were a red flag waving, announcing a very long vacay.
But why? It’s been years, exactly ten, to be fair,
since she strutted around with her deep red hair.
No, he must find out; he must stop her visit right now.
She can’t stay here, not for Christmas; he must stop it…but how?
CHAPTER ONE
Storee
“You know, you never trulyget over the first pucker of your nips when that mountain air hits you,” I say as I stuff my mittened hands into my jacket pockets while I survey the backdrop of freshly powdered mountains.
Taran, my sister, looks at me from over her shoulder and dramatically rolls her eyes. “It’s thirty-seven degrees—pretty nice for being at an elevation of over ten thousand feet at the beginning of December.”
“Pretty nice?” Good God, this is not pretty nice; this is frigid. “Guess I need to be grateful for global warming then, or else I think my breasts would be two pucks of ice on the ground right now.”
Taran stands tall with two duffel bags in hand. “Global warming is never something to joke about.” With that, she walks up the snow-cleared sidewalk to Aunt Cindy’s pink Victorian house.
In case you didn’t catch it from her tone, Taran is the uptight one of the two of us. Being the older sister has led her to adopt a starchy, prickly, slightly severe personality. She’s always dealing with a crisis, there’s always something to complain about, and nothing ever goes our way in the Taylor family.
Hence the five bags of luggage and trip to Kringletown, Colorado, for the unforeseeable future at the beginning of December.
No, this is not our hometown.
No, this is not the place I’d choose to visit in the wintertime thanks to my body’s affinity for the California climate.
And no, I would not jump at the chance to spend Christmas with my cranky, well-mannered, loves-a-good-lecture sister.
I love her, but she sure knows how to take the J-O-Y out of jolly.
Unfortunately for yours truly, Aunt Cindy had a recent fall—the telltale occurrence of many an octogenarian.
Once a spry sprite, known throughout her small town as the jolliest of them all, Aunt Cindy was on her way to remove a fresh batch of gingerbread cookies out of her oven when she, as she put it, felt a squeeze in her hip, then a seize in her left butt cheek, which in turn caused her to spin, wobble, and then fall to the ground. And because she’s a frail old coot, she had nothing to cushion the blow to the hip, and well…she broke it.
From there, you can imagine what happened. A broken hip to an elderly human is considered a death sentence—according to Aunt Cindy.
So of course, all hell broke loose.
Siren emojis went off in the family group text.
An emergency family meeting was called.
And before I knew it, I was staring at my computer screen, a shot of my father’s nostrils clouded in hair as the main image while he attempted to figure out “this Zoom thing.”
Mom sobbed in a sarong decorated with birds of paradise from her timeshare balcony in Cancún.
Dad consoled her while he wore a straw hat with a sunblock-painted nose.
Taran rapidly jotted down her issues on a notepad, like the good nurse she is.
And I sat back in my oversized, single-lady recliner, braless and snacking on a canister of chocolate-covered raisins I purchased from Costco that day, watching it all unfold.
“Something has to be done. Someone has to take care of her,” Mom squealed about her only living relative.
Did I mention, to me and my sister, she’sGreat-AuntCindy? But what a freaking mouthful, so we just say Aunt Cindy.
