The night he’d proposed to her, Sarah told Dave she would marry him under three conditions.
“First, you must always love me, forever and ever. Even though I can be a real butthead sometimes.”
“Agreed.”
“What, that I can be a real butthead sometimes? Or that you agree to always love me?”
“Well, both, actually.”
“Okay. Second, you must always be faithful to me. Without exception. And remember that if you’re ever not faithful I’ll turn you into a unicorn.”
“You mean a eunuch.”
“Okay, that too.”
“Well, since I will never be unfaithful to you, I have nothing to fear. So yes, I agree. What’s the third condition?”
“You must always let me have my way. Always, without exception.”
“Well, now, that’s a toughie. What if you happen to be in one your butthead moments and want something, but you’re completely wrong? Do you still want me to let you have your way?”
“You’re speaking hypothetically, right? Because I’m never ever wrong.”
“Even when you’re a butthead?”
“Especially when I’m a butthead.”
“Okay, then. It’s a hypothetical question. Even though we know you’re never wrong, if you ever are, should I let you have your way?”
“Then you have to make a choice. Either you give me my way and then suffer my wrath for letting me get myself into trouble. Or you don’t give me my way and suffer my wrath for not giving me my way. It’s a simple choice, really. Cyanide or arsenic. A blade or a bullet. How hard can it be, really?”
She smiled sweetly at him and batted her eyes, making it impossible not to laugh.
“I’ll tell you what,” he offered. “You’ve always said I was your knight in shining armor, right?”
“Don’t forget the big white horse.”
“Okay, I’m your knight in shining armor on a big white horse.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So a knight in shining armor should be someone you can trust, right?”
“Big white horse…”
“So a knight in shining armor on a big white horse should be someone you can trust, right?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So you should trust me to help you out if, say, you are making a choice… which is right at the time, because of course you always make the right choices. But let’s say that I have inside information that makes me know the decision you’re making will come back and bite you. Wouldn’t it be my knightly duty to rescue you by not letting you make that decision?”
“Maybe. What kind of inside information?”
“Inside information that only knights in shining armor on big white horses are allowed to know.”
“Well, I guess then it might be okay.”
“Then I agree with your third demand as well. So, you’ll marry me now?”
“Sure. Why not?”
He kissed her, and then asked, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure.”
“If we’re married for a million years, are you still going to make things this difficult for me?”
“Yep.”
“Okay. Thanks for letting me know.”
Dave found himself smiling after reliving the memory of that night, fifteen years before.
He was officially out of his funk.
-40-
Sarah’s first test of Dave’s loyalty, and his first chance to perform as her knight in shining armor, came just a couple of days after his proposal.
It was the first week of December and they were planning their first Christmas together, shacking up in Dave’s apartment.
“I want a Christmas tree.”
“Okay. We’ll go by K-Mart. I think they have them on sale.”
“No. A real Christmas tree.”
“But they shed needles and are hard to dispose of.”
“I don’t care. I want a real tree.”
She looked him in the eye.
“Or I’ll turn into Frosty the Snowman until after Christmas.”
He caught her icy drift, and gave in to her. An hour later they were headed out to a local lot that sold fir trees trucked in from two hundred miles away.
And so began the tradition of having a real Christmas tree in the Speer house. It had been that way every year since.
This year, though, Dave had no choice but to break from tradition. There were simply no fir or pine trees small enough to fit in his safe room, or his house, for that matter. Not unless he hiked for fifty miles into the hill country west of San Antonio and dragged one back by hand.
He was thinking that Sarah would probably forgive him, under the circumstances, for taking a shortcut.
The shortcut in this case meant using the tiny artificial tree that Sarah put in her classroom at the elementary school.
It was about three feet tall and she placed it in the corner of the room every year. She always put minimal decorations on it, and a star on top. She told her students that they were free to put things on it to decorate it if they wanted to, but they were certainly under no obligation. Someone asked her, “Is that a holiday tree?”
She told them, “Nope. It’s a Christmas tree.”
Dave had cringed when she’d told him that.
“Now the haters will be coming after you,” he’d said. “It’ll be all over the newspapers, and you’ll get suspended, and they’ll probably picket the school and demand you be fired.”
But none of that had happened. Most of the children embraced the tree, and several made crayon decorations for it.
“You see,” Sarah had told him. “Children are a lot more tolerant of others’ religions and beliefs than are grownups. It’s usually parents and outside instigators who take a nice tradition and turn it into something profane and ugly.”
Box by box, Dave searched for the tree. Finally he found it in a large plastic tub marked “Halloween decorations.” He shook his head and made a mental note to give Sarah a hard time about that the next time he wrote her.
Then he noticed it was his writing on the box, and decided to keep it to himself.
He went through the Christmas ornaments and selected the ones that contained photos of the girls. It was another holiday tradition they’d started when Lindsey was born. Each year they took photos of each of the girls and placed them in small ornaments specially made to hold photos.
