Winky came up with Winnie on his arm. He was sporting the worst haircut I’d ever seen.
“Geeze, Winky. Did you fall asleep in a vat of electric shavers?”
“Watch your gator mouth a’fore it gets your chicken butt in trouble,” he joked, and stuck his freckled nose in the air proudly. “I’ll have you know I donate my head as a Guinea pig for barbers in trainin’. It’s my contribution to society.”
Goober joined our little circle. “So, what are you gonna do now that pet cremation is off the table?” I asked.
“Off the grill, you mean,” Goober said. “I dunno. I may help Winkie and Winnie out. Or maybe become Jorge’s secretary. He landed a job as office manager down at the St. Pete station.”
“Jorge!” I cried out and patted him on the back. “You didn’t say!”
“Yeah, he’ll be back in the old division,” Tom said. “We’ll be partners again.”
“Good for you!” Vance said. “But does anyone know who the old drunk broad dressed in black is?” Vance asked.
“My mom,” Milly said with a smirk. “Welcome to the family.”
Vance stuck a finger in his collar to loosen it as we laughed and patted him on the back.
“Yes, welcome to the family,” we all said.
“Er...I guess now would be a good time to cut the cake,” Vance said.
“I’d keep an eye on that knife,” Winky joked.
“Yes! Cut the cake!” Laverne said, and jumped up and down with enthusiasm.
While Milly and Vance posed for pictures in front of the cake, Tom came and put his arm around me. Laverne stood beside us, her eyes glued to the cake. The wedding pair took the knife and cut into the cake together as everyone cheered. As they fed chunks of golden-orange cake to each other, I heard Laverne gasp.
I looked over at the funny, kooky old sage who’d become my friend. She was crying.
“Geeze, Laverne,” I whispered. “Is something wrong?”
“The cake,” she said. “It’s a wedding miracle!”
WHILE EVERYONE DANCED in the moonlight, Tom took me by the hand. “Let’s take a walk,” he said.
We strolled along the gentle shore of the Gulf of Mexico, a scene that I knew so well. But tonight it seemed different somehow as I watched the starlight dance in Tom’s golden blond hair.
“I want us to be happy together,” Tom said. He stopped and picked up a small shell. He studied it for a moment, then flung it back in the water.
“Me, too,” I said.
“Why were you so unsure about us?” he asked.
“It wasn’t you I ever doubted, Tom. It was me. I was afraid I didn’t love you enough. You deserve someone who’s completely gaga over you. I’m not the gaga type. I’m more of the...I dunno...process-of-elimination type.”
Tom laughed softly and kissed me. “You’re also the honest type. I don’t want to force you if you’re not ready.”
“I wonder, Tom. How can you be so sure I’m the one? What’s so special about me?”
“It’s not you, per se,” he teased.
“Oh. Thanks.”
Tom laughed and squeezed my hand. “No. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s more the way I am when I’m around you. All your pain-in-the-butt challenges and questions...they keep me on my toes. When I’m with you, I feel awake...alive.”
“Oh.”
“You know, despite all your bravado, Val Fremden, you need me. Everybody needs someone. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I think my best shot at happiness is with you.”
“Cold Cuts says happiness is a choice.”
Tom took me in his arms. “She’s right. It is. I choose you.”
“But Tom, if I wear this ring, I’ll be different.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll be...un-cursed.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The ring. It...changes me. If I wear it, I won’t be klutzy anymore. Or disaster prone. Or have weird things happen to me anymore. You see, this ring – it takes all that away. It makes me...normal.”
“Val, that’s crazy –”
“Watch,” I said. I took the ring off and handed it to Tom.
I took a few steps down the beach. My foot landed on a conch shell. I tripped and fell face-first in the sand. Tom ran up and knelt beside me. He held my hand and patted my back as I hacked out a mouthful of sand and seaweed.
“Are you okay?”
“I will be,” I sputtered. “When you put the ring back on me.”
Tom fished the ring from his shirt pocket. “Val, are you saying that if you wear this ring, you’ll have a normal life?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
“Well then, here goes,” he said. Tom stood up, reared back his hand and flung the ring as hard as he could into the ocean.
“Tom! What did you do that for?”
“Because I don’t want a normal life, Val. I want the kind of life I have with you.”
