Mazie found her way down to Mrs. Pfister’s dimly lit, cobwebby basement and located the water heater. It was set to one fifty—hazardously high. Mazie turned it down to one twenty.
“How is that young man of yours—Ben, isn’t it?” Mrs. Pfister asked when Mazie returned to the living room.
“Well …” Mazie cleared her throat, trying to decide how much to reveal. Everyone on her route knew Labeck because he’d helped out several times. He’d been an enormous hit—the men liked him because he talked sports, and the women—well, their other faculties might have faded, but the ability to appreciate a handsome face never dwindled.
“You didn’t break up with him, did you?” asked Mrs. Pfister.
Might as well get it over with. “We’re—taking a breather from each other.”
“What happened?” Mrs. Pfister seemed genuinely upset. “Was it another woman?”
“Make that women.”
“Why, the cad! Two-timing you with a bunch of floozies?”
Mazie laughed. “It wasn’t like that.”
Mrs. Pfister reached out and patted Mazie’s hand. “These things happen, dear. And you know what they say: every cloud has a silver lining.” Mrs. Pfister got to her feet, slopping tea out of her cup, and hobbled after Mazie as she made her way toward the door. “Now that you don’t have a Steady Eddie anymore, I’ll set you up with my grandnephew.”
“Thanks, but no,” Mazie said, speeding up her pace. “I really don’t—”
“His name is Lester. He’s a lovely boy. Well, not a boy—he’s thirty-four years old, exactly the right age to settle down and start a family.”
Mazie shook her head. “I don’t want to get married.”
Mrs. Pfister winked. “That’s right, sweetie—play hard to get. Make ’em chase you until you catch ’em. That’s what I did when Arthur was courting me. Of course I got pregnant, too, but that’s another story. Lester, now—bright as a button, owns his own business—one of these days he’ll be a very wealthy young man. He’s a great catch—you should snap him up before some gold-digging Jezebel gets her hooks into him.”
“I’m sure he prefers to find his own girlfriends.” Mazie caught hold of the door handle, but Mrs. Pfister laid a bony hand on her sleeve and was not about to let her go.
“Not at all. Why, Lester loves it when I fix him up with girls. He’s too bashful to do it himself. It all dates back to when he had that awful acne, but that’s almost all cleared up now, thanks to that hemorrhoid medication the doctor prescribed. Wonderful stuff. It cleared up his top and his bottom.”
Mazie managed to get the door open and wedge her body through, hoping she didn’t have to physically pry the old woman’s hands off.
“I’m going to go call Lester right now. Are you free Saturday night? Oh, and tell me your favorite color so he knows what kind of flowers to bring.”
“No!” Mazie said. “No flowers! No date! I have to shampoo my dog Saturday night.”
“Lester could help you. He’s good with animals. And he loves children, too!”
Pretending she hadn’t heard, Mazie scurried out to the van parked at the curb. She never bothered to lock the van because not even the most desperate thief would steal it. Its background color was the bright green of the Emerald City in Oz. It was custom painted to illustrate the Vittles Van theme: grapes gamboled across the hood, bananas boogied around the doors, and potatoes bearing a bizarre resemblance to Mr. Potato Heads baked on the roof. Muffins, cookies, and bagels with big-eyed, smiling faces lived next to foaming glasses of milk. The glamour veggies—corn on the cob, tomatoes, and sugar snap peas—starred at center stage, while the gaseous vegetables—beans, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower—clustered at the van’s rear, just above the exhaust pipe. THE VITTLES VAN was written in bold, psychedelic letters on the doors, apparently by a sign painter who’d mixed cough medicine with vodka. The lunches themselves, packed in insulated cardboard boxes, were stored on shelves in the back of the van.
Mazie chased a wasp out the window and started the van. Next stop: Flora McDonald, who lived in a boardinghouse on Lafayette Place.
“Pork loin!” Flora said, clapping her hands. “I love pork loin!”
“I hate pork loin,” griped Melvin Werner at Mazie’s next stop. He always met Mazie at the door of his asphalt-shingled duplex and then stood there guarding it, as though fearing she might try to force her way in and steal his collection of cottage cheese lids and bread wrappers. “And they give you such stingy portions,” he added.
Walter Ostertag was tapping his watch when Mazie climbed the forty-five steps that led to his third-floor walk-up apartment.
