by Elise Sax
“Don’t touch them.”
“Are they French?”
“American, Gladie. Don’t you know anything? Western American. Your heritage. Your people came here during the gold rush, same as mine.”
“Really?” I asked her. “Our families have known each other for over one hundred years?”
“Sit over there.” Ruth pointed to a small couch, which looked like it had come out of a John Wayne movie.
“I can’t sit on it without touching it.”
“Shut up and sit down.”
“Okay, just warning you that if I sit down, I’ll be touching it.”
Ruth put her hands on her hips and scrunched up her face. “Sit down, or I’m getting my Louisville Slugger.”
I put my hands up in surrender. “Just messing with you, Ruth. I have to have some fun.”
I sat down, and Ruth sat next to me. “I heard what Spencer said to you. You know, about your father. I’ve decided to tell you about that day.”
I stopped breathing. I was shocked to my core. I never expected her to talk about my father’s accident.
“I’ve never spoken about it. Never.” She adjusted her position on the couch, as if she couldn’t get comfortable. I couldn’t get comfortable, either. I was hanging on her every word, and I had turned toward her like I was squeezing orange juice out of my ass.
“Your father was a no account, you know that, right?” Ruth continued. “But I loved him like he was my own son.” She took a linen handkerchief out of her trouser pocket and wiped her eyes. “I’m not crying. I just have something in my eye.”
“Me, too,” I said, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand.
“There was just something about that boy, and I knew him since he was in diapers, you know. Knew him before that, when he was in your Grandma’s belly like Bridget’s baby is now. He used to give me lip. When he was five, he would walk to my shop by himself, and I would give him Earl Grey with a big chunk of rock sugar. When he was eleven, he stole my entire stock of scones and sold them in town, taking the profits to buy himself a stack of comic books and enough Hershey bars to rot out his teeth. When I finally caught up to him after that, I made him sweep my store every morning for three months. That showed him because he hated hard work more than anything, but he did it, and he would charm the socks off me every day that he did. He was like that, you know. Precocious. Rebellious. He was his own drummer, and he learned everything the hard way. When he decided to become a poet, well, what else would he choose to be? Sometimes he would visit me late at night and read to me what he was working on. He was made of magic, that Jonathan Burger. Pure magic.”
“But his magic didn’t protect him,” I said.
“The day his motorcycle went kablooey, and Jonathan died, the old Chief of Police called me to the scene. He didn’t want to upset Zelda, you see. And even back then your mother wasn’t the most stable woman on the planet. So, I went to identify your father. The whole way there I made deals with the universe that it wouldn’t be him. But it was. His bike was a tangled mess of metal, and he was a tangled mess of a man. Bloody. Bruised. But it was him.”
I sucked in air. “Yes. That’s what Spencer said.”
“You had your doubts? That’s why you had him look into it?”
How much should I tell her? I didn’t know.
“I’ll tell you this,” Ruth continued without waiting for me to answer. “I never liked those friends of his, and the old Chief never questioned any of them.”
“Which friends?” I asked, sitting up straight.
“They were all attached at the hip. They all wanted to be intellectual writers of one type or another. I see a couple of them from time to time. Roman Strand was one of them.”
“The Roman Strand? The writer?” I wasn’t a big reader, but you had to live under a rock not to have heard of Roman Strand. He had written a blockbuster that had won every literary award on the planet.
“That’s the one. Rich as Roosevelt. Something fishy about that one. Never looks me in the eye. The rest of them are fishy, too. The only reason I’m telling you is that you have a gift for fishy, and maybe it’s time to stick your nose in.”
I thought back to my father’s notes about faking his death. Why had he written them? Was that his plan, but he died before he could make it happen? And what did his friends have to do with it? “What do you mean they’re fishy?”
“Your father built his own motorcycle. He started riding it when his feet could reach the pedals. The day he was killed, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the sun was shining overhead, and there wasn’t another car on the road. Something happened that wasn’t kosher. Fishy.”
