Down Home Carolina Christmas by Pamela Browning

rang inside the house. She let it ring. Family and friends knew to call back or stop by Smitty’s if they were phoning about anything important.
    She lifted the basket of vegetables and hurried to the back gate of the white picket fence, heavy with Carolina jasmine. On the other side of the fence was the house, a big rambling white Victorian with a deep porch hugging the front and sides. In the back, a screened porch jutted past a yew hedge, ending just short of a sundial on one side of the path, a birdbath on the other.
    Carrie was grateful to whoever designed the home place back in the early 1900s; the porch overhang kept out the hot summer sun, and tall windows admitted a fresh breeze. Seventeen-foot-high ceilings coaxed hot air up above the inhabitants, who at present totaled only two—Carrie and her resident rabbit.
    After setting the baskets on the big table where her great-grandmother had served meals to farmworkers long ago, she wiped her sweaty forehead with one arm. She’d have to hurry if she wanted to get to the garage at her usual time and set these vegetables out to sell. They brought in a few extra dollars from customers, and every cent counted these days.
    The kitchen phone rang again, and this time she answered on the first ring.
    â€œThis is Mike Calphus,” said the young voice on the other end.
    â€œOh, Mike,” Carrie replied, wondering what was up. Mike was just ten, and she felt a worrisome niggle of alarm at the sound of his voice.
    â€œCarrie, Shasta wasn’t at the garage this morning. Do you know where she is?”
    â€œWhy, no, Mike.”
    â€œMe and Jamie, we looked all over. Hub wasn’t there yet.” Mike sounded as though he might cry.
    The Calphus boys had become mightily attached to Shasta in the short time that she’d been hanging around. They’d been stopping by in the mornings on their way to baseball practice to give her treats and play catch with her out back of the garage.
    â€œOh, Mike, I’m sorry. Tell you what, we’ll hunt for Shasta as soon as I get there, I promise.”
    â€œMom went to work, and Grandma doesn’t drive, but if you ride us around the neighborhood and we holler out the windows, maybe Shasta will come.” Mike still sounded perilously near tears.
    â€œI’ll be there in twenty minutes or so,” Carrie said. She hung up in dismay. Last weekend, the boys had carried the dog home with them, but Ginger Calphus, a single mother, had put her foot down and refused to keep her. The boys’ grandmother, who lived next door, had too many other responsibilities to take on a dog, and despite Carrie’s best efforts, no one else had offered a home.
    Killer, Carrie’s lop-eared rabbit, so named because of his aggression toward almost everyone but her, hopped into the kitchen and wiggled his nose hopefully. “If it weren’t for you,” she told him sternly, “Shasta would live with me.” Carrie had developed a true affection for the pup, but Killer would not have much chance of survival if the two ever found themselves in the same room together, even though the rabbit owed his name to a deadly hind-leg kick.
    Leaving Killer happily chomping on a newly harvested lettuce leaf, Carrie headed for town. She called ahead on her cell phone to inform Hub that he’d be doing the brake job and drove straight to the Calphus house. Ginger Calphus had been a classmate of Carrie’s and lived next door to the house where she’d grown up. This simplified child-care arrangements for Ginger, who had been divorced for a couple of years and worked at the bank with Joyanne. Ginger’s parents, Edna Earle and Fred Hindershot, kept an eye on her two boys during the day, and Carrie stopped to ask Edna Earle if it was okay for Mike and Jamie to come with her to look for the dog.
    â€œSure, go ahead. They do love that dog, but Ginger’s devoted to those cats of hers and can’t