On Strike for Christmas by Sheila Roberts Read Free Book Online

years ago she’d lost Ray, her soul mate of thirty-six years. Both her parents were gone now, and her sister was getting ready to take a monthlong cruise with husband number two. Carol’s nephews and nieces were all busy with their own lives, and she didn’t want to impose herself on anyone, so this Christmas she had only…
    She looked down at her cat, George, who had met her at the door and was now rubbing against her ankle. “You’re happy to see me, aren’t you?” she crooned, and picked him up.
    He squirmed loose and jumped from her arms, trotting toward the kitchen, his signal that she was to follow him and give him his evening snack, which followed his after-dinner snack. George had been svelte and gorgeous like his namesake, George Clooney, when Carol first got him, but he was fast losing his trim physique thanks to her overfeeding
    She followed him to the kitchen. It was much too big for one woman, with more cupboards than she could fill, counters too long to work at alone, and a breakfast bar it depressed her to sit at. When she and Ray had moved in, though, they’d planned to do a lot of entertaining. These days she only entertained George.
    â€œWhat would the people at PAWS say if they saw you now?” she asked him. “They’d probably have me arrested for cat abuse.”
    George rubbed against her again, unconcerned with what PAWS thought about her cat-parenting skills. She knew from experience that he’d give her one more polite leg rub; then, if she didn’t cough up the food, he’d nip her.
    She sighed. “Either I’ve trained you badly or you’ve trained me well.”
    She dumped half a can of cat food in his bowl and crouched on the kitchen floor, watching him eat. “You and I are going to have to think up something to do with ourselves or this is going to be a very unmerry season,” she informed him.
    She replayed the conversation at the Stitch In Time in her head and sighed. Joy and Laura and the others—who would have pegged them for Grinchettes? All that complaining about their lives when they had their health and their families—it was like whining about inferior caviar while just outside your door people were starving.
    Jerri, like her, had remained silent, and as they followed the other Stitch ’N Bitchers out of the shop, she’d asked Jerri what she thought of the strike.
    Jerri had shaken her head and said, “I wish I had the energy to do all those things they’re complaining about. They don’t know how lucky they are.”
    Carol’s sentiment exactly. Maybe they’d come to their senses once they got home.
    Â 
    Sharon arrived home to find Pete raiding the cookies. “Peter Timothy Benedict! I told you to stay out of those.”
    He stuffed one in his mouth before she could grab the Tupperware container. “Well, I don’t see the point of you making them if we can’t eat them,” he said around a mouthful of cookie.
    She put the lid on the container and stashed it in the top cupboard. “You know they’re for special occasions.”
    â€œSince when is your knitting group a special occasion?”
    There he stood in those stained, ripped jeans she kept trying to throw away and that grubby old, gray sweatshirt, his chin covered in so much five o’clock shadow he looked like a Chia plant. Even after almost thirteen years of husband training he still could be such a barbarian.
    â€œGoing someplace where people are dressed up and act civilized counts as a special occasion,” she informed him. “And besides, it takes a long time to make those cookies, so I don’t want you devouring them in one day like a big, old locust when I may need them for a church or school function.” And since she was on strike, she couldn’t be baking any more. What she had would have to last. Maybe she should hide them.
    Pete made a face. “Oh, no. Yulezilla