A Stitch in Time Pt. 01

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MarshAlien
MarshAlien
2,692 Followers

We stepped into a simple foyer, made fancy by the evergreen roping that hung on the staircase, decorated here and there with elegant red globes. There were voices coming from the right.

"Eeeehhhh," I recognized the voice of my Uncle Bill imitating a buzzer. "Next, please."

"I thought it was perfect," Aunt Helen protested.

"Perfectly flat," her husband, Uncle Ted, chimed in.

"It's not too late to ruin the gravy," Aunt Helen warned him.

"Perfectly wonderful," Uncle Ted corrected himself. "But now it's my turn. Maestro? Excuse me, maestress? Maestrix?"

The tinkle of Aunt Ruth's piano drowned him out and filled the house, and Uncle Ted's baritone followed close behind.

"O ni-ight dee-viiiiiine. O-o niiiiiight, when Christ was booooorn. O niiiiight, dee-VIIIIINE — "

"No, it's hideous," another woman protested as the piano went silent. "Make it stop! Make it stop!"

"Philistines!" Uncle Ted roared through the laughter.

By that point, Aunt Ruth had put our coats in the hall closet and escorted us into the living room, where a group of five adults was gathered around the piano, all five of them laughing helplessly. The living room was even more splendidly festive than the hallway. There were candles in all the windows, and a block-shaped pine-scented candle burning inside a wreath on the coffee table. The angel atop the Christmas tree was almost touching the nine-foot ceiling, while the tree itself held globes of silver, red, and gold; and ornaments of every shape and description, ranging from an elegant glass crèche to a homemade lime-colored clay wreath inscribed "Love, Jeanne" that had been given a place of prominence right in the middle. And tinsel. This was my mother's family. Strands of tinsel were draped on all the branches, making the whole tree shimmer in the reflected light of hundreds of tiny white bulbs.

I looked over to see a tear running down Jeanne's cheek, which she quickly brushed away before the singers realized we were among them.

"Uh-oh, cops," Uncle Ted grinned as he finally caught sight of us. "Cool it everyone."

"Jeanne!" Aunt Helen raised a glass of punch from the piano in a toast to my sister.

"And Patrick," Aunt Ruth added quickly, eager to save everyone else from making the faux pas of not recognizing their nephew.

"Patrick!" Aunt Helen's eyes twinkled. She pushed herself off the piano — she'd probably consumed a little more than a moderate amount of the punch, her own special Christmas recipe that I'd never been allowed to try — and walked over to me. "Give us a kiss."

She winked at Jeanne and stuck her cheek out at me. Helen was Mom's younger sister, probably still a year or two shy of forty, and she'd always been the adventurous one. And the flirtatious one. It was usually Ruth who got the cheek kisses; Helen always liked a nice firm smack on the lips, a source of unending embarrassment to the 15-year-old me who she'd fooled into giving her one that last time she visited us. Or the last time I remembered her visiting us, at least.

Like the others, she was dressed in what I thought of as church clothes — skirts and sweaters for the women; pressed slacks, button-down shirts for the men. I felt very out of place in my jeans and flannel shirt. Jeanne, I was only noticing now, had changed out of her jeans into a pair of black slacks and a very pretty plum-colored blouse.

I delivered the commanded kiss at the same instant that she turned her head. Our lips met briefly, and I hastily pulled back.

"He's gotten taller, hasn't he?" Aunt Helen asked Jeanne with a merry giggle.

"A little," Jeanne smiled back at her. "More support for his swelled head."

Everybody had a good laugh at my expense, and Jeanne collected a hug and a kiss from her other aunt as well. Uncles Ted and Bill came over with handshakes for me and kisses for Jeanne, and then Aunt Ruth turned to her other guests, a handsome couple in their late twenties or early thirties.

"Jeff and Sheila Jenkins," she said, "I'd like you to meet my niece and nephew, Jeanne and Patrick Sterling."

Jeff rose to offer his hand, while Sheila stayed seated at the piano bench, from which she offered us a half-hearted wave. She looked a little nauseous, to tell the truth, and Uncle Ted hustled back to her side to ask if she was all right.

"A little too much punch, maybe," she said weakly. "Could I just have a glass of water?"

My aunts raced toward the kitchen for some water as the men gathered solicitously around the stricken woman. She was incredibly attractive; her church clothes included a sweater that seemed to have expelled all of the air that might have fit between it and her skin.

"I thought you said she moved," Jeanne stepped toward me and hissed into my ear.

