by Piper Stone
“He looks like the kind of guy who always gets what he wants for Christmas,” the Nice Guy observed. “And just about any other day, as well.”
“It seems I forgot to actually place the damned order,” Dennis growled at me as he approached the table. “You’ll have to pick up something for Rawlins in the morning, before we leave the city.” He didn’t seem to notice that there was another man sitting there.
So, I made the introductions. “This is my fiancé, Dennis Fleming, Mr… Oh, God! I’m sorry, but I never got your name, did I?”
The Nice Guy smiled and extended his hand to Dennis. “Jeff McLaughlin.”
“Mr. McLaughlin was kind enough to let me have the truck you wanted, Dennis,” I explained quickly. “He’d already picked it up, and had every right to keep it, but he let me have it, instead, when I told him how much you wanted it.”
“Well, thanks, McLaughlin. I appreciate that. I get one every year, and I understand there’s a shortage this year. Every damned, spoiled rotten kid in the city wants one. That truck may very well be the last one in the city. I’ve got better things to do with my time than to wait for three hours in a line with a lot of housewives and whiny kids. That’s why I sent Meg to the mall this morning. How’s that for loyalty?” He gave loyal Meg’s shoulder an affectionate pat.
“I always say that loyalty’s a great trait in a woman,” McLaughlin said. “Or in a dog, of course.”
Dennis looked confused.
I’ll skip over the rest of the conversation that followed. With my usual luck, Dennis was in one of his rare, congenial moods, and before I could stop him, he had told the Nice Guy – Jeff McLaughlin – about our weekend plans with what he referred to as his “peculiar future in-laws.” He then offered the Nice Guy a lift as far as the Nice Guy’s sister’s house – in Holbrook.
“Why in the name of God did you offer him a ride?” I protested later. “We don’t even know the man! The first time I ever laid eyes on him was this afternoon at Bloomingdale’s.”
“I thought he was a friend of yours,” Dennis said, with a disinterested shrug. “His car’s in the shop, and it’s right on the way to your parents’ place. He seems nice enough. Do you want me to call him tonight and tell him I’ve changed my mind?”
I rolled my eyes. “No, we can’t do that. Not now. I’m sure it’ll be all right. After all, it’s only as far as Holbrook.”
Chapter 2
The drive to the country was tense. For reasons I have never completely understood, I always get tense when Dennis and I are around people other than his friends or colleagues. Dennis, on the other hand, is always just… well, Dennis.
“It’s just as well you came along,” he explained to Jeff once we were on the road. “I can use the company. Meg’s a lovely girl, of course, but her family has to be seen to be believed. Extremely odd, all of them.”
“Odd?” Jeff asked.
“I suppose the most euphemistic word to describe them would be eccentric. There’s no excuse for it either. Both parents were educated at excellent Ivy League schools.”
Jeff nodded. “That’s always good to know. It’s easy to meet the wrong ones, if you’re not careful.”
Dennis shot him a quick look, to see if the remark was an attempt at sarcasm. Dennis sometimes worries that people are making jokes at his expense.
When we reached the turnoff to Holbrook, the road was flooded – and closed. A state trooper in a yellow slicker was redirecting traffic, back to the city.
Dennis, who tends to take changes in the weather personally, was very unhappy.
“I’m sorry, sir,” the trooper said wearily. “There’s no way anyone’s getting through tonight. Tomorrow afternoon, if you’re lucky and even then only if this storm heads north. The best thing to do is go back into the city and take the bridge west. No guarantees, but…”
“We just came from the city!” Dennis complained. “Going around will take me four hours out of my way.”
The trooper shrugged. “Sorry, but this road is still closed, along with the only other access road to Holbrook. I’d give my family a call and tell them you’re not going to make it today.”
I saw that Dennis was poised to argue, so I touched his arm. “Let’s go, Dennis, please. There’s nothing this officer can do.” I leaned across the steering wheel and smiled at the trooper. “Thank you, Officer. We’ll go around.”
