The 13th Day of Christmas

  © 2012 Jason F. Wright.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, Shadow Mountain®. The views expressed herein are the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of Shadow Mountain.

  All characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wright, Jason F., author.

  The 13th day of Christmas / Jason F. Wright.

  pages cm

  Summary: When nine-year-old Charlee and eighty-one-year-old Marva are both diagnosed with cancer, the prospects of having a merry Christmas seem bleak. That is, until a series of letters and gifts that coincide with the 12 days of Christmas begin appearing. And the last letter—for the 13th day of Christmas—might just be the most important one of all.

  ISBN 978-1-60907-177-6 (hardbound : alk. paper)

  1. Christmas stories. 2. Cancer—Patients—Fiction. I. Title. II. Title: Thirteenth day of Christmas.

  PS3623.R539A614 2012

  813'.6—dc232012025813

  Printed in the United States of America

  Worzalla Publishing Co., Stevens Point, WI

  10987654321

  To the original Traveling Elf,

  Willard Samuel Wright

  Table of Contents

  Praise for the Novels of Jason F. Wright

  Other Books by Jason F. Wright

  Acknowledgments

  Marva

  A Girl Named Charlee

  Welcome Home

  Someone Always Sees You

  Whisper-Shouts

  Christmas Help Wanted

  The Advent Calendar

  Emily's Journal

  Rusty Apronisms

  Thanksgiving Day

  Black Friday

  Balloons

  Missing Marva

  Visitors

  The Woodbrook Weekly

  Homecoming

  Doubting Thomas

  What's Your Twenty?

  Sherlock Charlee

  No Chances

  Just Waiting

  Wondering and Wishing

  Neighbors

  Talkies, but Not Walkies

  Mason

  Christmas Eve

  Home

  Christmas

  The 13th Day of Christmas

  One Year Later

  December 26

  Author's Note

  Praise for the Novels of Jason F. Wright

  “Plenty of uplift and tradition-affirming sentiment.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Just like It’s a Wonderful Life, Christmas Jars

  is American storytelling at its best. Jason Wright has

  written the next Christmas classic.”

  —Glenn Beck, talk radio host, #1 New York Times bestselling author

  “Sharp prose, clever characterizations,

  thought-provoking insights . . . fresh and spiritual.”

  —Don Piper, New York Times bestselling author of

  90 Minutes in Heaven and Heaven Is Real

  “In the tradition of Catherine Ryan Hyde’s

  Pay It Forward, Wright’s holiday novel could inspire

  others to Christmas generosity.”

  —Library Journal

  Other Books by Jason F. Wright

  Christmas Jars

  Christmas Jars Reunion

  The Cross Gardener

  The James Miracle

  Penny’s Christmas Jar Miracle

  Recovering Charles

  The Seventeen Second Miracle

  The Wedding Letters

  The Wednesday Letters

  Acknowledgments

  No book makes it from an author’s noggin to your hands without enormous assistance from talented teams of elves.

  The Family Elves are led by my wife and favorite reader, Kodi. The others are Oakli, Jadi, Kason, Koleson, Pilgrim, Beverly, Sandi, Milo, Gayle, Sterling, Ann, Jeff, April, John, and Terilynne.

  Early Reader Elves are Matt Birch, Michelle Denson, Rusty Ferguson, Stuart Freakley, Angie Godfrey, Josi Kilpack, Sandra Nazar, Laurie Paisley, Melissa Skinner, and Patricia Utley.

  Professional Elves are Sheri Dew, publisher; Chris Schoebinger and Heidi Taylor, product directors; and the many other talented elves at Shadow Mountain. I’m also grateful for the family of elves at the Deseret News who challenge me each week to become a better wordsmith. They are Emily Eyring, Christine Rappleye, Aaron Shill, and Bob Walsh.

  A special army of Christmas Elves earns thanks as the pioneer supporters of a very important cause: The Christmas Jars Foundation. They are Matt and Christa Birch, Keith and Sheri Bird, Les and Cynthia Blades, Aaron and Jessica Blight, Bruce “Duke” Brubaker III, Tamara Brubaker, Bruce “Brock” Brubaker IV, Brody Lee Brubaker, Gwen Casteel, Lynnda Robinson Coyle, Christie D’Amour, Margaret Dansie, Chad Decker, Cathy Ellis, Eric and Randa Farnsworth, Chrissy and Stephen Funk, Michael and Tanya Groll, Roberta M. Hulse, Kib and Lisa Jensen, Jeff and Lucy Kimble, Aaron and Jeanette Lee, Sarah Lovesee, Marcie Siegel McCauley, Lisa Mikitarian, Sandra Nazar, Laurie Paisley, Bob and Michelle Rimel, Shannon Rolfe, Mike and Sabrina Showalter, Michael Stephenson, Lisa J. Sullivan, Dan and Cindy Walsh, Tiffany Warner, and Mark and Margaret Wright.

