Macaroni and Freeze

by Christine Wenger

  I looked around at all the boxes and bins that I’d just brought up from the basement and lugged down from the attic of my Big House. Now, where was my Santa mug?

  But no matter how much I love Christmas and all that goes with it, I will not decorate until the dishes are in the dishwasher after Thanksgiving dinner and all my guests are either gone or in a recliner sleeping off the tryptophan from consuming mass quantities of turkey.

  Right now, on Thanksgiving night, all my guests are indeed gone. The only one sleeping in a recliner is my pal Antoinette Chloe Brown (who has recently shunned her married name of Brownelli).

  So now I’m going to begin decorating my diner, the Silver Bullet, which is only a few hundred yards off the main road, Route 3, which splits Sandy Harbor, New York, in half—sort of diagonally, then a dogleg left to the right.

  Speaking of dogs, I decided to take my sweet golden retriever, Blondie, for a walk in the thirteen degree temperature and three feet of snow on the ground. Mother Nature and Lake Ontario have gone easy on us so far, with only one blizzard, but this balmy weather won’t last.

  “Blondie, come!” I said, and she grudgingly lifted her head from a cozy spot under my thick oak kitchen table. “Let’s go for a walk!”

  She didn’t hurry to get up. “Come on. You love the snow.” Ty Brisco, a Houston cowboy transplant who works as a deputy with the Sandy Harbor Sheriff’s Department, and I rescued Blondie when she appeared half-frozen by the Dumpster in back of the Silver Bullet. Poor thing.

  We share her, but I have primary custody. It gets lonely here at the Big House—my huge white farmhouse with green shutters and a wraparound porch.

  I got winterized—puffy parka, hat, boots and gloves—and picked up a couple of plastic bins and a couple of boxes. I called for Blondie one more time, and she appeared at my side. Juggling everything, I opened the door, let her go out in front of me and then closed the door. Carefully, I felt my way with my boots across my back porch and down the five steps that would lead me to ground level.

  Or was that eight steps?

  I dropped to the ground like a cut Christmas tree. My packages soared through the air, and a box of lights landed on my head. I did a split that any gymnast would have envied, but I’d bet they’d never heard anything crack as loudly as a couple of my bones.

  My teeth hit the snowy and icy sidewalk, and I tasted blood, salt, and snow and spit out a tooth. Oh, sure. I’d just paid off Dr. Henny, after a root canal, and there I went again. Shoot! I should have saved the tooth.

  Where had it gone?

  I quickly gave up. It was like looking for a tooth in a snowbank.

  Blondie was barking, and I couldn’t calm her down. I couldn’t even calm myself down.

  “Blondie, go get Ty. Go get Antoinette Chloe!”

  She just stood there, barking. Then she peed in a fresh patch of snow, not far from my head. Then more barking.

  “Get Ty, Blondie. Go get him!”

  She stopped barking for a while, then tilted her head as if to say, “Trixie, I’m not Lassie, for heaven’s sake!”

  “Yeah, I know. Just keep barking. Maybe someone will hear you.”

  I tried to get up, but I felt like a manatee swimming through quicksand. Everything hurt, but mostly it was my right leg and ankle.

  As I lay there, trying to catch my breath, I noticed my big Santa Claus mug, which I had been thinking of. It had fallen out of the box and was broken.

  It was then I began to cry.

  I don’t like to cry, although I am a pro at it. I cry at sappy movies. When the channels start putting on their holiday movies, I am one big, blubbering mountain of tissues.

  But now I was crying for myself, as I saw my Christmas season melt away before my watery eyes.

  Who was going to decorate?

  Who was going to finish my shopping?

  Who was going to cater the rehearsal each evening for the holiday pageant at the Sandy Harbor Community Church? Most everyone was coming right from school or work during the three weeks before Christmas Eve, and they needed sustenance, so Pastor Fritz had hired me to provide food and drink.

  And I was supposed to cater the town’s annual Christmas buffet after the play in the church’s community room.

  And who was going to cater the approximate three dozen holiday parties that I’d booked?

