Читать книгу The Christmas Strike - Nikki Rivers - Страница 10

I pulled up the hood of my baby-blue parka as I hurried down Main Street on my way to Dempsey’s Diner. It was unseasonably cold even for a waning December afternoon in Willow Creek, Wisconsin. The weatherman on the radio that morning had forecast snow. The steely sky above me and the wetness of the wind on my face made me think he’d gotten it right for a change. I waved at Ivan Mueller as I passed Mueller the Jeweler. While hanging a Christmas wreath in the window, he paused long enough to wave back. The entire downtown—all two blocks of it—was decked out for the holiday, which was only two weeks away. My own Christmas spirit was woefully lacking this year, making me almost resent the festive candy cane wreath on the door at the diner.

Just as I reached for the knob on the diner’s front door, it was pushed open from inside, nearly knocking me off my feet. A gaggle of teenagers spilled onto the sidewalk, laughing and hooting. I smiled slightly at their antics. I’d been young once myself—I think.

They hadn’t bothered to hold the door for me, so I pulled it open and went inside. The aroma of freshly brewing coffee and frying donuts embraced me right down to my chilled bones.

“Will you look at this?” Joanne Dempsey demanded as she shook her head at the mound of salt on the counter in front of her. “I bet those rotten kids that were just in here loosened every damned salt shaker in the place.”

I shook my head. “Remember when we used to do that?”

“If that’s your polite way of telling me that paybacks are a bitch, forget it. It is not lost on me that I am now the Old Mrs. Dempsey down at the diner that the kids from junior high get to harass for the price of a Coke.”

I slid into one of the booths by the window and shrugged out of my parka. “Trust me, you’re nothing like your mother-in-law was.”

“Maybe not to you, since you’re now a middle-aged curmudgeon, too. But to those young hoodlums—”

“You know,” I interrupted, “using those kinds of words isn’t helping the image.”

“What kinds of words?” Iris Johnson asked as she entered the diner along with a burst of arctic air. “I hope I didn’t miss anything vulgar,” she said as she teetered over to the booth on four-inch heeled boots.

“Jo just called me a middle-aged curmudgeon,” I told her.

Iris, glaring at Jo, slipped off her full-length white fake fur, revealing tight black leather jeans and a gold metallic ruffled shirt, and tossed the coat toward the empty booth nearby. “Fifty-two is not middle-aged,” she emphatically insisted as she sat down across from me. “And what the hell is a curmudgeon? It sounds like something from The Wizard of Oz.”

“Those are Munchkins,” I corrected. Iris never had any kids.

“My mother-in-law, may she rest in peace,” Jo explained, “was a curmudgeon.”

Iris shrugged. “If you mean old bitch, say old bitch.” She lit a cigarette and we both glared at her. She, as usual, ignored us. “It’s true that you can be bitchy, Jo, honey, but you’re certainly not an old bitch. We are,” she said before pausing to blow smoke toward the hammered tin ceiling, “the same age.”

“Thank you,” Jo said.

“She’s upset because some kids loosened the tops on the salt shakers,” I explained.

“We used to do that,” Iris said.

“Exactly,” Jo exclaimed as she came over with three mugs, a carafe of coffee and a basket of hot donuts. “The postpubescent are now doing to me what we used to do to Mike’s mother. In other words, I’ve crossed over to the other side. Next thing you know they’ll be throwing snowballs at me hoping I fall on my ass.”

Iris took another drag then put the cigarette out. Her current program to quit smoking involved taking only two drags per cigarette. It was costing her a small fortune. The nicotine withdrawal wasn’t helping her mood, either. “Keep those donuts away from me,” she griped as she waved off the basket Jo was holding out to her. “I had a hard enough time zipping these jeans this morning.”

Jo pulled the basket closer to our side of the booth and we both dug in with gusto.

“Look,” Iris complained, “having coffee with you two every Friday afternoon is supposed to cheer me up. Get a clue. This conversation isn’t doing it. And the sight of you two scarfing down donuts like it’s the day before Armageddon isn’t helping.” She sighed. “Neither is the fact that that guy I met in Milwaukee last weekend still hasn’t called.”

