“Trick or treat!”
Mr. Perfect stands in the doorway, peering back at me – although he doesn’t know it’s me – with that half-sexy, half-curious expression of his.
“Oh!” he says, reaching back inside to grab an orange bowl from near the door. I recognize it – the bowl, not the door – as one of Dollar Jungle’s finest. “I almost forgot. Here you go!”
I open my trick or treat bag – really just a Dollar Jungle sack – and he shoves in a fist full of cheap Dollar Jungle candy: chocolate eyeballs and gummi monster fingers and wax lips and bubble gum teeth.
“Hey,” I say, wagging a finger as if I didn’t already know. “It’s you!”
He cocks his head, maybe trying to place the voice. “Sorry,” he says, half-smiling shyly. “I’m not sure I know any sexy pirates.”
I chuckle and set down my treat sack. Then, with great aplomb, I peel off my rusty moustache and flip up my cheap eye patch. “Ta da!”
“Mia?” My heart lifts when his face lights up and he says my name with such recognition I can’t help but be relieved. “Wait a minute… aren’t you a little old to be trick or treating?”
I shrug. “Well, they canceled the employee Halloween party on me at the last minute,” I fib, “and I already had the costume, so… I figured why waste it?”
“I love it,” he says and, as we stand there awkwardly I notice his orange T-shirt with black letters that look like they’re dripping blood. They say, “This is my costume.”
“Love yours,” I say, pointing to it. “I bet your guests do, too,” I tease-slash-hint… again.
“Oh, yeah, well…” He peers back inside the trailer. The shades are drawn and he’s blocking the doorway so I can’t see anybody, but I hear spooky Halloween music from inside and smile. “Hey, uh… you should stop in after you finish trick or treating.”
“Yeah?” I pick up my bag from the porch and squeeze by him before he can change his mind. “I’m done!”
He’s still laughing when he shuts the door behind me. His trailer is a double-wide, like mine, so just inside the door you’re pretty much standing in the living room – no room for a foyer – but beyond that, that’s where the similarity ends.
“This is great!” I beam, and not just the Halloween decorations. His floor is clean linoleum that looks just like tile, the walls papered, not paneled, in soft rust and maroon tones. Scary movie posters from the 60s and 70s hang in nice black frames from the walls.
There’s no couch or entertainment center, just four pleather wing chairs grouped on the far side of the room around a low, rustic coffee table.
Orange and purple string lights wink in the windows and various sizes of flickering jar candles clustered atop the coffee table fill the room with the scents of pumpkin and apples and nutmeg and spice.
“Your place is great,” I say. “I can’t even believe we live in the same trailer park.”
He’s still smiling at my compliment when it kind of… freezes… in place. “Wait, you… live in Whispering Pines, too?”
“Two years and counting,” I say, hardly believing it myself. “I can’t believe I’ve never seen you before.”
“I actually just moved in a few weeks ago,” he says, drifting past me to the kitchen. “So, are you legal?”
We both freeze in place before he turns, face as crimson as one of his cranberry chutney flickering candles. “No, God, I mean… can you drink beer?”
I laugh, blushing too. “Yes, and… please!”
“I hope you like pumpkin beer,” he says, face back to its normal ruddy glow. “I got a twelve-pack on special but I’ll never finish them all myself.”
I take the bottle from him, brown with an orange label featuring a headless horseman blazing across the front. “What about your guests?” It tastes good, just pumpkin-y enough, not too much with the spices.
“Yeah, about that,” he says, leaning back against the kitchen counter as I slide into a chair at the kitchen table. “I said I was having a Halloween party. I never said… there’d be guests.”
Now it’s my turn to cock my head. “But… isn’t that the same thing?”
“Not really,” he says. “I just… wanted to have a party. I didn’t really have anybody to invite anyway.”
“Except for me,” I remind him.
He nods and seems a little embarrassed so I leave it alone. Instead I look down at the kitchen table, beaming. “Hey,” I say, fingering the orange placemat that had first started his Autumn shopping spree. “I know these!”
“You should,” he says, jerking his thumb to a small pumpkin shaped bulletin board on the kitchen wall next to him. Opened up, like a centerfold, and held tight with little push pins is the seasonal page from the October Dollar Jungle sales flyer. “I got the whole collection!”
