Foul Play at the PTA

by Laura Alden

  “Hmm.” He scanned the paper. What had once been a simple, straightforward listing of food items was now decorated with strikethroughs, circles, stars, and arrows. “Rutabagas?”

  I’d crossed off the rutabagas at least twice and had, twice, returned them to the dinner plan. “It’s a family thing.”

  “Ah.” He gave me a glance, then went back to the list. “Oyster dressing? Same side of the family?”

  I thought a moment. Family lore said Uncle Rolly, my mom’s bachelor brother, had started bringing the rutabaga casserole. The oyster dressing had come from Grandma Chittenden, an East Coast transplant. “No. And unlike the rutabagas, most of us eat the oyster dressing.”

  He frowned. “If no one eats the rutabagas, why—”

  We were saved by the ringing of the telephone. I picked up the receiver. “Good evening, the Children’s Bookshelf. How may I help you?”

  “Beth?”

  “Hi, Marcia.” I made a dead-bolt-turning motion to Evan and mouthed the word “Please.”

  “Oh, good, I caught you before you left.” Her words ran together. This was unusual for Marcia, who normally wouldn’t, couldn’t be rushed.

  “What can I do for you?” Maybe she’d forgotten to tell me something. This wasn’t necessarily a phone call that meant trouble. Why did I assume the worst?

  “It’s about Wednesday night,” she said.

  Or maybe I assumed the worst because that was what so often happened. “What about it?” Wednesday night was the sole evening that all the downtown retailers were open, a tradition handed down in the mists of time. Marcia had worked Wednesday nights for years.

  It worked out well because Wednesday was PTA night. I dedicated that evening to secretarial duties, even if we didn’t hold a meeting. If there weren’t minutes to work on, there were letters to write or fund-raisers to plan or parental e-mail to answer, and I was almost keeping up with it. This Wednesday there was a meeting, and since I’d asked to get something on the agenda, attendance was an absolute must.

  “I can’t work Wednesday night,” Marcia said. “It’s not going to be a problem, is it?” She didn’t wait for an answer, but plunged on. “You’ll figure out a new schedule. It shouldn’t be too hard, one extra night. See, my grandson is starting swim lessons and I’d never forgive myself if I miss seeing him learn. You used to swim yourself, didn’t you? I knew you’d understand.”

  “Are you talking about missing just this Wednesday?”

  Marcia gave a peal of laughter. “It takes longer than one time to learn how to swim. No, these lessons run until March. Or is it April? Do you want me to check right now?”

  No, I didn’t. What I wanted was an employee who actually wanted to work. I said good-bye and hung up the phone. Marina was right: Something had to be done about Marcia. Too bad I hadn’t a clue what it was.

  “Problems?” Evan put his elbow on top of a nearby bookshelf. At the end of a long, busy day in retail he still managed to look unrumpled and drop-dead gorgeous. Curly blond hair going gray at the temples, long lean body, and a smile that quirked up on one side of his face, he was on track to become a Distinguished Older Man.

  Some days—okay, most days, to be truthful—it was hard to believe he was interested in plain old me. What he saw in Beth Kennedy, age forty-one, divorced mother of two, and busy owner of a children’s bookstore who’d been endowed with mousy brown limp hair and had accumulated an extra fifteen hip-area pounds, I had no idea.

  Well, twenty pounds.

  “What makes you think there are problems?” I asked.

  “When you’re worried you get little lines right here.” He stretched out and tapped his index finger above the bridge of my nose.

  His touch sent a cold wave down my back. Why did I keep feeling like a love-struck teenager around this man? I was Beth Kennedy, once voted Least Likely to Scream at a Rolling Stones Concert. “Lines?” I lurched backward, frantically scrubbing at my forehead. “I’m not old enough for lines. I’m not gray enough. I’m not lined enough.”

  Evan chuckled. “Then you’d better stop worrying. They might stick.”

  I stopped my fake rubbing. If I got wrinkles, would he still want to be seen with me in public? If I got any uglier, surely he’d stop—

  The phone rang. Automatically, I reached to answer. “Hello, Children’s Bookshelf.”