I suddenly wasn't feeling that good myself, and the next glass of water was for me. After a time, though, both Sheila and I recovered. She seemed intent on ignoring me for the rest of the afternoon, or at least ignoring whatever relationship we had had. For my part, I was as blissfully ignorant as everyone else in the room of the details of that relationship. Only Jeanne apparently knew that there had been one, and she treated Shelia with an initial coolness that I'd never seen in her before.

After a while, even that thawed. Jeanne could no more ignore the spirit of Christmas than she could stop breathing, and soon she was standing behind Sheila, her hand on Sheila's shoulder, taking her own turn at the show-stopping chorus of "O Holy Night." After I had a turn, standing well in back of Sheila, Jeanne was awarded first prize, and allowed to select any ornament she wanted from the tree.

"How 'bout that wreath?" Uncle Bill joked, pointing at Jeanne's youthful gift.

"You touch that wreath, Bill Parkinson," Aunt Ruth's eyes flashed, "and you'll lose something very dear to you."

"Very dear to you," he suggested with a flick of his eyebrows.

"I can get another one," Aunt Ruth quickly retorted.

"I could make a better one," Jeanne offered.

The room exploded into laughter.

"A better wreath, I meant," Jeanne turned a brilliant crimson. "It's a little, uh, lumpy."

"You touch that wreath, Jeanne Sterling," Aunt Ruth turned on her, "and you'll get no pie for dessert."

"She gets no pie and I get disfigured?" Bill asked.

"I know which punishments work on which offenders," Aunt Ruth smirked. "Now which one would you like, dear?"

Jeanne had to examine each and every ornament on the tree, and finally plucked a hand-painted wooden Santa Claus off a branch in the back.

She held it out to Aunt Ruth with great delight, and Aunt Ruth, with equal delight, pulled open a drawer in one of her tables and extracted a box in which the ornament fit perfectly.

"You knew!" Jeanne seemed awed.

"I bought it for you," Aunt Ruth smiled at her. "Still, I'm surprised you won it this early. I was figuring you'd win charades once everybody else got a little tipsy."

As it turned out, I won the charades, even though I had earlier been pronounced old enough to finally sample the punch and was probably a little tipsy myself. In a similar vein, both Jeanne and I were pronounced old enough to be able to dispense with "Aunt" and "Uncle," which Helen argued made her feel old.

Dinner was served just after three, a turkey that had been butchered at a local farm only two days earlier, and that Bill butchered again with his electric carving knife. It was still wonderful, though, just like stuffing, the mashed potatoes, and Ruth's exquisite gravy. Later, when Jeanne was busy washing dishes in the kitchen and Bill had dragged Ted and Jeff out to the garage to see his new toy, I found myself sitting at the table with Sheila.

"So how have you been?" she asked quietly.

"A little sick," I admitted. "Not quite myself lately."

"I've been thinking of you," she said. While she was thinking, she'd apparently kicked off one of her heels. I could feel a stockinged foot begin to trace a course up my leg. "My husband never found out who it was, you know. Only that I was cheating on him."

"Uh-huh," I agreed. Her foot had reached my crotch, and I couldn't believe that I wasn't exploding into my pants.

"Therapy was so boring," she said, taking another sip of the wine we'd shared during dinner as she began rubbing the ball of her foot up and down the ridge in my jeans created by my swollen dick. "And I guess I sort of promised not to do it again. But still..."

She gave me a look that could almost be described as predatory.

Just then, Helen popped back in from the kitchen, gaily humming "Deck the Halls."

"You drove out the men?" she asked us. Sheila had yanked her foot out of my lap as if it were on fire, and she lifted her glass for another drink.

"They went to check out Bill's car," I answered Helen, happy for a change of subject.

"His car," Helen nodded knowingly. "So that's where he keeps the annual Playboy magazine that Ruth gives him each Christmas."

Helen sat back down at the table and picked up her own half-full wine glass.

"So," she looked at me after a sip, "tell us what's new?"

"New?" I asked. As far as I was concerned, everything was new.

"New girlfriend?" Helen teased me with a guileless wink at Sheila. "Any new scholarship offers?"

"No," I shook my head. "Not that I know of.

"I'd still like to go to UVA," I added. I wondered if I'd even submitted an application? Or whether, as an in-demand jock, I simply considered myself above applications.

Now it was Helen shaking her head.

