Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?

by Stevi Mittman

  I wonder if any mother really believes that. Or if we all have no choice but to go with the party line.

  CHAPTER 12

  The living room is for living. Remember that when selecting fabric for your sofa, displaying your precious memorabilia, choosing a lightly colored carpet and arranging your furniture. It’s fine to keep the living room free of the detritus of everyday life, but if you find yourself saving the room for formal entertaining, ask yourself if you’re getting your money’s worth from the real estate. You probably aren’t. And in the process you’re also treating your family less well than the couple you can’t stand from around the corner. Are you sure that’s the lesson you want your children to learn?

  —TipsFromTeddi.com

  “Maybe you could play it backward and see if it says Paul is dead,” Drew says sarcastically when I make him watch the DVD of The Spare Slices he’s just brought over to the house.

  “Not funny,” I say, serving him the brownies I promised as payment for having the tape converted to a DVD. “Don’t you think he’s saying ticket just after he waves his left arm?” I flick the recording back a frame and yell “There!” at the appropriate moment.

  Drew shrugs. I tell him about Milt Sherman’s new boat. He puts his hands over his ears and tells me he doesn’t want to hear it, so I skip the part about actually going on the boat. And I leave out dinner with Dave and his mother, too.

  “A man who is going to buy a seventeen-thousand-dollar pool table dies a very suspicious death. The doctor who recently operated on him is murdered. The men who go in on lottery tickets with him are spending money like they’ve won that lottery…”

  “And you make almost-good brownies,” Drew says, licking off the underdone part that is sticking to his fingers. I’m about to offer to do that for him when he adds, “Really. Not half bad.”

  “Oh, what you just missed,” I say, shaking my head.

  He looks confused and I give him just a hint by brushing a crumb from his lip and then offering it up to his lips.

  “Great brownies,” he says, holding my hand an inch from his mouth. “Terrific. Never had better.” And he licks my finger and sucks it into his mouth. Let me tell you, the brownies aren’t the only thing going gooey…

  “Bobbie’s on her way over,” I say. It comes out dreamily, and he doesn’t seem to care as he pulls me gently into his lap.

  He reaches for another brownie, squeezes it, and then paints my lips with the underdone chocolate.

  “Love your lipstick,” he says, kissing me rather passionately for ten-thirty in the morning. “You’re sure you can’t get the day off?”

  “I’m here,” Bobbie yells as she comes in the back door to my kitchen. We can hear her heels click-clack on my terra-cotta floor.

  “So am I,” Drew yells back, and we hear Bobbie’s footsteps stop.

  “Do I need to give you two a minute?” she asks, as I climb out of Drew’s lap while he tries to halfheartedly hold on to me. “We’re already late, you know.”

  I tell her to come on in while I straighten my clothes and Drew laughs at me.

  “Oh, brownies!” she says with delight. “Do I have to smear them on my face, too? Or can I just eat one?”

  I look at Drew. He looks like he was in a mousse-eating contest. He looks at me. I probably look like I ate the whole mousse. Bobbie hands us each napkins and says she wonders what we could have been doing.

  “The rest of your pool tables are coming,” she reminds me, tapping her watch. “No better way to start the day than watching men flex their muscles.”

  Drew’s napkin is in his lap.

  I couldn’t agree more.

  “OH, I REMEMBER FIRST LOVE,” Bobbie says wistfully as we pull up to the alley. I’ve given her the broad outline of the Dana saga and she agreed that grounding Dana would just convince the kid that I don’t get what this means to her. “The pain. The heartache. Makes me wonder if Michael Jacobs ever got over me.”

  I see the truck from Century Billiards parked by the doors and two guys leaning against it drinking coffee out of foam cups. Bobbie was right about our getting here to watch the muscles work, because apparently these guys aren’t flexing them without an audience.

