Fowl Weather (23 page)

“There we go!” my mother cried. “Now we're cooking with gas.”

Her use of that old catchphrase from the Harry S. Truman era led me to ask her about her youth as I paid a few bills at the dining room table and drank a cup of tea. She didn't find a sure footing for spinning a tale until my mention of her 1937 trip to Cuba brought an excited glow to her eyes.

“Well, I think I told you before that I went with four other girls, including May Heaver, who was my boss at Mueller Brass in Port Huron, and her cousin Kathy, who was an epileptic. But I probably didn't mention that when we landed in Havana, we were met by Mr. José Ollio himself.”

“Who's José Ollio?”

“He was the head of the José Ollio Company,” my mother beamed. “He was an important man, but he gave us gals the royal treatment, because he did a lot of business with Mueller Brass.”

I didn't mind that I had heard most of the Cuban anecdotes before. I loved the idea of my mom as an adventurous girl just out of high school taking a trip that her father didn't approve of. Many years
later she convinced my dad to forgo their annual four-thousand-mile-long asphalt oval in favor of a trip abroad instead. He ended up enjoying the bus tour of England so much and relished sharing stories and influenza bugs with his fellow bus passengers to such a degree that encapsulated trips to Spain, Germany, Morocco, Thailand, and China followed.

I mentioned to my mom that I was fond of Cuban music, and she told me that José Ollio had taken them to Havana nightclubs. “The orchestra would play one set of American songs, then after an intermission they'd play Latin numbers.” She also mentioned a cab driver who had committed an unnamed naughty indiscretion that resulted in all five of the girls bolting from the taxi at a traffic light.

“How did you find your way back to the hotel?” I said, laughing.

“I don't remember that,” she said. “I think we just waited for another cab.”

My mom's good mood carried over until the following afternoon, when her furnace stopped again. Bett remembered that a close friend of Mom and Dad's used to inspect furnaces for the City of Grand Rapids and knew the older models inside and out, so she gave him a call.

“Mike found the problem,” Mom told me on the phone after dinner. “He even had the right part at home, and he said he was saving the box to remind him of the part number in case it goes ka-flooey again.”

All seemed well until the phone rang an hour later and my mom asked me, “The next time you stop by, would you please bring back the package that was on the countertop? I didn't get a chance to open it yet.”

“What package would that be?”

“I don't what it was, but Mike dropped it off.”

“You're thinking of the furnace part he replaced,” I told her.

“Is that what it was?”

“He didn't even leave it. He showed you the box and took it with him.”

This answer satisfied her for about forty minutes. “I'm sorry to bother you again,” she said. “But I need the package that you took from the countertop.” When I ran through my explanation about Mike and the furnace part, she insisted that he had also dropped off a package for her. While we talked, Dusty muttered in the background in a perfect imitation of my telephone manner, “Uhhuh. Oh? Hmm. Okay. Bye-bye,” until I hung up.

“Maybe he did bring her something, and she hid it,” Linda suggested.

Just to be on the safe side, Dusty and I called Mike and asked him if he had indeed left anything with my mom. He told me no, but he suggested that we consider replacing the furnace. He didn't think he'd be able to fix it the next time it went ka-flooey.

B
USINESS HAD APPARENTLY
gone ka-flooey at the Weigh and Pay. As Bill Holm and I approached the cash register with our food plates ready for the scale, Bo pointed at a sheet of paper taped to the wall announcing a new pricing policy in a rainbow of computer typefaces. “No more of that weighing bull,” he informed us. “I finally convinced Dad to just charge one price like a normal buffet, so go back and load up your dish.”

I shook my head. “I don't eat very much.” In an apparent concession to Bo's father, golden oldies from the 1960s showered us from the ceiling speaker in place of heavy metal.

“I'll be back for seconds,” Bill told Bo as we headed for a booth along the wall under the scrutiny of the only occupied table in the restaurant. From the expressions on the gawkers' faces and the
lettering on the yellow bus parked outdoors, these were residents of a home for the developmentally disabled who had never witnessed anyone eating food before. Each forkful that rose to my mouth received silent scrutiny from diners that weren't doing much dining themselves. A taste of my au gratin potatoes suggested a reason why.

