Recovering Dad

by Libby Sternberg

  The bedroom is decorated in Frills-R-Us style, with a canopied bed in a ruffled floral print, matching curtains, a doilied dresser, skirted vanity, and locked jewelry chest in the corner. Maneuvering around all the stuff crammed into this room, I stub my barefoot toe on the corner of the dresser and have to bite my finger to keep myself from crying out in pain.

  I try the closet first. It’s jammed with clothes — frothy chiffons, satiny tops, and a few wildly colorful cotton smocks that would make the alarms go off at the threshold of an Abercrombie & Fitch. Shoes in all shapes and colors — with an inordinate number of athletic varieties — line the floor, and scarves and hats are piled high on the upper shelves. Nothing in here except plenty of footage for a “What Not to Wear” show.

  Softly closing the doors to the closet, I turn to the dresser. I pull open some drawers and see a collection of those engineered bras, designed to make Gardenia’s already full cleavage look as deep and shadowy as the Grand Canyon. She appears to have ordered every color in the catalog — purple lace, satiny rose, silky pink, and many other varieties that bloom in a veritable garden patch of Wonderbras. Gardenia uses some kind of overpowering lavender-scented sachet to keep her blossoms smelling nice, and the scent tickles my nose, turning on the pilot light of a sneeze.

  But I can’t sneeze — Gardenia might hear me, and realize I’m not in her bathroom. I hold my nose. I hold my breath. I jump up and down on the plush carpet on one foot. Hey — sometimes that works.

  And sometimes it makes me fall into things.

  This time, I crash into a corner of the dresser and tumble to the floor, grasping the first thing I can get my hands on — a lamp. Fortunately, it doesn’t hit the floor and break.

  Instead, it hits my head, and I’m able to catch it in my lap, where it bruises my thigh. Lucky me.

  But along with the lamp, a rectangle of green paper floats to the floor. It must have been under the lamp. I scoop it up and read it.

  It’s a check. From Steve Paluchek to Gardenia Beckel. For fifteen-hundred dollars.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CONNIE’S VOICE IS louder. She’s declaiming as if she were a Shakespearean actor playing to the balcony. She shouts about how the “Lord calls us to be good ministers of the truth and wants us to work with SPEED and conviction and HASTEN to the aid of our fellow brothers and SISTERS as we prepare for the final LEAVETAKING of this earth and the FAREWELLS that must surely accompany our worldly journeys …”

  But I get it. She’s telling me to get a move on. I shove the check into my pocket and head for the living room, making sure Gardenia isn’t looking my way. As soon as I’m within a foot of Connie, she reaches out and grabs my sweater, thanks Gardenia profusely for her time, and rushes us from the apartment faster than you can say “heretic burning.”

  We’re halfway down the stairs when we hear Gardenia’s voice. She’s calling after us, asking about her free Bible. Connie tells her it’ll be sent in the mail.

  Back at the car, I proudly show Connie what I’ve found, expecting her to ooh and ah over my investigative prowess. Instead, she grimaces and snatches the check from my hands.

  “You numbskull! Why’d you take this? You could have just told me what it was. Now, when she discovers it’s missing, Gardenia’s probably going to report us to the police as thieves.”

  She taps her chin with the check and then whips out her cell phone.

  “Only one thing to do. We have to return it before she discovers it’s missing.” She makes a quick call to Information and gets Gardenia’s phone number, and before I can protest, she’s feigning a high-pitched, Scandanavian-sounding accent.

  “Miss Beckellll, iz zat you, ja? Zis is ze Crown Liquor store on York Road and you are a vinner in our Best Customer contest. Ja, ja — you haf von a bottle of our best Scotch. But ve haf a problem. Ve need you to pick it up right away, ja, because ve are closing for holiday tomorrow. Ja, big Svedish holiday. Johann Johansen Day. Ja, like Christmas for us. Ja, ja, Christmas in April, very special, ja …”

  Almost the second she’s off the phone, we hear Gardenia’s front door open and close and her clicking heels on the stairs and asphalt. Zoom — she’s off in a cloud of exhaust.

  “C’mon,” Connie says, getting out of her car. “We don’t have much time.”

