The Wrong McElroy

by KL Hughes

  She stood, her hand slowly untangling itself from Fiona’s hair, and crossed to the bedroom. She paused in the door frame for a moment but didn’t look back. “See you down there.”

  “Wait.”

  Lizzie halted again, but Fiona wasn’t sure what she wanted to say. She didn’t know why she had called Lizzie back, didn’t have a clue. Every feeling she had stuck to her insides and refused to budge, refused to be pressed into words, so, after a moment, she shrugged and said the first thing that popped into her mind. “How did your grandpa lose his toes?”

  “Really?” Lizzie’s boisterous laugh bounced about the small room as she leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “That’s what’s on your mind?”

  Fiona tried not to blush. “It’s probably better if we don’t talk about what’s actually on my mind.” The smirk that settled on Lizzie’s lips was so smug that Fiona scoffed at her. “Are you going to tell me about the toes or not?”

  “Okay, but I’m warning you, you’re about to trade in what I’m guessing is a pretty damned good image in your head for a horrifying one. You realize that, right?”

  “A dose of horrifying would probably do me some good right now.”

  “Wow.” That smug expression reappeared, making Fiona burn anew. “Must be a really good image floating around in there, huh?”

  “Lizzie.”

  “Mhm?”

  “Are you always like this?”

  “Like what? A holy terror? Yes, my mother’s been calling me one since I was at least four.”

  “Tell me about the toes.”

  “He mowed them off.”

  Fiona blinked. Her mouth worked wordlessly for a moment. “Um, he did what?”

  “He mowed them off.” Lizzie rocked back and forth against the doorframe on the ball of her shoulder. “It was one of those older push mowers. Not like the ones now that have the self-propelling thing, but like the old-school ones that you basically have to put all your body weight behind to push. Do you even know what I’m talking about? I mean, there’s nothing in LA but dirt, and the people who do have grass all hire gardeners and stuff to do it for them.”

  “I know what a lawn mower is, Lizzie.”

  “Are you sure? Because I’m talking about a machine, not a person.”

  “I’m going to throw this hot chocolate at you.”

  “Have you ever even mown a lawn before?”

  “No. I’ve also never performed surgery. Doesn’t mean I don’t know what a scalpel is, does it?”

  “Uh-huh. And what about grass? Did you ever witness actual grass before you moved to Missouri?”

  “Oh yeah. California’s got tons of grass. There’s a pot dispensary on every corner. Just look for the stores with the green plus signs on the windows.”

  “Ha! Well, the story goes that he was out mowing with one of those big, old push mowers, and when he dragged it back to start another lane, he pulled it right over his foot.”

  “What about his shoes?”

  “He wasn’t wearing any.”

  “He wasn’t wearing any shoes?”

  “It’s Arkansas, Fiona. People do all kinds of shit here with no shoes on. Mom and Dad don’t even lock the doors at night. They leave the car keys in the ignition half the time. It’s a lot more relaxed out here in the country than it is in the city.”

  “But while you’re mowing?”

  “Yeah, admittedly, that was pretty dumb, but nobody ever said it was smart.”

  “So, he just chopped them off with the mower?”

  “Oh yeah. The mower ate them right up like weeds. Spit them back out like weeds, too, shredded to hell.” Fiona’s mouth hung open as she listened, the new image in her head just as horrifying as Lizzie had promised it would be. “Grandma tried to collect all the little pieces, too. She threw them in one of the old ice coolers and lugged the thing to the emergency room with Grandpa, who, by the way, insisted on finishing the yard before going.”

  “Okay, now you’re screwing with me.” Fiona ran her hands down her chilled legs, then gripped her bare toes. They ached despite still being firmly attached. “You can’t be serious.”

  “No, I’m dead serious. Grandma actually lugged a cooler full of grassy, severed body parts to the hospital just so Grandpa could get his toes put back on, but the doctor said the pieces were too mangled to reattach. He said Grandpa could do physical therapy, but of course he didn’t want to do it because he didn’t want to have to pay for it, so Grandma settled for giving him a stern lecture about wearing shoes when he mowed. Then, I guess, she just took him home with, you know, significantly fewer toes than he’d started the day with.”

