The holiday detour, p.1
The Holiday Detour, page 1
The Holiday Detour
Synopsis
Sometimes it takes everything going wrong to make you see how right things are.
Dana Gottfried is a stressed-out Jewish lesbian who’s just quit her job and wants to get home to see her grandmother. When her car breaks down in Indiana on Christmas Eve, Dana is stranded—until she’s rescued by Charlie, a pig farmer who doesn’t identify as male or female. Although they come from different worlds, Dana is intrigued by Charlie’s sense of humor and kindness. Despite her better judgment, Dana says yes when Charlie offers a ride.
But the journey home is paved with detours. From car accidents to scheming ex-girlfriends to a snowy and deserted Chicago Loop, everything that could go wrong on their road trip does, but it leads Dana on a path of self-discovery that just might end in love.
The Holiday Detour
Brought to you by
eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com
eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.
The Holiday Detour
© 2020 By Jane Kolven. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-63555-719-0
This Electronic Original Is Published By
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, NY 12185
First Edition: September 2020
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editor: Cindy Cresap
Production Design: Susan Ramundo
Cover Design By Tammy Seidick
eBook Design By Toni Whitaker
Dedication
For Lizzi, who picked me up in their rusty car and has been changing my world ever since.
Chapter One
Among the things I disliked most in the world were long car rides, and yet every year I found myself putting off booking a flight home to the suburbs of Chicago until it was too late, the tickets were all too expensive (if there were even any left), and voilà. I would be stuck driving all the way from Cleveland in the frigid, dark winter by myself with nothing to do in the car but listen to the Christmas music that had taken over every radio station.
Why did I do this every year if I hated it so much? My nana. I didn’t have many friends left in Highland Park, Illinois, where I grew up, but my grandmother still lived there. I invited her to celebrate Christmas with me in Cleveland, but at eighty-five she was better off staying put. At thirty-two, I could much more easily go to her, even if I had to listen to “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year” on repeat across three states.
The more the singer emphasized how wonderful it was, the more I was convinced it was actually lousy. This year promised to be even worse because Nana had called to tell me that Mitchell Wormerstein would also be home visiting his own grandmother, who happens to live a block away from Nana. Mitchell and I went to school together from kindergarten, when he picked his nose and ate what he found, to eighth grade, when he popped his zits in class and they squirted on his homework. In high school his family had thankfully moved away. Since it had been some fifteen years since I’d seen him, Nana thought I might like to visit with him. I would have rather given Nana a pedicure.
I hadn’t even made it to Toledo when my phone rang with an unknown number. Since my friends always texted me like normal people, I was in the habit of assuming phone calls were from debt collectors for some bill I forgot to pay, which made me absolutely not want to answer the phone. But I was also in the habit of worrying that someone might be calling to tell me something bad had happened to Nana. Both possibilities made my heart skip a beat whenever the phone rang, for very different reasons, but because of the latter, I always answered, just in case.
“Hello, is this Dana?”
“Yes,” I answered nervously.
“This is Mitch Stein,” a suave voice said. He chuckled, and it was the sound a chocolate shaving on top of a cheesecake would make if it made sounds. “Actually, you knew me as Mitchell Wormerstein.”
I nearly swerved off the highway.
“Mitchell? Mitch?” I repeated. Then psychotically, with way too much enthusiasm, I screamed into the phone, “Mitch! Hi! How are you?!”
“I’m doing fine.” He cooed like a 1950s movie star whose hair was slicked back with Brilliantine, but Mitchell Wormerstein—Mitch Stein—had been a bug-eyed, chubby-cheeked freak when I’d last seen him. I wasn’t fooled by a silken voice. “You’re probably wondering how I got your number and why I’m calling.”
No kidding.
“Your grandmother gave your number to my grandmother, and before you get angry at them—or me—I promise you I don’t have any intention of bothering you about meeting up over Christmas.”
Like many people, when I felt backed into a corner, I tended to do and say the exact opposite of what I was thinking and feeling. I heard myself give an artificial laugh and promise him, “Not at all, Mitch! I’d love to meet up while we’re both in town! It’d be great after all these years!”
“Oh, well, okay, I think I can find some time for that.” He sounded a little off-put.
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel. How dare he suggest he would be busier than I would and that he would deign to grant me some of his precious time? He’d once conned me into playing Uno in a corner of the classroom during indoor recess on a rainy day, and I’d only said yes because I didn’t know how to say no. He’d spent the whole time farting and pretending it wasn’t him.
“Anyway,” Mitchell—Mitch—continued as if it wasn’t supremely gracious of me to even be talking to someone so obviously lower than me in the elementary school social hierarchy, “the reason I’m calling is that my grandmother wanted to know if it would be okay if Mrs. Gottfried came over here tonight. Granny says Mrs. Gottfried is usually alone because you can’t get here in time, so she wanted me to check with you about your travel plans. We obviously don’t want to interfere in anything you might have going on, but we didn’t want your grandmother to be alone.”