  “What are we going to do?” I race after her, but not before throwing my one shoe back into the car.

  “Get inside, put this danged check back, and go home — that’s what!” She keeps walking.

  “But how are we going to get in?” I say.

  “I’m a PI. I know something about picking locks,” she snaps.

  Oh, yeah. She knows something about picking locks, all right. She knows how not to do it. After a few minutes, she’s tried every wire, rod, and fake key she can dig out of a little leather case — all to no avail. Gardenia either has some Krazy-Glue kind of lock on her front door or my sister failed the PI correspondence course in breaking and entering. I’m betting on the latter. This isn’t the first time her lockpicking acumen, or lack thereof, has failed us.

  “Call Kurt,” I whisper to her.

  “No time.” Connie straightens and shoves the case in her pocket. She turns and heads back down the stairs, making me think she’s giving up, but instead of going to the car, she walks to the other side of the building, past a small pool, and stares up at Gardenia’s apartment balcony.

  “Oh, no,” I say. “You’re not thinking of—”

  “Look,” she says, pointing to the vine-covered wall. “There’s a trellis. It’s just like a ladder. It’ll be a snap. And she left her sliding door open a tad — see it? It couldn’t be easier. You’ll be in and out in no time.”

  What?!!

  “I’ll be in and out in no time? I thought you were the—”

  Connie narrows her eyes. In Balducci language, that means, No, you thought you were the clever PI, my friend, and if you don’t do this simple little PI task, the real PI in the family might not consider you for further employment, so get crackin’.

  I growl under my breath and head for the trellis.

  It’s a snap, all right. I climb the trellis at lightning speed, nearly managing to gouge my eyes out on vines that have this spiky thorn thing going on, which some horticulturalist probably bred into them for maximum burglar-repellant powers. I make fast work of returning the check to the dresser and am feeling pretty darn proud of myself when I reappear on the balcony, smiling at Connie below.

  She doesn’t smile back. Instead, she waves frantically and whisper-shouts something I can’t quite understand. It sounds like “She’s humming.”

  No, not humming—coming! Gardenia’s coming back!

  I hoist myself over the balcony and grab for the trellis with my left hand, but the blasted spikes from the Little Shop of Horrors plant dig into my palm, and I cry out in pain.

  “Be quiet!” Connie snarls. “And hurry up! She parked her car!”

  I find footing on a rung of the trellis and lean back to tell Connie she’s not being very helpful, discovering in the process something I missed on the way up. The trellis isn’t well-fastened to the wall. In fact, it’s not really fastened at all. It kind of leans against the wall with its heavy burden of thorn-infested vinage. And if someone is on the trellis leaning backward, said trellis tends to lean backward, too, pulled toward the earth by the inexorable force of gravity as those diabolical vines weigh it down. It’s like a giant fishing pole bending toward a lake.

  That turns out to be an appropriate metaphor as I fall toward a glistening, shimmering, aquamarine rectangle. Yes, the pool is just waiting for a trellis-hooked piece of bait to splash into its depths, a piece of bait who happens to look a lot like the feckless and shoeless Bianca Balducci.

  I hit the water with a muted splash and come sputtering to the surface a few seconds later. Connie grabs me by the shoulder and hoists me out of the pool with a pitiless yank.

  “Hey — lucky for you they filled this thing early, B
ianc.”

  Funny, but I don’t feel very lucky right now.

  I hear the flinty-stepped Gardenia heading toward the stairs, muttering under her breath. Guess that liquor store didn’t deliver on its promise. Imagine that.

  Dripping wet, I follow Connie around the far side of the building, managing to step in dog doo along the way. And I am not, of course, wearing shoes.

  Has this been a great evening or what?

  At home a half hour later, I sneeze and cough my way upstairs and into a warm tub while Connie pulls off a diversion with Mom, explaining that we got caught in traffic and then decided to stop for an ice cream on the way home. Mom makes a comment about how I smell like chlorine, and Connie tells her we were trying on perfumes at the drugstore and it must be a combination of scents coming together to create the chlorine effect. She quickly sprays deodorizer around the room and up the stairs.