The hair on my arms stood on end, and a shiver went up my spine. “What else can you tell me about his friends?”
“Nothing. But there’s one person who was there for all of it. You need to start with her.”
“With who?”
My stomach was filled with lunch and a large latte, but I was craving chocolate in a big way. Either that or a lobotomy to excise the advice that Ruth had given me. I didn’t want to go the route she suggested, but now that I had opened Pandora’s box, I had to get down to the nitty-gritty fishiness of my father’s life and death.
After I finished speaking with Ruth, I drove home. I bypassed Grandma as quickly as I could to race upstairs to the attic. My grandmother seemed slightly suspicious, but the wedding and all things love were keeping her distracted enough so that she didn’t ask any questions.
Once I was in the attic, I looked at my father’s journal again.
Motorcycle accident.
Injuries too great to identify the body.
Man runs away to a new life, leaving his family behind.
There it was in black and white. I hadn’t read it wrong the first time. But with a clearer head, I could now continue reading. Below, my father had scribbled another note in his cat scratch, which was almost impossible to make out. Three words.
Not gonna happen.
Not gonna happen. Not gonna happen? Why did he write it if it wasn’t gonna happen? Was he trying to convince himself not to do it?
But he didn’t do it. He didn’t fake his death. He did die in the motorcycle accident.
My arms sprouted goosebumps. The notes were his but the words weren’t. He was noting what someone said to him. A threat. He had been threatened, and he noted it down. He noted down a threat, and then he died.
Perhaps my father’s accident wasn’t an accident.
Who had threatened him? I had no clue. I didn’t know anything about his life or his friends. Damn it. I was going to have to follow Ruth’s advice and ask you-know-who.
There was a loud noise outside, and I looked out the window to see if Spencer’s house—I mean our house—was okay. Two teenagers ran down the street, each holding what I would have bet money were school bus batteries. In the distance, I heard a police siren. Marked car, not like Spencer’s work car. One of the kids turned onto a yard and ducked behind the house. The other kid kept running down our street. I recognized him. It was the teenager who had tricked me into helping him steal bubble gum.
I should have been angry at him, but something in me connected to his civil disobedience. And stealing gum and school bus batteries was funny.
“Up here!” I shouted. He looked up, and I waved. “I’ll meet you at the door!”
I jogged downstairs and met him at the door, pulling him into the house right before the police car raced by. “Thanks,” he said, breathlessly. “Do I know you?”
“I’m Gladie. I rode on your shoulders yesterday when you stole bubble gum from the convenience store.”
“Oh, yeah. You’re lighter than you look.”
I sucked in my stomach. “Thank you. What are you doing?”
“I’m in the resistance. DICK wants to turn us into zombies. I’m not a zombie. I’m Draco.”
“Draco?”
“My mom’s a Harry Potter fan. Can I put this down? It’s kind of
heavy.”
“Put it there,” Grandma told him, coming into the entranceway. She pointed at the floor by the door. “Stay clear of the window. They’re going to come back around slower this time.”
“Are you a witch?” he asked her.
Grandma shrugged. “Tomato, tomahto.” He put the battery down. “You hungry? We were just about to have a snack,” she told him.
We followed her into the kitchen. A huge spread was laid out on the kitchen table. “A new restaurant opened in town,” Grandma explained. “They brought over their entire menu and asked me to leave a review with Michael Phelps.”
“The Olympic swimmer?” I asked.
Grandma shrugged. “It sounded funny to me, too.”
“Michael Phelps?” Draco asked. “You mean Yelp? You’re supposed to leave a review on Yelp?”
My grandmother touched her lips. “Maybe he said Yelp. But that doesn’t make any more sense than Michael Phelps.”
“Yelp,” Draco said looking from my grandmother to me and back again. “Yelp. Yelp. Yelp. You haven’t heard of Yelp? C’mon. Yelp.” Grandma and I stared back at him, blank-faced. “You know…Yelp,” he persisted. “Yelp. How can you not know about Yelp? Yelp. Yelp. Yelp.”
