by Claire Cook
That sounded boring even for Seth. “Don’t you have any friends turning fifty this year? Maybe you could all do something together.”
Geri actually looked up. “Yeah, I’m still in touch with some friends from college. We got out our calendars a couple times, and it looks like we might have a window in late August. . . .”
Geri went back to her endless search, and I took a sip of water and started thinking about friends. I’d had lots of friends over the course of my life, but I seemed to be without many actual active friendships now. Most of them had been the casualty of marriage and kids, and others had turned out to be all about work and had evaporated pretty quickly once I left that particular job. And still others turned out to be based on the shared interest of going places to meet men, and that whole thing just got old for me. I must have drifted away from the rest of them when I headed back to live in the compound. You don’t want just anybody to know you live over your parents’ garage.
“Hey,” I said, thinking maybe I should work on my conversational skills in the unlikely case I ever made any new friends. “Wanna hear something strange?”
Geri didn’t say anything, which I took as a yes.
“Mom buried a statue of St. Joseph to help the house sell, and when Dad went to dig it up, it wasn’t there.”
“That’s nice,” Geri said.
“You don’t happen to have any extra statues kicking around, do you? I’m just thinking I should put another one in the hole so they don’t start blaming each other. That way if Dad looks, he’ll think he just missed it the first time, and if Mom checks, she’ll think it’s still there.” Even at my age, I hated the sound of my parents fighting.
Geri sighed and looked up. “The drawer to the left of the silverware.”
I found it on the first try and pulled it all the way out. “Wow,” I said as I rooted around in a tangled mass of CCD books, church bulletins, dried palm frond crosses, and an ancient mantilla that must have belonged to Geri when she was a kid, since I’d had one just like it. “What’s this, your God Help Us drawer?”
Geri closed her folder and pushed her chair back. She reached around in the drawer and handed me a small plastic statue.
“I don’t think this is the same one,” I said. “The other guy didn’t have anybody sitting on his shoulder.” I’d always been able to distinguish the boy saints from the girl saints by their beards, but beyond that, one cheap plastic statue looked pretty much like the next one to me. Possibly it was a matter of so many saints, so much skipped Sunday school. Yes, we’ve all heard of St. Joseph, but could we pick him out of a lineup?
“Do you want it or not?”
“Yeah, okay. I mean, I guess it’s pretty dark in that hole anyway.” Before she could close the drawer again, I grabbed a pair of rosary beads. The beads looked like real tigereye, and they were linked with intricate silver filigree. I held them out of my sister’s reach. “Can I have these, too?”
Geri tapped her toe on the kitchen floor. “For what?”
“I don’t know, I was thinking I might start praying again.”
“Yeah, right.” My sister held out her hand. “Give those back to me right now. You cannot turn them into earrings.”
I held the rosary beads behind my back.
“You’ll rot in Hell,” my older sister said.
“No you won’t, Aunt Ginger,” Rachel said as she came into the room with Becca right behind her. They both had their hands full. “Everybody’s making rosary jewelry. Paris Hilton has a whole line.”
“She’s already going to rot in Hell,” Geri said. “Your aunt still has a slight shot at Purgatory.”
When I got home, I decided to give St. Whoever He Was a quick burial before it got dark. I was happy to discover that when it came to digging holes, the third time in the same place was a total piece of cake.
Chapter 11
I PUT THE SHOVEL BACK IN THE GARAGE, BRUSHED OFF my hands, and headed upstairs with my library books and hand-me-down art supplies. I took a few steps into the apartment and stopped. For a split second I thought I’d been robbed, but then I realized that Boyfriend had been shredding again.
Boyfriend loved to shred. His favorite thing was to wiggle the toilet paper, or even the paper towel roll, off the holder. He’d wrestle it down the hallway, thumping it with his hind feet as if he were subduing a dangerous criminal. Then he’d pull a long sheet off the roll, wad it up, and carry it around the house with him. Sometimes he’d leave it on my pillow as a present.
