And then they turn to me. “What does your friend the police detective say?” Jerry asks me.
“That it’s suspicious,” I say. But I admit they seem to be getting nowhere. “I keep trying to come up with how Dr. Doris’s death could be related, but I can’t figure out how.”
Jerry asks if Milt or Max had surgery, suggesting that could be a link. I tell him that the police have checked that out already.
“So they have no theories?” Jerry asks. “They got bubkes?”
“Seems like. At least that’s what they tell me.”
“It’s the bowling team,” Rita says. “Grown men going out and playing every week like boys. Arguing over whether they stepped over the line…”
“I never trusted that one…what’s his name, Ritzala? The one who took Robby to the arcade?”
She tells him it was Dave and that he’s wrong about that one. I’m still back on stepping over the line. What if Joey wasn’t talking about bowling?
“The important thing,” Jerry says, more to Rita than to me, “is that Teddi should stay out of it. It could be dangerous, putting her sweet nose in there.”
Rita agrees, reluctantly, that he is right.
“If only I could figure out that connection,” I say. “Who did Joey argue with about stepping over the line?”
“Dave,” Rita tells me. “Dave was always telling Joey what was fair and what wasn’t. Like he was the referee or the umpire or something and my Joey was the big cheat. Can you imagine?”
“Russell—now he was the one who’d put his finger on the scale every now and then,” Jerry says. “But not Joey. Never Joey. Straight as an arrow.”
I glance at my watch and Jerry urges me to go, saying I shouldn’t miss my deadline.
“I’m going,” I say, giving each of them a quick hug before slipping into my peacoat. “But I promise you that I will keep my ear to the ground and try to figure out who killed Joey.”
“See if you can get trans fat arrested,” Jerry says, and I can hear Rita arguing with him as I shut the door behind me and head for L.I. Lanes.
I STOP HOME and find a bouquet of flowers waiting on the front steps. Now Drew’s never sent me flowers before, and try as I might, I can’t come up with any anniversary or any other reason he might have sent these.
Which doesn’t make me any less disappointed when I open the little envelope and find that they are from Rio, apologizing for being unable to help and thanking me for not ratting on him to Carmine. At least I assume that’s what “Sorry and Thanks, Rio,” means.
Jesse comes up the walk, surprised to see me. Nervous, maybe. He asks if anything is wrong. Until that moment, I’d have to say no.
“So how come you’re home?” he asks. “Isn’t Alyssa going home with that new girl? Olivia?”
He’s a good big brother, keeping track of Lys for me the way he has while I get this job done.
“So are you going back to the Lanes?” He seems in an inordinate hurry to get rid of me and he hasn’t even asked about the flowers I’m holding. When I ask him about both, he’s quick to deny the former and inquire about the latter.
“They’re from your father,” I say, expecting him to direct me to throw them out.
Instead, he tells me that was a nice thing for Rio to do. What exactly did Carmine tell me earlier? A father wants to be there for his kids?
And a mother’s got to let him.
“Something you want to tell me, Jess?” I ask, opening the door and holding it for him.
He shakes his head and offers to walk Maggie. “I know you’re busy,” he says.
Jesse is a good kid, but no kid is this good. Do I ask what he’s hiding? I weigh my options while I study his sweet face. I suggest we walk her together, but again he tells me how busy I am and says he can do it himself.
And with a peck on the cheek, he and Maggie are out the door and I have a moment of peace I can’t help but relish.
It doesn’t last long.
“What are you doing tonight?” my father asks when I pick up the ringing phone.
“I have to work,” I tell him. He asks me until when.
My answer, “Until I drop,” doesn’t please him.
“I’ll come watch the kids,” he says. “Your mother’s got her mah-jongg game here and five women clacking tiles and tongues is more than a man should have to take.”
I tell him I’d appreciate it. I almost tell him that I’m worried about Jesse, but my father isn’t exactly subtle and I don’t want Jess to think I’m spying on him.
“Or I could come to the alley and lend a hand,” he adds, and I can hear the hope in his voice.