"Well, you can ask Ted," she said, "but apparently they've decided to toughen up academic standards for athletic scholarships, and I think they're starting with the baseball recruits. Here he is. Honey, what was it you told me about baseball scholarships?"

"Pretty ruthless," Ted said. "A two point seven five average and somewhere around a 1400 on the SAT combination."

I nodded to myself. That didn't sound that hard. The last report card I remembered, after the first semester of ninth grade, had straight A-pluses, which was like, what, a four-five? I had no idea what my average was at this point, of course, and no idea whether I'd even taken the SAT.

By now, though, everyone else had gathered around the table again, and judging by the look on Jeanne's face, I wasn't going to be attending UVA any time soon. I felt tears coming to my eyes, and I tried to cover them up by knocking over my water glass.

"I'm sorry," Jeanne said gently as we got settled into the car for the ride home. "You never mentioned UVA anymore, so I thought you'd given up on it."

"It doesn't matter," I said. "That was fun, huh?"

"That was Christmas," Jeanne sighed, nestling herself into the passenger seat like she was ready for a nap.

Oh shit. She was in the passenger seat. I was in the driver's seat.

"So you wanna drive back?" I asked her as casually as I could.

"No," she said sleepily. "I just wanna sit here and remember that feeling."

She stretched like a cat, and I returned my attention to the car.

All right, I thought to myself, trying to replay the instructions Jeanne had recited, I put in the clutch, I start the car. I let the parking brake off, I put it in reverse. Now I slowly let my foot off the clutch, and when I feel it reach the stall point, I put on the gas, and - YESSS!

I pumped my hand as the car began backing down the driveway. Thank God for muscle memory; apparently I'd done this enough that my feet and hands could feel when it was time to shift and when it was time to let the clutch out. I'd done a good job memorizing the directions, too, and had no trouble navigating my way home.

Driving? That was another story altogether. Thank God for tryptophan, or whatever it is in turkey that puts you to sleep, because Jeanne would have been terrified of ever getting in any car again, let alone mine, if she had seen the two dogs we almost hit, the stop sign we ran through, the cute little family that had to jump back to the curb with expressions of horror on their cute little faces — yeah, like I'd really been that close to the stroller — and the general disregard I showed for the dotted and solid lines that had been painted down the middle of the road. Muscle memory is apparently of absolutely no use outside of that shifting thing. Once you've got the car going, that whole driving business apparently requires input from the brain. Mine was still 15 years old, the same age it had been yesterday when I went to sleep.

Finally, thank God for Christmas; on any other day of the year, the roads between our house and Aunt Ruth's would have been filled with traffic, and even more pedestrians than the ones whose lives I'd nearly ended. With sweat dripping from my chin, I pulled into our driveway and jerked the car to a halt.

"Are we here already?" Jeanne asked, once again doing the cat stretch. "Thanks, Trick. Thanks for bringing me. You did have fun, didn't you?"

"I did," I nodded, a little taken aback at the surprise with which she'd laced that question. "After a while, I even forgot what a schlub I looked like."

"Nobody noticed," she smiled, still lost in nostalgic reverie. "Nobody ever notices anything like that over there. Speaking of which, that was Sheila, wasn't it?"

Reverie over.

"Um," I said, "I really thought she'd moved. I haven't seen her in, like, forever. She seems to be happy with her husband, though."

"Bullshit," Jeanne said. "I saw the way she looked at you when she thought nobody else was looking. You be careful, Trick. The last thing you need is another paternity test."

She looked at our house, the lights of the tree in the living room the only visible sign that we celebrated Christmas.

"Whaddya bet they're in there having meatloaf for Christmas dinner?" she sighed.

She slammed the door and left me in the car to ponder my life. Another paternity test? I hoped to God I'd at least passed that one.

Chapter 4

In one sense, every day is the first day of the rest of your life. December 26, 2006, though, was a little bit more. Christmas was over, and I woke up to find myself in the same room, in the same body, and in the same life in which I'd found myself the day before. All of which were three years older than they were when I'd gone to bed on December 24.

My first thought as I woke up, stretched, and sat up in bed, was that if Mom were still alive, she'd reinstate spanking just to make sure my room never looked like this again. And I would have agreed with her; it was disgusting. So laundry was still high on my list of priorities. Since it was only seven o'clock, however, I figured I'd better wait a bit to start that project. Instead, I tiptoed down to the kitchen, where Dad and my older brother Dave were drinking coffee and reading the paper, Dad the sports section and Dave the business news.

"Morning," I said cheerfully.