Jo and I made sympathetic noises, but we couldn’t relate. Jo had been married to Mike Dempsey, her high school sweetheart, since the age of nineteen and even though I’d been widowed for over twenty years, I’d never put myself back on the market. When you have lived in a town of less than five thousand people nearly all your life, you pretty much know why every eligible man is still eligible. The reason was never good. Which is why Iris had started fishing in a bigger pond.

She examined her nails, then started to play with the ends of her hair—auburn this week. Iris was a huge fan of the current resurgence of big hair. As owner of Iris’s House of Beauty, she had half the women in town looking like they should be living in Texas. Luckily, I wore my graying blond hair too short for one of her makeovers. It didn’t keep her from trying to talk me into it, though. So far, Jo, who still wore her brown hair like she had in high school—short bob with full bangs—had also resisted.

Mike came out of the kitchen with a rack of clean glasses and noisily set them on the counter. “You taking another break?” he asked.

“Friday afternoon coffee klatch, remember?”

“You know, you can be replaced,” Mike quipped.

“I’d like to see you try,” Jo shot back.

It was their usual banter. Mike, who was still built like the linebacker he’d been in high school and still had that mop of wavy brown hair and a pair of dimples that could kill, was crazy about Jo and we all knew it, even when he gave her a hard time.

“You know,” Mike said, “I just saw something on the news about a man who went on strike against his wife because she wasn’t giving him enough affection.”

We all laughed.

“Go ahead, laugh. But I’m serious, ladies. It was on CNN.”

“Don’t worry, Mike, I’ve got you penciled in for some affection later tonight,” Jo assured him.

He shook his head. “Not good enough. I want indelible ink or nothing.”

Jo smiled. “You got it, babe. Now get back in that kitchen and start frying some more donuts before the after-work crowd gets here.”

He gave her a look. “Boy, that better be a lot of affection I’m gonna get.”

Mike disappeared into the kitchen and I thought about how lucky Jo was not to have to sleep alone at night.

“Look at that,” Iris said as she jerked her chin toward the window. “Old man Kilbourn at the drugstore has been putting those same decorations in his windows since the Beatles made their first record.” She sighed. “Nothing ever changes in this town. How the hell did the three of us end up back here?”

Although it was a question one of us asked periodically, no one really ever bothered to answer. We each had our reasons. Certainly, none of us had intended to live out our lives here. As far as we were concerned the whole point of growing up in Willow Creek was to get out of Willow Creek. My two much older siblings, a brother and sister, had moved to the west coast long before I’d graduated from high school. I’d made my escape at the age of nineteen when I’d moved to Milwaukee and enrolled in night courses in accounting while working as a secretary during the day at an accounting firm. That was where I’d met my husband, Charlie.

Nat and Gwen were babies and Charlie and I were looking for our first house when my father became terminally ill. I moved back to Willow Creek with the kids to help my mother take care of my father. Charlie came down on weekends. After my father died, it was clear my aging mother could no longer live alone. We didn’t want to have just a weekend marriage, so Charlie moved into my mother’s house with me and the kids, and opened an accounting office in Willow Creek. Neither of us considered the move a permanent one, though. We figured it was only a matter of time before we’d pick up our lives in the city where we’d left off.

Then came the car accident and in the blink of an eye, I became the Widow of Willow Creek. With two toddlers tugging at my jeans and an increasingly needy mother to take care of, I closed Charlie’s office and opened a bookkeeping and tax preparation service that I ran out of the house. By the time my mother had passed on, the girls were entering their teens with social lives of their own and I figured I was meant to be born, live and die in Willow Creek.

I looked at my watch. “I’ve got to keep an eye on the time.”

“Fetching the grandkids from school again today?” Jo asked.

I nodded. “Natalie picked up an extra half shift out at the Mega-mart. They can use the money.”

“Jeremy find anything yet?”

I sighed, refilled my mug and grabbed another donut. “My son-in-law has taken root on the sofa,” I said with my mouth full. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to start watering him soon.”

“Must be in the depression stage,” Iris said. “Unemployment can put you through the same five stages as grief, you know.”

Jo and I looked at each other, then back at Iris.

