by Vicki Grant
We figured we’d keep it simple. Pretend that nothing had changed, that we just wanted another look before we made our big decision about where to put Granny. I was worried Janie might get suspicious if two kids were in charge, so I got Kev to come as Albertina’s son. He even did it for free. (He’d taken a bit of a shine to her after all the good things Reverend Muncaster had to say at the funeral.)
We got to Time of Our Lives Adult Daycare just before three. Janie opened the door, big smile on her face, and invited us in. The first few “guests” had already arrived and were working on their art projects. Janie helped an old guy with a runny eye choose a bead for his dream catcher, then asked us how our grandmother was. Kev said she’d “had a bit of a bad spell,” which, I admit, was somewhat of an understatement, but the truth wouldn’t have gotten us where we needed to go.
We started to explain why we were there. Janie stopped us, her eyes suddenly sad. She took us aside.
“I’m really sorry but I got some bad news the other day, and, well, I’m not going to be able to offer your grandmother a place—or anyone else for that matter. The church is being sold. I’ve been using this space for free, but the new owners have evicted me. I have to close down the daycare. I’m doing my best to find spots for everyone. I’ll certainly keep your grandmother in mind but it might be tough. Not many places like this in the city.”
She invited us to stay for tea and cookies, but I felt bad eating her stuff when she was going to be out of work soon and everything. We said thanks and left.
Kev had to run. He had a divorce hearing (his own) at four. He caught a cab. Raylene and I walked.
“So?” she said. “You think this problem just took care of itself, or should we keep digging and find out what Janie’s really up to?”
I didn’t think either. “There’s a third possibility, you know. Albertina could’ve been wrong.”
I felt sort of bad even suggesting it, her being dead and all. But she’d been wrong about Dad and me. Why couldn’t she have been wrong this time?
“Janie just seems so, I don’t know, good or something,” I said. “The people there look happy. The place is nice. Didn’t she say we wouldn’t even have to pay if we couldn’t afford it? I just don’t see what her scam is.”
“Yeah. Me neither. But people are cagey. That’s how they get away with stuff. Acting better than they are. Still . . .”
“Still, what?”
“I don’t know. Either Albertina made a mistake and we should drop it, or Janie’s an even better liar than Schmidt. Frankly, I can only take one evil nutcase at a time.”
I nodded. That was actually a little more than I could take.
We decided not to worry about Janie until we’d dealt with Schmidt, then Raylene said she had to go see about dessert. She leaned up, kissed my cheek, and walked away.
I stood watching her go and kicking myself for being such a spineless wuss, then I just thought get over it.
I went, “That doesn’t count.”
She turned around, smiling. “What?” She kept walking backwards. “Not good enough for you?”
“No, frankly, it wasn’t.”
She laughed. “Well, I’ll see if I can do better next time.”
Then she left and I just stood there with my tongue between my teeth and my hands in my pockets and my insides jumping around like a basket full of puppies.
CHAPTER 36
Raylene was off getting dessert. Dad was in his bedroom. I was pretending to watch TV while desperately trying to concoct some way to make sure this dinner didn’t happen.
When I was little, I swallowed a Lego wagon wheel so Dad would miss a parent–teacher meeting. I considered doing it again.
“So? How’s this?” Dad was standing in his doorway wearing a blue suit, white shirt, and paisley tie.
“You anchoring the news tonight or something?”
He looked down at his outfit. “I see what you mean.” He went back inside.
I started digging behind the sofa cushions for something big enough to send me to the emergency room, but not big enough to kill me.
“This any better?” He was back. Khaki pants, polo shirt, and dock shoes.
I sighed. “Dad-In-Quotation-Marks.”
“Ooh. Very Suraj-esque of you, but whatever does it mean?”
“It means you’re pretending to be Dad. You’re giving me the full fifty-bucks-an-hour-Almost-Family-Deluxe-Dad package.”
“Only the finest for my boy!”
“Would you quit it? If we actually have to go through with this tonight, could you just be, like, Dad? For once?”
