Foul Play at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  Which left two people in the room—me and the woman whose name I couldn’t remember. Awkward situation number two, coming right up.

  She carried a light blue ski jacket that, though it carried the logo of an expensive manufacturer, looked as if it had seen a lot of winters. Her jeans were scuffed at the bottom hems, but that didn’t mean anything. I’d recently discovered that the worn look was considered cool, even for adults. So either she was trendy or she didn’t have a lot of money to spend on clothes. Or maybe she was like me and cared about clothes as much as she cared about the current price for a share of Berkshire Hathaway stock.

  “Hi, Beth,” she said. “I don’t know if you remember me. Summer Lang?” She lifted the ends of her sentences, making everything she said sound like a question.

  “Hello, Summer.” I slid a glance at my watch. “What can I do for you?” If I knew my best friend, right now Marina would be shooting baskets with the kids. She was the worst basketball player ever, but that didn’t stop her from having a good time. I could just hear her: “She shoots! She misses for the three hundred and thirty-seventh time!”

  Since I was the second worst basketball player in the world, and since I didn’t find nearly as much fun as Marina did in playing horribly, it didn’t tweak my mom guilt too much to let them play on without me.

  Summer dropped a glove, picked it up, then dropped it again. “I just wanted to say how much I admire you for standing up to Claudia like that. That took real courage.”

  I blinked. “Courage?” Laughter burbled up inside me, but the earnest look on her face made me lock it inside. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew how much I wanted to let Claudia have the vote.”

  Summer dropped another glove. “If you wanted to back down but didn’t, that makes you even braver.”

  I didn’t agree, but she was entitled to her opinion. “Well, thanks.”

  We stood there in silence, and I came to the sudden realization that we were both feeling the same thing. Awkward.

  “So,” I said, “it seems as if we’re having a dance. Do you have much left to do?”

  “Oh, gosh, yes. I’m in charge of food. Lots of food to buy and bake. Which reminds me . . .” She plopped her purse on the table and pulled out a multifolded piece of paper and a pen. “Muffin papers,” she said, writing. “Can’t forget. Sorry, but I have to make a list if there are four things we need at the grocery store.”

  “It’s three for me.” I laughed. “Do you title your lists?”

  In answer, she handed me her sheet of paper. At the top in block letters she’d written “PTA Dance Grocery List.”

  I dug into the diaper bag and showed her a sheet of yellow paper I’d torn off the legal pad at work. Its title: “Tentative Thanksgiving Menu.”

  “Nice title,” Summer said. “Wonder what else we have in common?”

  I felt the stirrings of friendship. “How do you feel about politics?”

  She shrugged. “Ignore them as much as I can. Coffee or tea?”

  “Tea, except for an occasional cup of decaf with dessert.”

  She nodded. “I love movies with intermissions.”

  “Books with illustrations.”

  “Swing dancing.”

  I held out my hand and she shook it firmly. “Speaking of dancing,” I said, “does the committee need any help?”

  She fished into her purse for another piece of paper. “Let me look at the master list.” She scanned the page. “As long as everyone does what they’ve promised to do, we’re all set.” The paper went back into her purse. “Is this dance really the best moneymaker the PTA has?”

  “Yup. Something about dancing with their little girls gets the dads to fork over wads of cash.” I smiled. “If the moms were around to keep the wallets in the pockets, we’d make a lot less money, but it usually turns into a contest.”

  Her eyebrows drew close together. “What do you mean?”

  “They wind up seeing who can hand over the biggest cash donation.”

  “Huh. Must be a guy thing. What’s the next best fund-raiser?”

  “Let me think. We try to hold an event every month of the school year.” I ticked off the months on my fingers. “September is the Relay for Tarver. October is the Spook House. November is this dance. February is the mother-son dance. March is the carnival. April is the Spring Fling and May is the Fun Run.

  “Plus,” I went on, “we’re going to work on the senior story project this spring and present it in June.” At least that was my general plan. One of these days I had to get going on a real schedule. Names. Dates. All that. But there’d be plenty of time after Christmas. Lots of time.

