‘Residents can have pets?’ I inquired.
‘Of course.’ The librarian smiled. ‘They’re family members, too. To say you can’t bring a family member with you … well, that would be cruel. We even have a vet on call twenty-four seven.’
I was mulling that over, thinking sourly that grandchildren were family members, too, when a new voice trilled, ‘Hannah!’
It belonged to an old friend, Angela McSpadden, one of my on-again, off-again jogging buddies. I hadn’t seen her since we ran together in the Ocean City Komen Race for the Cure to raise money for breast cancer research the previous April. ‘Angie! What are you doing here?’
Angie, I knew, had only recently achieved the Big Five-Oh, so unless she’d divorced Bill McSpadden and married an aging sugar daddy she wouldn’t yet qualify to live in the colony.
‘Visiting Mom.’ She nodded in the direction of the woman wearing the red sweater who had moved on from a dissertation on poodle manicures to a spirited discussion of the previous evening’s broadcast of American’s Got Talent. ‘Hi, Mom,’ Angie trilled, waggling her fingers in her mother’s direction.
Her mother frowned, deepening the already prominent lines that furrowed her brow. ‘Go away and leave me alone! Can’t you see I’m busy?’
Angie must have been used to such shabby treatment because she merely smiled and said, ‘Oh, dear. Somebody got up out of the wrong side of the bed this morning.’ She took a deep breath then let it out slowly. ‘Christie’s my mother-in-law, actually. She tries my patience! Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going to do with her. She spends hours and hours talking to that, that …’ She paused, searching for the appropriate word.
Naddie saved Angie the trouble, cutting in before she could complete the sentence. ‘Have you discussed the situation with her social worker?’
‘Yes. She seems to think it’s harmless enough.’
I’d completely lost the plot. ‘Seems to me that Skyping is a good way to keep in touch with your family,’ I cut in.
‘If only …’ Angie sighed. ‘But that guy isn’t family.’
‘Then who …?’ I asked.
‘She says he’s her boyfriend.’
I was struck momentarily dumb while I processed that information. A woman, eighty years old at least. A young man, clearly on the low side of thirty. ‘But …’ I began.
Angie waved my sentence away. ‘Exactly. Mother says I’m just jealous.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘As if.’
‘I can hear you, Angela!’ her mother-in-law screeched. She flopped back in her chair. ‘Now you’ve done it! I’ve lost the connection.’
Angie lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘They met on Match dot.com. What does that tell you about the website’s screening process?’
‘Maybe the guy lied,’ I suggested. ‘Claimed to be older. It’s been known to happen.’
‘The guy’s a dickwad,’ she snarled.
‘Richard! His name is Richard. Richard Kent.’ Christie blushed to her white roots. ‘But he prefers that I call him Dickie.’ She scowled darkly and began tapping keys, but, judging from the mumbled curses, without much success at restoring the connection.
‘I’ll bet he does,’ Angela muttered under her breath, just loud enough, I calculated, for her mother-in-law to hear. ‘Little Dickie Dickhead.’
Christie bristled. ‘You wouldn’t know true love if it came up and bit you on the butt, Miss Smarty Pants.’ She gestured at the monitor where a beefcake photo of her true love shirtless and flexing his tats was displayed, as big as a screensaver. A blue angel wrapped its wings around Dickie’s right bicep and rays of light shot toward his shoulder where gothic letters spelled out, ‘St Michael the Archangle Defend Me in Battle.’
Angie frowned at the screen. ‘Where is spellcheck when you really need it?’
I stifled a laugh.
‘You just don’t believe that somebody this handsome could want me,’ Christie said.
I suspected Angie’s mother-in-law didn’t have both oars in the water. ‘What do you suppose he does see in her?’ I whispered. ‘Not to cast aspersions on Bill’s Mom, Angie, but she’s got to be fifty years that’s guy’s senior.’
‘And she keeps her teeth in a glass of water by the bed.’ Angie sighed. ‘May–December romance, my foot!’ she hooted. ‘January–December is more like it.’
