Perfect on Paper (12 page)

I watched relief replace the apprehension on his face, but only for a moment.

“Aunt Dana?”

“Yes?”

“You’d tell me if my mom was gonna, like, die, right?”

“Is that what you’re worried about? Believe me, Eddie—if your mother was sick, I’d be moving into your guest room,
not
taking the 11:14 back to New York City.”

Finally Eddie relaxed, hugged me goodbye, and retreated upstairs to sleep off his gaming hangover. I used my sleeve to blot my suddenly moist eyes before joining Elinor Ann in the kitchen.

She was pacing between the stove and the refrigerator, gnawing on a thumbnail and hyperventilating.

“Ready to go?” I said.

In response, she leaned over the sink and threw up.

“God, I wish I could blame the potpie for that,” she whimpered, flicking the switch on the disposal.

CHAPTER NINE
THE CAT IN THE HAT COMES BACK

B
y the time we pulled into Renningers’ parking lot, Elinor Ann had run through nearly half a roll of paper towels mopping the sweat from her palms. “Thank god you remembered to bring these,” she said, tearing off another sheet. “If my hands had slipped on the steering wheel—”

“But they didn’t,” I interrupted. “And you didn’t crash the car, and we didn’t die, and nothing bad’s going to happen on your way home, either.”

She winced at my mention of her pending solo trip. “I’d really rather not talk about that right now.” She parked, and we entered the low building that housed the antique dealers: two narrow aisles of jam-packed booths that connected at one end to a larger structure occupied by a farmers’ market. I turned left toward the market, but before I could take a single step, Elinor Ann’s hand clamped onto my shoulder.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“The Plain & Fancy Donut Shop, where else?” We always kicked off our visits to Renningers with their Long Johns, éclair-shaped sugar bombs roughly four times the size of a normal doughnut. In the unlikely event I make it to heaven, I expect to see Long Johns sharing space on the buffet table alongside the more traditional fare of manna and ambrosia.

“Don’t make me eat anything today,” she pleaded. “I’ll just barf again on my way home from the bus station.”

Her expression was so mournful, all I could do was envelop her in a hug. “It’s going to be okay,” I said, stroking up and down her spine. I could feel her whole body trembling. Over her shoulder, the sleazy antique firearms dealer whose booth we always took pains to avoid leered at us unabashedly.

“Have a super day… ladies,” he said, in a tone reminiscent of the late Barry White, after we’d let go of one another and passed by the front of his display case.

“What’s with him?” Elinor Ann whispered.

“I think he mistook our exchange for girl-on-girl action.”

She rolled her eyes. “No wonder I’d rather stay home.”

“Well, you’ve come this far. Let’s find the crazy woman with the four-foot-long braids—she ought to have vintage dish towels.”

Elinor Ann picked up eight towels, and I expanded my collection of amateur dog paintings with an astoundingly awful portrait of a German shepherd that appeared to have both eyes on the same side of its head, and then it was time to face the inevitable.

“I’m sure you can manage this,” I said.

“I’m glad one of us thinks so.”

“Of course I do. Why, I’ll bet you could even handle a detour to the convenience store on our way to the bus stop.”

She groaned. “I should have known. Your precious
New York Times
.”

“Hey—you can’t deprive me of my Saturday crossword. I’ve already been denied my Long John.”

She made a show of consulting her watch. “We still have a few minutes. I’m sure that creepy gun dealer would be delighted to provide you with
his
Long John.”

“A joke! There’s hope!”

“Shut up.”

I refused to let Elinor Ann wait with me for the bus to arrive from Reading. “Keep your momentum going,” I instructed. “And call me the instant you get home. The bus isn’t due for fifteen minutes; I’ll still be sitting right here.”

She sighed. “I know this is stupid.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. If I can manage to get back and forth to work every day, you’d think I’d be able to drive the five miles home.”

“Well, sure—that’s the logical way to look at it. But you’re crazy, remember?”

