“You have some too.”
“I am, Ma.” I turned so she could see the cup. "I already told you.” I carried it to the table, set it down, and took the chair opposite her.
“Get the cookies,” she said. “Oreos, your favorite."
I hadn’t gotten a rush from Oreos in thirty years or more. But I’d promised Glenn I'd be kind. Anyhow, she clearly couldn't help it. It killed me to admit it, but her short-term memory was worse than last time. As a kid, I'd occasionally prayed that Ma would die and God would send me a better mother. If I could make amends by breaking cookies with her now, I’d do it. I looked around and found the package on the table, at her elbow. I dragged it toward me across the stained Irish linen cloth.
“Here, Ma.” I reached out and placed two cookies on her plate. “Bon appetit.”
She stuffed a cookie into her mouth and munched, doing a pretty good job considering the missing teeth.
“Ma, do you want me to get your dentures?” I should have thought of it before I gave her the Oreos.
She shook her head, patted her chest with one hand, and waved my offer away with the other. A flurry of cookie crumbs drifted down and landed on her chest. She coughed.
“Are you okay? Do you want some water?”
She nodded, spraying more crumbs and wheezing. I leaped up and then hesitated, not sure whether to get the water or perform the Heimlich maneuver. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I could do it, but the detox on the Bowery where I first got sober had lacked reading matter, and I’d memorized the poster. Luckily, she caught her breath. She cleared her throat nonstop until I handed her the water. She gulped it down.
“Do you want a cookie?” She set down the empty glass. “I got Oreos.”
Oh, God, what a nightmare. Her short-term memory was shot. She really did have dementia. Barbara had made me google it and insisted we go over the list of symptoms. Trouble with abstract thinking? My mother had never been an intellectual. Losing initiative? What initiative? Becoming passive, not wanting to go places or see people? Passivity was my mother’s life plan, not the loss of something she had ever had. Becoming irritable, suspicious, and fearful? My mother’s basic character.
“Are you still married to that tramp?” my mother asked. “I always knew she was a slut. But when did you ever listen to your mother? Never.”
“Laura’s dead, Ma,” I said. “We got divorced, and then she died.” She’d forget that too, and I’d have to say it over and over. Grudges, on the other hand, she hadn't forgotten yet.
Before I got sober, I used to arm myself with a six-pack before I’d venture into my mother’s lair. She’d kept a dry house since my dad died. In fact, I’d caught her tucking his last bottle of Scotch into the casket at his viewing. Post-mortem enabling. I’d rescued it and downed the whole thing behind a handy mausoleum in the graveyard after the burial. Good thing I was an alcoholic with elevated tolerance for booze, or I’d have ended up in a coma. The numbing effect had worked, but even at the maudlin stage, I’d been unable to cry for my father.
"How are you getting on, Ma? Are you paying the bills on time?"
Talk about cosmic irony. When I was drinking, I used to crumple my own bills up and use them to shoot baskets into the trash. When my dad died, my mother had to learn how to use a checkbook. But she had been functional enough back then to manage it. Now, the DA term "terminally vague" could have been coined to describe her.
"I'm fine," she said. "You don't think anybody else is going to bother helping me, do you? I can stand on my own two feet. And don't you think you can put me in a home, either."
Ready to tear my hair, I put my head in my hands. My elbow knocked aside a folded newspaper on the table, revealing unopened envelopes from Con Ed, Verizon, and the landlord, the last one probably the rent.
"I'm not putting you in a home, Ma," I said. "Where do you keep your checkbook?"
"What do you want my checkbook for?"
"I'm just going to pay these bills for you, Ma. I'm only trying to help."
"I don't need any help."
It took some persuasion, but she finally let me pay the bills, all of them on the brink of overdue. Luckily, the checkbook had been living in the same drawer for so long that we didn't need her short-term memory to find it. I wondered what a DA pressure relief group would say about my getting involved in someone else's finances, even my mother's. One reason I didn't have a pressure group was that I didn't want to know. There were some situations that the program didn't cover. Or had I simply not achieved enough recovery to see how?
