Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped (24 page)

“No, thank you,” I say and get up to get a glass of wine. My cupboards are filled with glasses. I open a drawer. A whole set of silverware gleams at me. I open the pantry, the refrigerator. Stocked. A sinking happens inside of me. “Wow,” I say, “it looks like I settled in.”

“About time,” Miss Tilney says. “Who lives with one fork?”

“Uncle Paulie is quitting and I’m supposed to take his place in the Polenta family slot,” I tell my mother.

“That’s nice,” my mother says. “Isn’t it?”

“You knew, didn’t you?”

“Your father said something.”

“He should let Squirt be a partner. She passed her test.”

“I’m sure your father would rather have you.”

“You mean he’s stuck with me.”

“Like I said—grumpy.” Miss Tilney says to my mother. “Don’t buy into it.”

“Why don’t you have a glass of wine and relax?” my mother says. “I’ll start supper as soon as we finish here. “We’ve already done the other rooms. It shouldn’t be long.”

“Petal to the metal, right, Angie?” Miss Tilney says.

Nobody ever calls my mother Angie, but she smiles at Miss Tilney, and says, “That’s right, Clara.” They’re all buddy-buddies now.

“Why doncha go look?” Miss Tilney glares at me like I’m some ungrateful wretch of a person.

“Why does everyone call you MISS Tilney if you were married?” I ask her.

“I took my old name back. Harold’s name was Rump. I didn’t want to offend him when he was alive, but I couldn’t wait to change my name back after he died. I had enough years as Mrs. Rump.”

My mother laughs. I stomp down the hall. The bed is all assembled and made with the crisp white bedding I bought, and the windows are hung with the aforementioned curtains. A fuzzy rug is beside the bedside. “Who assembled the bed?” I yell.

“That nice man, Joseph,” my mother yells back. “He’s coming over for dinner so I can repay him. There were a lot of pieces though. That might be two dinners, don’t you think, Clara?”

“A big dessert oughta do it,” Miss Tilney says.

I look into the bathroom. Little green rug, green and white coordinating towels. There’s even a green soap dish. All for moi… the grinch.

I hear chuckles from the other room. “I love this part,” Miss Tilney says.

I go back in the room. A tiny little Diane Lane is talking to a tiny little Italian man on the beach. “He just uses her,” I say. “There’s nothing that works out in the movie unless you count the dweebie guy at the end with the backpack, and I can’t believe that Diane Lane would fall for a guy with a backpack and hiking boots. I hate hiking boots.”

They both look at me.

“I bet he has a car with a roof rack too and a kayak.” I kind of fade out. “Oh well, I’m going to take Dreamer for a walk.,”

“Chicken cacciatore,” Miss Tilney says back.

“What?”

“What your mother’s making for dinner. She invited me too.”

“Okay,” I say. I go outside and just start walking. Dreamer pads alongside. We weave along the dirt road through the trailers. “What’s wrong with me?” I ask her.

I knock on Joe’s door. “What up?” he says. He’s all neat and showered.

“Your cacciatore won’t be ready for a while yet. They’re making curtains.”

“Your mother, she’s something else.”

“Do you think she’s moving in?”

“That I don’t know. Why don’t you ask her?”

“I’m afraid to.”

“You have a lot of fears.”

“That’s why I’ll never be any good at my job.” Some bird is screeching in the trees and rattling its throat. It clatters out through the leaves. “You don’t have those trilly little songbirds here, do you?”

“Seems not.”

“I failed the P.I. test.”

“Didn’t you review?”

I roll my eyes. “My mother is making me floral curtains.”

“So you said.”

“You know Ernie had a tape of the tarot guy and Feather?” He looks at me. I tell him the whole story of Squirt and the mirrors and the chubby weasel-y tarot guy. Joe’s eyes get all crinkly a couple times.

“This is serious,” I tell him. “We almost died from falling mirrors.”

“I wish I was there to see it,” he says. “Where do you think the tape is hidden?” We both look around as if it would be hanging in the orange tree in Joe’s yard.

“I went around with George this morning in the golf cart. We didn’t see any more of Ernie’s birdhouses.”

“It’s gotta be something like that though,” I say.

“Something that Ernie made that opens?”

“I have an idea,” I say. “Remember what Marie said about the heart being a door…”

“Yeah,”

“What if Ernie had the tape inside a heart door that he made?”