“An hour, twenty-two minutes late,” he groused. “That’s the trouble with you young people nowadays. No sense of responsibility. No notion of promptness.”
“Sorry,” Mazie said. Arguing with Walter was as pointless as trying to stop water running downhill. One of Mazie’s co-workers, who ran a Vittle Van route on the west side of town, believed that a lot of their elderly customers enjoyed grumbling—in fact it was their main occupation—and that depriving them of their chance to vent was almost cruel.
Mazie was supposed to deliver her seventy-two meals in two hours, starting at eleven in the morning. The Vittles Van training manual said that you should hand the lunches to the senior citizens at their doors, but it hadn’t mentioned how cagey the seniors were, how they’d use any excuse to get you inside. Once you were inside, you were fair game.
Mazie, would you zip me up? Unbutton me? Open this goddamn childproof pill container? Sharpen this knife because it won’t even cut butter? Screw in this lightbulb? Chase the spider out of the bathtub? Reach that can down from the top shelf? Back my car out of the driveway? Read the fine print on this bill to me? Show me how this danged cell phone works?
She couldn’t say no. Some of her clients—it was what you were supposed to call them—had no one else to help them. Mazie was the only able-bodied person they saw all day. Isolation was the curse of old age. Your friends went and died on you and your family never came to see you. Your hearing got as wonky as an old transistor bulb radio and half the time you didn’t know what anybody was saying. The shallow, beautiful people on TV talk shows became your constant daily companions.
Seymour Steiner was Mazie’s second-to-last client of the day. He was a widower who lived with his Chihuahua in a well-kept-up bungalow on Newberry Avenue. He was her joke-of-the-day guy, always ready with a new one when she showed up with his lunch. She suspected that Seymour practiced his delivery before she arrived. He had a great sense of timing and was a natural-born comedian. Mazie often told him he should do open mike night at the Bling Bling Club. He’d served in the army during the Second World War and was one of the veterans Ben Labeck was featuring in his documentary.
She wished Mr. Steiner were the last client on her route because she always left his place smiling. Unfortunately, her last drop-off was Horrible Henrietta, who lived in a condo on Ivanhoe Place. Horrible Henrietta always knew to the millisecond how late Mazie was with her lunch and positively relished tattling on her to her boss.
The Vittles Van was sponsored by an organization named Elder Hearts. Its headquarters were located in a sprawling, two-story building on Astor Street, just north of Milwaukee’s downtown. Its offices were on the second floor, while its first floor housed the giant kitchens that produced the Vittles Van meals.
Mazie was called to the Elder Hearts director’s office the instant she got back that afternoon. Roger Thorndike, the Elder Hearts director, looked up as she entered his office. He was a tall, gray-haired man with a gray complexion who favored gray suits. He was not overweight, but his lower face had somehow melted as he’d aged and he’d developed three chins, one sitting on top of the other. His eyes were small, colorless, and flinty.
Sighing, Mazie went to stand on the carpet in front of his desk. When you were called to the carpet by Mr. Thorndike, you were literally made to stand in front of his desk on an ugl
y brown rug that resembled a dead buffalo.
“One of our clients just called me,” said Thorndike, folding his hands beneath his chins. “He said his meal hadn’t been delivered until nearly two this afternoon.”
“Mr. Ostertag?” Mazie said. “It was a quarter to one. He never reset his clock to daylight savings time.”
“That’s still twenty-four minutes later than his scheduled delivery time.” Thorndike frowned at a form sitting atop his desk. Reading upside down, Mazie saw it was a computer printout of her delivery schedules. The times she’d been late were highlighted in yellow marker. The sheet was nearly all yellow.
“I had to help Mrs. Singh lure her cat back in,” Mazie explained. “She was practically hysterical. Mrs. Singh, I mean. Then at my next stop Lamont Williams—you know, that nice old gentleman who’s legally blind—wanted me to help him find his car keys.”
“His car keys?” Thorndike raised an eyelid; Mazie thought he might have some lizard DNA mixed in with his human cells. He’d never met a t he hadn’t crossed; never met an expense account he hadn’t blue-lined.