“I don’t think repeating it is going to make us understand it any better,” I said.
“It sounds funny,” Grandma said. “Yelp? It can’t be that. Michael Phelps sounds a lot more logical.”
“Is this a joke?” Draco demanded. “Have I landed in an alternate universe? Yelp. C’mon…Yelp.”
“Give it up,” I told him. “Best thing is sit back, eat, and ask no questions.”
“But it’s Yelp.”
I shrugged. “I don’t want to blow your mind completely, but we have a landline, too.”
We sat down and consumed an enormous amount of free food. “I’m going to tell Michael Phelps to go to this restaurant, and I’m putting it on my delivery list,” Grandma announced. “No fried chicken, but they make killer chili cheese fries.”
“Hey Draco, I know you’re busy trying to take down DICK, but if you have any time, can I hire you to help me with my laptop and some data entry?” I asked him.
“You mean, like, real money?”
My grandmother’s head popped up. She had chili on her chin, but her eyes were focused entirely on me. “You’re going to visit your mother in prison?” she asked me, nonplussed.
CHAPTER 6
Every now and then, you’re going to get a real kvetcher match that you’re going to want to throw out the window. You know the kind…nothing’s ever good enough for them. They would complain about winning the lottery. When you get one of these, you might want to give up on them, but here’s a little advice from me to you: Even kvetches deserve love. And sometimes with a little love, even a kvetch can become lovable.
Lesson 137, Matchmaking advice from your
Grandma Zelda
Yikes. Somehow, my grandmother had picked up that I was going to visit my mother. I didn’t want to, but Ruth told me to go to her first to investigate my father’s murder, so I was going to. I didn’t think that my grandmother could read minds, but just in case, I tried to think about sand to put her off the scent. Sand. Sand. Sand. “I thought it would be nice to visit my mother,” I lied to her. Sand. Sand. Sand. “You know, because of Mother’s Day.”
“Mother’s Day was last month,” Draco said. “Wow, you guys need help.”
Grandma cocked her head to the side and looked at me with her laser eyes, probably trying to get into my brain to see what I was thinking. Sand. Sand. Sand.
I stood up. Sand. Sand. Sand. “I’m stuffed. Grandma, this was awesome. Tell Michael Phelps for me. Draco, come with me, and I’ll show you what I want.”
Upstairs, Draco paused at the entrance to the attic. “You guys aren’t serial killers, are you?” he asked.
“I’m ninety-percent sure that we’re not serial killers,” I said. “I just need computer help.”
“I’m not a computer geek.”
“But you’re young. Young people know computers.”
He shrugged and stepped inside. I held up my laptop. “It won’t turn on. It turned on before, but now it won’t.”
Faced with the possibility of pushing a button, Draco was unable to resist. He sat down at the folding table, took my laptop from me, and pushed a button. “It’s on,” he said.
I looked at the screen. “How did you do that?”
“Is that all you want me to do?”
“No. I need help going through some boxes and put it into the computer in a list. Have you heard of Excel before?”
“Boring.”
“I’ll pay you.”
“My parents pay me.”
Millennials. I couldn’t make them out. They lived with their families until they were well into adulthood, sponging off the free rent and food. I would have never done that.
Oh, wait.
“Fair enough,” I said. “How about I don’t tell DICK where you are, and I give you free food, too.”
Draco perked up. “My parents eat paleo.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Draco, I can assure you that there’s no paleo food anywhere in this house.”
“Okay. Deal.”
We made a deal for him to start the next morning, and I promised to drive him home. As he turned to leave, he knocked my father’s box onto the floor. “I’ll get that,” I said, upset to see my father’s souvenirs strewn over the dirty attic floor.
“I’ll help,” Draco said, dropping to his knees. “This is matchmaking stuff?”
“Not this box,” I murmured. I felt a pang of protectiveness, like a pit bull protecting a dump.
