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https://cathylamb.substack.com/p/the-cats-the-blood-the-vet?r=kayfq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

“I killed him, didn’t I?”

Decades later, I could still hear my mother’s stricken, choked words, her hands shaking. The scent of our freshly baked apple and peach pies floated through our sunny home, with a slight hint of the pink roses in a Ball jar on our kitchen table.

It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, November 1979, and a fine blue afternoon. The hummingbirds were whizzing around, the birds were chirping, and there was no warning of what would happen next.

Panting with fear from what I’d seen, the thunk I’d heard, and my injured right arm, I bent over the man sprawled on our kitchen floor. Blood was pooling beneath his head like cherry Kool-Aid, mixing with pieces of the shattered red pie pan. His stomach bulged like a balloon.

“I don’t think he’s breathing, Mom,” I said, my voice wobbling, my throat raw from all the screaming I’d done. “But he looks pregnant.”

“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” she whispered, then swayed, her light-yellow daisy dress swirling around her knees. I grabbed her around the waist as her blue eyes shut, and she started to fall back.

“Mom!” I shouted, scared to death that I’d drop her as her knees gave out. “Mommy!”

Within seconds, Tommy flew into the kitchen, a tall, muscled tank of a man, followed by his sons Tony and Nick and my sister Joyce.

Tommy took charge immediately, lifting my fainting mother in his tattooed arms. “I got you, Annie.”

Nick reached for me and held me tight against his bare chest—he never wore a shirt—as Tommy gently carried my mother, her eyes fluttering, to the couch.

“Annie, don’t worry,” he said in a loud voice, probably to keep her from passing out completely. “I’m right here, and I will take care of this, I promise. Stay with me, honey, open your eyes.”

My heart was racing, my knees woozy. What happened had been one of the scariest things—probably the scariest thing—I’d ever experienced.

But Handsome Nick, with his arms tight around me, helped steady me on my feet, his warm, brown-gold eyes worried and inches from mine. I caught my breath, which might have had nothing to do with my mother and everything to do with Nick.

Tony and Joyce immediately crowded around us, Joyce linking an arm around my waist and Tony grabbing my hand and arm with both of his.

Tony said, so concerned, his face inches from mine, “Are you okay, Jesse? What happened?”

“Yes, I’m fine.” It was a lie—I wasn’t fine. I couldn’t believe what my mother and I had just gone through or how fast it had happened, how frightening. My hands started to shake.

Tony eyed the bleeding man on the floor as he patted my hand. “Uh-oh. This looks like a scene out of a horror movie.”

Nick nodded. “Yeah, he doesn’t look so good. Are you hurt, Jesse?”

Nick still had his arms around me, so I was, at once, terrified and enjoying how Nick smelled like sunshine, honeysuckle, and mint.

I said, “No,” but my arm ached where it had taken a blow.

Joyce said, her voice completely calm as she brushed my hair out of my face, “I never liked him anyhow. What a dick.”

A dick! Wow. Joyce had used a bad word. But it was fitting for the moment! She always knew what to say. Plus, she was so composed. Why couldn’t I be calm and smart like Joyce?

“You girls,” Tommy said to me and Joyce as he darted back from the couch where he’d deposited my near-fainting mother. “Go and help your mother.”

He stopped to bend down to examine me, face-to-face, and said another bad word, followed by, “Are you all right, Jesse?”

I lied again, and Tommy nodded and bent to check on the deathly and unconscious state of the pregnant man and said two very bad words.

Three days later, my mother was arrested. She faced a trial and possible jail time for swinging her favorite red ceramic pie pan at the pregnant man who’d attacked us. She was also told, by the pregnant man’s reptilian attorney, that she would likely lose custody of the five of us, permanently, because of her “unpredictable and unnecessary violence.”

How did that come about? Because the pregnant man lied about what happened.

It was 1979. A few powerful, rich men, for various sordid reasons, believed him. Or they pretended to believe him. Money talked.

I would never forget what led up to those terrifying moments or what happened later.

Never.

Annie will continue to fall head over heels in love with the hot “gangster”/ table maker, Tommy. Joyce will continue to be cool and Julie will continue wearing wobbly alien eyeballs as she watches for signs of life in the galaxy.

Five year old Johnny will continue to refer to the scar on his head as his “manhood” and Joshua will speak seriously with worms. Porky the parrot will still want a beer, and Jesse will tell the story.

Most importantly, Liliana the mermaid will sing to break your heart, or laugh, or both, all in the same song.

Ten kids, two families, a lotta love, and one rather upsetting arrest, complete with handcuffs and a night in jail.

