THE MINERVA MINK STORY
"Two Minks and a Little Lady"

Chapter 6


     From the driveway of a squat little ranch home on the other side of Burbank from Minerva’s dwelling, the sound of a car’s engine slowly became audible. It sped quickly up the one lane path that shunt from the main highway, the driver knowing that they wouldn’t encounter any other vehicles on this particular road.

     Turning the curve just before the ranch home became visible, the car gave a sudden loud shudder and gained speed, causing the birds that had been quietly nesting in a near by tree to take to the sky with angry squawks.

     This burst of speed was short lived however, and upon spotting the drive that lead up to the small home, the car slowed, dropping gears until it was able to make the sharp turn into the gravel drive.

     Rocks repelled from the underside of the moving tires, smacking the underside and producing a multitude of “ping” sounds. Soon the car came to a stop, the engine idling, then shut down.

     Minerva stepped out from behind the wheel of her little red convertible, and removed her sunglasses. Squinting into the morning sun, she took a look around the quiet house, trying to determine if anyone was home after all.

     The ranch was probably as nondescript as a home could be, simple design, four standard rooms long and two wide with a door smack in the center of it like a nose on a face. It was a dull white color with brown trim and black shingles.

     There was a modest size yard, that Minerva observed could use a trim, one or two sapling fruit trees, and poking out from the back side of the house like a child playing hide and seek was the back half of a little pink bike.

     Despite these, the house looked deserted. There was also something else, that unless you were directly looking for it as Minerva was, you probably wouldn’t have seen. The place was totally devoid of any ‘female touches.’

     No curtains in the windows, no door mat, no bird feeder, no garden or flowers could be seen, though Minerva knew that there was a grown over scar in the back lawn where one had been and tended quite diligently for years, but then......

     She sighed, and walked up the door, listening to the echo of her heals click on the stone walk way.

     She had a busy day ahead of her, and she had dressed herself appropriately for it. Had she only one or two stops to make that day, she might have put on her suit she had warn the week before, but she had several calls to make before the day was out and a suit’s clean professional look would have faded quickly. Besides, most of these would be casual encounters rather than business meetings.

     So she had opted for one of her other favorite outfits. A cream colored blouse that opened in the front, a floating necklace draped around her exposed neck, and a pink skirt with matching pink pumps and button earrings. The girls had dubbed this her “Bubble Gum” outfit, and it would have undoubtably looked dated and tacky on anyone else, but Minerva had always joked that one of her lesser known super powers was that ability to wear just about anything and still turn heads.

     She approached the door, stepped up on the concrete landing and stopped short of punching the doorbell as a disgusted feeling gripped her. ‘What if ‘you know who’ answers?’ She quickly shook her head. ‘No. My flesh would have started crawl way before this.’She thought and touched the doorbell with her finger.

     A familiar ‘Ding-Gong’ sounded somewhere inside, and almost instantly, she could hear the sound of feet making a mad rush for the door. ‘Here she comes!” Minerva smiled to herself and opened her arms.

     The door burst open with a scream “AUNTY MINERVA!” and a fury of white fur and red pigtails leapt off the floor and into the awaiting arms. Minerva burst into happy laughter, hugging the little girl in her arms and spinning her around and around on the front stoop.

     “Eeeeee! How is my favorite little girl in the whole world!!” She kissed the child excitedly on the cheek and tickled her with her free hand.

     “Tee-Hee he hehe! Stop it Aunty Nerva!” The child squealed, trying to fend of Minerva’s tickling hand from her belly with her tiny arms.

     “I’m fine! I’m so glad you came!” She gave her Aunt a surprisingly strong hug around the neck.

     ‘Wow! You’ve got quite a grip little missy! Man, they grow up so fast.’ Minerva smiled to herself and squeezed her again, then let her slip back down to the ground.

     “Is your dad around sweetie? I need to talk to him before we go.”

     The little mink girl grinned up at her, giving her ‘Osh-Kosh’ overalls a gentile tug. “Yup, but he’s nappin’. Want me to go wake him up?”

     There was a sudden twang in Minerva’s heart as she stepped into the home and looked down at the little girl. ‘Uhgh. She looks so much like her mom!’

     ‘Little Missy’ was actually Stephanie Mink, her older brother’s only child. She was an average seven year old, good at school, already forming her own little friendship clicks not unlike her aunt, losing her baby teeth, and full of nonstop energy.