Yeah, yeah, I was supposed to trust my Higher Power. I'd gotten better with that, but HP tended to check out when I felt depressed. What if Ma got so bad she couldn’t live alone? Would a Higher Power feed and dress her? Go shopping for her? Pay for a nursing home? Would she have to live with me? Shakespeare said, "The valiant never taste of death but once." I must be a coward, because it was already killing me to think of having Ma on my hands.
My mother took another cookie.
“You should go to confession before it’s too late," she said. "And when are you going to take the pledge? You’re getting to be just like your father.”
She couldn’t even remember I was sober.
Chapter Eighteen: Bruce
"It's too bad the cops didn't find Sophia's fourth step," I said, "instead of Jimmy's."
"Maybe they did," Jimmy said.
"If they had," Barbara said, "they wouldn't have this ridiculous idea that I'm the most likely suspect. They would have a list of people she knew she'd wronged. Her eighth step list would be even better. Just because you make amends to people doesn't mean they forgive you."
"Sophia came across kind of perfect," Jimmy said, with a sidelong glance at Barbara, "in her recovery, I mean. But she told me once that she'd done some things it was hard to make amends for."
I had worked hard to get the two of them to this moment, sitting in their kitchen breaking bread together. Okay, they weren't literally breaking bread, because we were eating Chinese takeout. They still felt hurt and angry. But they were trying to "act as if." So we broke fortune cookies and shoveled in General Tso's chicken as we talked about the murder.
"Did she give you a for instance?" Barbara reached across the table with her chopsticks and snagged a slippery mass of baby eggplant in garlic sauce from the container. "What about meetings? Did she go into detail when she told her story?"
"Not everyone judges a qualification by its entertainment value," Jimmy said.
He looked sideways at Barbara. I knew he was only teasing, but did she? She opened her mouth, then closed it again, as if she was uncertain whether he would take one of her usual snappy retorts amiss. I hated them being on such shaky ground with each other. It made me feel as if the ground under my own feet could crumble any time. In fact, it had, because Cindy still wasn't answering my calls. I didn't want to mess up her shot at making detective. But without her, I had no place to go. Yeah, yeah. I could go to a meeting. Or a bar, if I really wanted to add to my problems, which I didn't.
"I never heard her speak at an AA meeting," Jimmy said. "The big relationship in her DA story was between her and the money. She made major amends to the IRS and Citibank and the Bank of America. I don't think any of them killed her."
I hadn't even thought about the IRS. I'd paid my taxes since I'd gotten sober, and the feds hadn't come after me for the years before then, when I hadn't bothered. Yet. If I had a DA pressure relief group, they could tell me how to make amends. I didn't think a sincere apology would satisfy the IRS.
"What did she do?" I asked.
"She went to each of her creditors," Jimmy said, "and explained about being in recovery. They agreed on a repayment plan that she could manage. It's pretty amazing, when you think about it."
"We need to get hold of Sophia's sponsor," Barbara said. "She'd know Sophia's secrets if anyone did."
"She could have blabbed Sophia's secrets to everyone she met," Jimmy said, "when she was o
ut there drinking and drugging."
"She could have forgotten them, too," I said. "But she's back in program now. We should be able to find her. We know her name and where she worked, and Brent said she goes to the same double winners meeting as the others."
"She must not have gone back to meetings until after Sophia died," Barbara said. "Or could there be some other reason she hasn't shown up by now?"
"You mean she might have known something about Sophia that nobody else did," Jimmy said. "That's the whole point of having a sponsor: someone you trust enough to tell everything."
I glanced sidelong at Barbara. She was biting her lip, probably to hold back an outburst to the effect that you weren't supposed to trust anybody more than the woman you loved.
"Maybe Cousin Brent knows Sophia's secrets," I said. "She might have spilled the beans when she twelve-stepped him into AA. She'd have told him her story to show him how AA worked for her, hoping he'd get it that the program could help him too."
"Why would he share Sophia's beans with us?" Jimmy asked. "I mean, her secrets?"
"Don't be such a pessimist," Barbara said. "He might fall over himself to tell us who had a grudge against Sophia."