  When I reappear from the bathroom a little while later, Connie hands me a note. It’s a phone message Mom took while we were out. Mom’s a stickler about writing down messages. “Doug phoned,” it says in her neat, sloping handwriting, with the date and time in the corner. Darn!

  “Doesn’t he have our cell numbers?” Connie asks in a sympathetic voice.

  “Nope.” I sigh heavily and march off to my bedroom, where I plunk on a CD of the Dresden Dolls singing “Coin-Operated Boy.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  WE ALL GO to church together in the morning — well, the womenfolk do. Either Tony is still in bed, or something lumpy and big is in his bed, twisted under his coverlet — something that grumbled when I poked it and asked if he wanted to go to the nine o’clock Mass with us.

  Mom isn’t a dictator about going to church, but we “get religion” in our way, usually all together on the big holidays and occasionally throughout the year. I go more than my siblings because I’m the youngest and it seems like the thing to do to be companionable. I don’t ask, but my guess is Connie’s going today because she’s trying to buddy up to Mom to get intel from her. And maybe she wants to ask God to smite the impending nuptials or something like that. As for me, hey, I was up early, coughing and sneezing, probably the result of my unscheduled late-night swim, and was convinced I’d be smited myself (with pneumonia or something worse) if I opted out this morning.

  During the sermon, Mom shoots me a grimace when I sneeze so loudly the priest pauses and looks our way. I smile. At least he notices I’m here. That should count for something.

  After Mass, Connie suggests stopping by a bakery for some donuts. Usually, I’m all for donuts, except this cold has devoured my tastebuds and I’d really just like to go home and crawl back into bed. Connie drives us to the Petrucchio Pastry Shop on Wolfe Street and I wait in the car with my eyes closed — in addition to being stuffed up and coughing and sneezing, I’ve now developed the embers of a headache, and I don’t want it bursting into a crackling flame. The day is already warming, one of those spring tease days Baltimore throws at you this time of year, making you think cold is gone for good. Hah — it could yank the rug out from under you with a cold snap by the end of the week.

  I’ve just floated into a dream where I’ve been invited to the White House to celebrate scoring the first ever “Perfect Plus 200 Points” on the SATs, and am about to step up to the podium to describe all the test-givers’ errors I caught, when I hear Mom’s voice — her raised voice.

  “It’s not that I don’t like their cookies, Con. I just like Berger cookies better.” Did someone say Berger cookies? They’re a round cakey confection slathered with about an inch of dark chocolate frosting. This Baltimore specialty is so good, their “eat me” rays penetrate cough-and-cold-dulled tastebuds. I’m drooling.

  “Mmm, I could go for some Berger cookies,” I say as Connie gets in the front seat with Mom and slams the door.

  “Well, we got cheesecake and donuts instead. What’s the matter with that?” Already, Connie seems to have lost the glow of Christian fellowship and wandered over to the dark side. She jerks away from the curb so hard Mom tells her to watch out, and I have the distinct impression I’ve missed some important exchange. No matter. I’m a Balducci, and I can figure this out. I sit up straight as Connie careens around corners, driving us the few blocks home as if trying out for a NASCAR spot.

  “I thought you liked Petrucchio’s,” she says to Mom. Translation: I was doing something special for you, and you didn’t appreciate it. Bwwaa-waaah.

  “They’re okay, hon. They make good cheesecake.” Translation: I do love you, daughter. See, I pointed out something good about your choice.

  “We used to get stuff there a lot.” Translation: Uh … translation? Translation? Hey — what happened to my translator? That darn cold is knocking out my systems. I smack myself gently on the side of the head.

  “It was never my favorite,” Mom says. Uh-oh. Translation: It was your father’s favorite, not mine.

  Oh, Connie. How obvious can you get? Geez. Taking Mom to a bakery Dad used to frequent? Why not just drive a knife through her heart, huh?

  “What do you mean,” I stammer, “you won’t make a commitment?” It’s nearly four o’clock on Sunday afternoon and I’ve napped, talked on the phone with Kerrie and Doug, eaten too much cheesecake (hey, I thought if I kept eating it, I’d eventually taste it), finished my homework, doodled around on MySpace.com, and have now decided I’ll troll the waters of summer job-hunting, i.e., talk to Connie about working in her office. But Connie, who is on her back on the floor of her bedroom doing some funky kicking exercise, will not promise anything.

