'Tis the Friggin' Season

by Kim Hunt Harris

  The woman found a bent over old man, leaning on a walker and talking to younger guy, and put a hand on his arm. “Daddy, there are a couple of women here who would like to speak to you.”

  He was either full of holiday cheer or just a naturally friendly guy, because he acted like he’d been looking forward to seeing us all day. He had no clue who we were, of course. Not even Viv, who reminded him they’d done water aerobics side-by-side for the past month.

  “What happened to you?” he asked me as he lead us into a wood-paneled den and motioned for us to sit in two wing-back chairs.

  “Fight with a parrot,” I said. I shrugged like it was no big deal.

  He picked up a gadget from the fireplace mantel, and the fireplace roared to life. I raised my eyebrows, impressed. He returned my look with a grin that said, “Pretty nifty, huh?”

  He sat in his own chair with a groan, and his daughter perched on the edge of the chair, her mouth set like she was just waiting for one of us to give her an excuse to throw us out.

  “Now, what can I do for you two?” he asked.

  “It’s what we can do for you,” Viv said. She handed him the letter.

  He took it, then froze when he saw the handwriting. His hands shook as he opened it.

  “Is that – ?” his daughter asked.

  He nodded slowly.

  She looked at us. “How did you get that? What do you want?”

  Viv wrinkled her nose. “We want to give you the letter back. We were housesitting for that weirdo, and found the letter. It took some doing, I don’t mind saying. And as you can see, we got a bit roughed up in the process. But eventually we got the details out of him.”

  I raised an eyebrow but let her go on. I don’t mind sounding like more of a badass than I actually am, especially when I’m all hardcore-looking to go with it.

  “Daddy, is it really over? Can we kick that fool to the curb, finally?”

  Boulder folded the letter back up and tapped it against his knee. “I don’t know, honey. I don’t know if we should do that to him.”

  Desiree rolled her eyes and shook her head, but she gave him an indulgent smile. “You’re way too much of a softie, Daddy.” She patted his arm. “That nutcase family has been milking this letter for almost sixty years. First the father and now the son.”

  Boulder shifted a little in his seat. “Oh, it’s okay. No harm done, sweetie. I don’t think that young man is equipped to deal with life without some sort of safety net.”

  Viv and I looked at each other. I’m not sure what she was expecting, but I was expecting more of a “My shameful secret is finally safe!” kind of thing from the old man.

  He tapped the letter against his knee again. He looked at it and shook his head. “I never really thought I’d see this again. Never really wanted to, to be honest. The thing is, when I wrote this letter, I thought I meant every word of it. I really did. I thought I loved Emily with my whole heart, but I saw an opportunity to get a career started with Mr. Burgess, with plans to hightail it out of there as soon as I had built up a client base of my own. I was going to start my own dealership and steal all the customers out from under Burgess. When Jergensen came to me with the letter he intercepted, I was terrified. Terrified. I would have given him anything he wanted, and when it turned out all he wanted was to ride the gravy train with me, I agreed…”

  He stopped and looked up at his daughter. “Then I really looked at the woman who was right in front of me. Nancy was…well, she was an amazing woman. She made me laugh, she made me think. She challenged me to be the best person I could be. And before very long, I saw how close I was coming to missing out on the best thing life had to offer.”

  He stood and moved back and forth in front of the fire, then pointed to Viv with the letter. “Nancy knew about this letter. I told her, because I just couldn’t stand for that to be between us anymore. I was even more terrified then, because I had so much more to lose than just a career. I had my whole life to lose. She said she knew all along that I hadn’t been in love with her at first. But she said knew me and she knew us, and she knew eventually I would get there. She even pinpointed the day I fell for her. And she was right.” He looked at Desiree. “Your mother was a smart cookie.”

  “Why did you go through all that trouble to get the letter back, then?” Viv asked Desiree. “He said you pretended to be interested in him so you could get in his house and get it back?”

  “Well, Daddy didn’t ask me to do it, so you can forget that notion. I did it on my own because I didn’t like those – those people having that hold over my daddy,” she said. “I had gone to work keeping the books at the dealership, and I saw regular payments to him and finally got the story out of Mama.”

  “Your wife knew about the blackmail?”

  “Oh, sure. It was her idea to keep him on the payroll. She had a huge heart, that woman. Huge. She saw him as another cause to support, like the Little League and the library wing and the food pantry. Everyone needs a little extra help with something, she always said to me. For some people it’s money, and we have money to spare.

  “It’s outrageous, of course,” Desiree said. “To just pay someone month after month, year after year, for nothing. Just for their silence, when you don’t even need their silence. Outrageous. I wanted to protect Daddy from that bunch of fools. But Trevor found out what I was after, and then he really went off the deep end. I was kind of glad, to tell the truth. It was way harder than I thought it would be, pretending to find him attractive.” She shuddered and looked at me. “One word. Brylcreem. You know? Honestly. Here’s my daddy, working every day of his life, giving to the community, doing what he can to make the world a better place. And here’s that bozo, sitting on his rear end with his hands out.”

