Home for the Holidays

by Hill, April

  Melissa sighed. "It’s around back." Ben looked puzzled, but it all seemed too complicated to explain, so she simply walked down the steps and indicated for him to follow her to the back of the rambling old house. One picture, as it has been said, was worth a thousand words. And maybe a bare-assed walloping of potentially epic proportions.

  Ben didn't say much at first, just walked around the shattered remains of the porch, obviously working out in his mind what had happened.

  "You got somethin' against houses?" he asked finally. "This is the second one you’ve put a vehicle through, that I know of." (This was also a reference to the peculiar manner in which they'd met—details to be found in "Getting Out of Dodgeville.") His words were affable enough, and even held a hint of his usual humor, but Melissa knew he was simply trying to get his temper under control. Ben almost never raised his voice, but he did have a temper.

  "This was an accident, you know," she said morosely. “Okay, a little bizarre, as accidents go, but still an accident. In this arrangement of ours, do I get spanked for accidents?"

  "Nope. Accidents happen—even bizarre ones."

  Melissa sighed with relief—a moment too soon.

  "On the other hand," he said, reaching into the cab of the pickup to remove the keys, "driving a dangerous truck you were told to stay clear of isn’t an accident. It's just plain cussed orneriness, and in about one minute, I'm gonna take you inside and blister your bare ass 'til you holler the rest of the damned house down. If I were you, I wouldn't count on sittin' down for …" He paused, apparently calculating the number and severity of the promised ass blistering. "Let's say twenty-four hours?"

  "The children?" she said quietly, and she could see Ben swearing under his breath.

  "Luckily for me, but not for you," he said grimly, "we've got us a genuine, old-fashioned woodshed, right in our own backyard." He dealt her backside a single, unbelievably painful smack with his bare hand. "Move!"

  Actually, it was more like thirty-six hours before she could sit down again with any degree of comfort. She had already learned that the results of being soundly spanked with a large wooden hairbrush could vary from miserable to really miserable. Once she was bent over Ben's big wooden workbench with her feet dangling, her pants drooping down around her chilled knees and her teeth gritted, she learned that a doubled belt, wet with sleet and half frozen, could be even more miserable.

  It was hard to tell which was really worse, of course, because Melissa always felt that the spanking she was currently getting was the worst one she'd ever had—or ever would get. It was all in the perception of the moment. But this one, she decided later, had to be one of the top ten, even if she lived to be a hundred. For one thing, she'd never been spanked in a freezing shed, bare from the waist down, with the outside temperature hovering below thirty degrees—something she pointed out to her husband in the hope of a temporary reprieve, or at least a change in venue—to someplace warmer.

  "Take my word on it, Babe, being too cold's not going to be your biggest problem," he promised, pulling the worn leather belt from his jeans. He was right, of course. After the second blazing blow of the belt, Melissa was reduced to stuffing her fist in her mouth to stifle her yelps—because of the kids. It wasn't that far to the house, and the ragged, gaping hole in the living room wall had nothing but a Little Mermaid blanket covering it.

  After maybe two-dozen blows, she began to sob—a first for her. Crying had never been Melissa's style, but then, she'd never seen Ben so determined, either. In a battle of wills between bare flesh and stiff leather—the leather had definitely won.

  When he was finished, Melissa was fairly sure she was raw, but a quick check in the bathroom mirror proved her wrong. Her rear end was throbbing and felt like it was on fire. From mid-bottom to mid-thigh she was splotched bright red, and in a couple of places she could feel the edge of what would probably be a slight welt, come morning. All things considered, though, even Melissa would have glumly admitted that she had gotten exactly what she had coming. Which could mean one of several things. The Reasonable, Practical Melissa argued that she was growing up, and finally learning to accept responsibility for the stupid things she did. The Liberated, Feminist Melissa, on the other hand, suggested that in letting herself be spanked, she was simply sacrificing her independence—and maybe losing her mind. The Reasonable Melissa didn't feel any less liberated, though, just spanked. Very soundly and painfully spanked by a man she loved very much, for doing something very dangerous and truly dumb. She looked in the mirror again, and gave the matched globes of her glowing red bottom a second look. What was really needed now was a big green bow, and maybe a little brass bell.