Their intent was to continue the practice until each of the girls moved out on their own, and then to give them their ornaments to decorate their own trees.
“If you keep it going with your own children,” Sarah told them, “it can be a lot of fun. Your children will be able to see what you looked like as you grew up, and you can be reminded of their earlier years as well.”
Unfortunately, this year there would be no new photographs and no new ornaments.
But it was what it was. When Dave finally got everything downstairs and set up in his safe room, his disposition had turned around a hundred and eighty degrees.
But as he looked at the tree, it seemed rather bare.
It definitely needed something.
Sarah had insisted they keep packets of microwave popcorn in their dry stock, to provide an occasional treat for her and the girls after the lights went out. Dave wasn’t a fan of popcorn himself, but he had to admit it was a lot of fun making popcorn garland with the girls each year.
So he popped a bag, ate half of it so it wouldn’t go to waste, and used the other half to thread about five feet of garland.
That wasted an hour.
He retrieved a large package of trail mix from the dry stock hidden in the wall in Lindsey’s bedroom. It took him awhile to find the one he was looking for, since they had made several different varieties of the stuff.
The favorite one, for everyone in the family, had miniature marshmallows and M&Ms. That was the one he was looking for.
He wasted another hour munching on the trail mix as he picked out the marshma
llows and threaded them into another garland.
He wasn’t a big marshmallow fan, although even he admitted they added significantly to the taste of the trail mix. He tasted one of them and noted they were already slightly stale. After being on the tree for a week or two, they’d be even more so. But he knew that when the day came to take down the tree, he’d hold his breath and his nose and eat the popcorn and marshmallows from the garland. Because food was much too precious to waste.
Using the needle and thread gave Dave an idea for another project. But he’d do it later. Now it was time to relax.
He checked the calendar again and noticed for the first time it was Christmas Eve.
When he went to bed he knelt down on his knees and prayed.
“Lord, thank you for showing me that I’ve got a lot more to be thankful for than to be sorry about. I trust in you to keep my family alive and well until I can get to them and bring them back home where they belong. Thank you for watching over me as well, Lord. I know I’m not deserving. I’ve done some very bad things of late. I can only imagine that you’ve spared me because you have a mission for me to do. I won’t let you down again. Amen.”
Dave spent Christmas day watching home movies, of all fifteen of his Christmases together with his family. He ran the generator all night long, and finally drifted off to sleep during the last video, from the previous year.
In a way, he got to spend the holiday with his family after all.
-41-
After the holidays were done Dave put aside his project of sorting all of Sarah’s internet research for a couple of days to work another project. This one was a little more pressing.
One of Dave’s hobbies as a kid was curing animal hides. He’d learned how to hunt with his grandfather as a young boy, and was taught never to let anything go to waste.
“Don’t ever shoot anything you can’t eat,” his grandpa had told him. Killing for the sake of killing is a sin in God’s eyes, be it man or beast. Killing for sustenance, on the other hand, is part of nature’s plan.
His grandpa was part Cherokee Indian. Only a small part. But he had enough Cherokee blood in his body to want to carry on some of the Native American traditions.
“The Indians used every part of the animals they killed. What they couldn’t use for food or clothing or tools, they used for fertilizer. If you’re going to kill one of God’s creatures, at least give it the dignity of having its death be worth something.”
When he was twelve and a Boy Scout, he got his first rifle. It was only a .22 caliber starter rifle, but he loved that thing so much he slept with it at night.
Unloaded, of course.
Little Davie, as everyone had called him back then, was a great shot, and was soon bringing home rabbits and squirrels.
As his grandfather had taught him, he always presented the meat to his mom. She liked the taste of neither, but she was a trooper, and made rabbit or squirrel stew occasionally for the men in the family.
So that the furs wouldn’t go to waste, Dave learned how to cure them. He cut the squirrel pelts into pieces and made toys for his friends by buying small plastic figurines of animals at a hobby store and gluing the fur to them.
His first efforts at the toys weren’t much to look at, but he got better with time. Eventually his friends all had shelves in their rooms which displayed Davie’s little works of art: tiny bears, wolves, coyotes and foxes. And, of course, rabbits and squirrels.
Little Davie used the rabbit pelts to make mittens and gloves for his family and friends. After a few decidedly ugly attempts, he got quite good at it, and his works were in great demand among his friends.
The mittens Little Davie had made were fur-lined on the inside as well as the outside. His grandmother told him she’d never seen such mittens in all her years, and she liked them because they kept her hands “warm as biscuits” no matter what the temperature.
His grandfather used a less delicate version of the mittens’ insulating abilities by saying, “They make your hands sweat even when it’s a hundred below outside.”
But he appreciated them nonetheless.
Dave hadn’t made them since he was fifteen or sixteen years old, but he still remembered how. And when he and Sarah decided to include rabbits as part of their disaster preparations, he bought all the supplies he needed to pick up the hobby again.
