The Christmas Shoes (Christmas Hope) Read online

  Dear Reader,

  First and foremost, thank you for downloading this special promotional e-book edition of The Christmas Shoes. When this book released ten years ago I had no idea it would become a movie for CBS Television, that it would be the first in the series of Christmas novels or that I would receive countless e-mails, letters and Facebook comments about how the book touched people’s lives. I am grateful for each of you.

  When you’ve finished reading The Christmas Shoes, I hope you’ll take a moment to read a few chapters from my newest book, which you’ll find in the back of this e-book. The Christmas Note is the story of an unlikely friendship between two women, Gretchen Daniels and Melissa McCreary.

  Gretchen has recently relocated to a small town with her two children to be closer to her mother, Miriam. After spending years moving around as a soldier’s wife, she’s attempting to build a new life in a new community. A mysterious young woman, Melissa McCreary, lives next door. She has few possessions, little personality, and keeps to herself. Yet the two very different women find themselves embarking on a journey together, uncovering Melissa’s long lost family secrets and ultimately exploring the need for forgiveness, hope, and redemption.

  I’m also sharing an exclusive sneak peak at a new project I’m very excited about, The Good Dream, which you won’t see in bookstores until next summer. Until then, you can catch updates from me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/donnavanliere or on my website at www.donnavanliere.com.

  Happy Reading and Merry Christmas!

  Donna

  Also by Donna VanLiere

  The Christmas Journey

  The Christmas Secret

  Finding Grace

  The Christmas Promise

  The Angels of Morgan Hill

  The Christmas Shoes

  The Christmas Blessing

  The Christmas Hope

  For Troy,

  who always encourages, always inspires, always believes

  God gave us the greatest proof of love that

  the world has ever seen.

  —Andrew Murray

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  Preview

  Preface

  Today

  Some people go their entire lives missing the small miracles that happen throughout the day—those small blessings God sends from heaven to make us smile, laugh, or to break our hearts, and gently nudge us closer to His side.

  I used to miss those tiny miracles: my children’s giggles, their first awkward steps—their little hands wrapped gingerly around my fingers for support. I missed the sense of renewal as one season changed into the next: our dogwoods’ scrawny limbs exploding into magnificent blossoms each spring, and summers when the giant oaks in our backyard dressed themselves in thick foliage, shading our home. I never noticed my wife’s warm glances and easy laugh. I missed the blessing of her love for me.

  One night, when joy was far away, God’s grace touched me and opened my eyes. That same grace has inspired me to write this story, to share with you some of the things I have learned, though it’s true, no one could have told me any of this then.

  We all have questions in this life. It’s taken me a long time to figure out what the really important questions are, the ones that matter. Not How am I going to make enough money? or What can I do to get promoted? No, more like What are the flowers thinking beneath the snow? When do birds make reservations to fly south? What is God’s plan for my life? What are my wife’s dreams?

  A year ago I was finally able to connect all of the pieces. I met a young man who told me how it all happened. Now I know the truth, because now I know how God’s hand guided my life.

  Some people, perhaps someone like you, may write off this story as coincidence—a chance encounter, the random crossing of two lives. There was a time, just a few years ago, when I would have said the same. Back then you could not have convinced me that God would use a pair of shoes to change someone’s life. But now I believe.

  I most definitely believe.

  Prologue

  Christmas Day, 2000

  That winter, Christmas arrived without snow, which for our town was quite unusual. The fall had been beautiful, sunny and mild. People were in shirtsleeves at Thanksgiving. However, as the holiday season approached, nature turned, bringing, instead of blizzards, some of the worst ice storms of the century, coating everything with ice and knocking down trees and power lines. Then the weather turned bitterly cold, and stayed dark and grim, as everyone waited for the White Christmas Bing Crosby was dreaming of on all the local jukeboxes.

  The sedan’s tires spun on the ice, groping for solid ground. I put the car in reverse, backed up, turned the wheels at a different angle, put the car in drive, and attempted the hill into the cemetery a second time. This time the car climbed halfway up, but then the tires began to hum loudly, spinning again. I gave the car more gas but to no avail. Shifting into neutral, I released the clutch and let the car ease backward to the base of the hill, where I parked and turned off the engine.

  From where I sat, I could see that the tombstone was covered with a brilliant sheen of ice. Icicles hung off the sides, and brown leaves sat in frozen clusters on the cold stone. I would have to clean it off before I could decorate. I decided to leave everything in the trunk until I cleared the site.

  As I got out of the car, the wind shrieked, cutting at my face. I pulled my wool overcoat tightly around me and picked up my gloves from the front seat. Realizing I’d left my hat at home, I pulled up my coat collar as high around my neck as I could and closed the car door behind me. I shivered and began the short climb up the hill.

  Walking the hill was not much easier than driving it. I had to place my steps carefully to avoid slipping on the ice. As I entered the park, I could see that most of the pathways that wove throughout the grounds were clear and sparkling. I reached the gravesite I was in the habit of decorating every Christmas. Frost clung to the lettering, shielding the name. I pushed away the leaves and ice, working hard with my gloves, until a ray of sunlight illuminated the date of death: 1985.

  It had been fifteen years….

  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 brandnew 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 for a jo
b. Though her salary was paltry, it paid the rent on our tiny one-bedroom apartment and put gas and the occasional spark plug in our beat up Plymouth Champ. We both knew we would struggle for a few years but that once my career took off, we’d live comfortably.

  With my job secure at Mathers, Williams & Hurst, the money started rolling in. Kate suggested that we stay on in our apartment, or maybe move to a small condo for a few years, so we could sock away savings for our future. I disagreed; we couldn’t entertain my colleagues in cramped quarters decorated with hand-me-down furniture from our parents or the Goodwill store. Like it or not, part of being an effective attorney is looking the part, and I felt that extended to our home.

  We bought a large brick house in a respectable neighborhood and filled it with furniture. My old wardrobe was quickly replaced with freshly starched Polo shirts, Hart Schaffner and Marx suits, and Johnston and Murphy shoes. I considered the Plymouth Champ beneath Kate’s status and sold it for $500, buying her what she called a “no-personality” used Volvo sedan, to sit beside my new BMW in our new two-car garage.

  Both cars, like the home and the furniture, were financed. Kate had grown up in a home where nothing was purchased on credit. Her parents hadn’t even owned a credit card until she was in college, and the card was used only for absolute necessities; the balance was paid off at the beginning of every month. As hard as she tried, Kate couldn’t see as crucial to our well-being a Carver CD player, tape deck, amp, and preamp, a Thorens turntable, B&W speakers, hi-fi Mitsubishi VCR, or 27-inch Proton monitor. But I always prevailed. Each item was the best our money could buy, and I justified the purchases by reasoning “We have the money, and we’re not tied down with kids yet. Let’s have some fun with it while we can.” When Kate complained that the house was too large, as she often did, I reminded her that we would need extra room after the children were born.