Tommy came over. “Guess I might as well be first,” he said.
He took the chalk from me and wrote his name on the black squirrel side. He wrote, “December 7 at 4:10 a.m.” Then he put a ten-dollar bill in the big empty pickle jar he saved for this occasion.
I have no idea when this tradition began but it was a long time ago. Our town is one of the few on earth that boasts black squirrels along with regular gray squirrels. Squirrels are noted for predicting an early or late winter based on when they start gathering acorns. But townspeople noticed that black squirrels and gray squirrels each started gathering acorns at different times. Sometimes the blacks started gathering first, other times the grays. People began to have arguments over which color of squirrel was predicting the onset of winter correctly.
A not-so-elaborate—or accurate—betting game emerged. If your gut instincts told you that winter was going to come early, you’d back the squirrels that were gathering nuts early in the fall. You’d pick your “team,” meaning the Blacks or the Grays. Then you would write down when you thought the first snowfall would occur. The person closest to the actual date and time won the jar and bragging rights for their squirrel team for a year. Three years running, the person who won had backed the gray squirrels. Last year, the winner took home $2,420. I took my tip money from my apron pocket, deposited ten dollars in the jar, and wrote, “Jeannie Thompson, November 30, 12:00 p.m.” on the gray squirrel side.
“That’s a lousy time,” Tommy called after my back. “First snows never start at noon.” I waved him off and kept walking. This was a familiar conversation. Every year, the fall months would be filled with arguments of statistics about past first snowfalls. But right now I didn’t want to talk about it. It was sunny and eighty degrees out.
After I changed the sheets on all the beds and cleaned the bathroom, I noticed that Elizabeth’s schedule for bedrooms was now posted on the refrigerator. Lucy and Chuck would be staying here until they left for school in a few weeks. My name was not next to “couch,” Evan’s was. It got worse. It said:
Lucy and Chuck: guest room
Grandma: pink room
Elizabeth: dessert room
Mom and Dad: Mom and Dad’s room
Evan: couch
Jeannie: basement
“Mom!” I was horrified. “There’s not even a bed in the basement!” Our basement wasn’t finished. It was gray and musty with exposed pipes. Books and boxes and Christmas ornaments were piled everywhere, with only a narrow path to the washer and dryer. I had organized it many times but had given up after it kept going right back to its original mess in no time at all.
“You can switch with Elizabeth,” she said helpfully.
“You know I can’t ask a pregnant woman to sleep on a basement floor!” I replied.
Mom hustled off to find Dad’s sleeping bag from his stint in the army during the Korean War. She figured that she could make a bed for me out of that. As she rummaged through a closet, I heard her say, “I think there’s enough room for you under the ironing board.”
Grandma was flipping her cards down on the table. I looked over her shoulder and saw that the dreaded ace of spades was upside down again. “Didn’t you say that means death?” I tapped the card.
Grandma nodded without looking up and continued flipping until the cards were laid out in neat rows. The ace of spades was surrounded again by the jack of diamonds, the queen of hearts, and the queen of diamonds.
“Grandma, that’s what came up right before we thought Lucy was dead. What’s the probability of that?” I asked.
“It’s inevitable,” she said without looking at me. She was giving me the chills on a very hot day.
“Do you mean that card formation will keep coming up because someone is supposed to die?”
“Yes.”
“But it’s not what turned up the last time you did a reading.”
“It depends on who you’re reading for.”
“Who are you reading these for now?”
Grandma looked up at me. “Your mother.” I backed away from her and ran out into the yard. I tilted my face to the late afternoon sun and thought, She doesn’t mean any harm. She is an old woman who doesn’t mean what she says. I lowered my head and looked at the house. I didn’t believe a word of what I was telling myself. And I felt bad about it.
Dad would be coming home from work soon. Evan should be docking any minute now. Once a week he captained a research vessel for scientists who studied water currents. Mom was trying to figure out what to make for dinner and worrying about what to feed two pregnant women in the coming weeks. “Everything,” I teased her.
