Sharon Cupp Pennington
author of contemporary romantic suspense

THE RIGHT THING

Deborah Sterling tipped the deliveryman. Her husband, Craig, would say too generously. She closed the door and slid the glittering ribbon off the foil box. Throughout her childhood, she’d been poor as the proverbial church mouse. As an adult, the Christmas season became her favorite time of year, what with the car radio exuding carols and festive greeting cards arriving in the mail daily, endless parties to attend and gifts wrapped to perfection by the ladies at Craig’s Ballantine Avenue department store. Parents and giggling children always appreciated the mechanized holiday window he and his team spent months preparing, even when the economy was on the downslide.

Married thirty-three years, Craig’s delight in spoiling her and their only child, Daniel, never diminished. Deborah carried the box to the overstuffed chair by the fireplace and set it in her lap. Her attention focused on the photograph atop the Chippendale tilt-top candle stand. She lifted the lacquered frame and ran her finger across the square-jawed face of the handsome young man in uniform.

“Little Daniel’s not so little anymore,” she whispered. “Where are you, son?”

“Don’t give up on him.” Craig repeatedly reassured her. “Daniel’s a Marine, smart and resourceful, superbly trained. Iraq’s swarming with Coalition guys, Deb. They’ll find him. He’ll be alive and home by Christmas. I promise.”

By Christmas, three weeks away? It wouldn’t happen.

She returned the photograph to the candle stand and studied the box swathed in the green folds of her velvet skirt. Another gift from her husband. Another sweet, yet futile attempt to lessen her grief.

Grief he said she shouldn’t feel. Not yet.

Inside the box, she found four fortune cookies nestled in gold satin. She picked one up, cracked it open and removed the white slip of paper. “What goes around comes around.” She frowned and opened another. “As you sow, so shall you reap.” She trembled while reading the third. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Sweat trickled past her temple as she reached for the fourth cookie, then quickly returned it to the box and closed the lid. No, not from Craig. A cruel joke from someone who knew about her missing son, someone against the war. Someone who knew her father.

Her father’s rule.

Reverend Albert Merriday had sworn by it. Her sainted mother embraced it every hardworking day of her short life.

When times were lean and money tight they dug deeper, gave more, did more. “Not because it’s expected of us,” her father said, “but because it’s the right thing to do.”

Her last visit home, following her mother’s death eighteen years ago, her father had called Deborah spoiled and uncaring. He said she led a decadent life, too much money and scrambled priorities. He’d called her a sinner.

But he didn’t know her. Not then, not now.

She stood, placed the box on a table near the window. Who would send such a gift? The window pane was bitingly cold when she cleared a circle in the moisture and peered out. Snow fell again. Daniel loved the snow.

Craig swore when they married she’d never want for anything. Well, she wanted now. Desperately. She wanted to see her boy, she needed to touch Daniel and hold him and never let go.

“You need to work,” she scolded her pity as she left the room and hurried upstairs to her studio. She loved designing clothing and in a career spanning twenty-five exciting years, she’d worked for one of the most prestigious houses and some of the most fickle stars. In London and Paris, Milan. That’s where she’d met Craig. So tall and kind, handsome and. . .

And that was a long time ago. Today, as she awaited word of Daniel, it seemed another lifetime.

She circled the dress form in the room’s center, trying not to think of the fortune cookies or who had cruelly sent them. This year’s dress meant more to her than all the others she’d designed since leaving the fashion industry. It would go to someone she knew.

One dress a year she’d made, for thirteen years, for someone’s cousin or niece or granddaughter, for someone who knew someone who knew someone, all completed gratis.

They’d become friends with Jimmy Chang and his wife years ago, when the little Chinese restaurant first opened on Shaw Street. Jimmy and Mei Chang had driven her to the hospital the night she went into premature labor in their restaurant’s busy kitchen. Another night Craig worked late at his father’s store.

This January the Chang’s eldest daughter, Li Ming, would marry and this would be her dress, this one-of-a-kind Deborah Sterling original.

The telephone rang. In her haste to answer it, she bumped the sewing table and seed pearls scattered. “Hello?”

Craig’s breathless voice. “Turn on the TV, Deb. Hurry.”

“Why, what channel?”

“Doesn’t matter. All the networks are running the story. Daniel and three others, two soldiers, two civilians! All of them a little worse for wear, but--”

“How, where? Oh, God, when?”

“No details yet. Jimmy Chang called to say he’d sent you the fortune cookies from lunch. God only knows why you like those tasteless things, but he made these special, a reminder of all the lovely things you do for others. He was listening to the radio and the anchor broke in. Then I got this call. Deb, stop sobbing and turn on the TV!”

She dropped the phone and ran downstairs. Daniel’s face filled the television screen. He looked drawn, thin yet tan. A little older maybe, a little sadder.

Laughing, crying, she snatched up the box from Jimmy Chang and tossed the lid. Her hands shook so badly she could hardly unfurl the tiny slip of paper from the fourth cookie. She choked on the words, “Good things come to those who wait.”