by Vicki Grant
“Dr. Blaine’s a fraud! This is a scam!”
Damian ditched Dr. Blaine and went after Raylene. Every time he almost had her, she’d toss the earphone to me, then he’d lunge my way and I’d toss them back to her. It was like Monkey in the Middle, only played with an angry gorilla.
And a beautiful girl.
A beautiful, laughing girl.
Some of the spryer folks in the crowd were standing up to get a look at what was happening. Others had their hands cupped behind their ears and were going, “Eh? What? What’s all the shouting about?”
Then, suddenly, more guys in blue suits materialized from the sidelines. They got me by the collar and Raylene by the armpits and started dragging us out, kicking and screaming. I was scared out of my mind and my heart was pounding like crazy, but mostly I was just loving it.
Damian was speeding Albertina towards the exit, but she wasn’t going quietly either. She was stretched over the arm of her wheelchair like a dog with its head out a car window, hollering, “Old ain’t stupid! Old ain’t stupid!”
By the time security pried Raylene’s fingers off the front door and manhandled us into the parking lot, the chant had caught on and the geezers were mobbing Candace for their refunds.
Best gig ever—and I’m including the time that guy took us bungee jumping.
CHAPTER 10
The thing with the toupée was hilarious.
Albertina yanked it off and it went flying and hit this lady two rows back, who totally freaked. You’d swear she was being attacked by some vicious longhaired bat. We played the video over and over again until Albertina’s laughing turned into choking. Then Raylene and I ran around her little apartment trying to find pills and juice and a glass clean enough to put it in.
That was harder than it sounds. From the outside, Albertina’s apartment building didn’t look that bad. Just one of those brick cubes you see all over the place but nobody you know ever lives in. Her parking space was right by the back door, and the back door was right by the elevator, and the elevator opened right by her apartment.
The inside of her place was a different story. She lived in a bachelor apartment roughly the size of an SUV, so you’d think everything would be more or less nearby. Maybe it was, but that didn’t mean it was easy to find. Every square inch of the place—the porta-potty-sized bathroom, the rusty lawn chair, the TV dinner table, the itty-bitty Fisher-Price kitchen—was covered in big, fat file folders, all spewing paper and photos and old newspaper clippings. The only thing missing from the picture was a couple dozen feral cats.
Albertina managed to get a pill down and some colour back in her face. “You know, I wouldn’t mind dying laughing.” She wiped her nose on her wrist. “Especially if I could come back to Dr. Blaine and rub it in his face.”
Raylene found a corner of a chair to sit on. “How’d you even find out about him?”
“That’s my job, sugar. I’m always sniffing around trying to figure out where the bad smell is coming from.”
Raylene picked up the file she’d been using as a footrest and started flipping through it. “These all people you’re going after?”
“No. Most I got already. I just hang on to the evidence. Scammers are worse than cockroaches. Can never be sure they’re gone for good.”
I peeked in another file. I hoped there might be some random facts in there that would attract Raylene’s interest. “Who’s Charles Butler?”
“Charlie Butler.” Albertina chuckled affectionately. “a.k.a. Craig Butler, Chase Benson, Chuck Bogdanovich. Immigration specialist—as in he specialized in ripping off immigrants. He fell for my little Russian babushka act and now he’s doing twelve to fifteen for fraud.”
“Brenda Anselm?” Raylene was tilting her head back and forth checking out a photo. “She looks kind of like the lunchroom monitor we had when I was little.”
Albertina closed one eye and thought about it. “Don’t recall. What do my notes say?”
Raylene tried to make out what she’d written. “St. Luke’s something something dinner something—then maybe saliva? No. Salvation?”
“Oh, yeah. Salvation Army. Big do-gooder. Always organizing church suppers and bingos and what-have-you. And why wouldn’t she? She was pocketing half the cash.”
Albertina pried off a shoe. “You’d think she could have used some of it to buy herself a decent outfit. These women who let themselves go. Never understood it.”