That was sweet of his grandmother Ruthie. She and Nana had known each other since their first year of high school. They’d gone to separate colleges but stayed friends, and they had both moved from Rogers Park to Highland Park in the 1950s when they got married and started having kids. My dad had been the first born to the two families in 1957, and Ruthie’s daughter Lila came shortly after. I think Nana had always expected them to end up together, and maybe giving Mitchell—Mitch—my phone number was her way of uniting the clans a generation later.
As if Nana didn’t know I was gay.
“That’s very thoughtful,” I told Mitch. “You know Nana refuses to celebrate Christmas, right? She’ll eat and drink your wine, but she’ll get huffy if you try to make her do anything more than that.”
Mitch gave a mirthful chuckle, and this time I thought of a powdery snowfall sprinkling down from the heavens. Had he actually grown up to be attractive, or did he just get a really good voice after puberty? The last time I’d spoken to him, he had sounded like a cat in heat.
“We actually do some Christmas stuff,” he explained, “since my father never converted, and my mom says it’s important to her that we share his heritage. But Granny will probably get her revenge by keeping the menorah out even though Hanukkah was two weeks ago. She and Mrs. Gottfried are welcome to spin dreidels if they’d like. Last year, when Granny visited us, she staged a murder scene with some reindeer figurines. She made us all act as detectives to figure out who killed it.”
Ruthie was lucky her second daughter, Hannah, was still alive to torture her into celebrating Christmas. Like many families in Highland Park, mine was Jewish, and so, for the most part, was Mitch’s. But unlike many families, mine was just my grandmother and me. My grandfather had died of cancer when I was four, and my parents had died in a car accident while I was in college. Nana and I had been surviving on our own ever since.
“Anyway,” Mitch continued, “everyone will be there this year, Lila and my folks, me, Ruthie, and I think Franklin Silverman is coming. Your grandmother would be very welcome.”
“Really, it’s so nice of you to think of her,” I repeated. “But I’m actually on my way to Illinois right now. I should be there by dinnertime unless a snowstorm kicks in. So Nana won’t be alone.”
I expected Mitch to conclude our conversation at that point, but instead he said quite insistently, “Oh, well, of course, you’re more than welcome.”
I lied and said I would be delighted to see him, and we hung up. I definitely did not want to celebrate Christmas among a big family, especially a semi-Jewish one that didn’t even want to be celebrating Christmas, and I certainly did not want to be forced to interact with Mitchell Wormerstein. Mitch Stein. Whatever he called himself now. I groaned aloud in the car to no one, adjusted the heater, and angrily switched the radio station away from “Holly Jolly Christmas.” The next station was playing “Jingle Bell Rock.” Just great.
Chapter Two
Somewhere in Indiana, I stopped to fill my gas tank and get something to eat. Although I was generally a healthy eater, I allowed myself to eat whatever I wanted on road trips. The problem with this was that Nana always wanted to feed me when I showed up on her doorstep, but by that point I was usually so bloated with soda and fries that I would nearly vomit at the mention of food. I supposed I was nearing the age when I should have started thinking more carefully about what I put into my body, but…Well, the slushy machine at the gas station had something lime green that was calling my name. It was on sale for seventy-nine cents, so after I went to the bathroom, I filled a cup, grabbed a package of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, and returned to my car, proud that my late lunch cost less than three dollars.
A few miles down the highway, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror. There was electric red powder dotting my lips, and my tongue was slime green. For a moment I wondered if things like this explained why I was always single.
Sometimes on long trips I tried to imagine someone sitting in the passenger seat. I didn’t know what she’d look like, what snacks she’d get from the gas station, or whether she’d sing off-key and loudly like me, at least when the radio stations weren’t taken over by the Ronettes maniacally repeating the phrase “sleigh ride.”
I was halfway to fantasizing about a cross-country road trip all the way from Maine to California, something I’d always wanted to do but had never done because I didn’t want to go alone, when my check engine light came on. Before I could think about why or what to do about it, an alarm started dinging, and I frantically tried to steer to the nearest off-ramp.
I didn’t make it.
My car made a horrible grinding noise a few yards from the off-ramp, a thunderous metallic clunk that rattled the whole car, and then the engine died. I put the gearshift in park, turned the ignition off and on, and tried to restart the engine. Nothing. The radio and lights didn’t even come on.
I didn’t know anything about cars. I had never hit a squirrel, I didn’t know how to change my own oil, and I definitely couldn’t take a peek under the hood to see what was going on. The one time I got a flat tire, I discovered it after coming out of Target with about three hundred dollars’ worth of goods in plastic shopping bags. I’d called roadside assistance to come and fix it and hoped my frozen dinners wouldn’t melt before they arrived. But I didn’t need to be a mechanic to know that the metallic clunk I’d heard just now wasn’t good. It sounded as if part of the engine had fallen out. Somehow I knew in the pit of my stomach that my sweet baby car, which had been a graduation present from Nana and which had been in my life for almost ten years since, was completely, truly dead.
