Short for Chameleon

by Vicki Grant

  I don’t know if it was because I was worried about getting in trouble or because I was worried about returning to a life of no-name cereal, but I didn’t mention Albertina to Dad then either.

  CHAPTER 6

  The next day, I got to the coffee shop in the lobby of the Spring Garden Professional Centre just before ten. Albertina was sitting at a table near the back, waving a claw at me.

  “You alone?” She craned her neck as if she were casing the place for undercover agents. (Like way undercover. The place was totally empty.) “Good. I was hoping it’d just be you. Not sure The Bloater has the constitution for this type of thing.”

  She held up her half-empty glass and hollered, “Waiter!”

  The teenaged guy behind the sandwich counter looked up from his cell phone and sighed.

  “Another one of these for me, please and thank you,” she said, “and bring us something pink and fizzy for my grandson here.”

  “Uh . . . this is self-serve? I think we’ve discussed that before?”

  “Much obliged!” She turned back to me and smiled the way teachers do just before they give you the I-know-you-can-do-better speech. “So. I imagine you’re aware how serious these violations are.”

  I wasn’t, but I didn’t want to let on so I cleverly allowed all the blood to drain from my face.

  “I did some homework after our little meeting the other day. No food handler’s licence. No CPR training. Flu, polio, malaria vaccinations: not up to date. No record whatsoever of any training in senior care, bereavement counselling, or public speaking.” She shrugged. “Frankly, it’s not looking good for Almost Family.”

  I pictured Dad with his eye patch flipped up, wolfing down a bowl of stale Frooty Zeros before heading out for another night at Pirate Ned’s Brewery Tours.

  We were toast. Burnt, margarine-smeared, way-past-the-best-before-date toast. I gulped.

  “I’m sorry, but you can see what I’m up against. With this number of violations . . .” She wrinkled her nose and shook her head.

  The guy came with our order. Albertina threw her hand out to stop him. “Careful! The boy hasn’t had his shots. Just leave his drink on the table and step away.”

  The guy scurried back to the counter and started scrubbing his hands. Two girls who’d come in to check out the muffin selection turned around and left.

  Albertina poured out a pile of pills and washed them down with her iced tea. “Now, Cam. I like you. Don’t know why, but I do. Might be the way that in some lights, it’s hard to tell if you’re a boy or a girl. Kind of sweet. ’Course, I’ve always had a soft spot for Bloat too. So I don’t want to throw the book at you fellas. Unfortunately, it’s not up to me.”

  She took out another pill and put it under her tongue.

  “But I think I may have a solution. I could use an assistant. Been begging for one for years. You help me out and I’ll keep my mouth shut for a while. That should give you a chance to get your certifications up to snuff. Whaddya say?”

  “What kind of assistant?”

  “Oh, you know. Someone to help with my hair and makeup. Personal grooming. That type of thing.”

  Looked like Dad was going to have to get his Velcro parrot out of storage after all.

  “Just kidding. Ha! Good Lord, you’re gullible. And in case you’re wondering, I do this all myself. Got a bit of a knack for it.” She checked her reflection in the window, then turned back to me.

  “What I actually need you for is investigative work. I’m a scam-buster. Specialty: seniors. Sad to say, but it’s a growing business these days. Always someone out there ready to rip off the wrinklies.” She clicked her tongue in disgust.

  “Truth is, I’ve got a pretty effective modus operandi. The scumbag takes one look at me and thinks, ‘Sweet little old lady in a wheelchair? The perfect victim.’ Ha! Have I got a surprise for him.”

  “So what do you need me for, then?”

  “An extra set of eyes. Someone to cause a bit of a distraction occasionally. A decoy to throw the bad guys off the scent. You get the idea. Dawned on me the other day that a wet noodle of a grandson could be the perfect decoy. Naturally, I thought of you.”

  Naturally.

  “So what I’m proposing is this: you make yourself useful and I’ll help you get your papers stamped. Heck, play your cards right and we might not even need to bother Bloat about this.”

