Fifty Shames of Earl Grey: A Parody Fanny Merkin (the giving tree read aloud TXT) 📖

“Slow down!” I shout. “Now I’m frightened.”

“I’m sorry, Anna, but we have to outrun him,” Earl says. “This car is made for speed.”

“Didn’t you also say it was a movie prop from thirty years ago or something?”

“Well, yes,” he concedes.

“And anyway, I’ve seen NASCAR races. I’ve seen these cars wipe out and go up in flames.”

“Then how would you recommend we shake our friend off?” he says.

“I don’t know. Do you have a gun?”

“You think I carry a gun with me in the glove compartment of my stock car, Anna? What kind of thug do you think I am?”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“But you have a point. I think I have a bazooka in the backseat,” he says. “Let’s trade places—you take the wheel.”

We’re going almost three hundred miles an hour down the highway, but we switch places without slowing down. It’s only when I’m in the driver’s seat that I remember something important. “I don’t have a driver’s license,” I tell Earl.

“Don’t worry,” he says, leaning into the backseat and opening an oversized violin case. He pulls a bazooka out.

“I’ve never driven a car before, either,” I protest. My foot is on the gas and I’m trying to steer. It’s just enough like Super Mario Kart that I sort of have the hang of it.

“You’re doing fine,” Earl says, loading the bazooka.

“Thank God it’s not a stick shift,” I say. I’ve heard stories about stick shifts. While they might make for fun double entendres, I hear driving them can be a bitch.

Earl looks at me, confusion plastered all over his face. “It is a stick shift, Anna,” he says.

Uh-oh.

“Don’t worry, though,” he says. “I’ll just fire a warning shot at this guy; he’ll back off, and hopefully you won’t have to change speed. Okay?”

I nod, as the hills zip by us on the right . . . and a thousand-foot cliff looms to the left. Gulp.

Earl tries rolling down his window, but it’s locked. “Can you turn the child lock off?” he asks me.

As I search the driver’s-side door for the child lock, the PT Cruiser chasing us taps our bumper. I grab the steering wheel with both hands and start hyperventilating. “I can’t do this,” I say.

Earl grips my arm and gazes gazingly into my eyes with his steely gray eyes. Even in almost total darkness, they look as beautiful and luminescent as ever. What did I do to deserve this gorgeous man? “You can do this,” he says. “Now unlock the windows and keep your eyes on the road and your foot on the gas pedal.”

“Yes, Sir,” I say, grinning. I find the child lock and flip it so that Earl can roll his window down.

He grins at me. “Let’s show this SOB what happens when you ride Earl Grey’s ass.” He leans out the window and aims the bazooka at the PT Cruiser.

“Fire in the hole,” he says, shooting the bazooka. All this talk about riding asses and firing in holes is turning me on. I can’t wait until we get back to his penthouse . . .

The PT Cruiser explodes behind us in a fiery inferno that lights up the mountainside. Woah. Earl grabs the wheel and we trade places again. He slows the car and turns it around.

“I thought you were just firing a warning shot,” I say.

“That was what I was trying to do,” he says. “It was also my first time using a bazooka. My bad.”

“Could anyone have survived that?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know, but we’re going to find out.”

Earl drives the car up to the edge of the wreckage, which is still blazing. He leaves the car idling with the headlights illuminating the crash site and steps out. I follow him.

There’s a crumpled body on the ground crawling out of the twisted metal. Earl bends over and rolls the person onto their back. It’s a bruised and bloodied elderly woman I instantly recognize as one of the door greeters from my Walmart store.

“Mother!” Earl says.

“Oh, my baby boy,” she says weakly. She looks like hell, but that’s to be expected since she just survived a car chase that ended in a bazooka blast.

“I thought you were dead,” he says, cradling the woman in his arms.

“I faked my own death so you could never find me,” she says. “I didn’t want you to see your poor mother as a casino junkie. Even after I shot my blackjack dealer in the face and got clean, I knew that I could only complicate your life. After rehab, I applied for the only job an ex-addict who looks thirty years older than her driver’s license can get in this country—”

“A Walmart greeter,” I say.

“Exactly,” she says, nodding. “I had written you off completely, Earl. Until last week, when you walked through the automatic doors and back into my life.”

“At the Portland Walmart,” he says.

“Yes. You didn’t see me—no one looks at us greeters—but I immediately knew it was you. Your tousled hair, penetrating gray eyes, and long fingers haven’t changed a bit since you were a baby.”

He shakes his head in disbelief. “Why follow us, though? Why not try to contact me?”

“I wasn’t sure you would want to talk to me,” she says, hacking up a lung. Earl tosses it aside. “I wanted to know you were okay, though,” his mother continues. “Stalking you seemed like the only reasonable option.”

Like mother, like son . . .

“Now that I know you’re alive, I’m not going let you leave me again,” Earl says. “You won’t die on me, dammit.” He throws her over his shoulder and carries her to the stock car, then pops the trunk and dumps her body inside. Earl slams the trunk shut. “Let’s ride.”

We speed back down the highway toward Seattle in silence. What I wouldn’t give to know what’s going on inside his mind right now! He grits his teeth, but keeps his eyes on the road.

We pull up to the