Clive saluted him solemnly. “OK. The one in the middle it is, then. I’m counting on it.” He drew the scratch card closer and motioned at Daniel for another drink. “Easy livin’, here we come. Me and the boys from Bud’s Tavern.”
The scratcher was a bust, and Hector shook his head as he walked off, muttering. Clive slapped the bar again, this time gently, and took a sip of his whiskey. “Well. Only two left now.” He watched Dan collect the debris and throw it away. “So… what’s new with you? How’s it going with that old lady? Dog still bugging you?”
Daniel looked down at his feet and thought about the birds. “You could say that.”
“You talk to her about it?”
“Nah. I tried taking him back home a few times. I put him in her yard. Gate seems secure, but he always gets right out again.”
“Must know how to open the gate. Shepherd, you said?”
“Yeah. They’re smart.”
“Sure enough they are. Shepherds are damn smart. You oughta talk to her, though. Maybe she’d do something.”
Daniel nodded an empty nod. “I just wish she’d sell the house. Then she’d move away and I wouldn’t have a dog problem anymore.”
“You don’t know that. Could be you’ll get a worse neighbor. One with three-four dogs barking all night long. Or some kids with a band, playing all hours.” Clive reached for the pretzels and scooped out a small handful of them. He set them on the bar and arranged them in a circle. “I used to live next to this guy… he was such a pain in the ass. He’d be cleaning his yard, and he’d throw the crap over my fence. Bottles, paper, whatever. Dogshit. Rocks, anything. He had a little dog, too, barked a lot. So I was glad when he moved away. This was years ago.”
Clive rearranged the pretzels as he spoke; now they were in a long line. He tapped them gently, evening up the edges. “Then the new guys moved in there. They had a band, played loud rock music. Lousy music, first of all, let me make that clear. Not even good music. They were out howling at the damn moon, partying all night… and they threw trash all over the place.”
“Better the devil you know, right?”
Clive laughed and swept the pretzels into a pile. “Besides, I’ve seen the look on your face. I think you’d miss the old gal if she left. I think you like doing things for her, painting her kitchen and all that.”
“Maybe. It’s not like I really mind helping her out. I’m just tired, is all. I was on her roof at nine this morning, and now I’m here until midnight, and I have to be back here at eight tomorrow.”
“Damn.” Clive ate a pretzel and scratched one of the two remaining cards. It was a one dollar winner. “Getting rich here, one scratcher at a time. I’m up an entire dollar now. When you become bartender on my private yacht I’ll make sure you don’t have any late shifts.”
Daniel laughed. “Well. Bud says he’s bringing his son in to help. We’ll see how that goes.”
“Son?” Clive’s eyebrows went up. “Is he a bartender?”
“No. He’s in computers, I think. We’ll see how it goes. Bud thinks it’ll take some of the pressure off. More help, teach the kid the business. Maybe Bud can retire early.”
“Early? How old is Bud?”
“Um.” Daniel looked up, thinking. “Well, I don’t know, not too old. He’s around seventy I think.”
Clive slapped the bar, laughing. “Retiring early. At seventy. Well, age is all relative anyway. How old’s your lady across the street?”
“Dunno, around the same age I guess. Seventy or so. I never asked.”
“So. She’s old, and Bud’s not?”
“Well…” Daniel began, then faltered. What could he say? “Ellie seems older than she is, I guess. Maybe because she doesn’t get out enough. Bud just seems like… Bud.”
Clive drained his drink and toyed with the last scratch card. “She should get out more, then, if it’s making her that old. Here,” he said, sliding the scratcher across the bar. “A tip for you. Remember me when you’re rich.”
Daniel thanked him. After Clive had gone, he looked long and hard at the scratcher before slipping it into his pocket. What would he do with a million dollars, if he won? Quit his job, buy a new house, move away. No more dog haunting his porch with his dead gifts and his yellow-eyed stare. Sure, he might miss Ellie, but he’d get used to that pretty fast. Especially if he started sleeping well, he’d get used to it. He could visit Ellie, after all. Maybe even hire her a gardener.