  The blood started gurgling back up into my face. I actually liked the sound of this. Dad always considered Almost Family acting work. I preferred to think of it as “covert ops.” Danger, excitement, forces of good and evil—that’s what I kept hoping for. Of course, I didn’t get to see much of that at the Gordon B. Isnor Retirement Home or the SaniWipe staff picnic. Now Albertina wasn’t just proposing a solution to our little problem with the health department, she was fulfilling one of my lifelong dreams.

  (And, yes, I do know how pathetic that sounds.)

  “Sure.” I gave her a big smile.

  She didn’t smile back. She tilted her head and sized me up out of the corner of her eye.

  “Hmm. Your enthusiasm makes me suspicious.” She tapped the table with a finger, looked out the window, then looked back at me. “Think I need to test drive you first before I commit to anything. What are you doing right now?”

  Albertina didn’t wait for an answer. She tucked a ten-dollar bill under her iced tea and released the brakes on her wheelchair.

  “All right, then. Get moving, boy. Let’s see what you can do.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Beige hair. Beige glasses. White lab coat with Randy stitched in blue over the pocket. The guy sure didn’t look like a scam artist to me.

  “Mrs. Legge.” He leaned his elbows on the counter to get eye-to-eye with her and smiled. “How might we be of help today?”

  “Need my prescriptions refilled.”

  “Oh? Which ones?”

  “All of them.”

  “So soon?” No more Mr. Friendly Neighbourhood Pharmacist. “You were just in last week.”

  Albertina let out a blast of air, like yeah, so?

  Randy stood up and folded his arms. “Mrs. Legge. We’ve talked about this. Those are very powerful medications. I can’t be dispensing new prescriptions each time you misplace—”

  “Who said anything about me misplacing my medications? It was him!” She swung around like she was playing Death in a bad school play and pointed a finger in my face.

  I went, “Me?!”

  “Well, now, isn’t he just the picture of innocence? Come on, Cam. Tell Randy what you did. Come on! Tell him.” Before we’d gone into the drugstore, she’d distinctly told me to keep my pie hole shut and let her do the talking.

  I made various vowel sounds. “Oh . . . ah . . . I . . .”

  “Oh, crikey.” Albertina swatted a hand at me. She turned back to Randy. “You probably read about it in the papers, anyway.”

  “Read about what?” He propped his glasses on his forehead and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “‘Elderly Woman Rescued from Harbour’? Front-page news last Thursday.”

  “I read the paper every day. I didn’t see anything—”

  “Oh, come now, Randal. How could you miss it? Been nipping into your supplies or something?”

  “Excuse me! I—”

  “Relax. Just pulling your chain.”

  “Mrs. Legge. I’m a busy man. I’ve—”

  “Okay. Then here’s the Reader’s Digest version for you. At the waterfront. Grandson’s phone rings. Lets go of wheelchair to answer it. So busy cooing into his girlfriend’s ear, doesn’t notice the boat ramp. No idea I’d done a swan dive into the North Atlantic until he hears the splash.”

  Randy drummed his fingers on the counter. He wasn’t buying it.

  “It’s on YouTube,” she said. “By the time they got me breathing again, I had over eighteen thousand views. Can’t believe you didn’t see it.”

  “No. Oddly enough, I did not. But what does this have
to do with your medications?”

  “Had them with me, case my heart acted up. Lost the whole lot of them, other than the little stash I keep by my bedside. It was very upsetting. They were in my favourite purse.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Randy’s face was scrunched up into a what-kind-of-moron-do-you-think-I-am emoticon. “I suggest you get in touch with your doctor and—”

  “Very upsetting, indeed. In fact, just thinking about it makes me, makes me—” Albertina put her hand on her cheek. Her eyes got big and watery. She started to pant. “Oooh . . . Cam. My purse. My. My. Purse!”

  She was going mauve around the lips. I grabbed her purse from the handle of her wheelchair. She was scaring me.

  She started hurling face powder and Kleenex and an unbelievable amount of eye shadow onto the floor until she found a fuzzy grey pill in the bottom and put it under her tongue.

