The Season of Us

by Holly Chamberlin

Genres: Family Life; Holiday books; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Against the irresistible backdrop of Christmas in New England, bestselling author Holly Chamberlin creates a heartfelt and memorable novel -- a story of reunited family, new beginnings, and unconditional love -- the best gift of all.

To outsiders, Appleville, New Hampshire, is a storybook small town complete with a little white church and a gazebo on the village green. To Gincy Gannon Luongo, it was a place to escape from, as quickly and as permanently as she could. Since she moved away twenty years ago, Appleville has been her hometown in name only. But at her brother Tommy's urging, Gincy is coming back to visit their recently widowed mother in the weeks leading up to Christmas -- and she's bringing her teenage daughter, Tamsin, with her.

Ellen Gannon, once feisty and strong-willed, is mired in depression six months after losing her husband. Tommy isn't doing much better. Gincy starts restoring order to the household in her usual practical way, but the real issues run much deeper than an empty fridge or an unpaid bill. Imagined slights and lingering resentments have created chasms between them all.

With each passing day, Gincy realizes she has seriously undervalued her mother and underestimated her brother. Only now, with the support of her husband, daughter, and best friends, is she starting to see how much she may have missed. For beyond the surface of every family and every picturesque town is something more complicated but infinitely more rewarding -- a tapestry of those small acts of acceptance, love, and loyalty that could transform this Christmas into the best Gincy's ever known.

Release date: October 25, 2016

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Gincy stood at the windows in the living area of the Leather District loft she shared with her family. The people who lived in the loft directly across from theirs were lucky enough to have a covered deck, and on it they had arranged a row of four potted trees, each beautifully decorated. There was the angel tree, replete with ethereal winged creatures carrying elaborate lanterns and blowing on golden trumpets. Next to it stood the Santa tree, adorned with charming figurines representing the changing image of St. Nicholas over the centuries. The third tree, Gincy’s favorite, was trimmed with gorgeously colored glass birds, from iridescent blue and green peacocks to scarlet cardinals to shimmering white swans. And the fourth tree was entirely covered in bows made of pale pink and powder blue velvet.

That was one of the wonderful things about living in Boston, Gincy thought as she turned away from the windows. There was always something interesting around the next corner—or, in this case, out of your window—especially at the holiday season.

And it was the holiday season, with Christmas about a week away, and then, a week after that, the start of a new year. The truth was that Gincy wouldn’t be sad to see the old year go.

Certainly, there had been good times. In early August she and her husband, Rick, and their two children, Justin and Tamsin, had spent a week on Martha’s Vineyard in a charming cottage blissfully situated in the middle of nowhere. Back in early June, Tamsin had ended her freshman year of high school with honors, and Justin received an unexpected promotion at work. And Gincy and Rick had managed a romantic autumn getaway weekend in Quebec City.

But the year had brought with it trying times, too. Worst of all, Gincy’s beloved father had died at the beginning of June, slipping away in his sleep at the age of seventy-eight. Rick had pointed out that Ed Gannon’s manner of passing was a sort of blessing. He hadn’t suffered. He hadn’t had to endure a long and painful illness, sparing Ellen Gannon, Ed’s wife of over fifty years, the financial devastation a prolonged illness might have wrought, not to mention the emotional strain.

That was all true. Still, the fact was that her father was gone, and six months after his death Gincy was still grieving, though with every passing day there came a greater degree of peace and acceptance. And because she and her father had grown so much closer over time, she felt little in the way of regret or lost opportunity. It had taken her almost thirty years to open her eyes and look closely at the man she had always loved uncomplicatedly as Dad and to finally see the whole person, the individual man of sensitivity and talents she had never really noticed. She had taken her father for granted, she felt, and so on the cusp of her thirtieth birthday she had set about making reparations by inviting him to visit her in Boston; introducing him to Rick and Justin; going for long, slow walks together; asking his opinions; learning more about his childhood and what really made him laugh; discovering his favorite foods, the long-remembered dishes his mother had cooked for her family that Ellen Gannon did not care to cook for hers. The revitalized relationship with her father had brought Gincy so much happiness, and, she believed, it had done the same for her father.