Finally she managed a smile. “I knew I could count on you for moral support.”

I gave her a parting squeeze, then stood and waved and prayed—even though I don’t usually go in for that sort of thing—until the car was out of sight.

“She has to get better,” I beseeched the vaguely face-shaped image embedded in an overhead cloud formation. I’d been praying to sort-of-faces in clouds ever since I was a kid, preferring a visible embodiment of my alleged creator over the amorphous “force of nature” that many agnostics espouse.

“Please let Elinor Ann get home safely,” I added. “And while you’re at it, maybe you could just… cure her?”

I sighed and sat down on the curb. The next few minutes would be harrowing for both of us. Thank Cloud I had the newspaper to pass the time.

I was all the way up to the Metro section, more than enough time for her to cover the distance between Fair Street and the Burkholder homestead, when the bus rounded the corner. What the hell was going on?

Nothing,
I answered myself.
She’s probably so happy she made it back, she forgot to call. Or one of the boys woke up and distracted her with a breakfast order. Or she stopped to chat with the old lady next door.

Or she’s stranded on the side of the road in a state of coronary arrest.

I reached into the little side pouch of my purse where I always keep my cell phone, but it was empty. With growing anxiety, I rooted through the entire bag, but to no avail. Even though I knew I hadn’t put it in my duffel, I checked that next and confirmed the obvious. Had it slipped out onto Elinor Ann’s car seat? Had I laid it down while paying for the dog portrait?

I cursed under my breath. Of course I hadn’t. I could see the phone in my mind’s eye, still attached to its charger, which was plugged into the socket next to the bureau in the Burkholders’ guest room.

Which was fine. Elinor Ann was home, and she was fine. She’d taken the first step. And she’d take another step on Monday, just as soon as I convinced her to drive to the post office and send me my damn phone, which I was a
stupid
,
stupid idiot
for leaving behind.

But there was nothing I could do about that now, so I might as well get on the damn bus and solve the crossword.

Since it was just under a half hour’s ride from Kutztown to Wescosville, and since the devious Saturday puzzle often took longer than a Sunday, I always challenged myself to complete it before the doors of the bus opened for the next influx of passengers. For the past several years, I’d achieved my goal even before the bus made the turn off Route 222, but as soon as I opened the Arts section and located the puzzle, I knew today’s ride would be a race against time. The byline on top of the grid read “W. W. W. Moody.”

To put it succinctly, I was his bitch. This was a man—I was convinced he was a pudgy, middle-aged mathematician—who knew exactly how to phrase his clues to elicit maximum confusion (“Number?” for NOVOCAINE); who packed his grid with misleading letter patterns (ONTV?
Ohhh
—“On TV”); who rarely included a theme to ease the plight of the solver. His diabolic constructions usually appeared on Saturdays, and my finished product would invariably be riddled with corrected squares, the pen marks getting darker and thicker each time a letter was changed, then changed again.

I could hardly wait for the bus to get moving.

I had read nearly half the Across clues before I was sure enough of an answer to ink in three squares: “Bill supporting science education” was definitely NYE, as in “Bill Nye, the Science Guy.”

“Catawampus”? “Complects”? “Cassowary”?
Crap!

“Lola locale,” 33-Down, was surely COPA. What a sadist that W. W. W. Moody was. Not only was he causing me to feel like a complete moron, but now Barry Manilow was singing his lungs out inside my cranium.

“Shop securer”? “Saganaki selections”? “Strep source”?
Shit!!

Eventually the Saganaki selections turned out to be FETAS and the source of the dreaded strep was revealed as a DRSERROR—doctor’s error.…

Ahhh
. “Shop securer” was C CLAMP, and “Catawampus,” AWRY. But what the hell was a “rudra veena,” and what could its successor possibly be?

SITAR.
Satan!!!

The hiss of bus brakes served as my two-minute warning. We were about to turn off into the parking lot of the Charcoal, a former restaurant that had forsaken its burgers for buses a few years earlier. I glimpsed its faded, freestanding sign out my window before fixing my gaze on the last empty area of the puzzle, a gaping white hole in the upper-right corner of the grid.