At the end of his long, long shift, he scratched the ticket. It won nothing.
Chapter 42
Later that week, Daniel came home from the store and pulled into his driveway. He had groceries in the back seat, and they’d fallen over. He leaned in to sort them. When he pulled his head back out again, Ellie was on her porch, calling to him. He turned, arms full of groceries, to see what she wanted.
“You have any eggs?” She shifted from foot to foot and grinned at him somewhat sheepishly. “I’m trying to make cookies. Remember? I said I’d make cookies, and keep the eggshells? Well… I’m out of eggs.”
He laughed, and looked helplessly at the bags in his arms. “Not on me, but I have some inside. Hang on, I’ll bring you a couple.” He opened his door and let himself in, quickly put away his few groceries, and ran his fingers over the eggs resting in their little cups in the refrigerator door. How many did she need? He tried to remember the last time he made cookies. Two, wasn’t it? He selected two eggs, then changed his mind and made it three. He bumped the fridge door shut with his hip and turned, cradling the three eggs against his chest. Gringo was watching him from the living room.
“Shit. Get out of here.” He shooed the dog along to the door, which he’d left standing wide open. “Enough of you as it is, I don’t need you inside. Go on.” He nudged Gringo through the doorway with his knee and followed him out. The dog threw himself down on the porch with a sigh.
Ellie was no longer on her porch, but her door was wide open. Daniel carried the eggs across and called to her. She appeared in the hall by the kitchen and waved him inside.
“Here,” he said, holding the eggs out. She took them with a smile.
“Thank you, Daniel. I feel like a fool. This whole day… one thing after another. I started off with the coffee, and then I thought about the eggshells, so I decided today was the day. I had planned to make snickerdoodles.” Ellie held the three eggs against her with one arm and raised the hand of the other to clear stray hair out of her eyes. “Of course, I couldn’t remember the recipe exactly. So I got out the flour and the oil and the cinnamon… the stuff I know it calls for, you see. Then I started looking around for the recipe, but I don’t know where it’s got to. Oh, it’s around here somewhere, I know. But if I can find it, I’ll be damned.”
“I know that feeling.” Daniel leaned on the wall and nodded, watching Ellie describe her morning frustrations. She was still in her nightgown, a pale blue number with frills at the cuffs.
“So I decided to heck with it, I remember it well enough. The recipe. I mean, they’re just basically sugar cookies. They call for cream cheese, which I’m out of, but you can make them without it. Not as good, but… oh, well. I was just going to do without. Then I started measuring the flour, and look! There’s bugs in it.” She pointed dramatically at a sack of flour. “They aren’t moving, at least. What are those? Weevils?”
Daniel picked up the flour and poked his finger through it, shaking it gently until he got one of the bugs close enough to take in his hand. It was certainly not moving, and it wasn’t a weevil, either. “Carpet beetles,” he said. “Larvae, anyway. This was a baby. That’s why it’s not moving; it’s just a shell. The larvae shed their skins as they grow. There’s nothing inside it. See?” He held it out on the tip of his finger toward Ellie, who made a squeamish face but leaned in anyway to peer at it.
“It’s not there?”
“Nothing there but the outside. The exoskeleton. The little guy got too big for his
clothes and took them off. You’ve seen spider skeletons around, right? Same thing.” He resumed poking around in the flour. “There’s a lot of ‘em. You can sift them out of the flour, you know. They won’t really hurt anything.” But he knew from the look on her face she was having none of that.
“No, thank you just the same. Ugh. Beetles? Baby beetles? So there’s grown ones here somewhere?”
Daniel shrugged. The whole world was damn near made of insects. “Probably. Don’t think about it too much.”
Ellie drew a deep breath, became aware of the eggs she was still holding, and shifted them slightly. “Well, anyway, there I was: no flour. So I looked in the cabinets to see if I had any more stashed in the back. I didn’t have more flour – of course if I had, it would have been full of bugs too, probably – but I found this box mix. It’s pretty old, I guess. But they put a zillion preservatives in these things. There’s no bugs in it; I checked.” She handed the empty box to Daniel. “So I poured the mix in, and measured the oil and water. And then…well.”
