Widow

by Martha Miller

  “So you needed money?” Bertha remembered Stumpy telling her to shoot to kill, and she wondered if she could, with Grandma lying six feet away. In her peripheral vision she could see Grandma’s breathing change and could tell she was awake.

  “You could say that. I started working for Albert Cioni, keeping his books and collecting the kickbacks. Then my grandson got in trouble with drugs. I didn’t really make a decision to get in bed with drug suppliers, but one thing led to the next. He’s been in and out of treatment a half-dozen times in as many years. Every time I helped him to hopefully do the right thing, I got more involved. Like his father and his grandfather, Logan is weak.”

  “I’m sorry.” And Bertha was sorry. “Tell me something. Why did you visit me at the hospital in the middle of the night? Were you planning to kill me like Scottie?”

  Billie shrugged. “I wanted to find out what all you knew. If it was too much, I’d have killed you too.”

  Bertha’s eyes went to Grandma. How long could she stay still?

  Billie’s noticed and she said, “Old girl must have had a helluva day to sleep so well.”

  “She’s got nothing on her conscience to keep her awake. Life is pretty simple for my grandma. She eats, she sleeps, and she loves.” Then Bertha added, “Look, Billie, you don’t have to do this. Just take your money and leave.”

  Billie only stared at her through eyes that seemed empty.

  “After all that’s happened, you surely can’t think you’ll get away.”

  “You’re right about one thing. I’m in so deep, another killing or two won’t matter. Actually, each one gets easier.”

  “Tell me. I’ve got to know. Did you set Toni up to be killed?”

  “I just wanted to scare her. The guys who did the job got carried away.”

  Bertha remembered Fred Cook mentioning the blue hair. “Your grandson.”

  “You have learned a few things. Yes, Logan and some of his friends got carried away. Then you started asking questions, and Scotty needed to be silenced.”

  “The day I visited her, you came in. You were there to kill her, weren’t you?”

  “Had to come back later.”

  “The threatening phone calls? Was that him?”

  “He knew Doree from high school, and even though he was ahead of her, he knew where she hung out and knew the boy she dated. You understand we wanted to be in a position to get the things Toni stole from us. Eventually Cioni got involved. He had your house searched and finally tried to burn the damn thing down. See, he needed to destroy the records of payments from the businesses in my area.”

  “Being between crooked cops and angry drug dealers is truly between a rock and a hard place.”

  Grandma changed positions and started snoring softly. Bertha thought she might actually have fallen back to sleep because she could see the blinking red light from the edge of her blanket.

  Billie hesitated. “I just need to get this done and I’m on my way to Florida. That’s where rich old people go, right?”

  They both blinked as the overhead lights came on. Billie turned toward the door, and Pop Wilson stood there with his gun trained on her. While Billie was distracted, Bertha yanked the gun from her hand. Then the uniforms started coming into the room.

  Bertha crossed the small room and gave Billie’s gun to Pop and then said, “Logan, the grandson, is waiting in the car.”

  “Not anymore he’s not.”

  Billie was cuffed and escorted out of the room.

  Grandma said, “I was worried there for a minute.”

  “Me too.” Bertha went to her bedside and picked up the tape recorder.

  Grandma said, “Think about it. She’d have to kill me too.”

  Bertha nodded.

  “Life’s too goddamn short as it is.”

  “Copy that.”

  “So when do I get my scooter?”

  Afterword

  “Happy Birthday, babe.” Bertha laid three roses on the flat tombstone. She was quiet for a moment, relaxing into the bittersweet serenity that the cemetery often produced. The sun was bright, but the temperature was cool. A lawnmower hummed in the distance. At length she said, “Sometimes I feel like nothing is ever going to make sense again.” Bertha spoke to Toni often when she was alone. Sometimes she spoke out loud, like now, and sometimes the words were only thoughts.

  “I miss you. I still have days when I just walk through what I know I’m supposed to do. Other days are okay, sometimes better. Occasionally I feel like you’re hanging around the house watching us. I like believing that.

  “Oh, and Grandma’s scooter opened a floodgate. Now two other people at Golden Promise have them, and a nurse’s aide said she’s thinking of getting one herself. Corridors right before dinner are a real adventure.

  “Doree’s doing better. She has a new boyfriend—a basketball player, a good-looking black kid named Carlos. I always thought our grandkids would look more like you than me. Now I wonder. Of course, we’re a long way from grandkids. Since her seventeenth birthday in December, she’s been caught up in all the stuff seniors do: prom, senior trip, college applications, and of course basketball games. I’ve gone to a couple. Carlos is pretty good—plays in the frontcourt. A couple of college scouts are watching him. Doree wants to go college wherever he ends up, but I’m pulling for Columbia in Chicago, where she can stay with Aunt Lucy and save money on housing. Staying with a relative means I’ll know it if she gets into any serious trouble.”