“But Tom! The –”
“Shhh,” Tom said, and shook his head softly. “All the weird stuff is the best part, Val. With you, I know our lives will never be boring.”
“But what about the getting married part?” I asked.
Tom knelt beside me and brushed the sand from my face. Then he used a finger to draw a question in the sand.
“Do you love me?” he wrote.
“Yes,” I said. “I really do.”
He smiled and swept me up in his arms. “Then that’s plenty enough for me.”
DEAR READER,
Thanks so much for reading Five Oh! I hope you enjoyed the story. Val bit the big one this time. A half a century and still so far to go....
For Val, age is just a number. She’s been set back to zero so many times, she’s quit counting everything but sheep. So the big five-oh birthday was no big deal. Not compared to Tom’s matrimonial advances, anyway. We all know we can’t stop time from marching on. But we can keep people from marching all over us. In Five Oh, Val hammers out a way to add people to her life without subtracting from her own. Basic math for some. But not for all. How about you?
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Thanks again for reading my book! For some, life begins at forty. Others, fifty. I say, life begins today. Make it a good one! ;)
Sincerely,
Margaret Lashley
P.S. If you’d like to check out the next book in the series, Six Tricks, I’ve included a sample for you in the back of this book. Or click here:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BPMC22T
P.S.S. I live for reviews! The link to leave yours is right here:
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What’s Next for Val?
I hope you enjoyed Five Oh: Fifty is the New F-Word. Click the link below now and leave a review. I read every single one!
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Ready for more Val?
Val survived turning fifty, and getting engaged. But Tom’s not done with his relationship roulette just yet. What’s he up to next?
Enjoy the following excerpt from the next Val Fremden Mystery:
Si
x Tricks: Doggone Disaster!
Six Tricks Excerpt
Chapter One
“I’m too old and set in my ways for this crap,” Laverne said. She rolled her big, bulgy eyes and handed me a Tanqueray and tonic. It was in a highball glass she’d filched from the Flamingo Casino decades ago, back in her Vegas-showgirl days.
“Tell me about it,” I groused, and took a sip from the glass. The cartoon caricature of a cross-eyed, long-necked pink bird stared back at me. Its expression seemed oddly appropriate. “What are we gonna do?”
“I don’t know,” Laverne said. “But we better think of something fast. It’s driving me crazy!” The old woman pursed her thin lips, then threw back her horsey head and chugged her Dirty Shirley like a merchant marine at last call. She slammed the glass on the counter and said, “Come with me, Val. I got something to show you.”
I followed Laverne’s shriveled, brown butt cheeks down the hall toward her bedroom. As I watched her two raisin-like buttocks wobble back and forth, I couldn’t decide which view of the tall, skinny, seventy-something woman in a gold thong bikini was more disconcerting, the front or the back.
“Get a look at this,” Laverne snarled. She threw open her closet door, spun around to face me, and stabbed a red-lacquered fingernail at the source of her disdain. “He’s commandeered nearly half the lower rack!”
I followed the trajectory of her high-gloss fingertip to a spot about midway down the closet wall. Hanging on the bottom rung of Laverne’s huge walk-in closet were about a dozen diminutive men’s shirts and pants, along with a sweater and a sport jacket. Together, they were eating away at well over a foot of precious closet space. It was a single woman’s worst nightmare. And soon, if Tom had his way, it would be my nightmare, too.
“Geeze!” I said. “That’s the most disturbing thing I’ve seen since Uncle Jack’s comb-over!”
Laverne scrunched her red lips into the shape of an inflamed sphincter. “That’s not even the worst of it.”
“What?” I tore my eyes from the horrific scene. “I mean...how...what?”
“J.D. doesn’t like me sunbathing,” Laverne complained. “He says it wrinkles my skin. And...you’re not going to believe this.” Laverne stared into my eyes. Her penciled-on eyebrows formed twin pyramids just below her strawberry-blonde curls. “He hates my gold thong, Val!”
Laverne straightened her back and stuck out her pendulous boobs, clothed only in two woefully inadequate triangles of glittery, gold fabric. “J.D. says it’s not dignified. Can you believe it? If I wanted to be dignified, don’t you think I’d have gone and done it by now? I’d have moved into one of those blasted...what ’cha call ‘em? Anal-retentive communities.”
