The Grandmother Plot

by Caroline B. Cooney

  Shawn’s grandparents were from Italy and were serious gardeners. There were grapevines, raised tomato beds, a chicken run, a glass shed, and a row of tiny fruit trees, whose slender branches linked little twiggy fingers. There was a rhubarb bed and thorny assortments of berries. The vegetable garden had raised rows, and fall produce awaited the daily harvest. Freddy wasn’t that keen on vegetables and certainly didn’t want to raise them, but he liked the garden.

  Shawn’s truck wasn’t parked beside the barn. Freddy had been counting on the camaraderie that only another lampworker could provide. Since he wanted his living arrangements to be temporary, he hadn’t made an effort to reach old high-school friends. But wanting his situation to be temporary was awfully close to wanting his own grandmother to die, so Freddy tried not to go there.

  Maude’s death hit him again, and again he couldn’t believe it. It was too crazy. Too vicious. Too pointless.

  He was making a three-point turn to leave when Shawn’s mother came out of the house. Freddy put the window down. “Hi, Mrs. Aminetti.”

  “Freddy, come in. Keep me company. I just made cookies,” she added.

  Being polite to old women was a large part of his life these days, so he parked and followed her in. In the center of her very large, never remodeled kitchen sat a table with scrubbed oilcloth in a strawberry-and-wicker-basket pattern. Crowded together in the center were an Elvis salt and pepper, a cruet of oil, a cracked sugar bowl, and a chipped china thing packed with paper napkins.

  She poured Freddy a glass of milk and set down a plate with a dozen cookies, thick with chocolate chips and oatmeal.

  She said, “You heard then.” Her voice was raw.

  The cookies had had Freddy’s attention, but now he looked at Shawn’s mother. She’d been crying. “I didn’t hear anything. What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “Shawn’s in jail. He got caught buying cocaine in Norwich. They charged him with intent to distribute.”

  Freddy almost fell off the chair. Shawn? Without an ambition in the entire world except lunch? Deciding to become a drug dealer? You didn’t deal coke if you didn’t already use it, and Freddy could not believe Shawn was into coke. “Mrs. Aminetti, it has to be a mistake. Shawn would never do that.”

  “There were cameras. It’s on video.”

  Could Shawn have been set up the way Auburn and Danielle set up Br? What could be achieved by controlling a shoreline constable? It would be like controlling a traffic light.

  “Shawn said he was ordered to do it by some horrible person he knows from glass.”

  How could anybody order Shawn to do anything? Shawn gave the orders; that was what it was to be a cop.

  “Oh, Freddy,” Mrs. Aminetti burst out. “How could you and Shawn get into this terrible thing? This pipe thing, this nightmare, this evil?”

  Freddy did not present a defense. Among themselves, lampworkers called pipe-making “the degenerate art.” Shawn’s mother would not want to hear that.

  He thought of Shawn behind bars. Behind bars for a long time. Connecticut might make marijuana legal, but it would never make selling cocaine legal. “Shawn give you a name?”

  “No. He just said the person was dangerous.”

  Freddy drank some milk. Could Shawn be mixed up with the same dangerous person Freddy was? But Shawn’s glass wasn’t even minor league. It was more like T-ball. Glass was just a hobby for him, and Freddy respected that. But whatever it was, it wasn’t a channel to Gary Leperov.

  “Have a cookie,” said Mrs. Aminetti.

  “I’m not very hungry, thanks.”

  Mrs. Aminetti opened a low, deep drawer and took out waxed paper. They still manufactured waxed paper? Mrs. Aminetti had not even converted to plastic bags? I’m living out my life with people who are living their lives in the 1950s, Freddy thought.

  She tore off a large square, put half a dozen cookies in it, wrapped the cookies in a neat package, and twisted a fat rubber band around it. Probably the rubber band had held the newspaper and been saved for a week or a year.

  “Thank you,” said Freddy, accepting the cookie packet. “Is there anything I can do to help?” He prayed she would say no. He prayed really hard.

  She whirled toward him and glared. “Quit making pipes! Stop using drugs!” Her voice rose. “Grow up, Freddy! Get out of glass!” She slapped her palm on her table.

