Wreck the Halls Read Online Free PDF Page A

crack.
    “You know, Victor, I think I hear your mother calling you,” Wade said evenly. Because tolerating Victor was one thing—he was, after all, Sam's father—but putting up with his bushwa was entirely another, in Wade's opinion.
    Victor thumped his coffee cup down on the table, from which I would pick it up later and wash it, and put it away. The first thing he did when he moved here to Eastport was hire a cleaning woman, and when he found out she didn’t wear housedresses and aprons to work he went out and bought some for her.
    “So long, then,” he said, readying to vamoose.
    “Wait a minute.” I stopped him at the door.
    Wade had already gotten out an electric sander and gone down to the cellar with it, bringing along an extension cord. “What did you want from me?” I asked Victor.
    Because when it comes to knowing what it is that Victor's little heart pines for, later isn’t better. Over the years I have found to my sorrow that if no one is helping it, tending it and encouraging it and just sort of generally paving its way, Victor's little heart goes after whatever it wants regardless, with disastrous results.
    “Spill it, Victor.”
    In the cellar, the sander went on. I grabbed a dust maskfrom the cabinet and tossed it down. If the paint dates from before 1978, it's lead-based, and this paint met the criteria by a century or so.
    “Thanks,” Wade's muffled voice came from the shadows at the bottom of the stairwell.
    My ex-husband shifted uncomfortably. “Well. Actually, I was hoping you’d invite me over for dinner tonight. With a guest of mine. Joy Abrams.”
    The light dawned: news around town was that Victor had acquired a new girlfriend. And while this for Victor was like saying he habitually breathed oxygen—during our marriage he’d kept two little black books, one local and one longdistance—I hadn’t known who she was.
    Until now. “I see. Giving you trouble, is she? And you think that a dinner here might just possibly open her eyes to the pleasures of domestic life?”
    Right; in his dreams. Joy was a buxom beauty whose wild youth was the stuff of local legend; lately she’d returned home to run a beauty parlor out of a mobile home in nearby Quoddy Village. That neighborhood was the closest thing Eastport had to anything like a suburb.
    And Joy, whose lush curves made the Maine coastline look straight as a boardwalk, was the closest it had to a bombshell. With her gold ankle bracelet, complicated hairdo, and the fouled anchor prominently tattooed on her left shoulder, Joy was not the sweet, pliantly adoring type Victor usually went for.
    “That was the idea,” Victor admitted. “So, can I? Come for dinner?”
    I didn’t know Joy, but on her reputation alone I figured that when she got through with Victor there’d be nothing left of him but a little pile of bones and hair.
    Which to tell you the truth I thought was not a half-bad idea; while I considered it, Wade returned from the cellar.
    “If you hit them with the sander first—real coarsesandpaper, not the fine stuff—you’ll jolt the old paint up out of the cracks so it scrapes easier.”
    He came into the hall, saw Victor still there but didn’t comment. “It's backwards, but it’ll speed the job, you want to do it that way,” he added. “Why not just pour a coat of chemical stripper on them?”
    “Because the fumes have the charming habit of flowing downhill. Toward,” I added, “the electric starter on the furnace. So, ka-boom.”
    “Right. Ka-boom,” he repeated pleasantly to Victor, who seemed to feel opening the back door in some haste was a prudent move, all of a sudden.
    Wade went on out to the parlor where, before his freighter job, he’d been finishing up his plans for decorating the harbor tugboat for tonight's winter holiday festival. During the event, tubby fishing vessels and barges would tootle around Passamaquoddy Bay, twinkling and hooting, their crews taking a break from the hard, dangerous