To hell with them! He’d be damned if he apologized to any of them!
He watched Cynthia sullenly slice some roast beef for a boot-wearing commercial fisherman, and was alternately remorseful and unrepentant.
Finally, Orianna ventured down the aisle where he was wiping down shelves.
“Hey, uh, didn’t mean to intrude earlier,” she said warily. “Hope everything’s OK.”
“It is,” Thomas replied in curt dismissal.
Orianna returned to her register quickly, leaving Thomas again agonizing over his actions, and then stubbornly insisting they were just and even courageous.
Chapter Eight
It was the night of the Oxendine’s Grocery Christmas Party. Thomas sped happily towards downtown Morehead City as other drivers stared at his vehicle in rebuke. Though many employees thought the Party was schmaltzy, and either suffered through it or came up with a lame excuse to avoid attending, Thomas loved it. He could be casual with the people he worked with; there were no shelves to stock, groceries to bag, or carts to retrieve from the lot. They could talk, eat, drink (everyone of age was encouraged to bring alcohol, and the employees not of age spent the evening trying to avoid Yolanda’s watchful eye so they could steal a drink or two) and be merry.
Following the Party’s potluck injunction, Thomas had brought a pre-made chocolate cheesecake along with a six-pack of Bud Light. Some employees conveniently forgot to bring something, but most arrived with at least one item of food or drink. Thomas expected to see Maureen’s pigs-in-a-blanket, Eldridge’s miraculously delicious meatloaf, and Eddie’s gooey mac’n’cheese. (“It’s good, ain’t it? Tell me that ain’t good!”) What the newer employees would bring was a mystery; some of them had promised to bring a meticulously-prepared dish that would dazzle the tastebuds, but those people usually showed up with a bag of potato chips and a jar of french onion dip.
Thomas pulled down a side street and parked near the Carteret County Chamber of Commerce’s headquarters. The Party was officially held in the Chamber’s conference room, though it spilled out into all sections of the building. Vernon had commandeered this building for the Party for decades; it seemed impossible that it could be held anywhere else. One infamous year, however, the Party’s location was uncertain, as the new Chamber president — a small, squat man whose most frequent statement was “The problem with this country is that no one wants to work hard anymore” — decided to flex his newly-granted muscle and deny Vernon’s request/demand for use of the Chamber building because of “scheduling conflicts” — though the real reason was because Vernon had made questionable comments about his penny loafers one day at the grocery store. Vernon fumed: “By God, I’ll show that good-for-nothing namby-pamby stick-in-the-mud what’s what!” He “got on the horn,” and the president was soon besieged by angry calls from Chamber members on behalf of “our good friend, Vernon Oxendine,” specifically concerning “his Christmas Party, which has been held at the Chamber of Commerce building since before you were a glint in your daddy’s eye.” (This wasn’t close to being true, but it got the point across.) The president backed down, though he complained to his wife that “they ganged up on me, those bastards. Let me take ’em one on one, then I’ll show ’em something!”
As he walked towards the entrance, Thomas recalled some of the more distinctive things that had occurred at the Party over the years. There was Vernon under the mistletoe, as usual, inviting the girls to give him a smooch, only to get plastered with a kiss from a flamboyantly gay employee, the only out-of-the-closet homosexual Oxendine’s had ever had. As Vernon stuttered and blushed, and as everyone else laughed or looked shocked, the employee purred and stroked the sleeve of Vernon’s Santa suit. Finally Vernon recovered with “I’ve got no problem with you and your preferences, Nate, but don’t plant those lips on me, ya hear?”
There was Vernon under the mistletoe, getting kissed and groped by a drunken Milly, the store’s young sexpot, as Yolanda stared and complained loudly about “that hussy and her siren-like ways.” After this, there were rumors that Vernon and Milly had assignations all over Morehead City: at the seedy Quality Inn, in Vernon’s office after the store closed, on sand dunes. Thomas could neither confirm nor deny these reports. Milly eventually left to study nursing, and Vernon was noticeably glum for several weeks after her departure.
There was the time one of the high-school-age employees insulted Eldridge, who responded with a haymaker that sent the teenager crashing into one of the Chamber’s potted ferns.
There was the time Maureen got a flat tire on her way to the Party, and everyone had driven out to help her in an explosion of goodwill, and she’d cried thankful tears because “you all are so helpful and kind to me!”
There was the time Alexis, a known cougar, had dragged Thomas behind the building and given him a handjob, all the while looking at him in a strangely sinister fashion. They’d had a stormy one-week relationship after that, until Alexis dumped him (though it could be argued they were never dating at all), married a Marine ten years her junior, and followed her new husband to Germany. Whenever Thomas thought of her, he got hard quite quickly: she’d been into crazy, kinky stuff, like anal. After he’d had a few beers, he sometimes found himself browsing through her Facebook photos. Even though she was now in her fifties (and, of course, divorced — twice), her knowing sneer and come-hither eyes suggested she still rolled around in the hay from time to time.
But the one memory that stood out was the first Christmas Party Thomas attended, way back when he was a teenager himself. He hoped the evening wouldn’t be too boring, and he wondered how long he was expected to stay; he had teenage things to do, like play video games. Instead of boredom, however, he found ecstasy in this mirth-filled building. He wished they could stay there forever, laughing, eating, and drinking (he’d stolen a few sips of vodka, and felt powerful), just seal up the building and forget everything else except holiday cheer.
Though the evening had, of course, wound down eventually, to Thomas’s dismay, he held this memory in his mind like an enchanting snowglobe that could be shaken again and again.
As he burst through the door now, he was as hearty as those older people had been so long ago, and he was determined to set a few things straight. He would apologize to Cynthia and Orianna for being rude to them after Kara’s temper tantrum, and he would, if possible, extend his apology to Orianna into a discussion about — things. What exactly they would say could not be conceived, but it would work itself out.
Yolanda was the first person he met. She was standing by the entrance, next to the receptionist’s desk, sipping a drink and admiring the lifesize Santa the Chamber had put in a corner.
“Thomas!” she cooed. “There you are!”
She wrapped him in a plump hug. Thomas was conscious of bosom, hot breath, and a stale attic smell mixed with a sharp perfume of some kind.
“Won’t it be fun tonight!” she exclaimed.
“Of course,” Thomas agreed. “It is every year.”
“I’m glad you think so. We do love to throw a little event for our employees, who’ve worked hard all year, and — what’d you bring? Oh, cheesecake! Yum yum! And beer! Now, don’t let any of the young’uns get ahold of that, ya hear? I’ve got my Eagle Eye on them, but some of ’em are crafty and might get by me!”
Thomas assured her that he would tenaciously defend his beer against theft from minors, and moved to the conference room, which was bubbling with noise.
The long conference table was covered with food and drink of all sorts. Thomas picked out Eldridge’s meatloaf and Maureen’s pigs-in-a-blanket, and smiled hungrily. There was a pasta dish of some sort, a towering platter of barbecue, a small pizza that looked homemade because it wasn’t exactly circular, potatoes au gratin, a saliva-inducing peach cobbler, peanut brittle — and this was just a small sample of all the goodness. There were so many smells drifting around that it was hard to fixate on just one. The alcohol hadn’t been neglected, either: several liquor bottles stood classily and sinfully on the table, and there was a large ice-packed cooler on the floor for the beer. Thomas set down his cheesecake, stuffed his beer into the cooler, placed Eddie’s Secret Santa gift in the large pile with the others gifts, and peered about.