(All righty then – Richard has been invited to spent Christmas Day with Kate and her family; this is a short excerpt from the next Luna City Chronicle – and will, of course, be continued …)
“Are
you sure that Ozzie will be OK?” Kate asked, as she wheeled her little VW bug
down the disgracefully rutted drive between the Age of Aquarius Campground and
Goat Farm and Route 123. “I mean, we could have taken him with us, or left him
in the trailer…”
Richard
sighed. “Absolutely not, Kate of my heart. Your parents don’t know me, let
alone my cat. And if we left him behind, he would have pissed in the bed,
through fury at having been left behind, and locked up for all of a day. Ozzie
is a social cat, although I am not entirely sure of the beings that he chooses
to be social with … after all, the mice must be absolutely narked at being
stalked and hunted. Bree promised that she would take care of him and ensure
that he was properly amused and diverted until tomorrow morning; she claims
that Ozzie would relish a slumber-party at the Straw Castle, and absolutely
promised that she would keep the Grants’ other cats from beating up on him. He adores
her as much as he adores you, since she saves out the juicy fish scraps for
him, when we prep the Friday luncheon entree. Although she claims that he
cheats at Monopoly something awful…”
“You’re
chattering, Rich,” Kate shot him a sideways look from those amazing blue-green
eyes; eyes the exact color and sparkle of very fine beryl jewels. “You’re not
nervous about meeting Mom and Dad, are you?”
“Yes,”
Richard confessed with another and even deeper sigh. “Paralyzed with terror,
actually. I don’t suppose that we could turn around and spend Christmas here …
you know, I could fix you a splendid dinner, with a lovely little bûche de
Nöel made from scratch, and we could open each other’s gifts…”
“Nope,
sorry,” Kate replied, heartlessly, as she waited for a very large tanker lorry
to pass on 123 northbound towards San Antonio, raising a cloud of grit as it
blew past the unpaved and little-marked road from the Age. “You committed when
I asked you about this two months ago, and every time since then that I asked
to reconfirm. Mom and Dad are expecting you to show … we’ve been dating for
what – two years now? You simply must bite the bullet and show up with me for a
traditional Griswald family Christmas gathering. Everyone is expecting to meet
my nice English boyfriend. And you promised an authentic English Christmas
pudding for the dessert table, don’t forget.”
“Griswald?”
Rich was utterly confounded. “What fresh hell might this be, Kate? Not that I
have any intention of balking at the jumps – but what?”
“Christmas
movie, about overdoing Christmas,” Kate explained, and the tiny engine of the
Bug roared obligingly as she stomped on the accelerator. “No, sweetie – you’ll
be fine. You’ve hung out often enough with Joe and Jess, and Araceli and Pat on
Sunday afternoons; you’ll be able to get along with Dad, and my big brother
Matt, my other brothers, and Cousin Lester the shrink, if they want to talk
about football. Especially if they want to talk about football. Mom will be
sweet – she thinks the world of you already, since she tried out that
white-bean and garlic on pita chip dip at Thanksgiving, and everyone couldn’t
get enough of it. No, the ‘rents will be cool. It’s ….”
There
was a long and heavily pregnant pause, nearly long enough to birth a litter of
kittens. Richard thought it might be due to Kate’s adamantine concentration on
overtaking an enormous and ponderously slow articulated lorry, which had
inconveniently decided to take up a lane and a half. Richard, his heart in his
mouth, kept heroic silence. He could never entirely become comfortable with the
insouciant manner in which certain Lunaites and Kate drove on the major
highways and byways in a manner more befitting to some reckless movie daredevil
intent on leaping over gaps in highways and abruptly raised drawbridges.
He
didn’t want to distract her. Not for a moment.
When
the Bug’s little engine settled down to a steady purr, as the car slid into a
position ahead of the enormous lorry, Richard recovered his voice.
“You
said ‘it’s’, Kate of my heart. As if there was an individual exception to a
happy reception of my own self at your familial Christmas gathering. You’d
better spill. You know how very much I hate unpleasant surprises. Such
incidents are … unsettling.”
Another
beat and a pause, as Kate cast a glance in the rear-view mirror.
“All
right, then Rich. Grandpa Fritz is coming to Christmas dinner. His girlfriend
Hazel busted him out of the assisted-living place where he lives. No, not
really busted, like she smuggled him out in a basket of laundry, or a sheet
rope over the wall. She’s a visiting nurse and social worker, which is how they
met. She got him out totally legit. You’d like Hazel – she’s …”
“Kate,”
Richard cleared his throat in a meaningful manner. “I care nothing for your
grandfathers’ fascinating social life among the geriatrics …”
“Please,”
Kate replied, smartly. “Hazel is half his age. She likes him lots – says he’s
the most interesting and original guy she knows. But Grandpa Fritz … it’s going
to be awkward, and I should have told you as soon as Mom texted me that he
would be there, too.”
“And?”
Richard held his breath and his patience, as Kate zipped around another big
articulated and slow-going lorry. As soon as Kate eased the Bug into the fast
lane, she confessed. Or something that sounded like a confession.
“Grandpa
Fritz is … like ninety-something. He was born and raised on a little ranch way
north-west of Boerne … you know that town up the highway from San Antonio
that’s pronounced ‘Bernie’? Well, yeah – Grandpa Fritz went to high school
there. But he grew up speaking German. You know, there’s heaps of people in the
Hill Country who are ethnically a hundred and ten percent German, and there’s ever
so many of them. Enough that the Hill Country was basically German speaking –
schools, churches, newspapers and everything, until … well, never mind about
that. Grandpa Fritz – Dad’s father, to make it clear…”
“You’re
babbling again, Kate of my heart,” Richard interjected.