“Officious jerk,” Dennis fumed. Fortunately, the trooper had turned his attentions to the car behind us. I turned around to say something to Jeff, but he was already punching in his sister’s number on his cell phone.
“I’m sorry,” I said, when he’d hung up. “It looks like we’ve kind of wrecked your weekend.”
He grinned. “My sister has four out of control kids and a cat that greets visitors by urinating on their shoes. Besides, she’s burned every turkey she’s ever attempted. Just drop me at the first hotel we come to. I’ll get back to town tomorrow.”
“Why don’t you come with us?” I suggested suddenly. “Mom loves company.”
“Thanks, but I can’t do that,” he said. “No one wants a stranger hanging around at a family get-together.”
“You have some very backward ideas about family, Mr. McLaughlin. What better time to make warm, new friends than at Christmas time? Okay, so I may have read that on a Hallmark card somewhere, but it’s true. My folks have plenty of room. Of course, you’ll have to share a bathroom with six other people and string the lights and help decorate the house.”
“Isn’t that doing it a little late?” he inquired.
“Actually, he’s doing it several days early, in honor of our visit. Dad says decorating too early takes the true meaning out of Christmas. Normally, he even waits until Christmas Eve to put the tree up. When we were little, we thought Santa brought it down the chimney and decorated it. Mom and Dad must have stayed up all night every Christmas Eve.”
Jeff smiled. “You have some nice traditions. Exhausting, but nice.”
“Oh, and there’s something I should probably tell you,” I added, knowing that it’s usually a good idea to forewarn first time guests at Mom’s table. “My mother is kind of an experimental cook. We won’t be having turkey, exactly. I think this year it’s going to be vegetarian tofu burritos, with jalapeno cranberry sauce, and sage and onion stuffing.”
Jeff grinned. “Terrific. There’s nothing I like better than a nice, hot Christmas burrito with all the trimmings.”
I grinned back at him. And that’s when the front tire blew.
Dennis was on the phone – on hold with the auto club – within seconds. Fifteen minutes later, he was still holding, and listening to the seventeenth playing of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Suddenly, Jeff opened the back door, and asked me to pop the trunk of the car.
Five minutes later, the tire was changed, and we were on our way again.
“Don’t sit there and look at me like that,” Dennis muttered to me as he pulled the car back onto the road. “I could have done that, you know. Change the damned tire. I just saw no point in getting filthy.”
“I know, Dennis,” I said, patting his arm.
It was going to be a very long weekend.
This was to be my thirty-third Christmas on Earth, and up until a few years ago, the holiday had meant two things – visiting my family, and giving and receiving closets full of gifts neither they, nor I, really wanted or needed. My brother is rich, and needs store-bought presents like I need more cellulite. Dad hasn’t bought anything new in thirty years, since he believes that if it doesn’t come from a Salvation Army store or a local flea market, the buyer was ripped off. It’s not just that he’s a kind and extremely charitable person – which he is. He’s also cheap.
Mom thinks Christmas is for family, specifically for decking the halls with all the crap Dad drags home from the Salvation Army store, and for setting a lovely table for her loved ones, their friends, and for homeless and needy strangers in need of a hot, home-cooked meal in the
bosom of a loving family. Her loving family, all of whom have been eating at Mom’s table for their entire lives, know the score, but there’s simply no telling how many homeless and needy people Mom has poisoned in the last twenty years. They’re usually somewhere else by the time the cramps begin. Some years ago, my brother and I began handing out gaily wrapped bottles of Pepto-Bismol to our holiday visitors as they departed for home – or back to the shelter. And we always bury the more suspect leftovers where the dogs – Ethel and Fred – can’t get to them.
I was really annoyed when Dennis described my family to Jeff as odd, but when we pulled into the driveway early that afternoon; I was actually kind of relieved that he’d said it. Dad was out on the lawn, sailing aluminum pie plates at a bunch of deer, and in between the pie plates, he was hurling a lot of small round objects that later turned out to be Mom’s homemade rum balls. Even as a kid, I realized that my family wasn’t exactly like everybody else’s, but most kids grow up thinking the way the people they love do things is normal, and I was no different. Over the years, though, before inviting people to visit my folks for the first time, I’ve learned to mention a few of Mom and Dad’s eccentricities in advance, just in case.