In one corner of the garage was the salt and borax and other materials he needed to cure the furs. He also had patterns for the gloves and mittens, sturdy needles and thread, Exact-o knives and a pair of scissors specially designed to cut thick fur.
And in a box beside it were all the rabbit furs from the animals he’d killed since the blackout started.
He’d been planning on making rabbit fur coats for Sarah and each of the girls once he had enough furs. But those could wait until next winter, since the girls wouldn’t be back before then anyway.
He went to the garage and lugged the two boxes into the safe room, where he went through the furs, trying to find ones that were good quality and similar in color. It just wouldn’t do to have a left hand that was brown and a right hand that was gray.
The inside of the mittens didn’t matter quite so much. Also, no one would notice slight imperfections if they were on the inside. So selecting the furs for the inside was much easier.
Once he selected his furs, he selected the appropriate patterns and pinned them to the furs, one at a time. Then he very carefully cut the fur around the patterns. When he was finished he had eight pieces on the bed beside him, four considerably larger than the others.
Then it was simply a matter of carefully sewing the pieces together, tying off the ends of the coarse thread so it didn’t poke the hands inside the mittens, and trimming off the excess edges of the fur.
The last step was to turn each mitten inside out, effectively hiding the seam.
It didn’t take Dave long before he realized that he’d forgotten a very important item. After he pushed the needle through the rabbit’s hide a few times, his right thumb started to develop a blister.
“Darn it!” he said aloud.
He’d forgotten to pack a thimble.
Now, a lot of husbands would have merely gone to their wife’s sewing kit in hopes of finding a thimble large enough to fit over their thumb.
But Sarah wasn’t a seamstress.
Sarah’s idea of repairing a loose hem or missing button was throwing the garment in the nearest Goodwill collection box and heading to the store for a replacement.
That habit had frustrated Dave in the past, because he considered himself thrifty. Sarah considered him cheap. But it all boiled down to the same thing.
“That’s the way I was raised,” Sarah would tell him. “So it’s not my fault. My grandmother had an old Singer sewing machine that she willed to my mom. Mom made a planter out of it.
“That’s what we did in my family. We planted things. We didn’t sew. So sue me if you want, but I am the way I am. So deal with it, Bucko.
“And by the way, if you’re going to sue me, you’ll have to wait until I get back. I’m headed out to Kohl’s.”
The memory brought a smile to Dave’s face, and he even chuckled.
With no thimble available, he did the next best thing by tearing off a piece of duct tape and wrapping it around his thumb four times.
Problem solved.
-42-
A few nights later, Dave carefully approached the Woodards’ front porch. He’d waited for several days hoping for a break in the cold. And in fact, it had gone above twenty degrees two nights in a row. He was hoping it would go higher, but it dropped again instead.
He had no doubt that the weather gods were laughing at him and saying, “You should have gone when you had the chance, bonehead.”
It was just after ten p.m. and he was hoping his friends were still up.
He rapped on the door.
“Frank! Eva! Are you awake? It’s Dave.”
He heard shuffling in the house a
lmost immediately.
From the other side of the door he heard, “Just a minute, Dave. Eva’s looking for her housecoat.”
A few seconds later the door opened, and Frank, dressed on flannel pajamas and a thick robe, stepped aside to let him enter.
Dave looked down at the pink bunny slippers on Frank’s feet.
“Don’t ask,” Frank said. “It was a joke gift from a friend with a weird sense of humor. But they’re damned warm, so I don’t much care how they look.”
“How are you, my friend?”
“I’m fine, Dave. And how are you doing?”
“Oh, you know. I’ve been better. But I’ve been worse too. I’m still counting the days.”
From the kitchen came another voice.
“Hello, Dave. Get comfortable. I’m going to heat us up some coffee.”
Then the unmistakable sound of the generator being fired up in the garage.
“Thank you, Eva. Sounds good.”
Frank led his friend into the living room and they sat down in front of the fire. Dave noticed that the mattress the couple slept on in front of the fire was leaning up against the wall.
“Does this mean I caught you before you went to bed this time?”
“Yes. Your timing is getting better. We were starting to wind down, and would have been in bed in another half hour or so. But…”
Eva walked out of the kitchen and finished his sentence for him.
“…but we’d much rather visit with a friend and find out what you’ve been up to.”
“Oh, the usual. Just trying to find enough stuff to keep me busy, and counting down the days until this blasted winter is over with.”
Frank said, “One of the neighbors collects copies of the Farmer’s Almanac, dating back into the 1800s. He says this is the worst winter on record for San Antonio.”
Dave chuckled.
“Yeah, I kinda thought that might be the case.”
Eva sat down on an easy chair.
She turned to Dave.
“We worried about you on Christmas day, home alone all by yourself. Did you get through it okay?”
An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2) Page 15