  Just as I’m about to snap off the radio and turn off the car, the news comes on. “Coming up, police are still baffled in the murder of vascular surgeon Doris Peterson. Dr. Doris, as she was known to her patients, was brutally murdered in the early morning hours just ten days ago in the parking lot of her medical building after having completed her rounds. A vigil by former patients is scheduled for tonight outside the building. A spokesman for the group says they are ‘disappointed’ with the police department’s efforts in the case. ‘This woman saved so many lives’” a voice says. “‘We can’t save hers, but we can bring her killer to justice.’”

  “You don’t see any vigils for Joey,” I say. “Nobody’s—”

  “Give it a rest,” Bobbie tells me, opening the car door. “We have to finish this place in less than two weeks. And what work have you done on the Kroll job? Shut it off and let’s go.” She is standing outside the car, holding the door open, waiting for me. I gather up my stuff, hoping for more news in the Dr. Doris case before I go inside, where I will simply point at the tape outline I’ve already put on the floor to signify where the pool tables should go. It’s not like you can move those babies once they’re set up.

  “In other news,” the announcer says. “A freak accident in the parking lot of the Walbaum’s store in Plainview has left one man in critical condition. His name has not been released, pending notification of family, but he is believed to be an employee of the supermarket in its delicatessen department.”

  “Don’t even think it,” Bobbie says.

  I spend the day thinking of little else.

  At two, Drew gets around to returning my call. He tells me that since I couldn’t play with him, he went in to help on the Dr. Doris case even though it’s his day off. He offers me dinner but I tell him I have stuff going on with Dana and I have to be home.

  He takes it like it’s a brush-off.

  “Really,” I say. “This thing with Dana is big.”

  “Fine,” he says, but his voice has an edge to it.

  I really don’t need a fourth child and I simply refuse to go there.

  The billiards people are asking about which end of the table the break will be made from and other esoteric questions I assumed they’d have the answers to and I tell Drew that I have to go—that I have men waiting for me.

  “Yeah, well give ’em my sympathy,” he says. “I know how that can be.”

  This is not the time to bait me. I tell him I really do have to go.

  “Yeah,” he says, and I’m about to press End when I hear him say, “By the way, you hear about the Walbaum’s parking lot accident?”

  I point in Mark’s general direction, suggesting to the guy who wants to know which end is up, that Mark will be able to tell him. I tell Drew I heard about it over the radio.

  “Don’t go imagining conspiracies here, Ted, but unless there’s more than one Max in the deli department, this guy’s your Spare Slice friend.”

  “Is he—” For a woman who is racking up murders faster than the guys on Deadwood I still seem to get creeped out by words like dead and killed.

  “Nah. They think he’s gonna pull through, though it’s a miracle.” He hesitates like he shouldn’t have said that, then sighs. “Oh, what the hell. You’ll find out on your own, anyway, no doubt. Car ran over him twice.”

  I suck in a breath. “Tell me the department isn’t calling this an accident,” I say.

  “We’re on it,” Drew says. He doesn’t bother with the traditional keep out of it, Teddi lecture.

  I ask what hospital he’s in and Drew reluctantly tells me he’s in Plainview Hospital. The hospital is a quick five-minute drive from Syosset and I say I’ll go over there after work. Then I remember I have to be home for Dana. I’m totally committed to bonding
with her and the rest of my children. She needs sympathy, guidance and, frankly, a watchdog.

  “Can’t do dinner because you’ve got something with Dana, but you can get over to the hospital,” he says.

  I can understand his resentment. “No one’s trying to kill you,” I say in my defense.

  “You’re killing me, Teddi,” he says sadly.

  And then he hangs up the phone.

  The afternoon sucks. I am home when I want to be at the hospital and at the alley. Not to mention how much I’d like to be dressing for a dinner with Drew.

  But Good Mom is in gear and I work on some plans for the Kroll house in the kitchen so that I’m available to my kids. Not that Dana is talking to me now that she’s decided the tape from L.I. Lanes invades her right to privacy and wants to know why she isn’t afforded the same constitutional rights I worry the government is taking away.

  “The whole country is against me,” she announced when she got home from school today. “The whole universe.”

  And Jesse is totally freaked about the taping business, too, which makes me wonder what I missed seeing him up to.