"If he killed her," Jimmy said, “he'd want to cast suspicion on anybody but himself."
"If he's not the killer," I said, "he could be dying to talk about it. But maybe the cops have already asked him all our questions."
"I bet they haven't," Barbara said. "I've never seen a single TV cop show where the detectives said, 'I know! We'll ask the cousins!' We know he was important to Sophia because of the program connection. If she hadn't twelve-stepped him, he might be just a guy she sat through a lifetime of Thanksgiving dinners with."
"They could have been drinking buddies, for all we know," I said. "They could have gotten sloshed together every Thanksgiving before she got sober. He could have seen her make her mistakes and enemies. But I'm all for asking. For one thing, I'd like to hear more about Grandpa's will."
Jimmy cracked open his fortune cookie, extracted the fortune, and frowned as he perused it. He turned it over and read the other side with equal concentration. He's the only person I know who does that. He doesn't gamble, so the lucky numbers wouldn't interest him. He's memorizing the Chinese word.
"Let's see if the meeting they mentioned is on the AA meeting list," he said, crumpling the slip of paper. "Thursday lunchtime, Upper West Side, double winner DA focus."
"Look it up, Jimmy," Barbara said.
"Go on, dude, do it," I said.
Electronic devices grow from Jimmy's fingertips. He found the online AA meeting list in seconds.
"Here it is," he said. "Sober and Solvent. That's where we'll find Sophia's friends and maybe even her sponsor."
"I can't go," Barbara said. "I'm not in AA or DA. I’m not the right person for this. Anyhow, I have work."
"You're the meeting maven, Jimmy," I said. "Sober and Solvent sounds perfect for you."
"Thursday?" Jimmy checked his calendar, thumb flashing at the speed of light. "I can't. I have an interview."
"What? What kind of interview? Why didn't you tell me?" Barbara bounced up out of her chair. If she'd been a terrier and the information had been a stick, she would have been hanging by her teeth in midair, tail wagging.
"It's just a job interview," he said. "I don't know if anything will come of it, so there's nothing to tell."
"Just a job interview? Just a job interview?" she screeched. "This is important, Jimmy. Of course I want to know. I didn't even know you'd gotten your resumé together. I wanted to help you."
"Dan and Eleanor helped me," he said. "I said you'd probably take over if I asked you to help. I was joking. But they said I couldn't let you enable me."
Barbara pinched her lips together, the better not to let her first reactive words escape. I could almost see the precepts of Al-Anon streaming across her forehead like old-fashioned ticker tape. I knew Barbara. It killed her not to be allowed to help, and she sure didn't like strangers calling her an enabler. I had to buy her time to calm down.
"What's the job?" I asked. "How did you get the interview?"
"Well, you know, I've been around for a long time." He shifted his shoulders around and scratched his scalp with both hands, trying to get comfortable. "I know a lot of people. I've always gotten job offers."
"What?" That unzipped Barbara's lip in a jiffy. "Why is this the first I've heard about your getting job offers?"
Jimmy shrugged.
"I was never interested," he said. "You know I never wanted to work for someone else."
Thanks to my brief foray into therapy, I know what "passive aggressive" means, in this case avoiding her input on the subject by never mentioning it. Barbara carries most of the guilt in their various conflicts, but Jimmy plays his part. I knew better than to say so.
"So what's the job?"
"Designing apps for a start-up," Jimmy said. "I like the guys, but I'm not sure I want to work in a start-up. Dan and Eleanor keep telling me to think about the level of risk in terms of my goals. The salary would be low and include some equity in the company. If it went public, I could make a bundle. But it's a gamble."
"I bet Dan and Eleanor loved the sound of that," I said.
"No," Jimmy agreed, "a gamble doesn't usually make it into a DA spending plan. And if they got bought out by a big company, well, then I'd be working for a big company anyway. I've already had one interview with them."
I could see steam coming out of Barbara's ears. She emitted a martyred sigh.
"Do you want the job?" I asked.
"They want me," he said, "and that's great. But I have to think about what I really want to do."
"So why go?" I asked.