Once upon a time, in his prime, I thought my father could do anything. Then I learned about his affair with our housekeeper and thought he was “capable of anything” in a wholly different way. Now that he’s well past seventy, I can’t imagine asking him to reach, to bend, to carry or tighten or screw.
According to my mother, he isn’t doing that last one all that well anymore. Just the kind of information every daughter wants to know.
So I thank him kindly but tell him that Mark and I have it all under control. Twice he asks me if I’m sure and twice I tell him that being here with the kids is more help to me than he could possibly be at the alley.
And then I leave a quick note for Dana, who I pray is really at a drama club rehearsal, and head out to the car. I figure I’ll do a quick turn around the block to say bye to Jess and then meet Bobbie and Mark at L.I. Lanes.
It’s a good plan, unless I find Jesse around the corner standing next to the Rio Grande Security van talking to his dad. Which is what happens, of course. It’s not him talking to Rio that bothers me—I mean, the man is his father. It’s the guilty look that comes over his face when he sees me, the sudden change in demeanor, pulling back from the van, calling Maggie back from the street, the shrug he gives his father instead of a wave goodbye.
Rio pulls away and Jesse saunters over to the car.
“What’s up?” I ask, as casually as I can. Jesse tells me his father is a jerk. “What did he want?” I ask, and I’m actually getting ready to defend him when Jesse just shakes his head.
I want so much to let the whole thing just drop. Face it and fix it after that damn bowling alley grand opening is over and I’ve gotten paid. Only Jesse’s eyes are just a little too bright for me to pretend everything is fine.
Being the mother so sucks sometimes, I think as I put the car into neutral and tell him to grab Maggie and get in the car.
I drive, because Jesse talks better when I’m not reading his face. It’s a handicap for me that puts us on more equal footing, since my face-reading skills are better than his. I ask him if he wants to tell me what’s going on.
And we do the nothing/something’s bothering you/no, nothing/you can tell me/no I can’t/of course you can/nothing’s bothering me thing for two trips around the block during which I resist checking my watch, though I do throw a quick glance at the car clock every now and then.
I do not tell him I don’t have time for this part of the game, despite the fact that those exact words are batting around in my brain plotting their escape route.
“Something up with your Dad?” I throw out there, hoping it’ll stick.
My nerves are fraying after another circumnavigation of the neighborhood narrated by nothing’s up/something’s wrong, honey/nothing’s wrong/silence/I love you, Mom.
“I love you, too.” I reach back in my arsenal of young Jesse stories. “Remember when you borrowed Aunt Bobbie’s tennis racket and her balls and you lost one down the sewer? And you thought it was such a big deal that you kept it a secret for two days, thinking that when we discovered what had happened we’d be mad? And remember how it made you so miserable that you finally broke down and cried because you felt like you didn’t deserve our love and praise…all over a stupid ball no one cared about? Remember?”
“It’s not like that,” he says.
So finally we have an it’s. At this ra
te I can kiss my check goodbye. “Isn’t it?”
I pull over and turn off the engine, in part to signal that it’s time to fess up and in part because I’m in danger of Maggie driving the car, as she keeps trying to reach the gas pedal with her head.
“Dad and I have been shooting pool,” he says flatly.
So my heart is racing and I’m thinking that Rio’s been putting money on him and God knows, they are going to Vegas for a tournament and he’s taken up smoking because everyone knows that pool halls are full of smoke and maybe he likes the nicotine rush. Maybe he’s addicted to secondhand smoke. “And?” I say, and I pull it off perfectly. I sound like a calm, rational woman who hasn’t thought of any of the possibilities that have flown through my brain at breakneck speed.
“You’re not mad?” he asks, genuine amazement tinging his voice.
I look at this sweet, sweet child, who has stood by me and bolstered me and told me a hundred times I could make it on my own and there are tears in the big blue eyes he got from his father.
And it’s hard not to break down and bawl.
