A Jingle Bell Mingle (Christmas Notch Book 3)

by Julie Murphy

Fine. “Intentionally track down and corner into a random conversation about their dead relative.” Is that better?

If we could find James Dugan’s descendants, then we could get the Christmas legend as straight from the horse’s mouth as possible, given that the horse in this scenario was dead and buried near an emotionally jarring hologram.

“I find the truck quite charming, kind of like the first boyfriend I had after moving out of my family’s house when I was eighteen. He was a pizza delivery driver who got fired for eating a slice of pizza from a customer’s pizza before he delivered it. He was also thirty-four years old.”

Ick.

I wasn’t allowed to cast a vote, which seemed like some real Robert’s Rules of Bullshit to me.

It was that my own brother wanted to be legally disassociated from me.

“And then sometimes you even sigh in your sleep.” “You watch me while I’m sleeping? How very Edward Cullen of you.”

The woman who bubbled with joy and possibility and the girl who’d lived with grief for so long it had become a part of her and who had been alienated by the only family she had left. Most people hated witnessing other people’s sadness, because it reminded them of their own.

“So their urns are there then?” I shook my head. “Mom and Dad chose to naturally decompose. Their remains turned to soil and were used to plant two magnolia trees on the property.”

“No,” he said. “But they made you sad and I want to know who the fuck made Sunny Palmer sad.” “You gonna beat ’em up for me?” I asked. “No, but I’ll hire a construction crew to work on the house next door to them. Forever. Just for fun.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t read it.” “Why not?” “Because if I read it, it’s real and if it’s real, I have to deal with it.” “Okay, that is surprisingly sound logic.” “This is why we’re no good for each other,” I told him.

“The passcode is sixty-nine sixty-nine,” I said and handed over my phone. “That’s been Kallum’s code, and pin number, for as long as I’ve known him,” Isaac said. “Great minds think alike, and also mine used to be zero four twenty, but I had to reset it when I got a new phone.”

“Who wrote these bylaws anyway? Two kids in a trench coat?”

“Well, they can vote until they have blue balls—” “I think the expression is blue in the face,” he said.

I didn’t want to destroy the company my parents had worked so hard to build just because I’d done a few pornos and even directed one, or because I might actually be terrible at helping run a company. I mean, I couldn’t even stay with one gig long enough to call it a career. Makeup, porn, directing, my short-lived stint as the manager of a pottery cafe . . . how did I think I could commit to a multimillion-dollar diaper empire that would come with agendas and portfolios?

My earlier feelings about wise and healthy self-preservation no longer felt so wise and healthy. It felt more like getting stuck in an airport when all the food places were closed and the vending machines were broken. Like being stranded, except I’d been the one to strand myself.

“I hope someone doesn’t try to love me. The thought of love again is—terrifying.”

Much brooding.

But the intense devotion he had for Brooklyn only made him all the more equipped to share his love with somebody else one day, even if he couldn’t believe it yet.

“I think your capacity to love is stunning, Isaac Kelly. And whoever is lucky enough to have you want to spend time with them is luckier than the kids who survived the Final Destination movies.”

The renovation crew had come up here for mysterious electricity reasons, but I’d had them leave pretty much everything as it was, including the leftovers from the mansion’s tycoon era.

“I know it doesn’t make things less hard, Isaac. But also it doesn’t cheapen your grief to be happy once in a while.”

I didn’t want to forget her, I didn’t want to move on, I didn’t want to have the anniversary of her death be just another day when the sun rose and set like usual.

That I wasn’t one hologram short of a living graveyard.

What was the point of fighting? We were all going to die anyway. Might as well hold on to as much peace as we could before we popped our clogs.

I strummed again, making sure that my wrists were being extra wristy (whatever that meant), and then she glared. “You are a menace to my creativity.”

Do you know how tired I am of indenting new paragraphs?”

I immediately let go, completely betrayed by his willingness to remind me of my contractual obligations.

“And Isaac,” Steph told him. “My clients don’t make the rules. That’s not how this works.”

“Did that fluffy void just launch itself onto your antique dining room table like he owns this mansion?”

“That cat is a power bottom,” Teddy said.

Steph told us about the time a certain height-challenged actor tried to get her to become a Scientologist, and about a very dicey situation involving a maturing diva, two different boyfriends, and a nonconsensual food fight on a private jet that left one of the boyfriends hospitalized with caviar impacted in his ear canal.

They’d found this little crossroads where the two of them could exist and it gave me this startling sense of hope.

But after watching Bee and Nolan and then Kallum and Winnie fall so effortlessly for one another, it was nice to see these two fuckups just happily stumbling through life together side by side.

I’ve known since the moment I met her and she verbally eviscerated me to shreds.

This is going to be even better than the time I threw myself a baby shower when I got Mr. Tumnus!”

and worse than the meat mallet feeling was realizing that I wanted Sunny more than she wanted me, that whatever I was feeling right now was not reciprocated.

And Mrs. James Dugan is named there as Mrs. Bernice *Bushey* Dugan!

You’re only saying that because you remember 1948 better than Betty and me. Judy: I was only three years old. Dee: Tell it to Truman.

In her lap was a bag of gummy bears, and whenever I opened my mouth, she would place a non-yellow gummy bear on my tongue so I could keep my eyes on the road.

What do you have against yellow?

“You know,” she mused, “it’s far more likely that we’ll be killed by a moose than a truck.” “What.” I saw her nod sagely out of the corner of my eye. “You can’t see their eyes shine in the dark like you can with deer because they’re too tall. That’s also what makes them so deadly—their moosely bodies are at the same height as a windshield. And then—BAM!” She smacked her palm with her other hand, making me jump. “Instant death!” “I’m much less tense now, thank you.”

Sometimes, stories bring the people we’ve lost back to us, you know? Even if it’s just for a few minutes, even if it’s only for one. It could be a kind of gift, getting to tell someone. Getting to remember out loud.”

Bringing Brooklyn back to me not as a way to cling to her or hurt myself with her memory, but as a way to recall the simple gift her life had been.

“I don’t want to use you like some kind of . . . dead-wife priest. That’s not fair to you.”

“The tombstone company is still backlogged from the disaster at the maple syrup processing plant—but I’m afraid it’s true. We all miss her dearly, and it was so unexpected.”

“Oh, she didn’t die of old age,” the receptionist said. “Moose accident on the way to the store to get more vape cartridges.

As we walked past the cafeteria, we saw carving stations, a man making fresh-to-order onion rings, a juice bar, and a sexual wellness desk with bowls full of condoms, lube, and info on a biweekly STI clinic.

The receptionist, who we’d since learned was named Teresa-Kate, answered me from over her shoulder. “Our residents are . . . active in many regards.”

“Doris is one of our water bugs. Her hair turned green last year from too much time in the pool.”

“It better not be those godforsaken grandchildren of mine,” she said with a chuckle as she turned to us. “No grandchildren,” I said. “But we may perhaps be godforsaken.”

Isaac went for his wallet, and Doris swatted at his hand. “I’ve got a punch card to fill, young man.”

The way she said the word my spoke volumes, and I immediately recognized it as the same way Bee and I talked about each other.