“Something you read in Vogue?” Jo asked with sweet sarcasm and a batting of her mascara-less lashes.

Iris shook her hair back. “I read other things, too, you know.” She sniffed. “Anyway, it’s only common sense. You put a virile guy like Jeremy out of work and give him nothing to do and he’s bound to start struggling with his ego.”

“Believe me,” I said dryly as I sipped my coffee, “I’ve given Jeremy plenty to do. Nice little list that looks as fresh as the day I gave it to him.”

“See? Another symptom of depression is an inability to take action,” Iris pointed out. “It’s like you become frozen. Jeremy could even be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I read just the other day—”

Iris was a magazine junkie. While you waited your turn at Iris’s House of Beauty, you could read everything from Psychology Today and Herbal Monthly to Vogue and Cosmo. She claimed that since she could use the subscriptions as a business expense that ordering so many was just her way of sticking it to the government, but Jo and I knew she was addicted.

“All I want to know about a breakdown,” I said as I struggled back into my parka, “is when is it going to be my turn to have one? I wouldn’t mind lying on the sofa and watching old movies all day long in my pajamas.” I slid out of the booth and headed for the door.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Jo called. “We haven’t decided on what the Prisoners of Willow Creek Enrichment Society is doing tomorrow. This is our Saturday, you know.”

Iris groaned. “I’ve got a great idea. Let’s sleep.”

Jo gave her a look of reproach. We’d formed the Prisoners Enrichment Society several years ago when it became clear that none of us was likely to escape Willow Creek a second time. We may be stuck in Willow Creek but we didn’t plan on becoming stagnant.

“Okay, okay.” Iris gave in under Jo’s look. “Just let’s not go bowling again.”

“If this snow keeps up, why don’t we plan on a hike along the creek?” I suggested. “It’ll be gorgeous.”

“It’ll be cold,” Iris said.

“Besides, Iris doesn’t own a pair of boots with heels under three inches,” Jo pointed out. “Why don’t we drive over to that new ceramics shop near Lake Geneva? They’re having an introductory class. For ten bucks you get to paint your own latte cup.”

“Yippeee,” Iris drawled sarcastically as she lit another cigarette.

“That reminds me,” I asked Jo, “how’s the cappuccino war going?”

Jo was currently working on Mike to buy a cappuccino maker. She had dreams of turning the diner into a café. She felt it would give the town a little dash. We were in an area about halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago and surrounded by towns that had become weekend spots for the upper middle class from both cities. Willow Creek had remained just a small town while many of the neighboring ones had become favorites of tourists looking for a bucolic, small town experience but who didn’t want to travel far from home.

Many in Willow Creek saw the town’s anonymity as a victory and were happy with less intrusion from the outside world. Jo wasn’t one of them. She was constantly battling with Mike to turn the diner into the kind of place that would pull in business from tourists. But I had a feeling that if she ever won we would all miss the geometric-patterned gray Formica countertops, the red fake-leather-covered booths and the old fashioned soda fountain behind the curved counter with its chrome and red stools that spun in place. We’d all been coming here since Mike’s parents were probably younger than we were now—unsettling thought that that was. Most of the girls in town had done a stint as a waitress at Dempsey’s. That’s how Jo first fell in love with Mike.

“Mike still thinks the diner, like his mother, is perfect,” Jo said. “He says why tamper with success. Which is exactly what his mother always said. But, frankly, with all three kids in college, we could use a little more success.” She took a moment to make sure Mike was out of earshot. “I’m sneaking a pasta dish on the menu next week,” she whispered. “And he doesn’t know it yet, but I’m thinking about putting our Christmas club money into a new sign out on the highway.”

“The assault begins,” Iris pronounced.

“I don’t care who wins,” I said, “as long as you don’t switch coffee suppliers or take the donuts off the menu.”

The diner only offered one kind of donut—a plain cake one—but they were made fresh several times daily. The outsides were always just slightly crunchy while the insides were so tender they melted in your mouth. Nearly the entire town was addicted to them.

“So,” I said as I zipped up my parka, “ceramics class tomorrow?”

We both looked at Iris. She took a second drag on the new cigarette then stamped it out in the black plastic ashtray in front of her.

“I can hardly wait,” she said.