  Fiona’s silent, astonished gaping gave way to a loud, ringing laugh. “Holy shit.” She laughed so hard her belly hurt. “That’s insane.”

  “Just wait,” Lizzie said. “There’ll be plenty more stories before the weekend’s over.” She popped off the doorframe and tapped the door. “Now, hurry up and get dressed. We’ve got gingerbread houses to build.”

  Almost as soon as the words left her lips, she was gone, and all Fiona could do was sit and stare at the place she’d only just been, a goofy grin still stuck on her lips.

  It lasted only seconds before the ridiculousness of the story melted away and all that had come before began to leak in again. It amazed Fiona how surreal it all suddenly seemed, as if it had never actually happened or had perhaps only occurred in a dream. It was as if Lizzie had never come, never touched her, never been there at all. All that remained of her, the only proof of her presence, was the scent of apricots and the untouched mug of hot chocolate on the floor.

  The scent around her faded as Fiona disturbed the air, grabbing the mug. It was cool to the touch, the contents inside now as cold as Fiona’s mostly bare body. She sipped it anyway and grimaced, then made herself get up and dressed. As each article of clothing slid on, she couldn’t help wondering what might have happened if she’d remained bare, if she’d stayed in Lizzie’s arms. What would have happened if they’d closed the door and locked it, if they’d had just a bit more time together on that chilly bathroom floor? What would have happened if she hadn’t been so afraid?

  Chapter 6

  When Fiona arrived downstairs, freshly dressed in a thick pair of sweatpants and a Saint Louis University sweatshirt, it was like walking onto the set of a Food Network competition show. The large dining room table had been divided into elaborately stocked stations, each already occupied. Charlie Sr. and Rosie sat at the head of the table with Charlie on their right, surrounded by his daughters. They climbed all over him, passing candies back and forth and occasionally sneaking them into their mouths. Beside him sat Sophie, and next to her, the only empty seat at the table. It sat between her and Michael, waiting for Fiona. Brian and Grace occupied the stations on the other side of the table, along with Lizzie and Jessie. Everyone was present except Grandma Sophia, who Fiona guessed was still lounging in her chair in the living room, likely asleep.

  Candies of every shape, shade, and size filled the bowls and boxes that lined the length of the table. There were gumdrops and peppermint sticks, licorice ropes and crushed peanut brittle. Silver and gold candy-coated chocolates shined under the dining-room lights, their pearlescent sheens making them appear as precious gems waiting to be discovered. Jelly beans, gummy bears, and candied popcorn added bursts of bright color, and Fiona could already imagine putting them to use. They could be Christmas lights strung along the frame of her and Michael’s gingerbread house. And the white-chocolate Kit-Kat bars could be the wooden planks of a picket fence. Ideas presented themselves with each new candy bowl she explored.

  “Come on, Fi,” Michael said. “Everyone else’s already got a jump-start on us.”

  Fiona claimed the empty seat beside him. “Okay, I knew this was going to be good, but this is next level.”

  “Yeah, Mom go
es all out,” he said. “She even used to bake all the gingerbread herself, but it got to be a bit much after a while, so we switched to the kits. We still get all the good toppings, though.”

  Decorating bags filled with different-colored icing and assorted design tips were set up at each station. There were tips for piping out flowers, straight lines, angled lines, stars, balls, and squiggles. White royal icing had been prepared to glue the gingerbread siding together, and there was buttercream for embellishments. It seemed not a single thing hadn’t been thought of or prepared. Everything a person could hope to have in order to build their dream gingerbread house was right there, right at their fingertips.

  “There’s only one craft store in town,” Sophie said. “It’s a little mom-and-pop shop, but really well stocked, and you can practically see the owner’s mouth watering every Christmas when we walk in.” She grabbed a peppermint stick from their station and placed it at her own. “This competition probably pays his December rent every year.”

  “Hey.” Michael reached over Fiona and swatted Sophie’s hand. He tried to snatch back the peppermint stick but couldn’t reach it. “You’ve got your own peppermint sticks. Put it back.”

  “I need an extra.”

