More Muffia (The Muffia Book 2) (4 page)

Lauren
is the member of The Muffia whom some of us secretly refer to as “Rich Muff.” She married an heir to the Anheuser-Busch dynasty—before they sold it to Germany. She doesn’t act like a rich girl, though, not that I have any deep knowledge about how girls as rich as Lauren act. She’s down to earth, has a couple of kids, and is starting a non-profit aimed at curing Alzheimer’s that has a too-long name. If it were a movie, it would bomb for sure, but just because you name your organization the
Alzheimer’s Search for the Cure at the Sweet-Busch Center for Neurological Research
doesn’t mean it’s going to fail. I was simply concerned people would hear Sweet and Busch together, and not even read the mission statement
.

Sarah
worked her way up to mid-management at Williams-Sonoma and regularly hooked us up with expensive Balsamic Vinegars and biscuit mixes, but gave it up to raise her son, Nate Jr., which was unfortunate for us, though clearly better for Natey. We’re all a little concerned about her too-modern open marriage to Nate Sr., which the rest of us think involves swinging and seems to be collapsing under the strain.
Rachel
, the youngest Muff at thirty-two, is a painter. She’s very talented but super-opinionated—especially about books, which can get sort of tedious. She’s a blonde bombshell who’s dabbled in the same sex arena, but lately always seems to have a new guy in her life. Next up is
Kiki
, who is married to Saul with a son named Troy who is, or was, a vegan. She used to be an actress—a pretty good one, too— but now she’s training to be a nurse practitioner, which all of us are happy about since we don’t know what kind of health care we’re going to be able to afford in our old age, with or without Obamacare.

Then there is
Paige
, who is the unofficial Muff boss. She teaches tennis and is in a highly dysfunctional relationship—or so the rest of us think— with a guy named Richard, but we all give her props for trying to make it work. She has a couple of kids under ten from a previous relationship and is a total hands-on mom with the school—volunteering and carpool and school trips to every museum in California. She’s a great girl and a fantastic cook and has been known to throw her weight around on book choices. The Muffia’s most inspirational member is, without question,
Vicki
. She’s divorced with a grown son (she married young), and she’s also a cancer survivor. It’s not her style to whine or complain, and she is filled with that sense of gratitude I’m still working on.
Yes, yes; thank you, thank you
. Maybe it helps to feel like you’ve been given another shot at life. Vicki has always worked, and now she’s decided to go back to filmmaking and, for some reason, has been shooting our book club gatherings. All of us are hoping she never does anything with the footage because it would be devastatingly embarrassing, if for no other reason than it would be too boring to watch; how embarrassing is that?! But it was Vicki who said she’d try online dating with me. We figured we could help each other, away from the scrutiny of some of the other more aggressive, serial dating Muffs who might think they knew best and tell us what to do.

And finally there’s
Jelicka
, the Muff who just woke me up. Jel is a character out of
Desperate Housewives.
Recently divorced, she
tends to overdo it on the Botox and lip injections—at least as long as her spousal support holds out—and who knows what other kinds of procedures, such as the aforementioned vaginal rejuvenation. Wacky as she can be, her intentions are honorable and her heart is pure. She’s also The Muffia’s very own resident conspiracy theorist—a label that has only increased in aptness since her husband left her for an
older
woman. According to her, this was
not
supposed to happen! Though encouraging to older women everywhere it has, in no small way, tweaked Jelicka’s entire worldview. She has seen multiple UFOs, is convinced the government staged the moon landing in the New Mexico desert—not to mention masterminding 9-1-1—and swears there’s a consortium of international scientists who have developed a cure for cancer, but Big Pharma won’t release it because cancer care is a gazillion-dollar business, the loss of which might destroy our tiny hold on positive economic growth.

She could be right about some or even most of these things. But while I appreciate that she has us thinking about topics we might otherwise not pay any attention to, life’s too short to be that paranoid.

“Quinn, are you listening? Oh,
Qui
-
inn
!” Jelicka was practically chanting my name on the phone.

“Huh? I’m here,” I said, still trying to figure out how I ended up lying on my living room floor.

“I want to be on record as saying, ‘I
told
you so.’ ”

“
Mmm
, you told us so. On record; duly noted.”