I hated when she worried so much. Sometimes, when she was getting into full-scale worry mode, I’d dance her around the kitchen. I’d twirl her in and out, carefully avoiding the refrigerator and the cabinets and Buddy lying on the floor. Once I’d tripped over the open door of the dishwasher and dropped her flat on her bottom when I was trying to dip her. We both laughed, tangled up on the floor. “Oh, Jeannie!” my mom would say, with tears of laughter rolling down her face. That usually snapped her out of herself.
With us, she didn’t put up with much self-pity or self-doubt. After listening to and advising on our various complaints (boyfriend broke up with me, got fired from my job, hair turned green in the chlorine), she would eventually announce, “Pull up your bootstraps!”
Now I grabbed her for a quick spin at the stove until she laughed. Then she balanced her cigarette on the side of the counter while she studied the contents of the refrigerator.
“I want that spaghetti you made a while ago,” Grandma said.
Mom said, “Well, all right, I guess that would be easy.” She went to the basement to get a few jars of her homemade tomato sauce. Since Walker was taking me out to dinner, I wasn’t worried about having to face the icky sauce. I was thinking about what to wear on my date when I heard Mom’s voice from below. “Jeannie?” her voice quavered. I went down the steps and saw Mom standing in the middle of the room. “Do you smell something?” she whispered.
I pulled my T-shirt up over my nose to block the smell. “Omigod, Mom, what is it?”
“Gas,” she said.
I could hear a hissing noise and I frantically moved boxes away from the wall until I found where the gas was seeping in. It was behind the dryer. The gas line had been wrenched apart, and gas was filling the basement. I grabbed a towel and tried to shove it into the broken line but I could still hear it hissing deep inside the wall. “Is your cigarette out?” My voice was squeaky.
Mom was moving a heavy bookcase trying to see if there was another access to the interior of the wall. “I left it on the kitchen counter upstairs. Thank God.” She grunted with the strain of the bookcase.
“Do you know where the gas shutoff is?” I asked her.
“No. Your father always handles things like that.”
“I’ll go call the fire department. You should get out of here now.” Then I turned and saw the tiny pilot flame. “Mom! The water heater!” I yelped.
Her eyes widened. “Get your grandmother and run outside. Now!”
I didn’t go. I ran around the basement looking for something to douse that flame with before our house became a fireball. I threw the washer open and, sure enough, there were damp clothes inside. I grabbed the first thing handy and sprawled on my belly. I shoved the damp cloth as far under the heater as I could, praying it reached and extinguished the source of certain destruction. I pulled the fabric out carefully and studied the space between the heater and the floor. The flame was out. I laid my head on the concrete floor and sighed.
“Hey, are you guys down there?” Evan shouted. I heard his feet hitting the top steps. Mom ran headlong up the steps and pushed Evan out of the stairwell. When I got upstairs they were picking themselves up off the floor. Evan had a cigarette in his hand. “What the hell?” he sputtered.
“Out, now, out!” Mom gasped. She grabbed Grandma and moved her bodily to the back door.
“Evan, open the windows and doors!” I cranked open every pane of glass I could find. Evan didn’t ask what was happening but started helping me. I grabbed the phone and dialed 9-1-1. When the operator answered, I yelled, “Gas leak! We have a gas leak!”
There was a pause and then the operator said quizzically, “Jeannie?”
“Yes! It’s Jeannie! Get somebody over here who knows where the hell the gas shutoff is!”
“End of Fourth Street, right?”
“Right!”
The operator said she’d have someone over in a minute and hung up. Evan and I left the house and joined Mom and Grandma in the front yard. We watched the house for signs of imminent explosion. Dad pulled into the driveway. When he saw us all in the front yard, he hurried over to Mom. “What happened?”
“It’s a gas leak, Harold. I have no idea how long that hose was pouring gas into the house. We all could have been killed.” Mom was regaining her composure.