And now that he was gone, Gincy was getting on with life in the way she always had. Since she was a little girl she had been known as the strong, no-nonsense one people turned to in a crisis—as long as the crisis didn’t include anything too emotionally demanding. Being warm and fuzzy was sometimes a challenge for her, except when it came to her children and her husband. She was unabashedly emotional with the three of them and had embarrassed the kids, if not Rick, time and again with public displays of love and pride.

Tamsin: “Mom, did you have to scream so loud when I scored that goal? Everybody was looking at you.”

Justin: “Mom, please don’t hug and kiss me so much in front of my friends.”

Gincy was working from home that afternoon, something she didn’t do often, but there were moments—and they came more frequently these days—when she needed the utter quiet of her home in order to properly think, edit, and write.

After graduation from Addison College with a degree in communications, Gincy had taken a lowly job as an assistant’s assistant at one of Boston’s public broadcasting stations. Making rent was a challenge for the first few years of her professional life, let alone keeping herself in decent clothing, but she had soldiered on, rising steadily until at the age of twenty-nine she was appointed senior editor of the station’s monthly print publication.

Now, after a journey that included a few years as an in-house writer for a magazine dedicated to the visual arts (the magazine had never been profitable and had finally run out of operating funds) and a brief stint as the editor of a society column for a women’s glossy (she had never been able to work up interest in who wore what when and where), she was a senior editor-at-large at the Globe, the city’s most respected newspaper. It was a job she had earned, and she loved everything about it.

When Gincy or Rick worked from home, they set up at the dining table, Gincy at one end and Rick at the other. Though she worked on a laptop for final copy, she still used a yellow legal pad and pencil to make a good deal of her notes. And not a mechanical pencil either, but the kind with lead you had to sharpen with one of those little plastic-covered blade thingies. Her daughter, who did all of her homework on her computer, found this intensely amusing.

Gincy glanced back at the beautifully decorated trees across the way and not for the first time realized just how happy she was living where she did. They had bought the loft ten years earlier; it had been in decent condition and had required little repair or updating. Most of the twenty-two-hundred feet of living space was on the lower level; only Rick and Gincy’s bedroom and bathroom were on the second level. There were several exposed brick walls, a wonderfully high ceiling, and hardwood floors throughout. Large windows provided lots of natural light.

Justin, now twenty-five and Rick’s son from his first marriage, lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. He still kept a fair amount of his “stuff” in his old room, though he rarely visited. Except for the week on the Vineyard, the family had not seen him since his grandfather’s funeral. To his credit he kept in regular touch through e-mail and the occasional phone call.

Tamsin, Gincy’s fifteen-year-old daughter with Rick, was a bright and good-natured young woman. Still, for all of that she was a notorious slob, and her bedroom was best entered with caution. She was personally clean—Tamsin spent a big part of her allowance on organic soaps, shampoos, and body lotions—but the notion of putting dirty clothes into the laundry hamper instead of on the floor and making her bed on any regular basis seemed not to interest her.

It wasn’t rebellion. Gincy recognized teenaged rebellion when she saw it. Tamsin just didn’t think about order and neatness. Gincy hadn’t thought about such things either when she was young; in college her roommate had nicknamed her Moldy, and the nickname had not been entirely unfair.

Gincy looked at her watch. It was almost three o’clock, time for her afternoon pick-me-up. She went to the kitchen and poured what was left of the breakfast coffee into a mug, heated it in the microwave, and took it back to the dining table where she sat in one of the two ergonomic chairs Rick had insisted they buy. “It’s a waste of money,” she had protested, but in fact the chairs were insanely comfortable, and more than once she had found herself nodding off in one of them when she should have been paying bills.

