Free Christmas in Dogtown by Suzanne Johnson

 
    ~1~
     
    Resa Madere folded her raggiest pair of jeans, wedged them into her red suitcase, and slammed it shut. Rubbing a scuff off the leather, she wondered if she could sell the thing online. She’d already auctioned off the vintage cobalt Fiestaware collected over the past five years. The leather coat she rarely needed in New Orleans ’ mild winters. The tennis bracelet of tiny diamonds Jules had presented six months before he dumped her.
    Stray Mardi Gras beads winked ironic glints of purple, green, and gold among past-due bills on the top of her desk, and she swept an arm across it, pushing the whole sorry mess into a white plastic garbage bag. A single photo remained: Jules. Julian her perfect guy. Julian who moved on when she lost her job.
    Jul ian the Jerk.
    She carefully tore off the outside edges of the photo so he became Julian the Earless Jerk. Then she ripped off his head and tossed Julian the Headless Jerk into the bag with the rest of the trash.
    Except he’d be spending the holidays with his rich uptown family while Resa did the white-trash shuffle. She was headed for Paulina, thirty miles upriver, carrying several hanks of pork casings from a local butcher in time to help Uncle Emile make sausages for the holiday rush. Two weeks until Christmas and the orders were piling in.
    No, correct that. She wasn’t even going to Paulina proper. Resa would be spending the next three weeks in a borrowed single-wide trailer in a barely-there community five miles from Paulina, right on the edge of Maurepas Swamp. On the maps, it had no name. Locally, it was called Dogtown. And she’d arrive in the backwater her family had lived in for seven generations hauling a trunkload of pig intestines.
    Resa didn’t know what life held for her, but she had a feeling this was not going down as a holiday season she’d remember, at least not for any of the right reasons. Family was family, however, as her mom had reminded her, and Uncle Emile had been under the weather. The only girl in a sprawling family of boys who had hunting and fishing and football to occupy their time, Resa had grown up helping Uncle Aim at Madere’s Meats, an d she’s the one he’d asked for.
    It wasn’t like she had a real job to go to anymore, as Mom also had reminded her (like she’d had a brain fart and forgotten six months of unemployment). Plus, Uncle Aim had offered to pay her. The past couple of months, Resa had been holding onto her little shotgun house in uptown New Orleans by the tips of her fingernails. She wouldn’t turn down the chance to earn a couple of mortgage payments.
    On her way out of town, she stopped in front of Julian’s condo and taped a pig intestine to his mailbox. If she was revisiting her roots as the sausage princess of St. James Parish, she might as well start acting like it.

 
    ~2~
     
    Instead of taking the interstate, Resa drove along the narrow, winding Highway 44, the River Road , that led west out of New Orleans and twisted its way to Paulina. She’d hoped that concentrating on the treacherous curves would keep her from wallowing in self-pit y, but it didn’t work.
    She’d fought so hard to leave Dogtown behind that even agreeing to go back for three weeks felt like failure. She’d gotten a scholarship to ULL, worked nights slinging pizzas in Lafayette to save money, and escaped to New Orleans before the ink on her diploma dried. Worked her way up to head of the copywriting department at Crescent City Advertising at age twenty-six. Got laid off at twenty-nine as her agency clients cut ad costs due to the trifecta of Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill, and the economic crash. No one wanted to hire an overqualified ad executive to wait tables, so she’d cut back and stretched her retirement fund until it was gone.
    Things would get better after the holidays. They had to.
    She drove through “metro” Paulina, which spread north a few blocks from the river levee much like nearby Gramercy and Lutcher,