“Ah shit, not again.” Dad sighed. Mom, Evan, and I stared at Dad. Grandma turned her head away conspicuously. I heard sirens growing louder. Why they were using sirens I had no idea. The firehouse was only three blocks away. The fire truck came around the corner, closely followed by the paramedic truck and North Muskegon’s lone cop car. The volunteer firemen and Marv Carson trooped into our house. I watched the blue and red lights flashing across our neighbors’ houses. They were all coming out now to see what the excitement was about. A crowd gathered at a safe distance across the street. Walker jogged across the lawn to me.
“Is everybody all right?” We all nodded yes. He took my hand. “So what happened now?”
“A gas leak,” I said. I looked at my grandmother and decided not to bring up my suspicions.
“I had to park over on Third Street. They’ve got your entire block cordoned off,” Walker said. I wasn’t really listening to him because I was wondering what Marv Carson was carrying out of the house. As he lugged his burden down the front steps, I ran toward him.
“Hey, you can’t go near there yet!” a fireman yelled at me. I didn’t stop until I was standing in front of Marv at the bottom of the steps. His head was down and the brim of his hat obscured his eyes.
“Officer Carson?” It was a question, and he knew what it meant. When he raised his head I saw his eyes were glistening.
“Ah, Jeannie. Ah, shit. I’m so sorry.”
I stroked the brown fur. “Is he . . . can we . . .” I didn’t finish. I knew the answer. Marv walked heavily to a corner of the yard and laid Buddy’s body on the grass. He took care that Buddy’s feet were not under his body and that his neck wasn’t lolling. I sat next to my dog and pulled his head onto my lap. My family gathered around.
I looked up at my dad. I opened my mouth to tell his sad blue eyes it would all be okay. Instead, a wail came out. “Daaad!” He reached down and scooped me up like I was a five-year-old. He hugged me hard and only the toes of my tennis shoes scraped the grass as I hung on to his shoulders. I knew Walker and every neighbor were watching my family and I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop crying.
Chapter Twenty-six
April 2006
I gently swirled my glass of red wine. Aidan seemed stricken. “Buddy died?”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t a mistake, like with Lucy?”
“No.” I stared at the fire in my little brick fireplace and readjusted the phone next to my ear. I had been speaking to Aidan for more than an hour now, telling my story.
He sounded like he had lost his best friend. “What happened? Why didn’t Buddy get out?”
I thought back to that long-ago night. Once we were allowed back inside, we had talked at the kitchen table late into the evening. Every time Dad and Evan wanted to smoke Mom shooed them outside, just in case the gas had lingered. Grandma was sleeping. Buddy had been wrapped in my favorite quilt and was laid out carefully on the garage floor. I had protested that I wanted him in the house but Mom said that probably wasn’t the best idea.
I answered Aidan’s question. “Marv found him in the basement. He sometimes slept there on the cool concrete floor. The paramedic said that he probably passed out and never woke up.”
“But you and your mom didn’t see him when you were down there.” That fact had tormented me for months after Buddy’s death. If we had seen his body in the corner, maybe we could have revived him, but we hadn’t. The difference between life and death can be as simple as a glance into a corner at the right time.
“Did your Grandma jimmy with the gas hose?” Aidan asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s pretty difficult to do,” Aidan mused.
“Apparently she had practice,” I said.
Aidan’s voice was now anxious. “Practice?”
“Yeah, well, there’s more to the story.”
“Christ, Jeannie, you’re getting to be like Scheherazade. I’m starting to feel like you just keep inventing stories to delay making a decision about us.”
“I’m not making this stuff up, you know,” I finally said.
“I know, I know. It’s just . . . just . . . oh, I don’t know.”
At this point I was anxious myself. Lucy’s plane had landed at 7 p.m. It was now eight thirty and she would be here any second. I pulled back the living room curtains to see if there was a cab coming down the street. “I love you, Aidan. Let’s talk about all of this in person. We’ve been on the phone a long time now and I need to review some stuff for work.”
“Yeah.” Aidan sounded reluctant. “I’d better be going too. I have to get a really early start tomorrow. We’re looking at new locations outside of Vancouver.”