  “How about January?” Summer asked.

  “Um . . .” Did we have a January event? For me that month was a blur of postholiday recovery and store inventory. “I don’t think there is anything.”

  “Do we want to do anything?”

  I looked at her. The question was astute. Summer might be young, but she knew her way around a PTA. “We always want to do more projects,” I said, “and projects cost money. Do you have something in mind?”

  She reached into her bag and pulled out another piece of paper. “Since you mentioned it, yes.”

  Where the other papers had been white, this one was pink. I wondered if she had a color-coded system for her lists, but decided not to ask. Envy wasn’t an attractive trait, and list envy was even worse. I plucked the paper from her hand and read the loopy handwriting.

  “Summer,” I said, “this will have to be run by the board, but I think you have a winner.”

  Marina and the kids and I walked the three blocks to her house. The kids, as usual, were running half a block ahead. A couple of weeks ago, during the dedication of the new Agnes Mephisto Memorial Ice Arena, we’d enjoyed unseasonable warmth. Blue skies, calm winds, light jackets and no gloves. Those days were long gone. Now the wind whistled through the naked trees, rattling the branches against each other in a rhythm that sounded almost like speech.

  I wondered what trees would say to each other. Did they discuss us humans? Did they wish they had our freedom of movement, or did they pity us? “Poor humans,” said the trees. “They have such a narrow range of comfort.”

  “What’s so funny?” Marina asked. Even in the sporadic light cast by streetlights and porch lights, she’d seen my smile.

  “Oh, nothing.” Best friend she might be, but she’d hoot at my whimsical thoughts. She opened her mouth, undoubtedly to say that no woman could truly be thinking of nothing, so I jumped ahead of her. “I fired Marcia.”

  “You . . . what?” She stuck her mittened index finger into her ear and twisted it around. “Did I hear you correctly? Tell me true, dear heart.”

  Marina had been on a Shakespeare kick lately. The Southern belle of last year was sooo twelve months ago. I’d spent half a morning dreaming up what she might do next and had come up with possibilities too horrible to consider. Fractured and inaccurate Shakespeare was preferable by far to affecting fake street slang. Or speaking in tongues.

  “You heard me the first time,” I said. There were reasons I hadn’t told Marina yet, and most of them had to do with the very real possibility of hearing “I told you so.”

  “Forsooth, verily.”

  “That’s redundant.”

  “If you hadn’t given me such good news, I’d call you a nitpicker, but today I won’t.” She took a couple of quick steps to get ahead, then turned around to face me. Walking backward, she said, “Did you really get rid of that leech on the store’s profits? That personality-challenged clerk who couldn’t sell a Harry Potter book to a kid with a lightning bolt tattooed on his forehead? That incompetent present wrapper? That”—she groped for a suitable epithet—“that giggler?”

  “She didn’t want to work the week of Thanksgiving.”

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk.” Marina’s smile was wide.

  “Or the week of Christmas. Or the week after.”

  “Away, you moldy rogue, away!” M
arina made sweeping motions with her hands.

  “Since I’m a mother, she thought I’d understand that she wants to spend a lot of time with her grandson.”

  “Pish!”

  “That’s not Shakespeare.” I stopped walking. “And quit going backward or you’re going to trip and land on your keister.”

  She patted the body part in question with both hands, but slowed to a halt. “Lots of cushion. And I never said ‘pish’ was Shakespeare.”

  “Then you need to wave a flag when you’re out of the William S. zone.”

  “Where are you going to find another clerk?”

  “Aye, there’s the rub.”

  Marina clapped her mittens together. “Beth’s playing? Hooray!”

  I winced. “It was an accident.”

  “You are no fun. But I bet that has much to do with the unlamented but certainly painful departure of your former employee. Tell me when I’m wrong.” She threaded her arm through mine and we started walking again. Ahead, the kids had jumped into the gutter and were scuffing through the last leaves of the season. “Your hands were shaking. You had to take deep breaths. Your mouth was dry.” She patted my arm. “Do I have the symptoms right so far?”

