The Grandmother Plot

by Caroline B. Cooney

  The doors opened.

  Hundreds of women tromped in, intense and happy, like a victorious army or maybe gamblers, sure that this throw would win it all. Freddy had an excellent booth position, close to the entry so that almost everybody had to walk past.

  That, of course, was the problem. Almost everybody did walk past. They wanted cheap beads: beads from China or India. For what Freddy charged for a single bead, they could buy a dozen strands from the third world. But it was a numbers game and Freddy just needed the cream: women who would really spend, for whom beading was not a hobby but a calling, or women who owned bead shops and wanted product to make their customers swoon.

  The convention hall was even more of an airport now, people swirling and scurrying and meeting and buying and eating and looking for someplace, anyplace, to sit.

  Time after time, a woman Freddy did not recognize hurried up to him, beaming, sure he would remember her from a fifteen-minute purchase last year. He would lope out from behind the exhibit. “Heyyyyyy,” he’d say, stretching the greeting until he was close enough to read the name tag. “Sonya! Lookin’ grand.”

  Some of the ladies wore necklaces of great drama and beauty. If the centerpiece was one of Freddy’s beads, he’d photograph the woman on his cell and put the picture on Instagram and Facebook.

  Women who loved beading really loved it. They made tons of necklaces. Freddy always wondered what they did with them all. They only had one neck. Necklaces followed styles: one year, they were all glitter, and the next year, they would feature ropes of tiny beads, and the following spring, they would be more like collars.

  He had a few customers who kicked ass and took names all day, and they wanted jewelry to match: bold, stern, and striking. These women invariably shopped the first morning of the convention and marched around stroking beads, looking for a personality match.

  But no matter how intriguing the customer, the instant they left the booth, he forgot them because he had to fuss over the next set.

  Freddy had been at a low point at that Milwaukee Bead and Button. He was straddling two glass worlds: beads because he wanted to be an artist and pipes for smoking weed because he wanted an income. There weren’t enough hours to do both, he couldn’t hone the technical skill for both, and he had to choose.

  Cynthia, his girlfriend, who ought to have known all along that he had convention girlfriends, had expressed rage and hatred upon discovering that Freddy did not, in fact, save motel money by spending the night on the floor under his booth hidden by the table skirt but by sharing rooms with various bead ladies. Cynthia had wrecked enough of his studio back in Evanston that he had to earn serious money to replace it, and Freddy did not earn serious money.

  He had found himself too broke to pay the fees for this very important show. Shows were hideously expensive. It took twelve, fourteen hours a day to create enough beads for three shows a year, but after he packed everything and had to pay a bag fee plus leave it with TSA baggage handlers and pray the airline didn’t break all his product, shell out for plane fare, hotel, meals, and convention fees (which would make anybody homicidal—extra fees for electricity just so he could have a light bulb and the customer could actually see the beads?), he ended up with barely enough to buy a burrito.

  He joked about this on the Instagram site where he sold pipes and within hours had a message from Gary Leperov offering to cover his costs. All the Lep asked in return was that both their names were on record for the booth.

  Freddy was in awe of the Leper. They were the same age, and yet the Lep had accomplished a hundred times more. His marijuana rigs were collectible sculptures, astounding grotesque creations way beyond Freddy’s skill set. Since his real name was Leperov, he chose the Leper as his glass name. Leprosy being a disease that involved the loss of toes, nose, or fingers, the Leper was famous for pendants that were dead, sloughed-off digits, ridiculously expensive for your basic stoner. He sold them on a hemp string to the hippie crowd and on a silver chain to the rich dudes. A pendant on a chain was a weed world statement.

  The Leper’s signature was that each glass pipe had small mangled feet. It was brilliant work, and also horrifying. People paid tons of money for a Leper pipe.

  But Milwaukee was a bead show, not a pipe show, and there was no place for Gary Leperov’s work, brilliant or not. So why would the Lep want his name on Freddy’s booth?

