Feb: The Worst Valentine’s Day in the World™ (other than the Valentine’s Day Massacre)

I loathe and detest Valentine’s Day with a passion reserved for guys who put curry sauce and extra onions on their fries and then expect you to be grateful when they want to stick their tongue down your throat because they bought you a beer during Happy Hour. Why the hell do we celebrate a saint who was beaten to death and beheaded as someone who is invested in pink paper hearts and crappy, over-priced food on February 14^th (unless you’re a beekeeper because then he’s your patron saint.) What are people thinking? Bless their hearts.

Here’s a case in point: the Valentine’s Day Massacre.

And another case in point…

Me.

I don’t have a great history with that mid-February date, although maybe not quite as bad as Julius Caesar blamed the ‘ides of March’. Although I think if he’d checked his calendar, he’d realise he was a month out.

Last Valentine’s Day I thought that Craig was going to propose to me – I’d even seen the Tiffany box in his sock drawer. Turns out I was right—he just wasn’t proposing to me but to the woman he’d been cheating on me with for the previous four months.

Yep, you got that right: four months. I’d been doing his laundry for four years. May his skidmarks rot in H E Double Hockeysticks.

I’d had to find a new apartment (since I lived with him), and a new job (since I worked for him), and then decided to go all in and move from my small hometown of El Dorado, a sweet piece of homemade apple pie nestled in the southern portion of Arkansas where it nudges up to Louisiana, to the Big Apple Crumble of New York City.

Momma never liked Craig, but being Southern, she was always hospitable to him, but after I cried all over her gingham apron when he broke up with me, she said:

“Sweet girl, you’re better off without that boy. He thinks the sun comes up just to hear him crow.” Then she cupped my face in her hands and hugged me tight. “You don’t have to leave because of his shame,” she said.

But I did, I really did. I couldn’t face running into Georgia-Mae at the grocery store and at my favorite traincar coffee shop, wearing the engagement ring that I thought would be mine; and I definitely couldn’t face running into her on Craig’s arm after church and listening to the whispers and giggles as I passed on by.

So, I left, took up smoking and cussing and chewing gum in the street until I realised that you can take the girl out of the South, but you can’t take the South out of the girl. So, I gave up cussing and chewing gum (except in the car), and headed north.

I’d have given up smoking, too, except that’s a lot harder—as hard as giving up Meemaw’s brownies baked to her secret recipe: crispy on top and full of gooey goodness inside which makes everyone who samples them as happy as a tick on a fat dog.

But now I’m far from home, living in an apartment so small that I can touch both sides with my arms stretched out, and I have to fold my bed away to be able to open my front door.

I was working longer hours for less money and my bills were twice as high, but there was no way I was turning tail to go home, just as everyone had predicted (everyone being all my so-called friends who sided with Craig and Georgia-Mae).

I hated my job because my boss was a pig who talked to my girls and not to my face, to the point where I’m not sure he’d recognize me in the street even though I’d worked for him nearly ten months.

Like most mornings, my day began to go downhill when I woke up. I hadn’t slept much the night before because it was a year to the day when Craig had dumped me. I didn’t miss him, but I missed pretty much everything else about my life.

But I opened my eyes and started the day with a smile as fake as a two-dollar bill because Momma told me that frown lines are aging. I was five at the time.

But then I blinked at the clock on my wall, my eyes widening comically.

Because I was late.

Because I’d overslept.

Because I’d forgotten to plug in my phone charger.

“Holy crapola! I’m so dang blasted late!”

I half fell out of bed, shivering in my unheated apartment, and ran for the bathroom (two paces), then stubbed my toe on the shower cubicle because I was rushing.

“Aaagh! Oh, Sugar Honey Iced Tea!”

I hopped about and cracked my knee on the basin.

“Nooooo! Son of a bee sting!”

And when I finally limped into the kitchen, I’d run out of coffee beans because I hadn’t gotten a lunchbreak yesterday and didn’t have time to run to the store before it closed. My emergency jar of instant coffee had become solid (because I’d bought it when I was a college freshman and I graduated eight years ago and because Momma always said, Waste not, want not), and I broke a nail when I was trying to chip out a few grounds to make something drinkable. It wasn’t.

“Bleuch! Yuk! Urgh! Barf! Oh, my melons!”

So, I smoked a cigarette instead then remembered that I’d given up smoking for February.

“Cough! Hack!”

And because I was in a bad mood, completely decaffeinated, and rushing, I poked myself in the eye with a mascara wand and cried half my makeup off.

“Owwwww! Kiss my grass! That hurts like a mother fudger!”

My eye was too sore to put in my second contact, so I couldn’t see properly either, which is why I manged to singe my scalp with my hair straighteners.

“Eeek! Dang flabbit!”

By now, I was seriously late.

I snagged my last pair of good pantyhose sprinting to the subway station and didn’t even swear, because it was so cold, my eyeballs just about froze so I wasn’t gonna go open my mouth and prove my eyeballs right.

The traffic was backed up all along Fifth Avenue and funny enough it didn’t help when I yelled endearments at the guy who double parked his fancy car so no one could get past.

“Crud muffins! Move your dang gang blasted horse feathers!”

