by Ted Staunton
“I know.” I glance in the backseat. The new Sony video camera is there, in its travel bag.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Jer says, “I think it’s great that you’re doing this in Grandpa’s memory and all.” He has his bandanna back on, and a pair of mirrored aviators, with his plaid shorts and Converse sneakers. It’s been cool all spring; Jer’s legs are still pale even though it’s late June. I’m not wearing shorts. I don’t wear shorts, ever. “But,” Jer goes on, “I can see how this could all seem a little wonky, you know?”
“I know,” I say. I push my glasses higher on my nose. “I’m cool with it. It’ll take, like, five minutes. And I have to, right? Everybody else is doing theirs.” But really, I’m not that cool with it.
“No, but see, that’s what I mean,” Jer says. “You don’t have to just because—”
Sometimes Jer just can’t let stuff go. He’s wrong, of course; I do have to do this because everyone else is doing their task, and the whole family will know if I wimp out. Luckily, right then Jer gets sidetracked.
“In one hundred yards, turn left onto Eriebreeze Avenue.” It’s the woman’s voice from the GPS.
“Eriebreeze?” says Jer, suddenly all concerned. “Eriebreeze? Is that the right name? These things can be wrong, you know. Are you sure you programmed it right?”
“It’s cool.”
Jer thinks technology peaked at bicycles and analog sound. It’s a good thing he didn’t want to pedal to Buffalo. We slow and hang a left onto Eriebreeze. “You have reached your destination.”
Up ahead, on the right, is a big sign in a clump of trimmed-just-so bushes. ERIE ESTATES LODGE, it reads in big letters. Underneath, in smaller letters it says, Retirement Residency at its Finest.
We turn in the drive and roll along to the parking lot. Gloria Lorraine, ex-movie star and Grandpa’s fave, lives here. It’s time for my close-up.
FIVE
“I’ll come in with you,” Jer says as he turns off the car.
“No, it’s okay.” I want the kiss and a quick getaway; that’s it. I can see Jer asking for an autograph or an in-depth interview about symbolism in Cosmo’s Castaways. I climb out of the car and then grab the camera from the backseat. “And she said to come in on my own,” I add.
Jer says, “How are you going to—?”
“I’m cool.” I close the door fast and start across the parking lot.
“I’ll be waiting,” Jer calls out his window. “Call if you need Roy Rogers.”
Actually I’m not cool, and it’s not just the heat in the parking lot that’s getting to me. Now that I’m at Erie Estates Lodge, this whole thing is creeping me out a little. What is a ninety-year-old doing on Facebook anyway? That’s strange enough. When I sent her my message about my grandpa, David McLean, asking me to get a kiss on the cheek for him, she answered right back and told me to come down this morning. She doesn’t know Grandpa from a hole in the ground, so how weird is that? I mean, does she get her jollies kissing teenage boys? I’ve heard about older women being cougars, but for me, Scarlett Johansson is an older woman. I’m just glad I haven’t told Gloria about the filming. That might be too kinky. What did Grandpa D have against me anyhow? Have fun in Europe and Africa, guys, I thought. How did they get all the luck?
Erie Estates Lodge reminds me of a hotel we stayed in one time in Montreal, when we all went to a conference with Deb. It’s got this big arch thing over the front doors and the lobby has sofas and chairs and a fake fireplace burning even though it’s hot out.
Gloria Lorraine said to ask for her at reception, so I go to a big counter that’s not so much like a hotel. The woman behind the counter has her hair pulled back tight and she looks as strong as Bunny. She’s wearing pink hospital scrubs.
“Miz Lorraine is on the patio.” She points the way.
I get lost anyway and end up in a lounge or something where a big flat-screen TV is blaring a game show at top volume. The place smells like a mixture of perfume and pee, and it’s filled with geezers and geezettes. Heads turn toward me. It’s a panicky moment. First thing I think is, Call Jer.
“Who ya lookin’ fow-ah?” A thousand-year-old man, with impossibly black hair and giant black-rimmed glasses, is growling at me. He’s sitting on one of those walker thingies, dressed to kill in a red blazer and a green tie over a yellow shirt that hangs off his ropy neck. All of him shakes, including his voice.