“Don’t do this, Jonathan,” Draco read, reading from a scrap of paper. “Nothing good will come from it. And if you persist, you will have to be stopped.” Draco waved it at me. “Wow, hardcore. Matchmaking’s gangster. Who’s Jonathan? You ever get one of these things? Bamboo shoots under your fingernails from angry desperate singles? Bomb threats? The Isis of love. Is matchmaking that sort of thing?”
I took the paper from him. It had been typed on an old, manual typewriter. Another three sentences. I was learning about my father three sentences at a time. I read it over five times, trying to make sense out of it.
Nope. I couldn’t figure it out.
In a moment of whatever the opposite of lucidity is, I asked the juvenile delinquent wearing a No One Cares t-shirt what it meant. “Isis of Love? You think it’s a threat?”
“Dude.” That said it all, and really, I didn’t need his opinion. It was definitely a threat.
“I’ll take you home,” I said, putting the scrap of paper in my purse.
Draco rode in the passenger seat with the school bus battery on his lap. “We have to put the battery back,” I told him, driving toward the school bus lot outside of town. “I don’t want you to wind up in juvy. I feel responsible for you since I’m feeding you.”
“No way. Stealing the bus batteries is genius. DICK wants us to behave. Now, we can’t even get to school.”
“You can walk to school from anywhere in Cannes,” I pointed out.
“It’s the thought that counts.” Draco sucked in air. “Get down! There they are!”
Draco slumped in his seat. “Who? Who?” I asked looking around.
“DICK!”
“Where? Where?”
“The ones wearing the sweaters with the buttons.”
“You mean cardigans?” Sure enough there was a group of three middle-aged women and one elderly man walking on the sidewalk, and they were all wearing cardigans. “So, that’s DICK, huh?”
“They’re everywhere,” Draco said. “But we’re going to show them.”
“They don’t look very scary, Draco. They’ll probably get tired and go home, wherever that is.”
“I heard they’re from Utah or a state next to it, like New Hampshire.”
We arrived at the bus lot, and I stopped the car next to a scho
ol bus, which had its hood up. “All righty. Put the battery back in the bus,” I told him.
“I can’t.”
“C’mon. We’re not leaving until you do it.”
“No, I mean, I can’t. I don’t know how.”
“Don’t you take auto shop in school?”
“What’s auto shop?”
“I can’t believe this,” I said, opening my door. “Fine. I’ll do it. At least bring out the battery for me.”
We got out, and I climbed onto the bus’s front bumper. Looking inside, I realized I had no idea how to install a battery, either. But at least there was an obvious gaping hole where the battery went. “I’ll just put it in here, and they can fix the wires, later,” I told Draco. “Hand me the battery.”
He handed it to me, and I worked to let it down into the motor. It was a good plan, but it was harder than I had expected. I had to practically crawl inside to get access. I see-sawed over the lip of the hood, trying to put the battery in without damaging the motor.
“You should probably go faster,” Draco said. “Yep, going faster would be really good right about now.”
“I’m going as fast as I’m going to go. Instead of complaining, why don’t you come up here and help me? I could use some help. Come on, Draco. Draco? Draco? Draco, are you there?”
There was no answer. I struggled to turn around, but I lost my balance and fell face-first into the bowels of the bus. “Draco, help me out of here,” I said, but there was still no sign of him.
“Hurry, Officer!” I heard a woman yell. “They’re at it, again! Stop! Decency in Cannes Kids! Decency in Cannes Kids!”
Someone tugged at my foot and came away with my shoe. “Get out of there!” another woman yelled. “Decency…”
“In Cannes Kids!” I finished for her. “Yeah. Yeah. I get it, but I can’t get out of here.”
“Officer, it’s happening, again. This town is rotten to the core.” This time it was a man talking. How many people were out there? “This boy’s butt is out for everyone to see,” the man announced.
“My butt doesn’t look anything like a boy’s butt,” I complained.