by Elise Sax
“Maybe it’s the baby’s bladder. That would make two,” Fred suggested. “Your bladder and its bladder, you know.”
“It doesn’t work that way, Fred. I have one bladder. One.”
“I knew a woman with two bladders,” he continued, not letting go of his theory for her robust pee-pee activity. “The doctor offered to take one out, but she kept both of them.”
“I have one bladder,” she insisted, her pregnant voice raspy and full of rage.
“But I guess with two bladders maybe you wouldn’t have to pee as much because you could hold twice as much. I don’t know how it works with two bladders.”
There was a long pause before Bridget spoke, again. “Yep, I have to pee, again. Come on.”
I heard the gate open and close. Thank goodness for Bridget’s bladder. It was the perfect diversion. As soon as they left, Lucy and I got back to it, feverishly ripping open boxes because we didn’t have a lot of time before Fred would return and we would be found out.
Lucy opened a box, looked inside for a second and slammed it shut. “Darlin’, I found it,” she said and touched my arm.
I stumbled backward a step and clutched at my chest. My heart was beating like the Marines Band, and it felt like it was going to explode. “Wait,” I said. “Wait. Wait. Wait.”
“You want me to leave so that you can look at it alone?” Lucy asked.
“Yes. No. Yes. No.” I took a deep breath and tried, again. “Yes. No. Yes. No.”
“Gladie, I think you’re broken. Should I slap you to jumpstart your brain?”
I probably needed to be slapped. Lucy was right. I was broken. But I didn’t want to be slapped. Faced with a box that represented my father’s death, I couldn’t move myself to look inside. His life was one thing, but his death was something different altogether.
“You want me to do it?” Lucy asked me, as if she was reading my mind.
“Yes. No. Yes. No.”
“I’m good at slapping. Let me slap you.”
“No. I’m going to do it.” As much as I didn’t want to examine my father’s death, I didn’t want someone else to be the first to look into it. I wasn’t the most private person in the world, but where my father was concerned, I was Fort Knox.
I took the box from Lucy and sat down on the floor. She sat across from me, and I put the box down between us. I stared at the lid.
“Remember why you’re doing this,” Lucy said. “Your father might still be alive. So this might not be his box. It might be someone else’s box.”
We locked eyes. I hadn’t thought about that, about who the someone else could be. And if my father faked his death, then where did he get this someone else who died instead of him? I squirmed a little. “Maybe it’s not such a good idea to be poking my nose in,” I said.
“You may be right, darlin’, but when has that ever stopped you before?”
“This might get complicated. Messy.”
“Again, when has that ever stopped you before?”
She had a point. No matter how messy or complicated, nothing was going to stop me from snooping in the box and getting to the bottom of my father’s death. Or his not death.
I opened the box.
The sound of the fence’s gate opening broke through the silence, and I heard the familiar clack-clack of expensive Italian men’s shoes on the cement floor. Uh oh.
“Quick,” I whispered to Lucy. “I need a plausible excuse about why I’m sitting on the floor in the records room with my father’s box.”
“Insanity,” she whispered back. “Drugs. Alien abduction. Leprosy.”
“I like the alien abduction one. You think it’ll work?”
“No. You might have luck with leprosy, though.”
“Don’t go in there,” I heard Bridget shout. Best friends are the best. She was doing everything in her power to stop me from being found out.
“What’s going on, Bridget?”
There it was, the voice that went with expensive Italian men’s shoes. Spencer. The Chief of Police. My fiancé.
“I’m bearing life. I’m the earth goddess. I am woman.”
“What does that have to do with the records room?” he asked her.
“This is going to be bad,” Lucy whispered to me. “You should have let me bring in the shovel. I could have beaned him in the head and he wouldn’t have been the wiser.”
“Damnit, Lucy. Why didn’t I let you bring in the shovel?”
“I have a baby punching my bladder,” I heard Bridget tell Spencer. Her voice was getting closer, and so were Spencer’s Italian shoes. “Stop. Don’t go any further. Help! Police brutality! Attica!”
