SYLER MCKNIGHT: A Holiday Tale

by Brent, Cora

  SYLER MCKNIGHT

  A Holiday Tale

  Cora Brent

  Contents

  Also By Cora Brent:

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  1. Life is a Bicycle

  2. Bath Bombs Away

  3. Land Of Gingerbread and Supermodels

  4. Spirit Killers and Other Creeps

  5. The God of Flannel

  6. When Vultures Call

  7. THAT NIGHT, Part 1

  8. The Wisdom of the World’s Oldest Chicken

  9. Snickerdoodle Failures

  10. THAT NIGHT, Part 2

  11. Arctic Circle Bliss

  12. Talented Hands

  13. Chasing Beansy

  14. Those Aren’t the Words to Silent Night

  15. Ryland’s Rocks

  16. Wolves and Giraffes

  17. Pancakes and Important Work

  18. The King of Heartfelt Monologues

  19. Thirty Candles

  20. The Best Place To Be

  Epilogue

  Author Note

  Also By Cora Brent:

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  Also By Cora Brent:

  Gentry Boys Box Set Books 1-4

  GENTRY BOYS (Books 1-4)

  Gentry Boys Series

  DRAW (Saylor and Cord)

  RISK (Creed and Truly)

  GAME (Chase and Stephanie)

  FALL (Deck and Jenny)

  HOLD

  CROSS (A Novella)

  WALK (Stone and Evie)

  EDGE (Conway and Roslyn)

  SNOW (A Christmas Story)

  Gentry Generations

  (A Gentry family spinoff series)

  STRIKE (Cami and Dalton)

  TURN (Cassie and Curtis)

  KEEP (A Novella)

  TEST (Derek and Paige)

  CLASH (Kellan and Taylor)

  The Ruins of Emblem

  TRISTAN (Cadence and Tristan)

  JEDSON (Ryan and Leah)

  LANDON (TBR 2020)

  Worked Up

  FIRED

  NAILED

  Stand Alones

  UNRULY

  IN THIS LIFE

  HICKEY

  THE HERMIT

  Please respect the work of this author. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without permission. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Any similarity to events or situations is also coincidental.

  The publisher and author acknowledge the trademark status and trademark ownership of all trademarks and locations mentioned in this book. Trademarks and locations are not sponsored or endorsed by trademark owners.

  © 2019 by Cora Brent

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover: Wicked by Design

  Created with Vellum

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  1

  Life is a Bicycle

  Syler

  I was balls deep in this garbage, teetering on the edge of a deadline and not tolerating distractions. There was a very short list of callers who deserved my attention under these circumstances.

  My sister was on that list but Gemma never called on Saturday afternoons. As a busy mother of four, her weekends were a cyclone of soccer games and Costco outings and rummage sale management. So the instant I heard her ring tone I dove for the phone while balancing my keyboard on one knee.

  “Hey, Gem.” My attention was divided between the phone and the screen where tedious lines of code were stacked like crooked bricks.

  She coughed. Or sniffed. The sound was muffled. “Hi there, little brother,” she said in a shaky voice that grabbed my full attention.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  Because something was definitely wrong. Gemma didn’t veer between emotional outbursts. She was so steady and unruffled she was practically preternatural. She smiled with serene sympathy when her ass hat of a husband steered his ride-on lawnmower into a duck pond. She applauded her youngest son’s creativity when the kid engineered a mud mountain atop the hundred-year-old oak floors in the parlor.

  On the other end of the line there was more sniffing. The distinctive honk of a nose being blown. “Syler, I have to tell you something bad.”

  A lightning bolt of horror sliced through me. “Is it the kids?”

  “No, no,” she assured me quickly. “The kids are all fine.”

  I exhaled with relief. My nieces and nephews collectively owned my heart. “So what’s up?”

  The sigh of despair was an unfamiliar sound from Gemma McKnight Reese. “Russell left me this morning.”

  The mere mention of my sister’s husband raised my hackles. Not that the guy was a complete monster. To my knowledge Russell didn’t get high or beat anyone up. But that was about as much praise as he deserved. Russell Reese’s problem was that he’d peaked at age eighteen. Adulthood was a disappointment. Something to be waded through while his gut thickened and his wife performed all the heavy lifting. I’d lost count of the times I’d gritted my teeth as he gave his kids the brush off or barked at my sister for something stupid like failing to buy him the right flavor corn nuts. My approach to my brother-in-law was to interact with him as little as possible and pretend he was a bad humored sitcom character who would eventually get what’s coming to him.

  And now, for all the times I’d restrained my urge to haul Russell Reese into a headlock, I suddenly hoped he was better than I always thought he was.

  I spoke slowly. “What do you mean Russell left you?”