I say, “Uh, Gloria Lorraine?”
“SPEAK UP!” says the thousand-year-old, even louder than the TV.
“GLORIA LORRAINE.” Now I’m too loud. Get me out of here.
“MIZ LORRAINE.” The old guy glares as if I stepped on his white shoes. “OUT ONNA PATIO.” He jerks his shaky head to show the direction. His shiny black hair slips around a little. “Givva my regahds.” He turns to the TV and then back to me. His eyes narrow behind his glasses and he nods at my camera bag. “You packin’?”
“No,” I say, “I’m not going anywhere.” I walk out to the patio.
SIX
It’s a patio: flowers and garden furniture, umbrellas over tables. At first I think no one is there, but then I see the top of a red straw hat peeking over the back of a chair. I smell cigarette smoke. A voice says, “Well, don’t just stand there.” The voice is a bad imitation of the one I heard when I watched part of Dead Letter Office last night. That one was kind of smoky and sexy; this one sounds as if Jer has been going at it with the paint scraper.
I walk around in front of the chair. A tiny old lady is perched in it. Under the red sun hat she’s got enormous sunglasses, and the rest of her face is makeup and wrinkles. Platinum blond hair— it must be a wig—grazes the gigantic shoulders of her white jacket. She’s got one elbow on the arm of the chair and a cigarette between her red fingernails. Silvery bracelets with blue stones droop down her skinny arm and into the sleeve of her jacket. Her head moves a little. I guess she’s looking me over from behind the glasses. I think about calling Jer again.
“You the one who wrote?” she croaks.
“Uh, yeah,” I say. “Spencer O’Toole.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“What was your grandfather’s name again?”
I feel as if I’m taking a test. I push up my glasses again. “David McLean.”
“You don’t—never mind.” She waves the words away with her cigarette. Bracelets clank. “Why didn’t he come himself?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “Maybe because he died.”
She sits up straighter at that and her lips bunch up. “What’d your grandfather say about me?”
“Well, uh, nothing. He just said you were his favorite actress and for me to get a kiss on the cheek from you, for him.”
“Just on the cheek?”
“Uh, yeah.”
She laughs. It’s another horrible paint-scraper sound that ends in a cough. “Probably all I’m good for these days anyway. I used to be pretty hot stuff, you know. Not a bombshell, but a looker. And none of that enhancement crap either. You ever see my movies?”
“Sure.” I nod. It’s kind of true. Like I said, I saw a clip from Dead Letter online. And I’m definitely putting Swamp Creatures from Zorgon on my list. Any movie on all those worst-movies-of-all-time lists has to be too cool to miss.
“All me,” she says. “The real thing. They didn’t even have to cap my teeth. And legs? To die for.”
“Uh-huh.” What else can I say? I notice her feet don’t reach the ground. I wonder how long this is going to take, and how weird it’s going to be. Talking boob jobs in a retirement home isn’t really moving things along. Problem is, I don’t know what to do to move them along. Kneel down, maybe? Before I can, she changes direction.
“And is that what I think it is?” She pokes her cigarette at the camera bag. She still hasn’t smoked any of it.
“It’s a video camera. My grandpa wanted me to film us—I mean you—giving me the kiss.”
“What for?”
She snorts. “Sounds a little kinky if you ask me.”
“I don’t know,” I say. I can hear my voice getting a little desperate. “He left me and all my cousins tasks to do. This is mine.”
“The kiss or the movie?”
“Both. So, anyway, if I could just, uh…” I take a step forward.
Gloria Lorraine hoists one marked-on eyebrow over her sunglasses. “Hold your horses, Spunky.”
“Spencer.”
“Whatever. I’m not that kind of girl. First we’ve got things to do.”
I stare at her. She says, “What, you think I kiss every kid that comes mooning around with a hard-luck story? You’ve gotta work for it.”