  Glass was his life. He wasn’t getting out.

  For Shawn, glass was a sideline. Now prison would be Shawn’s life.

  Shawn was a slow, relaxed kind of guy. Weed magnified these traits, so on his days off, Shawn was a sloth, hanging out on his little deck, binging on TV, taking in the sun. He was addicted to a show where people went naked in snake-infested regions of Central American countries where the natives were smart enough not to live. The Americans would run around bare, knee deep in poisonous frogs and spiders the size of bricks.

  Just thinking about jungles made Freddy want to go hug a parking lot.

  Shawn had been saving for a boat trip up the Amazon.

  Had the Lep promised him airfare? Had Shawn agreed to peddle coke for a cruise?

  Freddy couldn’t see it. Plus, the Lep’s world was marijuana. Cocaine was a whole ’nother universe.

  Unless Gary Leperov occupied two worlds.

  Freddy hadn’t let himself use the phrase “money laundering,” even though he knew perfectly well that was what he was doing. He liked to think of it as sales receipts—okay, faked, but like, whatever.

  But it was money laundering, and the dirt that had to be washed out of Gary Leperov’s cash might be from coke. Freddy had agreed in part because it struck him as fun. The first time he got away with it, he thought, How cool is that?

  If it’s coke money, he thought now, there’s nothing cool about it.

  Mrs. Aminetti said, “There is one thing you could do, Freddy. Take Shawn’s dog.”

  Freddy went into spasm. His fingers crushed the cookie packet.

  The dog, Snap, was named for his habit of nipping people. He was cute enough. Medium size, long black-and-white coat, long floppy ears, long sharp teeth. Snap chewed occasionally on Shawn, but Shawn just laughed and rubbed him behind the ears. “He doesn’t draw blood,” Shawn liked to say. “He just likes to get a grip now and then.”

  Take Snap? Feed him? Walk him? Protect neighborhood kids from him? Not that Grandma’s house was in a neighborhood. What with woods, railroad tracks, and swamps, it was as isolated as you could get on two acres.

  Mrs. Aminetti said, “Shawn was so nervous buying drugs he didn’t even remember to fasten Snap’s leash. The animal-control officer in Norwich called us. They found the dog wandering in some park there.”

  Snap always rode in the front of Shawn’s pickup, the window cracked for the dog to sniff whatever cool things dogs sniffed, something Freddy wished he could do. The passenger window was crusted with dried saliva. Shawn couldn’t see any right-side traffic.

  “I’ll go buy a crate,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  “You won’t be back,” said Mrs. Aminetti. “The minute you drive around the corner, you’ll know better than to take Snap, and you’ll be in the next state under a different name.”

  Since Freddy frequently planned to be in the next state under a different name, he couldn’t laugh.

  “I have a crate,” she said, leading Freddy down to her truly magnificent cellar, a place even more packed with tantalizing stuff than Grandma’s garage, a place where a man could root for days, plus drink homemade wine.

  Freddy lugged the crate upstairs.

  Next to the barn, Snap waited in his run. He wagged his tail, but this was deceptive. Freddy positioned the open crate against the dog-run gate, slid the gate open, and wiggled his bare fingers through the mesh as bait. Snap leaped forward. Freddy withdrew his fingers just before crunch time and fastened Sn
ap in.

  Mrs. Aminetti gave him a case of canned dog food and two huge bags of dry dog food. Freddy hoisted the crate onto the wide front seat and drove home.

  Because his sister Emma lived there, Freddy had taken up Alaska reality shows on TV. He followed Alaska state troopers, Alaska railroad engineers, Alaskans living north of the Arctic Circle, Alaska real estate agents, and Alaska cattle ranchers. In most episodes, a man lifted his chin and said into the camera, “I’m here so I can be free.” Right after that, the guy would spend a whole day splitting wood in three feet of snow at ten below in a high wind. This was freedom?

  With a dog he didn’t want whining in his front seat, Freddy pulled into Grandma’s driveway. Freddy was living under the radar—no taxes, no bureaucracy, no licenses, car registrations, or diplomas. Instead, he had dementia visits, an ugly raised ranch, somebody else’s dog that bit people, and the Leper. This was freedom?