  Sniff. Sniff. Hiccup. Sniff. “He was cheating on me.”

  “That motherfucker!”

  Gemma could hardly get the words out. “I was totally blindsided, Sy. I mean, sure we had our problems but I truly had no idea. How could I have been so clueless?”

  “Russell fucking cheated on you?”

  “Russell freaking cheated on me.”

  Even in the midst of desperation Gemma couldn’t quite bring herself to drop the full F bomb. She’d always been an ‘Oh my goodness’ kind of girl.

  “Apparently it’s been going on since the Fourth of July town picnic. This is like a bad dream. My husband left me for the high school principal. I can’t believe this is really happening.”

  I couldn’t believe this was really happening either. During my years at Maple Springs High the principal was a squat, thick-chested man in his fifties who suffered from severe psoriasis and was obsessed with pirate culture. His cramped office smelled like urinal cakes and he was nicknamed Looney Rooney. While Russell was a shit person of the first order, I had to assume his tastes hadn’t fallen quite as far as Looney Rooney. I’d graduated a decade ago. There must be a different principal now, not that it mattered. Russell was still trash.

  My anger was rising by the second and my right hand closed into a tight fist. “Where the hell is he right now?”

  Gemma took a deep breath. “He loaded up his truck before dawn and sped out of here before the kids woke up. They’re moving to Syracuse. The two of them. Ophelia got a job there at the university. ”

  That was
one mystery solved. Maple Springs wasn’t a huge town and Ophelia had to be Ophelia Benoit, heiress to the Benoit Bakery on Union Avenue. I remembered her as a hyper-enthusiastic guidance counselor who bounced around the school hallways in cherry red high heels, handed out chocolate bars to her ass kissing disciples and coached the lethargic cheerleading squad to last place in the state championships. Apparently she’d been promoted since then. There’d always been something about her apple-cheeked optimism that struck me as phony, although I’d scoffed when my football teammate Ben Crain claimed they’d performed horizontal acrobatics in the bed of his father’s rusty pickup truck after the senior year homecoming dance. Now I wondered if I owed Ben Crain an apology for calling him a bullshit king with back acne.

  None of that information was useful to this conversation. I opted to keep it to myself.

  “Gem, I’m so sorry,” I said, wishing I had something more insightful to offer in the face of my sister’s anguish over her husband’s abandonment. Something like ‘I knew he was a son of a bitch when he used to fake leg cramps to get out of tackle practice in high school,’ probably wouldn’t be valuable right now.

  Gemma was valiantly trying not to cry. “This just feels so unreal. And I still have to tell the kids. Russell was too much of a coward. He wouldn’t even leave a note for them. He said I should tell them to call his cell phone if they had any questions. Can you believe that? But Chloe already knows something’s up. She noticed his NASCAR glass collection was gone this morning. They’ll all be home from school in a few hours and I’ll have no choice but to level with them. I don’t understand why he couldn’t have at least waited until Christmas.”

  My heart hurt to think of my nieces and nephews running through the front door of the old house all full of holiday excitement, only to be crushed by the news that their father had deserted the family to go chase a pair of red heels to Syracuse.

  Even worse, this news was destined to be the biggest Maple Springs scandal ever. The high school principal runs off with the former prom king. It’s the stuff small town gossip is made from. Tongues would wag. Rumors would fly. The annual cookie exchange and the Christmas carol procession might wind up being cancelled thanks to the fallout.

  At the center of that maelstrom would be Gemma and the kids.

  “What can I do?” I asked my sister. “Tell me what you need.”

  I wasn’t a violent guy but if she said the word I’d happily track down Russell Reese’s saggy ass and drop kick it into the depths of the Adirondack Mountains.

  More sniffing. “Thanks, Sy. I don’t know what I need. I don’t even know what to do right now. But can you please not say anything to The Units or to Ryland? I’m just not ready to handle all the scientific inquiries yet.”

  I didn’t think it was strange that Gemma had yet to call our parents. They were renowned scientists who’d long been affectionately nicknamed The Units by their neglected children. At present they were rumored to be in the Arctic Circle conducting Important Work. We’d always known that Important Work triumphed over all other obligations, including parenthood, and so as kids it made sense when our long stays at our grandparents’ home in upstate New York transitioned to a permanent arrangement.

  Meanwhile, our older brother Ryland was a genius geologist who could now easily brag about Important Work of his own if Ry was at all inclined to brag. If memory served, then right now he was doing something in the South Dakota Badlands that had earned him a segment on a future Discovery Channel special. Ryland was a great guy. People just weren’t his thing. He preferred rocks. Ryland might have the right idea.