“He’s your dad,” I say, opening my arms and trying to hug him across the gear shift and the console.
“But he hurt you and he did really bad stuff to you, Mom,” he says. “And I really didn’t want to like…betray you, but he’s lonely and he’s not so good at much, and…”
“He needs you,” I say, and Jesse nods silently. How ever did a messed-up woman and a cheat ever produce and raise such a mensch? “I guess I’d better learn to share.”
CHAPTER 19
Decorating can be an exciting adventure. Don’t rush it. Remember that “haste makes waste.” Taste all the possibilities. Let them roll around on your tongue, savor them like good dark chocolate—but without the calories. Let yourself imagine your room in a hundred different incarnations. Enjoy the process. When you’re sure, don’t stop at just a lick—plunge in all the way. Think of it like love or sex—how wonderful is it when you know it’s right.
—TipsFromTeddi.com
I relate to Bobbie, who arrived just moments before me, and Mark how Jesse felt guilty for seeing his dad—proof that I am a rotten, no good, lousy mother.
They are quick to agree.
“You should turn in your mother card,” Bobbie says, hobbling over to the computer where she is printing up menu cards for the bar.
“They should make you hold down a job, raise three kids and hire a mother to tell you twice a day that you don’t do either well. Oh, wait,” Mark says. “That’s your life.”
“If only you tried harder,” Bobbie says. “Instead of just breezing along, eating bonbons and watching soap operas while your kids get stoned and shoplift.”
“And you neglect your clients,” Mark adds. “Which reminds me—some weird guy stopped by singing your praises and left you some cookies. He said to call his dad.”
“Robby Kroll,” I say, pulling out my phone and punching in his number. While I wait for him to answer I tell Mark what amazing progress he’s made. For the first time I really think I might be telling the truth when I say we’ll make the deadline. Maybe.
Jerry tells me Rita put him up to the call. “She wants to know if you’ve found out anything,” he says. I hear Robby in the background telling his father to hurry up. “In a minute,” he says.
“It’s the doctor thing,” I tell him. “I can’t shake it. Does Rita have any ideas? Did Dr. Doris and Joey maybe have a thing…you know, something going?”
Talk about groping for straws. Joey was probably twenty years her senior and, as my mother would say, worked in a deli slicing meat while Dr. Doris, a well-respected surgeon, was slicing open chests for a lot more money.
Jerry says he certainly doesn’t think so, but how would he know? Maybe he should check it out. He’ll go to the hospital tonight and check it out, he says.
“No, I’ll go,” I say. “My father is watching the kids and I’ll need a break here anyway, come midnight or so.” I tell him that I’ll go find the closest Dunkin’ Donuts to Plainview Hospital and catch some of the nurses after their shift.
“Ritzala would so appreciate that,” he says. “She just won’t let go of this murder idea.”
“Me, either,” I admit sheepishly. Somehow, it seems ridiculous when it’s somebody else, you know?
“But don’t eat any doughnuts,” he warns me.
“I know,” I say. “Trans fats.”
AFTER FIRST TELLING MY DAD I was staying past midnight at the alley and getting an earful, I lied and told him that I was meeting Drew. I told him it was perfectly fine to go ahead home. Dana is a fully qualified babysitter. She actually took the Red Cross course and he needn’t worry.
Just to be on the safe side, Bobbie calls Mike and tells him to keep an ear open for my kids along with theirs. He asks when the hell she’s coming home. She looks at me and seems to make up her mind to irritate him, telling him that she and I are going out for drinks. She doesn’t reveal that those drinks are coffee.
Mark shoos us out and locks the door behind us with orders that we go straight home after our little doughnut run. “Do not come back here,” he warns. “Or you’ll learn my elfin secret and be cast forever in a pit of remorse.”
“Whatever,” Bobbie says as she scoops up a few of Jerry’s cookies and we head to my car.
“She’s one,” Bobbie says as we sit at a table at the back of the Dunkin’ Donuts on Jericho Turnpike having a cup of the best coffee known to man. She nods toward a woman in her early forties wearing pink polyester pants that stick out from under her black ski jacket. “Bet you a doughnut her shirt has little teddy bears on it.”