  It is freedom, he thought. Shawn threw it away.

  And maybe I did too, agreeing to do whatever the Lep said.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Valeski house was a huge brown-shingled affair, with a big, old porch facing the beach and a big, old porch facing the lane. Laura bet it had big, old problems and would cost a big, old amount of money to fix. Workmen on high ladders were closing second-floor shutters for the winter, so it was one of the few remaining beachfront houses not remodeled for year-round occupancy.

  “Hi, Laura,” called a woman.

  “Kemmy! Is this your house? Are you a Valeski?” Kemmy sang alto in the concert choir and was one of many friends Laura knew only by voice.

  “Nobody’s a Valeski,” said Kemmy.

  “It’s on the property records as Valeski.”

  “Oh, that’s true. Nonna Valeski is still alive. She’s ninety-six. But she had only daughters, and they all married, so the Valeski name disappeared, like, half a century ago. I married a grandson. What are you doing pawing through property records? Planning to make us an offer? We’ll take it. Nonna still comes down for the summer and it’s a nightmare, because she can’t use stairs, can’t manage the stove, can’t do anything really, so we take turns staying with her, and she’s deaf as a post, so we also take turns shouting.”

  Laura had enough people like that in her life. “I got interested in Charles Ives,” she explained. “The composer.”

  “Hideous stuff. Gives me headaches. I nearly left the rehearsal when Gordon Clary began blatting about him. Such an annoying man. Gordon, I mean, not Charles Ives. Why does he have to starch his shirt collar so heavily that his neck explodes out of it? And then he tucks the shirt in and tightens his belt and his waist explodes as well. But if you don’t look at him, he’s fine.”

  “The whole point of a conductor is that you look at him,” said Laura. “Anyway, Charlie Ives summered on this beach and practiced the piano at your house.”

  “Don’t be silly. Nonna would have said so.”

  Laura had a wild thought. A house that had changed hands only twice in over a century. Had it been redecorated? Or decade after decade, had summer people happily used the same, old shabby stuff? “I don’t suppose you have an old piano that Charles Ives might have played.”

  Kemmy hooted with laughter. “There is a piano but it can’t be that old. Nothing lasts that long in unheated, un-air-conditioned waterfront property. Nobody’s played it in years. It’s a plant stand now.”

  They went inside to look. The house was cold and ugly and smelled of mothballs, low tide, and onions. It wasn’t even a remodeling candidate. It was a teardown. But in Charlie’s day, with kids racing in, a salty breeze blowing through open windows, and a dog barking? Perfect.

  The piano was an upright grand. Probably weighed a literal ton. Years of icy winters, scorching summer heat, and salt air had destroyed the finish. One side looked as if it had been through a house fire. Even the name of the piano’s maker had peeled away.

  Kemmy moved a row of dead African violets and wrenched up the warped lid, exposing the keyboard. Some of the ivory had curled but Laura attempted a scale anyway. Only a few keys made sound.

  “You want it, you move it,” said Kemmy. “And it’s not Charles Ives’s. It’s junk. You were paying way too much attention to Gordon Clary.”

  Laura tried to be sensible. She actually was quite practical, even thrifty, if you didn’t count organ installations and red Cadillacs. But speaking of organ installations, she had two strong men at her house at this very minute. And they had a truck, a ramp, and a dolly.

  She called them on her cell.

  Howard and Marco had liked Laura Maple before, because they liked anybody who commissioned a pipe organ. But a woman who would buy a dead piano on the off chance it once felt the hands of Charles Ives? When they finally stopped laughing at the sight of the ruined upright, they treated it as piano royalty.

  The possible Ives piano would have to live in the same room as the two grands and the future organ, and even after the men condensed the pipe crates, it was a tight fit.

  Howard removed the front paneling of the dead piano to see if the works could be restored. Off came the rectangular slab above the keys. The lower door, below the keyboard and above the pedals, seemed to be hinged, which was unusual. Generally this part of the case was held in by pegs. The hinges had rusted shut.