“Oh, Boy,” I said out loud as I surveyed the damage. He’d pretty much covered the apartment in little nests of toilet paper. I wondered if my HMO had a therapist who’d be willing to give my cat and me a group rate.
I decided I’d deal with the mess in the morning. I changed Boyfriend’s water and poured some more dry food into his bowl. And then I saw it. The cardboard box I kept my earring supplies in was lying on its side under my tiny kitchen table. Boyfriend had managed to unravel the better part of a spool of wire and empty my bag of sea glass into the center. All that was left in the box were a pair of needle-nose pliers and two packages of hypoallergenic pierced earring wires.
I’d planned on bringing my earring supplies with me to kill some time on the set tomorrow, and maybe even make a few sales while I was at it. But it would take me forever to straighten everything out tonight, and I was just too tired to deal with it. “It’s okay, Boyfriend,” I said. It wasn’t really my cat’s fault. I was the one who’d taught him to play with sea glass in the first place.
I took a step back. I tilted my head to one side. The sea glass shards weren’t just dumped on the wire, they were nestled in it, with tendrils of wire crisscrossing in the most surprising ways. It looked like a sculpture of sorts. You could solder it to some sheet metal for a wall hanging, or I could even see it as kind of a chandelier if you added some strands of little white lights. It was balanced and yet unexpected, with that certain je ne sais quoi that made it recognizably, if inexplicably, art. Carefully, I lifted the whole thing up onto my kitchen table.
Wouldn’t you know it, even my goddamned cat was more talented than I was. I put the beads and the polymer clay down on the table. Maybe one of us could put them to good use.
“KNOCK-KNOCK!” a strange voice yelled just before my door opened.
I was sitting on my pulled-out sofa bed. I’d been trying to decide whether to make dinner, drag myself the three steps it took to get to my bathroom to wash up, or just go to sleep in my clothes.
My mother walked in, flanked by the dreaded red hatters. I considered making a quick dive under the covers, but they’d already spotted me.
The woman closest to me was wearing a red fisherman’s hat. It was covered with buttons. One of them said, A WOMAN WITHOUT A MAN IS LIKE A FISH WITHOUT A BICYCLE. I wondered if all the other buttons had an aquatic theme to match her hat, too. Before I could read any more of them, she said, “Oh, dear. You’ll never find a husband with these housekeeping skills.”
I thought her mouth and her button were seriously out of sync, but I wasn’t sure it was worth pointing out.
The other woman was wearing a red straw hat that, in my opinion, was a bit Easter bonnet-y for late May. The brim was topped with red and purple flowers, and a miniature bird’s nest with three tiny red eggs was tucked in tidily. “Maybe a younger one,” she said. “They’re not as keen on cleanliness.”
I glared at my mother. She ignored me and walked over to my bathroom and started dragging out garbage bags. “Your father will be over in the morning to take these to the dump. I told him you’d made a good start bagging things up, but you needed some help getting rid of them.”
I couldn’t think of a thing to say that wouldn’t get my father in trouble.
The fisherman’s hat lady was sniffing now. “Clutter can kill a sale,” she said, “but we have to think about all five senses. Pet owners can’t smell their own pets, so pets are a particular liability. You might want to consider boarding
the cat until after the open house. That way we can take the kitty toys and the litter box right out of here.”
Boyfriend jumped up beside me and burrowed under the sheets. Maybe we could find a kennel that would take both of us.
“Size really does matter,” the Easter bonnet lady said. The three of them giggled, and I rolled my eyes. “The rule of thumb,” she continued, “is to get rid of half of everything, and the place will look twice as big. Especially in the closet. And the underwear drawers. Only the sexy items should stay. People think they’re buying a house, but they’re really buying a fantasy.”
My own personal fantasy was that they’d all disappear before any of them found my underwear drawer.
“Selling a house,” the fisherman’s hat lady was saying, “is a lot like making love. Setting the mood is half the battle.” She walked over to a window and pulled up the old venetian blind. “People will pay a premium for good light. We’ll want to keep these blinds up and the windows open from now on, dear.”
