Read If Only in My Dreams for Free Online

black vinyl drape and peers out the window of the trailer at the frosty gray dawn, pulling her terry-cloth robe more tightly around her. “You know, it actually looks like it’s going to snow. Wouldn’t that be great?”
    “Snow? Great? I’d rather be on a tropical island, shellfish and all, wearing a thong and drinking a piña colada.”
    “A thong?” She raises an eyebrow and attempts to block out the mental image of Jesus deJesus in a thong.
    “A sarong?”
    She makes a face. “I’ll take the snow. And a parka.”
    “Oh, come on.” Jesus shudders, looking at the overcast sky. “You wouldn’t kill to be lying on a beach right now?”
    “Not in December,” she says, remembering that today is the first of the month. “In December, I want snow. It putsme into the Christmas spirit. Only twenty-four shopping days left.”
    “Fa la la la freaking la,” Jesus replies in a monotone.
    She sticks out her tongue at him.
    Then, as Jesus warns, “Don’t you go messing up those perfect lips with that slimy tongue!” she realizes that she forgot, for a merry moment, about her plight.
    “And anyway,” Jesus adds, “it’s not supposed to snow. It’s supposed to warm up to fifty and rain.”
    Fifty degrees and rain?
    So much for being in the Christmas spirit, Clara thinks glumly, and steps out into the gray December morning.
    In the heart of formerly-countryside, now-suburban Glenhaven Park is a town green that looks like something out of
It’s a Wonderful Life
. Especially today, thanks to the Oscar-winning art director’s holiday magic.
    Store windows are artificially frosted, and some, like the five-and-dime, display packets of holiday cards, compartmented boxes of metallic ornaments, and bags filled with fancy ribbon candy. Every lamppost is wrapped in shiny silver garland. Nostalgic strings of wide-spaced, bright-colored bulbs line the gingerbread eaves above most front porches; flocked trees decked with bubble lights and tinsel stand in picture windows; door wreaths abound.
    As long as you don’t look at the vast condo community sprawled on a hillside above the Congregational church and overlooking the town, you might actually believe you’ve stepped back in time.
    A wide, grassy strip runs the length of the town, encompassing three blocks. A brick path meanders among trees andshrubs, wrought-iron benches, and tall posts that appear to hold gaslights.
    On either side of the green, Victorian-era homes and businesses that line the sidewalks have been stripped of anything post-WWII. Flags with fifty stars have been replaced with flags bearing forty-eight. In place of SUVs and foreign sports cars are vintage roadsters parked in driveways and diagonally along the curbs. The Internet café has been transformed into a telegraph office; the trendy clothing boutique now advertises STYLISH WOMEN’S HATS and MODERN SLACKS .
    A half mile up the commuter railroad tracks, an authentic diesel locomotive—painted a cheery red—has been positioned. It’s ready to steam into town towing old-fashioned domed, corrugated railroad cars, and to dispatch Clara and several extras on the platform to block the first scene.
    Clad in platform shoes with high wedge heels, a trim-fitting gray wool skirt suit, black wool coat, and brimmed black velvet hat, Clara boards the train with a crowd of period-costumed extras.
    She’s struck, as she was during rehearsals, by the dated rotating mohair seats and ornate lighting fixtures. What a far cry from the modern commuter railroad she takes out to her father’s place in Jersey.
    “It smells like smoke in here,” one of the extras comments, fanning the stale air.
    It
does
smell like smoke.
    Repulsed, Clara clasps her wrist against her nostrils to inhale instead the potent fragrance of the essential oil she dabbed all over herself this morning. A blend of lavender and geranium, the concoction is, quite suitably, called Calming.
    God knows Clara can use as much of that as she can get