mistake to bring him home so soon.”
“He’s better than he was,” I said.
“That’s not saying much.”
“All you need is a good night’s sleep,” I suggested. “Why don’t you go visit your daughter at college? Go away for a few days and rest. I’ll take Blaze home with me.”
What was I saying? I could hardly handle what I had, let alone watch over my son.
Mary sniffed. “Really?” Her eyes shined with hope.
“Go pack,” I said to her back end.
She was already running down the hall.
Chapter 4
GRANDMA JOHNSON HAD ATTEMPTED TO heat up frozen pasties while I was gone. How many times have I asked her to stay out of the kitchen? A hundred times, at least, and that’s just this week.
Grandma is my ninety-two-year-old mother-in-law. After Barney died, I went through a typical grieving process, starting with anger and moving slowly through despair. Two years later, I’m still angry with him for leaving me alone to deal with his mother.
The worst part is, she moved in with me, and I can’t get rid of her. It’s still a mystery why she picked me, since we’ve never gotten along. Personally? I think she’s plotting to drive me insane.
“’Bout time you showed up,” she snapped “The oven is broken.” She pointed at the dishwasher. “My pasties are wet and soggy. Ruined!”
Grandma has been known to serve raw chicken to a table of guests. And she’s been known to blow out the stove’s pilot light and turn the burners on, causing deadly fumes to waft through the house. My home is going to explode one of these days, if I don’t get her into a nursing home.
“I’ll fix it,” Blaze offered, bending and squinting at the dishwasher. “Where’s the chain saw?”
“What are you doing here?” Grandma Johnson said. “I thought you were in a POW camp.”
Barney’s mother has hardening of the brain arteries, just enough to be dangerous. The next several days of living with her and Blaze would be more exciting than I could possibly handle alone.
“Cora Mae,” I said into the phone, after I had deposited the two kooks at the kitchen table with canned chicken noodle soup and saltines. Grandma was right for a change. The pasties hadn’t been dishwasher safe. They were ruined. “Can you come and stay with me? It’ll only be a couple days.”
“Fat chance,” my best friend said. “I know you have Blaze over there.”
“How did you find out so fast?”
“Scanner. Blaze announced it over the airwaves.”
I turned around and sure enough, he was in the next room on the radio, whispering coordinates to some imaginary ally. The police scanner Cora Mae gave me last year popped and crackled. We stopped talking on both ends of the phone line and listened in. I recognized Dickey Snell’s voice. He puffed and pontificated and coded this and ten-somethinged that. “That’s Blaze Johnson compromising the emergency channel again. Can someone remove him from the radio?”
Once Cora Mae and I realized Dickey had nothing useful to say we went back to business.
“I can’t come over,” Cora Mae continued, “but Kitty’s back and-
“I’ll be right there,” I heard Kitty shout from Cora Mae’s side of the phone.
Within minutes she was slamming through the front door. “Tony Lento got away from me this side of Paradise,” Kitty said, making herself at home at the kitchen table next to Grandma Johnson and Blaze, who had returned to his chair for more army rations.
“Hell,” Blaze said, picking at a cracker.
“No, I said Paradise,” Kitty answered.
“I like Climax best,” Grandma Johnson said, forgetting her table manners. She giggled.
“That’s under the bridge,” Kitty reminded her. “Quite a ways from Paradise.”
“What was Tony doing in Paradise?” I asked.
“Business, I guess. You’re next up to watch him. His wife says he’s going turkey hunting in the morning.”
“Lyla took me over behind Bear Creek. He has a ground blind set up.”
“Do you want company?”
“I’ll manage as long as you can watch Blaze and Grandma.”
“It must be icky for you, taking care of these two alone,” Kitty said, using the alternate word for the day, falling right into my trap.
____________________
Icky!
I laughed out loud all the way to Escanaba. Kitty and I were in a big-word contest. She had a way of infiltrating my word of the day notes to discover my next word and then flaunting her assumed superior vocabulary abilities in my face by using the word first. Or, she’d use a humungous word and expect me to challenge her with an even larger word.
Those days are over. I made a “mistake” and left this week’s words where she could easily find them. However, she has her mitts the alternate list, which is nothing like the real word list. Icky was today’s alternate word.
The last thing I said to her before I left her in charge of Blaze and Grandma was, “Boondoggle.”
“What are friends for?” she had replied, looking a trifle confused.
I turned onto Ludington Street, parked the truck, and swung through the hospital’s revolving door. The gift shop was still open, so I purchased a small display of flowers, asked for Angie Gates’ room number, and took the elevator up.
She was asleep. I cleared my throat loud enough to wake her up and placed the flowers on her bed stand, busying myself with the arrangement while she blinked away the sandman.
“You were at the credit union this morning,” Angie said, her voice gravely. She scooted up into a sitting position, grimacing with pain and gingerly touching her head. “Thanks for the flowers.”
Angie Gates was a hard-baked thirty or thirty-five years old. Although she was pretty enough, she’d smoked and partied too much, and it showed. I’ve seen that a lot, people adrift, waiting out their time on earth to pass, trying to rush the end.
“How are you doing?” I asked. “That was quite a clonk to your head.”
“Concussion,” she said. “I’m quitting that job the minute I’m released.”
“Tough break. We never had a robbery before.”
“I didn’t like the work much anyway. I’m going back to waitressing. I can make more in tips in one day than I can all week counting out money that isn’t mine.”
“I wish you’d reconsider. Give it another chance.” I felt bad for the woman.
A nurse came in and fussed over Angie, taking her blood pressure and temperature and checking the IV. When she left the room, I said, “The robber’s name was Kent Miller.”
“Never heard of him, but I’ve only been in the U.P. about a year.”
“He was from the Soo. No one around here knew him. The pillowcase was full of Monopoly money.”
“I heard.”
“What do you make of that?”
Angie shrugged. “Someone was trying to cover up something.”
“A cover up?” I hadn’t thought of that.
“Sure. I saw it on TV. The money’s already gone due to an inside job, and the pressure’s on to account for it, so the real thief plans a robbery that isn’t really a robbery. In the television show, the fake robber got away.”
I thought over Angie’s theory and decided it had merit. If she ever wanted to work for manicures instead of money, I’d hire her in a minute.
“Who’d do a thing like that?” I asked. The credit union staff had been entrenched in Tamarack County forever.