  “We’ll get to it later,” they told her. “Right now, we gotta get back to our organ.”

  Laura loved the pronoun. It was their organ until it was finished, and then it was hers. But hers or not, she was in their way. Laura retreated to her nicely rearranged parlor, and guilt attacked. Guilt was something Freddy often wanted to discuss. What was it anyway? Why did some people have it and some people didn’t?

  Laura had hoped that doing good deeds would erase her own guilt about the past, but it hadn’t worked out like that. No matter how much decency she displayed now, the ugly past stayed ugly.

  She rarely visited MMC two days in a row, but sometimes visiting Aunt Polly assuaged a little of the guilt. She remembered Maude. How could she have set aside the horror of Maude’s death? How could she have branched out into some foolish music-history project when there was Maude to think of?

  Because I’ve turned my whole life into silly projects so that I don’t have to think of my past. But I should think about Maude. I owe Maude my thoughts.

  At Grandma’s, Freddy uncrated Snap and fastened his leash. The two of them ran in circles around the house for a while. Maybe all Snap needed was exercise. For sure Shawn never exercised. But it turned out that what Snap mainly wanted to exercise were his jaws.

  He led Snap through the Way Back, so full of great smells that Snap was in dog ecstasy. Freddy hauled him over the little swamp and yanked on the ropes of the old tire swing to test them. They hadn’t rotted. He took off the leash, gripping Snap’s collar with one hand, and tossed the leash around the swing rope, threaded it through its handle, and reattached it to the collar. Snap could now roam about twenty feet.

  Snap sat on his haunches and gave Freddy the sad liquid stare that melted most dog owners’ hearts, but not one as reluctant as Freddy. The absolute last thing he needed was a bad dog. Back at the house, he filled a water bowl and a kibble bowl and carried them to Snap, who snarfed up the kibble and flung his tongue around in the water.

  Freddy walked back to the shop. He didn’t have enough focus to eat a cookie, let alone work.

  He was awash in anxiety. Shawn dealt drugs? Kenneth suffocated his wife? The Lep threw people off bridges?

  He had a jittery sense of needing to put his arm around his grandmother, make sure she was okay.

  Freddy never felt better after visiting Grandma, exactly, but he always felt good, like his mother might actually be pleased with him. Not proud, she was never proud. But at least not disgusted.

  At MMC, Laura found Kenneth once again standing in front of the cl
osed door of his wife’s room, staring at the solid wood like a dementia patient who bumps into a wall and can’t remember how to go sideways.

  “Hello, Kenneth,” she said. “I was hoping to read Maude’s obituary. Learn more about her life and career. What paper is it in?”

  Kenneth twitched the locked doorknob of his wife’s room. “I’m not writing an obituary. Maude disapproved of them.”

  You could disapprove of gambling, bad movies, or a president, but could you really disapprove of obituaries? But then, Laura disapproved of approximately a million things that seemed to be just fine with society.

  “If anything happened to her, the staff did it,” said Kenneth fiercely, “or one of those jerks pretending to entertain. The residents don’t even notice the entertainment. They’re just bringing these people in so the staff doesn’t get bored. I think it was some activities person. All those cloggers. That creep with the puppets.”

  The puppet guy was creepy. Having dementia was probably a plus during that particular entertainment.

  Kenneth rubbed his eyes so hard Laura thought he might avulse his own eyeballs. All of a sudden, he looked older.

  He really is Maude’s age, she decided. He just has good skin. Everybody has good something: eyesight, hearing, knee joints. His is skin.

  Kenneth kept trying the doorknob. “I can’t even get her things.”

  Nobody had valuables here. The poor patients no longer knew what was valuable. And there wasn’t space to accessorize. No matter how you had lived before, no matter how grand your possessions and collections, here you were down to a windowsill and a shelf. Maude’s room would contain nothing but food-stained blouses and worn-out slippers.

  Kenneth gave up on the door and walked away.

  Laura found Polly in the art room, crayoning along with half a dozen other residents. Each had been given a page cut from a toddler’s coloring book. The volunteer was suggesting good colors for the teddy bear. “Is this brown?” Aunt Polly asked, holding up a green crayon.