“They're doing interesting things with leather these days.”

“You should try the chicken,” said Bill. “It's older than Eric Burdon.”

Between slowly swallowed mouthfuls, I described the recent spate of phone calls from my mother. “The accusations are unrelenting. In the past, she'd call me once or twice suggesting that I'd stolen something of hers, and that would be it. But I've heard from her every day this week about the package I was supposed to have taken.”

“Wouldn't it be easier to bring it back?”

“I would if I could. But this has got to be about my father, and I'm a miserable substitute. Maybe that's what's supposed to be in the package.”

“The missing ingredients—so to speak?” Bill poked unhappily at a dollop of macaroni and cheese. “It certainly doesn't need more salt.”

I spoke quietly so that the vigilant Bo didn't overhear. “Any word from Bobo?”

“Just ‘Beep Beep.'”

“Why ‘Beep Beep'?”

“That's the question. Carol and I were driving to her brother's house, and she had the radio on. It was playing Nilsson's ‘Don't Leave Me.' “

Here we go,
I thought.
Another Nilsson rant.

“You know, his parody of dramatic loss-of-love songs.”

“Yes, I kind of remember it,” I mumbled to my mashed potatoes.

“I was amazed to hear it. It's so funny. He was such a tortured man—so skilled and emotive in so many styles and forms, yet
at the same time he hates them for their clichés and their grip on him. His stuff is so very serious and funny and ironic and arty. It's so derivative and so original all at the same time, and the tension ended up killing him. That's my theory, anyway. I was kind of tingly hearing it, and it has that part where he just wails to the woman who dumped him, ‘Beep-beep, bip-bip yeah,'—you know, from the Beatles ‘Drive My Car,' as if that's going to win her back somehow. It's an amazing performance. Then that awful ‘Dust in the Wind' by Kansas came on, and as I changed the station, I said to Carol that one song I hadn't heard in years was ‘Beep Beep'—the one about the little Nash Rambler trying to pass the Cadillac—and you can guess what song came on next.”

As if on cue, Bo interrupted us by honking, “How's the food, guys?” But his display of enthusiasm dissipated as he plopped down on the red leatherette bench next to Bill and groused, “This weather isn't helping us at all. If things don't start to turn around, we'll be lucky to stay open another month.”

The weather grew steadily more dismal as we consoled Bo with a few oblique phrases while eating around the worst parts of our meals. By the time we had jettisoned our substance-laden plates in the trash receptacle, snow covered Bill's blue Jetta. We could barely see the road in front of us on the two-mile drive back to my house. “Don't you think you had better head home?” I said. “Spare yourself further exposure to the perils of the world at large?”

“You wish,” he told me. “Not when there's good television to watch.”

To Bill, “good television” meant finding the Inuit-language Canadian channel on our satellite system and watching a Frobisher Bay resident cook an apparent lump of animal fat over a campfire. “That looks better than anything we ate,” he said. “At least it didn't sit around for a couple of weeks.”

Safely isolated from the glare of our personalities, Linda lay in
the bedroom talking on the phone with the door closed. After a while, she came out to ask, “Did you hear something?”

“It sounded like a pop,” said Bill.

“It sounded like an accident,” Linda said.

Spread out across the windows of the front porch, we strained to find signs of a wreck through the swirling snow and darkness. “Maybe the ice is cracking again,” I offered. Then an SUV slowed and turned on its emergency flashers. As it pulled onto the shoulder, its headlights illuminated a car sitting sideways just off the road. Steam poured out of the pulverized engine section. A teenage boy and girl stood in the ditch with dazed expressions. As one man from the SUV approached them, another ran past them toward our barn.

Throwing on their jackets, Linda hurried outside to talk to the teenagers while Bill followed the man into the darkness. He returned quickly. “It looks pretty bad,” he said. “There's isn't much left of the other car.”