  * * *

  It took Ben and Randy a week to plaster the hole in the living room, rebuild the outer wall and fix the planks on the splintered porch. They tore the damaged section of the roof down and left the rest of the needed repairs 'til spring. The enormous tree looked a bit stunted when they cut away the damaged upper branches and put it up it in the living room. It looked lovely fully decorated, but one afternoon, while Ben was at a cattle auction, Melissa decided to improve the poor, truncated tree's appearance. She dragged a rickety old wooden ladder in from the woodshed, leaned it against the nearest wall, then balanced precariously on the top rung to reshape the top branches with a pair of wire cutters. She had almost finished when the rung broke with a loud crack. Andrew giggled with delight at the sight of his mother tumbling comically down the ladder on her rear end. She landed on the living room rug in a storm of profanity, with shattered ornaments, tinsel and pine needles in her hair—and her right ankle broken in two places.

  Despite the last-minute accident, Christmas was beautiful, and it was widely agreed among the Harris clan that this tree was the most perfect tree they'd ever had.

  "And Mel swears it only cost her forty bucks," Ben explained cheerfully. "The porch set us back about six thousand, and the roof should run around half that, maybe a little more. He looked up at the towering tree. "At eleven feet, I figure that tree there's running us somewhere in the neighborhood of eight-hundred-and-twenty bucks a foot." He leaned over and kissed Melissa. "And well worth it, right Mel?"

  Melissa smiled. What she still thought of as "The Broken Ankle Spanking" had been accomplished with her draped carefully over the back of the living room couch, with the awkward cast resting on a sofa cushion. In deference to his wife's infirmity and unwilling to move her injured leg too much, Ben had used one of the big wooden spoons Melissa had bought at the dollar store and painted for the school's Holiday Bazaar. The spoon featured a happy, smiling Santa Claus face, and had a little brass bell attached.

  Ben had once old her that a lady hadn't really been spanked until she'd been spanked by a cowboy, and Melissa's experience with her very own handsome cowboy had more or less proven that adage to her satisfaction. Of course, a wooden spoon probably wasn't the manliest or most cowboy-ish of implements, and the Marlboro Man probably would have frowned at the image of a helpless, howling woman in a cast, sprawled across a couch and being spanked by a cowboy wielding a leering, merrily jingling Santa Claus spoon. But what the hell, it was Christmas.

  THE END

  "A NEW YEAR'S PROMISE"

  CHAPTER ONE

  I began hating New Year’s Eve the year I was old enough to fully comprehend failure, rejection, and suicidal depression. As a child, I spent every New Year’s Eve like every other kid I knew, sitting on the floor and dutifully stuffing myself with popcorn and Lipton’s onion dip and drinking ginger ale out of plastic champagne glasses. Determined to take full advantage of this opportunity to stay up late, the children in my family all waited eagerly for the "ball" to drop in Times Square, counting down the last ten seconds as though they truly cared, or even knew the difference between one year and the next. At the precise instant the ball came to rest, while all the adults went briefly insane, we kids leapt up and took the one golden opportunity of the year to throw confetti all over my mother’s spotless l
iving room without fear of reprisal. Then we watched with a mixture of curiosity and distaste as all the half-smashed adults began the required midnight kissing orgy—kissing everyone on the mouth. Yuck! Those of us who didn't wish to be marked indelibly with my grandmother’s blood-red lipstick generally beat it upstairs before our drunken elders ran totally amuck and broke into that loathsome song that Robert Burns probably wishes from his Highland grave that he'd never written.

  You get the picture, right? I’m not really crazy about New Year’s Eve.

  I learned to hate it even more when I got to high school, where I learned that not having a date on New Year’s Eve was the accepted yearly penalty for being a short, plump "egghead." Even if you managed to snag a date, the rules said that if he wasn’t a major jock or a hunk or didn’t take you dancing at someplace like the Rainbow Room, you didn’t get points for him. I had only one New Year’s Eve date all the way through high school. The poor guy had mild acne and thick-rimmed glasses scotch-taped together over his nose, and he took me to the movies. His name was Willis, and his mother drove us to the theater and picked us up. Instead of a corsage, he gave me a potted plant.