  But Freddy had forgotten he even had an agreement with the guy—because forgetting stuff came naturally to Freddy—until the second afternoon, when traffic was slower and Jason was covering Freddy’s booth so he could grab a late lunch.

  Freddy bumped into the Lep in the hall outside the show.

  The Lep was wearing skateboard clothes: Toro cap on backward, a custom T-shirt from Sherbet, a glass pendant from Salt. It didn’t tell the bead ladies anything, but it told Freddy everything. The Leper was not showing off his own stuff, but he was showing off. Freddy, comfortable in jeans and his favorite lucky sweatshirt, probably looked homeless and maybe even desperate next to Gary Leperov. He suddenly worried that his bead ladies were buying from pity.

  The Lep nodded toward an up escalator and Freddy followed him to a level not currently in use, where they sat at a small table overlooking the chaos below. The Lep handed Freddy a paper bag that held an excellent lunch, way more delicious than Freddy could afford: a thick sourdough sandwich with hummus, ham, avocado, bacon, and tomatoes. He felt kind of important because the Leper had remembered Freddy’s taste in sandwiches from back at the Vegas show, which was all pipes and no beads.

  He wanted to eat slowly and enjoy every bite, but he couldn’t make Jason watch his booth for too long, so he scarfed the sandwich down.

  The Leper set a sheaf of papers on the table. “Sales receipts,” he said, smiling.

  “Huh?” said Freddy.

  “I filled everything out. You just sign ’em.”

  Freddy was not fond of official forms. “What are they for?”

  “Bead sales. You are some salesman, Freddy. You sold fifty thousand dollars’ worth of my beads.”

  Freddy stared blankly. He would be lucky to sell a tenth of that. Besides, the Leper had not given him any beads to sell.

  “This is a cash business, Freddy. You especially. You don’t take credit cards, debit cards, or checks. You point your customers to the ATM outside the hall. And who’s to say whether a bead sells for fifteen dollars or five hundred?”

  Freddy couldn’t chew, let alone swallow.

  “This,” said the Leper, adding a thick envelope to the pile of sales receipts, “is cash. You’ll take the cash to the sales tax booth, because everything you do here is nice and legal, so of course you’re paying sales tax on the beads you and your booth partner sold.”

  Freddy’s mind crawled slowly toward understanding. Gary Leperov would now have fifty thousand dollars to declare as regular old taxable income from beads.

  Sounded iffy, but the Lep had paid for Freddy’s booth and his lunch, and Freddy couldn’t see how this would hurt him or the world at large, and he couldn’t leave Jason hanging much longer, so he agreed to fake a few sales for Gary Leperov.

  Chapter Four

  Laura let Freddy, the wheelchair, and Cordelia Chase out at the entrance, circled the visitor lot, and parked at the far edge where she was least likely to end up with a ding from some poorly parked vehicle. She loved her car. It was too large for her and over-the-top expensive, but she had seen that fire-engine red across the dealer lot, sparkling with a metallic finish, and she fell in love. Car love was a new experience for Laura. Usually she just thought of a car as wheels that sheltered her from the weather and could also play music. She loved to park her glittery scarlet SRX in her drive and admire her excellent taste from every window.

  She walked across MMC’s pretty little campus and into the big lobby, whose high ceiling reminded her of the pipe-organ installation
in her own high-ceilinged room. She called Howard to be sure everything was going all right. Not that she really worried. If you couldn’t trust a pipe-organ installer, who could you trust?

  Then she signed in.

  Freddy never signed in. Or out, for that matter. He said it offended his anarchist nature. Laura thought Freddy was pretty conformist, actually, but she would never have insulted him with that observation.

  She caught up to him and bent over the wheelchair to tug his grandmother’s skirt down. Cordelia Chase was the only female resident who did not wear pants, usually mail-order super-cheap double-knit elastic-waist pants that these women would not have been caught dead in when they were themselves but that easily went over their pull-ups. Cordelia had a fine wardrobe, all of it far too big now. She was still a lovely woman, though painfully frail. Her smile had remained intact, which was unusual. Dementia and Alzheimer’s often collapsed normal facial expressions.