Before opening the file she had been working on earlier, Gincy checked her personal e-mail account and found no fewer than eleven announcements of Once in a Lifetime Holiday Sales that Absolutely Could Not Be Missed. She deleted all of them. She had completed her Christmas shopping and decorating the week before; her cards had gone out the second week of the month. Gincy was nothing if not organized, and she had never, ever missed a deadline of any sort.

Along the shelf behind the couch she had set out twelve white candles in an eclectic selection of candlesticks collected from sidewalk sales and antique shops. Four bright red felt stockings already bulging with small treats, hung from the shelf. Justin’s train set—a vintage model Rick had found at an estate sale in Portland—curled around the base of the tree, a fresh blue spruce Gincy watered twice a day. You could never be too careful. It was something her father used to say about pretty much everything he thought might be a potential hazard, from dry Christmas trees to sharp edges on the lids of metal cans.

The tree was hung with simple glass ornaments in blue and red, but there were also ornaments with more personal meaning, like the tiny ceramic angels Tamsin had been collecting for the past few years and miniatures of the characters from Justin’s all-time favorite Christmas special, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. At the very top of the tree sat a large silvery star.

To complete the holiday décor, Tamsin had hung a red metal jingle bell on the front door. It made a horrible clanging racket every time the door was opened or closed, but she loved it and the neighbors hadn’t complained so there it stayed.

A few presents were already gathered under the tree, including a small box wrapped in gold paper and tied with a red velvet ribbon. Gincy knew what Rick was giving her for Christmas—a brown leather blazer to replace the one she had been wearing for fifteen years—and as an article of clothing would never fit in a box that measured only about three square inches, it was a safe assumption that the little box contained something special to mark the occasion of her fiftieth birthday on the first of January. And she was pretty sure she knew what it was.

The last time she and Rick had spent the day in Portsmouth they had wandered into Market Square Jewelers, a store that offered an incredible selection of vintage and antique items. Almost immediately, a small gold fede—“faith” or “fidelity”—ring dating from the Georgian period had caught her eye. The symbolism of two hands clasped was simple but powerful, and she had remarked on it. It would be just like Rick to buy her the ring for a landmark birthday.

Sheesh, she thought, closing the e-mail program and opening the file on which she had been working earlier. Half a century on this planet. She had been told often enough that she “didn’t look her age,” which she supposed meant that she didn’t look like a total physical wreck. Still, her short dark hair was threaded with a few gray strands, and she had started to carry a pair of reading glasses in her bag. And she was no longer the scrawny thing that Rick had first met and fallen in love with. Time, having a baby, and living with a man who liked to keep her well fed had seen to that.

Gincy’s cell phone rang just as she took the first sip of her coffee. She pulled the phone from the pocket of her wool sweater and recognized the New Hampshire area code. But it was not her mother’s number, and the only other person she knew in the state was her brother and he never called her. They were not the kind of siblings who kept in regular touch; they had absolutely nothing in common except a bit of shared DNA.

If this was Tommy, no good could come of whatever her ne’er-do-well brother was calling about. Of that she was sure. The last time Tommy had called out of the blue, it was from the emergency room one town over from Appleville. He had totaled a friend’s car—not that it was his fault—and the thing was his friend had said he could borrow the car but now he was saying Tommy had taken it without permission and that he was going to report Tommy to the police and could Gincy tell him what he should do. Oh, and he had a broken wrist and could Gincy not tell Mom and Dad what had happened. And the time before that . . .

“Hello?” she said, answering the call with a frown.

“Gince, it’s me. Tommy. Your brother. Oh, right. You know that. Look, I need help with Mom.”

“What do you mean help?” Gincy asked. He’s going to ask for money again, she thought. Nothing ever changed with Tommy. There were three things you could count on in this world. Death. Taxes. And Tommy never changing.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. “The other night I was over at Mom’s house for dinner and the potatoes were, like, half cooked. And she didn’t even notice. And the milk had gone sour. You know how crazy she is about milk being fresh. The second she thinks it’s going off, bam, right down the sink.”

