“When a Cuppa Won’t Do” by Margery Reynolds

The whirling flash of red and blue emergency lights across the street drew my attention to the kitchen window. Two cruisers pulled up alongside the ambulance and unmarked car already in the driveway across the street. An army of police officers spilled out of the vehicles and surrounded the house, while the plain clothes officials went inside.

The whistling of the kettle pulled my thoughts back to the kitchen, and Jenny who sat at my table, her head buried between her trembling hands.

“What if…?” Jenny asked.

“A bit late for ifs,” I said.

Jenny’s husband of twenty-two years had been having an affair. I would never have believed it. Sid just wasn’t the type. I’d said as much when Jenny first mentioned she suspected something was going on. “He’s a family man, a brilliant father, devoted to you and the kids,” I’d said.

I was wrong. Five years later, things came crashing down and now Jenny sat at my table, waiting, wondering, worried.

I dropped three tea bags into Granny’s porcelain pot, poured in the boiling water the way I’d done a hundred times before, because that’s what you did, when someone’s world was caving in. You made tea.

“There’s nothing a good cup of tea can’t fix,” Granny used to say. “A cuppa cures all.”

But then I realized something. Jenny and I weren’t children anymore, and this wasn’t a skinned knee in the playground. A cup of tea just wouldn’t do. This called for something other than tea. I reached into the cupboard above the stove and hauled down a bottle of the good scotch.

Jenny slid back her chair, fetched two of my best tumblers from the cabinet and set them on the table, her eyes flitting to the scene unfolding across the street at her house. “Now you’re talkin’,” she said, a slow smile spreading over her face as I poured the amber liquid.

Jenny slid back her chair, fetched two of my best tumblers from the cabinet and set them on the table, her eyes flitting across the street to her house, and back again.

“Now you’re talkin’,” she said. A slow smile spread over her face as I poured the amber liquid.

The first sip burned all the way down and when it hit the pit of my stomach, it lay there smoldering. I ventured a look out the window when I heard the ambulance doors slam shut. A woman in handcuffs, flanked by uniformed officers, was escorted out of Jenny’s house and into the back seat of a cruiser. In less than a minute they were gone, nothing left but ribbons of yellow crime scene tape flapping in the breeze.

My eyes met Jenny’s. I raised my glass in a mocking toast. “To freedom, because Sid will never darken your doorstep again.”

Jenny’s lips curved into a wicked smile. “To Mary. It’ll be twenty-five to life before she ever ruins another marriage.”

Dale Margery Rutherford aka Margery Reynolds gave up her bookstore and tea shop, called Novel-Teas, in 2016 to pursue her interest in writing. In 2022 she published her first novel, followed by her second in 2023, and will have two releases in 2024. One Autumn at Ril Lake (the third in the Muskoka Cottage Novel Series) and the first in her Dotty Hamilton Series; A Tapestry of Lies.

Besides writing, Margery is also a freelance developmental editor and facilitator of a local writing group. Her personal reading choices lean toward historical fiction, family drama, women’s fiction, cozy mysteries, and the occasional suspense. When she isn’t writing, she’s researching her family tree, doing jig-saw puzzles and watching binge-worthy TV shows.

This story, “When A Cuppa Won’t Do,” started from a writing prompt at one of Brian Henry’s writing retreats at the Briars.

You can find Margery’s books in e-book form anywhere you usually buy e-books, or on loan through Overdrive or Hoopla at your local library. Print copies are available on Amazon or Ingram Spark.

You can follow Margery on Facebook here, on her website here, or on her Substack here.

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