“Am
I? Sorry,” Kate sounded honestly rattled, for nearly the first time in their
acquaintance. Richard found this endearing; he held his tongue and waited
patiently for Kate to elaborate. Which she did, as soon as she had negotiated another
pass by a large and slow-going truck. “Well, he’s 93, and kind of autocratic.
He was in the war, you see. World War Two – he was in the paratroops, although
he fibbed about his age initially, just to enlist in the Army after Pearl
Harbor. He jumped on D-Day, although he never really talked about that to
anyone but Matt…”
“What
did he talk about, Kate of my heart,” Richard ventured after a good few moments,
during which Kate’s little Bug bored down the featureless highway toward
Karnesville, unimpeded by any other traffic.
“Mostly
how he and three of his buddies broke out of their camp in England and went
drinking in a local pub in the nearest town.” Kate had her eyes resolutely on
the highway, a single-mindedness of which Richard fully approved. “They didn’t
officially have liberty to leave camp – they went for a drink or two, and
Grandpa got arrested by the Home Guard and the local constable. They thought he
was an escaped German prisoner of war. It was a bit embarrassing, as they were
all in uniform. American uniform.”
“Why
would that have been a problem?” Richard demanded, in some indignation. “Our
coppers aren’t idiots – even now, and they certainly weren’t seventy years ago,
even allowing for wartime paranoia.”
“Because
Grandpa … he had a German accent, when he spoke English,” Kate confessed. “He
still does. And seriously – at the age of eighteen or so he looked like the perfect
Hitler Youth recruiting poster. The brutal Hun personified from central casting
in one of those old black and white war movies. Dad has a book at home with a
picture of Grandpa Fritz and his paratroop buddies as they were forming up the
night before D-Day – and yeah; I’d have wondered, myself, American uniform or
no.”
“So
what happened, then?” Richard was honestly intrigued. Gran had maundered over
her memories of that time, of being a Land Girl; more of the fun she had with
her friends, not so much of the brutal agricultural labor which that situation
had involved.
“Their
commander got …” Kate considered her phrasing with care. “Informed. Of course
there was a ruckus when the local constable tried to arrest Grandpa, and his
pals took exception. To hear Grandpa tell it, there was a lot of busted-up
furniture and some bloody noses. The result was that everyone in his unit got
confined to camp for a month as punishment, and the feelings were pretty bad
all the way round, because nobody could go out drinking. The locals were pissed
because Grandpa Fritz and his buddies really wrecked the pub and the constable
and a couple of Home Guard volunteers were injured in the fracas. Later on, in
France in the middle of the push back against the Germans, Grandpa Fritz got
separated from his unit, and when some British forces picked him up, they were
all about shooting him as a German spy in US uniform …” Kate sighed. “The way
that Grandpa Fritz tells it, he was about five minutes from being stood up
against a wall and offered a last cigarette. He is still angry about it all.”
“The
prospect of being shot at dawn does concentrate the mind wonderfully,” Richard
observed. “Kate, of Kate Hall, will there be sufficient other guests present
that I may tactfully avoid close conversation with your formidable and
justifiably resentful grandfather?”
“Most
likely,” Kate replied. “I mean, you won’t have to set next to him, or anything
… there’ll be my Mom and Dad, of course, and my brothers; Matt and Cherry and
their kids, Pete and Marsha and theirs … Alan and Brenda with the baby – it’s
his first Christmas. My little bro Ken and his girlfriend. Then Cousin Lester
and Marian, and I don’t know which of their kids are coming, Bill Weitzman from
the University – you know him, right? He’s one of the Luna City Players; and he
dressed up as Marie Antoinette when the Karnes Company Rangers absolutely
destroyed that stupid zombie movie? You remember?”
“That
moment is branded irreversibly on my memory,” Richard confessed, for it
certainly was – the moment when a brawling band of cross-dressers came over the
sunrise-lit ridge and charged downhill into the ranks of visibly-rotting zombie
Mexican soldiers, to the detriment of the biggest movie moment ever to be
filmed in or around Luna City.
Kate
snickered. “Yeah, that moment lives on in infamy for Bill – he says that his
obit, decades from now, will make note of his appearance in that awful movie.
Anyway, between the family, and whatever friends who are at loose ends at Christmas
… you should be able to avoid Grandpa Fritz. Except that I’m Mom and Dad’s only
girl-child. Simply everyone will be wanting to check you out and make
absolutely certain that you are good enough for their little Katie. And no, you
cannot go and hide out in the kitchen. Mom will simply not permit that – until the
main supper prep is done, and you put the final touches on the flaming
Christmas pudding … really, are you going to pour flaming brandy over all?”
“Yes,
I am,” Richard answered. “And prepare the custard sauce … say, I won’t be
allowed in the kitchen until that moment?”
Kate
took no apparent notion of his desperation.
“No,”
she replied, heartlessly – especially heartlessly to Richard. “You simply have
to meet my immediate kinfolk, Rich. They love me, you love me – I think! And I
… umm, rather love you. Time to move out of your comfort zone, Rich. Time to
grapple with the human race – you know, those others of your kind? You are
human, after all; or so we have always assumed…”
“I’m
a time lord from Gallifrey, “Richard returned, solid in his insistence,
whereupon Kate favored him with a brief and heart-warming smile, and signaled a
turn, onto a side-road. Yes, they were almost to Karnesville. His doom was upon
him.
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