by Barry Rachin
She produced a fresh towel and washcloth. “We’ll pick up a few things at the Value Plus in the morning along with whatever else you need.” Before closing the door, Aunt Josie gave him another generous kiss and announced, “Welcome to Spaulding, Ned Scoletti. I hope the rest of your visit turns out better than the trip north.”
Ned adjusted the water temperature and settled under the shower, but the hot spray pummeling his back only heightened the foul stench. A bar of Irish Spring soap rested in the soap dish. Ned washed himself thoroughly from head to toe, then repeated the process. With a forefinger and some borrowed toothpaste, he brushed his teeth. He hadn’t planned well, skipping over practical details and leaving everything to chance. But then, Ned was here in Spaulding, Massachusetts, on a special mission, a mission that was being redefined from one, tenuous minute to the next.
“Scoletti,” Aunt Josie inquired without looking up, when Ned emerged from the bathroom. She was in the kitchen preparing an early supper. “Your father wouldn’t be Frankie Scoletti.”
“Yeah, that’s my dad.”
Cousin Heather was seated backwards straddling a chair at the kitchen table. She stared at him with a deadpan expression - like a bug under a microscope or a long lost relative she never knew existed until fifteen minutes earlier. Surprise! Surprise! “I went to school with your father,” his aunt elaborated. “He played guard on the varsity basketball team. All the girls were crazy for Frankie Scoletti.”
“You never told me about him,” Heather piped up indignantly.
Aunt Josie slipped the chops into a Pyrex dish and centered it in the oven. “You never asked and, anyway, that was a hundred years ago back when your drop-dead beautiful mother had hormones and a full head of natural blond hair.”
An aunt with a sense of humor. What next? Clearly Aunt Josie approved of the match and was delighted to hear Ned’s mother hooked up with Frankie Scoletti. She had nothing to hide - harbored neither grudge nor grievance. So what was the problem? Why a decade’s worth of unquenchable bitterness? Ned felt even more confused than before he’d stumbled over the threshold.
Neither Aunt Josie nor her stony-faced daughter realized that Ned’s mother had a son. They didn’t even know she married Frankie Scoletti. But Cousin Heather was privy to certain, hidden secrets. Of that, Ned was absolutely sure. All the while he sat there making small talk, chewing the fat, his cousin’s eyes never strayed from his face. She seemed to be enjoying the intrigue, like a bonus chapter in a favorite book. But what genre - spy, mystery, romance, detective?
“I got this notion.” Aunt Josie opened the oven and placed a pat of butter on each pork chop then sprinkled the meat with breadcrumbs and cooking sherry. “Depending on how things go, you might want to extend your visit ... spend the remainder of the summer with us and fly home a few days before school starts.” She placed some string beans in a steamer, added water and set the timer for fifteen minutes. “Of course we’d need your folk’s permission.”
She removed a bottle of virgin olive oil from the cabinet. “We like to keep things simple. Oil and salt on the beans.”
Strange! That’s exactly the way his mother fixed them back home in Fort Pierce. “Yes, that’s fine.”
“About the beans or spending more time with us?”
Ned grinned easily. “Both.”
His aunt, who was setting the table, slipped her arms around him and gave him a quick hug. “Heather will show you around the city and maybe introduce you to some of her friends.” The girl, who had hardly said two words since returning from the market, swung her leg off the back of the chair and helped her mother finish setting the table.
There it was again - that Cheshire cat grin that screamed, “I know the murky, convoluted history of the Applebee clan... what you’ve traveled the length of the East Coast to discover... the unseemly buried truth you’ve come to unearth and lay bare.”
At supper Heather asked what he wanted to drink. Ned pointed to a bottle of soda resting on the table near the peas. “Cola’s fine.” Filling his glass, he took a swig of the liquid and almost gagged. It had a strong, almost medicinal scent that burned the roof of his mouth with an acrid, smoky aftertaste. “What’s this?”
“Moxie,” his aunt replied.
“Never heard of it.”
“It’s made from an extract of gentian root with a dollop of wintergreen. Good for digestion.”