“I believe the term is deed restricted communities.”
“That’s it!” Laverne’s angular eyebrows rounded themselves into McDonald’s arches. “I don’t want to be deed restricted, Val.” She pouted as her shoulders slumped. “I love J.D., but it ain’t worth it if I have to give up myself in the process.”
I bit my lip and looked down. I couldn’t have said it better myself. But maybe my mom, Glad Goldrich, could have. Glad once told me that no one could stop change. And whether a particular change itself was good or bad depended on your perspective. Well, the way I saw it, the changes hurtling toward me and my neighbor Laverne were neither good nor bad. They were downright, gut-flopping terrifying.
The night of Vance and Milly’s wedding, I thought I’d dodged the bullet and put the whole matrimony debate between me and my boyfriend Tom to rest. When he’d flung our cursed engagement ring in the ocean, I’d thought that meant my troubles were over.
Boy, had I been wrong.
Right after he’d tossed the ring, Tom had explained to me that he could live with the way things were...the operative term being live with. He’d told me he wanted us to play house – as in, live together! Crap on a cracker! The way I saw relationships, marriage was just a ceremony. The real work was surviving cohabitation. Misery didn’t love company. Misery was company – if you had no choice in the matter.
The mere thought of coming home to find Tom in my space every single blasted day for the rest of my life had set my teeth to gnashing. But if there was one consolation – ironic as it was – it was the fact that I wasn’t alone in my dilemma. Laverne was trying to bail her way out of the same sinking boat. Mr. J.D. Fellows, Esq., it seemed, had his eye on moving in with her.
“You got any ideas how to deal with this catastrophe?” Laverne asked as I stared blankly at the man-infestation slowly taking over her closet.
“Not a dang clue,” I muttered.
“Aww, crap,” Laverne said, and slammed the closet door shut.
BACK HOME, I TIPSILY eyeballed my own bedroom closet. It was half as big as Laverne’s. And Tom was twice the size of J.D. Fellows. I didn’t like the way the math was adding up....
I heard a light rap on my front door. I closed the closet and padded barefoot down the hall. But before I could answer the door, it opened on its own. Tom strolled in like he owned the place.
“Hi there, cutie!” he said, and gave me one of his irresistible winks.
For the first time, Tom’s handsome, blond, sea-green-eyed magic didn’t work on me. It had been rendered powerless by what he carried in his left hand.
“What have you got in the duffle bag?” I asked, and eyed them both suspiciously.
“Just a couple of things,” he said, and kissed me on the lips.
My heart skipped a beat. But not from his kiss.
Just a couple of things, my behind! Thanks to my earlier pow-wow with Laverne, I knew what this was. It was the first step in Tom’s insidious plan to...to...to what? Invade my space? Take over my life? Destroy my world as I knew it?
Well, that was the million-dollar question, wasn’t it? Only this time, I didn’t have a million dollars to lose....
Keep reading! Get your copy of Six Tricks on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BPMC22T
About the Author
Like the characters in my novels, I haven’t lead a life of wealth or luxury. In fact, as it stands now, I’m set to inherit a half-eaten jar of Cheez Whiz...if my siblings don’t beat me to it.
During my illustrious career, I’ve been a roller-skating waitress, an actuarial assistant, an advertising copywriter, a real estate agent, a house flipper, an organic farmer, and a traveling vagabond/truth seeker. But no matter where I’ve gone or what I’ve done, I’ve always felt like a weirdo.
I’ve learned a heck of a lot in my life. But getting to know myself has been my greatest journey. Today, I know I’m smart. I’m direct. I’m jaded. I’m hopeful. I’m funny. I’m fierce. I’m a pushover. And I have a laugh that makes strangers come up and want to join in the fun. In other words, I’m a jumble of opposing talents and flaws and emotions. And it’s all good.
In some ways, I’m a lot like Val Fremden. My books featuring Val are not autobiographical, but what comes out of her mouth was first formed in my mind, and sometimes the parallels are undeniable. I drink TNTs. I had a car like Shabby Maggie. And I’ve started my life over four times, driving away with whatever earthly possessions fit in my car. And, perhaps most importantly, I’ve learned that friends come from unexpected places.
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