The Acrosses were killing me. The clue for number 8, “Like 19-D,” was useless, since 19-Down was TORAH. The answer could be anything, as long as it started with a
B
—I was sure BENEFIT was correct for “Capitalize.”

“Charcoal!” the driver announced.

The doors to the bus whooshed open, and passengers began to board. I tuned out everything but the grid while I stared intently at the “Down” clues emanating from 8-Across.

Wait a second. “Capitalize” wasn’t BENEFIT; it was MAKE HAY!

The bus lurched into motion, causing my pen to slash a jagged diagonal line through the puzzle before I could complete the fill. “Loan request”… Of
course
! CARRY ME. And “Battle line” was IMHIT—I’m hit! And that pesky “Like 19-D,” meaning the Torah?

MOSAIC.

Bastard.

Finally I laid down my pen, the smell of burned brain cells flooding my nostrils, and checked my watch. Twenty-five, twenty-six minutes—a mortifying time for a Saturday puzzle, but respectable for a W. W. W. Moody.

“Impressive,” said a voice from the aisle seat opposite mine. I glanced up into a pair of gray-green eyes.

Or maybe they were more green than gray.

“Fancy meeting you here,” Scruffy said, with just the tiniest hint of a smirk in his tone.

I was momentarily struck dumb by the one-two punch of cuteness and coincidence.

But only momentarily. “This is… wow. Unexpected. Hey—sorry you missed that first bus on Thanksgiving.”

“So was I.” His eyes darted to my completed crossword, which shared the page that day with the theater listings and assorted ads for Broadway shows. “So, how long did it take you?”

“Oh god—forever,” I said, before remembering how he’d struggled last Thursday. If it had taken me twenty-five or -six minutes to solve this puzzle, it must have consumed the better part of Scruffy’s morning. Declining to share my solving time, I pointed to the
Times
poking out of his backpack. “Have you finished it yet?”

“No. Well, actually”—he pointed toward my newspaper—“I’m him.”

I focused on the display ad he seemed to have indicated and immediately became confused.

“You’re… the Cat in the Hat?”

He laughed and extended his hand, tapping a finger squarely on the puzzle’s byline before he offered it to me. “Billy Moody.”

Billy. As in William. As in…

No. Way.

“You’re lying,” I said, simultaneously shaking my head and his hand and hoping he wouldn’t notice the slight tremor in my grip. “W. W. W. Moody is a frumpy academic with a slide rule and a pocket protector.”

“That’s not a bad guess. Quite a few constructors are mathematicians. But I’m telling you the truth.” He reached into his back pocket for his wallet and extracted his driver’s license. “See?”

“This is simply not possible,” I said, blinking at it in disbelief. But there was his face, right next to the words, “Moody, William.”

And there was his thumb, partially obscuring his date of birth—which was probably for the best.

He grinned. “Believe me now?”

“I… guess I have to.”
Oh my god,
I thought.
Elinor Ann is going to die when she hears about this.

“Good. I’m glad that’s settled.”

Oh my god,
I thought.
Elinor Ann.

“Uh, listen,” I said. “I know we’ve only just met, and I hate to ask, but I have this sort of emergency, and I left my cell phone in Kutztown.…”

He pulled his from a shirt pocket. “Of course you can borrow mine. But the least you can do is tell me your name first.”

“Oh! Sorry. Dana Mayo.”

“Yo! Amanda!”

“Huh?”

“It’s your anagrammed name.”

God, this guy was a nerd. But so cute. So ridiculously, fatally cute.

“Unless you’re prone to making regular guttural noises,” he added.

“Excuse me?”

“Then it could be Moan A Day,” he explained.

I would ponder the implications of that after I completed my call.

As soon as I heard her voice, I knew Elinor Ann’s trip had not gone as planned.

“Where
are
you?” she said.