Curds and Whey Box Set

by G M Eppers

“I hope the rest is just as fast.”

  He was going to make me ask. “Okay, so where are you meeting?”

  “I can’t tell you.” He stood up, his hands on either end of the towel around his neck.

  “Billings!”

  “Mom!” he complained back at me, then added, “He said not to tell you unless you swear on your father’s grave, his words, that you won’t follow me. You. Stay. Here.”

  I was stunned. That was dirty pool. Making me swear on my father’s grave. “That’s . . . “ I was going to say unreasonable, but it certainly was not. He wanted a private audience with his son and he knew me too well to just let it slide. I heaved a put-upon sigh. “Okay, deal.”

  He bent over to give me a peck on the cheek. “I’ll give you the lowdown later. He’s going to buy me a sandwich and a soy misto at the Starbucks north of Metro Central. But if he riles me, I’m jogging the Mall until I calm down. Don’t wait up.” He went upstairs to shower. Sounded to me like he was expecting to get riled. He probably already had a head start, in fact.

  Half an hour later I saw him out the door. What followed was one of the longest evenings of my life. The house was empty. For the first time in a long while, I ate dinner alone at the kitchen table, a quick burger and a pile of chips washed down with a Diet Pepsi. He had said not to wait up, but of course, that was exactly what I was going to do. I turned on the TV in the living room rather than watching the one upstairs in my suite like I usually did, and tried to lose myself in a movie. The offered films were right up my alley: World War Z, I Am Legend, Independence Day, and 2012. I love a good apocalypse, or even a bad apocalypse, but I flipped from one to the other at every commercial break without any amount of interest. I looked at my watch about every five minutes, and synchronized it with the clock on the corner of the screen during the evening news. It was going to get as low as 68 degrees tonight with clear skies changing to partly cloudy by tomorrow noon. It could get as high as 87, but no rain was expected for the rest of the week.

  When I started to get sleepy, I made myself a cup of coffee and found a block of M*A*S*H reruns on some channel I didn’t know we had. The team got back around 10. “A week from Saturday,” Badger told me. “The Plus One, Alfredo’s Alfredo Palace. Be there or be square!” He swayed as he talked, with his denim jacket slung over his back and hooked on one finger. “It’s going to be BIG! Huge! Gigantic! Dancing girls! A mariachi band! A magician and three clowns!” He and his 30-proof breath leaned toward me. “Do you like Italian?”

  I don’t like cheese and Billings is lactose intolerant. Everyone knew that. So why they planned an Italian dinner, I don’t know. I suppose it was Sir Haughty’s idea. He was the big cheese fan, though he normally preferred the specialty kind supplied at wine tastings and such rather than the mass market lowest common denominator cheeses at a popular restaurant. Alfredo’s Alfredo Palace was one of the few Italian restaurants still left, actually. Most of them had been driven out of business by the OOPS, and Italian in general was not nearly as popular as it had once been. So a place like Alfredo’s was now considered quite chic. Their CURDS / FDA certification was plastered prominently on their front door. One slip up and it would be arrivederci Alfredo’s Alfredo Palace.

  Sir Haughty came up behind Badger and took him gently by the shoulders. “Come with me, lad. Let’s put you to bed. Helena, I apologize. I should not have let him drink so much.”

  Sylvia, her eye patch slightly askew revealing just a peek at her damaged eye, came to help with Badger, but appeared to be half lit herself. “They had a new drink. It’s called Betcha Can’t. Um…we could. Three or four times. I think Badger did five.”

  I got a bit concerned. “Is anyone coherent?”

  I was answered by a round of giggles. “Okay, listen up!” I said loudly, positioning myself in the center of the group. The twins cringed and covered their ears. There were groans and mumbled complaints. “I’m glad you had a good time. If you can do it without drowning, everyone please take a cold shower and throw up. I’ll serve ibuprofen with breakfast, or maybe FOR breakfast. Good night!”

  They all stumbled upstairs to bed. I heard a few showers run, but mattresses were creaking way too soon. I wasn’t overly upset. The night of the physicals was pretty much the only night all year that we were absolutely guaranteed not to be called. You had to expect people to explode a little. They deserved it. I was still not convinced the party planning would pan out, but it was pointless to object.