After we hung up I sat in front of the fire feeling like a complete shit. I couldn’t even understand myself. What was wrong with committing to a man whom I loved? The truth was I hadn’t been right about my first husband, Walker, so how could I trust myself to make such a big decision again? Walker thought he could simply ignore my family by never seeing them. But that took too big of a toll on me.
I was so deep in thought that the doorbell jolted me. Running to the door, I swung it open. “Lucy!” I swept her up into a hug.
After I released her I saw that while travel worn, Lucy looked great, as always. Her dark hair was pinned up carelessly and she wore jeans, a sweater set, and a Burberry raincoat that she certainly wouldn’t need here in Los Angeles.
She rolled her suitcase inside and smiled at me. “Good to see you, Jeannie.” She continued toward the guest room.
“Where are you going?” I followed her.
“It’s 11:45 my time.” She yawned. “I love you but it is way past my bedtime and I’m going to bed.” With a final one-arm hug she disappeared into the guest room, which was just off the living room. Moments later I heard water running in the guest bathroom. I smiled to myself. Good old Lucy.
The next morning, Monday, I took several hours off from work to have some time with my sister. A long walk took us down to Venice Beach, where we found a restaurant on the boardwalk to have some breakfast. We scored a table outside in the sunshine. It faced the boardwalk with the wide beach and the Pacific Ocean lying just beyond.
“I haven’t been down here in years.” I marveled at the people slowly cruising by on bikes or Rollerblades. How do these people have the time to be outside on a Monday morning? I wondered.
“Years?” Lucy put her chin in her hands. “You only live about twelve blocks away.”
“I don’t get out much. I’m at the office most of the time.” I turned my attention to the menu.
“So I hear.”
Uh-oh. Alert, alert. Was Lucy going to start bashing me right away for not making time for the family? I thought she probably was, but mercifully the waitress showed up just then to take our orders. Lucy either dropped the subject or forgot about it because we spent our time talking about her caseload and my slate of movies. We both had to deal with completely impossible, insane people, and we giggled at each other’s stories.
My phone rang halfway through Lucy’s pantomime of a client falling out of a window and into some bushes. I checked caller ID and saw it was an Oxford Pictures phone number.
“I gotta take this but I’ll be quick,” I promised Lucy. I answered and it was our print production guy.
“Hey, Jeannie, I’ve got the artwork ready for your approval for the TechnoCat poster.”
“Yeah, um, that’s great. I’ll be in later on this afternoon,” I said.
“It’s on press right now. We have a tight schedule, as you know. If we don’t start printing it within an hour, we won’t be done in time to make FedEx to get the posters out to New York. Then it won’t be up in theaters tomorrow like you promised Rachael.”
One thing I knew right then was that I had better damn well not leave Lucy in order to go into work. I always, without fail, approved final artwork before going to press. But I had worked with this print production guy for years. He had an amazing eye for color, and if he said it was good to go, then it was good to go. Which is what I asked him. “Yep, it looks awesome,” he responded cheerfully.
“Then go ahead and print it.” I tapped END on my phone and settled in for another coffee and more conversation with Lucy.
Eventually, we made it back to my house. We went to our separate bedrooms to shed our sweats and get into work clothes. When Lucy showed up in the living room I saw that she had changed into a conservative gray suit with a white ruffled shirt buttoned up to the neck. She looked so East Coast that I almost laughed. “Things sure are different in Connecticut. Out here even lawyers show up in the expensive, crumpled, creative look.”
“I guess that explains what you have on,” she said a tad archly.
“What’s wrong with this?” I looked down at my high-heeled black boots, black tights, black skirt that was a bit short, and pink and black floral shirt.
“You could button up one more button, for starters.”
I started to retort; then I looked down again. She did have a point. I buttoned up. Aidan had a funny saying he learned in Australia about older women who dress too young for their age. He called it mutton dressed as lamb. I wasn’t mutton, to be sure. But I wasn’t exactly a lamb anymore, either. I tugged my skirt down a bit, too.
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