Three

by McMan, Ann;

  “There is a god after all,” I quipped.

  “Yo, Diz. I’m really sorry about bringing her along, too.” Marty was scooping up the paper birds his kids had flung around the room. “But we couldn’t leave her at home alone.”

  “It’s okay, Marty.”

  “I mean, the last time we tried that, she ate nine of those jumbo-sized boxes of Fruity Pebbles.”

  I held up a palm. “It’s really okay, Marty.”

  “Sheila got them on sale at Costco.”

  “Marty . . .”

  “Sadie shit a rainbow for a week.”

  “It’s really okay, Marty. You can stop apologizing.”

  The front door banged open, and Christa and Sheila walked in.

  I sighed and leaned into Clarissa. “Why don’t we just take that damn thing off its hinges?”

  “My, god. It’s practically whiteout conditions out there.” Sheila was carrying a stack of board games. “Where do you want me to plant the munchkins?”

  Frank stood up. “I’m on it. Let me take them to Diz’s office.” He turned around and addressed the kids. “Come on, you scalawags. Let’s go play some cutthroat Candyland.”

  Sheila looked at him gratefully. “You’re a saint, Father Frank.”

  Frank winked at her. “From your mouth to god’s ear, Sister Sheila.” He took off with the three boys in tow. I noticed that Marty passed him the bottle of bright pink pills.

  “They usually don’t make it past Gum Drop Mountain, if you get my drift,” he whispered.

  Frank shook the bottle like a rattle. “Who wants some chocolate milk?”

  “We do!” the kids screamed in unison.

  “Where should I put the Stollen?” Christa was holding a cookie sheet covered with a striped dishtowel.

  Bernard jerked a thumb toward the kitchen. “Someplace high.”

  Christa looked down at the two swaying canines.

  “Ya, well it looks like the Stollen won’t be the only thing high around here.” She looked up at Bernard. “What’s wrong with the Hündinnen?”

  “It’s complicated,” Bernard explained.

  “They’re drunk.” My dad emerged from the kitchen. “Christa, meet Clarissa’s father, Bernie Wiley. The lovely woman on the sofa is his wife, Elspeth.” He pointed down at Maris. “This is their prized Whippet, Maris.”

  Christa looked back and forth between Maris and Elspeth. “Mein, gott. Weibliche Zwillinge.”

  Bernard chuckled. “I think these two need to lie down.”

  He crossed to the fireplace. The two dogs staggered along beside him. Elspeth jumped up and spread Maris’s gray fleece blanket out in front of the hearth. Sadie and Maris collapsed on top of it, wrapped around each other like Chinese nesting dolls.

  “They do look pretty happy,” Elspeth observed. “Maybe Dr. Finklestein was right about immersion therapy . . .”

  Dad clapped his hands together. “All the food is ready. How about we fix our plates and eat in here by the fire?”

  “Shouldn’t we wait for the other guests to arrive?” I asked.

  “There aren’t any other guests.” Clarissa looked at me. “Everyone we invited is here.”

  “What are you talking about?” I was confused. “You said you were inviting twenty other people?”

  She shook her head.

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I know you don’t. I wanted this to just be a family event, but I knew you’d never agree to it.” She gestured toward the room. “And here they all are.” She smiled at me. “Our blended family.”

  “But the caterers . . .”

  “There are no caterers. I asked your father to do the food.”

  I looked up at Dad. “You knew about this?”

  He nodded. “Sorry for the deception, Dizzo. It was supposed to be a surprise.”

  It was a surprise all right.

  “Well, I, for one, am glad about that.” Bernard emptied his tumbler of eggnog. “I’ve been a fan of Artie’s crab cakes forever.”

  “I was going to ask how you two knew each other.” I felt like I was sleepwalking.

  “Oh, that’s easy. I have my boat worked on at a place in Essex. I found Art’s Back River Crab House years ago.” Bernard looked at his wife. “They’re the best crab cakes on the Eastern shore.”