  It wasn’t long before the house was so quiet I could hear Sir Haughty snoring upstairs. I turned up the TV a little louder to drown him out and returned to the block of M*A*S*H. About midnight, I turned it off and went up to my room, even though it put me even closer to Sir Haughty’s snoring. Billings couldn’t be out much longer, and I didn’t want him to catch me sleeping on the couch. I took a quick shower, put on my kitty cat collage pajamas, and climbed into my bed.

  Sometime later, I was roused from a light snooze by the door downstairs opening. I looked at my clock radio. It was 1:30 in the morning. If Billings was drunk, too, Butte was going to be in a lot of trouble. I was tempted to go downstairs and meet him, but I listened to him climb the stairs, stop, then approach my doorway. He must have seen the light under the door. There was a brief, quiet knock. “Come in.”

  Billings entered. He stood in the doorway, framed in shadow. “I told you not to wait up,” he whispered.

  I got out of bed and joined him at the doorway. It wasn’t worth giving him the line about not being able to sleep, or I lost track of time. “So tell me. What did he want?”

  He stood there silently for a very long moment before I realized he was still seething. He needed another shower, and when I put my hand on his chest I could feel his heart strobing like Nitro’s epilepsy test. “Oh my God, did you kill him?” I asked in a harsh whisper. I scanned him in the dim light, looking for signs of blood. “Are you on the lam?”

  “Mom,” he said, not voicing the ‘don’t be ridiculous’ that his inflection implied. I wasn’t sure it was entirely ridiculous though.

  I looked him in the eyes, and they were smoldering like deep pockets of magma ready to erupt. It frightened me. It frightened me more than a wheel of cheese crawling with spiders. “Did you hit him?”

  “No. I threw my drink in his face, though.” I tried to guide him into the room, but he stayed planted in the doorway.

  “That was rude.”

  “He deserved rude.” I imagined he deserved a lot more and I should be admiring Billings’ restraint. I was right. “He tried to recruit me, Mom.”

  “What?!”

  “He wants me to join WHEY and work with him. He’s insufferable. I don’t know what you ever saw in him.”

  “I saw you in him,” I said. I know, it’s supposed to work the other way around. But I think for me and Butte it was backwards. Everything with Butte felt backwards these days, but I certainly hadn’t seen it at the time. “I still do,” I added.

  Billings’ eyes got even darker, the magma bubbling. “Don’t say that.” He put his hand on mine and pulled it away from his chest. “Please, Mom. Don’t ever say I’m like him in any way. I’m NOTHING like him.” With that he dropped my hand and walked off toward his room without even saying good night.

  Chapter Three

  Unsurprisingly, I was the first one up the next morning. Before I fell asleep, I’d heard Billings, who had the room above me, lifting weights, still burning off the steam he’d built up meeting Butte. I may have a vague memory of hearing his shower running, but I might have dreamed it. It could have been Haughty’s shower across the hall, or Sylvia’s next door. I was so distracted by what Billings had told me I was on auto pilot for the rest of the night. I didn’t clearly remember turning out the light, but when I woke my light, radio, and portable TV were all off. The room was creepily dark and quiet. It was the day after. The team had gotten sloshed as usual. And it was up to me to be the adult and take care of their ills. After putting myself
together, I went down to the kitchen where I decided to take the opportunity to call my mother, who lives in southern Illinois, while I drank a morning cup of coffee and fixed a bagel with butter. “Hey, Mom,” I said when she answered.

  “Helena! My dear, how nice to hear from you. You’ll never guess what’s happened to Shirley.” Shirley is Mom’s best friend and something is always happening to her. Sometimes it’s small, like she lost a button off her sweater, and sometimes it’s large like she had appendicitis, but whatever it was it was almost always bad news and I was going to hear about it. “Go ahead, guess.”

  “You just said I’d never guess. You don’t want me to make you a liar, do you?” I stood at the toaster waiting for the bagel. Sometimes the toaster didn’t pop up, it just kept buzzing, and I didn’t want to make too much noise.

  “You’re no fun, Helena. When did you become a fuddy duddy?”

  “Just this morning. I never had the time before.”

