by Tamar Myers
Chanti’s mouth flew open and her hands formed talons; from what I could see through the crack in the door, she brought to mind an eagle swooping down to face its prey. “You were in my room?”
“Or,” Bob said, bravely feigning indifference, if not boredom, “the numbers on the tickets may be a code for something else.”
The eagle suddenly recoiled, afraid of the mouse. “Of course they’re just lottery numbers. Who would be stupid enough to put a safe combination on a lottery ticket?”
“You.”
“Oh crap,” Chanti said. She still had her pocketbook with her—a lovely beaded number that had to cost an arm and a leg—which she set on the kitchen table. “You might as well take the ring too. It’s here in my purse.”
I watched, spellbound, as Bob found himself staring into the barrel of a revolver for the first time in his life.
Chapter 27
Then I got angry: how dare she threaten my friend! I foolishly flung open the bathroom door to confront her, which startled Chanti so badly that she almost jumped out of her Jimmy Choos. Fortunately, I found my tongue first. “Chanti, sweetheart, you don’t want to hurt us. If you do, Rob will never forgive you. Never, ever.”
“Yeah? Well, maybe if I kill you, he won’t, but him—he can be easily replaced.”
“Don’t be ridiculous—I mean, so sure. Your son loves this man. They’ve been partners for over ten years.”
“Twelve years, three months, and six days,” Bob sniffed.
“Shut up, dear,” I said softly.
“My Robbie wasn’t even gay until he met this man,” Chanti said. Her eyes narrowed. “I should have shot you at the beginning; I would have grandchildren by now.”
“No,” I said, “you would have an unhappy, lonely son who probably wouldn’t visit you at whichever prison you were in.”
“Even you would have been better than nothing,” Chanti said, nodding in my direction. “A dozen years ago you might still have been young enough to be fertile. And although you’re about the tiniest thing I’ve ever seen, you do have nice wide hips—proportionally, I mean. Birthing hips, I think they’re called.”
“Why, thank you,” I said. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Abby,” Bob said plaintively, “are you making nicey-nice with this woman?”
“Shut up, Robert,” I said.
“Thank you,” Chanti said. “I’ve been wanting to say that to him since the day I met him.”
“Well, now is certainly your chance,” I said. “There’s nothing that annoying little man can do but listen—and lump it.”
“Ha! And lump it!” Chanti laughed and the gun wavered.
Bob’s eyes bulged and his Adam’s apple bobbed several times before he managed to speak. “Abby, I can’t believe you’re turning on me like this! We’re friends! And she—this woman—Rob’s mother is—well, I can’t even say it to her face. I wasn’t brought up like that.”
“Are you trying to say ‘bitch’?” Chanti asked.
“There!” Bob said. “She said it herself. You heard her!”
“And I should kill you just for wanting to say it,” Chanti hissed. “I despise you, Bonnie.”
“It’s Bob,” Bob said through clenched teeth.
I shook my head sadly, as if having arrived at some disappointing conclusion. “Chanti, I totally understand where you’re coming from. But like I said, it is so not worth it to kill a schmuck like this. Disposing of the body is going to be a major hassle. I suppose we could stick him in the attic and just let him dry out for several years before discarding him in a cornfield. But let me tell you something: Bob Steuben eats a lot of weird animals, and when he decomposes he’s going to smell something awful. You’re not going to be able to cover his stench up with room deodorizers. No sirree Bob, Spring Bouquet and Tropical Mist are not going to cut the mustard for this bad boy.”
As I wound up my little speech I gave Bob a whack across the back that sent him sprawling headlong into Chanti. The little revolver she’d been holding slipped from her hand and went skittering across the marble tiles of the kitchen floor and ricocheted off the baseboard of the dishwasher. Like a boomerang it arced back in our general direction, but this time it was my tiny hand that closed around the mother-of-pearl inlaid grip.
