He should have dismissed it, especially since he knew his brother Grady had already solved the problem well before Christmas. In fact, Grady was now a town hero in Amesport because he’d donated the needed funds. He had also gotten himself engaged and then married to the Center’s director, Emily.
Christmas is over. Leave it. Grady solved the ridiculous situation, getting himself injured in the process.
Evan wasn’t crazy about the outcome, especially the fact that his younger brother had thrown himself into the line of danger to resolve the whole debacle and rescue his new bride. But Grady seemed happy enough since his nuptials with Emily, even though, in Evan’s opinion, he’d married with far too little thought and way too much haste.
The entire holiday season had passed . . . thank God. Unfortunately, the audacity of the person who had sent the correspondence still annoyed him.
He frowned as he read the email again, still wondering about the author. It was a well-written account of the situation at the time it was composed, but it was still presumptuous. He hated the fact that the words were trying to play on his sense of guilt, duty, and family. If there was one thing that Evan did, it was watch out for his family. As the eldest in his broken family, he considered everything that happened to his siblings his business, his responsibility.
Uncharacteristically, he forgot about why he was in the mailbox for the Sinclair Fund in the first place. He switched gears and signed up for an anonymous email address on one of the numerous free sites that offered them, and decided to reply to the inquiry. The email had been appropriately ignored previously by employees, and probably should have just been deleted. For the sake of the charity, he didn’t want the sender to know exactly who was replying. He just wanted the author to understand that the Sinclair Fund wasn’t an appropriate place to seek a donation for a trivial problem. He could reprimand the person, discourage future emails of the same nature to the Sinclair Fund, and no one would ever know.
He copied and pasted the original email from the mystery author before replying.
Dear Concerned:
How else could he start the return email? He wasn’t even sure about the gender of the person writing, but he would place a hefty bet on the writer being a female. Women seemed to get ridiculously sentimental over certain holidays.
He promptly shot out a reply, closed the window for the free email site, and forgot all about the issue as he returned his attention to the Sinclair Fund mailbox to see if his donor actually had cause for complaint. Evan didn’t even think about the annoying email again . . . until he got an answer several days later.
Randi gaped at the rudest email she’d ever received, her mouth actually opening and closing like a fish out of water that was struggling to take a breath.
Dear Concerned:
I’m curious as to whether you really expected to receive an answer to your email sent before Christmas. Did you really think one of the Sinclairs was going to read your email, then actually provide funds for a town that isn’t even on the map, and for such a ludicrous reason? We are trying to help solve pressing concerns in both our nation and the world with the Sinclair Fund, not masquerade as Santa Claus. I think it would have been much more appropriate for you to address your email to the North Pole.
However, it is my understanding that you and the citizens of Amesport did get your Christmas wish. Wasn’t this issue completely resolved by Grady Sinclair?
Sincerely,
Unsympathetic in Boston
“Unsympathetic in Boston? Oh, my God! What a jerk!” Randi scowled at the computer screen at the Center, completely taken aback by the response to the email she’d sent two months earlier. After so long, she’d completely given up on getting an answer.
The only reason she’d signed in to that email address at all was to contact a parent of one of the children she was tutoring, and she’d been stunned to find that she finally had a reply to the email she’d sent to the Sinclair Fund.
She checked the date and realized her plea had only been answered a few days ago. Why now? She’d pathetically checked every single day for over a week after writing her email to the Sinclairs, desperately hoping somebody would respond. And so they did . . . after Christmas had passed, and with the snottiest comments imaginable!
Randi’s temper started to slowly simmer as she continued to gape at the snooty response, unable to believe that an employee of a charity would respond so bluntly. Maybe the problem did seem small to them, but it was important to her town.