Face it, I wasn’t exactly enthralled with the idea of painting flowers on a latte cup, either. But at least it would get me out of the house on a Saturday.

When we first formed the Prisoner’s Enrichment Society, we’d had loftier goals than ceramics or bowling in mind. We’d even planned a trip to Europe once. Went so far as to get our passports. Then my daughter Natalie found out she was pregnant with her second child on the same day Jeremy got laid off from the auto plant two towns over. Suddenly my Europe fund had other, more important places to go. The farthest the Society had ever taken us was a weekend trip to Chicago two years ago. But at least we hadn’t given up completely.

It was snowing lightly when I left the diner. Dark enough, in fact, on this December afternoon for the Christmas lights hanging from lampposts along Main Street to already be lit. I tried to muster up some Christmas spirit at the sight. Who knows? Maybe the snowfall put Jeremy in the mood and he’d gotten off the sofa long enough to put up our outdoor Christmas lights like he’d been promising to do since the day after Thanksgiving.

Luckily, the wind was at my back as I walked the few blocks to my car. I yanked open the door of my slightly rusting station wagon, wincing at the screech, and slid behind the wheel while I sent a silent wish into the frosty air that the wagon would start on the first try. It didn’t. I resisted the urge to pump the gas and tried again. The engine caught and I smiled and patted the dashboard. “Good girl. Now just get us to the grade school then home and I’ll tuck you in for the rest of the night.”

I drove over to the school, contemplating what to fix for dinner. Natalie, my twenty-nine-year-old daughter, and her husband, Jeremy, had moved in nearly four months ago when Jeremy’s unemployment ran out and the bank foreclosed on their house, but I still wasn’t used to planning family meals again. I’d grown accustomed to just grabbing a bowl of cereal or heating up some soup. Now meals were a big, noisy, messy deal again. Not that I didn’t love my grandkids. I loved them like crazy even when they made me crazy.

I pulled up behind a row of cars in front of the elementary school and waited. As usual, eight-year-old Tyler, dark haired and green eyed with a wrestler’s body like his father’s, was the first one to reach the car. “Shotgun!” he yelled while ten-year-old Matt, tall, lanky and sandy haired like his grandfather, tried to shove him out of the way.

“Knock it off, Matt,” I said.

“No fair,” Matt grumbled. “Tyler got shotgun yesterday.”

“You’re right. Tyler, get in the back, it’s Matty’s turn to ride up front.”

“Aww—” Tyler groused as he gave in.

“Where’s your sister?” I asked, craning my neck to get a look at the steady stream of kids coming out of the school.

“Probably giggling with those two morons she hangs around with,” said Matt.

I was just about to send one of the boys to look for her when Ashley broke from the pack and started skipping toward the car, her long blunt-cut auburn hair swinging from beneath her winter hat.

“Hi, Grandma,” she said as she got into the backseat. She threw her arms around my neck from behind and gave me a kiss on the cheek. She was the only one of my grandchildren who still showed me affection in public.

“Get on your own side of the car,” Tyler yelled.

“Dork,” Ashley said with all the indignity a six-year-old can muster.

“Ha! Dork? That the best you can do, loser?”

No doubt about it, Ashley sometimes had a tough time being the only girl.

“Hey,” she squealed, “stop elbowing me!”

Matt turned around and threw his cap at Ashley. “Quit screaming in my ear, weirdo.”

I stuck two fingers in my mouth and whistled. That got their attention. “The next one of you who says anything nasty or pokes, prods, elbows or otherwise harasses anyone gets to do the dishes tonight. All. By. Themselves.”

There were moans of varying degrees, but the dishes deterrent never failed. The three of them settled down. I turned on the radio, perpetually set on an oldies station, and everyone started singing along to “Sweet Caroline.” By the time we got home, we were mutilating the lyrics to “Brown Eyed Girl.”

Home was still the two-story Victorian with a wraparound porch in perpetual need of painting that had once belonged to my parents. I had just gotten around to the idea of selling it when Nat and Jeremy lost their house almost four months ago. What could I do? They needed a roof over their heads and I was still the mom, a role that no longer suited me as much as it used to. I was the grandmother. I was supposed to get to do the fun things with my grandchildren. Instead, I’d become the one who wiped up the spilled milk and broke up the fights.