In the meantime Bob remained sprawled on top of his pseudo-mother-in-law, in what can best be described as an indelicate position. A stranger finding the two of them on the floor, with their limbs arranged thusly, might be forgiven for jumping to a conclusion far different from what was really going on.
“Don’t let her up, Bob,” I said between gasps for breath.
“What? Suddenly you’re on my side?”
“I always was,” I said, “and I still am—but now with the gun.”
“Let me up, or I’ll sue,” Chanti rasped.
“Well, it’s time to call in the posse,” I said. “Chanti, any last words?”
“Huh?”
“Bob and I have both known you for a long time. Therefore I’m giving you a chance to tell us something about how you felt about Jerry and her death, before the police get here. We may not be a sympathetic audience, but we are familiar, and who knows, maybe we will understand after all.”
She wasted no time. “Do you have a sister, Abby?”
“No, but I have a brother who is aptly named Toy.”
She didn’t seem to really care about my sibling issues.
“Jerry was an extrovert so she got everything,” she said. “Dance lessons, piano lessons, riding lessons—hell, she even got a pony for her eighth birthday. Of course we had to keep it out at a stable somewhere in Union County, but it still counts. Did I mention that she got all the new clothes? Everything she wanted, that girl got.
“Then Ben was born, and he got everything. But a girl like me, nobody notices.”
“I bet your mother did,” I said, “even if she had ‘birthing hips.’ ”
“Go ahead, make fun of me, if you want. But you haven’t lived my life. You haven’t had the only man you’ll ever love stolen out from underneath you—then crushed by a man-eating carnivore—and spit out to die.”
“Your mixed metaphor intrigues me,” I said. “How did she crush him?”
“Alfred was a sensitive man—but an ambitious man. He would have gone very far in life. He was going to be a nuclear physicist. In high school he was voted most likely to win the Nobel Prize.”
“You were high school sweethearts?” I said.
“When Alfred was just finishing up his doctoral degree, and we were finally talking wedding dates, in Jerry sweeps like a bird of prey and carries him off in her talons.”
“What had she been doing in the meantime?”
“Working as a shopgirl as she ate up men and shit out the parts she couldn’t digest—just like an owl.”
“Pardon your French,” said Bob.
Chanti glared up at him. “It isn’t French. It’s an old, respected Anglo-Saxon word.”
“Not among the cozy set,” I said. “Now get on with your pathetic tale.”
“Pathetic? We’d been soul mates for a dozen years, and then along came Jerry, and her only motive was to steal him away from me. That’s all she wanted. The moment she knew she had him in her clutches—her talons—she dumped him.”
“But wasn’t it your fault that you didn’t take him back?” I said.
“I never saw Alfred alive again. That very same night he hung himself in the physics lab after hours. The janitor found him at four in the morning.” Chanti began to sob. “When I confronted Jerry, all she did was shrug,” she eventually managed to say.
In fact, Chanti was producing such a copious amount of tears and phlegm that Bob was forced to let her off her back, otherwise the scorned yet scornful woman was in danger of expiring there in her own kitchen.
Was it the right call? Who knows? Would I do it again the same the way, knowing what I do now? Probably not. Greg often says that although I
’m a little thing, I’m a big softy, and Bob—well, he may as well be made out of whipped cream. Together we’re hopeless.
We extracted a sacred oath out of Chanti, on beloved Alfred’s grave, that she would turn herself in to the police immediately following Jerry’s interment at Charlotte Hebrew Cemetery. In the meantime she would conduct herself as properly befits a grieving sister, and allow Robert Steuben to sit with his partner in the section reserved for family.
Rob was thrilled at his mother’s improved attitude and patted her arm throughout the service. Frankly, it made me sick to see him fawning all over her when she was the cause for us being there in the first place. Had there been an unscripted spot in the service, one where just anyone could get up and eulogize, mother and son would have been in for a rude surprise.
As soon as the last “ah-mein” was sounded, the family was ushered out to a caravan of cars for the trip to the cemetery. Mine was the second row to be released by the ushers, and even though I did my best to maneuver my way up a side aisle through a sea of elbows and pocketbooks, by the time I got outside, the hearse and accompanying caravan were no longer to be seen.