  “Beth.”

  Instantly, my senses went on red alert. “Kathy.” My sister had never in my entire life called me at work. That she did so now could only mean . . . “It’s Mom, isn’t it?” She was sick. Why hadn’t she told us earlier? Though Mom and I didn’t have the ideal mother-daughter relationship, she was still my mom. If something had happened to her, I’d never forgive myself for not getting back to Michigan last summer. “How is she?”

  “Mom?” Kathy’s round voice sounded puzzled. “Fine. At least she was this morning when I talked to her.”

  “Oh. Good.” My spine lost its stiffness. “So, um, how are you?”

  She laughed. “Same old Beth. Small talk isn’t one of your strengths, is it?”

  Never had been, and thank you very much for reminding me, biggest of all sisters.

  “It’s about Thanksgiving,” Kathy said.

  “Oh, good. We should talk about the menu.” I scrabbled around for the pencil. “Ron’s allergic to green beans, right? And is it the red or the orange Jell-O you can’t stand?”

  “Sorry. No can do.”

  The pencil rolled out of reach. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean we can’t make it on Thanksgiving. Ron’s company gave him an early Christmas bonus. Can you believe it?”

  “Um . . .” Kathy’s husband worked for a large financial services firm and made obscene amounts of money. I tried very hard not to be jealous and succeeded almost half the time.

  “Anyway,” Kathy said, “part of this year’s bonus is a Thanksgiving cruise to the Caribbean. The U.S. Virgin Islands, St. Kitts, St. Lucia.” She sighed dramatically. “It’s going to be heaven.”

  I did not want to go on a cruise, I told myself. Especially not at Thanksgiving. Who would want to take a vacation on this most honest of all holidays? Thanksgiving was about gathering around a crowded table with as much family as you could shoehorn in, knee to knee and elbow to elbow, praying, laughing, and having the same arguments you had every year. Thanksgiving wasn’t about shiny cruise ships and smiling waitstaff.

  I’d almost convinced myself when Kathy said, “Ron’s company is telling us the whole family is invited, so the kids are coming, too, plane tickets and all!”

  Her voice was alive with excitement, and in spite of my jealousy—not that I was jealous, of course I wasn’t—a smile spread across my face. “How long has it been since all the kids were in one place at the same time?” I asked.

  “Three years and five months,” Kathy said. “Ron thought you might be mad about us missing Thanksgiving, but I knew you’d be fine with it.”

  “Um . . .”

  “Oop, there’s the call waiting. Got to go. I’ll send you a postcard from the ship!” She hung up, laughing.

  “More problems?”

  I debated how to answer Evan’s question, and finally said, “Nope.” The menu lurked on the counter. I pulled a pen out of a coffee mug decorated with cats and rewrote “Green bean casserole.” Then I underlined it. Twice. “I just need to make a phone call.”

  My purse was in a drawer back in the glorified closet I called my office. I fetched it out front, extracting my cell phone on the way and finding the phone number for the PTA president. “Erica? Beth. It’s about Wednesday night.”

  Chapter 2

  I spent Wednesday night at the store. My manager, Lois, had bowling league that night, and my two part-time employees were both students at nearby University of Wisconsin. I didn’t want Sara or Paoze to sacrifice study time for the sake of a job that didn’t pay much more than minimum wage.

  Lois said I was dreaming if I thought college kids did nothin
g but study on weeknights. “Most of them are out spending Daddy’s money on video games and iTunes and beer. Not necessarily in that order.”

  “Do you really think so?” But I was happy in dreamland, so it was easy to picture blond, blue-eyed Sara chewing the ends of her hair while working on arcane organic chemistry equations. Even easier to see the brown-skinned, brown-eyed Paoze sitting in the library surrounded by the novels of dead white guys as he scribbled away on a paper for his latest English literature class. “Even Paoze?”

  She relented. “Well, not him. If he was freezing to death he wouldn’t have two quarters to make a spark.” She grinned evilly; quite a look on her sixtyish face. “Say, do you think I could get him on that?”