  “Oh, honey.” Boulder waved her concern away. “I told you then, it’s not that big a deal. He was a bitter, angry man and there’s no way he could have held a job anywhere else. He would have gotten fired within a week if I let him go. And then he would bring that boy of his in from time to time, and it was plain that he would never be able to support himself, either. So when Nancy and I got a message from the boy after his daddy died, saying keep the payments coming, I just thought, Oh, what the heck. No harm done.”

  Desiree shook her head and rolled her eyes, but it was plain to see she wasn’t that upset about it. “Outrageous,” she said again. But it was more like she was talking about gas prices, the kind of what-can-you-do attitude.

  I chewed on my lip. I was still having a little trouble keeping up. “Jergensen said there would be no Burgess-Boulder Little League team, etc, if everyone in town knew about this letter. You wouldn’t be the respected, upstanding citizen anymore.”

  “Well, maybe,” Boulder said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t really care. I might have, at one time, but Nancy taught me all about what’s important in life. Anyone who knows me has already decided what kind of person I am. In the end, hers was the only opinion I really cared about, and now that she’s gone...”

  “The rest can take a flying leap,” Desiree finished for him. She tugged on her father’s arm so he could sit back down. “Are you going to quit paying him, Daddy?”

  He tilted his head. “Probably not. It’s not that much money. The house is paid for and his living expenses revolve around his pets. Besides, I don’t think the man can support himself, I really don’t. He’s too invested in this whole scheme by now. I think our supposed feud and his bird are the only things keeping him going.”

  Viv and I looked at each other. “Now I feel kind of bad for taking the letter,” she said.

  Boulder waved a hand. “Nah, this was nice of you. Really. Such a nice thought. In fact,” he said as he jumped up again. “I want to give you two a reward.”

  “No,” Viv and I said together.

  “Please, allow me to do this. I am glad to have the letter back, even if I do plan to keep him on the payroll.” He looked at the letter again. “It’s good to be reminded of your ow
n bad judgment sometimes, you know. Keeps a man humble.” He lifted a checkbook out of the drawer and picked up a pen. “What are your names?”

  I felt like I should keep up the protests for the sake of politeness, but when Viv said her name, I said mine, too, and quick. He was one of those people who really liked to help other people, I told myself. And since it was now unlikely in the extreme I was going to get any money for babysitting Tinky, I was once again without money for Christmas presents. So I could use some help.

  By the time Boulder handed me the check, I had pretty much convinced myself I was doing him a favor.

  Someone tapped on the door, and Boulder and Desiree both moved to stand in the doorway and chat with whoever it was. I leaned over and whispered to Viv, “This guy is some kind of saint.”

  “I know,” she whispered back. She looked disconcerted by it all.

  “I think he might be too good for you,” I said.

  “I think you might be right.” She opened the check, and let out a low whistle. “Although I have been known to clean up my act for limited stretches of time.”

  I opened my check and stared at the number, dumbfounded. It was enough for the ER bill and every gift on my list.

  “Thank you,” I whispered, thinking that maybe this was the answer to my prayer. It was certainly a roundabout way to get here, who was I to question the mysterious ways of God while I was sitting with that check in my hand? It was possible I could look back on the experience and learn something valuable from it. Highly improbable, but possible.

  I stood so fast I lost my balance, just as Boulder and his daughter turned back to us.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as I caught myself on the back of the chair. I motioned toward my head. “The doctor told me to go home and straight to bed, but we wanted to come over here first. Give you the good news.” See what I mean about my lying proficiency? But to be fair, that’s what the doctor should have said.

  “That was so kind of you,” Boulder said, looking like he wished he’d written a bigger check.

  Which was the perfect time to leave. It never hurt to have a guy who liked to write checks feeling like he might owe you something.

  We made our way back through the party, and I thought I detected a sense of relief from the partygoers that we hadn’t, in fact, chopped Grady Boulder and his daughter to pieces. So all was merry and bright when we turned to say goodbye on the stoop of Boulder’s townhome. So bright, in fact, that at the last second a surge of Christmas hope filled my heart, and I said to Desiree Boulder, “Would you be free sometime in the next week or so, to talk about the quality of your drinking water?”

  Dear Reader,

  Thank you so much for reading “The Trailer Park Princess ‘Tis the Friggin’ Season”! I hope you enjoyed the characters and want to read more, because…there’s more! Salem and Viv (and a bunch of other funny people) are introduced in the full-length mystery/comedy novel called “The Trailer Park Princess and the Middle Finger of Fate” and go on another adventure in a short story called “The Trailer Park Princess and the Power of Bacon.” If you read any of them, I will be thrilled beyond words. If you leave a review and recommend them to a friend, well…I don’t know what I’ll do. Love you forever. Have your baby. Okay, I won’t do that, I’m past the baby-having stage and I don’t really know you that well. But I will be grateful. Deeply, deeply grateful. Truth!

  And if you’re still a little curious about the dingle-dangle, click here. I promise it’s not what you think.