  In the thirty seconds it took to happen, Randy went from prison warden to angel of mercy. He leapt over the counter, mopped her forehead, and checked her pulse. Once he was positive she’d live, he said, “I’ll have those prescriptions for you in a jiffy, Mrs. Legge.”

  Randy gave Albertina her medicine—and me a lecture about taking better care of my grandmother—then I wheeled her out of the Professional Centre Pharmacy and onto the sidewalk.

  “Boy, but we got him good, didn’t we?” Albertina was laughing so hard she was going a bit mauve again. “He fell for that cockahooey story hook, line, and stinker.”

  I didn’t find it funny. “You lied to him. You tricked the poor guy. That’s not fair.”

  “Fair?” She clamped her hands on the wheels of her chair and hung a U-ey. “Fair?! Well, let me tell you how this works, buster, then you tell me what’s fair.”

  I should have kept my pie hole shut.

  “Some squeaky-clean pharmacist falls for an old doll’s sob story, just like mine. He tells himself she’s just gotten a little forgetful, so he refills her prescription even though he’s not supposed to. Doesn’t think a thing about it until her grandson shows up on his own one day. Says he’s going to tell the police his nanny almost OD’d on all those extra drugs—unless Squeaky slips him a few sleeping pills to keep his mouth shut. Now poor Squeaky’s in a pickle, isn’t he? Report the blackmail and he’ll have to own up to giving the old lady the meds. He could lose his licence. Better just to dish out the sleeping pills. But the grandson doesn’t want sleeping pills anymore. He wants the hard stuff now.”

  She dropped her voice. “And that, kids, is how you go from druggist to drug dealer in one easy step! Don’t try this at home. So? Still thinking it ain’t fair?”

  I didn’t know what to think. I pushed Albertina to her car. She’d said it was parked by the fire hydrant but that’s not what it looked like. More like mating with the fire hydrant, if you ask me.

  “But what was he supposed to do?” I said. “You practically had a heart attack in front of him.”

  She took a big, jangly keychain out of her purse. It had about a dozen keys hanging off it, and a large gold tube of lipstick too.

  “Don’t have the stomach for that, kid? Well, maybe you’re not the man for me. No worries. I’ll find someone else.” She opened the lipstick, drew on a bright-pink clown smile, then turned back to me. “Oh, and BTW, good luck with Almost Family. Shouldn’t take you any more than a year or two to get your certifications.”

  I immediately remembered the weird bug-repellent smell the blue Frooty Zeros gave off and the way Dad used to stare sadly out the grimy window in our old basement apartment and try to tell me he just had something in his eye.

  “No, it’s not that. It’s . . .”

  Just then, my phone rang. I went to turn it off, but Albertina said, “Take it, take it! I got to get myself into the car anyway.”

  I didn’t recognize the number, but Dad was always forgetting to charge his cell phone and having to use someone else’s. He goes full Amber Alert if I don’t pick up by the third ring. I took it.

  “Cam?”

  Could there be a worse time for Raylene Let’s-Say-Butler to call? I turned away from Albertina and hunched over the phone.

  “Yup.”

  “You busy?”

  “Not, ah, really.” Just scrambling to keep my dad and me from plunging into poverty. That’s all. Same old, same old.

  “Wanna get together?”

  “Um.” Are you kidding me? “Yeah.”

  “Can you come here?”

  “Sure. Where are you?” Not that it mattered. I’d chew through concrete to get there if I had to.

  “Hmm. Don’t know exactly. There’s a statue of this bald guy? Pigeons on his head?”

  Not ringing any bells. “What street?”

  “The main one? Big hill. Old building.”

  “Oh, Winston Churchill.”

  “That the street?”

  “No. The statue, if it’s the one I’m thinking of.”

  “Cranky-faced? Bow tie?”

  “Yeah. That’s him. You’re by the library.”

  “Oh. Oh, right. Shoulda read the sign. Can you get here in, like, half an hour or something?”

  “Sure. Just let me—” The trunk of the car opened with a gates-of-hell shriek. I turned to look.

  Raylene went, “Hello? . . . Hey. You still there? . . . Your phone’s cutting out.”

