Dear Neighbor, Drop Dead

by Saralee Rosenberg

  Now as Mindy looked down at a tear-faced Emma, she wondered about the rumor that Beth used to glue coasters to her baby bottles. Unfortunately, she would have to ponder that when she wasn’t dealing with a medical emergency.

  “Mommy and Daddy just went to visit the car at the body shop, honey. They’ll be back soon. Can I take a look?”

  Mindy was no doctor, but it didn’t take four years of med school to diagnose swelling. Although the injury appeared minor, this was no garden-variety kid. A Beth Diamond offspring was someone who was taught to call boo-boos abrasions. Lord knows what a simple sprain would be called. Probably a million-dollar lawsuit.

  “Emma, I think what we have here is a twisted ankle. I know it hurts, but you’re going to be fine.” I, on the other hand, will be leaving town momentarily.

  “Should I get some ice?” Stacie piped in.

  “Excellent idea. And some Tylenol, too.”

  “But she vomits from Tylenol,” Jessica cried.

  “I know, sweetie. It’s for me.”

  Finally, Emma’s loud wails tapered off and she could talk. “I just want to go home!”

  “Okay, but first I think we’ll let Dr. Kornfeld have a look at you.”

  By the time they returned from Mindy’s second trip to the pediatrician’s office that day, Emma was enjoying the attention and the neon ice pack strapped to her ankle. She had, in fact, suffered a slight sprain. She’d be good as new as soon as the swelling subsided.

  The kids wanted to make a human stretcher for her, but Mindy teased that they shouldn’t get carried away. At ten years old, long-legged Emma was already so tall, she had no trouble putting her arm around Mindy’s neck and hopping.

  Pity that just as they reached the front door, the Diamonds returned from the body shop. Richard hadn’t even put his Range Rover in park when Beth ran to Emma.

  “Oh my God!” She pushed Mindy aside. “What did you do to my little girl?”

  With all the excitement, Mindy hadn’t prepared a speech. The kids were better rehearsed as they’d already told the story in the doctor’s waiting room. They all started explaining at once.

  “Just stop!” Beth stammered. “Look at me, Mindy! I’m a wreck. My face is a wreck. My car is a wreck…. And what is the source of all my pain? You! But silly me. I leave two healthy children in your possession for maybe what? An hour? Sure enough, I come home to find that my daughter has been maimed!”

  “She’s fine. Honest. We just got back from Dr. Kornfeld’s. She took a little spill on the steps and twisted her ankle. That’s all.”

  “That’s all?” Beth echoed. “You don’t think it’s a problem that Emma will have to hobble through airports now? And what did he say about the pool? Will she be allowed to swim? I swear it’s not just annoying to live next door to you, it’s dangerous! I’m going inside to call a realtor!”

  “Seriously?” Mindy had to disguise her delight. “You would consider moving over this?”

  “No, you will!” She scooped up her baby and headed home.

  Whenever Mindy needed a good cry, she locked herself in the basement bathroom. Not only would her family be unable to hear her down there, she couldn’t hear them either. “Mommmm! Stacie took my iPod and won’t give it back!” “Mommm! The little loser won’t get off the computer!” “Mommmm! I think my retainer got thrown out!”

  Unfortunately, holing up in there forced her to try to make sense of not only her problems but also the former owner’s attempts at decorating. Between the gothic light fixtures and haunted-house wallpaper, she felt like she was an extra on the set of Friday the 13th.

  When they moved in, Artie swore he’d torch the bathroom before he’d ever take a crap in there, but a hundred other fires had to be put out first. Therefore, it remained in its original state, like an accident scene the police cordoned off until further notice.

  “Hey.” Artie knocked. “Let me in. C’mon. You’ll feel better if we talk.”

  Mindy unlocked the door and wiped her nose. “Nothing is going to make me feel better. This has been the most awful day ever. I just want it to end.”

  “It wasn’t that bad. Tomorrow things will look different.”