I dialed 911 as Bill went back outdoors. “Can you check to see if anyone's hurt?” the operator asked me.

“There's not much left of the car,” I parroted.

“We need to know if we should send an ambulance.”

Bill ducked his head through the door as I stretched the telephone cord toward the porch. “The guy in the red car is unconscious,” he told me. “We can't get at him.”

“Send the ambulance,” I said.

“The people from the other car seem to be okay,” Bill added.

Linda had joined us again. “This woman who lives in Ionia just around the corner from the Chinese restaurant said the people in the white car passed her on the curve. She said they were passing everybody.”

A man in a dark blue stocking cap came into the glow of our outside light. “Call an ambulance.”

“It's on the way.”

Bill returned to the car with the man trapped inside, while Linda crossed the road to talk to a few more people who had joined the gathering crowd. I suited up and stood in the front yard. The man with the blue stocking cap set up flares and started directing traffic. I stared down the long curve toward Lowell until I saw the first flicker of emergency-vehicle lights and heard the sirens. When I came back into the house, the phone was ringing.

“I'm sorry to bother you so late,” my mother said. “But when you get a chance, could you bring back the package that Mike left for me? I never got a chance to look at it.”

“There's been an accident outside,” I told her. Flashing red lights swept the living room walls as a fire truck rumbled into position. “I talked to Mike already. Remember? We discussed this earlier today. He told me that he didn't leave anything at your house. There isn't any package.”

“It might not have been Mike,” she said, “but somebody left something somewhere.”

I couldn't really argue with that. It was as succinct a summing up of the seeming randomness of events in life as I had ever heard. “Call Joan and ask her about it. Maybe she knows something.” I certainly didn't. In fact, I knew a little less about the world every day.

I went back outdoors. The snow had begun to let up a little. Headlights lined the road in both directions as far as I could see. “I'll never get out of here,” said Bill's voice from behind me. While firemen worked on the crushed car, an ambulance driver convinced the teenage boy and girl to go with him. As he ducked his head and climbed into the back, the boy held his elbow to his chest as if he had been hurt.

Bill followed me inside. “Beep beep,” he said.

My mother's house was drowning in little slips of paper. She could have worked for a fortune cookie company, although most people, upon finishing their moo goo gai pan, might have been perplexed to crack open a cookie and encounter the message “Bring back my aluminum mixing bowls.” One note caught my eye as I hauled myself upstairs to hunt for the sixteenth pair of scissors we had bought her. Poking out of the back of my dad's antique-style clock on the archway overlooking the living room was the merest hint of the corner of a yellow sticky-note. I popped open the battery compartment to find a memo from four months earlier, which reported, “Purse is behind the humidifier, 12/29.” If my mom couldn't remember where she had hidden the purse, I wondered how she could recall where she had hidden the reminder about her purse.

Returning downstairs sans scissors, I spotted a spiral-bound notebook topping a heap of junk mail on the dining room table. At first, the taped-together advertisements commanded my attention. I had torn them into pieces and thrown them away the previous week so that my mom wouldn't confuse them with her bills and
try to pay them. But she had retrieved them from the wastebasket and reconstructed them with the care of a museum curator. As I stuffed them into a plastic trash bag for immediate conveyance to the garage garbage bin, my eyes wandered to the open page of the notebook; then I sat down to read the entry in full.

“When I was talking to Linda on the phone, Bob asked if he could see the watch that my husband gave me for our anniversary,” my mom wrote. “He stuck it in his pocket and took it home with him. I want that watch back. If he doesn't return it, I will call the lawyer and remove him from my will.”

“What's this?” I asked my mom as she bustled around the kitchen.

“Oh, that.” She casually ripped out the page and crumpled it up. “You haven't seen my anniversary watch, have you?”

“The one that's upstairs in your dresser drawer? Why on earth would you think I'd take that home?”

She chuckled guiltily. “I just get worked up sometimes. You know me. If I put it in the drawer, it was probably because I didn't want those little boys from next door to find it.”