Getting Sassy (8 page)

By now Bix’s stiff little tail was experiencing tremors, so I grabbed his doggie pack and my keys, and we went for a walk. It was dark and rather cool as Bix and I headed down to the park just a block east of my apartment.

And while Bix marked every third tree along way, I mulled over the evening’s events. If Erika was a fraud at least I wasn’t the only mark—Patricia was too. But I’d been the target. Patricia had simply been wasting her time. And what I couldn’t figure out was why Erika would go to the trouble of conjuring up someone I’d never known. And if she knew enough about me to know that Wyman wasn’t my biological father, then she also knew that Wyman was the only father I’d known. Why not conjure him up? And why conjure anyone up? I had a hard time believing it was just for a sensational story.

It had started to drizzle, and so Bix turned and began leading me toward home. He just doesn’t like the rain much.

By the time we got home and I’d toweled down my dog, I’d forced myself to examine the possibility that Erika, despite her absurd last name, might be the real thing. And if she was... then the man who
had died before I was born just remembered he had something to tell me. And as soon as I stopped doubting, as soon as I let a little hope seep in, it overwhelmed me. Then I told myself I was being silly—the dead don’t talk—and all that hope whooshed out of me, leaving me so empty I thought I would deflate.

And then there was what he said—don’t move your mother. The money exists.

“Right,” I said to Bix, who continued chomping on his rubber rabbit.

I poured myself a scotch over ice and dribbled a tablespoon of water in it, then scrolled through the caller ID numbers. There was a cellular number I didn’t recognize, a call from M Hughes and then there was my mother’s number on the monitor, which made my stomach clench. When she called at night, she was invariably more confused, anxious and demanding than usual. Sometimes she’d accuse of me things I couldn’t possibly have done, like stealing her money or moving her car. They call it sundowning; I call it heartbreaking.

Voicemail had two messages for me and, as I feared, one was from my mother.

“Robyn? Where are you?” Her voice had a panicky edge. “I’m ready to call the police. And your father... he hasn’t come home from work yet. I’ve got a pot roast in the oven?... who is going to eat it?... Robbie? Is that you?... I’ll call you back, Robyn. I think he’s at the door.”

Robbie? I quickly dialed the nursing station on my mother’s floor, talked to Vera, the night nurse, and learned my mother was napping. Crisis had passed. Yes, she’d been agitated, but not beyond the usual.

“Did she have any visitors tonight?” I mentioned the interruption.

“No,” Vera said. “That must’ve been me checking up on her.”

I thanked her and asked her to call me if things got rough again and then said a silent prayer that my phone was through ringing for the night.

I had one other message. This one was from Mick.

“Hey, how’d talking with that dead guy go? Can’t wait to hear. Oh, and I’ve got a way for you to take a few thousand out without paying any penalties. Call me.”

For a second, I almost did call him. Just to have someone to tell this to.

Instead, I changed into a pair of cut-offs and a T-shirt, pulled my hair up into a pony tail, then curled up in my comfy chair with my laptop and drink and brought up the internet.

The circumstances surrounding my father’s death had been a fact of my life that I’d never questioned. Why would I? He had died just outside of Colorado Springs, where my folks lived at the time. He’d been delivering mail when a guy driving a Chevy Impala swerved to miss hitting a turtle crawling across the road and plowed into my father. I was probably the size of a cantaloupe in my mother’s womb at the time. She moved to Illinois right after I was born and married Wyman a few years later.

In the past I had used the internet to search for records of my father, but had always come up empty. I had chalked this off to bad record keeping on Colorado Springs’s part. But now I began to wonder. And since my mother was less than forthcoming these days, I knew of only one other source where I might find some answers. That paper-filled box she’d asked me to get rid of was probably just that— a bunch of miscellany I could toss with impunity. But maybe now was the time to see if that was the case. I dug my key to the basement door out of the kitchen drawer where it had spent the last two years.

The picture framing store I lived above had taken up most of the basement, which was lit by two naked bulbs with long, beaded pulls. My corner was still there, although I had to move a large oil painting of a clown’s face—rather creepy, actually. But there I found my two suitcases, a few pots for planting and the box. While it wasn’t large or particularly heavy, it smelled moldy and I hoped no creatures had taken up residence in it.

I hauled it upstairs, sneezing as I went, put on a pot of coffee and settled in for a long night.

Around one thirty, I unearthed a nugget that sent me scrambling for my computer.

Although my internet search kept me up past three a.m., I was out of bed by seven the next morning. I showered and threw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and hustled Bix out the door for his morning walk. If I timed my visit right, I could get to Dryden Manor before my mother had breakfast, and then it would be easy to lure her into a meal of blueberry pancakes with maple syrup at Malone’s. I wasn’t craving her company; I was itching for a showdown. And I had no qualms about my plan to pump her for information while pumping her full of flapjacks. After my night of research, I was convinced that your average supermarket tabloid contained more facts than my early recorded history.

Bix cooperated and finished his business quickly, and we were on our way back to my apartment when a red Porsche drove by, then slowed and pulled over to the curb about ten feet in front of me. I’m generally not impressed by cars. It’s not that I’m above all the superficial materiality that has made us the greatest consumers in the history of the world. Possibly the universe. Hardly. If I had the money I’d buy the same digital camera every time it got upgraded. But I am not a car person. To me, driving is overrated. But this little convertible—black top up—perched beside the curb and humming at me, made me wonder if maybe I’d just never driven the right car. As I slowed, the passenger-side window slid down, and I saw Mick Hughes behind the wheel.