Figuring that there was no point in trying to fight my way out of the parking lot, I ducked in to use the restroom before driving out to the cemetery on my own. When I got there, the first person I saw was Bob. He was standing just inside the tall wrought-iron gates, and when he recognized my car he waved his suit jacket as if it was a matador’s cape. I pulled over into the nearest available spot, which happened to be in the shade of an ancient willow oak. Bob ran to catch up.
“Abby,” he panted. “We’ve got big trouble.”
Chapter 28
You lost her, didn’t you?”
“No! Of course not! Why would you say that?”
“Then where is she?”
“With the rest of the family—over by the gravesite.”
“Then I don’t get it. What’s the problem?”
“The problem is— Abby, I need to sit down. May I get in?”
“By all means.” I threw my handbag in the backseat.
“Ow!”
“Mama?” I shrieked. Trust me, being surprised from behind by another person is even worse when it happens in a cemetery.
“That’s my name, dear; just don’t wear it out. Abby, that thing hurt like the dickens!”
“I’m sorry, Mama—no, I’m not.” I’d unbuckled my seat belt and was on my knees confronting the maxi-me. She wasn’t bleeding that I could see. “Did I hit you in the eye?”
“No, you hit my shoulder, thank goodness. But you could have hit my eye.”
“Well, I’m glad I hit your shoulder. How long have you been sitting there?”
“Too long; I thought that service would never be over.”
“How did you get here—to the temple, I mean?”
“Well, if you must know, after you so rudely ducked out on our lunch, I decided to date Ben; he drove me. But my goodness, look around, will you? Apparently Rob’s aunt was a popular woman.”
“At least she knew a lot of people,” I said. I felt my lungs compress as the air was sucked out of them. “What do you mean that you’ve decided to date him? You can’t, Mama. He’s your own age and entirely normal; it would be unseemly. What kind of Charleston eccentric dates a normal man?”
“Oh, Abby, I’ve never been happier.”
“Does Ben know that you’re dating him?”
“He will soon enough, dear,” she trilled.
“Oy vey,” Bob said. “Abby, I can see it now; you and I will be in-laws.”
“So anyway,” Mama said, “since this is my car, I thought we’d carpool.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, Mama,” I said, still grousing. “But what gives? Why aren’t you sticking with the new love of your life? Every funeral has its widow snatchers—you know, folks who prey on the bereaved. And handsome brothers fall into that category. Some lithe young thing with fake blond hair is liable to put the moves on Ben right there at the gravesite; some women aren’t above that, and you know it.”
“Don’t answer, Mozella,” Bob said. “It’s my turn to talk first.”
“That’s right, Mama. We have a non-escaped killer on our hands.”
“Don’t be so jocular, Abby,” Bob snapped.
“I’m not,” I said, quite taken aback by his outburst. “I’m merely cynical. I get like this every time a gun gets pulled on me.”
Mama, bless her heart, didn’t say a word. She’s been through the wringer with me enough times to know that as long as I’m still standing (or even sitting upright, and flapping my gums), she has all she needs to know for the time being.
“In that case,” Bob said, “be prepared to get even more cynical. Do you hear a police siren right now?”
“Yes. But I must say it’s awfully early in the schedule of events for that. Chanti was going to wait until it was all over, but half the entourage has yet to arrive.”
“That’s because it’s Ben who the police are taking away.”
“Say what?”
“The four siblings rode over in the same limo—no spouses—and on the way over Chanti fed them some version of the story, and then—Abby, you’re going to love this—Ben, being the loving brother that he is, offered to take the rap for her.”
“What the heck?”
“Yeah, isn’t that a bummer? But it gets better; he did so because he has prostate cancer and is afraid of chemo, and figures that sooner rather than later, the state isn’t going to want to keep a dying old man incarcerated just because he didn’t take measures to prolong his sister’s life.”
“And she told you this?”