She flicks away the cigarette and hoists herself forward and out of the chair. She’s surprisingly fast for an old lady. “Get those bags,” she orders. She slips her purse strap over her shoulder. Beside her chair are a straw beach bag that matches her hat and a plastic bag from some store. As I stare, she grabs a cane that was hooked over the arm of her chair and starts motoring across the patio.
What can I do? I pick up the bags. They’re heavy. I follow her along a walkway that runs around the outside of Erie Estates Lodge.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
“Just running a few errands. Where’s your car?”
“In the parking lot. Errands? I guess my dad could drive us, but—”
Gloria Lorraine stops dead and doesn’t turn around. I have to hit the brakes so I don’t run her over. “Your father’s here?”
“Well, yeah. He’s waiting in the car,” I say to her back.
“Can’t you drive?”
“Sure, I can drive. I just—”
“Your grandpa—his father?”
“No, my mom’s. His dad—”
“Never mind,” she snaps. She turns around and whips off her sunglasses and glares up at me. Her eyes are brown with little blue flecks, and right now they’re hard enough to shrink my gonads. “I thought I told you to come by yourself.”
“Well, I did. He waited in the car.”
She hisses a word I can’t believe she knows. “Now I see why your grandpa wanted you to have the camera: to prove that you can do something right.” She turns away and lets out a few more F-bombs, then finally says, “All right, come on, come on.”
We pass some bushes and come out at the front of the building. Across the parking lot I can see our rental car, facing away from us. The windows are down and I can hear that Jer’s found a classic rock station on the radio. I say, “It’s over there.”
“Never mind,” she says, looking somewhere else. A smile cracks her makeup. “We’ll take mine.”
SEVEN
A white Cadillac convertible, top down, sits in the shade of the front arch, engine running. “I forgot I asked them to bring it around,” Gloria Lorraine says, hustling toward it. She’s pretty spry for a wrinkly. “Come on.”
The Cadillac has a red leather interior. The engine purrs. “You drive,” she snaps, yanking on the passenger door handle. I dump the bags and camera in the backseat and get behind the wheel.
“Come on, come on,” Gloria Lorraine says as I fumble with the seat belt. She doesn’t bother with hers, and the warning signal keeps dinging away. I put the car in drive and we roll into the sunlight. The Caddy’s the size of a whale, but compared to our family van it’s, well, a Cadillac. As we roll past the rental, I’m about to call out to Jer, but I see from the tilt of his bandannaed head that he’s probably Z’d out behind his shades. Gloria Lorraine sees me looking and says, “That your father?” I nod. “Why is he pretending to be a teenager?”
I don’t know what to say, so I go with, “Are we gonna be long? Because he’ll worry if I don’t call him.”
“He doesn’t look worried,” Gloria Lorraine replies. “And we won’t be long—unless you keep us crawling. Step on it! Turn right at the end of the driveway.” She’s leaning forward as if she’s trying to push the car faster. Or maybe she’s just falling over; it’s hard to tell.
As I make the turn onto Eriebreeze, I hear yelling back at the Lodge. I’m too busy driving to check the mirror. Gloria Lorraine acts as if she doesn’t hear. Maybe she doesn’t. There’s wind noise and I have to ask her twice where we’re going, plus her seat belt alert is still dinging too.
“Thirty-one twelve Lackawanna,” she yells, holding the red hat on with one hand.
“Where’s that?’
“What?”
“WHERE’S THAT?”
“It’s—oh, hell, I don’t know. It’s close. Don’t you have one of those GBS’s?”
“It’s your car,” I yell back.
“Oh. Yes. Well, look; there should be one. It’s got everything else.”
I scan the dash for a GPS. There it is. “I have to pull over to set it,” I tell her.
“Just make it snappy.”
I turn onto the next side street, pull over and punch in the address. The GPS fires up and feeds me instructions. It turns out we’re only three blocks away. When we pull up at a big modern house, Gloria Lorraine fumbles a piece of paper out of her pocket. “You all have cell phones. Dial this for me.”
The handwriting on the paper is shaky. I get out my phone and punch in the numbers. Gloria Lorraine waves for the phone as if she’s ordering champagne. After a moment she barks, “AmberLea? It’s Gran. Are you ready? Well, get up! We’re here…What do you mean, where? Here. Look out the window.” She nods to me. “Wave at the house.”