  “There are extras down by Mom.”

  “Oh, good. So, you can go down there and get an extra one to make up for the one I just took. No big deal, right?”

  Fiona nudged Michael with her shoulder. “One less peppermint stick isn’t going to kill us. I mean, we could make a whole gingerbread penthouse with all this stuff.”

  “It’s been done already.” He cut a glance Sophie’s way. “Christmas 2012.”

  Sophie smirked at him. “My trophy hot chocolate that year was divine.”

  “Are all your competition trophies food-and-drink related?”

  “Pretty much,” she said. “We like our treats.”

  “Okay. How about this?” Michael shoved a napkin Fiona’s way, on which he’d drawn his gingerbread architectural plan in crayon. “Stop trying to look, Sophie.” He flung an arm around Fiona so he could block the paper from the other side and hunkered over the table. “What do you think?”

  The three-story shack in the drawing leaned oddly to one side, had a snowman in the front yard, and was surrounded by a short fence. “Why is it crooked?”

  “My hand slipped.”

  “I mean,” Fiona said, choking back a laugh, “it honestly just looks like a shack. A leaning, three-story shack.”

  “All right. Fine.” He tossed the napkin aside and watched it float to the floor. “I was trying to actually make a plan since you just want to sit here and talk to everyone, but since nothing I make is good enough, you design the stupid thing.”

  “Oh, honey, don’t be such a sourpuss,” Rosie said. “It’s supposed to be fun.”

  “I am having fun, Mom,” Michael said through gritted teeth.

  Fiona leaned into him. “I’m sorry. It’s great. I love the way it leans to one side and looks like it’s about to topple. It’s sheer art. Truly.”

  “God, you’re a butthead.”

  The laugh Fiona loosed on him made Michael roll his eyes, but he smiled as he did it, so she knew he wasn’t mad. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get to work on this thing. Look, Brian’s already made his gingerbread man a hot tub.”

  Michael’s head shot up. “What?!” The peppermint-bark hot tub was filled with blue icing and topped with white cotton-candy steam. A small gingerbread man with a satisfied licorice smile stuck out of the top of the icing water. Beside him, on the lip of the hot tub’s frame, set a tiny bottle of beer molded out of fondant. “Are you serious right now?”

  “Hey.” Brian rolled out another tiny piece of fondant, preparing to sculpt it. “Grace is the brains behind the operation. I’m just the very skilled hands.”

  Grace worked on an elaborate napkin sketch with one hand and slid a peppermint to her twin with the other. “Smash that up when you’re done with the fondant.”

  “I honestly don’t even know why you’re surprised.” Lizzie held two pieces of gingerbread siding together, waiting for her icing to harden like glue. “After that carnival she designed in ’09? You remember that? It was the Christmas after I graduated high school. I don’t think anyone’s ever going to beat that one.”

  Fiona’s brows shot toward her hairline. “An entire carnival?”

  “Oh yeah.” Lizzie nodded. “There was a Ferris wheel and everything.”

  “That turned,” Sophie added. “I was so mad too because that was the year I made the livestock barn.”

  “Oh, Soph, come on,” Grace said. “That barn was never going to win.”

  “It was good!”

  Jessie chimed in from her station next to Lizzie’s. “Um, no, Sophie. That cow you made looked like a deformed dog.” She focused on piping something onto one side of a piece of gingerbread, tongue stuck out between her teeth as she worked. She paused for a second and looked up. “With, like, psoriasis or something.”

  The intense concentration around the table broke with a wave of laughter that rolled down the length of the table, making its way from person to person. They all shook with it, Fiona included. She tried to imagine such a thing and couldn’t. The best she could muster up was something similar to a cat she had attempted to mold out of Play-Doh when she was in elementary school. That creation had been the sad stuff of nightmares.

  “Oh, shut it,” Sophie said, throwing a gumdrop across the table. “What do you know? You were five.”

  “I was ten.”

  “I was talking about your mental age.”