  Finally, sincere thanks to those of you who will become Traveling Elves and flip the pages of this book until they turn into action. This year, may each of us share our faith and celebrate the real meaning of the 13th Day of Christmas.

  1

  Marva

  Marva Ferguson draped a wet yellow apron over the clothesline that ran along the side of her home. In curly cursive, a screen-printed message on the front of the apron boasted: If life gives you lemons, throw them through the candy shop window and grab some taffy.

  It was just one of more than 150 aprons in the collection that hung ten deep on pegs and hooks around Marva’s kitchen, pantry, and sunroom. She wore aprons while cooking, cleaning, and doing the laundry, and often changed them during the course of the day to suit her mood. It was hard to pick a favorite when she wore most of them only a few times each year, but this particular apron was a contender.

  Marva knew she was probably the last person in the town of Woodbrook who still used a clothesline. Once, when local newspaper columnist Rusty Cleveland of The Woodbrook Weekly knocked on her front door asking to do a profile on her as part of a weekly Know Your Neighbors series, Marva agreed on the condition he help her hang the morning’s load. Rusty had such a good time, he’d stopped by every couple of months since to check on the widow and work the clothesline. He’d even donated a few aprons to her collection.

  She enjoyed Rusty’s company and was grateful for his visits. She also appreciated the occasional drop-ins from the circle of widow friends she’d made at various volunteer gigs around town. But they surely didn’t make up for the mornings when her husband, John, used to hang clothes with her. He’d been gone thirty-three years, but she still saw him in the next row, smiling over a pair of overalls or damp dishtowels.

  John and Marva had an unusual history with laundry. When they were young, John joked with his pals that the first time he saw Marva, she was taking her clothes off. When their jaws dropped, he finished the joke. “Off the clothesline—get your minds outta the gutter!”

  It was true.

  She’d first laid eyes on him in 1946 while clipping a sand-colored beach towel to a clothesline in the backyard o
f her parents’ home. The eighteen-year-old young man with bad hearing and a World War II deferment had been cutting her neighbor’s lawn all morning, pushing a mower over the same patch of scratchy grass over and over like a perfectionist barber corralling a cowlick.

  But the drunken snail’s pace had nothing to do with lawn care. He just wanted to sneak peeks at Marva and admire the tall, sixteen-year-old with fire-red hair and a matching personality. He finally found the courage to introduce himself, but instead of the more formal introduction called for in 1940s America, he chose to pop up from behind a bedsheet with clothespins pinned to his ears and nose.

  How could she not love the boy?

  They were married five years later and spent many hours at the clothesline together until the second of two heart attacks took him in 1978. In the years since, she’d had plenty of suitors and had even been to dinner, the movies, or square dancing with a gentleman or two, but she never seriously considered remarrying. In her stubbornness, she determined that no other man’s clothes were worth washing besides John Ferguson’s. And there certainly were no other men she wanted to hang clothes with in the virgin morning air.

  She told friends that even before she met him, there was only John.

  When they were married, there was only John.

  Now that he waited in heaven, there would be only John. And she was sure he would still want to do laundry with her.

  Marva loved living life by hand, but it’s not as if she’d never tried using a dryer. In 1961, John was inspired by outgoing First Lady and pink devotee Mamie Eisenhower and surprised his wife with a Frigidaire Pink Custom Imperial Washer Dryer set for their ten-year anniversary. She liked it just fine, and it saved time as advertised, but she missed the moments the couple spent in the yard peering at one another between cotton dress shirts and sundresses. The first time the dryer needed repair, Marva told John not to bother.

  “I can live with the washer, John. It gets clothes cleaner than I ever could on the old board. But no dryer can get the clothes any cleaner on the line than God Himself. Plus, I think He makes them smell better.”

  John didn’t argue.

  Marva breathed in the morning air and admired her two lines of clothes, sheets, towels, and the lemon apron she’d chosen for the day. September had soaked up the southern humidity, and Marva thought the air had an unusual, tasty crispness to it, like a long, salted pretzel rod snapped in half.

  She dove her hands into the pockets of her apron that read (Insert Funny Apronism Here). A few children played in the field that separated her house from the 27 Homes trailer park. She watched them for a long time as they played tag and built an obstacle course from old plastic trash cans and worn truck tires. She hoped when the sun gave up for the day, they’d each get a full meal and fall asleep with full bellies. She knew some would; some wouldn’t.

  Even after seeing generations of children come and go from the neighborhood, even though she’d looked hundreds of kids in the eyes as they bounced by her on their pogo sticks or rolled past on roller skates, she still wished each one were the grandchild she never had from the son who’d preceded her husband to heaven too early.

  She watched until the kids in the field disappeared from view, and soon their distant laughter and shouts slipped away, too.

  The trailer park hadn’t always been named 27 Homes. When John and Marva sold the land to the town of Woodbrook, the planning commission proposed a low-income trailer park with twenty-one mobile homes on larger-than-average lots. The homes would go first to families with children, then the disabled, then veterans, then the elderly. The town billed the mini-development as a path to homeownership for those in need of a boost. It was a model Woodbrook hoped the surrounding county and other nearby cities and towns would adopt.