  Elspeth rolled her eyes. “Now I know why none of your pants fit any more.”

  Dad nodded. “Bernie’s photo is on my wall of shame.”

  Bernie ate one of Dad’s big ones?

  “Did you know about this?” I asked Clarissa.

  “Nope.” She bumped my shoulder. “It’s a Christmas miracle.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Speaking of Christmas miracles . . .” Frank reappeared from the hallway that led to my office. “The three little kings are already passed out.”

  “No way.” Marty pumped a fist in the air. “It usually takes longer than this for the Benadryl to kick in.”

  Sheila looked at him in horror. “Benadryl?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I gave some to Father Frank to help speed things along.”

  “Marty, you asshole.”

  “What?” He held out both hands. “You always do.”

  “Right,” she said. “And I did . . . right before we left home.”

  Marty looked at Frank. “Uh oh.”

  “How many milligrams are the tablets?” Elspeth asked.

  “Twenty-five,” Sheila replied. “I gave them each one.”

  “I gave them each one more,” Frank added.

  Elspeth did a quick calculation. “That’s two times the suggested dosage for children under age twelve, but they appear to be exceptionally . . . well fed. So they should fare just fine. However, I wouldn’t expect them to wake up any time soon.”

  I gave Clarissa a confused look.

  “My mother is an expert on prescription drugs,” she explained.

  “Well, merry Christmas, one and all.” Marty suddenly looked more relaxed than I’d ever seen him. He collapsed into a chair. “Can a fella get anything to drink around here?”

  “Want a beer?” Frank asked.

  “God, yes.”

  “I’m on it. Anyone else?” Frank looked about the room. Heads nodded all around. Even Elspeth timidly raised her hand.

  Clarissa eyed her mother with surprise.

  “What?” Elspeth waved her off. “I like a cold one from time to time.”

  Clarissa leaned into me. “I’m pretty sure I’m having an out-of-body experience.”

  I squeezed her hand. “That makes two of us.”

  Christa walked in from the kitchen. She handed Frank an oversized glass pitcher.

  “Use this. It’ll save you a few trips.”

  “Good idea.” Frank took the pitcher and headed for the back door.

  “How about that food?” Dad clapped his hands together again. “Come on, everyone. Let’s hit the kitchen and fix our plates.”

  Everyone got up and followed Dad and Christa. Clarissa and I stayed behind. We sat for a minute, listening to the clatter of plates and silverware, punctuated by laughter and snippets of light-hearted conversation.

  It the streetlight outside the front windows, we could see the snow coming down harder than ever.

  Maris snorted in her sleep and scrunched in closer to Sadie.

  Vinnie Zummo had finished his set. Mel Torme was now singing “The Christmas Song.”

  Clarissa rested her red head on my shoulder. I wrapped an arm around her.

  “This is what I always wanted,” she muttered.

  “What?” I was tempted to ask if she meant a drug-induced holiday. I wondered if Frank still had that bottle of pink pills handy . . .

  “This,” she said. “A house full of noisy, happy people. Coats piled on the bed. Kids sleeping down the hall.” She kissed me on the neck. “You.”

  I did what I always did when Clarissa kissed me. I forgot about everything else but her. The dogs, the kids, the crab cakes
and cabbage, the winter storm socking us all in—everything receded into the background. Even my burgeoning police record seemed insignificant compared to the heady rush of heat and happiness I experienced when she was this close to me. I hoped it would always be this way for us.

  I smiled into her hair.

  If we could survive a night like this one, I was pretty sure the odds were stacking up in our favor.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “You’d better.” She pushed something into my hand.

  “What’s this?” I looked down at the small, red box.

  “Remember I told you I had one thing to take care of before I came home tonight?”

  I nodded.

  “I took care of it.”

  My heart was pounding. Even though I was pretty sure what the box contained, I was having a hard time taking it in.

  “Is this what I think it is?”

  She shrugged. “It depends.”

  I turned the box over in my shaking hands. “On?”