Quizzical expression. “Houston? Houston? I’m losing you.”
“As in Will. Be yourself. You are off-duty tonight. Wear whatever best expresses the real you.”
He put his fingers and thumbs together and bowed like this was all some big Buddhist joke, but I knew he got it. A few minutes later, he came back out in a Pulp Fiction T-shirt and baggy shorts he’d had since his weight-loss surgery.
“Ladies and Gentlemen—the one, the only—Will Redden!!!!!!” He shook his hands in the air and waggled his head around as if a crowd of Muppets were going crazy for him.
I closed my eyes and sighed. This was going to be a disaster.
Dad made fettuccini Alfredo (the only thing he knows how to make). I emptied a bag of salad into a bowl and shook up a bottle of dressing. Then I sat on the futon and watched DVDs of Up to No Good while Dad did crunches on the floor. We were both nervous.
Raylene showed up half an hour late with a s’mores fudgecake big enough to feed a professional football team. She was wearing the dress she’d had on when she’d missed Albertina’s funeral only she’d torn off the sleeves and the bow and made it shorter somehow too. It actually looked pretty good. It actually looked like something she’d wear.
We put the toaster and the unopened mail on the floor and ate at the kitchen table. Dad eventually relaxed enough to ask Raylene questions about her family. I thought maybe we’d finally hear about her brother, but she just said she was an only child and how much she was enjoying the fettuccini.
Dad spent some time rearranging the noodles on his plate, then he said, “So, how’d you two meet?”
I looked at Raylene and she looked at me, and I realized with horror that we should have synched our stories before she got there. That’s Almost Family 101.
“I heard about him from someone and decided I had to meet him, so I looked him up.” Vague and not quite a lie and kind of flattering too.
Then she asked Dad about what I was like when I was little, which normally would have been unbelievably painful but was actually kind of perfect.
He told her all sorts of exaggerated stories about my many exploits, including the Lego-swallowing episode, the time I smuggled a Popsicle out of a store in my diaper, and how I’d got my head caught between the railings on my first day of junior high and the principal literally had to butter my ears to get me out. (Actually, if we’re going to be literal about it, it was margarine.) It was like his Greatest Hits album, but it worked. He and Raylene seemed to be enjoying themselves immensely. I got the feeling both of them were happiest when not having to stick to the absolute truth.
Dad called a cab for her when it was time to go and said goodbye. We sat outside on the front steps and waited. It was dark. No one was around. She was in a good mood. This would have been the perfect time for a kiss, but there was that black car again, idling outside our building. It hovered long enough to make sure we saw it, then it crawled away.
“Gulp,” I said, like I was making a joke about what a chicken I was instead of just admitting it.
Raylene snorted. “Schmidt doesn’t scare me. He’s trying to intimidate us because he doesn’t have anything better to do since his restaurant closed down.” We had a good chuckle at that.
I croaked out, “He poisoned me!” in this feeble old-lady voice, which I realize sounds kind of insensitive, making a joke about it so soon an
d everything, but Raylene laughed. We both knew Albertina would have been crazy-cackling-over-the-moon-thrilled to see all those bright-yellow Health Department WARNING stickers plastered across Lorenzo’s big, fancy windows.
“Gotta love her.” Raylene bumped shoulders with me but didn’t bump away. Her arm was bare and so was mine, at least from the elbow down, and our skin was touching. I felt like I had asthma or something. I was breathing but not getting any oxygen. Didn’t matter. I’d just have to make do with the air I had. I turned towards her.
The stupid cab arrived. Raylene stood up.
“No kiss again tonight,” I said.
“Nope.” She started walking down the steps. “Doesn’t look like it.”
I shrugged like big surprise.
“Hey. I got an idea.” She turned just as she got to the cab. “Let’s see how long we can resist before doing it.” She opened the door and got in. “Think how good it will be then.”
“Two elderly people clamping wrinkled lips together. The thrill might kill us.”