“Now you’re patronizing me.”

“I’m not.” I yawned. “I just need coffee.”

As you might expect, Jelicka’s assuming that Udi was still alive meant about as much as saying the Big One’s coming which, by the way, she tells us at every book club gathering, along with warning us to replenish our earthquake kits. But neither Udi nor earthquakes can we do anything about, save for, in the case of earthquakes, trying to make ourselves feel better by stocking up on water and canned goods. From the moment Jelicka heard about Udi having a heart attack and dying while he and Madelyn were having sex, followed soon after by his getting carted off by his so-called friends, Jel was already on record saying he wasn’t dead.

“You guys just thought I was being my typical, overly-vigilant self,” she was saying now. “But voila—turns out he’s alive the whole time, just like I said.”

I yawned loudly for effect.

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m exhausted. I just flew twenty hours next to a sumo wrestler and woke up thinking we had sex.”

There was a beat. “Seriously?”

“Seriously the flight, or seriously I had sex with the sumo?”

“The sex, silly.”

“I don’t know…it’s possible.”

She paused again. “I don’t know what to say…good for you?”

“How did you hear I saw Udi?” I decided that no good could come from continued thoughts of sex with the sumo.

“Maddie has a date with a new guy, so I asked if he was as hot as her sexy, dead-slash-not-dead Mossad agent boyfriend—you know, a logical question I thought—and she told me you called her. I got the distinct impression he wasn’t.”

In my current mental state, she was talking too fast for me to keep up. “Wasn’t what?”

“As
hot
, of course. Anyway, I was very impressed you recognized him, particularly considering he was playing dead when you met. I’m hoping now that he’s back and alive. I’ll get a chance to see that bad boy for myself.”

“I don’t know how. The guy I saw, if it
was
him, could be in Kazakhstan or any number of other places by now.”

“The way you and Maddie carried on about his body—it was like he was Michelangelo’s David, you know? Like some awesome marble statue.” She paused. “What does that even mean? Women say that kind of thing all the time. So-and-so’s boyfriend is like a Greek statue. Most of those Greek statues are missing limbs, so I don’t exactly see it as a compliment.”

“He was kind of like a statue...I guess; except he had all his limbs, of course. His abs were amazing, and his ass was Zeus-like.”

I really needed coffee. My head was now throbbing to the same beat as my ankle. “What time is it?” I pulled the phone from my ear to glance at the screen.
Shit—it was noon!
Talent Partners had little sympathy for any employee’s problems, not even those with injuries and accustomed to different time zones. I had permission to come in late, but I was pushing it. “I need to get going”

“Now that he’s risen
—
” Jelicka went on obliviously. “Wait, if he’s Israeli, that means rising again would be a religious impossibility, wouldn’t it? Only Jesus did that, I mean if you believe in Jesus. Don’t tell my Rabbi. I can’t remember anything I’m supposed to from my Bat Mitzvah. Which reminds me, do you want to sign up for
Lumosity
? They say it keeps your brain exercised; it’s sort of like Pilates for your pre-frontal cortex. They’re doing a two-for this week.”

“I can’t even make it to the gym and pole dancing on a semi-regular basis, let alone a Pilates for the brain class.”

“You can do the exercises from your phone! Anyway, it’s something to consider, especially now that Alzheimer’s has struck the Muffia family.”

“My grandmother had Alzheimer’s, Jel, and Sarah’s grandfather and who knows who else’s aunts and uncles. It’s not just Lauren’s mom.”

“That makes this next thing I’m going to say even more vital to understand!”
Oh, no, she was impassioned.
“Lauren is doing all this work—putting together the non-profit and the benefit—to try to halt her mother’s disease before it’s too late, right? And yes, I admire her for it. But what people don’t understand is that Alzheimer’s is another disease created by the government to get rid of old people. They want to stick ‘em in a facility and get the taxpayers to pay for their meds until they eventually fade away.”

See what I mean about Jelicka and her conspiracy theories?

“Isn’t there a genetic component to Alzheimer’s disease?” I sort of recalled reading this somewhere, but fittingly, not remembering where. “I’m pretty sure there is.”

“Minor,” Jelicka quipped. “If you only look at the genetics, we all have it a little. But they’re doing something to make it turn into full-blown Alzheimer’s.”