I nod, spotting a seasonal place setting at each of the four places around the small, humble kitchen table in his small, humble trailer. Placemats, plates, mugs, napkin holders, napkins, it’s all there. “You are perfect, aren’t you?”
He does that head-cock thing again. Then he waves a hand and shakes his head. “Naw, just… thorough.”
I chuckle. “No, I mean… you never introduced yourself, and I was too shy to ask, so… in my head I’ve been calling you ‘Mr. Perfect’ this whole time. Because you’re so intense about all this stuff.”
“Really?” he snorts. “That’s weird. And it’s Grant, by the way.” He raises his glass, I guess instead of a handshake. Then, looking concerned, he asks, “Wait, you mean everybody doesn’t get the whole set?”
I shake my head. “Hardly anybody. In fact, you’re the first customer I’ve ever waited on who did.”
“Then… why do you guys do it?”
I shrug. “You’re asking the cashier? Yeah, corporate doesn’t really check with me for that kind of thing. But wait… where’s all the Halloween stuff?”
His eyes light up, as if excited to show me. “Right this way,” he says, waving his beer like a pointer. I stand and follow him into the living room and, against the wall I couldn’t see from the doorway, he has a high top buffet table.
On top is a spooky display, also lifted straight from the Dollar Jungle sales circular, featuring all of our best dollar-only items: a spider table cloth beneath miniature haunted houses, blinking glitter pumpkins and, of course, leg bone pillar candles in eyeball candleholders.
“I’m even playing the official Dollar Jungle Halloween party CD!” he beams, waving the familiar looking CD case in my face from where he has it propped up, display style, next to an old-fashioned boom box.
“I thought it sounded familiar,” I chuckle as we sink into two of the chairs in his living room.
“You must think I’m a total dork,” he says between sips of his beer. “It’s just, I’ve never had to decorate my own place before so I just copied what was in your flyer.”
I squeeze the armrest of my chair. “This wasn’t in our flyer.” I nod to the posters on the walls. “They weren’t, either.”
“Okay, well… I have some skills.”
“So wait,” I back up a bit. “You never had a bachelor pad you decked out from top to bottom?”
“I never lived alone,” Grant explains, peering around the humble trailer, made less so by his vivid, almost dogged, attention to detail. “I shared a bedroom with my older brother until the day I went to college, where I shared a dorm room with a stranger until I moved off campus, where I shared a two-bedroom apartment with three friends. After college I moved in with a guy who worked at the first job I ever had, and that’s where I met Jasmine and then I moved in with her and, when we got married, bought a place together and…” He looks winded, almost embarrassed at the revelation, as if just now realizing it all himself.
I look around the room, trying to find a single feminine touch. I mean, not that Grant is the most masculine guy in the world, but… there’s no purse on the counter, no wedding photos on the walls, no trace of perfume or nail file resting on the end ta
ble. “And Jasmine would be…?”
He smirks and says, “My ex-wife.”
“Oh.” I blink, rapidly, in all this time never going there. I mean, sure, I’d been wondering about Mr. Perfect’s back story but… never that. “You seem so young to be married and already… un-married.”
He chuckles, standing and taking my empty beer bottle without being asked. I sigh and settle into the chair, finding it hard to remember the last time I’d sat and talked to a man – a real man – other than my boss, Mr. Archer. And, well, married with three kids and a white picket fence, he didn’t really count.
“You’re very generous,” he says, handing me my beer and sitting back down to sip his slowly. “What are you, twenty-one?”
“Twenty-three,” I brag, puffing out my chest.
“Wow,” he teases, eyes wide. “I’m surprised you left your wheelchair at home tonight!”
“You act like you’re some senior citizen or something yourself,” I tease back. “You probably aren’t even getting Medicare yet!”
He laughs at that, a rich, booming sound I haven’t heard before – but am instantly eager to hear again. “I’m thirty-four,” he says, a little sadly. “And I was already married at your age.”
“Really?” I marvel, trying to imagine him at my age, and who he might marry.
“Yes, really,” he says, no longer teasing. “I thought… I thought we’d be together forever.” He sees the cautious look on my face and smirks. “Don’t worry,” he sighs, sagging heavily down into his chair. “I’m not going to spend all night talking about my ex with you.”
“Phew,” I chuckle, because… yeah, I was already thinking that. “But, can you at least get to the good stuff, like… what happened?”