     She had most of her father’s features physically, shape of her face, his nose and ears, but she had her mother’s bright green eyes, red hair, and bouncy personality. Not to mention little bands of black fur on the tips of her ears, hands, and feet, typical to the fox race.

     “Sure honey, why don’t you do that for me.”

     “Is it true I get to spend the week with you Aunty ‘Nerva!?”

     Minerva smiled warmly at her. “You sure do sweet heart. And were going to have lots of fun. Now go get that lazy old man up so we can hit the highway.”

     Stephanie giggled and trotted off into the house toward her father’s bedroom.

     By herself now, Minerva took a look around the living room and felt a heavy sigh try and slither out of her. The place was virtually a mess. No, not virtually, it WAS a mess.

     Empty glasses, dirty plates and homework papers littered every considerable bare space in the living room. The TV was covered in a thick coat of fuzzy dust and tattered TV guides, some months old.

     The closet door was open and she could spot the toe of a sneaker sticking out, along with the sleeve of a coat. Several hangers also poked out from under the door, waiting to catch someone’s foot and send them to the floor.

     She stuck by the front door, not feeling brave enough to venture into the kitchen. ‘Oh gawd Rebecca, if you could only see what has happened here....”

     There was a creak toward the back of the house that Minerva knew as the bedroom door, and Stephanie returned with her father in tow.

     He shuffled in behind his daughter, hand on her little shoulder to help him find the way. “Hey Minny, thanks for stopping in.”

     “No problem Corrie, least I could do.” Minerva had to bite back the urge to cry as she looked up and down the creature in front of her that had once been her brother.

     “Go get your stuff together and put in your aunt’s death trap of a car, squirt.” He reached down and gave Steph a tap on the rump to get her going.

     “Okay pappa.” She knew that this meant that the grownups want to talk, so she skipped off the her room without argument.

     When the little girl was out of earshot and spy range, Minerva stepped forward and hugged her brother. “Hey, easy there. Damaged goods you know.”

     This was an understatement. Corrie was a ragged, gaunt scrap of a man, who had spent too many days sleeping and to many nights awake.

     He was only a few inches taller than her, same blonde hair and blue eyes, though she had seen less and less of them in the past few years. Most of the time he kept them closed or they were on the verge of turning bright red.

     He still had his earmark 80's McSqueeb hair that hung down over his eyes and had really only worked for a handful of people. His shirt, that sported a “Your Favorite Band Sucks’ logo, and white jeans were wrinkled, and he had the distinct smell of someone who had been cooped up in his home for too long.

     “Isn’t there anything else I can do Corrie?” She asked in a soft voice.

     “Naw, just keep the squirt happy till I get out of the hospital. The rest I can handle.”

     “Are you sure you want to even do this? No one will blame you if you don’t.”

     He shrugged, then sighed. “I figure I don’t have much of a choice Minerva. Either I do this now, when I still have a chance, or I never do it at all. The longer I wait, the more risk there is.” He fell silent for a moment then added. “I want to see Steph grow up.”

     Corrie had been the capital ‘B’ in beach bum during his teenage years. Surfing, drinking, and getting high were the top three spots on his priority list for the day. He dropped out of school, got arrested half a dozen times, and could be blamed for half of the gray hair her parents now sported.

     Minerva had spent the better part of her teen years, looking out for Corrie, bailing him out jail, helping him get over drug induced fevers, and keeping at least ten dollars in his wallet at all times.

     Then after high school, Minerva snapped. He fell into her room one night, higher than a kite and covered in his own blood. He tried to stiff a dealer and had gotten the snot beat out of him. He begged her to wash him up and not tell her parents about it, but she didn’t listen.

     She cleaned him up, put him to bed, then promptly went out and signed him up for rehabilitation classes. The months that followed were like a nightmare but she had never wavered. She came down on him time and time again in a Tyrannical manor, forcing him to go to his classes, and using the only means she had in which to influence his behavior. Crying. He could never stand to see her cry, no matter what.

     Slowly, the worthless being that had been her older brother began to change, he put weight back on, started working out, got and kept a job, cleaned himself up, went back to school, and topped it all off by winning a local surfing competition.

     Then, Minerva had hooked him up with a old school friend, Rebecca Moore, and the two became fast friends. They married after a year of steady dating, and Steph came not too long after.

