About The Christmas Visit

by Marshall Thornton
29 pages / 13500 words
ISBN: 978-1-60370-572-1, 1-60370-572-4
Available file types - html. lit, pdf, prc, epub, Sony Reader pdf

After his mother’s death, a Chicago advertising executive in his early thirties returns to his tiny upstate New York hometown to spend the Christmas holiday with his recently widowed father. While struggling to get along with his prickly father, he finds himself becoming involved with the teenage crush he’s never forgotten, now a closeted sheriff's deputy.

The relationship still has the same old fire, but it complicated by the old crush being married. Suddenly, everything takes a backseat solving the mystery at the center of the deputy’s marriage. Will a Christmas visit bring happiness to anyone, or will it end in misery?

Sample

I almost didn't go home for Christmas that year. Money was tight and, to be honest, I didn't consider Tomahawk Springs my home anymore and hadn't for most of the fifteen years since I'd gone away to college. On top of that, I'd just been there the August before to catch the last few weeks of my mother's dying of cancer. Of course, that ended up being the deciding factor, the thing that made me go ahead and put the plane ticket on a credit card that was way too close to being maxed-out. It would be the old man's first Christmas without her and even though we didn't have what you'd call an easy relationship, I couldn't let him go through it alone.

"You didn't have to come," he said when I got off the plane. "I would have been fine."

"It's all right. I wanted to come," I lied. He looked older than he had five months before, thinner and grayer. I doubted he'd been taking care of himself.

Watching your parents grow old is kind of weird; it's as though your future is somehow standing in front of you. My father and I have the same caramel-colored eyes, though his are now cloudy and rheumy while mine are clear and youthful. When he was young his hair was a rich, earthy brown, as mine is, but what hair he has left has turned a pure, clean white. Neither of us carries any excess weight, and we're both shorter than we'd like to be. My father’s face is bold, forceful almost, while I have my mother’s soft, undefined features.

On the drive from the airport to Tomahawk Springs, conversation was sketchy. "How's the truck holding up?" I asked about the ten-year-old Silverado.

"Gets me where I'm going," he said, knocking the dashboard as though it was wood. I cursed the reliability of the truck. A history of mechanical failures might have gotten us most of the way home. I gave up and looked out the window. Snow had fallen recently, making the houses we passed seem like iced gingerbread. The freeway, though, was clear and clean. We sped by Skyler, Hoover, Finley Pond, and half a dozen other small burgs. Much of the area was economically depressed and had been for more than a decade. It was pretty, I suppose, but there wasn't much to do, other than grow up and leave. Which is what I'd done. After high school, I'd gotten a scholarship at the Art Institute of Chicago, graduated, got a sell-out job in advertising, and never once considered moving back to Tomahawk Springs.

I asked my dad if he thought the world was going to end on New Year's Eve, what with all the hubbub about Y2K. He expressed his skepticism and switched the subject to a murder/suicide over in Hadley Township. Some old guy up and strangled his wife, then burned their house down with himself inside. "Cabin fever," my father said. "Happens every year."

"It's a bit early," I pointed out. "It's only Christmas."

"We've had snow since the start of November," he said in defense of his theory. The old man had an interest in such things since he'd been the sheriff of Verne County for more than twenty years, and before that logged fifteen as a deputy. I started to point out there was probably more to it than being stuck inside for two months, but I knew my father. When he took a position he held it -- no matter what.

When we were almost home, he asked a question he'd never asked before, "You got a special fellow?"