  I wasn’t going to be able to drive to make deliveries. I wasn’t going to be able to stand to cut, chop and cook, if all my bones that I thought were broken were broken.

  I was getting pretty cold here, sprawled out in the snow and ice. My parka was the jacket type, but right now it was the midriff type, and I tried to pull it down. My jeans were wet and icy.

  “That’s it. Keep barking, Blondie.”

  Silence.

  “Blondie, can you spell S-P-C-A?”

  She ran off to jump like a gazelle in the snow.

  Finally, finally, finally Antoinette Chloe appeared at the back door.

  “Trixie? What are you doing down there?”

  “Counting snowflakes.”

  “Interesting.” She yawned. “Why was Blondie barking? She woke me up. Want any coffee? I think I’ll have a cup before I drive home.”

  “Antoinette!”

  She knew something was wrong because no one—and I mean no one—ever leaves off the “Cloe” in her name if they value their lives.

  And no one calls me Beatrix for the same reason!

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “I need help. I fell. I heard bones snap, crackle and pop.”

  “Oh! I thought you were putting lights up around the sidewalk or stairs.”

  “By lying on the ground?”

  “I thought you were being . . . creative.”

  “Not that creative.” My leg and ankle were throbbing. “Antoinette Chloe, call an ambulance for me. I’m hurt pretty bad.” I sniffed.

  “I will! I will! I have to get my cell phone. I’ll be right back. Don’t go anywhere.”

  “‘Don’t go anywhere’?” I mumbled. “I thought I’d go Christmas caroling with the church choir, but I don’t have my sheet music with me.”

  I waited, and waited, and finally ACB returned. “You’re in luck. The ambulance drivers are at the Silver Bullet on a dinner break. Ty is on his way, too.”

  “Good. Thanks.”

  Under normal circumstances, I’d have to be half-dead to want to travel in an ambulance, but this wasn’t under normal circumstances, and I felt half-dead.

  The pain was so intense that it turned my stomach. It would have been a shame to waste a perfectly good Thanksgiving dinner.

  I took deep breaths of the cold air and listened to ACB ramble on. She did help pull down my jacket, and I felt a little warmer.

  Finally, I heard Blondie barking, and Ty’s deep voice. Then I saw red lights flashing. I didn’t know which made me feel better, but it wasn’t ACB talking about the upcoming auditions for the Christmas pageant at the Sandy Harbor Community Church.

  “Trixie, why on earth do they have auditions? Everyone who wants to be in the play gets to be in the play, for heaven’s sake. I think that being pageant director has gone to Liz Fellows’s head.”

  “It’s her first pageant,” I panted out each word. Where was my ride to the hospital? “She’s finding her own way.”

  “Margie Grace’s pageants were certainly entertaining. People are still talking about the shepherds tending their flock of salmon.”

  I shivered. “But people didn’t get it when the shepherds did the tango with the salmon. It was a little over-the-top for Sandy Harbor.”

  “Margie is hopping mad. She wanted to be asked again.”

  “Trixie? What happened?” Ty finally arrived with Blondie, and I relaxed a little. “The ambulance guys are here.”

  “I–
I . . . f-fell . . . down the s-stairs.” My teeth chattered, and I tried to get them to stop. “My right leg and ankle hurt. Maybe my back.”

  “Don’t move.”

  “I c-can’t anyway.”

  “Here come Ronnie and Ron. Linda Hermann is with them.”

  “Good.”

  After much ado, I was wheeled into the back of the ambulance and covered with heaps of blankets.

  “We are going to drive you to Syracuse,” said Ronnie. “I checked, and they have the shortest wait in their emergency room.”

  “Okay, Ronnie. Let’s go. I have decorations to put up!”

  * * *

  After an hour ride to Syracuse, two hours in the ER and another half hour getting trained on how to use crutches, I was headed home in Antoinette Chloe’s delivery van from her restaurant, Brown’s Four Corners. Her van couldn’t be missed. On the side, it sported a colorful salami with a fedora dancing with a chubby ham in jogging shoes and a tennis outfit. Nearby was an assortment of cheeses watching the dancing and clapping to music that only deli items could hear.