About what you would expect for Christmas.

they will (probably, usually, almost always) still be all jittery and maybe a tad cranky and will speak authoritatively of “this writer’s doomsday coming soon.”

(Here’s the Amazon link to my NEW book!

https://shorturl.at/gAiN2

I know this to be true because my brain goes into a treacherous zone of calamitous thinking.

Writing is not for the faint of heart. I have not yet fainted, but I do have a heart, I am quite sure because when I get anxious it thuds around a lot, like a nervous or inebriated butterfly, which happens when I release a book.

It is a rather nerve wrenching experience to throw a book into the world. It could go well. It could bomb, as in, explode into literary nothingness.

Poof!

It could make you wish living in a cave in a jungle selling cave art was possible, because you would do it lickety-split.

With a piece of imagined chocolate cake held high in my hand, and an inebriated butterfly in my stomach, I would like to tell you that my new book, “Ten Kids, Two Lemon Pies, and a Miracle,” is out in paperback and e-book.

It is the second book in the Deauville Drive Families series.

There now. I will go light candles in mine and Innocent Husband’s bedroom, it does not have padded pink walls but that does sound interesting and I shall tell Innocent Husband immediately, and see what he thinks of a possible remodelling project.

But what, you ask, does this line mean in the title of this newsletter? “There is a body on the kitchen floor?”

NO. There is no body on MY kitchen floor. I am sure of it. I have been looking for the chocolate chips and if there were a body here, I would have stepped on it.

The body is on the floor because Annie, she is the mother in this story if you have not yet read Book One, “Ten Kids, Two Lovebirds, and a Singing Mermaid,” has protected herself and twelve-year old Jesse in the kitchen of her Deauville Drive home against a pesky, monstrous man and clonked him with her favorite red pie pan.

It’s unfortunate that it shattered because she loved that red pie pan!

If you would like to read more, click on the link to my FREE Substack newsletter!

https://cathylamb.substack.com/p/my-new-book-is-out-today-and-there?r=kayfq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Remember: No one needs the body of a bad man who looks pregnant lying on the floor in their kitchen.

I so hope you like it.

Available only on Amazon.

Here’s the description:

Uh, no. There is no description. WordPress hates me today and will not let me copy and paste a description of the book. Sigh…I need a cookie or twelve. Marketing is such a drag.

Have a happy day.

Cathy

Link to my substack newsletter on my smokin’, drinkin’, swearin’ Grandma Dorothy.

https://cathylamb.substack.com/p/my-grandma-cigarettes-liquor-and?r=kayfq&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

She was cranky, and quite critical of my sweet mother, akin to a pick axe, who was her daughter-in-law. My sisters and brother and I, somewhat feral, made her anxious and jumpy.

I think you could say, politely, that she was “snippy.”

Link to my Substack article: https://cathylamb.substack.com/p/my-grandma-cigarettes-liquor-and

I got her curls. I got her height. I got her bluntness and her temper, although I’ve mellowed out in recent decades. I got most, but not all, of her nose.

I loved my Grandma Dorothy in a cautious way. She was married to my granddad who was in the airline industry way back when in Los Angeles.

Granddad was a Chuck Yeager drinking buddy. Let us stress the words “drinking buddy.” As in, Granddad was not afraid to slam back a few on a regular basis. He did not say “no” to scotch. Or bourbon. Or whiskey.

Maybe Grandma Dorothy was grumpy because of her husband and the copious scotch, that would make complete sense. Wife-Scotch-Husband is not a happy threesome.

Maybe it was because of the very tight constraints and total lack of equality our society, the government, and the church wrapped women up in, stifling and judgmental.

Grandma Dorothy was born in 1913. She didn’t have the opportunity or choice to become who she could have become. She was supposed to get married young, stay married forever, regardless, have children and become an obedient housewife, ready to serve one and all while wearing a clenched smile, clean apron, pearls, and heels.

But she was smart and sharp and I have an impossible time believing that the lack of freedom and fairness went over well with her at all. I would have been, at best, grumpy, so I have a lot of compassion for her.

She liked to play bridge with friends, drink and smoke, the haze heavy, the gossip as light as the martinis. But she wasn’t happy, even as a kid I could sense that.

My grandma made me cry one day over the shoes I was wearing for my First Communion in our Catholic church. I was in second grade.

Click on the link to read my free substack newsletter.

Happy day to you!

Cathy

https://cathylamb.substack.com/p/my-grandma-cigarettes-liquor-and

Only on Amazon, book two in the Deauville Drive series.

I SO hope you like it.

https://shorturl.at/V2vcY

Here’s the description:

Inspired by Cathy Lamb’s childhood, the amusing adventures of the Rossi and O’Brien families continue in Book Two of the Deauville Drive series.