  Then, after college, along came David, and life finally changed. David was handsome and funny, and he took me dancing. (At an abandoned mansion, with a pre-WWII wind-up phonograph, just like in the Great Gatsby). It was the most purely romantic date of my entire life, before or since. He proposed that night, which meant that if I played my cards right, I'd have a New Year's Eve date for the rest of my life. Whoopee! Except that neither one of us really likes New Years, or icy roads, or drunks. So we usually stay home that night, drink champagne and ginger ale from plastic glasses with our kids, and watch the "ball" fall in Times Square. And eat Lipton’s onion dip, of course. Tradition is tradition, after all.

  Christmas is a little different, though, because until I got old and cranky, I used to like it—a lot. I loved the decorations and the smells and the lights and all that peace on Earth, good will to men stuff. But then I got older and learned that making Santa pop down the chimney every year requires an expenditure roughly equal to the national debt of Liechtenstein. Over the years, I've learned to accept the expense, enjoy Christmas morning, and simply hope the kiddies don’t demolish 784 dollars worth of crap before the sun goes down on Christmas day. (I read shortly before the holidays last year that 784 dollars was what the "average" American family planned to spend that year on Christmas.)

  Leaving aside the sad truth that there are many, many "average," and, well, less than average families who don’t have 784 dollars to blow on Christmas shopping, let us direct our attentions now to one specific lady shopper who did have sufficient dollars, but who had been warned well in advance of the customary holiday spending orgy not to exceed her own budget—or else. The exact meaning of "or else" was not carefully defined, but the lady had reason to know that it would involve a good deal of discomfort on her end. Her rear end. This stern warning about holiday extravagance didn't come from mean old Ebenezer Scrooge, as you might think, but from a normally generous and forbearing husband. The husband was still feeling just a tad grumpy about the previous year’s Christmas outlay, which had run just a smidgen in excess of … well, never mind. Let’s just say that when the kindly husband of whom we speak discovered the extent of the damage, he threatened to coat his lovely wife’s naked body in honey and spread-eagle her on an anthill. He relented only after drawing from her a solemn promise that she would never be guilty of such senseless extravagance again.

  The difficulty with Christmas is that, once it’s over—on the very next day, for God’s sake, mail delivery resumes! Is this dumb, or what? What happened to all that Christmas spirit? Adding to this problem is the unhappy fact that the very banks that so considerately closed their doors early on Christmas Eve tend to reopen the very day after Christmas. Which means that those of us who have papered the town with last-minute worthless checks have scarcely any time at all to make good our errors by secret, last minute financial adjustments (i.e., transfers from savings to checking, hasty loans from understanding mothers or outright checkbook forgeries.) And so, those long envelopes with little telltale windows sometimes begin appearing in our mailboxes as early as the day after Christmas.

  Ah, blessed be the years when Christmas falls on a Thursday, or even a Wednesday— providing a relatively peaceful weekend until all hell breaks loose.

  All of this tension and pressure means that I really need a full week of peace on Earth before I have to face New Year’s. This year, though, I wasn’t going to get it.

  By Wednesday of the week after Christmas, you see, I had collected and hidden away in my underwear drawer seven envelopes with little windows and maybe a half-dozen bills, any one of which would put me well over my spending limit, and smack (!) in the middle of another post-Christmas crisis.

  It had started, as it so often did, with the obligatory visit to Santa Claus. And then another, and another, and another …

  TWO WEEKS EARLIER

  "Ho-Ho-Ho!" Santa roared—again. So far, there had been four hours of shopping in five stores, and six Santas. Some of the Santas bore more resemblance to the jolly old elf than others, not that it mattered to my children, Amanda and Michael. At five and eight, my younger offspring are already jaded consumers who don’t give a shit if Santa looks like tyrannosaurus rex, just so he forks over the free candy canes. This particular Santa looked more like Fidel Castro, and unless I was mistaken, Fidel had given my ass a quick pinch when I walked by. It might have been one of the damned elves, of course. You never can tell with elves.