‘Nobody thought anything of it when Anna Nicole Smith married that oil baron,’ her mother-in-law chimed in. ‘And he was in his nineties. You’re a sexist, Angela, pure and simple.’
‘And look how well that relationship worked out,’ Naddie reminded us. ‘There hadn’t been so much gold digging since 1849. And, in case you’ve forgotten, everyone ended up dead.’
‘The French have a good rule for judging appropriate relationships,’ I said, dredging up from the spot in my brain where arcane facts were stored. ‘Half your age plus seven.’
Angie furrowed her brow, working it out. ‘Mom’s eighty-four and Dickie-boy is thirty-two. So half her age is forty-two, add seven and you get forty-nine. In seventeen years, he’ll be forty-nine, at which time Mom will be one-hundred-and-eleven.’ She rolled her eyes.
Higher math had never been my friend. Just trying to follow along with Angie’s lightning-speed calculations made my head explode. ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I told her with a grin.
‘And it’s none of your beeswax, anyway,’ Angie’s mother-in-law grumbled, pounding on the keyboard with a balled fist as if trying to beat it into submission.
I drew Angie aside, leaned close to her ear and whispered, ‘Dickie can’t get into your mother-in-law’s bank account, can he?’
‘No, thank God. We sold the house and invested the proceeds. She has life interest in a trust which amounts to about a thousand dollars a month. She gets a bit of spending money for bingo, movies, trips to the museum, things like that, but her capital is all sewn up. There’s no way Dickie could clean her out.’
‘That’s a relief.’ I had a sudden thought. ‘Where’s Dickie Skyping from, anyway?’
‘He says he’s in Afghanistan.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘He claims he’s an army vet, working for a government contractor, but who knows. I can see that he’s Skyping from an office – a room with bookshelves, anyway – but he could be anywhere, really.’ Angie clutched her lightweight sweater, drew it more closely around her and shivered. ‘I hope he’s telling the truth about being in Kandahar,’ she said. ‘That’s far enough away for comfort. But what if he’s not? What if he comes calling? I have nightmares about that.’
‘Is he an American?’ Naddie wanted to know.
Lips slightly parted, Angie stared. ‘Except for the atrocious grammar in his emails, his English is perfect. I sort of assumed he was. Why?’
I knew where Naddie was headed. ‘What if he’s after a green card?’ I said.
Angie’s eyes grew wide, then narrowed. ‘Thanks, Hannah. Dickie-boy as my father-in-law, grandfather to my children. I know I shall sleep more soundly just thinking about that.’
I snaked an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. ‘Sorry, Angie. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
Angie stared daggers at her mother-in-law. ‘The way I feel right now, Dickie’s welcome to her. False teeth, Depends, and that horrible little dog, too.’
FOUR
‘“Most people think that senior food is like cafeteria dining,” said Filomena Buccho, catering services manager at Calvert Colony, Anne Arundel County’s new fifty million dollar waterfront retirement community. ‘We give our residents a true four-star dining experience. We offer menus to suit every taste, from steak and potatoes to carpaccio of smoked beef with marinated aubergine, prepared by Raniero, our master chef, who received his training at the Culinary Institute of America.”’
Annapolis Gazette, July 5, 2013, Section B, p. 1.
In the days of tall ships and iron men, sailors went off to sea carrying hardtack and a jug of rum. When I deposited Paul at
the Naval Academy sailing center on Wednesday he had a carton of power bars and two six-packs of designer water crammed into his sea bag. But farewell kisses hadn’t changed much over the centuries. Like wives and sweethearts long years before me, I planted a good one on my husband, holding him close and making it last, until we both had to come up for air.
‘Keep your phone on?’ I said as he hugged me one more time.
‘Promise.’
‘Don’t forget the cooler,’ I nagged cheerfully. ‘I didn’t spend a week freezing casseroles for the mids just to have you leave them thawing on the dock.’
‘Plebe detail!’ he called, waving to a firstie who seemed to be in charge. Seconds later the cooler had been whisked away by an underclassman, vanishing below decks.
As one of the coaches for the Naval Academy’s varsity offshore sailing team, Paul was heading up to New York City aboard Resolute, one of the Navy 44s participating in the annual Around Long Island Regatta. ‘Take care, you,’ I said as he stepped aboard the sailboat.