  “Yeah, they’ll look worse. You think Waspy is going to write us a check tomorrow? You think Beth is going to wake up and decide not to sue me? Maybe I’ll win the lottery so I have enough money to fly to Chicago. I don’t know why I was so excited about entering that stupid contest. We can’t afford for me to—.”

  “Shhh… We’ll figure it out. Just…I don’t know…keep it together for like five minutes. My mom is on the phone with the kids and wants to talk to you about the cruise.”

  “No! I can not deal with her right now. Tell her I’ve read all eleven of her e-mails and I will pick up number fifty sunscreen and get the passports from the vault.”

  “Yeah. Uh, that’s not why she called. Seems there was a little mix-up with the cabins.”

  “Oh my God. We’re not all together?”

  “No, we’re together. I mean really all together.”

  “What the hell?” Mindy screamed.

  “Calm down. Just calm down. Something must have gotten screwed up with the reservation when we added Aaron and Aunt Toby. Instead of giving us an extra cabin, they canceled one, and since the cruise is sold out, we’re just going to have to punt. My mom was thinking maybe you and Dana could bunk with two kids and—”

  “No! I’ll go crazy if I have to listen to Dana’s stupid lectures about trans fats wrecking my small intestines, and about how Ira bought her another piece of jewelry she doesn’t really like, or how when they redid their master suite, she wished that they’d made room for a Jacuzzi.”

  “Fine. I’ll make you a deal. You talk to my mom, and I’ll call Ira and tell him to have Dana cool it with the BS.”

  “But he’s worse than her with all his stupid little gadgets and the pictures on his cell of his Porsche from every angle. I just don’t get why everything has to turn into such a goddamn disaster!”

  “Relax. Okay? You’re not helping the situation by carrying on. God I hate PMS days!”

  “Excuse me?” she poked his shoulder. “What does PMS have to do with this? You think I’m imagining these problems or that I want to be under all this stress. You think I like feeling powerless? I swear if you say one more thing, you’d better get a running start because I will kill you with my bare hands and I am running out of places to hide the bodies. Do you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear. Kids, get your sneakers!” Artie yelled. “We’re getting TCBY. Mom needs a Mississippi Mud Thriller Chiller!”

  What to call the in-laws? That is the question newlyweds ponder, though not in Artie’s case. After his third date with Mindy, he told Helene that he was going to marry her daughter and started calling her Mom. She was so thrilled that a doctor’s son was falling in love with Mindy, she started calling him sonny boy and made him dinner every night.

  Rhoda, on the other hand, made it clear to Mindy that she had no interest in being adopted. “My two wonderful sons are my children. I’ll answer to anything but mother.”

  To his credit, Stan Sherman offered to let Mindy call him Dad, though she never found out if this unusually gracious gesture was because he’d always wanted a daughter or that he genuinely liked her.

  But how quickly that old familial feeling could dissipate. When Mindy mentioned she would like to start working reception part-time in his office, “Dad” suddenly changed his tune.

  There would be terms, he told her. She had better not expect to earn a dime more than the others, and if she tried pulling rank, she’d be out the door. “I don’t need the girls kvetching that you took an extra ten minutes for lunch.”

  Mindy assured him she understood, never expecting that it would be Stan who took advantage. He made her come in on her days off, yelled at her for mistakes made by others, and often sent her on personal errands he couldn’t be bothered with.

  T-minus two days before the crui
se, he realized he’d forgotten to pick up his new tux and told Mindy to get it for him on her lunch hour. “But be back by one. We have a full afternoon.”

  “I don’t believe him.” Mindy called Artie on the way to her car. “Why should I have to schlep all the way to Garden City? I have my own errands to run!”

  “Just do what he asks, okay?” he pleaded. “He’s treating us for a whole week.”

  “I don’t care. I’m so sick of this. I’m going back in and telling him what I think.”

  Artie had no such fear. He had heard his wife terrorize customer service reps in India, but confront Stan and his hard-boiled temper? Just the thought would make her break out in hives. And yet, what Artie didn’t realize was that something inside his wife was churning.