  I wondered if either of the kids still believed that one of these cloned Santas whooshed down the chimney on Christmas Eve and left presents wrapped in the same paper they’d seen me snatching up at the Hallmark Store sale last year. I was afraid to ask, and the moppets weren’t talking—a definite don’t ask, don’t tell policy. My older kids, twin girls now almost sixteen, had done the same thing when they were little. They milked the "Santa cow" as long as they could get away with it then dumped the old guy over the side of the sleigh without a backward glance.

  I watched as Michael grabbed his candy cane and coloring book from Fidel, evaded the grasp of a shouting elf and ducked under the velvet rope into the store’s roped-off North Pole display. Waving the cheap candy cane in triumph, he tore a wide swath through the store’s artfully arranged artificial snow-banks and made a cross-country dash to where I was sitting. The elf chasing him was screaming a lot of very un-elflike epithets at my youngest, so I pushed my delinquent child behind me, removed as much of the faux snow from his Big Bird sneakers as I could, and handed it back to the belligerent elf.

  "I’m sorry, really," I began, "I’m sure he didn’t mean to ..."

  "Okay, lady, just cut the crap and give me the fuckin’ snow, would you?" the Elf snarled. He yanked the wad of fake snow out of my hand and walked away, muttering. "Shit, what a job!"

  Heartwarming, isn’t it?

  Michael’s tennis shoes still glittered with wisps of artificial snow as we walked out of the mall into the dazzling sun. Eighty-six degrees. Another sweaty California Christmas. My feet were swollen; I had a blister on my left heel, and as we approached the car, I noticed a new dent in the rear passenger-side door. A big one, and no note admitting responsibility on the windshield.

  "Merry Christmas to you too, asshole," I growled under my breath. I was relieved, though. At least this one wasn’t my fault. The last serious dent had been my fault, of course, caused by an ill-timed attempt to change lanes on the Hollywood Freeway while chatting on my cell phone.

  The mishap had been witnessed (and ticketed) by an observant highway patrolman. I paid for the ticket in two installments. The second installment got paid at the DMV, with a check for 189 bucks. David had already collected the first installment, on the afternoon of the accident. He bent me over his garage workbench, pulled down my pants, and applied twenty-five swats to my rear end with a very big wooden rule
r. Later, he joked (ha, ha) that next time, he'd make it 189 swats.

  We got the bill from the insurance company three weeks later. A smidge over $4600. Three hundred dollars for the tiny little dent in my fender—and forty-three hundred for the brand-new Mercedes I'd clipped. No, I wasn't sentenced to 4600 swats. If I had been, I'd be living under an assumed name somewhere in the jungles of South America now, wearing a blonde wig, a Groucho Marx mustache, and a false nose. No, what I was sentenced to was one "fully cooperative" minute. This is an evil and sadistic term of David's invention, which means that I have to lie voluntarily across the arm of the couch with my underwear around my ankles and submit (without argument or escape attempts) to whatever hubby has in mind. And I have to let him do it for a full sixty seconds.

  And this one was spectacular, especially since it was delivered with the sturdy wooden hairbrush he reserves for my worst offenses. Anyone out there who doesn't think one minute is a lot, by the way, should try it some time. I'll even volunteer the husband and the big wooden hairbrush. What was upsetting, aside from the obvious, was that David kept reminding me, between blistering thwacks, was that he had warned me (repeatedly) not to talk on the phone while driving, especially with the kids in the car. And I had lied to him about it. Yes, dear readers, my own sweet-faced children had ratted me out. The little traitors had declined to back up my version of the accident (in which the cell phone was not a factor). Anyway, thirty seconds into this particular walloping, I experienced an epiphany: I was converted miraculously to David's point of view. He was absolutely right, I wailed. "I'll never use the phone again while I'm driving; I swear it!"

  David glanced at his watch. "Great. Now, see how easy that was?"

  "Then I can get up now?" I asked, starting to do just that.

  David smiled and patted my throbbing butt. "Do I look that dumb? Nice try, kiddo, but you just earned yourself another ten seconds."