We both wave. As we do, I hear a funny thump from somewhere behind us. I look back to see if the bags have fallen over, but they’re still on the seat. Then the front door of the house opens and a girl appears. She looks about my age. She’s wearing a faded pink T-shirt and pajama bottoms with what I think is a Winnie the Pooh pattern. It’s hard to tell at this distance. She’s also got total bedhead: her straw-colored hair sticks out all over the place. She stares at us, the phone still at her ear.
“Get dressed and get in the car,” Gloria Lorraine barks to her. The girl doesn’t move, just keeps staring. “Hurry up,” Gloria Lorraine barks again. “We haven’t got all day.”
The girl’s mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
“It’s borrowed.” Gloria Lorraine answers a question the girl hasn’t asked.
I say, “I thought you said—”
“Clam up,” she says, without looking at me. I hear another thump. She yells to the girl, “Where’s the Flexus or whatever it is?”
“Mom took it,” the girl says into the phone. I can hear her without it. “The Mercedes is in getting new tires. Today’s her golf day.”
“I know that,” Gloria Lorraine snaps. “It was always her father’s golf day too. With redheads.” She rips out another surprising word, then, “So: no car.”
“No.” The girl shrugs. She bats at her bedhead hair. “I didn’t know you wanted—and anyway, you know I can’t—”
“Five minutes.” Gloria Lorraine cuts her off. “On set in five minutes.” The girl ducks back into the house. Gloria Lorraine shuts my phone, sticks it in her pocket and mutters to herself, “We’ll damn well have to drive this one instead.” She turns to me. “Get me my scarf. It’s in the straw bag.”
I find the silky yellow scarf at the top of the bag and pass it to her. She loops it under her chin, over her hat and over her shoulder. “There.”
“Uh, can I have my phone back?” I ask as politely as I can. “I don’t want to lose it, and I think I ought to call my dad.”
“Listen, do you want this kiss or not? We’ll only be a little while. Besides, CB DeMille, you’re going to need someone to shoot our love scene. AmberLea can run the camera. And when you speak to me, call me Miss Lorraine. Got it?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
I sigh. “Okay, Miss Lorraine.”
“Better. If you turn out to be reliable, you can move up to calling m
e GL. We’ll see.”
Thump.
“Did you hear that, Miss Lorraine?”
“Hear what? If she’s not out here in thirty seconds, start honking the horn.”
“Never mind.” Maybe I’ve gotten lucky and a wheel has fallen off. By now, I’m figuring this whole thing is kind of sketchy. If this isn’t her car, whose is it? It’s all making me nervous. If I was watching it, that might be different, especially if AmberLea was superhot and there were zombies…
EIGHT
“Now we’re talking,” says Gloria Lorraine. AmberLea is trudging down to the car in skinny jeans, a red-and-white-striped T and flip-flops. She is not superhot. There is not much up top and she’s a teeny bit wide for skinnies, but she has a nice face and the bedhead has turned into smooth blond bangs. She has red sunglasses perched up there too.
“AmberLea, this is Spritzer.”
“Spencer,” I say.
“That’s what I said.”
AmberLea looks at me with wide, worried eyes. “Hey,” I say. I hear a squeak in my voice. I’m not that great with girls, even though I’d like to be. I try to get tips from movies, but there don’t seem to be many seventeen-year-old sex-god movie stars with glasses, braces and a minor acne problem.
“Hey,” AmberLea says back. She tries about a one-sixteenth smile, but even that much is hard to do because she’s sucking in her lower lip and her chin is tucked so far into her neck it’s practically in back of her head. Dubious is the word, I think. She looks as if we’re trying to sell her chocolate shoes.
“Hop in the back,” Gloria Lorraine says. “Now.”
AmberLea says, “GL, what’s—?”
“You said you’d do something for me today. This is it. And we don’t have much time. Skinner here—”
“Spencer.”
“That’s what I said—is a busy man. His father is waiting for him. We need your help.”