  She was tired and stressed as usual, but she’d also just returned from visiting her eighty-seven-year-old grandmother at the nursing home. A Holocaust survivor, and the only feisty member of Mindy’s lineage, of late, Jenny Baumann was an equal opportunity destroyer who woke up combative and didn’t close her eyes until someone had gotten a piece of her mind. “The only reason she’s still alive is because God is afraid to meet her,” Mindy would joke.

  Yet every time she left there, she’d say to herself, Mindy, you need to be more like her. Open your mouth! Stand up for your rights! Demand that the peas not be undercooked!

  Brimming with an eerie determination, Mindy returned to the office on a head of steam, shut Stan’s door, and zoned in on his temples. If it was a bad day and he was ready to blow, his lobes would be purple and pulsing like Shakira in concert. Thankfully they were resting.

  “I was thinking, Dad, “she cleared her throat, “since the tux place is right by Roosevelt Field, maybe afterward I would run over there and get some shopping done.”

  “Forget it. The girls would never let me hear the end of it.”

  “Oh. Really? Well okay then…I guess you’ll have to get the tux yourself.”

  “Can’t.” Cue left lobe. “You know I’m booked solid the whole day.”

  “Hmm. Tough call.” She stood with hands on her hips like she’d seen Rhoda do. “Lose an afternoon’s billings or give Mindy a few hours off?”

  “Have you lost your mind?” he looked up.

  “Very possibly…Aren’t you glad you’re the first to know?”

  “What the hell is going on with you? Do I look like I have time for games?”

  “No.” Her heart pounded as if she’d just missed her exit and hadn’t a clue how to get back to the highway. “See, here’s the thing…Dad…It’s times like this that I feel very unappreciated. Remember back when I first started? It would take you days to return calls to patients because everything was so disorganized. Now, thanks to me, lab reports get filed immediately and put in the right charts. And what about my great scheduling system? Patients love me because they know I’ll get them in right away and they won’t sit around the waiting room all day…And you do realize that because I handle so much of your phone work, you’re not losing time talking to people who just need their prescriptions refilled…Oh, and what about the other day when I figured out that Mrs. O’Hagan had early signs of temporal arteritis, and I made her go right to the emergency room? If she’d waited for you to come back from your golf game, she could have gone blind. So I was thinking…aren’t I entitled to a few hours off for all my hard work and dedication?”

  “No! You’re entitled to a paycheck!” Stan groused. “And you get a damn good one!”

  “Forget it.” Mindy headed out. “I hate when you’re like this!” Oh my God…Artie is going to kill me…not exactly the best way to start a family vacation he’s paying for.

  “Come back here,” he ordered.

  The obedient one stopped.

  “You have a helluva lot of nerve marching in here like this.”

  “I’m sorry. I just feel that—”

  “Let me finish, for Christ’s sake. I listened to you, now you listen to me. Go get my tux.” He reached for his wallet. “And then, I don’t know, go buy you and the kids some nice things to bring on the trip.”

  “Really?” Mindy stared at a wad of hundreds.

  “But we keep this between us.” He returned to his charts. “Understand?”

  “Deal!” She trotted to the door.

  “And Mindy? If you ever pull this shit again, don’t bother coming back.”

  “I know…although, hey, you’ve got to admit I was right about everything.”

  “Not everything,” he grumbled. “Mrs. O’Hagan had dish detergent in her eye.”

  An hour later, tux in the trunk, she was searching the Roosevelt Field lot for a spot and could barely contain herself. She had time, she had money…she was Beth!

  But funny how the instant she thought of her neighbor, she spotted a small blue sedan with a rental sticker on the bumper that was just like the model Beth was driving. And the only reason Mindy knew that was because the second Beth had gotten home, she’d dragged Mindy outside to see the “piece of crap car” that was all her fault.

  Mindy said a quick prayer that they didn’t run into each other, only to head toward the mall entrance and spot a very familiar face sitting in a silver Mercedes coupe, next to an older man who was not her husband. Beth?

  Couldn’t be. Mindy’s new contact lens prescription needed an adjustment. Then again, she’d just seen the rental car parked by the exit. And when the woman waved her Streisand-long nails, fluffed her blond hair, and laughed with dramatic flair, Mindy knew there was no mistake.