“You didn’t have eggs.”
“Exactly. Or eggs-actly,” she added with a small, quiet laugh. “I was going to give up and just accept the fact that I wasn’t supposed to make cookies today. That’s when you showed up.” She set the eggs on the counter and looked at the box directions, then smiled at Daniel. “Thanks for the loan. But I only need two. You can have the third one back.”
“Oh, keep it. You can have it for breakfast tomorrow.”
“Well, thank you. I might. It looks like a good egg. Put it in the fridge for me, will you?” She looked up from her mixing and smiled. “You’re a good egg yourself, you know it?”
Daniel tugged the door open and set the egg carefully in the holder. The good egg. His mother had called him that, too. Behind him, he heard Ellie cracking the others. He turned just in time to see her throw the shells into the trash, and he let out a little grunt of irritation.
She looked up, startled. “What?”
He pointed. “The shells. Remember?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake.” She gestured helplessly. “I… would you…?”
“No sweat.” He fished the shells out and set them on a saucer by the sink.
“I wonder if I’m supposed to wash those before I put them in the coffee. I guess I will. Do you think I have to crush them up, or just put them in like they are?”
He shook his head. He had no idea. Ellie began dispensing batter onto the cookie sheets in neat, orderly rows.
“Eggs are good for you. I should eat them more. Good for your hair.” She began spooning dough in little heaps onto the cookie sheets. “Your hair is really thick and shiny. You probably eat a lot of eggs, don’t you?”
“Some,” he said, running his fingers through his short hair briefly and enjoying the feel of it falling back into place. He hadn’t been able to do that when his hair was longer. When they first started the landscape business, he’d had long hair. Down to his shoulders, anyway. Sal had wanted him to cut it, saying he would be too hot. He had been right. Within two months, Daniel had cut it shorter. When full-on summer came, he’d cut it shorter still, even shorter than Sal’s. His girl had laughed at him and said he looked like an army soldier. Maybe that was the beginning of the end.
He’d wondered that more than once: just exactly where it had first gone wrong with his girl, and whether the length of his hair had played any part in it. Was it the broke-ass way he was living, trying to get the business going, was it the hours he was working, or was it the way he stank of dirt and pesticides and exhausted sweat when he came home? Maybe it was something he’d said or done that made it easy for her to turn away from him. Or, maybe it was something as stupid as the army-soldier length of his hair. Now, working as a bartender, he could certainly let it grow again if he wanted to. He’d thought about it.
Ellie was banging cookie sheets into the oven behind him. “Ten minutes,” she said, setting the timer on the oven. She drew her arm back and looked at it, frowning. “I got batter on my… well, look at me. I’m not even dressed. Will you watch those cookies, Daniel? Let me throw on some clothes.” She didn’t wait for him to agree, but moved off toward the bedroom.
He watched the cookies. They browned unevenly, so he donned an oven mitt and rotated them. When the timer went off, he took them out. Ellie still hadn’t returned, so he let them cool for a few minutes, then removed them to the cooling racks and sat at the counter, wishing he had a cup of coffee. With or without eggshells. He was blobbing spoonfuls of batter onto the cookie sheets for the second batch when Ellie came back in, wearing pants and a loose-fitting t-shirt with a picture of a cow on it.
“Nice cow.” Daniel fiddled with the last bit of batter, scraping it out of the bowl and licking the spoon.
Ellie swatted at him. “Don’t. Eggs are poison.”
“I thought you said eggs were good for you.”
“Not raw, they aren’t.” She tugged the spoon out of his hand and tossed it at the sink, where it landed and clanked around. “Can’t believe you don’t know that, Daniel.”
He did know, he just didn’t worry about it much. “What are the odds, really?”
She moved to the sink and began washing out the bowl quietly. Daniel picked out a cookie from the cooling rack and bit into it. “They taste better when they’re cooked, anyway.”
“That’s true.” Ellie wiped her hands with the dishtowel and selected a cookie of her own and they sat together eating cookies for a while in silence.