Chapter 43

Marie doesn’t respond to Joe’s knock. “Probably napping,” he whispers. “Let’s look again at the workbench.” He turns around. “We didn’t really look the last time because we didn’t know what we were looking for.”

We go back to Ernie’s workshop. The evening is still and the sky is turning pink. Everything kind of glows. I start looking more systematically. When Joe gets to the bin of crooked hearts he takes them all out and examines each one. None of them are big enough to hold a tape.

I look at everything that has a heart on it. There’s a box with a heart on it that opens, but nothing is inside. Then I see that the heart itself splits in two ingeniously. I slide the two sides apart. There’s a picture inside. It’s another car picture. But this time it’s daytime and the car is parked next to a big brick institutional-looking building. It’s another picture of the back of a car with the license plate showing. Joe pulls the photo close to his face. “That’s a red Lincoln Town Car if I’m not mistaken. It looks like Gene Swan’s car.”

“The red is distinctive.”

Joe nods.

“What’s the building?”

“It looks familiar but I don’t know…”

We head back to Joe’s. The walk is very quiet. We listen to our flip-flops slapping the pavement. “Where could the tape be,” I say thinking out loud.

Joe says, “That might be the loony bin.”

“What?” I say.

“That building in the picture,” he says, “the loony bin.”

“The bin!” I say and do a u-turn.

“Where are you going?” Joe says hurrying after me.

“The bin with all the hearts.”

“I looked in there.”

“Let’s look again.”

Joe takes all the hearts out of the heart bin. He feels around the corners. Something kind of pops.

“Aha,” he says.

“Aha?” I ask, and peek over his shoulder.

“False bottom,” he explains. “Little spring latch. And voila, a black plastic baggie the size of a video.”

“It IS…,” I say as he pulls the video tape out of the bag.

“We should tell the detective about this,” he says.

“After we look at it,” I say, but I’m thinking, uh oh, I don’t want to watch Feather and the tarot guy.

But that’s exactly what we do. We watch about 30 seconds. Then Joe calls detective Johansen. When Joe hangs up he tells me, “He’s coming, and he says, don’t touch it and don’t watch it.”

“Oh well,” I say. We sit down to wait. “How did Ernie get this?” I ask.

“Maybe the Tarot guy made it?”

“But how did Ernie get it from the Tarot guy?”

“Bought it?” Joe guesses.

“I doubt he spent money on anything other than Viagra. Somebody else had to have it and he took it from them. Someone he had access to…”

“The Tarot guy said he provided a service for Fred, didn’t he?”

“You think he made a tape for Fred of himself and Feather having sex? Would Fred want that?”

“People want weird things.”

“So Fred had the tape and Ernie took it from his trailer?”

·
        
* * *

We are right on time for dinner. The detective questioned us about where we found the tape and the photo, and how we found them. I had to mention Squirt and the trip to the tarot master earlier. I did not mention the Nerf gun or mirrors. Let the man find out something for himself.

When we arrive at my trailer, we can hear faint strains of Sinatra, and there’s a wonderful cloud of garlic and tomato smells around my trailer.

“On the George Foreman grill?” Joe asks.

“My mother borrowed Miss Tilney’s portable cooktop.”

One of the folding tables is covered in a white tablecloth and set with real dishes. My mother says, “Joe, will you pour the wine for us?” She’s got an apron tied around her waist. It’s made out of the curtain material. I feel like I’m in
The Sound of Music
; I wonder if they made me any play clothes from the same material.

“I’m going to wash my hands…,” I tell them.

“The sewing machines are in the shower, so don’t go turning it on,” Miss Tilney yells.

“…in the sink!” I yell back.

When we sit down to eat, my mother raises her glass. “This is nice,” she says. We all drink to that. The place does look okay. I mean really okay. The cacciatore looks delicious, and the warm bread, folded into an Ikea basket, is fragrant and steaming. An Ikea pillar candle sits in the middle of the table in an Ikea hurricane.

“I just don’t want it to be nice is all.” I tell them.

“Oh, not that again,” Miss Tilney says.

Joe bows his head. My mother looks puzzled. “You don’t like what we’ve done with the trailer?” she asks.

“Don’t indulge her,” Miss Tilney says.