1979. Deauville Drive, Huntington Beach, California. Ten kids, a singing mermaid, hundreds of pies, and a body in the kitchen.

Jesse O’Brien, twelve-years old, announces to her stricken mother, Annie, that the motionless man looks “pregnant” and may not be breathing as he lies corpse-still on the laminate floor. Annie clocked him with her favorite red pie pan which is now, sadly, cracked into tiny pieces.

Jesse knows that her mother will dearly miss the perfect pie pan, but the pregnant looking man, a sneaky friend of Annie’s weasel-face soon to be ex-husband deserved it, as he had angrily thundered through their screen door like a dump truck and Annie had protected them both.

Unfortunately, Annie is frazzled and upset. Clocking a man had not been on her day’s agenda! It had not been on her list of things to do!

Furthermore, there had been no sign of this upcoming calamity. Why, there were freshly baked apple and peach pies on the table, along with a Ball jar full of roses, with hummingbirds whizzing around and birds chirping on a fine blue afternoon.

With five kids, an upcoming divorce, a full-time job waitressing at Robby’s Big Boy, and a growing pie business, Jesse knew that her mother had enough on her plate. Falling in love with Vietnam veteran Tommy Rossi, who lives next door in a sprawling white house on an old orange orchard with his five kids offered up a sweet, if sometimes flustering, complication.

And now this! A body in their pretty yellow kitchen!

As Porky, the talking parrot, declares, “I want a beer!” and “I’m a cat!” Jesse and her close-knit family try to navigate a life that has been recently turned upside down and shaken.

The hilarious cast of Deauville Drive returns with quirky neighbors, a friendly stripper, and Liliana the singing mermaid, the one who brings peace and joy to all – unless she’s scaring the wits out of A

Please click on the link to read my latest Newsletter, Cathy Lamb’s Chat, on Substack.

It’s free!

https://cathylamb.substack.com/p/my-new-book-tea-and-crumpets-escaping?r=kayfq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

HAPPY NEWS!

My new book, “Ten Kids, Two Lemon Pies, and a Miracle,” is available to pre – order. E-book now, and paperback on September 8th.

I so, so (very much) hope you like it.

It’s the second book in the Deauville Drive series. Here’s the short and sweet summary, below.

Well, sort of short…Actually, not so short. If you need a book to relax and laugh with, here ya go.

Here’s the link:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=ten+kids%2C+two+lemon+pies+and+a+miracle&crid=3PQMH2UWWN4F6&sprefix=ten+kids%2C+two%2Caps%2C204&ref=nb_sb_ss_p13n-expert-pd-ops-ranker_2_13

And here’s a little, well, a LOT, of information about Book Two in the Deauville Drive Families series.

Inspired by Cathy Lamb’s childhood, the amusing adventures of the Rossi and O’Brien families continue in Book Two of the Deauville Drive series.

1979. Deauville Drive, Huntington Beach, California. Ten kids, a singing mermaid, hundreds of pies, and a body in the kitchen.

Jesse O’Brien, twelve-years old, announces to her stricken mother, Annie, that the motionless man looks “pregnant” and may not be breathing as he lies corpse-still on the laminate floor. Annie clocked him with her favorite red pie pan which is now, sadly, cracked into tiny pieces.

Jesse knows that her mother will dearly miss the perfect pie pan, but the pregnant looking man, a sneaky friend of Annie’s weasel-face soon to be ex-husband deserved it, as he had angrily thundered through their screen door like a dump truck and Annie had protected them both.

Unfortunately, Annie is frazzled and upset. Clocking a man had not been on her day’s agenda! It had not been on her list of things to do!

Furthermore, there had been no sign of this upcoming calamity. Why, there were freshly baked apple and peach pies on the table, along with a Ball jar full of roses, with hummingbirds whizzing around and birds chirping on a fine blue afternoon.

With five kids, an upcoming divorce, a full-time job waitressing at Robby’s Big Boy, and a growing pie business, Jesse knew that her mother had enough on her plate. Falling in love with Vietnam veteran Tommy Rossi, who lives next door in a sprawling white house on an old orange orchard with his five kids offered up a sweet, if sometimes flustering, complication.

And now this! A body in their pretty yellow kitchen!

As Porky, the talking parrot, declares, “I want a beer!” and “I’m a cat!” Jesse and her close-knit family try to navigate a life that has been recently turned upside down and shaken.

The hilarious cast of Deauville Drive returns with quirky neighbors, a friendly stripper, and Liliana the singing mermaid, the one who brings peace and joy to all – unless she’s scaring the wits out of Annie’s almost-ex-husband with a high-pitched C note blast, right in his ears.