Novel Bites: Nina’s Thanksgiving

Novel Bites is a series of short stories from the perspective of secondary characters in my novels. Sometimes the story is straight from the novel, sometimes it’s not. Nina is Alice’s daughter and narrator of the book, Alice. This is a Thanksgiving when she was younger, before the events in Alice. Please comment. Thanks.

Mom pulls the oven rack out enough to poke the withered orange lumps with a fork.

“Done!” She pulls the pans out and puts them on top of the stove. Eight halves of those little pumpkins she says are the best for pies, face down on cookie sheets.

“Why don’t you just use the canned stuff, like a normal person,” I grumble. I’m twelve and my mother’s no longer perfect.

She shrugs that off. “They taste better from fresh pumpkin.”

“Did you have pies like this when you were a kid? Is that it?” I dig at the issue.

“Yes.” Then she changes the subject like she always does. “We need to let these cool before we scoop them out. Are the ginger snaps ready to roll?”

She won’t ever talk about her childhood. I know her mother died when she was born and she was brought up by her father, and that’s about it. I’m not even sure if he’s dead or alive, and I don’t think she knows, either. But I bet someone always made pumpkin pies this way for the holidays when she was little. I bet she had normal Thanksgiving dinners. We never have.

“Nina.” Her voice breaks into my thoughts. “The cookie dough?”

We mixed up the cookie batter first thing this morning and it’s been cooling in the refrigerator while the pumpkins cooked. Mom’s efficient about energy use – we’ll bake the cookies while the oven’s still warm.

“Yup. All four batches.” I pull the first roll out of the fridge and start peeling the wax paper around it open. We have to make our cookies from scratch, too. Always. Mom won’t buy the frozen stuff. We’ll make six kinds of Christmas cookies, too, everything from the basics of flour, sugar, butter . . . not margarine, no way, not for Mom.

I’d get it if we had family that expected all this tradition stuff, but we don’t. It’s just us. And we’ll take the cookies and pies to the homeless shelter this year and have our Thanksgiving feast there, with a bunch of smelly people who won’t take off their coats because they’re afraid of having them stolen, and raggedy little kids running around screaming. When I was little, we’d go to a soup kitchen. The people there were usually cleaner. Most of them still had homes, I guess.

I try one more time. “Why can’t we go to the soup kitchen instead?”

Mom gives me the look, the one that says we’ve already been over this. There aren’t as many volunteers at the homeless shelter and I need to be less judgmental. If she lost her job, we could end up homeless.

But she’s a teacher and she’s been doing it long enough to have tenure, which means they can’t just fire her. She’d have to like murder someone in class or the school would have to collapse or something. She’s also dead set on this Thanksgiving tradition.

“I’ll help you with all the cooking, but I’m not going this year.” I try to sound as firm as she does when she’s giving me no choice. “Mary invited me to their house.”

Mom just looks at me. I’m not sure if she’s disappointed or what. But she’s not saying “No” right away, so maybe there’s a chance.

I work on it. “They’re having the whole family, her cousins I met last summer and a bunch more relatives, so one more won’t be any problem. Her mother said it was okay.”

Mom sighs and nods. “You’ve never had that kind of Thanksgiving. You should. It’s special.”

“I can go?” I almost didn’t bother asking! And she caved right away!

She smiles like it hurts and blinks like maybe she’s holding back tears, but she nods yes and I hug her, hard.

“Thanks, Mom!”

“I’ll miss you.” She says it quietly and it tugs at my heart, but this is something I need to do.

Guilt makes me try to explain. “I need to have one Thanksgiving with a bunch of people who know and care about each other, not strangers sharing an especially big meal.”

“I know,” she says. “When I was little, we didn’t have real family, but we had a huge group of friends who gathered together for the holidays – and baked the pumpkins for the pies – then when I was older, it was just two of us, and sometimes we ended up . . . anyway, yes, you can spend this holiday with Mary and her family. It’ll be good for you.”

“Were you homeless?” Maybe that’s why she never talks about it.

She smiles as if she’s having a memory that makes her feel warm. “Between homes. Sometimes we were between homes. Go call Mary, then get back here and help me with these cookies.”

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#resilience #backstory #YA #freefiction #YoungAdultFiction #Alice #strongwomen #fiction #GivingThanks

Impressions: A Grizzly Dog Tale

It was the damned dogs that caused all the trouble.

If they hadn’t barked all the time, we wouldn’t have gotten evicted, which the wife said was the last straw. Well, it was the camping out to avoid being served with the formal eviction notice that got to her, to be specific. Things had already been tense, even before we had to move out of the house, what with the electric and water being shut off just because the checks kept getting lost in the mail.

As long as we weren’t served, we could leave everything at the house until we got a new place, including the dogs. She wanted to put all our stuff in her parents’ garage, but they wouldn’t have anything to do with the animals, so what was the point?

The dogs never bothered me.

Dogs are supposed to bark. I always knew when someone was walking down the street, as long as the dogs were in the backyard where they belonged. But the kids would let them in the house sometimes, as if they didn’t make enough noise by themselves. Those brats bickered and fussed and screamed at each other every waking moment if they were within two rooms of each other.

So the wife had a point about the tent being too small.