She’s wrong.
They’re lambs. But I don’t make her buy, because both of us are too tired to drag ourselves to the counter.
“Pediatrics,” we both say in unison. Then we watch several other women come in, all too wide awake to be housewives finishing up a night on the town. Or even housewives who have been working all day, like us. They are all in polyester pants in varying pastel shades. It’s sort of an Easter egg convention without the bonnets. Bobbie, with only one eye open, is still nearly gagging at the lack of panache.
“They could wear scarves,” she whispers to me. “Or at least something in their hair and a little makeup, for God’s sake.”
I’m still trying to figure out how to approach any of them when she shifts around in her seat and asks the women in the booth behind her if they have any Sweet’n Low on their table.
A somewhat frazzled blonde in green scrubs hands her a yellow packet, at which Bobbie shakes her head. Gotta be pink, she tells them. One of the women agrees with her while another says they’re all the same. They all do the same thing.
“No,” Bobbie says, shaking her head for emphasis until I’m dizzy from watching. “That’s like saying all surgeons are the same. Maybe they all cut you open, but there are the good ones, the bad ones, the loose ones, the tight ones…”
“Dreamy ones,” I add, following her lead now that I’ve finally gotten the drift of where this conversation is going.
One of the women laughs at that one and someone adds a “Mc” to it, along with an “I wish!”
Bobbie continues her lecture. “There are snobs that fool around with only other surgeons, slummers that hit on the nurses, fishermen that do the patients…”
“Fishermen?” the blond nurse asks.
Bobbie explains her theory about women surgeons, how they’re looking for a great catch and hoping some patient will be Mr. Right.
“Like Dr. Doris?” I ask. “Was she fishing?” Not that I think Joey would have made a particularly good catch…
The women take great offense at the implication. “That woman was a doll,” one of them says and all the others agree.
“And she treated us like equals.” It’s the blonde again. “Some doctors seem to think we’re part of the maintenance crew—change the bedpans and dole out the meds. But she’d come in late at night and sit
with us and shoot the breeze for hours.”
“She’d tell us about her patients,” a pretty young woman with short brown hair from another table says, joining the conversation.
“She never used names, but she’d tell us about the things they’d say after some Versed or midazolam. Like they cheated on their wife or they were stealing from their boss. All sorts of stuff.”
I kick Bobbie under the table to be sure she’s heard and not fallen asleep. “Did she ever mention anybody saying something about winning the lottery?” I ask.
“They all say that,” one of the women says. “And when they do, they’re gonna buy all of us new cars and—”
“Diamonds. Don’t forget diamonds. If they live.”
“—and win the lottery.”
“Actually,” a nurse at another table says, getting pensive. “Remember that guy with the tricky procedure who told her that he had a winning ticket but he wasn’t going to split it with his partners?”
“He had some kind of plan worked out,” another one says.
“Yeah. He’d split it with her, instead.”
I’m lucky I don’t break my jaw when it hits the table. Oh…my…God.
“And no one else?” I ask, but the conversation has moved on to, “the woman who wanted to have a sex-change operation but hadn’t told her husband yet. And he was standing right there!”
Gales of laughter. Ha. Ha. Ha.
I knew he won the lottery. I knew it.
OKAY, I ADMIT IT. After the rush I get from sugar—and I probably shouldn’t have had the doughnut, not to mention the three cookies—I totally get wiped out. I thought the coffee would perk me up, but I’m blinking hard to stay alert behind the wheel. Beside me, Bobbie is slumped against the window as I frantically try to find my way home after turning the wrong way on Jericho Turnpike and winding up somewhere in Old Brookville. I turn onto the shortcut up CR 106, a narrow road right through the horsey set’s backyards.
“Objects in the mirror,” Bobbie says, checking the one on her side, “better be farther away than they appear.”
Whose Number Is Up, Anyway? Page 17