“So how do you like your new, extended family?” Heather quipped. Her mother flashed a dirty look, but Heather kept her eyes riveted on her newly discovered cousin.
“Just fine, I guess.” He steered a pile of corn onto his fork with the blade of a knife.
“What if we Applebees were a bunch of Neanderthals,” Heather would not be denied, “who picked their noses in public and had no redeeming virtues?”
“Jeez, Heather!” He mother shook a finger at her daughter. “You’re such a boorish twit!”
Ned wasn’t the least bit put off by his cousin’s antics. “If the visit was a bust, I planned to check into the nearest hotel for the night and catch the first bus out to Fort Pierce.”
“There are none,” Heather noted. “No hotels in sleepy Spaulding. Only a 7-Eleven and an all-night gas station.”
Ned tried another sip of the Moxie and discovered that, once he got past the tart aftertaste, his taste buds craved more. “If you’re gonna stay with us for any length of time,” his aunt assumed an apologetic tone, “you’ll have to make allowances for Cousin Heather. She tends to say any fool thing that comes into her flighty head.”
“Better that,” Ned replied, “than keeping secrets for the better part of eternity.” Aunt Josie shifted uncomfortably in her seat, and there was only light banter through the rest of the meal.
After supper, Ned’s aunt insisted that he call home. “And make sure you apologize a thousand times over for running off.” She dialed the number, handed him the phone and left the room, closing the door behind her.
“How could you do such a thing?” Ned’s mother hissed, but there was hardly any bitterness in her questioning tone, only relief.
“I had an aunt... all along.” Ned flung the accusation back at his mother. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Perverts lurk in bus station lobbies.” She ignored the question, glossed right over it. “Winos, degenerated, panhandlers, child molesters...”
“All I met was a religious black woman with a bag of red grapes.”
“How’s your fever, Ned?”
His pushy cousin had crammed the digital thermometer in his mouth again shortly after supper. The temperature was down to 99.5 and his swollen throat was greatly improved. “Much better. I just caught a chill passing through New Jersey.”
“Your father wants to say a few words.”
Ned’s father blustered for a good five minutes without saying anything he didn’t already know about the perils of traveling alone then put his mother back on the phone for a final goodbye. Strangely, no one asked to speak to Aunt Josie.
“She’s got a kid.” Ned said as the conversation ebbed.
“Who does?”
“Aunt Josie.” Aunt Josie - except on the bus trip, Ned hadn’t ever used those two words in normal conversation.
“Really?”
“Yeah, a daughter, Heather.”
“How old?”
“I dunno. About sixteen or so.” He waited but there was no response on the other end of the line. “She’s sort of weird.”
“Most teenage girls tend to weirdness.” They said their good-byes and hung up.
Later that night Aunt Josie pulled out the sleep sofa in the den and made up a bed for him. She fluffed the pillow and pulled the covers back at a diagonal. “Are there any other Scolettis I should know about?” Ned stared at his aunt trying to decipher her intent. “Brothers or sisters?”
“Two younger sisters, that’s all.”
“Imagine that!” Aunt Josie seemed genuinely pleased. “My kid sister with three youngin’s.”
“I skittered down the birth canal first. Your mother followed three minutes later.” Aunt Josie chuckled as though at some private joke. “Not much of a horse race, huh?”
“No photo finish.” Ned agreed.
They went to bed promptly at ten o’clock and Ned lay under the covers in the split-level ranch house in Spaulding, Massachusetts with his Aunt Josie - heart as big as the Grand Canyon - and super-weird Cousin Heather a short distance down the hall. His fever was gone altogether, the throat still scratchy but on the mend.
So where did things stand?
His mother had been totally in the dark that her own sister possessed a teenage daughter, and, until earlier, Aunt Josie wasn’t even remotely aware that Ned’s mother married Frank Scoletti, Spaulding’s most-eligible heartthrob, much less had a family of her own. And what about Cousin Heather’s father? Was he still in the picture?
Just before he turned off the light and settled under the covers, his cousin shuffled into the room. She wore cotton pajamas and slippers that made a crisp, slapping sound on the hardwood floor. “You okay?