“That’s not it. I came down here to escape from feeling anything. I don’t want to feel nice or attached or well… anything.”

“Good luck,” Miss Tilney says. “What kinda life is that?”

“Better than being hurt,” I tell her.

“Hurt?!” Miss Tilney says, “Ha. Soon we’ll be dead. I’d worry about THAT if I were you.”

“It’s not a good habit to get into,” Joe says.

“What habit?” I say.

“Running away.”

“It’s just a short term thing,” I say.

My mother raises her eyebrows. She knows I’ve been running away for years, and so do I. I look around. Three elderly faces look back at me kind of sad, kind of pissed. “Pass the bread please,” I say.

The table is a bit subdued for a few minutes and I force myself not to say anything. Every time I open my mouth, I say something stupid anyway.

My mother tells us more about her trip through the Everglades, and how the guide let my father drive the boat and how my father almost killed them going through a tunnel of mangroves. “If we didn’t duck, WHEW, there go our heads!” my mother laughed.

“That engine just brought something out in your father, Lola. He was free as a bird, not really watching where he was going…”

“My father—free?” I say.

“I know, but…”

Miss Tilney nods happily. “Did I ever tell you about my father?” she asks.

I don’t even know you, I think, but I shut up.

“He was a fishing boat captain,” she says proudly. “We used to live a block away from the lighthouse in Plum Island. That’s in Massachusetts,” she adds.

“That’s nice,” I tell her. I don’t know what it is with this “nice” thing but it’s kind of contagious.

“That’s not the story,” she snaps at me.

“Sorry,” I say.

“One day a dead whale washed up on the beach. It was huge. It was a WHALE, after all. And it stunk. Lord, did it smell. A crowd gathered. I was a little girl. We all put our shirts up over our noses. It was Clammer Ted’s idea to cut off its tail. I guess he felt like if we could chop it up, we could get rid of it in pieces. But just cutting the tail off took ten men a good hour. The poor men were almost dead from the smell. Once they got the tail off, they realized that now there REALLY was no way to get rid of it. They couldn’t tie the whale to anything, they couldn’t pull it out to sea or drag it somewhere and bury it. They had chopped off the only part of the whale that could have helped them.”

She sits back and puts her fork down.

“And…,” I say.

“And what?” she says.

“What’s the point of the story?”

“The point is that people do that all the time, chop off the part that could save them.”

“What happened to the whale?” Joe asks.

“Oh, they blew it up. Tommy Leonetti, who was the mayor at the time, but who always did drink too much to be commonsensical, decided to stuff the whale with dynamite and blow it to smithereens. Thank God my father pulled me way back from the crowd for that moment. The whale blew up into a million little bits. It rained whale. There was whale everywhere. Whale hanging from the telephone wires, whale on the roof, whale on the windows. It was all over the town for weeks, until we had a good nor’easter. And that was that.”

“Life,” Joe says chuckling.

“I would have just buried it, made a big huge mountain right there…,” I say.

My mother reaches over and pats my hand like I’m the old lady in the bunch.

Chapter 44

“I checked out Susie and Richie’s Facebook page,” Miss Tilney tells me. She’s standing outside with her pruners and her pompom robe when I take Dreamer out in the morning.

“Why do they have a Facebook page?”

“Everyone has one. Don’t you know anything? Susie is the head of her High School Reunion Committee. She grew up in Dobbs Ferry, New York. Her class is very active,” she tells me.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because the class reunion this year is taking place in Disney World.”

“Uh huh.”

“They’re leaving the day after tomorrow for Disney is what I’m telling you. They’re making a break for it.”

“Day after tomorrow! They can’t just up and leave, can they? I have to call the detective, see if he knows this.”

“Oh, and did your mother tell you?” Miss Tilney adds.

“Tell me what?”

“We’re going into business, me and her.” Miss Tilney points the pruning shears at my feet. “That’s right, and don’t make her feel bad about it. She’s all by herself up there in New Jersey and lonely, and down here she feels needed. Get it?”

“What kind of business?”

“Sewing. Home décor. That kind of stuff.”

I stand there blankly.

“Because it’s hell living on those Social Security checks.”

I say nothing.

“So don’t pipe up and ruin things is what I’m saying. Don’t go raining on your mother’s parade just because you’re not happy.”