and Anna was pleased with her choice in them. They had moved on from Community College and were now at the university to finish their last two years to earn their degrees. Polite and quiet, both Mark and Jeff gave Anna the sense of safety in having two men in the building to rely on in any unforeseeable time of need.

The Kendalls had been occupants for a little over one year, and Anna had been invited to Dylan’s seventh birthday party, which she did attend with a gift of Lincoln Logs in hand. Dylan wasn’t particularly impressed with the gift, but one of his friends was, and near the end of the event, all the children in attendance were playing with them in the courtyard. Daniel Kendall was the manager of the local restaurant Simplicity, which was owned by one of his wife’s friends whom she knew through college. Marybeth Kendall was an art teacher at the high school and loved to paint in her spare time, which is why the bay window held such an attraction to her. The window, she felt, would be a perfect place for her easel because the light would be from the north and cast no shadows throughout the day. The back rooms facing south looked out onto the patio in the small fenced yard.

The house, which was now cut up into four separate quarters, had originally been one belonging in the upper-middle class neighborhood that was built along Cherry Avenue. The other houses, too, had remained, but they were intact. This house, probably because it was on the corner, had become a Speakeasy during the twenties, and the staircase was added in order to access what had become a bordello above the main floor. The original upper rooms had been reached by a narrow set of back stairs and had housed the servant’s quarters. Those quarters had been expanded during the Roaring Twenties to equal the size of the lower portion of the main house and divided into three rooms on either side to make six compartments for the madam’s business. Now there were four apartments housed in this century-old house with an entry through one double door in the front that was recessed from the two bay windows, one on either side, and the six rooms upstairs converted into two units. The upper apartments sported dormer windows at the front over the bottom bay windows, giving the house a distinct design. Once in the foyer, Anna’s door was to the left, and now the Kendall entrance was to the right. There was a set of stairs along the wall on the right-hand side.

The staircase was curved, creating a slight turn onto a landing and allowing all four apartments to have their entry doors at the front room, which opened into a living space followed toward the rear by the kitchen area. The two bedrooms opened on either side at the rear wall of the kitchen and looked out onto the backyard. To finish off the floor plans, there was a bathroom between the two bedrooms, which left enough space behind it for a closet in each room. The apartments were of a nice size and had plenty of insulation, helping keep the sound dampened and also helping keep the rooms warm in the winter. The apartments were kept cooler in the summer by opening all the doors and windows to the ocean breeze that came from the shoreline eight blocks away.

Beneath the staircase was an ample tiled area for Dylan to play on in the winter, and the back french doors led to a lovely courtyard and patio furnished with outdoor armchairs and two bistro tables having four chairs each. Off the patio was a sizable grass area with two trees and a large garden shed. The courtyard held a moveable charcoal barbecue nearby with a drop-leaf cedar table next to it to use as a work surface when bringing out food stuff to cook. It was a nice, cozy area for invited friends and family to gather, and occasionally the tenants would all join forces for a summer meal, which Daniel oversaw. He loved to cook and his wife loved to paint, and Dylan loved to sit on the vestibule tile floor, drawing or playing with his plastic action figures, humming along to whichever classical piece Anna had on her radio. He was a quiet boy, rather a loner, who had friends but preferred his own company and liked to overhear Mrs. Dawson’s radio programs.

This brought Anna back to her current problem, if it was a problem. She poured a second cup of tea and dropped in a cube of sugar. While stirring it, she calmed her nerves, listening to the rowdy children above her in Alicia’s apartment.

Yes, Lewis, she said silently to his framed photo, moving day is chaotic. Yes, Lewis, she thought to herself, agreeing with him once more, children are messy and loud. While washing up, she thought again about the dying cherry tree near the garden shed. The property management company had asked for her recommendation, so she had hired an arborist to assess the possibility of pruning it severely in order to save the hundred-year-old tree, but to no avail. The tree expert had recommended removal since it had not borne fruit for at least fifty years and was clearly beyond its years. Anna hated to see another one of the house’s original trees cut down, but there it was, and she needed to call the company with her decision. Then she would have to get three estimates for the cutting and stump removal so the tree would remain as it stood for at least another month.

Now the three children above her were screaming in delight in one of the back bedrooms. Alicia must be made to understand that the noise level would have to be kept to a minimum.

And since when was Anna the decider of a decibel level for the whole fourplex? She thought it over while leaving her apartment and heading toward the courtyard. Lewis had tried to rein in his wife’s propensity toward judging others harshly, and she once again remembered his council and removed herself from the noise so as to remain neutral in the matter. Moving is chaotic at best, and children are messy and loud, she repeated soundlessly.