"Huh," Dave grunted.

Dad just looked over at me.

"Say, Dave," I tried again, pouring myself a cup of coffee, "thanks for the subscription."

He nodded, still without so much as a glance at me.

"So wadda you doin' today?" Dad asked me.

"I dunno," I shrugged.

"You're not gonna lift, are you?" his eyes narrowed. "You don't need that shit at this point."

"Yeah," I agreed. Okay, no lifting.

"Yeah, wouldn't want to strain the golden arm," Dave muttered.

"I don't remember your brother givin' you shit when you were playin,'" Dad said pointedly.

"Yeah, I know," Dave sighed and finally looked at me. "Sorry, little bro. Thanks for the gift card."

"Sure," I said.

God only knew which store I'd gotten him a gift card from.

"Actually," I turned back to Dad, "I still need to do some laundry."

"Tiff'll be up soon," Dad said. "Let her do it."

"Maybe he doesn't want his clothes to end up all the same color," Dave blurted out.

I watched Dad tense up, to the point where I could see the blood throbbing in his neck. Dave also realized he'd gone too far.

"Hey, sorry, Dad," he said, pushing himself back from the table. "It's been a tense week."

"Things rough at the Seven-Eleven?" Dad growled. "I think the Wal-Mart's hiring."

Dave bit back his own snappy comeback, put his dishes in the sink and left. Dad watched him go, and then turned to me.

"I swear one day I'm just gonna chuck his ass outta here," he said. He left for work himself a few minutes later, and Jeanne appeared a few minutes after that.

"Morning," I said. I figured the third time might be the charm as she sleepily walked around the kitchen to get herself a bowl of cereal.

"What do you want?" she demanded. Apparently I was mistaken.

"Sorry," I said, holding up my hand. What was it with this family?

"Look," she paused with an open milk bottle in her hand. "Christmas was special. Nice, even. But you don't have to pretend we're friends any more."

She said it with such savagery that the part of me that wanted to protest — to whine "we're not friends any more?" — found itself without a voice. Instead, I simply asked if she thought that anyone would mind if I started a load of laundry.

She looked at me with a smirk.

"Queen Tiffy and Princess Jill?" she scoffed. "They could sleep through a fire. When did you get so domestic?"

"No underwear," I said, putting a quick end to that discussion. "Do you know if the school's open today?"

"I thought all you jocks had your own key to the weight room," she spat.

"I meant the office," I said quietly.

"Oh," she said. "I dunno. I guess. Why?"

"I was, uh, thinkin' about changing some classes," I told her.

"Why?" she asked suspiciously.

"I dunno," I shrugged. "I see Dave and I think, suppose I get hurt. You know, what would I do then? I mean, no offense to the guy, but that's not really where I wanna see myself."

"What is it with you?" Jeanne asked as she sat down at the table.

"What?"

"Are you high?"

I just laughed. She shook her head, and we settled down to eat in silence. From my standpoint, the less I said about anything at this point, the less trouble I could get into.

I did my laundry, and around ten o'clock, with Tiffany and Jill still dead to the world, I hiked the two miles between my house and the high school. The front door was open, although the office itself held the only signs of life. Fortunately, it hadn't changed much. When you entered the office, you still came face-to-face with a counter, the first barrier between us, students, and them, the school's administration. Behind the counter were two desks, one normally occupied by Mrs. Carter, the other by Mrs. Waters. Together, the story went, they ran the school, occasionally dragging Mr. Linwood out of his principal's office to make announcements before they locked him back inside the office.

Today, though, there was only one young lady sitting at one of the desks, a Ms. Carter, if the sign on her desk was right. She was much nicer looking than either Mrs. Carter or Mrs. Waters had been, and if I lingered a few minutes at the counter before clearing my throat to attract her attention, well, who could blame me? Tall, slender, her auburn hair pulled back into a somewhat severe-looking bun, she sat there studying her computer screen with a pair of reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose, seemingly oblivious to the rest of the world.

"Did you want something, Mr. Sterling, or were you just going to stand there all and wait for someone to announce your visit?"

She still hadn't looked at me yet, although apparently I'd been wrong about the obliviousness.

"I, uh, I was thinking about changing my class schedule," I stammered.

She raised an eyebrow and cocked her head at me.

"I'm not sure we could make it any easier for you," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. "Maybe we could just assign you a room and your teachers could rotate in and out. Then we could have your lunch delivered as well."

MarshAlien
MarshAlien
2,692 Followers