  Only Alyssa still loves me. And I’m not sure it’s me and not the refrigerator cookies that she’s really fond of. I’ve sliced and thrown them into the toaster oven and now she’s waiting expectantly.

  I’d say Maggie May loves me, but this morning she dragged my best lace bra down the stairs and dropped it in her food bowl. I can’t figure out what she meant by that. I’m not sure I want to, either.

  Dinner is a silent affair, punctuated only by Dana’s sniffing and Jesse asking how long it takes girls to grow up. Makes me glad I didn’t invite Drew to join us, as I can just hear his answer to that one.

  In the middle of dinner, Dana’s phone plays Kelly Clark-son’s “Hear Me,” indicating that Rio is calling her. She ignores it. Jesse doesn’t remind her that it’s her father. Lys doesn’t ask if she’s going to get it. Maggie, sleeping by the refrigerator, doesn’t even open her eyes.

  Now, I have had a really hard time dealing with Dana’s loyalty to her father and her hope that we would ever get back together. So I should just relish the fact that she no longer sees him as our white knight, coming back to make us whole again. Okay, maybe that’s all the king’s horses…and Rio is certainly a horse’s—

  Anyway, I am not enjoying her animosity toward her father, despite it coinciding with my own. In fact, it breaks my heart.

  By the time dinner is over, we are all sullen and snippy. And I can’t help but wonder whether there is any point to my staying home.

  Moments after Dana’s cell rings, the house phone rings as well. We all know it’s Rio and everyone just lets it ring. Finally Jesse grabs the phone. He sounds truly sympathetic when he tells his dad that Dana won’t talk to him. Apparently he’s willing to settle for me.

  “Give her time,” I tell him and add that he and I need to have a very short talk, which we can have at the bowling alley tomorrow and he might want to wear shin guards.

  The warning sails over his head.

  “I gotta see her,” he tells me. “Can I come over tonight? I won’t stay long, I just gotta explain to her that I know boys like him. I was a boy like him. I know how they think, how they operate, how it all works.

  “And I just thought I had more time before I had to warn her.”

  I don’t say anything.

  “And I thought she was smarter than that. Not that you weren’t smarter, too. Don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking now, Teddi. Makes a helluva difference when you’re on this side of the fence, don’t it?”

  “Yeah, it makes a difference,” I agree.

  “There’s things I’d take back,” he says.

  “We got three delicious kids out of it,” I tell him. There’s no point now in being angry with him for not telling me about Dana. What would I have done that he didn’t do better? He got rid of the kid and he’s going to give Dana the talk from the male side. “Come on over. I’d like to go visit a sick friend, anyway.”

  He laughs. “A sick friend, huh? What’s he got? Blue balls?”

  You would think I’d have learned. Give Rio so much as a hair and he’s wrapping it around your throat in the hope of strangling you.

  I’m so ready to tell him not to come, but Dana’s shut her eyes tight, as if his coming was the answer to an unspoken prayer.

  “Remember it’s a school night,” I tell him.

  He tells me he just has to bundle up Elisa and he’ll be right over.

  Sometimes I forget that he has another family, or the remnants of one, anyway.

  What a complicated world we live in.

  AT THE HOSPITAL I ask for Max Koppel’s room. Drew has agreed to meet me in the restaurant cafeteria after I’ve seen Max.

  “And I haven’t sanctioned this visit. This is not police-approved and it’s completely independent of the department,” he warned me. “You are going to see him as a friend, a customer and not some pseudo-detective who thinks she’s Miss Marple’s descendant.”

  It’s nice that he no longer thinks I’m Miss Marple herself. Ever since I made him watch Murder Most Foul with Margaret Rutherford, he’s had a new appreciation for how obnoxious his calling me Miss Marple really is.

  Which means he reserves it for when he’s really ticked at me.

  I am standing outside Max’s room because someone else is with him. This does not qualify as eavesdropping. It’s merely being polite. Is it my fault if it so happens that I can hear most of what the person is saying?

  “How’s it going, buddy?” a male voice asks. “They taking good care of you?”

  If Max answers, I can’t hear it.