Dad had outdone himself this year in festooning the place for the holidays. Last month’s plastic pilgrims, turkeys, and scarecrows were still in place, but they’d been joined now by a collection of inflatable Santas and snowmen, along with the traditional illuminated plastic Virgin Mary and Wise Men, toy soldiers, nutcrackers, penguins, and gingerbread men. Dad thinks big in his holiday themes, and the recent availability of humongous inflatable lawn figures has fit right into his decorating scheme. There used to be more, until an unknown assailant caused the death by deflation of Dad’s treasured eight foot tall Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, using a stainless steel salad fork. Later, in what Dad took as a sadistic effort at intimidation, the secret slasher left Rudolph’s kidnapped nose in the mailbox, with a cryptic note saying. “Enough, already!” The outrage made all the local papers, and Dad was even interviewed on TV, lamenting the community’s lack of Christmas spirit.
And then, of course, there was the concrete cow.
“A Christmas cow?” Jeff asked, when he almost tripped over the enormous concrete figure lying half frozen into the ground in the front yard.
“It’s not a cow,” I explained. “It’s supposed to be a Labrador Retriever. Dad bought it out on the highway somewhere, from some out of work, no talent sculptor. He brought it home in a truck and had it wired to bark at the deer that come into the yard, but this big buck apparently fell in love with it last fall, and pushed it over like that while trying to… Anyway, it’s too heavy for Dad. Maybe you and Dennis can help get the poor thing back on its feet while we’re here.”
“I don’t know why he doesn’t just shoot the damned deer and be done with it,” Dennis grumbled. “They’re nothing but vermin. Maybe get himself a pair of pit bulls.”
“Mom would never forgive him,” I said to Jeff, while glaring at Dennis. “She adores the deer. Feeds them fruitcake and hamster food rolled in peanut butter. She even made Dad take down the fence so the deer wouldn’t get hurt jumping over it.”
“Do you see what I mean?” Dennis asked. “About her family?”
Dinner went fairly well, except for Dennis, who ate almost nothing, and kept wiping away imaginary water spots on the silverware. Mom and Dad were obviously taken with Jeff McLaughlin, as I knew they would be.
They’ve always been too polite to say anything, but I know they’ve never really “gotten” Dennis, or understood what he does for a living. Dennis is a stockbroker, “moving into venture capital,” and no, I have no idea at all what that means, except a lot of money. It’s not that my folks don’t like money; they just don’t understand the concept of making money on nothing but more money.
In my family, you either work with your hands, sell something useful, or provide a useable service – like being a baker or a dentist. Within minutes of learning that Jeff was a carpenter, Dad had dragged him down to the basement to discuss joists and support beams, and a new floor for the kitchen.
I actually felt sorry for Dennis, who had just spent two hours explaining to Dad why it was absolutely necessary to continue paying executives of failing companies million dollar bonuses – to get the best talent.
And by that evening, Mom was taking every opportunity to tell poor Jeff my good points. I won a baton twirling contest in the seventh grade. I was editor of the high school newspaper. I got a full scholarship in English to Winton U, but went to work in the city, instead – in what I had termed “the world of business.” I knew that Mom was visualizing her future, surrounded by a pack of adorable blue-eyed grandchildren with sandy blond hair – exactly like Jeff McLaughlin.
And the longer it went on, the more irritated I got – at everybody. I had known for the last year that Dennis and I were a mistake, but I was too much of a wimp to do anything about it. Let’s face it, leaving Dennis would mean having to admit to everyone that I’d made another gigantic life mistake.