  “Three for three. Am I going to live, Doctor?”

  “Only if you promise not to torture yourself for firing her. This was a long time coming, and the only thing you should regret is not doing it sooner.”

  “But—”

  “Promise.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Good.” She did the arm pat thing again. “Luckily, I have a surefire guaranteed cure.”

  “I don’t have time for a pedicure.”

  “Now, now. Let the doctor finish.”

  I looked at her. For years Marina’s guaranteed solution to anything had been a pedicure. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That’s a good patient. Dr. Marina knows best.”

  “What about the time she prescribed dinner at that run-down restaurant because it would be good for me to see the seamy side of life, and I got food poisoning?”

  “You ended up losing a few pounds, as I recall. Would you like to thank me now or later?”

  “I still can’t eat hamburgers.” The very thought made my stomach heave.

  “Thanking me later will be fine.” She hopped a step to make our footsteps match. “The current situation requires a serious level of doctoring. Please pay attention.”

  This game had gone far enough. Withdrawing my arm from hers, I stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “Uh-oh,” Marina said. “I went a little too far, didn’t I?”

  “About twenty feet ago.”

  “Oh, dear.” Her face drooped into lines of sorrow. “It’s the bane of my existence. The Devoted Husband says that’s why the older offspring never visit. That they’re afraid of their mother’s games.”

  “The kids never visit because one of them goes to college in Boston, one is stationed in Germany, and the other is in Africa with the Peace Corps.”

  “Why, that’s right, isn’t it? I should have known the DH was teasing.”

  “You do, however, tend to get carried away. It’s irritating that I always have to be the responsible one.”

  “I know.” She hung her head. “I promise never to do it again.”

  While on the surface it sounded like a great idea, on the whole the idea was a chilling one. No spur-of-the-moment Marina excursions? No more coin-flip trips? Some of my favorite adventures had played out from the flip of a coin. We’d pack the kids into the car and, whenever we came to an intersection where we were required to stop, someone would flip a coin. Tails, we’d go left, heads, we’d go right. If the coin was lost on the floor or in the upholstery, we’d go straight. Jenna still talked about the “best root beer float ever” we found on a coin-flip trip. A year later we tried to find it again, but couldn’t. Marina’s theory was that things appeared magically for a coin-flip trip and faded away like Brigadoon when we left the premises, and I almost believed her.

  “If you keep a promise like that,” I said, “you’ll wither away to mere normalcy, and no one wants that.”

  “Not even Zach?” She indicated her youngest son, who was showing inclinations that he might be taking after his father, a civil engineer. I was reminded of the old joke: At a party, how do you tell the difference between the introverted engineer and the extroverted engineer ? The extroverted one stares at your shoes instead of his own.

  “Zach loves cooking night,” I pointed out.

  Marina brightened. “He does, doesn’t he?” She’d begun cooking nights last winter. We gathered together leftover ingredients from both of our refrigerators and, with the kids’ help, brewed up a meal. Some dinners were hits, and once we’d had to order out pizza when not even iron-stomach Jenna could eat the unappetizing mix of corned beef, eggs, hot dogs, and chicken noodle soup, but overall, cooking night was a great success.

  “Yes, he does,” I said. “And once you tell me what you have planned for me, I’ll try and be more spontaneous myself.”

  “Promise?”

  I tried not to think about what I might be getting myself into. Though as I almost always went along with Marina’s ideas after short bouts of dragging my heels, I didn’t see that I was taking much of a risk. “Promise.”

  “Hot diggity!” Marina jumped into a little dance, humming what might have been an Irish sea chantey. “Then I will relent and taunt you no longer. You will be glad to know that I have solved all of your problems.”

  “It’s about time someone perfected cold fusion.”

  “That’s next week. This week I found you . . .” She spun around. Then, with a stomp of a foot, arms outstretched, she presented her announcement. “Ta-dahh! I found you the perfect bookstore clerk.”