“The good stuff?” he snorts.
“Yeah, you know,” I chuckle, because I figure he could use a good laugh. “Did you get caught flirting with the cashier at some dollar store or something?”
His face grows crimson as he stammers, “I wasn’t… we never… that wasn’t… flirting? It’s been so long, I’ve forgotten how!”
“Relax, I was just… so you didn’t get caught with your hand in the cookie jar?”
He snorts. “I met Jasmine when we were studying for the real estate exam together. It was one of those three-day courses in some hotel conference room, you know how it goes. You see each other in the lobby before one session, during lunch break from another, a few folks get together and go to the hotel restaurant for dinner, that kind of thing. By the end of the weekend, we were inseparable. We stayed like that for twelve years.”
He sighs, sips and continues. “We both started as realtors here in Snowflake a little while later. She taught me a lot, about business. I wasn’t very cutthroat then, I guess I never will be. But she was good, and helped me on a lot of deals she couldn’t handle herself. Pretty soon we were moving up in the world and opened our own office down on Mint Street. We couldn’t afford it ourselves so we found a silent partner. This big real estate developer from Florida. I met him a few times, mostly on Skype or whatever, but he liked the way we did business, and we did a lot of it, so he stayed out of our hair. Or… so I thought. That was eight years ago. Turns out he and Jasmine had been seeing each other for about seven of those, so…”
I gasp, because… I wasn’t expecting that. A few months, maybe. Even a few years, but… seven?
He blushes a little, but we’re kind of beyond that now. “And between you and me,” he says, whispering as if Jasmine might have the place bugged, “I’m pretty sure she said seven years and not eight just to be polite. Which is funny, seeing as she took everything I ever had in the divorce.”
“Wait, hold up: if she cheated on you, why did she get everything?”
“Remember how I said I wasn’t all that hot in business?” he reminds me. “Well, I just kind of let her put everything in her name and… she put everything in her name. I came home from work one day and the locks were changed on our condo. I couldn’t get my clothes, my computer, not even an extra pair of underwear for the next day!”
“Can she do that?”
He shrugs. “Legally, the condo was hers – and everything in it. We were able to negotiate a ‘settlement’ where she put a few of my things in the storage unit downstairs…” He pauses, mid-sentence, to wave at the scary movie posters on the wall. “That’s where these came from but, other than that… I had to start from scratch. We’re talking new underwear, socks, shorts, shoes, T-shirts… job, the works.”
“I’m sorry, Grant.”
“I’m not!” he insists. “It’s kind of… nice, actually. I mean, yeah, it’s a change in lifestyle but I’m working for a local property manager, taking care of rental units and houses, collecting rents, out in the fresh air, using my body instead of my mind. It’s good, it keeps me occupied and it’s not so bad having to start over. I mean, I met you, right?”
I snort, surprised and blushing and nearly spitting up my beer. “Not sure how great that is, but…”
“Sure it is,” he says, doing that little head cocking thing of his and peering back at me kindly. “Of course it is.”
I see his beer is empty and, before he can get up, I stand and drift toward the kitchen. “Do you mind?” I ask, hand on the refrigerator handle.
“My trailer is your trailer!”
I grab us two more beers, drifting by the Halloween display and recognizing the “Bewitched” theme on the spooky sounds CD. I smile, handing him the beer. “And this party?” I ask, both our hands on the beer for a few seconds before he takes it away. “Is that part of starting over, too?”
“We threw this big Halloween party every year,” he says, not sounding too excited about it. “But it always had to be this elaborate masquerade, with fancy masks and costumes and caterers and fancy foods and the best champagne and a live band and… I just wanted chocolate eye balls and gummi body parts and blinking pumpkins, you know?”
I jerk a thumb toward his Halloween display and say, “Well, you got ‘em now.”
“Yeah,” he snorts, shaking his head. “I sure did.”
“How’s it feel?” I ask, although the bittersweet triumph is written all over his face.
“I dunno,” he says. “I thought… it would make me happier, you know?”
“You sure seemed happy, coming in every night!”
“I was,” he says. “But I think it was all just a diversion, you know? To keep me busy, to keep my mind busy and off the fact that everything is so different this year.”
I nod, letting it just sit there, listening to the Halloween music and sipping my pumpkin beer.
“I’m kind of a mess,” he confesses when I don’t respond right away.