  It didn’t take long before Woodbrook squeezed in three more trailers and renamed it 24 Homes, complete with a new sign. Then, in 2001, they renamed it again, adding three nice double-wide trailers close to the entrance off the rural highway.

  When the third sign went up, the town manager finally had the foresight to design the numbers so they could easily be removed if the mobile home park grew yet again.

  Marva wondered what her husband would think of the neighborhood today. The place had been maintained for a decade, and the families worked hard to convey the impression that their trailers were not just temporary housing but permanent, comfortable homes. Yet, of late, many of the lots had taken ill. Most of the homes had faded siding; some were missing it entirely. A few homes still had nicely manicured lawns, but the majority of her neighbors had let their yards grow into jungles of weeds and broken swing sets.

  She assumed the best in people though, and chose to believe the struggling families simply didn’t have the energy to provide for their loved ones and care for the small plots of earth around them that they didn’t even own.

  She thought because the town owned the homes, residents certainly couldn’t be expected to invest much in them. Once upon a time, she’d heard that 27 Homes had a waiting list. Now she wondered how many people thought of it more like a prison than a path to homeownership. Because the sputtering economy and job market had played no favorites, she’d heard that out-of-work tenants were often behind and negotiating to stay another month, then another and another.

  Marva often said that selling the land was the smartest thing John had ever done, though he’d had his doubts. The deal allowed the Fergusons to stay on a large parcel at the northeast corner of the trailer park at the end of the main drive. Their home, once hidden like a juicy Southern secret in a grove of box elder trees, was now partially visible from a busy two-lane, east-west road that cut the county in half.

  Still, more than three decades after his death, Marva was grateful to live in the only home they’d shared together and to know she’d likely die in it too, just as John had. John’s decision to give up a portion of their land and privacy had become her nest egg when he left the world seven years before the law of averages and medical spreadsheets said he would.

  The town had originally designed an entrance to the neighborhood that was large and inviting, with fat azalea bushes on either side and the 21, then 24, then 27 Homes sign framed by hydrangeas. The road in was straight and wide with plenty of room for bicycles, Big Wheels, and minivans. After fifty yards of mobile homes on both sides of the road, a short stem shot to the left with six more homes, three on each side of the street. Another handful of homes sat back on the main straight road before the street took a sweeping round right and dead-ended at Marva’s private driveway.

  Locals said the neighborhood resembled a fishhook and over time referred to the three sections as if they were parts of a real hook. The long main street in was called the shank, the short dead-end street was the barb, and the bend was the big turn that held another six trailers and led to the Fergusons’ home.

  Those in the trailers nearest the entrance rarely saw Marva anyplace except in her Mazda Miata as she zipped in and out. Though the town had agreed to cut and pave a separate entrance through the trees for the Fergusons to access their property, there had been so many excuses through the years that Marva and John had finally given up the fight. Plus, with John gone at the age of fifty, not long after the town closed the deal for the land and trailers began appearing, Marva found she didn’t mind driving past the mobile homes and the children who occupied them.

  Even though they rarely spoke to her, and more than one child had been caught hanging from her clothesline or stealing aprons for a laugh, their simple presence in her daily universe reminded her that she was not alone.

  2

  A Girl Named Charlee

  Hey, Charlee Chew, have I ever told you the story about the monkey named Mason who jumped from the back of an airplane with a banana-shaped parachute?”

  Charlee loved that her father’s bedtime stories always began with a question. “You’ve told me lots of stor
ies about Mason,” she giggled her answer. “But not that one.”

  Mason had survived buckets of wild adventures at the hands of Thomas Alexander’s colorful storytelling. He had defeated ninjas using lasagna noodles, built a riverboat from orange peels, and ran successfully for president of Monkeymerica. In one of Charlee’s favorites, Mason went hunting in the jungle with a bamboo marshmallow shooter that only shot the extra plump kind used for making s’mores.

  There were some nights, if Charlee got to bed on time, when her father would tell a second Mason story with even more delicious monkey hijinks than the first. Charlee’s mother said that her husband enjoyed telling the tales so much, he’d wind up telling them to an empty room when his daughter was grown and gone.

  Charlee remembered the first night the color of the stories began to change. She’d been surprised when her father revealed that Mason’s family was moving. Mason’s monkey dad had lost his business and needed to find a different job in a different town. As he unfolded the tale, Charlee thought Mason’s voice sounded a lot like her dad’s. Soon many of the stories sounded a lot like his, too.

  Mason’s dad lost his business.

  Mason’s older brother needed to try a new school.

  An angry chimpanzee from the bank was coming to take their house, and they had to find a smaller one.

  Charlee watched her dad’s eyes as he told the stories until they drifted away from hers and all she could see was the side of his tired face. It was wrinkled and leathery and looked like the purse her mother bought on vacation in Mexico. Charlee’s dad had deep lines in his neck that got a little bit deeper and a little bit longer with every new story.