  The locked entrance was problematic, because from the inside, Mr. Griffin was politely knocking, hoping to be let out, and they couldn’t let that happen.

  Mr. Griffin had been a patent attorney and he was dressed for work, because he was always, every hour of every day at Memory Care, on his way to the office. His adult children took his button-down collar shirts to the cleaner for heavy starch and endlessly scrubbed the jacket lapels on which he spilled every meal and even bought him new ties to wear and listened over and over to his worries about where he might have parked his car.

  Mr. Griffin had not been allowed to drive for years.

  Laura held Cordelia’s wheelchair while Freddy unlocked the door and courteously took Mr. Griffin’s arm. “Hey, Mr. Griffin. How are you today?”

  “I’m very well, thank you,” said Mr. Griffin. “I wonder if you could help me find my car keys. I’ve set them down somewhere and I can’t locate them.”

  He and Freddy went down this path at least once a week. “Sure,” said Freddy. He walked Mr. Griffin away from the door and down the interior hallway toward one of the other wings. It would take Mr. Griffin quite a while to navigate back to the exit. “The parking lot is that way,” lied Freddy, patting the old man’s shoulder.

  “You’re very kind,” said Mr. Griffin gratefully.

  Laura pushed Cordelia’s wheelchair into the common room.

  Nancy, daughter of Betty, came most afternoons and sat with Betty through wheelchair exercise or bingo for the no longer numerically literate. Today Betty was singing the same four measures over and over, “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anybody else but me.” Betty could no longer match pitch. Sometimes Laura thought the absolute worst part of Alzheimer’s was that inborn abilities, like singing, came to a halt. It seemed so unfair that you could be musical from birth, but in your dotage, when you needed it most, it abandoned you.

  Of course there were so many absolute worst parts to Alzheimer’s that you couldn’t really number them.

  Big, broad-shouldered Philip, who usually swore steadily but quietly, was instead whacking his cane at the legs of passersby and shouting, “Get away from me! This is my desk!”

  Anna-Rose, wife of poor Ned, whose mind had dissolved at fifty, was telling a new aide her husband’s history. How Ned had once been an excellent tennis player, HR manager of a medium-sized corporation, and collector of antique tractors.

  Will, husband of Irene, was watching his wife circle the room. Many residents were room-circlers. The only words Irene could still speak were numbers. “Fifty-six,” she would tell Laura softly.

  Kenneth Yardley swayed on the threshold of his wife’s room. How many times had Laura watched Kenneth spoon pudding into his wife’s mouth as Maude shuddered with palsy and failed to swallow? Today, poor Kenneth couldn’t seem to go into Maude’s room and couldn’t seem to come out of it.

  Aunt Polly was standing in the middle of this, unaware of anything, including Laura.

  “It’s a madhouse today,” Laura said to Freddy.

  “I think it’s more like a séance. They’re all trying to get in touch with their old selves.”

  Laura was very taken by that. She studied everyone again, but all she learned—by sniffing—was that Aunt Polly needed fresh underwear.

  The first time Laura had to buy adult diapers for Polly, she drove to another town lest an acquaintance think she was buying those things for herself. Then she couldn’t even find them at the store and had to ask for help. “We don’t use the word ‘diaper,’” said the clerk severely. “We stock maximum-absorbency underwear, tranquility pads, and protective briefs. Now, does she actually need diapers? Because they are an entirely different product from pull-ups.”

  Aunt Polly had been a gym teacher who loved sports, coached at a high school for decades, and passionately followed several pro teams. But Polly could no longer hold a fork, let alone a field hockey stick. Once, Laura went to considerable effort to take her to a softball game, since Polly had coached the girls for decades, and all Polly said was “I’m cold,” so they went home.

  Laura waved for help. She and Grace coaxed Polly into her bathroom. Laura played word games on her phone while poor Grace did the dirty work. Finally back in the common room with Polly, she was surprised to find Freddy still there. An hour was pretty much tops for Freddy, and he’d already taken his grandmother for a spin. Perhaps he needed to talk. Laura sat on a sofa, positioned Aunt Polly’s wheelchair next to her, and patted the seat as an invitation to Freddy.