“Mr. Williams wanted to drive to the post office to mail a letter. I had to explain why it maybe wasn’t a good idea for him to drive.” Mazie didn’t mention that she’d hidden Mr. Williams’s car keys, which she was sure his children would appreciate. She’d taken his letter and planned to mail it herself later today.
“Still …” Thorndike pinched his lips, the most emotion he ever allowed himself. “You are allowed two minutes per person, Miss Maguire—surely that’s more than adequate time to deliver a meal.”
Leroy Campbell, who was sitting at a table sorting through a stack of manila folders, chuckled. He was one of the summer hires, a college kid who had a take-it-or-leave-it attitude toward the job. “You know what your problem is, Mazie?” he said. “You care about them folks. Me, I dump the box on the steps and run like hell. Those old people got Mazie figured for a sucker, got her finding their lost dentures and doing their tax returns and returning their library books and all kinds of shit.”
“I return the library books on my own time,” Mazie shot back, annoyed at Leroy’s suck-up-iness. “Helping out those poor people—that’s the decent thing to do!”
“You are not being paid to do the decent thing,” Roger Thorndike said primly.
Mazie made a whatever gesture. The pencil-pushing stiff deserved to be whatevered. She stormed out of the office, longing to get outdoors on this beautiful summer day for a long, therapeutic walk, but she still had three more hours to put in. Delivering meals was only part of her job; the rest was food preparation in the big kitchen. Putting together the thousands of meals that were delivered throughout the city required a lot of work. Everything was homemade. The soups were made from stock that had to be simmered overnight. There were potatoes to peel, piecrusts to roll out, vegetables to chop. Giant appliances did much of the work, but a lot of it still required human hands. It was nearly five o’clock by the time Mazie punched her time card and walked out, head throbbing, feet sore, stomach rumbling.
Her cell phone rang. She snatched it up, wishing that her stupid heart wouldn’t leap every time it thought Ben Labeck might be calling.
It wasn’t Labeck. It was Johnny Hoolihan.
“Mazie? You still talking to me, after all the trouble I got you in Saturday night?”
She smiled. “Still talking.”
“Any chance of your joining me? I’m at the downtown Hyatt, watching the city spin around me. I’ve got some news about Shayla.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Chapter Eighteen
Mazie’s job came with one perk. She was allowed to use the Vittles Van for her personal transportation, as long as she paid for her own gas. Unfortunately, the Vittles Van was as inconspicuous as the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. As she drove around the city in a vehicle painted with frolicking foodstuffs, people stared, pointed, and laughed. Mazie had taken to wearing dark, wraparound glasses in the hopes that no one she knew would recognize her.
Now, hurrying to meet Johnny, Mazie spotted a parking spot on Jefferson, in front of the George Watts and Son Tea Shop. Watts was a small, elegant boutique and restaurant that catered to women who spent more on their dogs’ pedicures than Mazie spent on rent. Back in the old days, while she was still Mrs. Kip Vonnerjohn, Mazie had occasionally met friends in the tearoom, where a slice of coconut cake and an oolong souchong in a porcelain cup could demolish a twenty in the blink of an eye. All that was gone with the wind—the overpriced teas and the friends, who’d dropped her at the first hint of trouble.
Mazie didn’t miss either; she’d never actually liked the friends or the tea.
Carefully checking the sidewalk in both directions for people who might recognize her, Mazie got out of the van. As she did, the door of the tea shop opened and a tall, blonde woman emerged, carrying a George Watts shopping bag.
Oh, Lord! It was Olivia Hyphenated Something, Mazie saw, Ben’s new whatever-she-was. Quick—duck back into the van!
Too late; Olivia had already spotted her.
Olivia’s eyes widened. “Oh, hello,” she called, raising her voice to be heard above traffic. “Mazie, isn’t it?”
For a dizzying second Mazie thought of denying it: no speak English, lady. But then she straightened her spine, closed the van door, and marched over to the sidewalk to feed the meter.
“Olivia, right?” she said, trying for jaunty, rummaging in her handbag for meter change. “How are you?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
Fine did describe Olivia. She was very fine. She was one of those rare blondes who could carry off white, probably because of her tan, the kind of natural tan you got sunbathing on a yacht or playing doubles on a squash court. She was rocking a nautical theme today in a waist-length white jacket whose cuffs were trimmed in gold sailor-style piping. She wore a necklace made of tiny, palest pink seashells entwined with seed pearls and minuscule gold starfish. Mazie would have swapped her eyeteeth for that necklace. You could always get replacement eyeteeth, but this necklace looked to be one of a kind, probably handcrafted by Neptune himself.
