The Christmas Shoes (Christmas Hope Series #1) - Hardcover

VanLiere, Donna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312289510 ISBN 13: 9780312289515

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2001

Synopsis

Sometimes, the things that can change your life will cross your path in one instant-and then, in a fleeting moment, they're gone. But if you open your eyes, and watch carefully, you will believe....

Robert is a successful attorney who has everything in life-and nothing at all. Focused on professional achievement and material rewards, Robert is on the brink of losing his marriage. He has lost sight of his wife, Kate, their two daughters, and ultimately himself. Eight year old Nathan has a beloved mother, Maggie, whom he is losing to cancer. But Nathan and his family are building a simple yet full life, and struggling to hold onto every moment they have together. A chance meeting on Christmas Even brings Robert and Nathan together-he is shopping for a family he hardly knows and Nathan is shopping for a mother he is soon to lose. In this one encounter, their lives are forever altered as Robert learns an important lesson: sometimes the smallest things can make all the difference. The Christmas Shoes is a universal story of the deeper meaning of serendipity, a tale of our shared humanity, and of how a power greater than ourselves can shape, and even save, our lives.

About this title

About the Author:

Donna VanLiere is a New York Times and USA Today best-selling author. Her much-loved Christmas Hope series includes The Christmas Shoes and The Christmas Blessing, both of which were adapted into movies for CBS Television; The Christmas Secret; The Christmas Journey; and The Christmas Hope, which was adapted into a film by Lifetime. She is also the author of The Angels of Morgan Hill and Finding Grace. VanLiere is the recipient of a Retailer's Choice Award for Fiction, a Dove Award, a Silver Angel Award, an Audie Award for best inspirational fiction, and a nominee for a Gold Medallion Book of the Year. She is a gifted speaker who speaks regularly at conferences. She lives in Franklin, Tennessee, with her husband and their children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

THE CHRISTMAS SHOES (Chapter One)December 1985

We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or give our anguish scope.
Something was dead within each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.

—Oscar Wilde

The first big snowstorm of the winter of 1985 fell on Thanksgiving. After that, another massive storm seemed to enter the area every few weeks and drop inches, or even a foot, blanketing the landscape and making the town look like a Christmas card, long before the holiday arrived.

Schools were closed more times that winter than in the previous five years combined. Nearly every week, Doris Patterson finalized the lesson plan for her second-grade class, only to have to change it entirely due to yet another snow day.

After twenty-nine years of teaching, Doris was accustomed to the unexpected. Where some saw chaos, she saw opportunity. When the principal announced an early dismissal over the PA system, Doris tried to think up a fun, new assignment for her students, to accompany the traditional spelling and math homework. Assignments like What are the flowers thinking beneath the snow? or When do birds make reservations to fly south? Though simple assignments, she’d seen them stir her students’ imaginations, creating wonderful memories for her scrapbook.

In the last couple of years, Doris had considered retiring but, for whatever reason, had always felt she wasn’t ready. Until now. She’d recently informed the principal that this would be her last school year. Her husband had retired four years earlier from the post office. He was anxious to hit the wide-open roads with her in a brand-new RV he’d purchased, with “Herb and Doris” airbrushed in blue and pink on the spare-tire cover. Maybe it was all the snow there had been that year, but warm winters in the Southwest had begun to sound good to her.

Doris never showed favoritism outwardly, but every year there was one child in her classroom who captured her heart. In 1985 that child was Nathan Andrews. Nathan was quiet and introspective. He had sandy hair, huge blue eyes, and a shy smile. Doris noticed that his gentle nature was lacking the spark she’d seen in his previous two years at the school. While other students interrupted her with “Um, Mrs. Patterson, Charity just sneezed on my head” or “Hey, Mrs. Patterson, Jacob just hit me with a spitball,” Nathan made his way to her desk without calling attention to himself and whispered, “Excuse me, Mrs. Patterson.” He’d then wait patiently until she turned to him. Compared with the boisterous natures of the twenty-five other eight-year-olds in her class, Nathan’s measured, serious disposition was, almost in a sad way, beyond his years.

Some of her colleagues maintained that children from poorer homes were harder to teach, had more disciplinary problems, and were generally mouthier than those students who came from middle- to upper-class homes. Doris disagreed. She knew Nathan’s family could be considered lower income. Mr. Andrews worked at a local auto-repair shop and, people said, could barely make ends meet. Yet in all her years of teaching, Nathan was one of the most polite children she’d ever met. Doris had learned that it wasn’t the size or cost of a home that created kind, well-adjusted children, but the love and attention that filled that home.

Nathan’s mother had often volunteered at the school in the early fall. She had helped out in Doris’s classroom, cutting out shapes and numbers for a math lesson, sounding out words for a student struggling with phonics, or stapling paper flowers and trees on the bulletin board. Nathan would beam with pride at the sight of his mother. But Doris hadn’t seen Maggie Andrews in many weeks.