We took the dogs with us the first night, when we thought it would only be a few days, but the campground host was a prick and came by first thing in the morning to tell us the dogs had to go. He wouldn’t make an exception to his no-pets rule, just because the collie mix barked from dusk until dawn. He should have been glad. She probably kept someone from getting eaten by a grizzly bear or something. But he didn’t see it that way, so I snuck them back to the house and put them in the backyard. The fence would keep people out, and I could slip in after dark to feed and water them.

The dogs were well cared for, got food and water every day. If they spilled the bowl, that wasn’t my fault. It was a pain to have to go over there almost every night with a jug of water, except it gave me a chance for some peace and quiet.

The wife always whined that I took too long, that she only had a half hour between jobs. She thought I should be there every minute she was gone, babysitting those brats. She said they were all mine, but I never made that kind of racket.

Well, I was enjoying the peace and quiet at the house when the wife shows up with all the kids. She left them in the car and came in screaming that she was going to be late to work because I was using the damn dogs as an excuse to sit and do nothing. Then she started in about me not having a job, as if it was my fault I was stuck watching those damn kids all day, as if I could go back and get a job last spring or winter, when I was checking the paper every week or so.

Anyway, when she went off on me like that and told me not to come back to the tent, I lost it. We hadn’t had any real fights in a long time, probably because she was too busy working to start them, but this one made up for it. I finally punched her in the stomach to knock the wind out of her and shut her up.

She hit me back!

There wasn’t any thinking about it. The man of the house deserves more respect than that. I smacked her good. If she’d had decent reactions, she’d have had her hand out to break the fall, but she didn’t, and her head slammed into the corner of the concrete step between the kitchen and the garage. She made a mess with that blood gushing all over, but it stopped pretty fast, I guess when the pump stopped.

I had to get the kids into the garage one at a time then, so I told the younger ones to take the water bottle out back and put some into the dogs’ dish, and the oldest followed me to the garage to tell me which of his stuff could be tossed.

He was whining the whole way. I swung that baseball bat like a kid at T-ball. Crack—a home run and instant quiet. One by one I took care of them. The littlest one was harder to trick. She noticed it was too quiet. But she was little, after all, and she looked so much like her mother.

It took three days of starving before the dogs began to eat. I brought our stuff back from the campground and told the guy we were moving out of town. Then I hid in the house, figuring I’d have to get rid of the bones. When the owner came snooping around, I stayed in the garage. I knew he’d never open it with the dogs barking.

It was the smell that made him call the Humane Society, who called the cops. If the dogs hadn’t been so picky, you’d never have heard this story.

Damn dogs.

Impressions is a series of character studies – short sketches to wet your appetite. Think he’d make a good villain in a longer tale? Leave a comment.

Thanks.

www.sherimcguinn.com www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

#voices #Horror #backstory #Impressions #freefiction #fiction

Impressions: Benny’s Last Dollar

Benny swallowed the end of his drink and looked at his last chip, a dollar.

It was all set up to favor the house. Benny knew that. He’d known it from the first time he went to a casino, but still, he couldn’t stop until his pocket was empty. There was a slot machine near the exit just waiting for this chip.

Even the time he hit the big jackpot, big enough to buy a new truck, maybe even one of those new little houses on the edge of town that his girl always talked about, he’d kept on playing until his stake was completely gone. That’s what he called it—his stake. That made him feel like one of the pros, the serious poker players in the big money games held privately in the back room. But Benny never took more than one day’s pay. However much he was earning, that was his limit.

Of course, he’d made that rule when he had a good full time job. This week, he’d only worked two days, helping an old lady fix a bunch of stuff on her house so she could sell it. He and George had really dragged their heels to make the job last. She was only paying them minimum. They used to make four, five times that with overtime.

Not anymore.

One day’s pay had gone for new socks, thrift store shoes and shirts, and groceries they never had at the food bank. He’d come to the casino with the rest, and he’d managed to make it last a good while – building it up, then losing some, building it up again. Until he ended up with nothing but this dollar chip. Since then he’d been watching other people play while he finished his drink.

Back in the day, he could say the free drinks paid for anything he lost. But he didn’t drink much anymore. He wasn’t AA or born-again; he hadn’t even tried to quit. It had come on him gradually, until one night last July he’d headed home and realized he’d nursed one whiskey the whole evening. Even when the company folded and his girl dumped him, all in one week, he didn’t crawl into a bottle like some of his buddies.

Benny scanned the casino, all the people absorbed by machines or tensed over tables. The drink girl came up and offered him a refill.

“No,” he said. He paused and stared at her as if she were an alien life form. “No, I’m done. Thank you.”

She moved on to the next customer.

Benny cashed in his chip and tucked his dollar into his pocket.

He straightened his shoulders, smiled a half smile to himself, and gave the pocket with his dollar in it a pat. Satisfied, he took one last look around before leaving.

He wouldn’t be back.

Impressions is a series of character studies – short sketches to wet your appetite. If you’d like reading more about Benny, leave a comment.

Thanks.

www.sherimcguinn.com www.amazon.com/author/sherimcguinn

#voices #backstory #recovery #YA #Impressions #freefiction #YoungAdultFiction #transition #fiction #InSearchofSelf #Writing #DefiningMoments