08bis Visions of Sugar Plums (3 page)

Okay. Whatever. "I'm going to my parents' now," I told him. "Maybe you want me to drop you someplace. Shopping center, pool hall, loony bin..."

"Boy, that really hurts. You don't want me to meet your parents."

"It's not like we're going steady."

"My assignment is to bring you some Christmas cheer, and I take my job
very
seriously."

I gave him disgusted. "You do
not
take your job seriously. You told me you don't even like Christmas."

"I was caught by surprise. It's not usually my gig. But I'm starting to get into it. Can't you tell? Don't I look more cheery?"

"I'm not going to get rid of you, am I?"

He rocked back on his heels, hands in jacket pockets, a large grin firmly in place. "No."

I blew out a sigh, put the car into gear, and pulled out of the lot. It wasn't a far ride to my parents' house in the Burg. The Burg is short for Chambersburg, a small residential community that sits on the edge of Trenton proper. I was born and raised in the Burg and I'll be a Burger for life. I've tried moving away, but I can't seem to get far enough.

Like most houses in the Burg, my parents' house is a small two-story clapboard built on a small, narrow lot. And like many houses in the Burg, the house shares a common wall with an identical house. Mabel Markowitz owns the house that adjoins my parents' house. She lives there alone, now that her husband has passed on. She keeps her windows clean, she plays bingo twice a week at the senior center, and she squeezes thirteen cents out of every dime.

I parked at the curb and Diesel looked at the two houses. Mrs. Markowitz's house was painted a bilious green. She had a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary in her tiny front yard and she'd put a pot of plastic red poinsettias next to the Virgin. A lone candle had been placed in her front window. My parents' house was painted yellow and brown and was decorated with a string of colored lights across the front of the house. A big old plastic Santa, his red suit sun-bleached to pale pink, had been set up in my parents' front yard, in direct competition with Mrs. Markowitz's Virgin. My mother had electric candles in all the windows and a wreath on the front door.

"Holy crap," Diesel said. "This is a car crash."

I had to agree with him. The houses were fascinating in their awfulness. Even worse, they were a comfort. They'd looked exactly like this for as long as I could remember. I couldn't imagine them looking any other way. When I was fourteen Mrs. Markowitz's Virgin had gotten beaned with a baseball and some of her head had chipped away, but that didn't stop the Virgin from blessing the house. She stood stalwart through wind and rain and sleet and storm with a chipped head. Just as Santa faded and dented but returned each year.

Grandma Mazur was behind my parents' glass storm door, looking out at us. Grandma Mazur lives with my parents now that Grampa Mazur's eating pork rinds and deep-fried peanut butter sandwiches with Elvis. Grandma Mazur's mostly spindle bone and slack skin. She keeps her gray hair curled tight to her head and carries a .45 long barrel in her purse. The concept of growing old gracefully has never taken hold with Grandma.

Grandma opened the door when I approached with Diesel. "Who's this?" she asked, eyeballing Diesel. "I didn't know you were bringing a new man over. Look at me. I'm not even dressed up. And what about Joseph? What happened to him?"

"Who's Joseph?" Diesel wanted to know.

"He's her boyfriend," Grandma Mazur said. "Joseph Morelli. He's a Trenton cop. He's supposed to be coming over later for dinner on account of it's Sunday."

Diesel grinned down at me. "You didn't tell me you had a boyfriend."

I introduced Diesel to my mom, Grandma Mazur, and my dad.

"What's with men and ponytails?" my father said. "Girls are supposed to have long hair. Men are supposed to have short hair."

"What about Jesus?" Grandma asked. "He had long hair."

"This guy isn't Jesus," my father said. He stuck his hand out to Diesel. "Nice to meet you. What are you, one of them wrestlers or something?"

"No sir, I'm not a wrestler," Diesel said, smiling.

"They're sports entertainers," Grandma said. "Only some of them are real good at wrestling, like Kurt Angle and Lance Storm."

"Lance Storm?" my father said. "What kind of a name is that?"

"It's one of those Canadian names," Grandma said. "He's a cutie, too."

Diesel looked at me and the smile widened. "I love your family."