One day her husband, Jack, had come to school to tell Doris that his wife was seriously ill. Maggie Andrews had cancer, and the prognosis wasn’t good. No wonder Nathan often seemed distracted. He was not old enough to fully understand the situation and probably didn’t know that his mother was dying. But some days Doris could see it in the boy’s eyes, a terrible sadness she recognized.

Her own mother had died of cancer when Doris was only twenty, and that single event had indelibly changed her. Her heart broke for the little boy as she watched him erase a hole into his paper, smoothing the tear with the back of his small hand as he continued with his work. She’d never had a student in her class who had lost a parent, and she found herself at a loss for words or actions. Somehow the gentle hug or extra playtime she’d given over the years to children who had lost a precious pet or extended family member seemed inadequate, even inappropriate. She still remembered that after her mother’s death, she had wished that people would say nothing at all, rather than the trite, though well-meaning words they’d offered in sympathy. Sometimes being quiet is the greatest gift you can give someone, Doris thought, as she watched the boy sharpen his pencil, something terribly heartbreaking in the way he struggled to turn the handle. She whispered a silent prayer for God to draw near and wrap the little boy in His arms.

I slammed the phone down in my office. For the umpteenth time, I had tried to make a call, only to hear a busy signal in my ear. The day was short on hours, and I was feeling even shorter on patience.

“Would somebody tell me how these new phones are supposed to work?” I shouted out my office door to my secretary.

Gwen Sturdivant, my assistant for the past ten years, hurried in to help me.

“First, make sure you select a line that isn’t lit up,” she explained.

“I know that, Gwen,” I said, exasperated. “I’m thirty-eight years old. I’m familiar with the general uses of a telephone. I want to know why I hear that stupid busy signal every time I make a call.”

“Once you dial, you need to wait for the tone and then punch in one of these codes for the client you’re billing to.” Gwen calmly demonstrated.

When I had started with the firm, the phone bill, along with the electric bill and office expenses, had been paid from the firm’s general receipts. Now everything—the fax machine, the photocopier, the office phones—all had a code. As soon as someone could figure out how to program it, my pager would have a code too. Ordinary tasks like dialing the phone had been made more frustrating so the firm could bill our clients right down to the penny.

“Just get Doug Crenshaw on the phone for me!” I groaned.

I had been at Mathers, Williams & Hurst for thirteen years. Like many young attorneys, I had walked in the door a bright-eyed, naively optimistic law-school graduate. We were a small firm at the time, sixteen lawyers, but the location was perfect—only a few miles from my mother’s home. My father had died of a heart attack five years earlier, and I wanted to move closer to my mother so I could keep an eye on her, in case she needed anything. My wife Kate’s family lived only three hours away, so she couldn’t have been more pleased when I took the job.

I spent the first day at MW&H in conference, a conference that had lasted thirteen years: conferences with clients, conferences with other associates, conferences with the firm’s partners, conferences with secretaries, conferences with paralegals, conferences at lunch, conferences over the phone. The visions of wowing a courtroom with my verbal prowess faded as the firm’s partners shifted many of their bankruptcy cases onto my desk. I had not minded the work at first. It was challenging and fun in the beginning, helping owners of small businesses and corporations liquidate their assets, seeing so many zeroes on a page reduced to one lone goose egg. Somehow my position within the firm as “the associate who helped with bankruptcy cases” changed over the years to “our bankruptcy associate.” After I got over my initial disappointment and accepted that my dream of becoming a hotshot courtroom brawler was not going to play out (the bankruptcy cases that made it as far as the courtroom were invariably simple presentations of fact, never the in-your-face litigating tours de force I’d always dreamed of performing), I buried myself in the bankruptcy files to impress the partners. My position within the firm established, I concentrated on every young law student’s goal: to become partner in just seven years.

I found that once I put my mind to a task and worked at it diligently, things came together as I had planned. Even with my wife, this seemed true.

I met Kate Abbott during my last year of law school. From the moment I saw her, I was smitten. She had recently moved into the neighborhood where I was sharing a small apartment with five roommates. My parents had paid for my books and tuition, on the condition that I support myself by taking on odd jobs to pay for food, rent, clothes, and whatever car I could afford. Meals in those days consisted of macaroni and cheese, Ramen noodles, and the rare special of Five Burgers for a Buck at the local Burger Castle. I owned one suit that my parents had bought me for my college graduation, three pairs of jeans, several ratty sweatshirts, two button-down shirts, a pair of loafers with a hole in the sole, and a pair of old running shoes. I would have felt my wardrobe was pathetic had not my roommates’ clothes looked exactly the same.

I first saw Kate unloading boxes and secondhand furniture from the back of a U-Haul van. I set out to meet her, and then, once I met her, I set out to marry her. She was raven-haired and lovely. A certain melody filled the air when she laughed. We married a week after I finished law school.

Like most new law graduates, I was poor and saddled with debt. Kate continued her work in the marketing department of a small local hospital while I looked fo...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0312289510
• ISBN 13: 9780312289515
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 144