  “Listen.” Rosie pointed around at her children. “You’ve all made something as ugly as sin at one point or another.” She elbowed her husband. “Remember that little haunted house Lizzie made when she was—what was she, hon?—six or seven? Oh, Fiona, you should’ve seen it. She tried to use peanut butter instead of icing to glue the pieces together, Lord knows why; so her little house just starts collapsing left and right.” She stopped and held her belly while she giggled. “So, she makes a little ribbon out of yellow fondant and wraps it around the whole pitiful thing.”

  “It was caution tape,” Grandma Sophia said, wobbling into the room with her gnarled cane in one hand, an empty coffee mug in the other, and Otis tucked under her arm. His legs and head hung as if he’d given up on life, or at least on struggling to get away.

  “Exactly!” Lizzie said. “Thank you, Grandma. It was genius.”

  “It sure was,” she said as she plopped into a cushy chair in the corner by the back door. She tucked Otis into the space between her thigh and the chair arm, then pulled a cigarette from behind her ear and stuck it into her mouth. A cool draft blew in as she cracked open the door and lit up. “Rosie, hon, the pot’s empty.”

  “Michael, put a pot of coffee on for Grandma, will you?”

  “Yup.” He popped up, no hesitation, and grabbed Grandma Sophia’s empty mug. He kissed the top of her head. “You want cream, Grandma?”

  “No, black’s fine, hon,” she said and patted his arm. “Well, a little whiskey, if there’s any.”

  He laughed. “All right. Be right back.”

  As the croak and wheeze of brewing coffee filtered in from the kitchen, Rosie launched into another tale. Fiona leaned back in her chair and listened, realizing that she felt more relaxed than she had in a long time. The gingerbread-house-building competition was much tamer than the snowball fight had been, less cutthroat and more mellow. The energy around the table flowed with ease, light and airy and pleasant. Fiona was content to sit within it, soaking in the feeling of a big, full family who, for at least this one weekend out of the year, had not a worry in the world beyond being together and making the most of that time. She didn’t care who won the competition and nabbed the prize. She was glad to simply be a part of it and suddenly found herself wis
hing she could be there under different circumstances.

  Across the table, Lizzie was engaged in a quiet conversation with Jessie. She said something, nudged Jessie, who nudged her back, then started laughing. They kept it low, snickering like two kids with a secret, but Lizzie’s smile was loud, stretched wide, showing all her front teeth. The skin around her eyes wrinkled the slightest bit, and Fiona found she couldn’t look away.

  Lizzie must have felt her staring. She looked up right at that moment and caught Fiona’s eyes. Her smile didn’t fade. It softened, a smile for someone she knew well, someone she cared for. Fiona wasn’t sure she deserved it, wasn’t sure she’d earned it in such a short time, but she was grateful for it all the same.

  “Hey.” Michael’s hand on her arm jarred her from thought. She hadn’t even realized he’d returned. “You know you actually have to help, right? Otherwise, I’m not giving you any of my hot chocolate when I win.”

  “Sorry. ” Her consciousness flooded with guilt. “I was just, um, listening to your mom’s stories.”

  “Yeah, that’s Mom’s tactic.” Michael threw a hot-tamale candy down the table and laughed when it landed and nestled into Rosie’s thick ginger curls. She didn’t even seem to notice it, too focused on smacking her husband’s hands away from a piping tip he was trying to screw onto a decorating bag. Michael raised his voice. “She likes to tell old family stories to try and distract us so we mess up. Ain’t that right, Mom?”

  Rosie stuck her tongue out at him. “Hush.”

  Fiona went to work, helping Michael create his three-story gingerbread shack—or as he referred to it, his “masterpiece.” The gingerbread pieces didn’t all fit perfectly together, but he’d made it work well enough. The actual tower, at least, wasn’t leaning to the left as the one in the drawing had been, and Fiona was impressed by the fact that Michael had managed to create a crooked little window at the top. A hole had been cut into the gingerbread and lined with a pretzel-stick frame.

  All that remained to do was the exterior decorating. Currently, it sat bare as bones, just an ugly, plain brown with white oozing out at the seams. Michael didn’t seem concerned with it, however. He was instead focused on the yard surrounding the tower, where he had created an admittedly awesome ice-skating rink of crushed blue-and-white peppermints.