I swore out loud.
It took me a few seconds of sitting behind the wheel while cars whizzed past me at seventy miles an hour to snap out of my shock. Then I took a deep breath and gathered my thoughts. The most important thing was to get out of the way of traffic before someone accidentally sideswiped me or killed us both. I tried the key in the ignition once more, but it was pointless. I briefly thought about getting out and pushing the car, but that would pose a much greater safety risk than leaving it where it was. No, I needed professional assistance.
I fumbled around for my phone, which I had carelessly tossed on the passenger seat after that unexpected phone call from Mitchell Wormerstein. It wasn’t on the seat anymore, so I had to unbuckle my seat belt and lean across the console, feet coming off the ground, to peek under the passenger seat. I spied the hot pink case tucked against the metal track used to adjust the seat, grabbed it, and righted myself. The screen had some crumbs from God knows what on it, which I blew off. For good measure, I rubbed the screen on my jeans.
New problem: the phone wasn’t charged. Talking to Mitchell Wormerstein must have depleted the battery, since I hadn’t charged the phone the night before because I am a total screw-up. I had assumed it wouldn’t be a problem because I could charge the phone while driving, but obviously that wasn’t going to work now.
There was a whopping four percent left to the battery, and I was going to use it. Before I attempted to dial, I scrounged in the glovebox for the little folder in which I kept the insurance information. Once I’d located the number for roadside assistance, I dialed. I managed to get someone on the phone and tell them which highway I was on, but I didn’t know where I was exactly. I was past the off-ramp sign, and I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention before the car died. I was fumbling with the map app to figure out where the little blue dot was when the battery finally died, in the middle of my phone call for help.
Well, this was a promising start to the day.
My car was getting really cold.
I tapped my forehead against the steering wheel a few times, contemplating what would happen if I got out and tried to walk down the off-ramp for help. How far could I walk without getting hit by a car? How far would I have to walk in the cold before I found a store or a gas station? I remembered when there used to be pay phones in public places and wondered why we had been so quick to give them up.
My next thoughts were about Nana, who wouldn’t worry if I were an hour or so behind schedule but who could have her own emergency and no way to reach me. I couldn’t sit in the car all day hoping roadside assistance had actually gotten enough information to come for me. No, I’d have to venture out into the cold and hope for the best. My scarf and gloves were on the seat beside me. I bundled myself up and climbed out of the car, flattening myself against the driver’s side door as a semi-truck came roaring by.
Those off-ramps to highways never looked very steep or very long to me when I was driving them, but on foot it took me a really long time to get to the bottom. I was only wearing Converse high-tops, and since I was too afraid of being hit by a car to walk in the road, my feet were soaking wet with snow slush. At the intersection, I slid on a patch of ice and landed hard on my bum. Things hurt, my pride most of all, but I managed to push myself onto all fours and then back to standing.
“This sucks.” I tried to sniffle up the snot that was running down my upper lip. I felt like Mitchell Wormerstein.
A beat-up blue truck honked from the other side of the street. The driver rolled the window down, and someone with floppy brown chin-length hair leaned out. “Are you okay?”
Was I okay? Not in the least. I was most definitely not okay. But did I want to admit it to a stranger? I didn’t know. From the little I could see of the person leaning out the truck window, I thought she was a woman, though with the haircut and voice it wasn’t totally clear. She had giant brown eyes, a gorgeous elfish type, and she didn’t match the truck at all.
“Do you need me to take you to the gas station?” the person yelled.
I waited for a car to pass through the intersection and then ran across the street with my hands warming in my pockets, trying not to think about how dorky I must have looked. I slowly approached the truck, feeling nervous and trying not to do that awkward shy-smile thing I usually did when I found someone attractive.
“Um…what?”
Best first line ever, Dana.
“What are you doing walking around the highway? Did you run out of gas?”
I shrugged and wiped my dripping nose with a gloved hand. “My car died, and then my phone died.” I hadn’t realized it until I tried to talk, but my mouth had frozen. My words came out in an indiscriminate slur.
“Did you just fall on your butt?”
“What? No.” My bruised bottom protested at the injustice of it all.
“Sounds like you’re having a rough day.” Up close, the driver looked like a woman. She had the smooth skin and delicate features of a woman, anyway. She patted the truck door. “Hop in, and I’ll take you to the gas station.”
“I can walk just fine.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m not a serial killer.”
“A serial killer wouldn’t admit to being a serial killer.”
“Suit yourself, the gas station is two miles back that way.” She jerked her thumb in the direction from which she’d come. She started to roll the window up.