  “You did . . . what?”

  “You heard me. She’s my new neighbor and she’ll be perfect for the job.” Marina smiled widely, sure that her offering was the best present I’d ever received.

  “I’ll find my own employees, thank you.”

  “Now, don’t go all annoyed at me,” Marina said. “What’s this?” She stretched her arms high and stood on her tiptoes.

  “If you’re trying to call a cab, we’re only half a block from your house.”

  “No, silly. It’s me, being high-handed. Get it? High-handed ? Come on, laugh. You know you want to.”

  I let my laughter rise up and out and into the night air. Marina knew nothing about clerking and, in spite of the fact that she’d raised three and a half children, knew very little about children’s books. She had a tendency to think her friends were smart, capable, and good-looking, and she had the best intentions in the world. Who could ask for a better friend?

  Chapter 5

  The following Wednesday was the opening of firearm deer season in Wisconsin. It was also the day the Children’s Bookshelf put out Christmas books. The previous owner had started the custom and I, after a private war with myself over stocking Christmas items before Thanksgiving, had continued the tradition. Thousands of men drove north to hunt, and thousands of “hunters’ widows” stayed behind to get started on their Christmas shopping. Who was I to deprive these poor women of the chance to cross a few items off their lengthy lists?

  In the past, Marcia had helped customers while Lois and I rearranged the store. Today it was just Lois and me. Sara was coming at noon, but that was hours from now.

  “How in the heck are we going to get this all done?” Lois, dressed in her Deer Day costume of Day-Glo orange turtleneck, neon green pants, and pink hair band, stood in the doorway to the back storeroom. She pursed her lips as she surveyed the towering stacks. The boxes had been opened and inventoried as they arrived at the store, but we hadn’t had time to sort them into categories. “And I can’t believe you ordered this many books. Last year we were selling holiday books at half price the week before Christmas just to get rid of them.” She slid me a glance. “Or . . . did you order these?”

&
nbsp; I sighed. “No. I let Marcia. She asked and asked. I thought maybe . . .”

  Lois gave an eloquent sniff.

  “We’ll do it in bits and pieces,” I said. “If we don’t get it all done today, the world’s not going to end.”

  Lois shook her head, clearly not convinced. “We always have these books out by two o’clock.”

  We looked at each other. I’m sure the anxiety I saw in her face was mirrored in my own. If we didn’t have the books out by two, we’d be facing the combined wrath of Mrs. Tolliver and Auntie May.

  Mrs. Tolliver was the blue-haired matriarch of one of the founding families of Rynwood. As far as she was concerned, her wishes were law, and one of her wishes was to buy a Christmas book for each of her grandchildren for a Thanksgiving present. “The gift of a book about Christmas,” she’d said more than once, “is pointless after the holiday has arrived.”

  Auntie May was May Werner. The entire town of Rynwood called her “Aunt,” and the entire town was afraid of the tiny ninety-one-year-old woman. While her memory of what happened last week might be fuzzy, she could recall every embarrassing incident in every person’s life, even if she hadn’t been present at the time. She had an uncanny memory for scandal and cackled with delight when someone was caught in a lie.

  She was a resident of Sunny Rest Assisted Living, two blocks away, and when the mood struck, neither snow nor rain nor heat of summer would keep Auntie May from getting some unlucky nurse’s aide to push her bright purple wheelchair downtown.

  Auntie May liked to see the Christmas books in the store before anyone else bought a single one. Two years ago, I’d made the mistake of letting Mrs. Tolliver choose a book before Auntie May had had her fill of gazing at the display. The mental wounds I’d received from the resulting scolding had healed, but I wasn’t sure of the thickness of the scar tissue.

  I looked at the pile of books, at Lois, back at the pile of books. There was no possible way we were going to get it all done by two o’clock. I closed my eyes and briefly considered fleeing the country. No, that wouldn’t work; I didn’t have passports for the kids. “All we can do is try our best,” I said. “No one can expect more.”