  Lois had developed a habit of playing on the gullibility of young Paoze. From snipe hunts to Paul Bunyan exploits, Lois worked hard at her tall tales. Even I got caught once in a while. She’d nailed Paoze multiple times—the fact that he’d fallen for the snipe hunt story still rankled with him—and for a week she’d had Sara believing in a left-handed wrench.

  Despite the fact that Paoze was born in Laos and didn’t move to the United States until he was a teenager, he probably knew better than most of us that flint is what sparks. “Remember last spring?” I asked. “He had that American Literature of the Early 1900s class and did a term paper on Jack London.”

  “That’s right.” Lois looked thoughtful. “ ‘To Build a Fire’ and all that. Hmm.”

  I made a mental note to warn Paoze about stories set in Alaska, and waved good-bye to her when she left at five.

  The clock ticked time away slowly. A woman came in and asked if we had anything by Jackie Collins. “There’s a bookstore in the mall,” I offered, but she wasn’t mollified and went away empty-handed and annoyed. The course of running a children’s bookstore never did run smooth.

  After she left, I did some alphabetizing, jotted down a few books to order, and was about to haul out the feather duster, when Marina breezed in.

  “Hail, fellow! Well met!”

  Along with my bigger-than-life best friend, the front door ushered in a blast of winter-cold air that made the back of my neck tense up. I cast a longing look toward the thermostat, which was resolutely set at sixty-eight degrees, and sighed. I loved Wisconsin, I told myself. There’s nothing prettier than sun sparkling on snow and nothing better than skating and skiing and seeing white puffs of air coming out of your mouth six months of the year.

  Marina shivered, sending waves of damp chill over me. “Nasty out there,” she said. “Remind me again why we live so far north?” She shook back her hair and droplets of water scattered in every direction.

  “Because this is where my house is?”

  She unbuttoned her bright pink coat. The color clashed horribly with her red hair, but a few years back Marina had decided that she liked pink, that she loved pink, and she wasn’t going to let any out-of-touch fashion traditions dictate what she was going to wear.

  Though I admired her attitude—I still found it hard to wear white shoes before Memorial Day—sometimes fashion rules were rules for a good reason. I trotted out that point of view when we were coat shopping, but she said I had no sense of adventure. In my experience, limited though it was, adventure meant uncertainty, discomfort, fear, and pain. None of those seemed like very sensible things to pursue on a regular basis.

  “You, my dah-ling”—Marina was back in Greta Garbo mode—“could use a large dose of excitement.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You have a wistful cast to your dainty features. You have that air of faint discontent.” She put her nose high and sniffed. “And, yes, the scent of ennui.”

  “It’s the smell of burning leaves, and the last time you said I needed excitement in my life we ended up sitting in traffic for three hours and overheating your engine.”

  “Minor annoyances must be expected. Especially during Chicago’s St. Patrick’s Day parade. It was an excellent time and you’re everlastingly grateful that I kidnapped you.”

  She was right. Watching the parade, seeing the cheerful crowds and the greened river, even sitting in a traffic jam had been the stuff of which fond memories are made. But saying so would just encourage her. “That was only eight months ago,” I said. “Talk to me about excitement when the snow melts.”

  She brushed an infinitesimal piece of dust off the counter, and when I saw the way her pinkie was extended—high etiquette style—I knew the argument was far from over. She sighed. “It’s so sad.”

  I looked at her warily. “What is?”

  “Your precious children.”

  The kids were with their father, having a great time stuffing themselves with fat-laden pizza, drinking sugar-saturated soda, and playing video games guaranteed to rip half an hour off their attention span. “What about them?”

  “Growing up without any adventure in their lives.” Mournfully, she straightened a pile of bookmarks. “When they’re old and gray, they’re going to bow their heads and say, ‘Remember when we were young? We never once did anything that wasn’t sanitized, supervised, and structured. Why weren’t we ever allowed to be kids? Why didn’t we have any adventures?’ ”

  I rubbed my forehead. “One minute you’re saying I’m boring, the next you’re wringing your hands over Jenna and Oliver’s old age. If there’s a connection, I’m missing it.”

  She slammed her open palm on the counter. “You! You’re the connection, dear silly one.”

  “Um . . .”