  I climbed into the van with ACB helping me or rather shoving my ample butt up and into the seat.

  Exhausted, stressed and ready for a meltdown, I plopped into the seat and then tried to position my behemoth of a cast into a comfortable spot.

  It didn’t help that I had a couple of broken ribs.

  “It smells like garlic in here,” I said, taking a deep breath.

  “Fingers just made a kielbasa run to Utica. Remember?”

  “Oh. I forgot.”

  ACB and I love this kielbasa, which we can only find in Utica at a certain grocery store. I turned ACB onto it, but I’ve been eating it for years. It’s a Matkowski tradition at Christmas and Easter, and it’s only complete with the fresh horseradish I make.

  Fingers, who was missing a couple of them, was ACB’s cook at Brown’s Four Corners Restaurant in downtown Sandy Harbor. ACB was thinking of selling the place to Fingers and opening a year-round drive-in movie on land she owned adjacent to mine, but she hasn’t figured out the logistics of snow and blizzard conditions on the drive-in screen or on the drive-in viewers, especially if they came in snowmobiles or Amish wagons.

  That was my pal ACB. Her ideas were as wild as her couture.

  I had given up nagging her about wearing flip-flops in the dead of winter. She had some kind of aversion to winter boots. She told me that she had lined her flip-flops with faux fur to shut me up.

  But it hadn’t.

  “Do you want to stop for anything in Syracuse?” she asked.

  “I’d like to go home and get some sleep. It’s been a long day.”

  “While they were putting your cast on, I called Linda Blessler. She’s going to work for you until further notice.”

  “Oh! That’s so nice of her, and it’s thoughtful of you to call her for me. Thanks, Antoinette Chloe. I’ll call her later and tell her that I might be recovering for a while. The doctor said that I did such a number on my ankle that I couldn’t have a soft boot. He had to put a cast on it.”

  “Oh, and I know you have a lot of catering coming up. Of course I’ll help you.”

  “What about your own restaurant?”

  “Fingers will shout if he needs me, but he never needs me. I should just sell the place to him.”

  “Does he want to buy it?”

  “I don’t know. I never asked him,” she said. “Maybe I should.”

  “Yeah.” I yawned. “I think the doc gave me something. I’m falling asleep.”

  “Go ahead, but first, tell me how to get to the highway.”

  “Go straight. Down the hill. You should see signs.”

  “I remember an Italian bread bakery around here?” she asked. “I love their bread.”

  “Antoinette Chloe, it’s ten o’clock at night. It’s closed.” I pointed to the tiny store in an old shingle house by the highway entrance. “Closed.”

  “Too bad. I’m in the mood for warm bread. We could have shared it on the ride home. I’m starving.”

  As if on cue, my stomach growled.

  Antoinette Chloe laughed. “I see a restaurant over there. No. It looks mostly like a bar, but they’d have bar food. Are you interested?”

  My throbbing ankle and ribs yelled, “Are you nuts?” but my stomach screamed, “Let’s go!”

  “Do you think they have anything to go?” I asked, hopeful that I could stay in the van.

  We both must have looked in the grimy window at the same time as ACB tried to pull her big van into a space only fit for my cook Linda Blessler’s red Mini Cooper.

  “It’s a cowboy bar,” ACB said.

  The mechanical bull in the window with a cowboy type riding it and ladies in Daisy Dukes cheering for him was our first clue.

  “You stay here, and I’ll see if they have sandwiches to go,” she said, reading my mind.

  “Thanks, Antoinette Chloe.”

  “Yeehaw!” was her response.

  I was going to point out that her dancing-salami-and-ham van was only half-parked, but she was already opening the door to the Ride ’Em Cowboy Saloon.

  That was our other clue that this was a cowboy bar.

  She came back to the car and opened the door. “Oops . . . Trixie, do you have any money?”

  I went to reach for my purse, but came up with a handful of air. “Oh, no, I don’t.” It was the second time I reached for my purse, which wasn’t there. The first was to hand the ER intake worker my insurance card. Luckily, they already had my insurance information from my recent late-in-life tonsillectomy.