This can’t be true, but just because Jelicka’s paranoid, doesn’t mean I don’t agree with her some of the time. I’m terrified of getting the diagnosis. Lauren’s mom isn’t even “old.” Seventy is the new fifty, or whatever. Exercising my brain suddenly seemed extremely important. “Send me the info,” I said. “I’ll check it out.”

“The good news is that by starting her organization, Lauren will have a chance to redeem herself and her family after turning on her country when she and George became little Mr.-and-Mrs.-watch-us-sell-the-great-American-beer-company-to-the-highest-bidder.”

“George’s
father
sold the company, Jel. And what does it matter now in our globalized world? The French buy Japanese companies, the Germans buy American, the Chinese buy…”

“The Chinese buy
everything!
They just bought the Pulaski Skyway, for God’s sake. That’s like buying New Jersey. What’s next—the Grand Canyon?”

“I’d like them to buy my car.” That stopped the rant, if only briefly.

“And what are
we
buying?”
She was on a roll now.
“Cheap clothes made by under-aged, under-paid workers in Bangladesh just before their factory caves in killing them all. Do we really need more crappy clothes? We don’t
make
anything anymore.”

“We make great cupcakes.”

“Ha, ha.” She was not amused.

“Jelicka, it’s too early for this. My brain can’t handle it. Besides, don’t we make Botox? I’m pretty sure we do. There’s a growth field if there ever was one. Think about all the Chinese we can sell it to.”

“The Chinese don’t get wrinkles. They won’t buy our Botox.”

I gave up. “Listen, I really have to get to work.”

“George is a wimp,” she said, ignoring me. “Sorry, Lauren, but your husband is a wimp. He should have stood up to his father. It’s anti-American what they did. He should have stood up to the old man and said, ‘No. No, no, no, no, NO!’ Every country needs a national beer, and ours was Budweiser.”

“So now it’ll be a different brand. Things change; we have to adapt. I personally couldn’t care less about beer.”

“What’s going to happen to the Clydesdales?”

“The what?”

“The horses.”

“Oh, they’ll be okay. Someone will want them.”

“It’s a shame… just a shame. Somebody will probably
eat
them!”

She was taking this way too personally. “You could start one of those online petitions people are doing now: ‘Bring back our beer’ or ‘Save the Clydesdales.’ ”

She snorted. “Not a bad idea. I’ve actually been thinking about running for office—on this and a whole range of issues; I’d do a better job than a lot of these people getting elected and not doing anything. At least I have no desire to Tweet my naked body all over the planet, as if that helps get a bill passed.”

Pulling the phone from my ear, I checked the time again, then put the phone on speaker so I could get going while she continued ripping holes in a growing list of individuals and institutions. I stretched my body to its full length, and a searing pain bolted through my ankle. “
Yeaowwh!”

“What’s the matter?”

“Rolled my ankle running for the plane.”

“Ouch.”

Sitting up, I saw that my ankle had swelled to the size of an eggplant. “No heels for me today,” I sighed. “Hey, you’re a shoe aficionado—can I wear Crocs to work?”

No answer. I rolled to pick up the phone and glanced at the screen, where it appeared the connection was still good. “Jel?”

“How is it possible you even own a pair of Crocs?” she hissed.

“I’m too tired to deny it.”

“How about some cute gem-encrusted flip-flops? Wear those if you’ve waxed your legs recently.”

“My legs are clean, but my toes are swollen together and shooting out at odd angles. Not quite as bad as Julianne Moore’s did at Cannes, but still really unattractive.”

“You’re right; people will remember that and have a negative association. I recommend staying home.”

“Not possible.”

“How ’bout this: wear one good shoe and put the Croc on the other foot and maybe glue Swarovski crystals on it so it looks cute.”

Swarovski crystals? Where did she think I was going to get Swarovski crystals to glue on my Crocs? “Can we talk later? I gotta go.”

“Wait,
Quinn
! One more thing—what makes you sure it was him? I mean, can we
prove
it was him? What was it about the guy that told you he was the same guy who died, or supposedly died, at Maddie’s and who we are referring to as Udi?”

She was not helping me start my first day back at work with grace and aplomb.