“As soon as we got there, she dragged me away from Rob and told me the real deal. She also said that if I ever as much as hint to Rob that she had anything to do with her sister’s untimely death, she will string me up by my cojones, after which she will tell Rob how I assaulted her in her kitchen. Abby, did you know that she has a security camera in every room, and that she can edit the tapes?”
“No, and I don’t believe her.”
I felt Mama’s soft hand on my shoulder. “Whatever this is about,” she said, “I think you should both sleep on it before deciding your next course of action.”
One of the things that has really disappointed me in life is the discovery that what little wisdom I’ve managed to accumulate for the years has been of interest to no one. Not once has anyone positioned himself or herself at my feet and begged for a pearl of wisdom. What’s more, the pearls that I’ve thrown at my children in passing (they were running to avoid them) rolled off them like water off the back of an Alaskan duck.
Maybe things will change, given more time. I say this because I am just now realizing that Mama may possess a smidgen of wisdom. A pinch of perspective. At the very least, she is so much smarter now than she was when I was a teenager. If Mama advised waiting, then that’s what I would do.
“Mama’s right,” I heard myself say. “We’ll sleep on it for now.”
“But Abby,” Bob protested, “the woman’s demonic. You saw how she behaved when she had the gun. We have to find some way to tell Rob!”
“For now is not forever,” Mama said quietly.
“Has anyone seen C.J.?” I asked.
Mama, Bob, and Wynnell all shook their heads in the negative. It had been a strange supper at the Olive Garden in Pineville to say the least. Bob was furious at Rob for agreeing to stay at his mom’s overnight, and he was outraged that Chanti should have asked. His anger, of course, spilled over onto Mama and me, but being the polite sort, he expressed it by remaining mum.
“You know C.J.,” Wynnell said, with the wave of a breadstick. “She’s young and impetuous. By now she could be halfway to China.”
C.J. has always been like a second daughter to Mama. In fact, she is her ex-daughter-in-law.
“Sort of like you dashing off to Japan,” Mama said. “Right, dear?”
Wynnell, who is guilty of having done j
ust that, had the decency to blush. “Touché, Mozella. Have you tried calling Toy?”
“You bet I did,” Mama said, as she snapped a breadstick in two. “Some little tart named Tiffany had the temerity to answer his cell phone.”
“Alliteration is frowned on these days, Mama,” I said.
Mama frowned. “Echo schmeko,” she said, in response to a raised red pen somewhere, for she was practically on the verge of swearing. “I’m not done talking. The ink is barely dry on Toy’s divorce papers, and he’s already shacking up with a bimbette who had the nerve to then ask me who I was. Can y’all believe that?”
“We can’t,” we chorused.
Before anyone could gain the floor again, Wynnell snapped her breadstick, then another, and then waved a third one pointedly at each of us. “So, as I was about to say,” she said, enunciating each word as if she was teaching a class of immigrants (perhaps from countries where non-Indo-European languages were spoken), “being in Waxhaw yesterday has reminded me where my priorities lie.”
“They lie with your husband, Ed,” Mama said. I’d never heard her speak that sharply—at least not in a public place.
“And that’s where you should lie too,” Bob said.
It was clear just by the various contortions of her forehead muscles that Wynnell sorely regretted giving up her unibrow. “What are you two driving at?”
“The same thing that you are, dear,” I said. “You’re homesick for the Charlotte region. And when you were wandering around all those lovely antiques shops in Waxhaw, you began to envision a life there for yourself.”
“So what if I have?”
“But everyone knows that your husband Ed loves fishing and that he’s becoming a little—uh—set in his ways. To leave him now would be cruel.”
Wynnell aggressively poked the air in front of Mama with the last remaining whole stick. “It’s not definitive that he has Alzheimer’s,” she said. “All his doctor will commit to is that he is slowing down some. But I ask you, aren’t we all getting slower?”
“Still, you would divorce him this late in the game? Honestly, Wynnell, I thought you were better than this.”