“Pink lightbulbs will help, too,” the other woman said. “You should be using them anyway, hon. Now that you’re no longer a spring chickadee, they’re much more flattering.” She grabbed the handle of my father’s scooter and pulled it away from the wall. “I didn’t realize we had children here. We’ll have to make them scarce, too.”
“No children,” my mother said. “I have no idea where that old thing came from, but I’m sure Ginger can send it off to Take It or Leave It with her father.”
“Be careful what books and magazines you have lying around,” the Easter lady said. “Nothing risqué and nothing partisan. Voting for the wrong candidate can cost you a sale.”
“Does that mean I have to get rid of the autographed picture of the president I sent away for?” I asked.
“Well,” the fisherman lady said, “normally I like to turn down the bed and put a chocolate on the pillow to give the air of a fancy hotel, but I think we’re better off leaving the sleeper sofa folded up to optimize the floor space. We’ll play some nice Paul Anka music, though.”
She took a few steps around and sniffed some more. “And we still need to discuss flowers. Fragrant flowers will make a big difference in here. And maybe a drop of vanilla on each of the lightbulbs.”
“Don’t forget the plug-in fireplace you mentioned,” my mother said.
“We’ll drop that off later in the week,” the Easter lady said.
“Can’t wait,” I said.
My mother had worked her way over to my kitchen table and was staring down at my cat’s creation. “My goodness, Ginger. This is lovely. I had no idea you were so talented.”
The other two women joined my mother. “Marvelous,” one of them said. “But get it up on a wall or get it out of here.”
“PSST,” MY FATHER SAID from my doorway about two minutes later.
I conked my head against the back of my sleeper sofa. “Come on in, Dad.”
My father dropped two new garbage bags in the middle of my floor and bent down to give Boyfriend a pat. “How’s it going, Champ?”
Boyfriend licked my father’s hand briefly, then went back to grooming himself.
“Don’t worry,” my father said when he straightened up again. “I didn’t miss a word. You can hear everything that goes on up here from down in the garage.”
“Great, Dad. I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You would not believe what I found today at the Take It or Leave It, Toots.” My father untwisted the tie on one of the bags and dumped its contents on my floor. Before I closed my eyes I saw a toy jukebox, a sheriff’s badge, and a KISS THE COOK sign.
When I opened them again, my father was setting up a Chinese checkers game on the foot of my pulled-out bed, and my cat was batting a yellow marble around on the floor.
“We’re missing a few marbles here,” my father said.
“Speak for yourself,” I said.
“Hey, that’s a good one, Dollface. You get that from me, you know.” He slid the game closer to my end of the bed. “Okay, you can be red and I’ll be blue, and we’ll fill in the missing ones with the greens and just remember who they belong to. That way Champ can have the yellow ones all to himself.”
“Dad?”
“Okay, age before beauty. I’ll start.” My father moved a blue marble diagonally forward until it rested in the next tin dimple.
I picked up a red marble. “Dad? Mom’s not kidding, you know. She’s really going to sell the house. Maybe you should get rid of some of this stuff, and then we can rent you a storage unit for the rest of it.”
“This isn’t chess, you know, Toots. Come on, make your move.”
I put the marble down, and my father moved another blue one right away. “If I have to move,” he said, “I think I’d rather live on a houseboat. Maybe I can take your mother on a cruise and get her used to the idea.”
“I’m not sure we have time for that, Dad.”
“Okay, then we’ll pretend to be sick. First I’ll go, then you’ll come down with the same thing.” He scratched his head and picked up another marble. “We’ll have to synchronize our symptoms, though. That mother of yours is one smart cookie. How about a headache first and then it travels south from there?”