My throat grows tight, voice hoarse as I confess, “In case you haven’t already noticed… me too!”
“No you’re not!” he insists, sitting up and waving his beer like a pointer at a motivational seminar. “You’re… you’re the most together thing in my life right now.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you!”
“Grant, I work at Dollar Jungle! I wear green and yellow for a living. I stock boxes of candy corn and thin mints for a living. What is together about that?”
“You’re gainfully employed,” he points out. “You live here, in beautiful Whispering Pines! You’re young, you’re beautiful, you’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Don’t waste a single minute of it on thinking you’re a mess!”
I snort, biting my lower lip so that he asks, “I mean, you’re saying your life’s ambition isn’t to work at Dollar Jungle?”
I chuckle, exhaling loudly. “I started there when I was still going to Snowflake Community College,” I explain hesitantly. “Dad and I lived here, in the trailer, until Nettie Blackburn moved in next door. Then he moved in with her and I had the place to myself. It was cool, for awhile, until the bills started coming and Dad quit paying them. I asked him, I asked him what was going on and what I should do. He said… he said…”
/>
I pause, trying not to relive the moment so vividly. Peering up, I see Grant literally on the edge of his seat, not sure whether to come to my rescue or keep a safe distance. I spare him and continue: “He said I was over eighteen now, I was on my own. And he meant it. When Nattie Blackburn’s lease was up on her trailer a few months later, they both split. Dad came over one morning to pack up whatever was left of his things, while her car was running in the drive. He tried to kiss me on the forehead and when I flinched he shrugged, walked out and never looked back. I switched to full-time at Dollar Jungle three days later and, well… I guess I never looked back, either.”
“And now?” he asks, still teetering on the edge of his pleather seat, handsome face aglow in the wash of flickering pumpkin candles.
I shrug, sitting back, as if the moment has suddenly become too intimate now that it’s almost over. “I haven’t talked to him since,” I grunt. “I just keep my head down, pay the rent on the trailer and stay out of everybody’s way.”
“Until now,” he teased.
I snort. “Yeah, well… I just had to see what all this seasonal stuff looked like in real life.”
“That why you came around trick or treating?”
I wave a dismissive hand. “Naw, I just haven’t had enough cheap chocolate eyeballs this month!”
We laugh until the tears I never dared shed before are dry and he eases slightly back in his seat again.
“So we’re both a little screwed up,” he says, nodding at the flickering candles and plates of cheap Dollar Jungle candy. “Big deal. At least we know how to party!”
I laugh until I can’t cry anymore and my beer is almost done, but I don’t reach for another. And he doesn’t get up to fetch us a refill, even though his is empty as well.
“I have a confession,” he says, avoiding my eyes before peering back at me above a soft, comforting smile. “I could have gotten new forks and knives anywhere, Mia. I kept coming back to Dollar Jungle because of you!”
“I have confession, too,” I add after my last sip of my pumpkin beer. “I don’t work Sundays.” When his face looks confused I confess, “When you didn’t come in Friday, or Saturday, I was worried I’d miss you so I switched with one of our part-timers for her shift. She was stoked, now she could go trick or treating but… I just didn’t want to miss you in case you came in.”
He reaches for my hand, covering it gently before pulling it away. “I’m glad you did, Mia.”
“Why?” I ask, finally putting him on the spot.
“Because if you hadn’t,” he says, inching even closer and covering my hand with his, “I might have had to wait a whole other month to do this…” He kisses me then, soft and gentle and kind.
I taste his pumpkin beer, or maybe it’s mine, as we linger before drifting apart at exactly the same moment. “No you wouldn’t have,” I chuckle, sitting back with a satisfied sigh.
“No?” he asks, following suit.
I shake my head. “I would have jumped your bones long before then!”
Laughter fills the trailer with its happy, unfamiliar sounds. We look at each other then, in no great hurry to rush the moment. We might kiss again, we might not, but wondering when – or if – has my long dormant belly all twisted in warm, tender knots.
And besides, what’s a Halloween party without a little suspense, right?
* * * * *
About the Author
Rusty Fischer is the author of Christmas in Snowflake: Three Heartwarming Holiday Tales, forthcoming from Decadent Publishing. Visit him at www.snowflakeseries.com for dozens of FREE stories from the fictional town of Snowflake!
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