The Christmas Strike

“If that’s your polite way of telling me that paybacks are a bitch, forget it. It is not lost on me that I am now the Old Mrs. Dempsey down at the diner that the kids from junior high get to harass for the price of a Coke.”

I slid into one of the booths by the window and shrugged out of my parka. “Trust me, you’re nothing like your mother-in-law was.”

“Maybe not to you, since you’re now a middle-aged curmudgeon, too. But to those young hoodlums—”

“You know,” I interrupted, “using those kinds of words isn’t helping the image.”

“What kinds of words?” Iris Johnson asked as she entered the diner along with a burst of arctic air. “I hope I didn’t miss anything vulgar,” she said as she teetered over to the booth on four-inch heeled boots.

“Jo just called me a middle-aged curmudgeon,” I told her.

Iris, glaring at Jo, slipped off her full-length white fake fur, revealing tight black leather jeans and a gold metallic ruffled shirt, and tossed the coat toward the empty booth nearby. “Fifty-two is not middle-aged,” she emphatically insisted as she sat down across from me. “And what the hell is a curmudgeon? It sounds like something from The Wizard of Oz.”

“Those are Munchkins,” I corrected. Iris never had any kids.

“My mother-in-law, may she rest in peace,” Jo explained, “was a curmudgeon.”

Iris shrugged. “If you mean old bitch, say old bitch.” She lit a cigarette and we both glared at her. She, as usual, ignored us. “It’s true that you can be bitchy, Jo, honey, but you’re certainly not an old bitch. We are,” she said before pausing to blow smoke toward the hammered tin ceiling, “the same age.”

“Thank you,” Jo said.

“She’s upset because some kids loosened the tops on the salt shakers,” I explained.

“We used to do that,” Iris said.

“Exactly,” Jo exclaimed as she came over with three mugs, a carafe of coffee and a basket of hot donuts. “The postpubescent are now doing to me what we used to do to Mike’s mother. In other words, I’ve crossed over to the other side. Next thing you know they’ll be throwing snowballs at me hoping I fall on my ass.”

Iris took another drag then put the cigarette out. Her current program to quit smoking involved taking only two drags per cigarette. It was costing her a small fortune. The nicotine withdrawal wasn’t helping her mood, either. “Keep those donuts away from me,” she griped as she waved off the basket Jo was holding out to her. “I had a hard enough time zipping these jeans this morning.”

Jo pulled the basket closer to our side of the booth and we both dug in with gusto.

“Look,” Iris complained, “having coffee with you two every Friday afternoon is supposed to cheer me up. Get a clue. This conversation isn’t doing it. And the sight of you two scarfing down donuts like it’s the day before Armageddon isn’t helping.” She sighed. “Neither is the fact that that guy I met in Milwaukee last weekend still hasn’t called.”

Jo and I made sympathetic noises, but we couldn’t relate. Jo had been married to Mike Dempsey, her high school sweetheart, since the age of nineteen and even though I’d been widowed for over twenty years, I’d never put myself back on the market. When you have lived in a town of less than five thousand people nearly all your life, you pretty much know why every eligible man is still eligible. The reason was never good. Which is why Iris had started fishing in a bigger pond.

She examined her nails, then started to play with the ends of her hair—auburn this week. Iris was a huge fan of the current resurgence of big hair. As owner of Iris’s House of Beauty, she had half the women in town looking like they should be living in Texas. Luckily, I wore my graying blond hair too short for one of her makeovers. It didn’t keep her from trying to talk me into it, though. So far, Jo, who still wore her brown hair like she had in high school—short bob with full bangs—had also resisted.

Mike came out of the kitchen with a rack of clean glasses and noisily set them on the counter. “You taking another break?” he asked.

“Friday afternoon coffee klatch, remember?”

“You know, you can be replaced,” Mike quipped.

“I’d like to see you try,” Jo shot back.

It was their usual banter. Mike, who was still built like the linebacker he’d been in high school and still had that mop of wavy brown hair and a pair of dimples that could kill, was crazy about Jo and we all knew it, even when he gave her a hard time.

