Merry Random Christmas (5 page)

I looked under the booth. Unlaced construction boots, the color of a golden retriever puppy, flopped on the ground next to her bare feet.

“We found you,” Trevor said, his voice filled with a nervous questioning. If I spoke, I’d sound the same. We both frowned, then stayed silent. Darla would have to take the lead here. Too many questions swirled through my mind, and I was still trying to recover from the bizarre reality of that church organist strip-
a
-thon.

“About time. Where in the hell have you been?”
Her voice sounded well-used, like she’d been at a football game, screaming for the home team. Yet her volume was low. Energy depleted. A part of me chilled with a kind of fear and concern I don’t think I’ve ever felt before in my life. This wasn’t our normal, exuberant, louder-by-a-notch-than-normal Darla.
 

“Humping the elves at the North Pole?” said a voice from behind us. If zombies could talk, this is what they’d sound like. I pivoted to find myself face to face with a thousand-year-old raisin.

“Thanks, Madge,” Darla muttered as the old waitress threw down a plate of fried food and some kind of chocolate pie,
plus a peppermint ice cream sundae.
 

“Get you boys anything?” Madge leaned toward me and sniffed. “You already smell like a candy cane sundae.” She sniffed again, then
pointed to the parfait dish
.
T
he skin on her face crumpled like a paper bag balled up in your hand right before you pitch it in the trash.
Madge shook her head and turned her attention to Trevor.
 

“Just more of whatever Darla’s having,” Trevor muttered, bending down to sit across from her.
Madge shrugged and high-tailed it to the kitchen, typing on some electronic device that looked like a smartphone with a stylus.
 

“There you are!” screeched a new voice.

I didn’t turn around. I didn’t have to. I knew who that was. I arched one eyebrow and caught Darla’s eye.

“Your mom’s here with me,” she said drolly.

“I noticed.”

Hands pressed into my shoulders,
her strength surprising.
 

“Hi, Mom,”

“’Hi, Mom?’ ‘
Hi, Mom?’
I see your naked ass plastered all over the Internet and all you can say is ‘
Hi, Mom?’
”
 

I
still
didn’t want to turn around.
 

“I should say,” she added, her voice dripping with sarcasm, “I see your naked ass plastered all over the Internet
again
. Joey, do you have any idea how expensive that Internet reputation manager was? We just scrubbed all the search results for your name on Google. You can finally search for Joe Ross and not get that damn video of you with the gerbil clinging to your...with Darla’s breasts hanging out the window...with Trevor’s naked chest—”
 

“Jesus, lady, cut the fucking apron strings,” Madge crack
ed
as she deliver
ed
a pot of coffee and two more mugs.

M
om’s hands on my shoulders turn
ed
into talons.

“Excuse me?”
If a surgeon’s scalpel had a voice, it would be my mom’s.
 

Now I
really
d
id
n’t want to turn around.

Darla’
s
head lift
ed
slow
ly
, the corners of her mouth rising up in a grin. Her eyes flash
ed
with the kind of eagerness I’
d
seen in those gr
een, glowing pools of sweetness only when something big is about to happen.
 

And a showdown between my mother and Madge qualifie
d
.

Trevor poured a cup of coffee and watched my mom and
the old waitress
. I faced him and tried to catch his eye. He looked at Darla instead, who shot him a grin and rallied.

Great. Nothing like bloodsport to cheer up our girlfriend.
Darla would have fit in under Caligula’s reign.
 

“Are you deaf, or does all the Botox you pump into those veins bunch up in your ears and block your hearing?” Madge said to my mom, who inhaled sharply.

If I turned around, I would become a pillar of salt. I knew it. Instead, I moved slowly toward Darla’s side of the booth and slid in next to her, careful to move slowly lest I catch the attention of a predator.

Using peripheral vision, I watched the two of them face each other, Madge’s cat-butt mouth twisted with what I thought was a smile. Mom’s eyebrows were raised. Yeah, they were. It didn’t look like it, but they were.