‘You, too, Hannah. And no dead bodies, OK?’
I shrugged. ‘Naddie is threatening to rope me into volunteering at Blackwalnut Hall. That should keep me out of trouble and off the streets.’
‘Hah! The last time you two were together …’ He let the thought go. ‘Two peas in a pod, if you ask me, but give her my love,’ Paul said as the midshipmen began to untie the lines that secured the vessel to the dock.
I stood by as Resolute eased out of her slip under power and turned, heading east down the Severn River. The crew hoisted the main and sailed from the mouth of the river and into the bay. Depending on the weather, I might not see Paul again for weeks.
He was right about Naddie and me, I thought with some amusement as I watched the young sailors haul up and set the jib, the grinders and tailers working the winches like madmen in the brisk breeze. Before our last little adventure was over, I’d managed to get myself and Naddie locked up in a posh wine cellar by a couple of thugs. Paul had been off sailing when that caper began, too. No wonder he worried.
Resolute’s enormous sails gradually receded into the distance. I waited until they were a speck of white on the horizon before returning to the parking lot where I’d left my car.
I’d arranged to meet my erstwhile partner in crime for an early lunch at Blackwalnut Hall. When I arrived, the lounge was hopping. I’d clearly walked into the middle of a book club discussion. Six women sat in a conversational grouping around a square table littered with coffee cups and plates – licked clean of all but telltale crumbs – three well-thumbed paperback copies of McHenry’s The Kitchen Daughter and two Kindles. A chess game was in progress at a table set into a window nook, and another pair of residents sat in overstuffed chairs that flanked the fireplace, that – in deference to summer – had been filled, not with firewood, but with a pyramid of colorful glass balls.
An elderly couple cuddled on a sofa, a walker parked close by. As I passed, the woman kissed her companion’s cheek. He captured and squeezed her hand, causing the cartoonish Seabee tattooed on his upper arm to flex its wings.
Naddie wasn’t in the lobby, and when I asked, the receptionist hadn’t seen her. I settled into an empty chair between a dozing man and a woman reading the Bible and prepared to wait. I selected an issue of People magazine from the fanned-out array on the coffee table that separated me from the two young lovers. How could I not? ‘Royal Baby Joy!’ screamed the headline, but the article inside was disappointingly slim on facts about the newly arrived successor to the British throne.
Across from me the elderly woman giggled, and I looked up from the Royal Baby Gift Guide I’d been perusing. ‘You go first,’ she said.
‘No, you go,’ the man replied.
Her elbow nudged him playfully in the ribs. ‘If you go, I’ll go.’
He took his time considering the offer. A full minute passed before he said, ‘OK.’ He stood, pulled her to her feet and together they wandered over to the piano bench and sat down.
I watched, an amused smile on my lips, as she rested her fingers lightly on the keys. ‘What do you want me to play?’ she asked her companion.
He shrugged. ‘I dunno.’
‘You choose.’
A shoulder bump. ‘No, you.’
At this rate, any concert was going to be a long time coming.
‘OK,’ the woman said at last, and began to play, singing in a slow, but slightly wobbly soprano: ‘“The sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home, ’Tis summer, the darkies are gay; The corn-top’s ripe and the meadow’s in the bloom, While the birds make music all the day.”’
‘I can’t believe it,’ the woman on my left muttered, laying the Bible down on the crocheted afghan that covered her knees. ‘That word’s so offensive!’
‘Darkie, you mean?’ I said, although I knew quite well the word to which she was referring.
The singer began the second verse, singing from memory, her voice growing sweeter, stronger and more confident as she went along.
The woman holding the Bible leaned in closer and whispered, ‘It’s racist.’
‘Well, to be fair,’ I whispered back, ‘it’s been over one hundred and fifty years since Stephen Foster wrote “My Old Kentucky Home,” so we should probably cut the man a little slack.’
‘They should change it,’ she insisted.
‘They did,’ I told her. ‘In Kentucky nowadays, it’s summer and the people are gay.’