Olivia’s eyes skittered to Mazie’s forehead. A jolt of horror shot through Mazie as she realized she’d forgotten to take off the hair net she’d worn during her kitchen shift. The edge of the net came to the middle of her forehead, ending in a pucker that looked like a big black mole. Oh, Lord—as though being seen in the Vittles Van hadn’t been embarrassing enough! Feeling herself go scarlet, Mazie ripped off the cap and stuffed it in her pocket.
Olivia was much too polite to indicate she’d noticed it. “You survived Saturday night, I see,” she said, smiling.
Mazie wasn’t sure whether she was referring to the Phero-mates event or the shootout at the Hog Wild, but she nodded. “More or less.”
“I’m not used to so much excitement.” Olivia reached into her own perfectly organized Dolce and Gabbana handbag—beige patent leather with a gold chain—extracted four quarters, and handed them to Mazie.
Mazie couldn’t exactly say “I’m not used to so much excitement, either,” since—among other misadventures—she’d once had two thugs try to burn her alive and another time had nearly been drowned in a pool of toxic sludge by an insane beauty queen, but she decided not to go into that just now. “Thanks,” she said, accepting the quarters and turning with relief to the job of inserting them in the meter.
“I don’t mean to pry,” Olivia said, “but I sensed something between you and Ben Labeck the other night. Are you two—”
“Nope,” Mazie said breezily, raking a hand through her hair, which had matted down in a bad case of hairnet head. “Uh-uh. Nothing between us. Just good friends. Well, not that good.”
“You’re sure?” Olivia pressed. “Because … well, I’d like to ask Ben out, but I didn’t want to—you know—if you’re still …”
“Oh, no, it’s fine. He can go out with anyone he wants.” Against her will, Mazi
e found herself sort of liking Olivia. “I’ve moved on. Dating like crazy. Men coming out of the woodwork. On my way to meet a guy right now, in fact.”
Overkill. She couldn’t seem to shut up.
Olivia sighed. “Well, that’s good. Now I don’t feel so guilty. Because I really like Ben. I think he and I—well, it’s too early to say, but he just might be the one.”
“Gr-reat,” Mazie said, a little too heartily.
“That man you were with Saturday night, the one that looks like Bon Jovi, that cute sheriff—”
“Cop,” Mazie corrected.
“Were he and Ben going to actually fight?”
“Yup. Until you arrived. Just in time, by the way. It saved me from having to turn a fire hose on them.”
“Were they fighting over you?” Olivia looked genuinely curious. She didn’t seem to possess the normal amount of female cattiness, maybe because she’d never had to work hard to get what she wanted. When you looked the way Olivia did, life obligingly handed you things without your having to lift a finger.
“Oh, hell no—those two idiots just plain hate each other,” Mazie said.
Olivia laughed. “You’re really a lot of fun, Mazie. We should get together for coffee sometime. I’d love to get to know you better.”
“Sure, let’s do that,” Mazie said, with blatant insincerity. Olivia wasn’t doing it on purpose, but she was patronizing Mazie. Giant, supersized, big time. “Nice talking, but I’ve got to run.” She fished a dollar bill out of her jeans pocket and thrust it at Olivia. “For the quarters.”
“Oh, gee, you didn’t have to—”
“We’re fair and square now. See ya.”
Mazie hurried off, certain that Olivia had tossed her grungy dollar bill into a sewer grating and was even now swabbing her hands with the sanitizer she no doubt stocked in her well-organized purse.
Mazie hustled down three city blocks to the Hyatt. In the lobby she hesitated. She had a choice here between climbing thirty flights of stairs or taking the glass-sided elevator, which allowed passengers an unimpeded view of the dizzying heights they were ascending. Heights made Mazie’s palms go damp and sent electric tremors shooting up her legs, but she gave herself a stern face-your-fears pep talk and got in the elevator. It wasn’t so bad. All she had to do was squeeze her eyes shut and peek at the floor numbers through slitted lids.
The Sexiest Man Alive: Life and Love on the Lam (A Loveswept Contemporary Romance) Page 11