She laughed and blew me a kiss out the open window.
“Wow. Pathetic,” I said. “You couldn’t even resist for five seconds.”
“That doesn’t count.” And she laughed again. Which was almost as good.
CHAPTER 37
It was a couple of days before the letter arrived from Dalton. (By special delivery, no less. As I said, the guy had style.) Raylene didn’t have a cell so I just had to wait until she phoned to tell her. It was three whole days. We arranged to meet at the deli.
“Ooh, I love it! A real honest-to-goodness letter.” She turned it over in her hands. “So quaint.”
“Yeah. Until you read the return address.” Suraj pointed at the words Inmate #4270, Broadholm Correctional Institute. “Kind of ruins the effect.”
“Did you read it?” she asked me.
“No. Another thing I was seeing how long I could resist doing.” I smiled. She smiled. Suraj said, “What?” then closed his eyes and went, “I don’t want to know.”
We scrunched into a booth at the back and read the letter together. Mostly, Dalton was just repeating what he’d said before. Schmidt had a company called Bulwark. There was an investment scam. A bunch of people got wiped out by it. They took Schmidt to court but lost on a technicality. Dalton wrote:
That’s all I could get from the law books but I asked around. One of my “roommates” remembers Schmidt. He did some jobs for him ten years back or so: threatening phone calls, broken kneecaps, that sort of thing. Ernie hoped it might turn into a regular arrangement but then Schmidt decided to clean up his act. He wanted to give his mother something to be proud of. (He’s apparently quite a mama’s boy.)
There was some stuff about the various other businesses Schmidt got into—payday loans, a mattress franchise, and the restaurant chain we all knew about—but it wasn’t until the very end of the letter that things got interesting.
P.S. By the way, I found that Albertina Legge you mentioned too. Believe it or not, I knew her. Quite a firecracker and a nice little figure to boot. The reason I didn’t remember her is that she went by Tina back then and she hadn’t married the Legge guy yet either. She and her first husband were the people who spearheaded the case against Bulwark. He took the loss really hard. He’d talked his family into investing, so when he and Tina lost their money, the whole clan went belly-up too. As I recall, he killed himself shortly after the judgment came down. Tina took to drinking and lost custody of her kid. Sad story.
P.P.S. Dangerous felons such as myself aren’t allowed on the Internet, but you may be able to find out more about her husband if you google him. His name was Elton (or maybe Eldon?) Aikens and he was quite a well-known country-and-western singer for a while.
I dropped the letter on the table. Raylene put her hand over her mouth.
“What?” Suraj said. “C’mon! What? The Dawn-of-the-Dead-zombie-face thing is kind of scaring me.”
“Aikens,” I repeated.
Raylene nodded. “Janie.”
“Dr. Ewan? At the funeral? Asking about our big sister?”
Raylene slapped her forehead. “‘Resort to the truth.’ Remember Albertina saying that?”
“Exactly.”
Suraj said, “I can’t recall all the symptoms of stroke, but I’m pretty sure garbled speech is one of them. Answer in a full sentence immediately or I’m slapping you both with the paddles.”
“Janie Aikens really is Albertina’s granddaughter,” I said, more to Raylene than Suraj. He’d just have to catch up on his own.
“The big one,” Raylene said, “as in important one, not bad one. That’s why Albertina wanted to see her. That’s why she needed us to find out everything about her.”
And then I remembered something. I took out my phone and scrolled through the pictures I’d taken in Janie’s office. Those old black-and-white photos on the back of the door? I found one of a big man in a cowboy hat, a small lady in a tight outfit, and a little boy.
“That’s Eldon, Albertina, and their kid, I bet.”
“Their kid. As in Janie’s father,” Raylene said.
“It’s like trying to communicate with aliens or something. I’m getting out of here.” Suraj left to clean off another table.
Raylene and I were both crying a bit by then and sort of laughing too, and I don’t know if it was because we were happy or sad. I kept picturing Albertina with her wig off and her teeth out, holding Janie’s hand, and looking up at her with tears streaming down her face.
