A Jingle Bell Mingle (Christmas Notch Book 3)

by Julie Murphy

I pulled it out to see a new notification from my Crime Time Discord server.

My instruments had gone untouched, my slightly pretentious Smythson notebooks had been unwritten in, and my inbox had turned into a disaster so colossal that I eventually just started a new account and left the other one as a monument to my inertia.

The Crime Time Discord was a dedicated and intense place filled with people who had a surfeit of spare time, like retirees and creatively blocked pop stars, and as such, the Discord was always active.

I looked down at my phone to see my mom’s barely lined ivory face on the screen. I briefly considered throwing my phone into the snow—then heroically did not throw my phone into the snow—and pressed accept as I sat down at the mixing board. “Oh good, you answered,” my mother said. “I was worried you’d thrown your phone into the snow.”

My mother was famous for aging gracefully, whatever that meant, and had given interviews about why she’d skipped lip fillers and Botox in favor of letting nature take its course.

“I just wanted to check in and see if you’ve changed your mind about coming to Aspen for the holidays,” she was saying now. “I hate spending Christmas apart.” I didn’t like it either, but the idea of getting on a plane to spend two weeks somewhere I couldn’t brood in peace sounded exhausting.

That was a lie—I hadn’t germinated shit, even after moving to a probably haunted mansion overlooking a forever-Christmas town, but it seemed like the kind of fib that was really for the benefit of everyone. Myself included, because I was so tired of trying to explain why my brain had stopped producing Grammy-winning music.

Why hadn’t I thrown my phone into the snowbank again?

But you’ve grown up with so much comfort—I just worry that I didn’t instill enough drive in you. Enough work ethic. That’s the trouble with your generation, you know, is that no one wants to work anymore.”

You didn’t really start working until you decided you wanted to sing, and you were basically an adult by then.” “I was fourteen. Can’t we count the last five years as part of my deferred childhood?”

“Maybe you have plenty of money and some platinum records to show for yourself, but you can’t just be a shadow for the rest of your life, scrolling on your phone and waiting to die.”

Carina set down her tea and gave me the same expression one of her characters would give a president who didn’t heed her dire warnings about a restless volcano.

The real ghost of this mansion was Sunny Palmer, strewing hair ties and phone chargers and half-empty packs of gum all over the place like some kind of hot, ADHD poltergeist. And I was kind of loving being haunted.

She was wearing a sweatshirt that looked like it was from an Aspen gift shop, but maybe an Aspen gift shop twenty years ago, and I knew the mug in her hand held nothing but straight black coffee—and the kind that came from a big metal can at that.

Carina Kelly had—scandalously for the time—decided to have a child on her own, via artificial insemination, and when a no-nonsense nurse was the only one who could get me to sleep in the hospital, Carina offered her quadruple her nurse’s salary to come be my live-in caretaker. Nanny had agreed, and she became the third member of our family, essentially my other parent.

Given that I was bisexual and had known it since the first time I saw Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park as a kid—and given that I was part of a famously nontraditional family anyway—it took an embarrassing amount of time before I figured out that Nanny and Carina were together. And had been for a really long time.

Gay moms!

And also Nanny said there was too much patriarchy inherent in the construct of marriage to ever endear her to it.

She’d never made me feel bad about grief or depression or needing a fallow period.

Someone who could make me feel anything other than so goddamn aimless. Just enough for six original songs and five half-assed covers, and then I could go back to being alone and my label would never bother me again.

“Gum can really clog up your digestive tract,” he told me as the pacing restarted. “With all the gum you chew, your innards probably look like the Seattle Gum Wall.”

Mr. Tumnus knocked the cracked library door open with his head and proceeded to weave in and out of Isaac’s feet in an attempt to trip him.

Maybe you can call The Rock or someone to save you. Wasn’t he in your mom’s last movie?” He eyed Mr. Tumnus. “She is on his Christmas card list. Well, and he actually sends a calendar—of himself—and not a card, but that’s not the point.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But did you just ask me to be your muse? What am I supposed to do? Lie around naked all day and eat grapes?”

The thought of him counting on me to inspire his next album made me feel tethered and trapped and oh God. How could I, the owner of a half-finished associate’s degree and the world’s largest collection of wand vibrators, ever live up to the memory of his cherished Brooklyn Blue? How could anyone live up to her?