  No. My phone was fine. The problem was my brain.

  It cut out when I saw Albertina hurl her wheelchair into the trunk of the car, then sashay over to the driver’s seat on her hind legs.

  There are Victoria’s Secret models who can’t walk that good in heels.

  Who was scamming who here?

  CHAPTER 8

  Somehow I managed to get my head in gear. I told Raylene I was on my way, then hung up and turned to Albertina. I didn’t have time to get into the whole wheelchair/walking thing. I had to convince her to give me another chance and then boot it all the way to the library in less than half an hour.

  I got there six minutes late, and even then, I was sweating so bad that last night’s pork buns were oozing out my pores like gravy.

  Raylene was sitting on the ground, her back against Winston Churchill’s legs. She was cleaning her glasses on the tail of her plaid shirt. If it wasn’t for the silver hair, I might not have recognized her. She looked like an entirely different person with her glasses off. Kind of softer or something.

  Not so scary.

  Even prettier.

  Which made her scary again.

  She raised her hand when she saw me but didn’t say hi. I raised my hand too, then sat down more or less beside her. (Mostly less. I was the balloon. She was the pin. I knew all it would take was one touch and kaboom.)

  She put her glasses back on. She picked up an old french fry that must have fallen out of someone’s lunch and tossed it to a pigeon.

  “Um,” she finally said. “Guess you didn’t get my message. I left you a message.”

  I shook my head. I thought I’d heard my phone ringing while I was running over, but was in no condition to answer it.

  “Sorry I made you come all this way. I would’ve tried again but some other guy needed to use the pay phone and I don’t have a cell.”

  I shrugged like no big deal, but something about how she said it made me think that it was.

  “Thing is,” she said, “I had some time before you got here and nothing to do, and when you mentioned this was the library, I thought, I don’t know, may as well find out who this Winston Churchill guy is. Was. Whatever.”

  She picked at her fingernails. “I like random facts.” She didn’t laugh but made a snuffling noise that was sort of close. “You know, things that just kind of are and you have nothing to do with and you can’t change even if you wanted to. I find them weirdly relaxing.”

  I’d never thought of facts that way before, but I kind of got it. “No decisions to make.”

  “Yeah. Basically.”

  “I bet you’re one of those people wh
o always gets the daily special at the cafeteria.”

  That got a little laugh.

  “No. Too dangerous. Least at my school. And anyway, big decisions like that I prefer to make on my own.”

  “What school do you go to?”

  She acted like I hadn’t said anything. She squinted into the sky for a while, then went, “So. Churchill. Like I was saying. I looked him up on wiki. You probably know this already, but he was the prime minister of Britain, and when the Nazis were bombing London all to hell and everyone thought Hitler was going to win, he gave these big, you know, like, rousing speeches and made everyone buck up and go no way are we going to lose to that bulgy-eyed little jerk, and they didn’t, and he became this major hero.”

  She looked at me and I nodded. I only sort of knew that.

  “That was kind of interesting in a, like, multiple-choice sort of way, but the thing that really got me was something else. Something his father said to him in the Early Life section.”

  She smiled apologetically, which I should have known meant trouble. There’s never a good reason to smile at someone that way.

  “Apparently, little Winston was playing with his toy soldiers one day, and his dad sees him and gets all disgusted with him for, like, being a kid and playing or something, and he says, ‘You’re a wastrel.’”

  “A wastrel.”

  “Yeah. Good word, eh? ‘You’re a wastrel and you’ll never amount to anything.’ His dad actually said that to his own kid.”

  “Harsh.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And wrong too. I mean, by the sounds of it.”

  “Yeah. Winston sure showed him, didn’t he? Saving the free world and everything. Nowadays, it’s just the pigeons who crap all over him.”

  That was kind of funny, but she didn’t laugh. She made one of those squiggly, I’m-sorry mouths. “That’s why I called you. I read that and it’s like I suddenly remembered or something. All that stuff about families? Being there for each other and everything? It’s . . .” She stopped and pulled her knees up to her chin. She didn’t say anything for a long time.