“Bridget, I haven’t touched you. Are you okay?”
“Rodney King! Rodney King!” she shouted.
“That’s our cue,” I whispered to Lucy. I grabbed the box, and we got up, tip-toeing as quietly as we could, as far away from Spencer as we could get.
It wasn’t far.
“You know, this isn’t working, Bridget. I could carry you for ten miles and not work up a sweat,” I heard Spencer tell Bridget as they came closer.
“You could?” she asked him, obviously impressed.
“Without breathing hard,” he said.
Then, we saw them. And they saw us. Bridget was holding onto Spencer and digging her feet into the floor, so that he was forced to drag her as he walked, but like he said, it wasn’t hard for him. Spencer blinked and stopped in his tracks when he saw me, and his eyes went from me to the box I was holding and back again.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said.
“It looks like you’re stealing official records.”
“Not stealing,” Lucy said. “Not exactly stealing.”
“I just… we just… you see… oh, damn it,” I mumbled and then rocked back on my heels and ran in the opposite direction.
“Run, Gladie, run!” Bridget shouted.
“Are you kidding me?” Spencer griped and ran after me.
Of course, he was going to catch me sooner or later. I mean, we lived together, so it was inevitable. But I couldn’t stop running.
He caught me in five seconds. He took me down like a linebacker, and my father’s box flew out of my hands, the contents sailing through the air and landing here and there, scattered over the floor. Spencer blocked my fall, protecting my body as we landed. Cradling the back of my head with his big right hand, he looked into my eyes. I read confusion and tenderness in them. My Spencer was all things. Why did I run from him?
“Gladys Burger, what the fuck are you doing?” he demanded and let me drop.
“Don’t call me Gladys.”
He stood and smoothed out his suit and ran his fingers through his hair. “One minute we’re cake tasting, and the next you’re stealing official documents. Are you snooping again, Gladys?”
I sat up and tried to calm myself down. He knew that I hated to be called Gladys. “I’m not snooping. I’m not stealing. That box is mine. Sort of.”
“Tell him about your daddy,” Lucy said.
I swallowed. “I found something in the attic when I was organizing. I think my father faked his death.”
I told him about the journal entry and my plan to test his DNA. Spencer helped me up and pulled me in close. “Why didn’t you tell me, Pinky? I would have helped you.”
“But my priorities are supposed to be with the house and the wedding,” I said, my voice cracking.
Spencer tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear and glided his thumb over my bottom lip. “Oh, Pinky. Family comes first, especially this family. You should have come to me.”
“But the bamboo floors. And the couch.”
“Wow, I’ve been a royal jackass, haven’t I?” He leaned forward and rested his forehead against mine. “I just wanted the right couch to lay you down on and make love to you.”
“Oh,” I breathed, my face getting hot.
“Let me handle this for you.”
“Can you do it fast?”
<
br /> “As fast as humanly possible,” he said. “I can’t believe you thought I wouldn’t help you. It’s not like you’re chasing murderers and putting your life in jeopardy.”
“No, it’s not like that,” I said and a shiver went up my spine. In an instant, a vision flashed before me of my father on his motorcycle, driving around a bend. A figure in shadow stepped forward.
Bridget moaned, and my vision vanished. “This was beautiful,” she gushed. “I love to see true respect between the sexes who are in a relationship instead of the usual patriarchal, abusive dominance baloney that… that… ohhh…”
“What happened?” Lucy asked. “Her diatribe was cut off mid-sentence. That’s never happened to her before.”
Bridget clutched at her crotch. I had seen this before. Bridget moaned, again.
“Something’s happening,” she said. “Something… ahhh… ohhh… ow!”
“What’s happening? What’s happening?” Spencer demanded, his voice an octave higher than normal. Sweat had popped out on his upper lip, and he looked around him, as if he was searching for an escape route.
“The miracle of birth, I expect,” Lucy said.
“Here? Now?” Spencer asked.