“Yeah I’m fine.”
“Do you know the story of the heron and the crane?” Ernie asked. Heather wagged her head. He repeated the story almost word for word as Samantha Crowley had told it. Then he explained how the gopher lost his tail and elk got his long muzzle.
Heather sat down on the side of the bed. She kissed him on the cheek then rubbed the moistness away with her fingers. “Are all the relatives from Florida as flakey as you?”
“Now,” Ned ignored the question, “I want you to tell me a fairy tale.”
“Don’t know any.”
“The story of the identical twin sisters who acted every bit as childish as talking animals in the Siberian folktales.”
Heather took his hand and held it tight. Then she leaned over and placed her lips against his ear. “Tony Scoletti was not your mother’s first love. A year before she started dating your father she was engaged to another man… Henry Whipple.”
Ned felt nauseous, lightheaded. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You risked your neck traveling all this way alone. You’ve earned the truth.”
“The week before the wedding, the groom ran off with the bride’s older sister. That is, older sister by three minutes.” Josie and Henry were married by a justice of the peace a week after they reached Spaulding. Henry Whipple - the man who loved two sisters, but not equally - died of pancreatic cancer three days before their daughter’s first birthday.
“Push over,” Heather whispered as she slid under the covers next to him. Ned lay on his side facing the wall. “I’ll stay here until you fall asleep.”
Fifteen minutes passed. His cousin’s presence was comforting. Just before dozing off, it occurred to Ned that the Heron and Crane might have enjoyed similar solace had they shown better sense.
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Sanitation
When Hal McCarthy arrived at agility training, a coal-black Scottish terrier with stubby legs and a huge tuft of chin hair resembling a Fu Manchu was negotiating the course. The squat dog hurried effortlessly through the six-weave training chute, cleared the bar jump before heading off in the direction of the teeter totter. The dog’s owner, an Hispanic woman in her early thirties, waved a treat in front of the pooch’s nose. Leading the dog to the center, she pressed gently on the wooden plank. The raised portion settled to the floor and the dog promptly rushed off toward the thirty-foot tunnel.
“Nice run,” Hal noted when the woman exited the course. The Scottish terrier was well-behaved if somewhat skittish. Maria Santos warned Hal a week earlier not to pet the dog, which was food-aggressive and tended to snap at outstretched hands.
“He lost focus on the final turn.” Like her shaggy companion, the copper-skinned woman was short and squat with a broad forehead. On the final turn, the dog was supposed to leap through a vinyl tire suspended several inched off the ground, but the high-strung canine took a detour, waddling back into the thirty-foot, orange tunnel.
“What do you do for a living?” Maria asked.
“Up until retiring last August,” Hal explained, “I inspected food facilities for the health department.” A toy poodle, extremely fast and skittish, was racing about the course.
The woman eyed him curiously. “I’m opening a diner on Howard Avenue.”
“The old Breakfast Nook?” Hal asked. The woman nodded.
“We used to inspect the place. They had problems with the dishwasher.” Fifty feet away, the poodle was snaking through the training chute effortlessly en route to the bar jump. From previous experience Hal knew that the tiny dog would be in rare form for another twenty minutes or so until he tired and his attention span melted away to nothing.
“Water was never hot enough,” Hal picked up on the thread of his previous remark. “The previous owner had to install a booster to get dishwasher temperature up to code.”
“Yes, he mentioned something to that effect.” Maria noted. “Who does the inspections now?”
The toy poodle scampered around the final turn. Hal’s Lhasa Apso, Teddy, would be going next. Reaching down he checked the dog’s collar. “Donna Hadley took over when I retired.”
“And what’s Ms Hadley like?”
Hal rose to his feet and began leading the Lhasa toward the gate. “Finds fault with everything... a restaurant owner’s worst nightmare!”