The kids tumbled out of the car while I checked for any sign of Christmas light activity on the bare branches of the barberry bushes lining the front porch. Not one string was strung. I didn’t see any of the electric candles I’d asked him to put in the front windows, either.

I followed the kids up the stairs and into the house where they kicked off boots and parkas and threw them in the direction of the cobbler’s bench lining one side of the entrance hall. There was a sweatshirt thrown over the banister of the open staircase and a basket full of clean laundry sitting on the bottom step.

The living room was to the left of the entrance hall, while the dining room was to the right. The big family-style kitchen was behind the dining room.

The kids, as usual, clattered through the dining room to the kitchen to raid the cookie jar. I followed to make sure none of them took more than two cookies—homemade oatmeal that Natalie cleverly laced with wheat germ and sunflower seeds—poured milk and got them seated at the table with their homework. Then I headed back to the living room.

Sure enough, Jeremy was still in his flannel pajama pants and an old football jersey, slumped on one of the two matching sofas, his bare feet up on the coffee table between them, his eyes glazed over from watching too much daytime television.

“Jeremy, we need to talk,” I said.

“I’ve already applied every place I can think of, Abby,” he said dully without taking his eyes off the television.

“I know that and that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about anyway.”

His eyes drifted toward mine.

“I just think that maybe it’d be better if you got dressed every day and did something around here. Even just one thing. That’s all I ask, Jeremy. ’Cause I think you’re slipping into a depression.”

This brought his spine upright. “Oh, I can just guess who the topic of conversation was down at the diner this afternoon. I’ll hang the damn Christmas lights, okay?”

“That would be a start—”

His jaw worked, but I’d known him since he was thirteen and first started hanging around on my living room sofa. He was the boy who had cried when he’d lost a wrestling match in high school. The boy who had looked at Natalie with such love in his eyes as she’d walked down the aisle toward him when she was already three months pregnant with Matt. Jeremy could work his jaw all he wanted. It wasn’t about to make me back off.

“—but that’s not what I really wanted to talk to you about.”

He looked wary but defiant and I saw my grandson Tyler in his face. How could I not love this man, even if I sometimes felt like sending the sofas out to be reupholstered just to see what he’d do?

“So, what do you want to talk to me about?” he asked.

“Ma—come on—what were you thinking?” Natalie demanded when she got home from work a few hours later.

“It’s just that my business is going well, I could use the help and it would provide a little security for you and the kids. Since the two of you have been married, Jeremy has been laid off four times. Aren’t you sick of worrying about layoffs and plant closings? Can’t you see how each time it happens, Jeremy finds it harder to deal with?”

“Of course I can see that, Ma. That’s one of the reasons I’m pissed that you talked to him without discussing it with me first. It’s bad enough Jeremy has to depend on his mother-in-law for a roof over his head right now. How do you think he’d feel if you were his boss, too?”

I leaned against the kitchen sink and watched the kids out in the backyard tumbling around in the snow in the glow of the back porch light. A good four inches had already fallen. It didn’t seem to be hurting Jeremy’s manliness to not be out there shoveling snow. I wisely decided to keep that observation to myself.

“So, I’ll sell him part of the business. For heaven’s sake,” I said in exasperation, “the point is, he’d be making money while in training and you wouldn’t have to worry about layoffs and plant closings ever again.”

My daughter Natalie, as usual, looked both sullen and beautiful. Her long sandy hair was tangled, her pale skin was bare of makeup so the sprinkling of freckles on her nose showed. She was as tall as me—five foot ten—but finer boned, leaner, less bosomy. She really took after her father more than me in looks. Of my two daughters, she had always been the more openly rebellious one. Her three kids had come so quickly that Nat still had some growing up to do. But she had a big heart and, in her own way, she was a terrific mother. But, as far as I was concerned, she was still too stubborn for her own good.

“Yeah, Ma, every out-of-work guy wants to be trained by his mother-in-law.”

“Don’t you think you’re being a tad overprotective here?” I pointed out while I picked up a wooden spoon and went to stir the pot of chili on the stove. “He’s got a family to help support.”