  “I don’t get how this could happen,” the voice says, and I’m pretty sure it belongs to Dave Blumstein. “I feel like I lost my best friends. Not that you’re dead, or anything. But first Joey and now you. And Miles thinks he’s next and won’t even answer the phone. Milt says he’s wearing a disguise and only answers the door to get pizza delivered. And he calls different pizza places each time, Milt says.

  “He’s…what’s that word?” the voice asks, and now I’m sure it’s Dave.

  Paranoid, I think. Only, of course I don’t think he’s paranoid, since I don’t think he’s imagining he’s in danger.

  “You know,” Dave says. “There’s jokes about it. Like how do you know if you’re…I can’t think of the word.”

  Paranoid.

  “It starts with a P, I think.”

  Para-freakin’-noid.

  “I don’t know if you can hear me,” he says. “But maybe you can. So if you can and you know the word—”

  I can’t help myself.

  “Paranoid,” I say, coming into the room. I’m all set to apologize for overhearing, explain how I was just coming into the room and couldn’t help but hear, blah, blah, blah.

  Only he just lights up and says, “Yeah, that’s it! Paranoid. Hi, Teddi! Look, Max. It’s Teddi.”

  As you might guess, there’s no reaction from Max, who is lying still in the bed, bandaged, in traction. He appears to be sleeping. I ask how he is.

  Dave shrugs. “I think he’s just asleep. Otherwise his family wouldn’ta gone home, right?”

  I ask if the nurse has been in. Dave says she has, that she felt his pulse, so he must still be alive, right? Don’t I think so?

  I reassure Dave that Max is alive. I point out the monitor beside his bed, a good strong heartbeat bleeping across it. “He’s probably heavily sedated,” I say.

  Dave says, “Yeah. And they gave him some stuff for the pain and to help him sleep, too.”

  A disembodied voice announces that visiting hours are now over and asks all visitors to leave patients’ rooms.

  I want to put my hand on Max, reassure him, but there doesn’t seem to be a safe place to touch, so I lean down and whisper in his ear.

  “Don’t you dare give up, Max Koppel.

  “And I won’t either.”

  CHAP
TER 13

  Sure bedrooms are for sleeping, but they are also for loving. If there’s a man in permanent residence in the bedroom or an occasional visitor, don’t make him feel he’s in the wrong place by over-feminizing the room. Please, no lavenders, no pinks, no ruffles. Leave those to the seven-year-olds. But don’t go to the other extreme, either. No whips, no chains, no blindfolds where the kids can see or find them. Unless there’s a cop in the house, there’s really no excuse for hanging the handcuffs on the headboard, is there? A good rule of thumb is to imagine breaking your leg and having your mother in and out of your bedroom to take care of you. Quick—pad the walls!

  —TipsFromTeddi.com

  Drew is waiting outside the already closed cafeteria. “You want to just go home?” he asks me.

  I glance at my watch. Rio is probably still there and I’m not emotionally prepared to have our confrontation just yet. Especially not with the kids in the house. And I could do without Elisa tugging at my heartstrings, too.

  “Maybe coffee and a doughnut?” he offers. “Or is that too cliché?”

  How about a roll in the hay? Or is that too cliche? A snack in the sack?

  Another rack of billiards?

  “Coffee would be nice,” I agree. The image of pudgy me on the pool table is still painful. I vow to just have coffee and skip the doughnut.

  We stand in front of the counter at Dunkin’ Donuts, where at least twenty dozen doughnuts know my name and are shouting it, the chorus getting louder and louder. I can barely hear Drew telling me that the sugar will give me sweet dreams.

  Now how can I resist that?

  In the very last booth at the back of the restaurant—can you call a doughnut place a restaurant?—Drew and I sit facing each other. If the fluorescent lights are making Drew look sallow, I don’t want to know the view from his side of the table.

  “You learn anything?” he asks me.

  I’ve learned a lot. You shouldn’t underestimate your ex-husband. You shouldn’t assume your daughter is seeing someone age-appropriate. You shouldn’t think the man across the table from you will wait forever.