When Daniel got ready to leave, she put a hand on his arm. “I want you to take some home with you. I can’t eat all these cookies. Shouldn’t, either, unless I want to be big as a house.” She pulled out a stack of paper plates, and began loading cookies onto one of them.
He held a hand up to stop her. “I don’t want that many. Just a few.”
“Oh, go on. You can take some to work with you.”
He considered. “I’ll take some to Greg.” He grabbed a second plate and shifted a handful of cookies onto it. “He’ll appreciate them, I’m sure.”
“That’s a great idea.” Ellie watched Daniel arrange the cookies neatly. When he was finished, she leaned in to put a paper plate on top of each one like a lid.
“This is how my mother always did it,” she explained when she saw Daniel watching her.
She drew forth a length of foil and wrapped each package tightly, then handed them to him. “It was fun, today.”
Daniel rang Greg’s doorbell, and then stood waiting, an amused smile on his face. He’d been living here for years, and spoken to Greg probably hundreds of times, but he’d never rung the doorbell before. It played a tune: Beautiful Dreamer.
Greg came to the door and stepped back to let him in, and Mary appeared behind him.
“Danny!” Greg said. “What brings you out today? Have you met Mary?”
Daniel shifted the cookies and held out his hand to her. “Nice to meet you.”
Mary smiled a smile full of huge teeth. She towered over Greg by what was probably no more than six inches but seemed like a foot. When she took Daniel’s hand, she clasped it in both of hers and shook it as though she was trying to dislodge something from it. “Hi! It’s nice to meet you,” she said, almost shouting. “I hear so many good things.”
“I see. Well, I hear good things about you.” Daniel hadn’t heard very much about her, really. He wondered what she could have heard about him. Probably nothing. It was just something people said, wasn’t it? “I just came from Ellie’s. We made cookies. She wanted me to bring you some.”
Greg took the cookies and passed them to Mary. “Why, that’s very nice. Yes. Thank you.” He squinted at Daniel. “She still bakes?”
“Well, sure she does,” Daniel said. Then he thought about the flour. “Not very often, but yes, she bakes. I helped her a little.”
“Chocolate chip!” Mary said, peeking into the package. “My favorite.”
�
��Nothing fancy. Just a mix.”
“Well that’s fine, just fine. Thank you again! You be sure to give her our thanks as well! I should make some cookies, too. Maybe I’ll make some next week. How’s that sound, Greg? What’s your favorite kind?”
Greg held his hands out in a semi-shrug and grinned. “Any kind is fine with me, Mare. I’m not fussy.”
Mary talked about cookies for a while and Greg agreed with everything she said. Eventually Daniel left them and returned to his own house. Gringo was on the porch, looking up at him. His coat was thick and shiny, and Daniel chuckled.
“Your hair’s as pretty as mine, Gringo,” he said with a laugh. “You been eating lots of eggs too?”
He thought about the dead birds and wondered.
Chapter 43
Bud’s son started work at the bar. His first official act had been to buy new trashcans. Daniel tapped his foot against one, so new it still smelled of the factory instead of the trash inside it. “What do you think?”
Margie raised an eyebrow. “Dunno. Good, I guess. We needed some trashcans.”
“Yeah.” Daniel kicked at the can again, lifted the edge with his foot, watched it wobble back into place when he let it go. New trashcans were fine. But… “You know, these were like eighty bucks each, if you count the shipping.”
“No way.”
“Yes, way. I saw the invoice. He ordered—” Daniel broke off, casting his eye down the bar. Bud’s son Billy was seated at the end of it, flipping through the pages of a restaurant supply catalog, no doubt searching for more things he could order. So far, that was all he’d done: sit at the bar and sip tall glasses of Coke and order items out of catalogs.
Daniel lowered his voice. “He ordered more stuff this morning.”
“Well. He’s trying to get involved, I guess.”
“Yeah.” They watched Billy for a few moments as he reached across to refill his glass and then picked up his pencil and began making marks, apparently filling out an order form.
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