     Corrie seemed to glow whenever Rebecca was around, and Minerva herself often had to step back and realize just how handsome and happy her brother had become. Everything seemed so perfect.

     Then, Becky got sick. Steph was only three months old when the word came down it was breast cancer. They tried everything they could, Minerva and her parents both gave Corrie insane amounts of money to pay for a multitude of treatments, but it had not helped. The cancer spread, and finally drug away Rebecca Moore Mink kicking and screaming to dispatch, at the ripe old age of twenty five, leaving a haggard husband and a child that could only solidly remember her in dreams and pictures.

     The bubbly, bouncy vixen was gone, and Corrie deflated into his old self like a balloon with a slow leak. He took everything that he could find that reminded him of Becky, short of Steph, and gave it to Minerva to store in her attic, then promptly went out and got drunk.

     Things worsened until one night, Corrie smoked half his body weight in pot and went surfing in one of the worst summer storms California had seen in a long time. Minerva had always figured he meant to kill himself, but had chickened out. Even stoned out of his mind he had been too good a surfer and had managed to get to shore before a wave clipped him and smacked his head into his board hard enough to leave him half blind.

     The beach patrol found him the next morning, frozen and bleeding to death on the sand.

     But it hadn’t ended there. The state was convinced that he had attempted suicide and meant to take Steph away from him and place her in a home. Minerva’s mother had been able to pull strings and get the baby put in their care until the state lost interest, and Corrie had once again cleaned up.

     Especially when it had gotten through to him that they were serious about taking Steph, he had sobered up and went clean almost over night. You could say a lot of nasty things about Corrie, and most he deserved, but he was a good father, and loved his only daughter more than his own life. He might never say it, but Minerva suspected that, aside from normal fatherly possessiveness toward their daughters, Corrie saw Steph as the last living link he had to Becky, and had no intentions of letting anyone take her from him.

     However, some scars never heal, both mentally and physically. Corrie’s vision had slowly started to fail, and now he was faced with the prospect of being totally blind in about a year. His doctors had offered a special kind of laser and cornea reconstructive surgery to repair the damage, but it wasn’t without risk. It was a total fifty on fifty chance, that at first he wouldn’t even listen to, let alone consider. Now, with his medications not responding, he decided to take the plunge and let the chips fall where they may. ‘There will be water if God wills it.’ as their father often said.

     Minerva backed away from him and let her slender hands fall down to his sides and into his own drooping palms. He took them, infolding her in the span of them, and she noticed them gently shaking. ‘He’s not eating again...’

     “So... Who’s going to take you to the hospital tomorrow?” She asked, trying not to let her dismay seep into her voice. “You know mom and daddy wouldn’t mind, or one of the girls could take you over, Trudy has the day off and she could.....”

     He cut her off by leaning forward and planting a gentile kiss on her head just above her brow. “You worry about me too much, you know that? You ramble when your nervous.”

     She only blushed and closed her mouth , releasing his hands and folding them over her chest. He chuckled softly, and began to walk slowly over to the couch. “I’m not going to ask the folks for a ride, I’d rather walk first, you have your hands full, and you don’t need to bother Dee Dee or Trudy with my sorry butt.”

     Minerva took his arm and helped him down onto the ratty couch. ‘It has seen better days. Both of them have.’

     “Besides, I already have it worked out.”

     This sentence made Minerva’s blood drop a few degrees in temperature, like a cold wind had rushed across her flesh.

     “Oh gawd! Not HER!”

     If Corrie had caught the spite in her words he didn’t show it, rather, he fumbled around for the remote and turned on the dusty television set.

     ‘Her’ naturally referred to Corrie’s new ‘Housekeeper and personal aid,’ who obviously wasn’t doing her job, and that was only the start.

     The weasel woman and Minerva had never liked one another from the very beginning and she knew there was good reason for the bad blood. First, Minerva started to check on her work only to discover she wasn’t doing it and had threatened Stephanie if she told. Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, she had found out that this woman was trying to warm up to Corrie, for what reasons she could only imagine, and would often come over only to eat his food then leave.

     Corrie however seemed blind to this and let her stay, like some kind of parasite that he felt sorry for. “No, not Nate. The hospital is going to send an ambulance over to help me. All part of the service you see. You slash um, we stack um, and you carry them away.”

     ‘Nate’ was short for Natalie, and the woman was a complete butch. Minerva disliked her forceful attitude and almost masculine looks, not to mention how she got right in your face when she spoke.