“And who’s this?” I found an old black-and-white photo propped up near her bed. It was of a guy wearing a Stetson, a cowboy shirt, and one of those ties that looks like a shoelace.
“Eldon.”
“There really is an Eldon?” Raylene was right beside me in a second, almost touching me, smelling more like pound cake than lemons. I love pound cake. I never knew how much I loved pound cake.
“You really are newbies, aren’t you?” Albertina snorted. “Okay, undercover lesson numero uno: whenever possible, resort to the truth. The more lies you tell, the more you’re likely to forget. So, yes. There really is an Eldon, or at least was. And let me tell you, I’d have been over the moon had Dr. Blaine gotten him to sing to me. No sweeter man on the face of this earth.”
“What happened to him?” Raylene was braver than me.
Albertina removed her hair and put it on the TV table beside her. I tried to look as whatever as possible but it wasn’t easy. Her head was weirdly round and almost totally bald. It looked like a white dog had randomly shed on it.
“Life,” she said. “Life happened to him. It happens to all of us, of course. Some people just handle it better than others.”
Raylene and I both started doing that too-happy, let’s-change-the-subject thing.
“Oh, hey, and what’s inside this?” Raylene moved a bunch of files off a black metal cabinet.
Albertina gave a Wicked-Witch-of-the-West shriek, which, under the circumstances, was oddly reassuring. “Don’t touch that!”
Raylene jumped back. “Sorry. What is it?”
Albertina huffed, then began jimmying off the other shoe. “Just the most precious thing in the world to me. My makeup kit.”
Raylene and I both laughed.
“What?” Albertina said.
“Your makeup kit?” I said. “Who needs a makeup kit the size of a bar fridge?”
“Well, believe it or not, I don’t wake up looking this good. Takes a few artificial ingredients these days . . .”
“Yeah, but this thing’s huge.”
“Are you trying to make me feel bad?”
Albertina glared at me. Raylene glared at me. I dropped it.
“Speaking of makeup, Raylene, why don’t you let me see if I can do something with you one of these days? With a little lipstick and a lot of eye shadow, you might not be half bad.”
We both laughed at that, but apparently Albertina wasn’t joking.
“You’d have to lose the glasses too, of course. Which reminds me, there’s a place I want to visit tomorrow afternoon and I could use some backup. You in?”
I looked at Raylene. “Yeah,” she said as if the answer was obvious.
“Okay. Meet me at my doctor’s office tomorrow at two. Spring Garden Professional Centre. Suite 423. Then we’ll head over. This is the big one, guys—the one that counts—so be prepared.”
I didn’t know what that meant, but I liked the sound of it.
She hit a lever and her wheelchair’s footrest sprang up. “But, now, you can get the hell out of here, if you don’t mind. I got things to do.” She closed her eyes and stretched out. If she’d had a tag on her toe, you’d have thought she was dead.
“And, Cam,” she said without opening her eyes, “make sure you walk that girl home. Don’t want her family worrying. Lot of bad people out there.”
CHAPTER 11
We’d been running Almost Family for five years. You’d think I’d have been good at this sort of thing by then, but I wasn’t. When Dad realized the acting gene had skipped a generation
, he came up with workarounds for me. We had a leg cast I could slap on if I was supposed to be athletic, an arm cast if I was supposed to be artistic, and a makeup kit to fake any other injury necessary to hide my total lack of talent.
Usually, though, we didn’t have to resort to that. I figured out pretty fast the best disguise is just keeping my mouth shut. Don’t say anything at a funeral and people assume you’re too broken up to talk. Don’t say anything when you’re supposedly the long-lost nephew from Bulgaria and they assume you don’t speak English. Go quiet anywhere else and they just figure you’re a normal hormonal teenager.
In a way, Albertina had been right. Cam was short for chameleon, or should have been. I could fade into the background with the best of them.