Isaac probably had enough money and connections to open a real-life Jurassic Park.

“Gasp!” I said. “You’re a Top Model fan?” “I’m a recluse, Sunny,” Isaac said. “I’m not devoid of culture.”

In fact, they’d offered me so much advice that a mod had semi-politely asked us to move the conversation off the server because we were spamming the feed with cat content. And thus, the official Cat Advisory Text Thread was born.

Given that a not-insignificant portion of the server was made up of retired women with big-church-bake-sale energy, my age and widowed status meant that I was destined for some well-intentioned meddling.

The door was open, and I knocked before stepping inside, at first seeing only the four-poster bed, a leather briefcase full of embroidery floss, and an open suitcase that had somehow become an ecosystem of snarled leggings and loose socks. The whole space was the opposite of my room, which barely looked lived in, even after months of being here.

The truth was that I liked my room to match how I felt on the inside. Vacant. Bare. A showroom where a life could be lived, but wasn’t.

Broody.

One side of the room was dominated by what looked like a murder wall from a detective show, except happy, with neon-colored sticky notes, sparkly yarn, and a small whiteboard propped on top of a dressing table.

There was half a second before my brain caught up with my body and reminded my disco stick that it was not okay to stare at an ass without a prior ass-staring agreement in place.

Maybe I was too depressing or too boring to be around. Maybe I was bad in bed. Or maybe I shouldn’t have asked at all—maybe muses didn’t work like that.

it wasn’t like I’d been looking for a muse at all when Brooklyn and I had started dating. Our managers had plopped us together for PR reasons, I’d expected to be miserable, and instead found myself happily and wonderfully obsessed for twelve years.

You could feel the rusty beast doing its job; you could feel the road under the tires. There was something reassuring about that. Also people generally didn’t look twice at an old pickup truck, which meant I could drive around with some anonymity. Best twelve hundred dollars I’d ever spent.

Since it was still early in the day, the crowds were manageable, and I had no problem getting to our destination: the Christmas Notch Visitor’s Center. Which was also the city museum. And also the trolley depot.

I mean, that was a grisly murder and not a poignant war miracle, but you get my point.” “I remember that show!” Sunny said. “Is it true that she had to wear prosthetic eyebrows because her natural ones were too pretty?” “It’s true,” I confirmed. “And prosthetic sideburns.”

He caused a small Christmas Notch scandal by taking his wife’s last name when they got married in the seventies.

Haha!

The only two hookups I’d had since Brooklyn were app-assisted, and also it was hard to tell if someone was looking at me because they were interested in having sex with me or if they were looking because I used to dance in fake leather pants on Good Morning America.

Oddly specific.

I knew what Capri-Suns were, of course, but Carina Kelly wasn’t the type of mom to buy such things for her kid, and Nanny only ever allowed me organic juice that she bought from a farm up north.

“Look, you and Matt were about as subtle as a Jenner-sister spray tan, and, turns out, Matt is very free tonight. Congratulations, Mr. Onetime Winner of People’s Sexiest Man Alive! You have your first muse date in seven hours!”

Muses didn’t shake hands! They hugged!

“Have him home by a decent hour!” I called. “I can’t have the town rumor mill churning on about Isaac’s virtue.”

“Who’s Mr. Tumnus?” Matt asked. Isaac slid off his stool and took his coat from the back of his chair. “A vicious feline cursed to roam the earth for what feels like eternity.” I crossed my arms and pouted. There was acting and then there was insulting my son.

“Isaac,” I whispered, “do you know how to parallel park?” He pulled forward again and this time, the tire hit the curb. “I understand the theory of parallel parking,” he said.

“Um, would it surprise you if I told you that I too do not know how to parallel park?”

My driving instructor was an anticapitalist out-of-work actor who always talked about microdosing. I barely even recall learning how to use a blinker.

“Everyone knows CrossFit is a cult.”

Isaac needed this shit on his Christmas tree. Well, first he needed a Christmas tree to put shit on, but I’d have to take care of that later.

“My team usually hired someone to do curated holiday decorations, and that was if I was even home in the month of December. I’ve never really liked owning things. Especially after Brooklyn. Things just feel like a tether, I guess.”