  “On whether you think it’s the ridiculously plainest, solid platinum ring Cartier ever hammered out. If so, you’d be within spitting distance of right.”

  I was speechless.

  She leaned into me. “It’s legal in Maryland now, you know.”

  I nodded.

  “You wanna try it on and see if it fits?”

  I nodded again. My throat was thick.

  “Diz?”

  I looked at her with my heart in my eyes.

  “Merry Christmas.”

  I leaned in to kiss her, and there was a roar of applause from the kitchen doorway.

  We grinned at each other and touched our foreheads together like the guilty, happy women in love we were. Then we got up and joined our blended family in a curiously epicurean feast that would forever be the stuff of Christmas legend.

  (plus one)

  T’was the Nightmare

  Before Christmas

  It. Wasn’t. My. Fault.

  Somehow, these four words were becoming a leitmotif for me.

  Lately, I’d said them so many times that I considered having them tattooed on my forehead. That way, they could just precede me into every situation where they’d later have relevance.

  But this mess?

  This was one for the record books. If Guinness had a category for “most consecutive Christmas holidays blown completely to smithereens,” I’d be their poster child.

  But did I ever get my day in court? Did I ever get a chance to tell my side of the story? Was I ever regarded as innocent until proven guilty?

  No. Not by the redheaded Lord Chancellor who presided like a thundercloud over every case of Crown v. Gillespie.

  In fact, Clarissa is what they used to call a “hanging judge.” Which means that whenever I get hauled up before her to face charges for some new crime against nature, she just sighs and starts looking around for a sturdy tree limb.

  This time was no exception.

  It all started yesterday when Marty ducked his sweaty head into my cubicle at work, and told me he wasn’t feeling well. I wasn’t really surprised by that announcement. It was our last working day before Christmas, and we’d just had our annual office potluck luncheon where Marty had distinguished himself by ingesting his weight in Vienna sausages and cream-of-something casseroles. It didn’t help matters that those nimrods from the mailroom added so much rum to the bowl of eggnog that it took on the consistency of Kutzit varnish remover.

  It tasted like it, too.

  I managed to exercise more restraint that Marty did, however, and it seemed clear that he was on the verge of paying the price for his excesses.

  “Yo, Diz? I think I’m gonna hurl.”

  “Great.” I said. “You came in here to tell me that?”

  “No. I came in here because I need a ride home.”

  “Now?” I looked down at my desk. I was only halfway through fact-checking Grover Westlake’s diatribe about the proposed development of bike shares, a barge pool and a bridge connecting the east and west sides of the Inner Harbor. It was all part of his year-end “Best of Baltimore” column, and the draft was due back to editorial by three-thirty. “I can’t leave now, man. I gotta finish this article.”

  “Dude.” Marty leaned against the doorway of my cubicle. His face had an odd pallor—vaguely like the color of that eggnog. “I’m not kidding…I think I’m gonna…”

  He clapped a hand to his mouth.

  Oh, Judas.

  I grabbed my trashcan and thrust it toward him. Marty bent over and let it fly. It was pretty impressive. His retching went on and on. As disgusting as it was, I was surprised to notice that the partly ingested casseroles looked just about the same as they all had before the luncheon commenced.

  I was relieved that, for once, I’d listened to Clarissa, and steered clear of any dish that appeared to contain mayonnaise as its primary ingredient.

  Marty had finished his unpleasant errand and dropped down onto a chair.

  “God.” He was wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt.

  “Are you all right?”

  He gave me a miserable look. “Do I look all right?”

  He offered me the trashcan.

  I recoiled. “No thanks. You can keep it.”

  “I need to go home,” he repeated. “You can drive me and drop the van off later.”

  “Right.” I nodded.

  Marty was flying solo this week. His wife, Sheila, was in Michigan, helping her mother convalesce after undergoing emergency quintuple bypass surgery. How Marty was managing on his own to wrangle all three of their kids and that demon dog was beyond me.

  I didn’t want to think too much about it.

  “Let me call upstairs, and we’ll head out.”