M
y m
om put her hand up to
her
ear and cupped it. “I’m so sorry. I can’t hear you over the sound of your nipples dragging on the ground, like fingernails on a chal
k
board.
You used them to dig the trenches for the original Boston subway system, right?
”

“Ewww,” Darla and I said in unison.
T
revor’s eyes flicked down to look at Madge’s chest, and he shuddered.

Madge’
s face split into a smile. Either that, or it tore wide open, like a mummy’s arm being exposed to sunlight.
 

“Jesus, Joanne, how long’s it been?”

The two hugged.

I caught Trevor’s eye. “What the fuck did you slip us?”

“Huh?”

“I must be high as a kite, and it’s got to be your fault, because my mother and Madge are next to us, insulting each other and hugging, which can only mean one thing.”

“What?” Darla asked, her eyes still on the huggers.

“Trevor slipped us a bunch of
bad shrooms
and this is all just part of some
drug-induced dream
.”

Darla shoved a long-handled spoon into a peppermint ice-cream sundae and stuffed half a scoop of ice cream in her mouth. “Tasty delusion,” she muttered around the lump on her tongue.

“Twenty-five years,” Mom answered Madge, rolling her eyes up to pull the exact time frame from memory. “When we lived in that little hovel a few blocks away and Herb and I were managing Joey’s medical issues.”

Madge’s eyes went troubled, the skin bagging around them like a loose elephant’s pelt. She turned to me. “Joey.
Baby
Joey.” She smacked her forehead. “You mean this little uptight asshole is
b
aby Joey?”

Trevor grinned
at me
.

“
This is better than any peyote I’ve ever eaten,” he said, digging in to share Darla’s sundae.
 

I flipped him the middle finger.

He stuck an onion ring on it.

Darla

As if the night couldn’t get any fucking weirder,
there I was
, sitting in Jeddy’s, stuffing my face with a peppermint sundae and more fried food than my Uncle Mike can eat in a week, and Joe’s mom turns out to be bitchy besties with Madge.

Madge!

I fully expect
ed
most of the booths to empty, for driverless cars to crash, and for me to be left behind (duh) as the Rapture took the chosen
, for the end
wa
s definitely fucking
nigh
.

“Ignore them,” Joe order
ed
.
H
e open
ed
his mouth to ask me a series of questions that I kn
e
w w
ould
come out like I
was
being cross examined, so I
insert
e
d
a glob of ice cream sundae in his mouth.

And then my boo
b
s start
ed
to vibrate.

I reach
ed
between them to
answer
my phone and f
ou
nd a half-licked piece of candy cane stuck under one of them. When you are big breasted, all kind of things get stuck under the girls.
Bobby pins. Food crumbs. Smartphone screen protectors. Condoms (not used—don’t be gross).
 

Don’t judge. Unless you’ve been cursed with an overabundant supply of mammary parts, you wo
uldn
’t understand.

You know how there’s that thing called “the pencil test” in middle school? Where you take a pencil and put it under your naked boob and if it stays put, your breasts are big enough?

Yeah. I played that.

Only I could do it with a baseball bat.

In
fourth grade.

My phone
wa
s actually ringing. From a call.

It
was
Josie.

The night
wa
s getting worse.

“This better be important because I smell like camel urine and am wearing a shirt that has jail jizz stains on it,” I announce
d
into the phone.

“Uhhh,” sa
id
a deep man’s voice. “Darla?”

It
was
Alex. I suppose
d
I shou
ld
have
apologize
d
for that greeting, but
I was
about as apologetic as
Donald Trump at a feminist rally.
 

“Yep. I’m here. What’s going on, Alex?”

“Josie wanted me to call and just check in about tomorrow.”

“Hold on.” I looked at the clock. “It’s 11:14 p.m. Why on earth are you calling me so late?”