  “Don’t worry, Trixie. I’ll get us some takeout. Trust me.” ACB slammed the door.

  Yikes. We were headed for jail as sure as snow was falling.

  The heat was on full blast in the big, empty van, but I still shivered. I closed my eyes for just a moment, and when I opened them, I saw my friend Antoinette Chloe Brown riding the mechanical bull in the window.

  I could hear her yeehaws and laughter over the blasting heat and the highway noise. A couple of street people who were camping next to the highway in boxes and crates came to investigate.

  “Someone being stabbed?” I heard one ask the other.

  “I think it’s that lady in the muumuu riding the bull. She’s certainly enjoying herself.”

  My friend’s orange muumuu with various green palm trees covering it was hiked up almost to her waist. Not a good look for her, or anyone, for that matter. Her rhinestone flip-flops caught the glint of the overhead lights surrounding the bull. I had to get her out of there, or we’d never get home.

  I rolled down my window, and gave the horn a little tap. “Excuse me, sir.”

  One of the men pointed at himself, and I nodded. He came over to my side of the van.

  “I just came from the hospital, and I have a cast, and it’s hard to walk. Would you mind going in there and telling my friend”—I pointed to ACB in the window—“to come to the van, please?”

  “My apologies, but I’m banned from going in there.”

  “What about your friend?”

  He looked at the man standing not four inches from the window, looking at ACB. “He is also not welcome. The owner said that we couldn’t stare at the gals in those little . . . ahem . . . shorty shorts . . . because we were making them uncomfortable.” He pointed at ACB, who seemed to be going for another eight seconds. “But that there’s a real woman.”

  “Would you pound on the window then, and yell to her to that Trixie wants her?”

  “Who’s Trixie?”

  “I am.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  They both pounded on the window, got ACB’s attention, and pointed to me sitting in the car. Reluctantly, she waved to me and slid down from the bull as her muumuu slid up.

  Yikes.
r />   I could hear the crowd hoot and holler, and Antoinette Chloe grinned and waved.

  Whatever I was given in the hospital for pain and nausea was beginning to wear off. My body ached, my head was throbbing and my leg felt like I was dragging an anvil. I was hungry enough to search the pockets of my jacket for stray, lint-covered Tic Tacs.

  I found only one.

  Again, I was feeling sorry for myself. At least I wasn’t living in a box by the highway in the middle of winter like my two friends who were staring at a platinum blond woman with a red sequined blouse and “shorty shorts” now riding the bull.

  I looked up at the hospital I’d just left. It was sprawled on top of a hill overlooking Syracuse and glowing like a lighthouse in the crisp, dark night. I was much luckier than most of the people in that hospital, too.

  Making a mental note to contribute to the hospital as my Christmas gift, I beeped the horn to my two street guys. My friends came over.

  “Yes, Trixie?”

  “Um . . . I don’t know your name.”

  “I’m Jud and that’s Dan.”

  “This is all the money I have right now.” Pulling out all the change from the ash tray, I handed Jud around sixty-two cents. “Jud, if you and Dan ever get to Sandy Harbor, stop at the Silver Bullet and get yourself a nice meal on me. Okay?”

  “We sure will.” He smiled, and I wished I could get him some dental work.

  “Merry Christmas, Jud.”

  “Merry Christmas, Trixie.”

  Finally, ACB shuffled out of the bar, carrying several white bags. She hesitated when she saw Jud and Dan.

  Rolling down the window, I shouted, “They’re okay.”

  She plodded to the car. Dan pulled off the navy fisherman’s cap from his head and clutched it to his breast.

  “You are my kind of woman,” Dan said. “May I have the pleasure of knowing your name?”

  “Antoinette Chloe.”

  “Antoinette Chloe,” Dan repeated. “It rolls off the tongue like a song . . . or rather a poem by Emerson.” He cleared his throat. “‘She walks in Beauty, like the night/Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that’s best of dark and bright/Meet in her aspect and her eyes. . . .’”