It was too late to run or walk away. His Porsche had snared me as surely as a grappling hook.

“Hey,” he said, smiling as he twisted in his seat, one arm draped over the steering wheel. “That your dog?”

No, it’s the badger I’ve leash trained. “
Yeah. This is Bix.”

“Hey, there Bix,” he said, then lifted his chin toward me. “I was on my way to see a client and I saw you. Wondered if you got my message. About the casino.”

“I did. But I got home kind of late last night. I was tired.”

Bix, affable to a fault, was trying to pull me toward the car. But, small as he is, he didn’t stand a chance against my desire to remain inert.

“Sure,” Mick said, sounding not at all convinced. Despite the fact that the morning had brought with it a thick layer of gray clouds and a fine mist, he wore a pair of sunglasses that prevented me from reading any further. “So what do you think?”

“I really don’t like casinos. They’re too... discordant.”

He removed his sunglasses and squinted up at me. “Discordant, huh?”

I nodded. My feelings were difficult to describe in one word, but that came pretty close.

He rubbed his thumb across his lower lip. “Do you like to eat?”

I considered telling him I was on a macrobiotic diet, eating only that which I grew in jars in my apartment, but lies always came back to bite my ass. “I’ve been known to.”

“I’ll pick you up at seven. We can talk about your money. And other stuff.”

I hesitated, then nodded. “Okay.” Clearly, I would have to spell it out for this man. But not until I had the money to keep my mother from being put out on the curb. And the place for either of those subjects was not on a public street with him leaning across the passenger seat of his hot little car.

He put his sunglasses back on and as he pulled away the passenger window slid up. It occurred to me that having a client in this area was a bit of a coincidence. Unless Mick lived near here. And one didn’t
see many red Porsches parked in the apartment lots.

It was at this point that I began to wonder if I was being stalked by my accountant.

I spent the brief drive to Dryden deciding if it would be worth going out with Mick just to see if he had anything to contribute to my mother’s housing. Maybe he’d invite me back to his place. That could be dangerous, but I could handle him. Like Bix, he was small. Maybe he had a priceless coin collection he wouldn’t miss immediately. Or a Monet in an out of the way corner. I thought of that little safe in his office—if there was a safe. For all I knew he had a tiny plasma television behind the painting. Or a blank wall. Still, I let my imagination toy with the possibilities. Mob money? Money from gamblers using him as a bookie? Blackmail money? I was truly ashamed of where my thoughts wandered these days, but Mick’s intentions toward me probably weren’t any more virtuous. What did any of it matter? With her medications and all, I would need close to sixty thousand dollars to keep her in Dryden. And that was just for one year. My mental activity was merely intellectual aerobics, albeit larcenous aerobics. At least it kept my mind occupied, and that was a good thing. Because it was easier for me to plan a robbery than to imagine where my mother would be living in a matter of days.

I arrived at Dryden in time to see my mother emerge from the elevator with a group of the second-sitting breakfast eaters. Wearing a bright red blouse over black velour slacks, she bulled her way through the small crowd using her cane and repeating “Excuse me” in a loud voice along the way, her knitted brows reflecting her intense determination. She earned several glares, none of which she seemed to notice. When she saw me standing by the desk, she stopped, confused, as though she knew the dark-haired woman from somewhere but
couldn’t place me. This confusion lasted only a few moments, and then her features relaxed. By the time she reached me, she was nearly giddy. And when I suggested we go out for breakfast, she clasped her hands together and her eyes widened behind her large-framed, pink glasses. It was like I’d just asked her if she wanted to meet Santa.

“Oh, that sounds lovely, dear. Let me get my sweater.” Her abrupt turn nearly caused a collision with a walker-wielding woman, and there was no telling how many others that mishap would have taken out.

My mother gave the woman a dismissive look and said, “Excuse me, Betty, I’m going out to breakfast.”

I wasn’t sure, but it looked like Betty mouthed the word “bitch.”

My mother caught the next elevator up, leaving me to collect the nasty looks from those she left in her wake.

As I waited for her, one of the nurses came out of a back office. A huge woman with a lumbering walk and narrow eyes that harbored no nonsense, Lorena was actually a favorite among residents, including my mother. I think my mother liked the bigness—the safeness— of Lorena, and saw her as a benevolent bear in a white dress and Rykas. When Lorena saw me, she came right over. “We need to talk,” she said, almost under her breath, and my heart began pounding— a natural reaction when someone says those four words to me. Then she motioned me away from the desk and toward a grouping of three Victorian chairs, currently unoccupied. What had I done? How could she know we were running out of money?

When she began with: “I really should be telling April this, but I’m going to hold off,” I tried not to whimper. She glanced toward the hall leading to management’s offices. “We don’t make our money here by fining residents we catch smoking in their rooms.”

My jaw dropped, and I flapped it once before I said, “Smoking?”

“I didn’t catch her at it, but I know what it smells like. God knows, Lizzie’s not the first here to try it.” She paused and took a breath.

“This morning when I stopped in on Lizzie, I know I smelled cigarette smoke.”