Glad One: Starting Over is a %$#@&! (Val & Pals Book 2)

by Margaret Lashley

  By the way, I got Glad’s dragonfly pendant repaired. It never leaves the silver chain around my neck. I still spend a lot of time on Sunset Beach. I like watching the tourists and snowbirds from my mom's pink lounger. Every once in a while, someone will come up and say hello. When they see my face, they apologize and say, "Oh, for a second there, I thought you were Glad.”

  I always tell them the same thing. “Thank you. I am.”

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  Ready for More Val & Pals?

  Check out the first chapter of

  Two Crazy: Fickle Finger of Fate

  The next in the Val & Pals series by Margaret Lashley.

  Chapter One

  Glad Goldrich died nine months ago. So I was as surprised as anyone when she showed up today to wish me happy birthday.

  I found out last year that my real birthday was December 22. But I decided to keep celebrating it on April Fools’ Day, like I always had. Given the weird scenario surrounding this particular aspect of my life – correction – given the weird scenario surrounding my whole life in general, it just seemed…well…apropos.

  I’m Val Fremden, aka Thelma Gladys Goldrich, aka Valliant Stranger. A double life wasn’t interesting enough for me. So I decided to make it a triple.

  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Earlier today, I’d parked Shabby Maggie, my 1963 Ford Falcon Sprint convertible, at a drugstore on the corner of Gulf Boulevard and 107th in St. Pete Beach. Like me, Maggie was creamy-white and a bit girlie on the outside, but underneath her hood beat a V8 engine that could kick ass with the big boys. I’d been driving by the drugstore when I’d decided, on the spot, to celebrate my birthday in style with a king-sized Mounds candy bar. It might not have sounded like much of a birthday present, but for me it was. I never kept chocolate at my place. It was the only thing I couldn’t be trusted with.

  I’d done a three-sixty on Gulf. A few minutes later, I’d strolled out of the drugstore with half of that candy bar already crammed into my mouth. Distracted by the comingling of chewy coconut and rich, dark chocolate, I hadn’t noticed Glad sitting on the passenger side until my butt was already halfway onto the bucket seat. Her unexpected appearance, mere inches from my side, had totally freaked me out!

  I’d recoiled and screamed a high-pitched yelp that could only be heard by certain dogs and dolphins. Before my eyes and my mind had time to put two-and-two together, I’d swung my purse at her like a baseball bat and busted her square in the face!

  Right before my purse had pounded its target, I’d experienced one of those milliseconds of doomed realization. Oh shit! I’d inhaled sharply and nearly choked to death on masticated coconut. After a full minute of coughing and hacking, I’d finally cleared my throat and caught my breath.

  Dressed as she was, no one in the whole world would’ve recognized Glad except for me. She was wearing a plastic Mr. Peanut piggybank. It was the same makeshift, cremation-container disguise she was inhabiting the very last time I saw her – less than an hour before her botched burial at sea. Someone had stolen Glad from my car that day in this very same parking lot. Today, they’d returned her. And on my birthday, no less. I hadn’t been sure if that qualified as ironic or not, but no matter what the case, the timing had definitely been weird.

  Whoever the culprit was, he’d left a hand-written note beside Glad’s cheap, monocle-eyed coffin. The torn scrap of yellow paper read simply, ‘Sorry. Mr. P.’ I’d glanced around the parking lot. None of the tourists milling around the place had the look of perverted body snatchers. (Well, maybe one.) I’d shrugged, patted Glad on her plastic top hat, and turned the key to Maggie’s ignition. It might sound a bit crazy, but over the rumbling of Maggie’s twin, glass-pack muffler, I’d swear I heard Glad say, “Fuck you, Kiddo.”

  I couldn’t help but grin. “Nice to see you, too, Mom.”

  ***

  Last year, a bulldog-faced woman named Thelma Goldrich called me a whore and knocked me out cold at Caddy’s beach bar – right before the memorial service for an old beach bum named Tony. That punch in the nose turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.

  Long story short, Thelma’s right hook to my poor schnoz set in motion a chain of bizarre events that changed my life forever. I discovered that Justas and Lucille Jolly were not my biological parents. My real parents were a couple of crazy, beer-guzzling, beach-bum hoarders named Tony and Glad Goldrich. They both died within days of each other and named me – their biological, long-lost daughter – as sole heir to their tiny, junk-filled house on the Intracoastal Waterway in St. Petersburg, Florida. Oh yeah. They also left me enough cash to keep me in chocolate bars for a long while to come.

  Good thing, too. At the time I was like, seconds away from being homeless.

  I’d figured out this twisted story with the help of a cop named Tom Foreman and three washed-up derelicts named Winky, Jorge and Goober. I’d rewarded the three burn-outs with $5,000 each. The cop, well, let’s just say he got something else out of me.