When I met Dennis, though, I thought he was perfect. He was successful, ambitious, an inch short of being actually rich, and very attractive. A man any girl would want, especially a small town girl who’d come to the big city looking for excitement and success, and who had found neither. I was flattered when he asked me out for the first time, and enjoyed the sort of evenings that he always planned for us, at the theater, or at fine restaurants. And when he suggested that I move out of my shabby, little apartment and move in with him, I was pleased. Without meaning to, I was becoming what those old novels used to call a “kept woman.”
And then, six months ago, he decided I should give up my low level publishing job as an assistant editor and look for ‘something more worthy of my abilities.’ The problem was, nothing I got offered was ever good enough for Dennis, or up to his standards. Now, after four years together, Dennis and I had gotten our lives so entwined, it seemed simply less complicated to go ahead and get engaged, and worry about it later. I think we both knew it was only a matter of time, but Dennis never likes to admit failure, and I was just plain chicken. I was hoping that our tired relationship would simply die of natural causes, or that Dennis would make the first move and say that it was over.
Okay, so it wasn’t the most mature way of making an important life decision, but if there’s one thing I’ve always excelled at, it’s immaturity. How could I have known that a Really Nice Guy like Jeff McLaughlin would show up, and screw up such a terrific, foolproof life plan?
Chapter 3
Can you really fall in love with someone in only two days? Maybe not, logically, but by the next afternoon, I was beginning to think it was entirely possible.
The first clue came when I wandered into the living room after lunch. Mom was planning dinner, and Dennis was sitting by the fire, reading yesterday’s copy of the Wall Street Journal. Dad and Jeff were nowhere to be seen.
“If you’re looking for your friend McLaughlin, he’s outside with your father,” Dennis said dryly, although I hadn’t asked about Jeff. “They’re both drunk, and pissing on your mother’s rosebushes.”
“Your father read somewhere that human urine keeps the deer away,” Mom added cheerfully. “It’s only male urine, though, thank the Lord. I’m just too old and stiff to be of much help, especially in this cold.”
When I grinned, Dennis merely rolled his eyes, and went back to reading his paper.
It’s funny how little things can make you look at a person differently, isn’t it?
Later that day, with the yard apparently immunized from marauding herds of deer, we all went outside to build The Snowman, another revered family tradition. At least one phenomenally large snowperson per season – preferably a couple – and always anatomically correct.
While the snow couple was coming to life, Dennis remained on the enclosed sun porch, warm and dry, and snooty as always. When I came inside to rest for
a minute, he expressed his opinion of snowpersons in general, and of the sort of adult human beings who wasted their time creating them.
“It’s damned silly, is what it is,” he pontificated. “I expected this kind of childishness out of you people, but I thought McLaughlin would show a little more maturity. “
Ah, that word again – maturity. By this time, though, I had been nipping for several hours at Dad’s extra-special eggnog, and I wasn’t in the mood to be told I was silly and immature, even if I was.
“What you say has the ring of truth, sir,” I replied solemnly, giving Dennis a crisp, if slightly drunken salute. “I am certain that all of us immature and childish sillies will take your words under advisement.” And then, although I am not proud to admit it, I giggled.
Dennis also declined to participate in the annual snowball fight – another long-standing Christmas tradition that has been known to result in black eyes, broken windows, and occasional emergency dental work. Actually, our snowball fights are more like wars, with few rules of engagement, and no quarter given. My older brother was missing from this year’s fray, but Jeff turned out to be a worthy opponent, becoming only slightly cranky when I dumped a trash can full of hard-packed snow on his head from the garage roof.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, stop whining!” I said, while he rubbed the rising lump on the back of his head. “When I was a kid, we used to put rocks in our snowballs, then store them in the freezer ‘til they were pure ice. Sometimes, when the snow was really wet, we packed them with wet mud and called them slushbombs. You wouldn’t believe the mess a slushbomb made when it hit.”
He wiped the snow from his face, grinning. “I would, actually. Tell me, did you spend a lot of time in reform school as a child?”
“I was really cute as a child,” I said sweetly. “Really cute girls don’t get in trouble. Boys walk them home from school, and give them candy.”
