Tawny Jane Reese up close always made me think, man, she must have knocked them dead when she was twenty-five, how did she get stuck up here? I had heard that she still stayed late at the station to make tapes she sent to stations in every major market in the country, hoping someone would notice.
Whistler’s car pulled away.
“Forget it,” she said. “How’s your mom?”
“OK.”
“It’s one heck of a story.”
“Yeah. Nice scoop last night, by the way.”
I was thinking I’d try to scoop her back with what I’d learned about Nilus’s serial womanizing, as soon as I figured out what it meant.
She shifted her Channel Eight equipment bag from one shoulder to the other. “I don’t know what it’s got to do with anything, but I’ll take it. It’s been getting a lot of Web traffic.”
“Really? I never keep track of that stuff.”
“Maybe because your job is safe.”
“No safer than yours.”
“Really? Do they want to make you the weather bitch?”
“Huh?”
“They want me to do the weather, Gus.”
“You mean like-”
“Yes. They want me to give up news and become the weather bitch. You know, smiling and waving my arms around like a goddamn cheerleader.”
“Jesus. Why?”
“I don’t know. My numbers are down, they have new bimbos to try out, they want to yank my salary back to poverty level. Depends what time of day you ask. Either I beat everybody on this story or I’m going to have to get new boobs.”
She wasn’t kidding. No wonder she was sleeping with the competition.
“Sorry about that, T.J.”
“You know,” she said, “when you came back here a few years ago, I figured you were going to make a quick stop, get your shit together, and get out of Dodge.”
“I probably thought that, too. But here I am.”
“Yeah, well, I am not going to be the weather bitch.” She stuffed the microphone in her bag. “See you in the trenches.”
FIFTEEN
My mother picked up as I was parking on Main in front of the Pilot.
“Is that you, Gussy?” she said.
“Are you at my place?” I said.
“I am. Why are all these boxes here? There’s nowhere to sit.”
On the floor and the sofa in my living room were four or five boxes I hadn’t gotten around to unpacking. “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll be there in a little while.”
“You’re not going to throw away your old report cards, are you?”
The old hockey tape box on the sofa was filled with junk from my boyhood that Mom had salvaged. “I’ll look through it soon,” I said. “I’ve been kind of busy.”
Mom told me about her day as I went inside. She and Millie had had a nice late breakfast in an empty Audrey’s Diner and done some shopping and then gone back to Millie’s and played cribbage and talked.
“When’s the funeral?” I said.
“Pardon me?”
“You said you were going to Murray and Murray to see about arrangements.”
“Oh, yes. Millie called over there. They said Darlene was handling it.”
I couldn’t imagine how. “I thought you were helping.”
“Dingus arrested the Edwards boy?” She was changing the subject. “Whatever for?”
“I’m looking into it,” I said.
Neat stacks of mail crowded the Pilot ’s L-shaped front counter. The baskets and bouquets were standing on the floor in the corner. Whistler must have tidied up.
“Can you imagine what Bernice would think?”
If she were around, Tatch’s mom would have been at the press conference shouting biblical quotes. “I’ll get to the bottom of it,” I said.
“Good,” Mom said. “Tonight we have to go somewhere.”
The door swung open and the postman dropped a bundle of mail bound with rubber bands at my feet. “Do you need something at the store?” I said.
“No. As soon as it’s dark, we have to go. Before someone else gets there.”
“Someone else gets where?” I said, but Mom had hung up. “Everything’s a mystery,” I said to myself, shaking my head. I turned off my phone and picked up the bundle of mail. “Luke?” I called out. There was no answer.
A turquoise sweater, fuzzy with lint, one button missing, was draped over the back of the stool facing Mrs. B’s computer. I set the bundle on the chair and idly punched the space bar on her keyboard. The screen stayed black.
Mrs. B had stood there greeting customers, trading gossip, taking classifieds, paying the weekly bills until Media North automated the ads and bills and Philo asked me if the Pilot really needed Mrs. B anymore, if we shouldn’t just stand a placard on the counter with a list of phone numbers that visitors could call for their needs. “And who exactly will explain to Mrs. Evangelista why we moved the crossword from A2 to A8 and have her go back out the door smiling?” I had said.
Philo never brought it up again.
Next to Mrs. B’s computer stood three photographs in fake wooden frames she probably had bought off the dollar shelf at the drugstore. One was of Darlene, looking solemn on the day of her graduation from police academy, her hair in a bun, her deputy’s hat cradled in the crook of an elbow. Another showed her as a girl crouched inside an inner tube on a boat dock and throwing her pigtailed head back to laugh as her father tickled her from behind.
The last photo was of Mrs. B with my mother and Soupy’s mom. The frame was etched all around with the words “friends” and “forever.” The women were standing with their arms around one another, my mother at the center, in front of a minivan. I tilted the picture to see their faces better in the shadows. They were all smiling.
I had taken that picture.
It was a Friday in July and I had taken a long weekend off from the Times to come north and see Mom and relax by the lake. I was sitting down the bluff on her dock with the Pilot and a cup of coffee when I heard a woman’s shriek and then another. I dropped the paper and ran up to see Mrs. Campbell, all two-hundred-some pounds of her, lying on her back next to a minivan in Mom’s driveway. She was laughing. Mom and Mrs. B were doubled over laughing. “Curly, Curly, Curly,” Mrs. B kept saying between gasps of laughter, using Mrs. Campbell’s nickname.
“What’s going on?” I said, and all of them laughed even harder. Mrs. Campbell got to one knee. She had a wicker purse the size of an Easter basket looped around one arm. Tears glistened on her plump cheeks. Mom and Mrs. B helped her to her feet. They’d been trying, without success, to lift her into the minivan. “Dear lord, Louise,” Mom said. “If we don’t get you in that van, you’re never going to win that million dollars you promised Angus.” That brought more peals of laughter. I shook my head and was starting back down to the lake when they asked me to snap a photo.
They had been friends for as long as I could remember. Mrs. Campbell would refer to them as the Three Musketeers and Mom would say, on cue, “Oh no, dear, we are definitely the Three Stooges.” Mrs. Campbell was Curly, Mrs. B was Larry, and my mother, of course, was Moe.
Sometime after Soupy’s dad died, July 4, 1997, something happened between them that Mom chose not to