"Dan and Eleanor think it's a good idea to say yes to every opportunity. Each time, I learn more about what's out there and what my options are."
"I would appreciate your telling me about these things when they're happening, Jimmy." Barbara's cheeks were on fire. I could see a pulse jumping in her throat. "I do have a stake in your financial future, especially if we're getting married. We are still getting married, aren't we?"
I would have made a lousy therapist, always telling people what to do. It was so obvious what they needed to say. He was afraid of saying the wrong thing. She wanted reassurance, so his silence drove her crazy. Maybe Cindy had simply wanted me to reassure her that we could make a relationship between a cop and a civilian work. If so, I had blown it.
"I'm going to wash my face." Barbara flounced out of the room.
"Dude, I think you missed your cue," I said. "You were supposed to say of course you're still getting married."
"How can she not know that?"
"Um, I have a hunch that's not the point," I said. "Is this really the first you've told her about looking for a job? What about that guy Costello? Didn't the rabbi's wife talk to him about you after all?"
"She did," he said, "but we played phone tag for a while, and now he's out of the country."
"Why didn't you tell Barbara?"
"Costello is a much bigger deal and a much longer shot than this start-up. I didn't want to say anything and then disappoint her."
"Disappoint me how?" Barbara asked, coming back into the room with her face scrubbed pink and her eyes puffy from crying.
"Telling you about something that ends up not panning out," he said.
"For God's sake, Jimmy," she said, "please take my word for it that I'd rather know."
"Can't you design apps on your own?" I asked.
"I could, and I have," he said. "But Dan and Eleanor think a regular paycheck will help me face up to my responsibilities."
I snuck a glance at Barbara. "Face up to my responsibilities" sounded like "Yes, we're getting married and having a baby" to me. Unfortunately, what she probably heard was "Dan and Eleanor think."
"So Thursday is up to you, Bruce," Barbara said.
"Okay, okay," I said. "The mission, should I choose to accept it, is .
. . "
"Go to the meeting," she said. "If Brent is there, make contact. You know how to schmooze."
"I'll ask around for Judith too," I said. "How many opera singers just back from relapse can there be?"
"If we're lucky," Barbara said, "Grace will show up too. See if she knows what will happen to Sophia's business."
"What if she killed Sophia," Jimmy asked, "so she could take over her business?"
"Should I ask?"
"Don't be silly," Barbara said. "The killer's not going to confess. But you might get clues. I wonder if the cops have figured out that Sophia and all those witnesses were in program together. What does Cindy have to say about it?"
"Nothing," I said. "Right now I'm just a flax seed stuck between the teeth of her career."
"Oh, Bruce!" Barbara reached out and gave my hand a squeeze. "I'm so sorry, sweetie."
"It's okay, Barb," I said. "I'll go to the damn meeting and find out whatever I can."
"And ask questions."
"And ask questions. About?"
"PR, Sophia's business, the Schofields, inheritance, wills, the day Sophia died." She added, "Use your judgment."
I was good. I didn't even make a joke.
"I'm on it. I have to get going."
I pushed back my chair. The trouble with Chinese food is that it's soothing to the feelings, but you feel depressed again an hour later.
Chapter Nineteen: Bruce
The Thursday Sober and Solvent meeting was in full swing. I wondered if the AA grapevine had spread the word about the meeting that had been started by a murder victim, where you might be lucky enough to hear some of the witnesses share about the murder. But maybe not. Anonymity means you're not supposed to gossip. The speaker didn't mention it. He gave a straight AA qualification, five years sober, until the end, when he admitted that his credit cards were maxed out.
"I've been realizing that I get a charge, no pun intended, out of buying every gadget that catches my eye and then either never using it or upgrading as soon as the latest model comes out. I've got a robotic vacuum cleaner, six portable chargers for my phone and tablet, a camcorder that an NFL coach could use to analyze plays, and four other cameras, one with enough optical zoom for a private eye to use for snooping. Lately, I've been obsessing about buying a genuine carousel horse, and those aren't cheap. I don't even have a place to put it. I think HP is trying to tell me my spending is getting irrational."
Death Will Pay Your Debts Page 32