M
Y SISTER VALERIE CAME IN
from the kitchen. Valerie is recently divorced and penniless and has moved herself and her two lads into my old bedroom. Before the divorce and the move back to Jersey, Valerie was living in southern California where she had limited success at cloning herself into Meg Ryan. Valerie's still got the blond shag. The resilient perkiness dropped out of her somewhere over Kansas on the flight home.

"Dang," Valerie said, taking Diesel in.

Grandma agreed. "He's a pip, isn't he?" she said. "He's a real looker."

Diesel elbowed me in the side. "You see? They like me."

I dragged Diesel into the living room. "They think you've got a nice ass. That's different from liking you. Sit in front of the television. Watch cartoons. Try to find a ball game. Don't talk to anybody."

My mother and grandmother and sister were waiting for me in the kitchen.

"Who is he?" Valerie wanted to know. "He's gorgeous."

"Yeah, and I can tell he's a hottie," Grandma said. "He's got that look in his eye. And I bet he's got a good package."

"He's nobody," I said, trying to push aside thoughts of Diesel's package. "He moved into the building, and he doesn't know anybody, so I've sort of adopted him. He's kind of a charity case."

Valerie got serious. "Is he married?"

"I don't think so, but you don't want him. He's not normal."

"He looks normal."

"Trust me.
He's not your normal guy."

"He's gay, right?"

"Yep. That's it. I think he's gay." Better than telling Valerie that Diesel was a supernatural pain in the behind.

"The gorgeous ones are always gay," Valerie said with a sigh. "It's a rule."

Grandma had a big wad of cookie dough on the table. She rolled it out and then she gave me a star-shaped cookie cutter. "You do the sugar cookies," Grandma said. "I'm going to get Valerie working on the drop cookies."

If I take anything with me when I die it'll be the way my mother's kitchen smells. Coffee brewing in the morning, red cabbage and pot roast steaming the kitchen windows on a cold day in February, a hot apple pie on the counter in September. Sounds corny when I think about it, but the smells are real and as much a part of me as my thumb and my heart. I swear I first smelled pineapple upside-down cake when I was in the womb.

Today the air in my mother's kitchen was heavy with butter cookies baking in the oven. My mom used real butter and real vanilla, and the vanilla scent clung to my skin and hung in my hair. The kitchen was warm and cluttered with women, and I was drunk on butter cookies. It would be a perfect moment, if only there wasn't a space alien sitting in the living room, watching television with my dad.

I stuck my head out the kitchen door and looked through the dining room to Diesel and my dad in the living room. Diesel was standing in front of the Christmas tree — a scrawny, five-foot-tall spruce set into a rickety stand. Four days to Christmas and already the tree was dropping needles. My father had placed a green and silver foil star at the balding top of the tree. The rest of the tree was ringed with colored twinkle lights and decorated with an assortment of ornaments collected over the lifetime of my parents' marriage. The rickety stand was wrapped in white cotton batting that was supposed to resemble snow. A village of aging cardboard houses had been assembled on the cotton batting.

Valerie's kids, nine-year-old Angie and seven-year-old Mary Alice, had finished the tree off with gobs of tinsel. Angie is the perfect child and is often mistaken for a very short forty-year-old woman. Mary Alice has had a longstanding identity problem and is usually convinced she's a horse.

"Nice tree," Diesel said.

My father concentrated on the television screen. My father knew a loser tree when he saw one and this was no prizewinner. He'd cheaped out, as usual, and he'd gotten the tree from Andy at the Mobil station. Andy's trees always looked like they were grown next to a nuclear power plant.

Mary Alice and Angie had been watching television with my father. Mary Alice tore her attention away from the screen and looked up at Diesel. "Who are you?" she asked.

"My name's Diesel," he said. "Who are you?"

"I'm Mary Alice, and I'm a beautiful palomino. And that's my sister Angie. She's just a girl."

"You aren't a palomino," Angie said. "Palominos have golden hair, and you have brown hair."

"I can be a palomino if I want to," Mary Alice said.

"Can not."

"Can too."

"Can not."

I closed the kitchen door and returned to the cookie cutting. "There's a toy store in the Price Cutter strip mall in Hamilton Township," I said to my mother and grandmother. "Do either of you know anything about it?"