  He gave a weary-looking nod and tugged the trashcan closer. I took that as a bad sign.

  Clarissa answered on the first ring.

  “Wylie.”

  “Hey, honey, it’s me.”

  Marty started retching again. I turned away from him and lowered my voice. “I have a bit of a situation down here.”

  “What is that ungodly noise?”

  Clarissa always cut to the chase.

  “It’s Marty.”

  “Of course it is.” She sighed. “What’s wrong?”

  “He’s sick. I need to run him home.”

  “Sick? What kind of sick?”

  I looked over my shoulder at Marty.

  Uh oh.

  “The kind of sick that means if I don’t soon get him outta here, Wylie Magazine Group is gonna have to invest in a butt load of new trashcans.”

  “Oh, god. Okay…go. But don’t forget that dad is dropping Maris off at five-thirty.”

  Maris was her mother’s neurotic whippet. Clarissa’s parents were spending Christmas in Old Quebec this year, which meant we’d be stuck taking care of Maris for the holidays. My parents had already decamped for a weeklong, canasta-thon in Boca. Thank god my mother took her four cats along.

  “I won’t forget,” I assured her. “But right now, I need your help with something.”

  “What is it?” Her voice was tinged with suspicion.

  “My Grover Westlake article is only about two-thirds finished.”

  “When’s it due?”

  I looked at my watch. “In about ninety minutes.”

  She sighed. “Have Susan send it up. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Thanks, baby. See you later.”

  “Diz?” Clarissa asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Take care of Marty, but be sure to douse yourself liberally with Purel before you set foot inside our house.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “I love you.”

  I smiled. Even with the great distraction of Marty, heaving his guts out in the corner behind me, I couldn’t help feeling all the ways her simple declaration filled my world up with light.

  “I love you, too.”

  She hung up.

  I turned around to f
ace Marty. In the sixty seconds I’d been on the phone, he’d gone downhill pretty rapidly. He was sweating profusely and his pallor had gone from gray to green.

  “Can you make it to the parking deck?” I asked.

  He nodded. “But I’m gonna need another one of these.” He indicated the trashcan.

  I grabbed my coat. “We’ll figure something out.”

  By my calculation, Marty threw up at least four more times on the drive home. It was unclear to me whether or not these bouts were what you’d call productive—but it was an impressive performance just the same.

  “Dude?” I asked after the second or third episode. “How many of those Vienna sausages did you eat?”

  We were crawling along East Pratt Street. I had both of the front windows down. It was cold as hell and spitting snow, but without the fresh air blowing through the van’s passenger compartment, the stench would’ve been unbearable.

  Marty groaned and hunched over the hefty bag we snagged from the canteen on our way out of the building.

  Again?

  I don’t want to suggest here that I didn’t care about Marty’s distress. I did. But I guess I had enough of a Puritan streak to believe that he was reaping the rewards of the loutish behavior he’d exhibited by scarfing up so much bad food at the luncheon.

  And, selfishly, I was eager to get on with my own plans for the holiday. For the first time since we’d been together, Clarissa and I were planning a quiet, just us kind of Christmas. That meant no company, no family drama, no storm-of-the-century weather events, no marauding, psychotic dogs, no restraining orders, and, hopefully, no jail time for me.

  Just us. Alone. We’d been planning it for most of the month.

  Well…we’d have Maris. But we had a plan for that…we’d just double up on her doses of puppy Xanax to keep her in a chemically induced state of bliss.

  Yep. We’d be at home together, enjoying our own quiet rendition of a sweeter, simpler, Currier and Ives kind of Christmas.

  Except for the food.

  We’d spent every evening for the last week, pouring over our dog-eared copy of Mastering The Art of French Cooking, looking for exactly the right dish to prepare on Christmas day. And, finally, we found it. Roast goose with a chestnut and prune stuffing, finished with a brandy-based sauce. To drink, we were recreating Paul Child’s signature reverse martini: French vermouth, Dubonet, orange essence and dark rum.