  As if by telepathy, Beth sensed she was being watched and looked out. When their eyes locked, it was hard to tell whose face showed more fear.

  Would this be a bad time to remind you it’s your day to drive the kids home?

  Mindy thought about taking a picture with her cell. If she’d learned anything from watching CSI, it was the importance of the eyewitnesses at a crime scene committing details to memory in the event they were ever needed to testify. Instead, she fled as if she were the guilty party, but not before getting a glimpse of the man’s vanity plate.

  BODYDOC? Was he the guy repairing her car? No, this was Beth. BODYDOC had to be a plastic surgeon. Maybe the one she saw in the city. Had he been headed to his house in the Hamptons and offered to look at the damage to her face from the accident?

  Mindy was so wound up, she didn’t realize she was standing in the middle of Nordstrom’s cosmetics department.

  “Care to try the latest fragrance from our signature collection?” The lady in red asked.

  “What?”

  “It’s essence of patchouli,” she whispered as if she were revealing the Colonel’s secret recipe.

  “Oh…um…no thanks.”

  “You should really sample it.” She spritzed a card, waving it above her head.

  Mindy gagged. What happens when you mix Glade with Raid?

  “Why don’t you stop by the counter to try a different—”

  “Sorry…I can’t do this right now. I just spotted my next-door neighbor in a sports car with a man who isn’t her husband, and I am in shock.”

  “Not as much as his wife will be when she finds out,” she smirked. “I should know.”

  “I just can’t believe it—”

  “Oh, honey, it’s so common.” She leaned in as if to share a trade secret. “The fragrance industry would be dead if it weren’t for all the screwing around on the side.”

  “Really? I’m so naive. I never think these things happen except on TV.”

  “Well, don’t jump to any conclusions. Unless you saw them doing it—”

  “No. They were just talking.”

  “You know, you seem like a nice lady.” She scanned the crowd for a real customer. “Maybe you should just forget the whole thing.”

  “Are you kidding?” Mindy laughed. “This could be the opportunity of a lifetime!”

  “Why?”

  “Because it just gave me an idea for a new book…Bed Beth & Beyond.”
r />   “Oh, you’re a writer?”

  “I am now.”

  Four

  “Girls! Knock it off! I can’t take all this screaming,” Beth called from her bed. “You’ve got your own rooms, your own laptops, your own cell phones. What’s left to fight about?”

  “Look what your lovely daughter did!” Jessica ran in holding a Juicy jacket. “She wore it without asking and then got something totally disgusting on it!”

  “Did not!” Emma bellowed from her room. “It’s Kim Cho’s fault. She dropped her lunch on me.”

  “Shut up you little slob…now it’s all gross, Mommy. I am never going to wear it!”

  “Like hell you won’t! I paid almost two hundred dollars for that outfit. Just go downstairs, give it to Marina, and tell her you need it for school tomorrow. Meanwhile, it wouldn’t hurt you to be nice to your sister. You know she has a serious ankle sprain.”

  “No she doesn’t. She was just in the den playing DDR and she was on the second level!”

  “DD what?”

  “Dance Dance Revolution! The game where you follow the arrows and dance on the mat? Daddy bought it for her after she helped him clean the garage.”

  “Emma!” Beth screamed. “Are you kidding me? Dancing on your bad ankle?”

  “I hate you, Jessie! You are the worst sister evah!”

  “It’s not fair,” Jessica whined. “The little dork always gets to wear my clothes, but if I touch one thing of hers it’s like Jessica, give it back. Wear your own stuff!”

  “Would you stop? I have a migraine and you’re making it worse. Just go tell Marina to wash that by hand, and then you’d better get going on your homework. You know, Jessica, if you expect to be the speaker at the Founder’s Day ceremony, you need those math grades up.”

  “No I don’t! I keep telling you Mr. Ryan loves me, but I don’t even care anymore because Whitney and Mallory are like sucking up to him and now they’re probably going to get picked.”