Mr. Logan Hamilton
Oh please, cease my fluttering heart.
Lady Whiskey’s has an annual Christmas Carol Night. I hired the same group that comes every year—six men and women in their sixties and seventies. One was an actual rocker back in the day. She played the drums. Three other people played guitar/violin. One was a backup singer for a popular band in the nineties. He’s sixty-eight years old, and his gravelly voice rocks the bar down. The sixth person is our town’s orthodontist. She can fix your teeth and sing like Pat Benatar.
Lady Whiskey’s Christmas Carol Night is extremely popular. I had to have all staff on board. The band drummed and thrummed, the people sang and danced, and a rollicking, Christmassy time was had by all. The eight-foot-tall plastic Santa in the corner looked more drunk than usual. I stood in the back with Logan. We sang along but didn’t share any kisses. We were trying to keep things on the down-low.
It wasn’t working.
My cousins Ruby and Madison later sidled up to me. Ruby was wearing a red, lights-flashing tutu and Madison had a Rudolph hat on. Rudolph’s red nose was a bright light that flashed on and off like a strobe.
“Huh,” Madison said when Logan was visiting with friends on the other side of the bar. “Looks like Mr. and Mrs. Claus are getting back together.” She put an arm around my shoulders. “It’s like the angels got together and figured this mess out for you two. You can always count on angels.”
“What?” How did she know?
Madison winked at me. “The angels told me. They’re naughty.”
My cousin Ruby poked me in the ribs with a flying elbow, shouting over the Christmas carols, which were getting raunchier as the night went on, “Madison and I saw how you were ogling each other. Ogling! We were surprised the air between you didn’t catch fire, flames bursting everywhere. Honestly, Bellini, we never understood why you two broke up in the first place.”
“Now you’ve got a second chance at love and lust,” Madison said.
“Based on how healthy and vibrant she appears, I think she’s getting plenty of love and lust.” Ruby tapped her head to indicate how intuitive she was.
“I’m seein’ the glow. Like Rudolph’s nose,” Madison said, tapping her own Rudolph’s nose. “Not that your nose is red, Bellini, not at all. In fact, you have a nice, tidy, little nose.”
“Nice to know I don’t look like Rudolph.”
“Cousins can always be counted on to be honest,” Madison said, using her wise, ethereal tone. “There is no resemblance between you and Rudolph. I should know.”
That night, Logan and I snuck quietly into my house, careful not to wake my mother as we passed our collection of Christmas trees and the little white village.
The next morning, we made breakfast for her. She appreciated it. “It’s a pleasure to see you, Logan,” she told him, beaming.
He grinned back. “The pleasure is all mine, Whiskey. I’m glad I didn’t have to climb up two stories to Bellini’s bedroom with help from the pine tree and gutter this time.”
She laughed. “I always made sure that gutter was strong and tight, Logan. Couldn’t have you breaking your neck on the way down.”
We gaped at her.
“Mom, now that I’m thinking about it, you did have the gutter guy come out once a year.” She knew. She’d always known. “In fact, I remember when he put in an industrial-strength gutter…” I blinked as everything clicked together. “It was huge. He reinforced it with these steel clamps.”
“Now why do you think I did that, sugar? Logan is built like a tank.”
“Thanks, Whiskey,” Logan said, clinking his orange juice glass with hers. “As you can see, my neck is intact.”
“You’re welcome!”
My mother winked at me as I got up to get her more coffee. When I sat back down with another pancake for Logan, he winked at me, too. The Christmas tree lights were also winking. There was a lot of winking going on.
The next evening, a little bar fight between two sisters ensued.
Amelia and Addy Carruther come in to get burgers, a beer, and a shot of Deschutes Family Tequila once a week. They don’t always get along, probably because they are twins. They areeighty years old and live in the same pink Queen Anne home they were raised in, which their mother and grandmother were also raised in. All of the Carruther women live to be, at least, ninety. All of them are hell-raisers. It’s something to be proud of, as Amelia and Addy’s mother and grandmother fought for women’s rights their whole lives, using the considerable money their family made from mining.
Amelia and Addy were both married, once each, for about two years, then they divorced their husbands with fanfare. They took an ad out in the newspaper together to announce their divorces, which came within a month of each other fifty-five years ago. They told the people of Kalulell they were divorcing their husbands because they were “slothful, lazy, ignorant asses,” who—and I am not kidding— “were poor and selfish in the bedroom, leaving both of us to believe that we were sleeping with demented, rutting boars.”
Few newspapers would have printed that, but they owned the newspaper, which had a female editor, their eccentric aunt. They wrote that their husbands, and they named them, were as honest as “horse-jackin’ sleaze fiends.” They were also “gutless cowards and donkey-faced bacterial idiots.”
Amelia and Addy insisted in the ad that they had tried to explain what marriage was to both their husbands by “drawing pictures with crayons in a way that those pea-brained fraudsters could understand, but they still didn’t understand, because they think with a part of their anatomy they shouldn’t be thinking with.” They said they divorced their husbands to save their sanity from the “tiny-pickle kings, who believe their pickles are something to be proud of.”