  “Don’t you see?” She looked me solid in the eyes. “If you don’t teach them that life is to be lived to the fullest, that it’s worth wringing out every last drop of enjoyment, that there are no small parts, just small players, who will? Richard?” She snorted.

  I leaned against the cash register. “So I should be something I’m not for the sake of my children?”

  Marina crossed her arms. “Why did I know you wouldn’t take me seriously?”

  “Because I’ve known you more than ten years. And, thanks to those years of precedent, I know you have something up your sleeve.”

  “Me?” She tugged at the cuffs of her pink coat. “Nothing up there except air.”

  “You invoked the specter of future unhappiness for Jenna and Oliver. You never do that unless you’re trying to convince me to do something I don’t want to do.”

  “Poor Beth.” Marina shook her head sadly. “Always believing the worst in people.”

  “Poor Marina,” I said. “Having her past actions remembered so clearly.”

  She reached across the counter and, with her index fingers, pushed at the corners of my mouth until I wore a stretchy smile. “Much better.”

  “Quit that. Just tell me what you’re after, okay? I know you enjoy the convincing game, but I have work to do.”

  She pounced. “Exactly! Too much of it.”

  “That’s the fun of owning your own business. You get to pick which eighty hours a week you work.”

  “No, no, no.” She swatted away my words. “I’m not talking about the oppressive hours you slave without just compensation; I’m talking about the work you’re doing right now that should be done by someone else who shall remain nameless but her initials are Marcia Trommler.”

  I tried, and failed, to diagram Marina’s last sentence in my head. “That again.”

  “Yes,” she said, nodding so hard that her hair fell forward across her face. She hooked it back over her ears with impatient hands. “The problem isn’t going away.”

  “I know that.” My voice gained an unattractive edge. “But where am I going to find someone to replace her? It’s not easy to find someone who’ll work long hours for low wages, no benefits, and no bonuses.”

  “Long hours, you say?” Marina cupped a hand to her ear. “How many hours are on Marcia’s time sheet? And now she’s taking Wednesday nights off? Wednesday nights are PTA nights, remember?”

  “It’s her grandson,” I said lamely. “How can I not let her have tim
e off? She shouldn’t have to miss watching him grow up.”

  Marina scoffed. “Then she should quit and spend all day with him instead of wreaking havoc with the store’s work schedule.”

  I busied myself with straightening a stack of postcards. It could have been Lois standing there. Actually, she had been standing there, just a few hours earlier, and had said almost word for word what Marina was saying.

  “She’s been here a long time,” I said. “No one knows the picture books as well as Marcia. And she has great rapport with the customers.” At least the ones she knew. Strangers she didn’t much care for. “And kids like her.” Well, some did. The clean ones. Kids who came in with dirty hands were marched to the bathroom to wash.

  Marina gave me a look. “You’ve never let anyone go, have you?”

  “Um . . .”

  “Hah!” She grinned triumphantly. “This isn’t about Marcia’s inability to fulfill her duties as an employee; this is about your fear of firing!”

  “Is not.” But my gaze slid away from hers.

  She shook her index finger at me. “Prove it.”

  “It’s not fear.” So what if I hadn’t ever fired anyone? So what if the thought of firing Marcia made my stomach hurt? So what if the idea of inciting confrontation went against everything my mother ever taught me? If I had to fire Marcia, I would.

  “No?” Marina looked at me askance. “Then what is it?”

  “Timing. It’s too close to Christmas. And I’ll thank you to remember that this is my store, not some playground for your management theories.”

  Marina shook her head, sighing. “Poor Beth, still afraid of life. You need to show your daughter and son how to overcome fear. Show them how to push through the anxiety and come through on the other side. Fear is nothing,” she said solemnly. “If you’re scared, it means whatever you’re scared of isn’t happening. If it was, you’d be too busy working your way out of trouble. . . .”

  As she talked, I studied her, trying to figure out what was really going on in that busy brain. Clearly, she had an ulterior motive. And, just as clearly, she wasn’t going to tell me what it was. Ah, well. Time would eventually tell. It always did. Marina couldn’t keep a secret for beans.