"I never saw a toy store there," Grandma said, "but I was shopping with Tootie Frick last week, and we saw a store with a toy soldier on the door. I tried the door, but it was locked, and there weren't any lights on inside. I asked someone about it and he said the store was haunted. He said last week there was an electrical storm
inside
the store, with thunder and everything."

I transferred a raw cookie-dough star from the table to the cookie sheet. "I don't know about the haunted part, but the place is supposed to be a toy store. The guy who owns it has failed to appear for a court date, and I haven't been able to find him. Supposedly he makes some of his own toys, and he has a workshop somewhere, but I haven't been able to get an address for the workshop."

When the bail bonds office opened tomorrow morning I'd have Connie, the office manager, run a cyber search on Claws. I could also check to see if Claws was on the books for electric and water at a location other than his house and his store.

"You're gonna have to pick the pace up here," Grandma said. "We still got to put the frosting on these cookies. And we got the filled cookies to make yet. And the cream cheese snowballs. I can't be doing this all day because I gotta go to a viewing tonight. Lenny Jelinek is laid out. He was a member of the Moose lodge, and you know what that means."

My mother and I looked at Grandma. We were clueless.

"I give up," my mother said. "What does that mean?"

"There's always a crowd when there's a Moose laid out. Lots of men. Easy pickings, if you're in the market for a studmuffin."

My mother was mixing cookie dough in a big bowl. She looked up, spoon in hand, and a glob of dough slid off the spoon and plopped onto the floor. "Studmuffin?"

"Of course, I've already got my studmuffin all picked out," Grandma said. "I met him at Harry Farfel's viewing, week before last. It was a real romantic meeting. My studmuffin just moved into the area. He was driving around, trying to find a business associate, and he got lost. So he went into Stiva's Funeral Parlor to ask for directions, and he bumped right into me. He said he bumped into me on account of he has vision problems, but I knew it was fate. All the little hairs on my arm stood up the second he knocked me down. Can you imagine? And now we're practically going steady. He's a real honey. He's a good kisser, too. Makes my lips tingle!"

"You never said anything," my mother said.

"I didn't want to make a fuss, what with Christmas on top of us."

I thought it was sort of cool that Grandma had a studmuffin, but I didn't really want a mental image of Grandma and the good kisser. Last time Grandma brought a man home to dinner he took his glass eye out at the table and set it alongside his spoon while he ate.

I had some success at eliminating senior studmuffin thoughts. I was having less success at eliminating thoughts of Diesel. I was worried he was in the living room deciding who in my family should be beamed up to the mothership. Or maybe he wasn't an alien. What then? Maybe he was Satan. Except, he didn't smell like fire and brimstone. His scent was more
yum.
Okay, probably he wasn't Satan. I went to the kitchen door and did another look out.

The kids were on the floor, transfixed by the television. My father was in his chair, sleeping. No Diesel. "Hey," I shouted to Angie. "Where's Diesel?"

Angie shrugged. Mary Alice looked around at me and also shrugged.

"Dad," I shouted. "Where'd Diesel go?"

My dad opened one eye. "Out. He said he'd be back by dinnertime."

Out? As in
out for a walk?
Or out as in
out of body?
I looked up to the ceiling, hoping Diesel wasn't hovering above us like the Ghost of Christmas Past. "Did he say where he was going?"

"Nope. Just said he'd be back." My father's eyes closed. End of conversation.

I suddenly had a scary thought. I ran to the front foyer with the spatula still in my hand. I looked out the front door and my heart momentarily stopped. The CRV was gone. He took my car. "Damn, damn, damn!" I went outside to the sidewalk and looked up and down the street. "Diesel!" I yelled.
"Deeezel!"
No response. Big deal Man of Mysterious Talents can open doors but can't hear me calling him.

"I just got to thinking about today's paper," Grandma said when I returned to the kitchen. "I was looking at the want ads this morning, thinking I could use a job if the right thing turned up... like being a bar singer. Anyway, I didn't see any ads for bar singers, but there was an ad in there for toy makers. It was worded real cute, too. It said they were looking for elves."

The paper was on the floor beside my father's chair. I found the paper and read through the want ads. Sure enough, there was an ad for toy makers. Elves preferred. A phone number was given. Applicants were told to ask for Lester.

I dialed the number and got Lester on the second ring.