“I thought she was acting,” I said.
“Me too.” Raylene leaned her face against my arm. “I’m so glad we brought her there. I’m so glad she met Janie.”
Suraj walked past carrying a tray stacked with greasy plates and crushed plastic cups. His boss was watching so he had to look busy.
“Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” he whispered out of the side of his mouth and dropped a newspaper on our table. It was smeared with someone else’s hot sauce and had obviously been read a few times.
The first thing I saw was a big banner ad and Schmidt’s ugly face with the headline: “Lorenzo’s: Open Again for Business!”
CHAPTER 38
The four o’clock rush at the deli started and Suraj had to get back to actual work. Raylene and I left.
We went and sat in a little park a few blocks away. We were too bummed out to go much farther.
She slumped against a tree and started yanking clumps of grass out by the handful. “This just pisses me off so much. It’s bad enough Albertina died. It’s bad enough Wade Piece-of-Schmidt gets away with ruining all those people’s lives. But then they only close his restaurant for, like, five jeezly days or something? He’s not even going to feel that!”
She was, like, clear-cutting the lawn now. “I seriously cannot stomach people who act all honest and smart and good, and underneath they’re just some big, seething rat’s nest of lies.”
She almost hit me with the next clump. “Sorry. That’s what I hate.”
“Why?”
“Why?!” She leaned her head forward and let her jaw hang as if I was an idiot for even asking.
“I know why—I mean, of course that’s bad—but really, why? You hate those people more than you hate, like, child molesters or rapists or something?”
“I don’t know any child molesters or rapists.”
“Oh. But you do know rat’s-nest-of-lies kind of people?”
She turned away. I took that as a yes.
“Did someone cheat you out of bunch of money or something?” That would at least explain the tank top she wore almost every day and the cell phone she didn’t have.
“No. Not money,” she said as if I was incredibly shallow. “Money’s not the only important thing, you know.”
“Then what?”
She didn’t reply. I ran the possible answers through my head. There weren’t many. I mean, what else can you rip off a fifteen-year-old for?
“Love?” It was
embarrassing but that was the only thing I could think of.
She did that little snuffly laugh of hers. “Yeah.” She tossed some more grass. “I guess you could say that.”
So much for any chance I had of getting that kiss. As if there’d ever been one. Who did I think I was? Like, look at her. Of course there was someone else. I started pulling out grass too.
After a while, she went, “I can’t believe it.” She got up and started running towards the street.
Towards the black car. It was idling near the sidewalk at the edge of the park.
The driver must have seen her coming. He tried to pull out but traffic was blocking the way. Raylene started banging on the window.
I ran down to stop her or maybe help her. I wasn’t sure which.
She was going, “We know about you, Schmidt! We know what you did! Remember Al Capone? Remember what happened to him? We’re going to get you!”
There was a break in the traffic. The car screeched off. She screamed, “You’re so toast, Schmidt!” Then she turned away, put her head on my chest, and started to cry.
CHAPTER 39
It was only then that I remembered Albertina saying something to Schmidt about Al Capone. I didn’t know what she’d meant and there was so much else on the video messing up my head that I’d totally forgotten about it. Raylene finally stopped crying and laughing and apologizing for getting snot all over my T-shirt long enough for me to ask if she knew who he was.
“That big gangster. A long time ago. The thirties or something. You know, with the hat and the machine gun in the violin case?” She took off her glasses to wipe her face and the sun caught the green stripe in her right eye. It was like a little tiny LED Christmas light.
“More random facts.”
“Yeah, well, whatever.” She was in no mood to joke. “I think Capone was the guy who did the Valentine’s Day Massacre but I’m not sure. I just remember he was really violent. Everyone knew he was committing all these crimes, but they could never get him because all the witnesses were too scared to testify. Then the cops found out he was cheating on his taxes, so they stopped trying to convict him of murder or torture or whatever and went after him for that. That’s what he finally went to prison for. Taxes.”