Mrs. Dawson was the only one at home at present, besides those moving, because school was still in session and Daniel was, no doubt, busy with the lunch crowd at Simplicity. Anna sat in the covered courtyard at a patio table and again asked herself why she had chosen Alicia out of the five candidates possible. Alicia had lost her husband a year ago, and while the status of widow put her on the top of Anna’s list, there was more to it, and this is what she sat pondering. The other candidates had been interviewed as well, but there was something about Alicia that had tugged at Mrs. Dawson’s heart. She, in mulling it over, decided that it was a choice made, really, by Dylan Kendall. Dylan had just turned seven, and Alicia’s twin boys were also seven years of age, so they would all be attending the same school. Hopefully, they would get along famously and become fast friends. That was part of Anna’s motivation, surely, she thought out. The daughter, Clara, was five and in kindergarten, also to be at the same school but on a different schedule. Anna wondered if Alicia would choose the morning or the afternoon session for little Clara. It didn’t matter to her, of course, but she was thinking Alicia’s situation over.

Mrs. Thomas had quite the adjustment to make with the move and the registration of her children at school and her new work schedule. In order to support herself and her family, Alicia had taken the morning shift at the coffee shop so she could be off early enough to pick the twins up from school. Clara would be watched by the school after her session so that they could all be rounded up at the same time. That meant, Anna continued thinking through, that poor little Clara would have to be in the morning session and the boys dropped off early so that Alicia could get to the coffee shop for her shift. It was going to be terribly difficult for the children, but Alicia Thomas knew this school to be the best for her kids and had engineered the move, so that was that.

Anna’s main concern in choosing tenants was their show of kindness to others. She wanted a household filled with those people who could care for each other and who would be considerate of their neighbors. Mrs. Dawson had struck on the solution to her question: Alicia Thomas, despite her difficulties and widowhood, had shown empathy toward the death of Matilda Jefferson in the front apartment and had also wondered about the rather sad little boy playing alone in the vestibule. She had kept her three children seated obediently during the interview, and none of them had so much as swung their legs while waiting for their mother to be done. Mrs. Dawson was impressed with the whole family and had agreed to lease the apartment to them. Alicia had promised to give Anna a schedule of her paydays, since her income was not a set amount but it was reliable, although maybe not right in time for the rental date. So Mrs. Thomas might be late a couple of days on her rent, but it was assured. Anna, in keeping with the advice from her late husband, Lewis, set aside her judgment and acted with kindness and forbearance toward Alicia’s situation.

It was her three children, Adam, Byron, and Clara, who had her full sympathy for their upcoming long school days and, as she knew, their difficult adjustment to two new environments. Anna Dawson would need all the patience she could muster to put up with the new noises above her and the probable chaos she had just introduced to the house as a whole.

At that moment, the movers came downstairs and left the building, going to the van to fold their blankets and get to the next house. Mrs. Thomas had not had much in the way of furniture, but the turn in the staircase had caused some small problems in taking the beds up. The movers had put the twin’s bunk beds together and had set up the frame for the double bed in the master bedroom. She at least had their sleeping situation taken care of. The rest of it could wait a day or two.

Anna waited around for a few minutes to see if Alicia would need any help from her just as she had done all morning long. It was her duty as manager to see that any move was completed to the full satisfaction of her tenant, and this move had been short and, thus far, sweet. She watched the movers pack up and back out of the front parking spot at the same time that she heard Alicia and the children on the staircase.

Mrs. Thomas had a tote bag in one hand and Clara’s hand in the other. The twins took the stairs one at a time, jumping down with a thump at each step together.

We’re off to the park to burn a little energy, Alicia told Anna with a wry grin. I’m sorry for all of the noise, and we’ll see if we can work ourselves into taking a nap in an hour or so.

Anna agreed that it was a good idea to have the kids run around the park for a while and wear down their pent-up emotions. Did everything go all right? she asked, smiling down at the three children, who were paying no attention to her.

Oh, smoothly enough, I think, thank you, Alicia answered. I’ve packed some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to eat at one of the picnic tables, so that and apple slices should see to their needs until dinner. She stopped to consider this small woman, who was now such an integral part of her life. Thanks so much for waiting around and seeing us through this, she said.

Mrs. Dawson smiled. It was no bother, I assure you.

Alicia Thomas and all the assorted little Thomases went out the front door, down the three stairs, and turned left toward the small park to, hopefully, run around like mad and tire themselves out. Anna sighed and went into her apartment to get her coat and car keys. She would be earlier than she planned, but she wanted to get downtown to explain her design for the Valentine’s Day window at Goddard’s. Mrs. Dawson was the window dresser for a dozen downtown retail shops, which kept her busy and paid the bills. Her hours were flexible, and her social needs were met by this part-time endeavor of hers. Anna liked to walk the downtown area, poking into different shops for ideas and new contacts. Having lived in the area for most of her fifty-five years, she knew most of the shop owners and she was a familiar face to the locals. Mrs. Dawson was well liked.

Chapter Two

Friday morning was a zoo in the house. Alicia got her children up and dressed little Clara, reminding the boys to make their beds before they had their breakfast. Everyone in the Thomas apartment was well rested, having gone to bed early after a dinner of chicken strips