“Ma—I do not want to talk about this now, okay?” Nat said through tightened lips. “Jeremy is upstairs taking a nap but he could be down any minute. I’d like to get through dinner without a scene for a change, if you don’t mind.”

I bit my tongue so hard to keep the words down that I was surprised I wasn’t on my way to bleeding to death. I’d had enough scenes in the past months to last me a lifetime. I wasn’t sure which was worse: listening to Jeremy and Natalie fight or listening to them have makeup sex. No wonder the man needed so many naps.

The three kids came tumbling in, cheeks rosy from the cold, trailing snow, spilling milk and getting more chili on the table than in their mouths.

I loved them. I did. But afterwards, as I stood in the middle of the ruins of dinner on the big, square oak table and looked at the puddles of melted snow on the parquet wood floor, I couldn’t help but ask myself isn’t there someplace else I’m supposed to be?

When had this new restlessness started? Was it after Nat and her brood moved in or had it been there all along? And if this wasn’t where I was supposed to be, then where did I belong?

I got out the mop and told myself to get real. I was exactly where I was supposed to be. Where I’d chosen to be. Life wasn’t so bad. So Nat and Jeremy had had to move in for a while. It was happening all over the country. The boomerang generation, they called it. It’d only been a little over three months. And surely having the grandchildren here would rekindle my Christmas spirit eventually, wouldn’t it? Of course it would. Besides, things could always be worse. At least Gwen wasn’t coming home for Christmas this year.

Not that I didn’t love my oldest daughter, Gwen. I loved my daughters equally. Enjoyed being with them equally. I even fought with and was irritated by them pretty much equally. They were only a little over a year apart, but they were as different as peanut butter and steak: both of them delicious, but I’d prefer not to eat them at the same meal.

Nat and Gwen didn’t share the sisterly bond that I imagined I would have shared with my sister if she hadn’t been so much older than me. Basically, my daughters bonded by bickering. It was going to be a relief not to have that added to the cacophony that had become my auditory life. The bonus was, I didn’t even have to feel guilty that Gwen wouldn’t be here. Her husband, David, was taking her on a holiday cruise. Everyone was winning as far as I was concerned.

I’d always known that Gwen was the kind of girl who would grow up to marry the kind of man who could afford to take her on holiday cruises. Not to mention buy her just about anything she wanted. Gwen had lived her life toward that goal since she’d first discovered that she was not only smart but pretty, a phenomenon that had occurred to her around the age of twelve. Cheerleader. Prom Queen. Scholarships to good schools. A career in the city in banking that led to the kind of social life that got her invited to the right parties where she’d meet a man like David Hudson, an architect who was already making a name for himself at the age of thirty-five.

On paper, thirty-year-old Gwen read like the kind of young woman a mother never had to worry about. Yet I worried just as much about Gwen as I did about Nat. They were just different worries. For instance, I sometimes worried that Gwen loved her husband’s money and family connections more than she loved her husband.

David came from a family of old banking money, although both he and his father were architects. I didn’t know much about architecture, but even I had heard of Cole Hudson. I’d met him only once—at Gwen’s wedding in Chicago last spring. Once was enough as far as I was concerned. He was one of those arrogant, larger-than-life types. Full of himself. Very different from David, who was kind and sweet and loving—and easily wrapped around Gwen’s finger. I couldn’t imagine Cole Hudson letting any woman wrap so much as a strand of his hair around her finger.

There was a sudden crash from the living room and Ashley squealed, “Give that back to me!” Then, “Mom!” I sighed. One thing I’d never have to worry about was Gwen moving back in. I was pretty sure she’d jump from its balcony before she’d give up the high-rise condo near Chicago’s Loop—unless, of course, she’d be giving it up for a mansion on Lake Michigan.

I was finishing up the dishes while the kids were in the living room with Nat, who was checking over their homework before letting them watch TV, when I heard a plaintive voice behind me say, “Mother?”

I spun around. Gwen stood there with a look of such raw pain on her face that my heart immediately opened to her. “Honey,” I said as I moved toward her, “what is it?”

“My marriage is over, Mother. I’ve left David and come home for good.”