Bridget crouched down. “He’s coming! He’s coming! It’s happening!”
CHAPTER 5
One day when I was a little girl, my mother told me that I had the gift for love and that I would be a matchmaker just like she was. Up until then I wanted to be an ice-skating veterinarian, but the moment the words came out of her mouth, I knew she was telling the truth. In fact, as she spoke, I had a vision that Uncle Herbert would be very happy with Tilly, who sold tamales door-to-door. Two days later, I asked Tilly to come inside, and she fed Uncle Herbert a tamale, and they were married for fifty years. Sometimes it happens like that, dolly. You just know and even though you had your heart set on doing a double-axel at night after a day of neutering dogs, you can try to kibbitz around, but in the end, you can’t resist the calling. This is called following your truth, even if it’s just a vision in your head that no one else can see.
Lesson 21, Matchmaking advice from your
Grandma Zelda
He wasn’t coming. It wasn’t happening.
Again.
“Alexa, music off,” Dr. Sara ordered in exam room one.
“Was it farting labor, again?” Bridget asked, dejected.
“Braxton Hicks,” Dr. Sara explained. “That’s good. Your body is practicing to give birth to your son.” She smiled and clanged mini-cymbals over Bridget’s baby. “There you go. You’re one with the universe. I think the baby will be calm now until it’s time.”
She kept smiling, but her body was tense, and her left eyebrow was spasming. She had false labor PTSD. I recognized it. Bridget wasn’t doing too well, either. When Dr. Sara left the room, Bridget broke down in tears.
“She hates me,” Bridget blubbered.
I petted her head. “No she doesn’t. Nobody could hate you, Bridget.”
“She hates me because my damned uterus won’t work right. This baby is wedged in me and refuses to come out.”
“He’ll come out when it’s time,” I said, trying to make her feel better.
Bridget grabbed a handful of my shirt and pulled me down to her. “Liar,” she growled. “He’s never coming out. Never. I’ll be the first woman to be pregnant for six solid years. He’ll get so big that he’ll explode my belly, like in Alien. Alien, Gladie. My son is the Alien. That’s not good, you know, Gladie. I might not have a lot of experience with babies, but I know enough to know that Alien babies are not the best kind of babies.”
I stared at her belly, half-expecting an alien to burst from it. “I don’t think you have an alien in there,” I said, but I didn’t sound totally convinced.
“I’ll tell you this, Gladie. No more false labor for me. I don’t care how much agony I’m in, I’m not calling Dr. Sara until my baby’s head is halfway out of my vaginal canal. Okay?”
I didn’t answer. I was visualizing a baby’s head in her vaginal canal and thinking that that would hurt like a bitch and that I wouldn’t want to be there when it happened.
With no baby on the way, Bridget and I decided to meet Lucy for lunch at Saladz. Spencer had already swabbed my cheek on our way out of the police station so that he could compare my DNA with the DNA found at the scene of my father’s accident. Since my grandmother was handling my wedding, I found myself with nothing to do except be a lady who lunched. But I couldn’t help but feel that my work wasn’t done where my father was concerned and that I had stirred up something big.
“Gladie, what’s wrong with your face?” Bridget asked me, as she ate her last bite of French toast and sauerkraut.
“What do you mean?” I asked, touching my face.
“I know that face,” Lucy said, pointing her perfectly manicured finger at me. “It’s the whodunit face. It’s the Miss Marple face. It’s the… what happened? Where did that face come from? Did I miss something?”
“No! No,” I said, turning my traitorous face away from her. “It’s just my father.”
“Oh, that must be it,” Lucy said. She was on her second margarita, and her speech was slightly slurred. Bridget’s caffeine buzz was finally dying down, and she was yawning.
I took my friends home, but I wasn’t ready to return to my grandmother’s house just yet. Since we didn’t have a movie theater, I went back to Tea Time. This time, business was booming, but Ruth was in a terrible mood. Maybe because she was on her knees, under a table.