That wasn’t going to work here. It was only the two of us, walking down a dark street. I had to say something, especially since Raylene didn’t look like she was going to.
“So.” I was doing my best to bring my voice down below Smurfette range. “Where do you live?”
Raylene waved vaguely in front of us. She shrugged. I shrugged. I tried to smile but I felt like I’d just bought a brand-new face and wasn’t sure which muscle moved which part yet.
“So”—it took me a while to get up the guts to try again—“what do you think of Albertina?”
“I like her.” Raylene pulled a leaf off a tree and the branch sprang up. Little yellow things sprinkled all over us. “She’s tough. She’s funny. She’s honest.”
“Not that honest,” I said. “She can walk, you know. She doesn’t need the wheelchair.”
“Yeah, so? Who cares about that kind of honest? I mean, you were surprised? One look at Albertina and you must have known the hair’s not real.”
(Actually, I didn’t, at least not until it was sitting beside her.)
“Or the eyelashes. Or the boobs.”
“The boobs?”
“They’re hers, but they’ve clearly got a lot of help. Old ladies’ boobs don’t go straight out like that.”
“Oh, right.” I really didn’t want to think about old ladies’ boobs too much.
“The obvious stuff like that doesn’t bother me,” Raylene said. “Makes her happy, who cares? It’s the people who pretend to be all honest and aren’t that I can’t stand.”
“You wouldn’t like many of our customers, then.” I thought that might make her smile, but she’d gone back to being the old Raylene. She blew some yellow things off her shirt and looked away.
I couldn’t think of anything else to say. We kept walking, not talking. I was relieved when my phone buzzed. It was just a text from Dad reminding me we had Dalton the next day, but it gave me something to do. I texted “I know” and put the phone back in my pocket.
“We got a gig tomorrow,” I said, which I erroneously believed sounded cool until Raylene said, “You play music?” as if I might actually be interesting, and I had to say, “No, I mean, like, Almost Family.”
She said, “You call those gigs?”
“Dad does.” Like can you believe it? “But he’s an actor. That’s how we got into the business.”
“You like it?”
“Could be worse.”
“Your whole family do it?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Even your mother?”
I forgot about her. “No. I haven’t seen my mother in years.”
Raylene stopped and looked at me as if she’d missed something before. She didn’t say sorry. Guidance counsellors always do when they find out. They usually hug me too, before they send me back to class. I was hoping Raylene would hug me, but she didn’t.
“So it’s just you and your dad?”
“No. There are other people who work for us too, but you mean relatives? Then, yeah. It’s just us. What about your family?”
“I met you when I tried to rent a brother. Kind of says everything you need to know.”
“Need to? Well, I guess.” I tried to get some spit back into my mouth. “But I’m like you.”
She smiled a little, one eyebrow up. “Meaning . . . ?”
“I like random facts too.”
Now both eyebrows were up and it was a real smile.
“I’d like to know some random facts about you,” I said, my heart jackhammering away at my molars. “If you don’t mind.”
“So polite.” She folded the leaf down the centre and threw it like a paper airplane. “Okay. Five-foot-six. Ish. Allergic to melons. Pet peeve: long toenails.”
“On you or someone else?”
“Someone else. I can control my own toenails.”
“Like, telekinetically or something?”
I made her laugh. She hit me.
“As in, clip them. But seriously, that really bugs me, and it’s not just a grooming thing either. I’ve always thought there was something creepy and, I don’t know, prehensile or whatever about long toenails. I’m suspicious of people who have them.”
“Because they might use them to suddenly start scrambling up trees or something?”
She stopped and looked at me, all kind of twinkly, so I boldly carried on. “And then their jackets would tear open and hair would sprout all over the place?”
“Yes.” She flapped her hands out to the side. “Yes. Exactly. I’m not saying they would but that’s certainly the impression they give. I mean, in this day and age, what civilized human being needs toe claws? I never understood why other people can’t see that. They’re like, Oh, So-and-so just couldn’t find the nail clippers, and I’m like, No. It’s way weirder than that.”
