The Wedding Gift Read Free

fitting way to
remember Uncle Roger. Well hells bells, I say, who wants to
remember stuff like that?
    If it is a boy, and I know
it is, then naming him Charlie is also a way of remembering, but
remembering people in my family, who may not be all rich and smart
like the Willets is, but we don’t got no nasty-ass old psycho
killers in our family tree neither; you name babies to remember
good people, that’s what I say … people like my poor dead brother,
to name one, who was a fine boy that was not killed in some icky
way, but fell out of a tree on a Halloween dare before I was even a
year old. Besides, Charlie is my daddy’s name too, so that’s it as
far as I am concerned. You know, I’ve been thinking if we have us
another son down the road, I think I will call him Worthier;
Worthier Willets has a nice ring to it.
    See the thing is, old lady
Willets will pretty much poop herself a brick no matter what I do
for the rest of my natural life as far as I can see, so I might as
well just go ahead and do what I want anyway. George, he will go
along with stuff I want, 'cause he is as crazy about me as her old
George is about her. With poor Mr. Willets Sr., it's all
“ Yes, Sugar, and whatever you want,
Bethany ” all the time at their house. So I
figure things will run real smooth if that’s how it’s going to be
in my house with me and my George.
    I think in a few years,
when we have more than one little baby of our own, then George can
build me a huge old mansion and we’ll call it Leeann House. That
naming houses after themselves is a Willets' tradition, one I may
just take up myself seeing as how I am going to be a Willets
soon.
    See, here is how that
naming houses got started: Back almost a hundred years ago, the
first George Willets - who everyone in Dalton calls George the
First, built Willets House, which is a humongous, real life
Southern plantation house. It looks like Tara in ‘Gone with the
Wind’, only a lot bigger. Mr. Willets the First then passed it onto
his son Roger and his new wife, who got it for a wedding gift. And
then they lived in it, until their son Roger got married. That
Roger, who I named in my mind “Roger the Last”, which I know is
real disrespectful and whatnot, but it’s also true. Well then,
Roger the Last and his wife Robina took it over upon their marriage
and after the murders that was it for Willets' occupancy, so to
speak.
    Of course, the current
George, who is known as Big George Willets, well he refused to sell
the ancestral home, or better yet burn it to the ground, and since
the current Mrs. Bethany Willets refused to live there, he built
her a big house on the golf course, and named it Bethany
House.
    Now the original Willets
palace just sits there year after year, all empty and taking up a
whole city block for nothing. The family keeps it up, of course, so
it’s still beautiful and grand, but for all its being so fancy and
perfect looking, it ain’t stopped it from being our local haunted
house for as long as I can remember.
    For a long time after the
murders, I guess that local kids used to sneak in there on
Halloween and bring stuff out, and tell stories about what they’d
seen in there. But the last time someone broke in there - at least
as far as anyone knows - was when my brother and his buddy, Donny,
went inside the house seventeen years ago.
    Charlie was killed and
Donny was hurt real bad and even when he got better, he would never
tell anyone why he and Charlie were up in the tree together. People
talk, like always, and stories grew up around the house even more
after my brother was killed.
    These days, it’s still the
place that kids cross the street to avoid walking too close to. So
it just sits there big and white and beautiful behind these fancy
wrought iron gates with all those huge oak trees growing up the
sides of the driveway. Mama says that it looks like a movie set,
and she always expects to see ladies in hoop skirts on the lawn,
but to my mind