I moved another marble and tried to picture where I’d be in a few months. Not, I hoped, on a couch in my parents’ townhouse. Riley’s top bunk might be slightly less depressing. The only thing I knew for sure was that I was a lot of sea glass earrings away from my own apartment. I could try to talk myself into considering another sales job, but the money was so unreliable, especially in the beginning. And I knew I’d go crazy in an office job. I just couldn’t spend my life cooped up behind four walls, living someone else’s dream. I had to figure out something more fulfilling.
My father pushed himself off the edge of the sofa bed and started pacing. “Or maybe you and that young man of yours could get engaged, Toots. You could say you’ve always dreamed of a garden wedding. The old broad would never be able to resist that one.”
I buried my head in my hands.
“You don’t have to go through with it if you don’t want to, Dollface. A long engagement is all we need. He’s a nice young man, though. A good sweeper, too.”
My father squatted down and rolled a yellow marble. Boyfriend stalked it, then went in for the kill. “Way to go, Champ,” my father said.
He paced another few steps and leaned over my kitchen table. “Wooh, baby,” he said. “Will you look at that. What do you know, Champ. Looks like our Toots is quite the artist. A regular Picasso.”
Chapter 12
WHEN RILEY AND I GOT TO THE SET THE NEXT DAY, everybody was passing around the latest issue of The Daily Catch. “What happened?” I asked one of the AD people.
She shook her head and handed me her paper.
SHARK FLIES COOP
After a 23-day visit to the shores of Marshbury, a 14-foot, 1,700-pound female great white shark slipped out under the cover of darkness last night. Though a satellite tracking device, attached earlier, will allow scientists to observe the great white’s movements, it is unlikely that even Worldwide Studio will be able to talk the shark into returning to finish the filming of Shark Sense. When asked whether this constitutes a breach of contract on the part of the shark, Director Manny Muscadel had no comment.
Riley was reading over my elbow. “Uh-oh,” he said when he finished.
“Yeah,” I said, “who knew sharks could fly?”
He laughed, but not with his usual abandon. “What are they going to do?”
I didn’t have a clue so I just shrugged. Riley headed down the beach to join the other kids. I read the article one more time, just in case I’d missed something. When I looked up, Manny was standing in front of me.
I put the paper behind my back. “Too late,” he said. “I’ve already seen it.”
I wasn’t sure whether to smile or not. I bowed my head. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I mumbled.
He rubbed his
thumb and forefinger back and forth across his jaw. There was a jagged piece of toilet paper stuck below his right cheekbone. Maybe it was the fact that his sneakers were untied, but even with clear-cut evidence that he shaved, he looked about twelve. “Well,” he said finally. “Now I know why Spielberg built the shark for Jaws.”
“Is it still around? Maybe he’d let you borrow it.”
He didn’t seem to hear me. “I just figured we’d save so much money this way.”
“Or maybe you could bring in a sea lion or something?”
He shook his head. “The studio’s pulling the plug.”
For a minute I actually thought he meant they were pulling the plug on the whole ocean. Or at least the whole movie. Just to be safe, I went with a sympathetic shake of my head.
“ ‘Come back,’ they said. ‘There are plenty of sharks in LA.’ ” He buried his face in his hands.
I wasn’t sure what to do. I put a hand on his shoulder, then lifted it up. “But you’ll still get to make the movie, right?”
He looked up from his hands. “Yeah, I guess, if I can make what I got here fit with what I can do on the left coast. And stay within budget.” He reached up to straighten the brim of his baseball hat, and I could see that his hands were shaking. “Listen,” he said. “I was hoping you could help us out.”
“Sure,” I said. “Anything. Whatever you need.” I wondered if I should offer to help him tie his shoes before he tripped, or if he’d be insulted.
“It’s the kid. Who reps him?”
I looked at him blankly.
“Never mind. I’ll have the casting people look it up. But the kid, the kid is great. We’d like to take him with us to LA.”
When I glanced up, Tim Kelly was leaning over the back of a director’s chair watching me. He wiggled his eyebrows and grinned. I looked away, but not before he saw me looking.
WE’D CALLED HOME during the lunch break, so everybody was waiting for us when we got to Geri’s house.