Read Online Wreck the Halls by Sarah Graves - Free Book Online Page A

think of Joy Abrams? To look at her now, you’d never know she was the same girl who left Eastport. Her hair is so fancy, you can’t even see where it's connected to her head.”
    “I thought,” I began, meaning to say that this time Victor's reach might possibly have exceeded his greedy little grasp. But I never got the chance to finish:
    Outside, holiday carolers were fa-la-la-ing from the back of a pickup truck, up and down Eastport streets. The season was in high gear, though by the sound of it the pickup wasstruggling mightily to get out of low. A series of loud backfires exploded in the night like a string of cherry bombs.
    “Mom.” Sam put his head around the corner. “Sorry about my big mouth in the dining room.”
    “That's okay,” I said. Outside, the truck backfired again. “No harm, no foul.” But then I focused on him; back in the city he’d been in a little trouble, but now he was healthy. Clear-eyed and energetic.
    And he had good friends, here. Tommy was upstairs waiting for him; I gathered they were going to be a team on the Internet project. “Hey. I’m glad you’re home.”
    “Me, too. Anything in the fridge?” Without waiting for an answer he bounded past me to forage for nutrition; it had, after all, been half an hour since we’d finished dinner.
    Then: “Mom, do you think Tommy should have his ears fixed?”
    I turned in surprise. “Is he thinking about it?”
    Sam shrugged. “Sort of. He says they’re freaky looking, and there's a clinic in Bangor that sent out some sort of bulk-mail brochure, gave him the idea.”
    I’d seen the brochure, too, tossed it out without reading it. “I think Tommy's ears are fine,” I said, only crossing my fingers a little bit. Tommy worked the fish pens for an hourly wage and few benefits, and was helping to support his mother. “I’m sure your father would be happy to talk to him about it, if he wanted. But that surgery is expensive.”
    Sam grinned. “Yeah. I hope he doesn’t do it. I told him they make him lots easier to find in a crowd.”
    Which I wasn’t sure was quite the variety of reassurance Tommy had wanted, but before I could say so Sam had taken his supplies—sodas, a box of cookies, apples, and a bag of potato chips—back upstairs to share with his friend.
    When he was gone, Ellie got out two of Wade's bottles of ale and sank into a kitchen chair. “I let her down, Jake. Ishould never have let Faye Anne stay with Merle. I should have gotten her out of there.”
    “So should we all have. But it's too late to do anything about it, now.”
    Ellie is ordinarily a sweet, kind person, but every so often she gives me a look that would etch glass. “No, it's not.”
    “Okay, okay,” I said, backpedaling. “Maybe it isn’t. Maybe if we spend all our free time on it, we can work up some kind of convincing argument for extenuating circumstances, enough to make even what's happened seem like-well, not so much what it is. But Ellie…” I tried a last time to escape doom. “I’ve got a son home from college, a house that needs attention, a dog acting spooky, a new husband…”
    After marrying Victor, I spent most of what was supposed to have been our honeymoon in the waiting room of the neurosurgery suite at NYU Medical Center. Our nuptials were apparently the signal for every fool who thought he could drive a Harley to find out otherwise, with predictable results.
    “… and besides, it's nearly Christmas. I wanted to get the tree, buy presents and wrap them, do some baking, and…”
    Ellie just fixed me with that penetrating gaze of hers, so unfoolable that you could set her up at the CIA and use her to detect spies.
    I gave in to her scrutiny. “And I need time to figure out how I can get a wedding ring and an engagement ring,” I finished. “Diamonds, in platinum settings.”
    Ellie looked at me as if I’d admitted that I wanted one inserted through my nose. “Jacobia, I had no idea you were such a