  “I don’t sit on anything upholstered,” said Freddy. “You never know who was there before you or what bodily liquid might have soaked in.” Freddy dragged over a metal and plastic chair from the dining room, gave it a careful inspection, and sat.

  Chapter Five

  Freddy had three older sisters, and people always asked why the sisters weren’t caring for Grandma.

  Sadly, the girls had good excuses.

  Emma had married a forest ranger and lived in wonderful remote places Freddy loved to visit. Emma herself never visited anybody, because people came to her, and this was a good thing, because she would have gone berserk at the sight of her brother making drug paraphernalia in their grandmother’s house. She and her husband had two kids Freddy adored, even after Emma told him to make something of himself so his niece and nephew could be proud of him.

  Jenny had married an Australian, and they had a place in Sydney and a place in the Outback they referred to as their ranch, although it was only twenty acres and Freddy wasn’t sure you could use the word “ranch” at the same time as the words “twenty acres.” Freddy yearned to visit but had never gotten himself organized to buy a plane ticket, not to mention that he could hardly afford to fly to Albuquerque, let alone Sydney.

  Kara was married to a UPS pilot based in South Dakota. Perhaps because her husband was always gone, Kara had many time-consuming and expensive hobbies. The big one was horses, and once you had a stable, you weren’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, the kids were busy in 4-H, showing rabbits and horses and even chickens with feathers like ribbons, and Freddy would stare at their photographs on Facebook and wonder how Kara, brought up in suburban Connecticut, had even thought of this life, let alone created it.

  With her daughters so far flung and too broke or too busy to show up in Connecticut, their mother had assigned her mother to Freddy. Every time Alice left the country, which was a lot, she’d call him. “Remember the deal, Freddy. If anything happens to me, you’re responsible for your grandmother.”

  “Not to worry, Mom,” he would say, paying no attention. Like, sure, whatever. Piece of cake.

  Freddy loved his mother, but she was tiring and he was relieved when she was out of the country. Well, even in the country, he lived a thousand miles away from her, but he could feel her out there, disapproving of his lifestyle. That was what she called it, lifestyle, because discussing Freddy’s actual profession was impossible for her, although you’d think a w
oman who went anywhere and did anything could say out loud what her son did for a living.

  Not that Freddy usually said out loud what he did for a living either.

  After Alice was killed in Peru, Freddy drove fourteen hours from Evanston every month to spend a long weekend with Grandma. He’d fix a screen door, repair the ancient dryer, have the old blacktop driveway oiled, take her for a grocery run, whatever. Sunday mornings, of course, he took her to church.

  The four Bell children had grown up going to church: Sunday school, youth group, helping in the nursery (his sisters), working dawn till dusk on Chore Saturday (Freddy). They had all lapsed. Freddy did not know what his sisters thought now about God or church except that the topics did not get featured on their Facebook profiles, which probably meant something.

  Grandma, however, had sung in church choir from early childhood: cherub choir, children’s choir, and adult choir since her teens. She had rehearsed Wednesday nights for three-quarters of a century. It scared Freddy to think of doing anything that long, never mind choir rehearsal, but he loved that Grandma did it. Somebody ought to have that kind of life.

  Sundays began to worry Freddy. He had low clothing standards and was comfortable in Salvation Army–store shirts he bought for twenty-five cents, but he had to make Grandma go back into her closet and choose something more suitable for church than a food-stained red T-shirt with a weird slogan. She was getting pretty loose around the edges, but Freddy shrugged, because he loved Grandma however nuts she was.

  Then the minister, George Burnworth, sat Freddy down and said, “Cordelia can’t live on her own anymore. She’s too old and confused. She can’t keep the house clean, and she can’t keep herself clean. She can’t prepare meals. She can’t remember to turn the stove off. She can’t remember how to pay her bills.”