“You know,” Mike said, “I just saw something on the news about a man who went on strike against his wife because she wasn’t giving him enough affection.”

We all laughed.

“Go ahead, laugh. But I’m serious, ladies. It was on CNN.”

“Don’t worry, Mike, I’ve got you penciled in for some affection later tonight,” Jo assured him.

He shook his head. “Not good enough. I want indelible ink or nothing.”

Jo smiled. “You got it, babe. Now get back in that kitchen and start frying some more donuts before the after-work crowd gets here.”

He gave her a look. “Boy, that better be a lot of affection I’m gonna get.”

Mike disappeared into the kitchen and I thought about how lucky Jo was not to have to sleep alone at night.

“Look at that,” Iris said as she jerked her chin toward the window. “Old man Kilbourn at the drugstore has been putting those same decorations in his windows since the Beatles made their first record.” She sighed. “Nothing ever changes in this town. How the hell did the three of us end up back here?”

Although it was a question one of us asked periodically, no one really ever bothered to answer. We each had our reasons. Certainly, none of us had intended to live out our lives here. As far as we were concerned the whole point of growing up in Willow Creek was to get out of Willow Creek. My two much older siblings, a brother and sister, had moved to the west coast long before I’d graduated from high school. I’d made my escape at the age of nineteen when I’d moved to Milwaukee and enrolled in night courses in accounting while working as a secretary during the day at an accounting firm. That was where I’d met my husband, Charlie.

Nat and Gwen were babies and Charlie and I were looking for our first house when my father became terminally ill. I moved back to Willow Creek with the kids to help my mother take care of my father. Charlie came down on weekends. After my father died, it was clear my aging mother could no longer live alone. We didn’t want to have just a weekend marriage, so Charlie moved into my mother’s house with me and the kids, and opened an accounting office in Willow Creek. Neither of us considered the move a permanent one, though. We figured it was only a matter of time before we’d pick up our lives in the city where we’d left off.

Then came the car accident and in the blink of an eye, I became the Widow of Willow Creek. With two toddlers tugging at my jeans and an increasingly needy mother to take care of, I closed Charlie’s office and opened a bookkeeping and tax preparation service that I ran out of the house. By the time my mother had passed on, the girls were entering their teens with social lives of their own and I figured I was meant to be born, live and die in Willow Creek.

I looked at my watch. “I’ve got to keep an eye on the time.”

“Fetching the grandkids from school again today?” Jo asked.

I nodded. “Natalie picked up an extra half shift out at the Mega-mart. They can use the money.”

“Jeremy find anything yet?”

I sighed, refilled my mug and grabbed another donut. “My son-in-law has taken root on the sofa,” I said with my mouth full. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to start watering him soon.”

“Must be in the depression stage,” Iris said. “Unemployment can put you through the same five stages as grief, you know.”

Jo and I looked at each other, then back at Iris.

“Something you read in Vogue?” Jo asked with sweet sarcasm and a batting of her mascara-less lashes.

Iris shook her hair back. “I read other things, too, you know.” She sniffed. “Anyway, it’s only common sense. You put a virile guy like Jeremy out of work and give him nothing to do and he’s bound to start struggling with his ego.”

“Believe me,” I said dryly as I sipped my coffee, “I’ve given Jeremy plenty to do. Nice little list that looks as fresh as the day I gave it to him.”

“See? Another symptom of depression is an inability to take action,” Iris pointed out. “It’s like you become frozen. Jeremy could even be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I read just the other day—”

Iris was a magazine junkie. While you waited your turn at Iris’s House of Beauty, you could read everything from Psychology Today and Herbal Monthly to Vogue and Cosmo. She claimed that since she could use the subscriptions as a business expense that ordering so many was just her way of sticking it to the government, but Jo and I knew she was addicted.

“All I want to know about a breakdown,” I said as I struggled back into my parka, “is when is it going to be my turn to have one? I wouldn’t mind lying on the sofa and watching old movies all day long in my pajamas.” I slid out of the booth and headed for the door.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Jo called. “We haven’t decided on what the Prisoners of Willow Creek Enrichment Society is doing tomorrow. This is our Saturday, you know.”