Tuesday Tales: From the Word GREEN

Welcome to the last post for Tuesday Tales in 2021. This has been a hard year for many of us. Here’s hoping 2022 will be better. Our word prompt this week is GREEN. I’m continuing with Royal Flush. Enjoy, and I’ll see you here next year.

When my father had shown up at the board meeting with Isamu Tadashi, heir apparent to Bonsai Aeronautics, I’m sure I turned green, ready to lose my breakfast. I knew exactly what was going through dear daddy’s cold, calculating mind. Despite a little thing called creating a monopoly, he was hoping for more than one merger this year, and I was having none of it. Isamu, raised in a traditional Japanese family, one with ties to the Emperor, would expect his wife to be meek, mild, and obedient. I was none of those things and didn’t intend to start now. If Dad wanted to find someone who would take one for the team, he needed to look elsewhere.

While Dad had been arranging dinner with Isamu and the rest of our family, I’d been on the phone to my cousin, Jewel. Her father had tried to pull the same stunt a few years ago, and like me, she’d refused to have anything to do with it. Did I mention my extended family had a habit of naming their girls after gemstones? My female cousins, according to age, were Opal, Jade, Ruby, Amber, and Jewel. I rounded out the family’s weird habit with Pearl and, as the last of this generation not married, I honestly hoped the trend would stop with us. Jewel had escaped her fate and had fallen in love with and married a hunky cowboy she’d met years earlier at one of the annual family get-togethers on Catalina Island. I wasn’t looking to marry anyone, least of all Isamu.

I’d played nice-nice until Isamu had returned to Japan, and then I’d made my escape. At the moment, my dad believed I was in Norway, visiting an old friend and waiting out the virus and travel restrictions. That excuse had lasted three months and wasn’t going to be good much longer, but I really wasn’t ready to go back to Beverley Hills and the merger he proposed—not that Isamu had been anything but a perfect gentlemen. He just didn’t interest me. Besides, I liked it here in this small Vermont town where everyone treated me as if I were just an ordinary hard-working stiff.

“His name’s Kyle Stapleton, and he grew up here.” It didn’t occur to me not to answer Randy’s question. “You’ll probably remember him because of his mother.” I shrugged.

That’s it. Stay safe and don’t forget to check out the other Tuesday Tales