  Bertha took a deep breath, thinking about Doree. “You would’ve been proud of her the way she helped me during those six weeks off work with my knee. I thought I’d go nuts in that little condo Allstate put us in, without the routine, without keeping busy. All I had was a psycho cat and Doree, but she really came through. Somehow we had the time and space to adjust or readjust to our lives.”

  Bertha’s knee hurt, so she put her hands behind her on the new grass and sat. Stumpy’s grave was up over the next rise, farther from the road in an older section. At Christmas she’d brought two wreaths to decorate both graves. After a little time with Toni, she walked toward Stumpy’s grave. From a short distance, she saw he already had two wreaths. Probably one from his grandson, who’d come to take care of the farm until the family could decide what to do with it. The other would be from Pop and Mel—Stumpy’s best friends. Since it’d been Christmas, she remembered George Bailey and “No man is a failure who has friends.” She’d rearranged the wreaths and left a beautiful display on the little guy’s grave. At that moment she felt alone, but she gradually realized that she had lots of people who loved her, who would do anything (within the law) for her, who were her friends.

  Bertha shook off the memory and went on talking. “By the way, we moved back into the house in February. We took down the extra wall space between the family room and the kitchen. It wasn’t really the best plan because now we have to keep the kitchen straightened up or the city-dump look dominates everything more than ever. While the contractors were working, they cleaned and resurfaced the beams in the family room for the first and, I promise you, the last time.”

  Bertha pulled her knees close and wrapped her arms around them. “Some good came out of your investigation. For one, the Albert Cioni case just blew the lid off the city police department. The mayor committed suicide last fall, and most folks knew it was money, that he’d done something dishonest. Now people say that he was involved with Cioni up to his ears. I imagine it was like Fred Cook. He was under Cioni’s thumb for some reason. Anyway, heads started rolling, and no less than six officers were suspended without pay. Cioni cut a deal to retire early, and he has pending racketeering charges hanging over his head, which is good because, if convicted, he’ll lose his city pension.

  “One that surprised me was Billie Little. How could someone like her end up committing five murders? Remember how when we were first seeing each other, we’d go to Crones Nest and dance? I loved those days. Actually I loved every day with you, even the h
ard ones, like the trip to Shawnee Forrest. That was a tough time. I was angry about you changing to the night shift because I’d never see you. You wanted the extra money for Doree’s college fund. During that trip everything went wrong except us. But I started thinking that Doree needed to start out in life on the right foot. I remembered when we first met. You’d made it clear that you and the kid were a package deal. Then sometime on the road down there, I told myself we’d have a lifetime together after Doree was grown.” Bertha swallowed a painful knot in her throat. “But it didn’t work out that way. All of this hurts, but time moves only in one direction. Some things you can leave behind and others you can’t.”

  She picked up one of the roses and ran her thumb down the stem and over a thorn. She put the flower to her nose and inhaled, then started coughing. “Fucking allergies.” She placed the flower with the others and sighed. “You know, I went to college on my father’s life insurance, and Doree will go to college on yours.

  “Alvin recommended this grief support group. God love him, he did a lot of research and found a lesbian one up in Joliet. I went a couple of times, but I guess I wasn’t ready for it because the long trip up and back was holy hell. I kept wondering how I could tell those women that the thing that haunts me, the thing that makes it so hard to let go, is a shower more than twelve years ago—the day you stepped into it and joined me. So I’ve started going to AA meetings again. It’s not that I think I will drink. The thing I get there is how to move forward one step at a time, one day at a time. Cliché, I know, but it helps.”

  A sound came from behind Bertha, a car door. She turned to see the Honda had pulled up behind her new black Jeep. Doree was coming up the hill toward her. Bertha waved and Doree did the same. Of course she’d come here on her mother’s birthday. Bertha’d wanted her to come with her, but Doree had a basketball game to attend. As it turned out, Bertha was glad she’d had some time alone. She checked her watch. It was after five, and she’d head for the weekly dinner with friends that Maggie the cat lady had gotten her involved with. They were a group of eight women, single and couples, who met on Friday nights for dinner. Maggie had started dating one of the women from the group, and Bertha was happy for her.

  For Bertha, she was still busy putting one foot in front of the other.

  About the Author

  Award-winning Midwestern writer Martha Miller is the author of: Skin to Skin: Erotic Lesbian Love Stories, Nine Nights on the Windy Tree, Dispatch to Death, Tales from the Levee, and Retirement Plan. Her stories, reviews, and articles are widely published in anthologies, magazines, periodicals, and newspapers. She writes a monthly column “Martha [Lesbian] Living,” a lesbian send-up of that other, more domestic, Martha. She is a winner of a Raymond Carver Short Fiction Award and the Illinois Arts Council Artists Fellowship, among others. Her last book, Retirement Plan, was a Lambda finalist. She loves to read and she loves basketball. She teaches writing part-time at a local community college and lives a quiet life with her wife Ann and two dogs and two cats.

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