I crouched down. “Hey, there, Ruth. Can I get a latte?”
She pointed a metal tool at me. “Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“I thought you might be taking a break.”
“I’m scraping bubble gum off the undersides of my tables, like the whole town is doing.”
“Ruth, the whole town isn’t scraping gum off your tables.”
She crawled out from under the table and lifted her hand up. “Help me, dammit. My knees haven’t seen cartilage in fifty years.”
I pulled her up, and her knees cracked loudly. “You want me to call a doctor?”
“Why?” she demanded. “I’m not afraid of a little bone crunching. Didn’t I already give you a latte today?”
“It’s a two-latte day, today, Ruth.”
She limped toward the bar. “You’d be a lot better off if you drank some tea, Gladie. Coffee is barbaric.”
“You’re so right,” I said. “I’ll drink tea at some point. Not today, though.”
Strong arms wrapped around me, and I felt Spencer’s body up against my back. “Came to talk to you,” he whispered in my ear.
I turned around in his arms. “How did you know I was here?”
“I may have trackers on your car and your phone.”
“That’s a violation of privacy.”
“No, that’s called an ounce of prevention.”
“You’re here,” I said, realizing. “That means you have the DNA results?”
“DNA tests take longer than two hours, Pinky. But I looked through the evidence box, and this is going to be hard to hear.”
“Tell me,” I breathed and clenched my fists to prepare myself for the worst. I didn’t know what the worst could be. That my father faked his death? That my father didn’t fake his death?
“I looked at the incident photos,” Spencer explained. “They’re your father. They match up with the photos of him in Zelda’s house.”
“But they said his injuries were too great for us to identify his body.” My voice cracked, and I willed myself not to give into the emotion of losing a father that I had already lost years before.
“He was pretty beat up, obviously, and I figure they were trying to spare your mother and grandmother. But it’s him. Would you like to see the photos? I’ll give you free access to the evidence box whenever you want.”
“You will?” I asked, surprised. Spencer had a long history of blocking me where dead people we
re concerned.
“I told you. This is family. It’s not like you’re bloodhounding, again.”
“Right,” I said, looking up at the ceiling.
Ruth slapped my latte cup on the bar. “Hey, cop, what are you doing about these bubble gum bandits?” she growled at Spencer. “I’m scraping gum off every surface. They sneak in here and stick it wherever they can.”
Spencer put his serious cop face on. “We’re working on it, Ruth. They outnumber us.”
“They’re going after DICK, which I wholeheartedly approve,” she said. “But I have nothing to do with DICK. I don’t even let DICK within my walls!”
Spencer smirked and slapped his hand over his mouth to cover it up. “Yes, Ruth. We’re implementing a curfew for minors, starting tonight. That should help.”
Ruth harrumphed loudly and scowled at Spencer. His phone rang, and he answered. “What do you mean they took the batteries out of the school buses?” he barked into the phone. “Gotta go,” he told me. “Crazy ass town.”
He kissed me and left Tea Time.
“The cop’s a good catch,” Ruth told me when Spencer was gone. “But he’s crap where bubble gum’s concerned. You okay? Your face is doing something weird.”
“Again?”
“Come with me.”
“Where?”
“Follow me. Come on. I won’t bite you.”
“Put that in writing.”
She ignored me, and I followed her into the back of the shop and up the back stairs. “Is this where you live? You’re letting me into your home? Are you feeling okay? Should I call a doctor? What am I supposed to do for a stroke? Aspirin? CPR? Oh, God, Ruth, please don’t tell me that I have to do mouth-to-mouth on you.”
She stopped at a door and shot me a death stare. “Very funny, Gladie. I’m letting you in, but don’t touch anything. You touch something, I cut your hands off. You understand?”
I nodded. Ruth had been slightly less aggressive in recent months, but I wouldn’t have put it past her to cut my hands off. She was hardcore.
“Whoa. This is nice,” I said, walking into her apartment.
“Don’t touch anything.”
“These are antiques, right?”