“Makes perfect sense to me.” Sorta, now that she mentioned it. “It’s like in the movies. You know, those ones where the only way you can tell the aliens from the humans is by whether they have a functioning belly button or not.”
“Functioning.” Another little laugh from her. “You know, it actually would kind of make a good movie.”
I thought that was just one of those yeah-yeah-sure lines people use when things get awkward, but then she went, “It could open on a couple at a fancy restaurant. Man pours the lady some wine. She does that sexy-face thing and he’s all hey-hey-hey—but under the table, you see her perfectly polished toenails ripping through her Manolo Blahniks.”
“Which I’m almost positive are shoes of some type.”
“Clever boy.”
I tried not to love that too much. “Or what about a bus driver?”
“Interesting.”
“He’d be laughing and joking with the little kids as they all pile on with their little novelty backpacks and missing teeth and everything. Then he’d close the door. Pull onto the road. And the camera would zoom down on his foot hitting the accelerator—”
“. . . and a single gnarly claw . . .”
“Yup. Tears right through his boots.”
“Brilliant. Children in peril. A must for the modern slasher film.”
“The possibilities are kind of endless.” This was weirdly almost like talking with Suraj. As long as I didn’t let myself think about how she looked, sounded, or smelled, my brain seemed to function just fine.
I said, “The Queen waving from the porch at Buckingham Palace . . .”
“I doubt the Queen calls that the porch.”
“You know what I mean.”
“A surgeon with those little green booties they wear in the operating room . . .”
“Good one . . . Santa’s elves with the curly slippers . . .”
“Oooh. Ick. Ick.” She waved her hands around and scrunched her eyes closed. “You’d need really long toenails for that. Ooh. And they’d have to bend backwards too. Ick.”
“Sorry. Too much?”
“Yes.” Gag face. “Can we change the subject?”
“Sure,” I said, because, by now, I’d firmly established myself as a ladies’ man. “Let’s talk about your family.”
She mouthed ha-ha. “Shouldn’t you know everything already? Aren’t you supposed to be my brother?”
“Not any
more. Your five free hours are up. C’mon. I told you about my sorry excuse for a family. You should tell me about yours. Fair’s fair.”
She considered that. “Agreed—but I can’t right now because there’s a gas station just across the street and I really need to pee.”
“Another random fact about you!” I said. She walked away laughing. The light from the gas station lit up her hair like a halo.
I waited outside. Dad texted again, wanting to know my ETA. I answered, “Two hours.” I was making headway and wasn’t going to blow it.
He texted back “one hour” and a long list of articles of clothing that had to be lint-brushed for tomorrow. (Dalton is our best customer. Dad always gets wound up before Dalton.)
I texted “1.5” but wondered if that would be enough. Raylene was taking forever. I hoped that was a good sign. Maybe she was freshening up—brushing her teeth, mussing her hair, whatever it is girls do when they’re out with a hot guy.
I went into the gas station and bought some Mentos. I figured my breath could stand a little freshening up too. I noticed the door to the ladies’ room was open. I looked around the store. Raylene wasn’t there.
I turned to the counter guy. “Um, you see a girl with, like, silver hair? Came in to use the washroom?”
“Yeah. She left ages ago.” He handed me my change. “Asked if she could sneak out the back door. Said some creep wouldn’t leave her alone.”
CHAPTER 12
It was closing time and Suraj was cleaning out the meat case when I got to the deli. He made me a sandwich from some green pastrami he found stuck to the bottom. I wolfed it back. With any luck, it would kill me and I wouldn’t suffer anymore.
He had to watch the toupée video several times before he could get a handle on Albertina. (“The-Joker-in-drag.” It wasn’t his best, but it did kind of capture that whole unhinged vibe she gave off.)
He’d finished up the cash before I could bring myself to tell him about what happened with Raylene. He had an entirely different take on it than I did.