  “It’s April. You don’t get sprung until June,” she says between lunges.

  “You think you’ll find somebody better?” I sneeze.

  “Who says I’ll need anybody at all?”

  I proceed to launch into a scorching critique of her investigative prowess during the Incident of the Bakery. “What did you think — that taking Mom to Petrucchio’s would suddenly make her turn to you and say, ‘You know, Connie, this brings back so many memories, I don’t think I want to marry Steve Paluchek after all. Nobody can replace your father’?”

  For a moment, Connie stops, her face whitens, and her mouth disappears into a rage-induced pucker as she leans back on rigid arms. Then, when she starts her lunging exercises again, thrusting her legs into the air as if kicking something — or someone — away, she snarls, “Steve Paluchek will replace Dad over my dead body.” It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who she’s imagining on the receiving end of these kicks.

  “Dad was the kind of guy you don’t see anymore. He was a gentleman. He was brave. He was kind. He was everything Steve Palucheck is not,” she spits out, in a sharp, indignant voice, like that of a teacher who’s just discovered her best student cheating. Then she turns to me and says, “You didn’t know him.”

  No, I didn’t know Dad. I only know him vicariously — through Connie’s memories, through Mom’s, through old photographs and other people’s stories. She might as well have kicked me.

  “And the point of going to Petrucchio’s, you moron,” she huffs, “was to ease into talking about Dad and Steve’s relationship on the force.” Okay, she doesn’t really say “you moron,” but I hear it as she switches to sit-ups, her arms behind her head, her elbows thrusting toward her knees.

  “Well?”

  “Well, I found out something I didn’t know,” she says between curls. “Dad was promoted before Paluchek.”

  “So?”

  “So, that might have caused resentment.”

  “Enough to kill somebody?” (Does too much exercise change the chemistry in your brain?)

  “Enough to make you real angry.”

  “Have you ever seen evidence of that kind of rage in him before?”

  She says nothing at first, then crosses her arms over her chest and stares into the distance. “I’m looking into something. Don’t have enough quite yet.”

  Once again, I feel bad for Connie. She’s working s
o hard trying to prove Paluchek is a creep, she’s desperately clutching at every straw she can find. Her brain’s really addled. She simply can’t accept the idea that Mom might replace Dad. Seeing her like this is like getting word she’s just been diagnosed with a mental disorder.

  I spend a quarter hour trying to get her to spill what she thinks she has, but she’s mad at me now and not inclined to share.

  I’m too tired and congested to argue effectively, so I leave her room, sibling-sympathy now added to the stew of conflicting emotions in my stuffed-up chest. I’m so congested, in fact, that I can’t even smell the Sunday pork roast I saw Mom working on. I love Sunday roasts. The whole potato and meat thing is my kind of eating. Lately, Mom has been going low-carb, too, and Sunday is about the only day I can count on having this kind of feast around here, so I’m doubly bummed about my taste bud anesthetization.

  I hear Mom calling me from downstairs. “Bianca! Phone!”

  Geez, my hearing’s going, too. Didn’t even catch the ring. I scurry off to Mom’s room to grab the cordless, and am delighted— nay, ecstatic — to hear Doug’s voice again.

  You see, he called earlier, right after we got back from church. But that call was a very unsatisfying conversation in which he kept getting interrupted — his family has call waiting, which he always forgets to disable before phoning me — and I ended up telling him maybe he should get off and call me back when he had more time. Of course, I hadn’t meant for him to actually get off the phone and call me back. What I meant was for him to say, “Oh, no, Bianca, I want to talk to you, only you, the only girl in the world for me, sweetie-pie, honeycakes, kiss kiss kiss.” But he didn’t say that. He said, “Oh, yeah, good idea.”

  “What’s up?” I ask.

  “Are you holding your nose?”

  “No. Have a cold.”

  “We’re getting ready to head out so I thought I’d give you a ring,” he says. I hear bustling voices in the background, and they’re saying things like, “Did you forget to pack …” and “What’s the best route from …” Great! He’s called me during the Pre-departure Putter-about.