  “Twenty-eight hours I labored to bring you into the world, and this is the thanks I get? Wisecracks?” Sometimes it’s only twenty-two hours, and when she’s really angry with me it’s thirty-four. Someday I’ll tell her I’ve gotten pregnant out of wedlock (as if that were even a remote possibility at this point) or I’ve been arrested for prostitution and see if I can get her to forty.

  “Sorry, Mom. What happened to Shirley?” I know, I should have just gone on to my reason for the call in hopes that she would forget about Shirley or think she’d already told me, but I had already pushed my luck. Mom was still too sharp, especially first thing in the morning, to let stuff like that slip. I’d have a better chance calling her after dental surgery or following an IMAX movie on roller coasters. Odds were good that neither of those things had just happened.

  “She won five hundred dollars at Bingo last week!” Oh, thank goodness it was something positive. She’d be in a good mood and wouldn’t mind a gift suggestion for Billings. She normally preferred to use her own ideas and I think Billings’ premonition of a Hula Hoop may not have been very far off. “The really weird thing is that she won on O72,” she explained in a growing mystical voice, “and she turned 72 years old just two months ago. Plus, the caller’s name was Otis and she has a brother named Otis, and it was game number 15 and the 15th number called, which is really fast for Bingo. She got lots of rude stares from the other players, let me tell you. But then the very next day, her car broke down and the garage said it will cost $495.”

  “That’s amazing, Mom. Is she very upset about having to spend the money on the car?” The toaster dinged and started buzzing until I pushed up the lever. I pulled out the bagel quickly and began spreading butter on it.

  Mom continued, “Oh, not at all. Shirley had a dream three days before that she won the lottery. She didn’t remember all the numbers, but one of them was 72 –“

  “Mom, lotteries don’t go that high,” I said.

  “That’s why it was a dream and not the evening news, dear. Let me finish. In her dream, Shirley won exactly $500 but just couldn’t find her way to the counter where she bought it. It wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Do you ever have dreams like that? Of course, you do. Everybody does. Anyway, she woke up before she could cash in the ticket, which she said meant she wasn’t going to get to keep the money. So she already knew she’d need it for something right away. She told me so herself when we went to pick up the check at the Bingo parlor.”

  “That is truly amazing,” I said unenthusiastically. “Listen, Mom, I need to talk to you about Billings’ birthday.”

  “What about his birthday, dear?” The change of topic didn’t seem to faze her at all. It would appear that her story about Shirley had reached its conclusion.

  “Have you gotten him something yet?”

  “No, actually. Why?”

  “He told me he wants a Bük.”

  “Which book, dear? I’d be happy to get it for him. Is it one of those big expensive coffee table things?” I straightened her out on the spelling of the thing and explained what it was. “Oh, I see. I saw that commercial. Are you sure that’s what he wants? It doesn’t seem very . . . Billings-like.”

  I took a bite of bagel as she started talking and was able to swallow in time to answer. “Yes, Mom. He asked for it specifically. I can get it for him if you had something else in mind, but I thought you might like the chance. It’s bound to be his favorite gift and I’m sure he’d love to get it from his Grandma.” Plus, I had no idea where to get it, and didn’t really have time to shop for it. My usual plan was to take him for a steak dinner and give him a $100 bill. Planning for the upcoming evening was about as far as one could go in CURDS.

  “That’s very sweet! Of course, I’ll have it sent right away. Does it come in colors or sizes?”

  “I don’t really know.” As we talked, I’d carried my bagel and coffee to the table and sat down. “I guess you’ll have to use your judgment on that. Remember, he’s an adult now. All grown up, Mom. Make sure it looks dignified.”

  “Dignified. Got it. Thanks for the heads up! Love you, Sweetie!” We hung up and I began to eat my bagel in earnest.

  The rest of the team began to trickle down. Billings came first, dressed and ready for a new day. Others came a bit less ready, accompanied by moans and groans. Badger had his hands on his head as if he was holding it on and his eyeglasses were crooked, the twins were actually bumping into each other, and Roxy couldn’t seem to balance. Even her bedroom slippers had high heels and her hands never left the wall until she reached the kitchen table. She slid into a seat delicately, shushing everyone, although no one was talking. Sylvia seemed to be in better shape, just moving slowly, and Sir Haughty was tugging at his pajama top to straighten it. Perhaps it felt like it was falling off. Nitro, who had a room off the kitchen, came out last, dressed in just pajama bottoms, scratching his side and yawning. Normally, they would all be dressed. Not today. Not after last night. I began pouring cups of coffee and placing one in front of each. Creamers and sugar were already on the table, along with a small bowl of ibuprofen tablets. The tablets were the first to disappear, followed by the sounds of gentle blowing and sipping, and accompanied by a few very quiet “thank you, Helena”s.