  As for Gemma and me, we stuck together in part because we were failures by McKnight standards. At the age of twenty she’d abandoned her pre-med dreams to marry small town meathead Russell Reese and take over our grandmother’s established gourmet jam business.

  But I had that legacy beat, dropping out of college after junior year to launch a digital gaming platform that soared to stratospheric recognition until a creative dispute blew the arrangement to smithereens. The fact that my former business partner then launched a self help movement depicting me as the villainous crusher of all hopes and dreams was just icing on the cake.

  But such is life. One day you’re on a path to becoming a Silicon Valley titan. And the next you’re making ends meet as a freelance code expert in a dubious Philadelphia neighborhood and hoping that the angry red bearded gentleman who likes to stand on the street corner and moon passing traffic doesn’t notice you today.

  “I’ll keep my mouth shut,” I promised my sister, a promise that wouldn’t be tough to keep since the other McKnights only surfaced from Important Work once or twice a season.

  “Thanks.” There was a long pause. “I guess I need a lawyer.”

  “I will browse my vast network of contacts and see if any names pop out.”

  Finally, a snort of laughter. “You have lawyer friends?”

  “I have lawyer enemies. Kind of the same thing.”

  “I’ll take all the help I can get.”

  I had no natural gift for pep talks. I dug through my layers of cynicism and found something positive to say. “Chin up, big sister. You’ll get through this.”

  “I hope so.”

  “I know so. And I’m always available for a spontaneous trip to Syracuse.”

  “Why would you go to Syracuse?”

  “To flex my muscles. I can bench press three fifty without breaking a sweat. Russell might find that appropriately terrifying.”

  Gemma mulled the idea over. “He probably would. A few weeks ago he hurt his back while taking out the garbage.”

  “Figures.”

  “And last year when he decided to run the Maple Springs Five K Marathon he dropped to his knees halfway through and pretended to have an asthma attack. He doesn’t even have asthma.”

  “What a jerk.” The word ‘jerk’ was woefully inadequate but I was keeping a lid on my profanity for Gemma’s sake.

  She dragged out a long, shuddering sigh. “Look, I know you never liked Russell even back when we were in high school. And I’m painfully aware that our marriage had been on the rocks for years. But the kids…” Her voice cracked again.

  “The kids have you,” I assured her. “There’s no better mother than you. And Uncle Syler will always be happy to serve as backup.”

  “You’re still coming up here next week for Christmas, right?”

  “I could leave sooner.”

  “No, don’t to that. You shouldn’t need to run back to Maple Springs just to hand tissues to your disaster of a sister. I’ll be all right, Sy. And you’ve got your own life to live.”

  I glanced around my solitary studio apartment quarters. The plain walls were grey, the furniture minimal and the only cheerful objects in sight were the school photos of Gemma’s kids that had been taped to the fridge. I had few friends, I’d screwed up any relationship that lasted for longer than two weeks and my favorite dinner was cold chili eaten directly from the can. Nobody would accuse me of living the dream here in anonymous urban hibernation.

  I flashed back to the creaking old Victorian house where I’d spent my rambunctious but happy teenage years, where the walls were painted butter yellow and antique cross stitch projects complete with motivational sayings like ‘Keep moving on the bicycle of life’ hung wherever you looked. Gemma had kept it much the same as it had been when our grandparents were alive.

  Gemma took my silence for agreement. “You were in the middle of working, weren’t you? I’m sorry. We can talk later.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s nothing more important going on than this. And I wasn’t working at all.”

  “Hmmm. So you weren’t sitting there in one of your infamous red flannel shirts and staring at your computer screen with hypnotic fascination?”

  I glanced down at the guilty red flannel shirt. “What the hell? Do you have a camera on me?”

  “No. It’s just that after a lifetime of being your sister
I’ve caught on to your quirks. But I really should go. I need to think about what I’m going to say to the kids when they get home. And first I need to give Katrina a call to see if she’s all right and catch her up on the news.”

  Katrina.

  Never was one name so simultaneously electrifying and exasperating.

  It was typical of selfless Gemma to be worried about everyone else on a day when her own life was falling apart. Still, my curiosity skyrocketed. Even after all these years my sister’s best friend had an unshakable hold over me.

  “What kind of mess did Katrina get herself into now?”

  If Gemma was the icon of patient understanding then Katrina Feldman was the princess of everlasting chaos. To my knowledge she was no different as an adult than she’d been as a teenager, careening between relationship blunders and temperamental spectacles. She was loud and she was feisty and she was exhausting and in my mind she reigned supreme as the queen of my best filthy fantasies. However, I was very good at pretending otherwise so Gemma had no idea.

  My sister was surprised. “You don’t know about Katrina?”

  “Curiously, I’m not in the habit of calling your volatile best friend for gossip fests.”