“I just got off my shift. Christmas Eve. Do you have any idea how many people decide tonight’s the night to get those giant candy-filled plastic candy canes out and use them as butt plugs?” He sighed. “It’s been a long
evening
.”

I
was
speechless.
I
t takes a lot to make me
unable to talk
, especially after having a woman named Camel Toe Sanchez snuggle up to me in jail and ask me to pull out the two cigarettes she was hiding in a condom up her ass (“I’ll share one with you!”).

Alex just trumped
that
.

“Darla?”

“I’m here. Barely. Thanks,” I croaked. “I’m supposed to have visions of sugar plums dancing through my head tonight.
I
nstead, I get to imagine a Target
holiday checkout line
special shoved up random strangers’ poop chutes.”

Did Jeddy’s suddenly go silent, or what? Maybe the stereo system crapped out, because every set of eyes
wa
s suddenly on me.

“What?” I shouted to Joe,
T
revor, Joanne, Madge, and the other losers stuck in a twenty-four-hour diner on Chris
t
mas Eve. “You people never heard a woman talk to her uncle about
other people
shoving things up
their
ass
es
?”

“No. Remarkably, I can’t say I have,” Joanne said.

“Well, Alex does this for a living.”

“He removes items from anuses
for a living
?” Joanne’s smirk made me twitch.

“Right. Bet he could help you with your head.”

“DARLA!” Alex boomed into my phone.

“
Doesn’t the peppermint burn?” I asked him, distracted by my wondering. “Because once, I got my vaginal yeast cream mixed up with someone’s tube of BenGay and let me tell you—”
 

“I AM NOT TALKING ABOUT WORK RIGHT NOW!”

Who knew Alex could
yell
?

“Geez,” I muttered into the phone. “I wasn’t talking about
work
.”

“Your nether regions are not my preferred topic of conversation on Christmas Eve.”
If my daddy had lived, I have a feeling this is the exact tone of voice I’d have heard, oh, eight hundred times or so by now. But my daddy died when I was four, and Uncle Mike never talked to me like this. He just bellowed and threw the TV Guide at me when he didn’t like something I said.
 

“Since when did
my
nether regions become work for you, Alex?”
I replied. He couldn’t see my smirk, but somehow, I got the sense he felt it.
 

“You want me to count the ways?”
Yep. I was right.
“First, your friend Amy and the cell phone she got caught in her vagina. Then there was the giant chunk of wallpaper and your anus after your party here at the apartment. And if that weren’t bad enough, the gerbil claw extraction from your boyfriend’s ass involved a consultation on my part—”

“You sound like Josie! They say couples who spend enough time together start to take on each other’s personalities, Alex, but man,
the lecture
....”

“Time,” he snapped.

“
And besides, only
one
of those incidents involved
my
nether regions. Technically.”
 

“TIME!”

I heard a female voice in the background say, “Who are you yelling at?”

“Tell Josie I’ll be there tomorrow at two o’clock. And ask her if she knows any good defense lawyers.”

“
I heard that!” Josie shrieked. “It’s Christmas Eve! What’s she talking about,
defense lawyers
? Darla Jo Jennings, what kind of mess have you gotten yourself—”
 

C
lick.

Joe

I could hear Josie through Darla’s phone. I watched Darla pluck the thin silk of her neckline forward, then reach down between those luscious breasts, sliding
out
her phone
from
where she often tucked it in. Her shirt was stained and it sagged, as if someone had pulled on the cloth and overstretched it.

Her eyes had that slightly-hollow look to them, the kind of expression you get when you can’t quite believe that this is what your life has become.

I remember
ed
that feeling
all too well
.

H
anging from a window naked, bleeding, my broken bones grinding against each other as I clung for dear life to
T
revor’s hands, a gerbil trying to turn my ass into the Chunnel.

So yeah. I could relate.

“
What are you charged with?” I asked her, my heart racing. Might as well get to the point. I knew I shouldn’t ask, but...