Later that night at home Hal took Teddy outside one last time to pee. The dog was sure to sleep like the dead after the hour-long workout. The Hispanic woman knew next to nothing about sanitation or the Minotaur’s maze of health regulations governing food service. She never worked in the field or taken a single course at the community college. Inside the first minute, Donna Hadley would tease the truth from Ms Santos then set to work dismembering the Breakfast Nook with one petty code violation after another. Too bad! She seemed nice enough, even if her Scottish terrier was a bit high-strung.
*****
To insure a smooth transition, the Brandenburg Department of Health brought Donna Hadley on board a full month before Hal left his job. The only child of a neurosurgeon who owned a three-story brownstone in the posh Chestnut Hill section of Newton, Massachusetts, Donna’s family maintained a vacation home on Block Island.
“We had a thirty-foot sloop and stable full of horses,” Hal’s replacement gushed. “It was a truly bucolic existence, like something out of a Victorian novel.” The twosome had just returned from inspecting a Chinese restaurant. A dead roof rat lay near the dumpster; a strong oily smell – usually a sign of cockroaches – laced the air in the dry storage area, but otherwise the business was in compliance. Pest control had visited the facility a month earlier.
“Pride and Prejudice,” Hal offered.
“Yes, exactly that sort of rustic bliss.” Donna Hadley was a tall woman with a wide, mannish jaw. Boasting a masters degree in public health from Stanford, she struck Hal as rather unimaginative, the sort of brittle-minded hack who, despite a 3.5 grade average, seldom puts her intelligence to proper use.
They had arrived back at the department of health where Hal was writing up his report. “All summer long, I rode bareback through meadows of tiger lilies and salt spray roses. From June when school got out straight through to Labor Day, I never wore shoes.”
Hal thought the last remark a bit of a stretch, but obviously the youthful Donna Hadley lived a blessed existence far removed from the humdrum monotony that most middle-class working stiffs endured. “Our summer home was a mile and a half from the Southeast Lighthouse,” Ms Hadley prattled on. “A favorite tourist spot, it draws thousands of visitors to Block Island each year.”
Hal had toured the structure during a trip to Block island a few years back when his wife was alive. The lighthouse featured a six-sided, red brick base leading up to a formidable steel enclosure which
housed the light element. An attached, three-story building with scalloped windows was only slightly shorter than the massive light itself.
“There is so much history in the region. The area has been the site of numerous shipwrecks, including the Steamer Larchmont in 1907.”
“And, of course,” Donna Hadley was tripping over her words, “the wreck of the Princess Augusta, also known as the Palatine ship, which was later immortalized by John Greenleaf Whittier in his poem, The Wreck of the Palatine”. Raising an arm in a theatrical gesture, she recited from memory in a stilted, breathy monotone.
“Circled by waters that never freeze,
Beaten by billow and swept by breeze,
Lieth the island of Manisees,…”
“Very pithy!” Hal responded when the woman finished the poem. He felt like throwing up. This narcissistic clod who spent her childhood summers galloping frenetically around an historic island off the Atlantic coast, clearly considered herself royalty, an aristocratic breed apart.
“What about the Norwegian rat?”
“Roof rat,” Hal corrected. Roof rats were physically smaller and darker. “The dumpster was properly covered with no refuse lying about.”
“And the cockroaches?” Donna pressed.
“We didn’t actually see any bugs, and according to the pest control log, the place was fumigated recently.”
“I see.”
Hall didn’t think the woman saw much of anything.
On the contrary, she was spoiling for a fight – wanted to make her mark as a no-nonsense, upwardly mobile professional. But the owner of the restaurant, Mr. Lee, who enjoyed a respectable track record, had always been cooperative and forthcoming. More to the point, no history of food poisoning or complaints associated with the facility existed.
“A while back,” Hal noted in a flat monotone, “slaughterhouses in Kentucky were forced to make expensive renovations or go out of business.”
“Where did you learn this?”
“An essay by Wendell Berry.” He rose and went to the window. The last of the winter snows had melted away, crocuses tentatively thrusting delicate purple shoots up through the frozen earth. “These slaughterhouses were small, mom-and-pop operations. They didn’t process meat for the wholesale, commercial market but did custom work for local farmers… exclusively for their own, private use.”