     “Don’t talk like that. Steph might hear you.”

     Then, as if on cue, the hallway door popped open and Stephanie presented herself. “I’m ready! Lets go! Lets go!”

     The little girl was now sporting a bright pink ‘Barbie’ backpack and had a small suitcase on wheels in tow. Both the adults turned to look at her and smiled in a way she knew was used to mask nervousness.

     “Come here and give your old man a smooch first you carpet critter.”

     Steph dropped her suitcase and rushed into his arms, and he lifted her up into his lap. “Now, I want you to be good for your Aunt Minerva okay? And I’ll see you at the end of the week.”

     “Okay papa!” She grinned wickedly

     “Don’t you ‘okay’ me you little stinker. I know your lying through your teeth, or which ones you still have up in there pumpkin grin!”

     “Hehehe! Papa stop!” Corrie proceeded to cover her face with kisses and squeeze her in a big bear hug.

     “Roar!” He kissed her again and then set her back down on the ground. “Now, have a good time. Get!”

     “Why don’t you take your stuff out to the car sweetie, and I’ll be right out.” Minerva suggested.

     “Okay.” Stephanie lifted the suitcase back up on it’s wheels and trotted off toward the door.

     “I love you Stephanie.” Corrie said as she pulled the screen door back.

     She smiled at him, exposing a few little gaps in her teeth. “I love you too papa! Bye!” And she was gone.

     Corrie started to shudder and Minerva first thought he was going to cry, but didn’t. “Could you get me a beer before you go? I just got a new case in the fridge.”

     She didn’t answer, and slipped into the kitchen. It was a crud infested as the rest of the house and made her stomach lurch. Finding the fridge, she popped it open and scoured through the shelves looking for a beer.

     Finding an already opened case, she pulled him a silver bullet and popped the tab. Taking it back into the living room, she placed it in his hand. “Your new case is already half gone kiddo.”

     Corrie about jumped off the couch with anger. “What?! I just bought that last Monday! I’ve not had any of it, and unless Steph is starting a habit......! Son of a....! ARGH!”

     He slumped back down and took a sip of the beer, and Minerva said nothing. ‘Hope that sunk into your think skull brother dear. I know you don’t mind the food missing, but you do love your beer don’t you?’

     She kissed him on the forehead and started toward the door. Stopping where Steph had been only moments before she turned to take another look at him.

     But he wasn’t on the couch anymore. She jumped, startled, and saw him standing by the bookshelf looking at small picture in a frame that sat on it’s fold out leg just in front of some of Steph’s school books.

     “Corrie?” Minerva squeaked. More than a little freaked out.

     The picture was a family photo he had taken of Rebecca, Stephanie, and himself right after the baby had been born. Becky was sitting on a small chair holding a wriggling little bundle and Corrie stood behind her, his big hands resting on her shoulders. It was the only picture of her in the entire house.

     “Steph’s growing up fast Minny. Pretty soon.... well you know what I mean. I have this feeling, she is going to want to know about her mom when that happens. I don’t know why I know that, it just must be a ‘Dad’ thing. When she does, can you tell her? Show her the stuff I gave you? I.... I don’t think I can, now, then, or ever. I.....” He trailed off, still staring blankly at the photo.

     “Sure Corrie. I would be proud to.” Minerva felt as if she was going to cry anyway, despite her resolve to keep her composure.

     “You know what else?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “She always thought she was going to get better. Always talked about going home, cooking dinner, or seeing the baby. Never once did she think she wasn’t going to get better.”

     That had done it, and Minerva felt a tear roll down her cheek, but Corrie was like a block of stone.

     “I don’t want to do that. Don’t want to fool myself. Ahhhhh..... Get out of here Minny, and take good care of the squirt okay? I’ll see you on the other side.” He waved her way with two fingers, but never looked back at her.

     “Don’t worry.” She said, brushing off a tear, and stepped out the door into the bright sun.


     “So what are we going to do this week Aunt Minerva!? Huh? Huh?” Steph bounced up and down in her seat excitedly.

     “Well, for today, I thought we would hit the grocery store, get some snacks and ice cream, then make a raid on the movie store and spend the rest of our day in our pajamas, eating junk and having some girl time. Sound good?”

     “Yup! Can Aunt Dee Dee and Aunt Trudy come over too?”

     “I don’t see why not. Were going to have a blast little girl! Just you and me!”

     And the little red car drove off............