I had to squeeze between two unwashed cars and got mud all over my cute cream pencil skirt, and then I slipped in the slush, wrenching my ankle.

And when I finally limped into the office, breathless, perspiring and hot as a pig in a pepper patch, I knew that I wasn’t looking my best.

“Wow, you look like shit,” laughed Gemma, the receptionist to the fancy lawyer firm where I worked. “Are you okay?”

“Honey, if I felt any better, I’d drop my harp plumb through the cloud.”

And I gave her another fake smile, worth at least a dollar fifty this time.

“Riiight…”

“Ms Castleberry, if you can find the time to do some work instead of gossiping in reception,” scowled my boss.

I turned to face him, trying to keep that three-bit smile plastered on my face, until he threw his car keys at me and they hit me in the arm.

“The parking valet is off sick,” he fumed, storming toward the elevators. “Go park my Aston Martin, and don’t touch the paintwork—I’ve just had it waxed.”

“Well, there’s no need to have a dyin’ duck fit,” I mumbled to myself.

Sighing, I picked up his keys and headed back outside. I guess that double-parked car was the one he was talking about.

Every man and his dog were leaning on their horns, and I’m sure my face was as red as a tomato as I scooched down into the smooth leather seat.

And realized that the car was a stick shift.

“Oh, kiss my grits!” I wailed.

I’d never driven a stick. With the way my luck was going, it didn’t seem the day to learn.

“Ma’am, you can’t park here,” said a man, leaning down and peering in the fogged up window.

“I know! I know! I’m going! Just give me two shakes of a cow’s tail!”

“Excuse me?”

I looked up and squeaked as I saw a police officer glaring at me.

I shoved the car in gear, panicking as it leapfrogged forward and then the engine died. Why did this car have three pedals? I tried again, and herky-jerked that car to the underground parking lot.

“Quit making that noise!” I yelled above the engine as I crunched the gears, mashing down on a button that opened all the windows and the sunroof, letting in the freezing cold air. “You may think you’re a rooster today, you car, you, but you’ll just be a feather duster one day!”

I was so flustered that I took the entrance too fast, cringing as I heard a metallic scraping sound, panicked again, recalculated wrongly and wrenched the steering wheel in the other direction, bashing off the entire passenger side wing mirror.

“Son of a nutcracker! I don’t believe this!”

“Neither do I,” said the police officer who’d followed me. “That has to be the worst parking I’ve ever seen. Ma’am, have you been drinking?”

I rested my head on the steering wheel and felt tears welling in my eyes.

“No, I have not, so you can just quit being so ugly. It’s a year to the day since my ex decided that he’d rather marry Georgia-Mae just because her boobs are bigger than her IQ and I moved to New York for a new start but my apartment is so small I cain’t even swing a flea let alone a cat and I got mud all over my favorite skirt and twisted my ankle just getting to a job that I hate and my boss is the biggest ninnymugging bojangle and I never wanted drive his dumb car with its dumb stick shift and now I’m going to get fired and sued or sued and fired and probably arrested and I wish I’d never even gotten out of bed this morning so you can just quit laughing at me!”

I took a deep breath, peeling open my eyelids and gazing up at the police officer, waiting for the click of handcuffs around my wrists, but instead I was staring in the prettiest brown eyes I’d ever seen, the exact color of Meemaw’s brownies, and a smile so warm, I swear it melted the snow for five blocks.

He was tall with coal black hair, and even in his bulky winter uniform, I could see that he was wide-shoulder and strong, probably fitter than a flea in a flying circus.

But he was still a police officer and I must have broken about a dozen laws.

“Aren’t you going to arrest me, officer?”

His smile widened.

“It sounds as though your day is bad enough already, so no, I’m not going to arrest you.”

“Are you going to give me a ticket?”

“Nope, but I think I’m feeling the need to ticket the asshat who double-parked this baby in the first place.”

“Oh!”

“Can I see your license please, ma’am?”

“Yes, of course, officer.”

My hands were shaking as I fished in my purse, handing him my driver’s license.

“Tonya Castleberry from Brooklyn. Although I’m guessing you’re not a Brooklyn native.”

“No, sir, I’m not. I’m from a tad further south.”

“I’d never have guessed,” he said drily. “Although I think I’d be on the money if I guessed that you don’t like Valentine’s Day so much?”

“It’s as worthless as gum on a boot heel,” I said sadly.

“Then you don’t have a date for tonight?”

“No, sir. I’ll be going home alone, sober and sorry.”

There was a long silence and I risked another look at his handsome face.

“I wouldn’t bet on that, Ms Castleberry,” he said, his brown eyes twinkling at me. “Have a nice day.”

I sat in the damaged car for several more minutes until I felt sure enough of my shaky knees and sore ankle to make it back to the office.

I put the car keys on my boss’s desk and began typing up my resignation letter. I was just putting my signature to it when Gemma sidled up to my desk with an enormous bouquet of magnolias.

“You never said you were dating anyone?” she grinned, popping one hand on her hip.

“I’m not,” I replied, utterly mystified.

She pulled out a small card that came with the flowers and read it out loud.

To a beautiful southern belle—I hope your day gets better

Ross Benson, NYPD

PS you can call me ‘sir’ anytime

A slow smile tilted my lips upwards until it just about reached my ears.

THE END