  Badger, staring at the middle of the table, said, “Helena, would it surprise you to know I don’t remember coming home last night?”

  “Not at all. I imagine five Betcha Can’ts are listed in the NDR as a top notch anesthesia.”

  “Five?” He asked. Evidently, he remembered what a Betcha Can’t was (or at this point didn’t care.)

  “According to Sylvia.”

  His head landed, face down, with a thud on the table. He said “ow,” but stayed there, his cup of coffee next to his ear.

  “Oh, hey, what did I miss?” asked Billings, putting two sugars in his own coffee and another two in Avis’ cup next to him. She mouthed a thank you, but couldn’t bear to speak aloud. Agnes appeared to have fallen back asleep, her head on her sister’s shoulder.

  “Probably the same things I missed,” said Badger, still not lifting his head, his voice muffled by the tabletop. He did turn his face toward me, however, and his neighbor, Roxy, smoothly moved his coffee to keep his hair out of it. “I remember something about clowns, I think.”

  “Clowns?” Billings asked.

  “Yes,” I explained. “You said there would be three of them. A mariachi band, a magician, and three clowns,” I recited. “Oh, and dancing girls.”

  “Where? Just so I can stay away. That sounds awful.”

  “At the plus one party. Alfredo’s. I think you said a week from Saturday.”

  Badger sat up ramrod straight very quickly, then slapped a hand over his mouth. Those nearest him slid their chairs backwards a bit, but he didn’t race to the bathroom. Whatever it was he battled with, he won and his hand came down. “Oh my God. Did I book it? Helena, tell me it’s a joke!”

  “I have no idea,” I had to admit.

  “Guys?” He pleaded with the o
thers around the table. “Help me out here!” There was silence for a while as utter panic built up in Badger’s pickled brain. “Guys? Buddies? Pals?”

  Finally, Sir Haughty carefully put down his coffee cup. “As I recall, the plans are still all speculation. We weren’t eating at Alfredo’s, after all. We were at The Bridgewater Buffet.”

  Badger put a hand on his chest in relief. “Thank goodness. I hate dancing girls.”

  “We know,” most everyone replied.

  I had a suggestion. “You might want to check your outgoing calls,” I said, smiling as several hands reached for phones that weren’t there. Who carries their phones in their pajamas? Despite how they were all feeling, a human stampede went back up the stairs, and Nitro skittered back to his room, leaving Billings and me alone with our coffee.

  He shook his head in dismay. “And I’m supposed to be interested in drinking?”

  “I won’t be broken hearted if you aren’t,” I said. “Do you want to talk more about your evening?” I know I risked opening a can of worms, but I also wanted more details. “What else did Butte say?”

  “Actually,” Billings began. “I think we’ll wait for the others to get back. There is more. Are there more bagels?” Without waiting for an answer, he got up and prepared one of his own, spreading his with soft liver sausage and adding bacon crumbles. We waited, and had both finished eating by the time the rest returned, fully dressed, but no more alert than before.

  The twins, surprisingly, were wearing identical outfits, both in red shirts and deep indigo denim. Badger, also in jeans, though of a lighter shade and looser fit, wore a solid black T with a breast pocket. He had traded his eyeglasses for contacts, as well. Sylvia, in her eye patch, wore a top to bottom jumpsuit with a studded belt. Sir Haughty had on a dark suit with a yellow ascot. And Roxy, as was her habit, had slipped into a sky blue silk dress with intricate lace edgings. She lifted her skirt to show me her shoes, which were high heeled pumps trimmed in matching blue lace. “I’ve been wanting to wear these for weeks!” She said, lifting one foot to show me the red sole. “Look, they are Christian Louboutins! I found them at an estate sale in Foggy Bottom. They had NO idea. And they happen to match this dress as if they were made for it!”