What’s the big deal about half-cooked potatoes or sour milk? Gincy thought. Neither seemed to warrant this call for help from her brother. “I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” she said.

“And there’s kind of a musty smell in the upstairs hallway.”

Gincy resisted rolling her eyes. “Did you try opening a few windows in the rooms along the hall to let in some fresh air?”

“Oh,” Tommy said. “No. But the worst thing is that the electric company turned off Mom’s lights just because she forgot to pay last month’s bill. I mean, how can they do that to an old lady?”

Gincy sighed. “That’s not how it works, Tommy. Look, did she eventually pay the bill? Does she have power back?”

“Yeah. But I think it freaked her out. I mean, she didn’t say that she was freaked out, but I could tell. She never forgets stuff.”

He was right about that, Gincy thought. Her mother had a mind like a steel trap when it came to things like paying bills and balancing her budget. “Did she actually tell you she forgot to pay the bill?” she asked. “How did you find out?”

“I went over there one morning and she was upset that the toaster wasn’t working and that the coffeepot wasn’t perking or whatever and she said that a bunch of lightbulbs had burned out overnight and I said, That’s weird, maybe you forgot to pay the electric bill. I meant it as a joke but she went all white and that’s what it was, she’d forgotten.”

Gincy wondered what other bills her mother might have neglected to pay. Worse, she wondered what money Ellen might have been conned into giving away to some bogus charity or stranded African prince. It happened all the time. There was always someone around pathetic and immoral enough to bilk the elderly. The situation could, in fact, be serious.

“Okay, Tommy,” she said. “I’ll call her this evening, though I’m not sure what I’ll be able to find out.”

“Thanks, Gince,” Tommy said. “Look, don’t tell her I called, okay? She made me promise not to tell you about the electric bill but . . .”

“Don’t worry, Tommy. I won’t say a word.”

“Thanks again, Gince,” he said, and Gincy could hear the unmistakable relief in his voice. “I owe you one.”

It was no good. An hour after the disturbing call from her brother, Gincy still couldn’t concentrate on correcting grammar and tightening sentence structure. Her conscience, that annoyingly vigilant thing, was bothering her.

The fact was that she had not been back to Appleville since her father’s funeral. And apart from her usual biweekly call to her mother and an obligatory call on Thanksgiving, she had had no further correspondence with her. Come to think of it, Gincy realized, Ellen hadn’t sent them a card at Thanksgiving. That was odd. Maybe her mother, always frugal, had simply committed to further belt tightening now that her husband was gone. Or maybe sending a Thanksgiving card was something else that had slipped her mind.

And as for her brother . . . The last time Gincy had spoken to Tommy was during the course of their father’s funeral, and that communication had been limited to her asking questions like, “Who was that man sitting two rows behind us at the wake, the one with the plaid jacket and bad toupee?” to which Tommy had replied with a shrug. Limited communication wasn’t unusual for the Gannon siblings. Most every time Gincy did engage with her brother, she was left feeling frustrated, annoyed, or downright angry. He just never seemed to listen, and when he did listen he turned everything into a joke or he dismissed what she was saying with a grin and a shrug, even when a more appropriate answer might be “Thanks, Gincy, for asking about my friend’s chemotherapy” or “Hey, Gincy, that’s great news about the new job.” When possible, she avoided conversation with people who routinely provoked such unpleasant feelings in her.

But now, at the distance of half a year, she remembered that at their father’s funeral Tommy had seemed . . . What was it? Lost? Scared?

At the time she hadn’t given his state of mind any thought. First there had been the wake to survive, two interminable three-hour viewings a day for two days straight, during which time she and her mother had shaken hands with what seemed like hundreds of sympathetic well-wishers. Then had come the funeral at the church her mother had taken to frequenting in the last few years, followed by a visit to the cemetery, where at her father’s grave the assistant pastor of the church had spoken a few additional words of comfort. Gincy had been too wrapped up in her o. . .