‘Really?’ she said. ‘The people are gay? Doesn’t sound like much of an improvement to me.’
The gentleman on my right had apparently overheard our conversation. Just as the singer launched into the chorus, joined by practically everyone in our vicinity, some singing in harmony, he leaned across me. ‘Well, I’m gay, Edith, so stop whining.’
I suppressed a laugh, gave the old guy a mental high five and, in my passable alto, joined in with him and the others: ‘“Weep no more, my lady. Oh, weep no more today. We will sing one song for my old Kentucky home, for my old Kentucky home far away.”’
As the last notes of the hauntingly beautiful and melancholy tune died away the guy leaned over, extended his hand and introduced himself. ‘I’m Chuck,’ he said. ‘I live upstairs.’
‘Hannah,’ I replied.
‘Family?’ he asked, indicating Edith, who glowered disapprovingly like my great aunt Gerty.
I grinned. ‘No, Edith and I just met. I’m waiting for a friend.’
The pianist had a bottomless stock of Stephen Foster in her repertoire. ‘I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,’ was followed by ‘Beautiful Dreamer’ and a sensitive performance of ‘Old Black Joe,’ at which point Edith harrumphed, gathered up her Bible and stomped out of the lounge, her afghan trailing like a bridal train along the carpet behind her. Whether the singer noticed her departure or not, she seemed to sense that the mood of the audience needed lifting after singing about lost friends calling us up to heaven, so she launched into a spirited rendition of ‘Camptown Races.’
Rather than prance around the room like several of the book club women were now doing, I checked my watch. Where the heck was Naddie? Thinking I might have gotten my wires crossed and she could be waiting for me in the dining room, I excused myself and headed off to search for her.
Except for the tables and chairs, the dining room was empty.
At the far end, a pair of doors labeled IN and OUT led, I presumed, to the kitchen. The doors were substantial, but not sufficiently padded to muffle the clang of pots, the clink of utensils and the sound of raised voices coming from the kitchen behind them.
‘Idiota! Debo hacer todo yo mismo?’ Something metal clanged to the floor, followed by a string of words so vile that if I’d uttered even one of them my mother would have washed my mouth out with soap and grounded me for a week. Then:
‘Idiota! Tarado! Pelotudo!’
Idiota, I got. But I’d majored in French, so the rest was lost on me, not that they’d teach words like that
in Spanish 101 anyway. I didn’t need a translator to know that whoever was on the receiving end of the string of expletive deleteds wafting out of the kitchen like the aroma of sautéed bacon and onions was probably hiding in a cupboard or cowering in a corner, protecting his head with his arms.
I decided to get out while the going was good, but I ran into Naddie coming the other way. She paused, cocked her head and listened. ‘Gosh, I wonder how he really feels?’
‘Raniero?’ I guessed.
Naddie nodded. ‘No doubt. Looks like an angel but has a devil of a temper. Save us from perfectionists with short fuses.’ She glanced at the antique Regulator hanging on the wall behind the hostess station. ‘We’re a bit early, Hannah. Would you like to see my town home before lunch?’
I was about to reply when Raniero yelled, ‘Go! Jump in the oven! Make my life easier!’ followed by the bright, sharp sound of shattering glass.
As if on cue Filomena erupted from the Tidewater Bar into the dining room, linked her arms through both of ours and urged us gently back toward the lounge, safely away from whatever disaster was noisily brewing in the kitchen. ‘The chef, he is temperamental, you know? Have you seen the show on television, Kitchen Nightmares? Raniero, he is like that Gordon Ramsay. Everything must be just so. You wait here. I’ll go see what’s the matter.’
I could think of several television chefs who would be better role models for Raniero than the foul-mouthed Gordon Ramsay – Jamie Oliver, for instance, or Bobby Flay – but decided the suggestion wouldn’t be appreciated.
There was a deafening crash of crockery. Filomena winced. ‘It’s that stupid Korean girl again. We have two kitchens at the colony,’ she explained. ‘One we must keep kosher for our Jewish residents. This girl, she doesn’t understand that the meat dishes and the dairy dishes must be washed separately. There are always mixups.’
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