hand. “I’ll pick you up at six sharp.”
Mom stared at the hand Mrs. B had placed on hers. I heard snowmobiles whining their way past the house on the lake below.
“I don’t like church,” Mom said.
“We’re not going to church. We’re going to bingo.”
“We shouldn’t leave the house on bingo night.”
“How else are we going to go to bingo?” Mrs. B said. “Maybe Gus will babysit.”
“What about my house?” I said, grinning.
“Right,” Mom said. “That’s what the burglar must be looking for-smelly old hockey equipment.”
“I’ll have my lovely daughter swing by,” Mrs. B said. “I think she’s on duty tonight.”
“I have a game,” I said. Mom was staring at Mrs. B’s hand now. “Mom?”
“I don’t like the mothballs,” she said.
Mrs. B gave me a reassuring glance, then addressed Mom. “There are no mothballs, Bea. That was a long time ago.”
“We kept the robes in mothballs.”
She was talking about the job she’d had at the church rectory, many years before I was born. She did this from time to time, slipped back into the long ago like falling backward off of our dive raft into the lake. On recent Sunday mornings, I had noticed, she was more likely to go back a long way. Then she’d suddenly arrive back in the moment, as if she’d emerged from a time machine, as alert as if she had never left.
“Yes, I know,” Mrs. B said. “The mothballs are gone now.”
Mom pursed her lips, thinking. I hesitated as I might with someone having a nightmare. I had heard you weren’t supposed to wake them up. I didn’t know what to do. The doctors weren’t sure, either.
“Mom?” I finally said. “Are you all right?”
“Bingo?” she said. “Phyllis?”
“That’s right, tonight,” Mrs. B said. “I’ll be here at six.”
Mom folded her arms. “Call me at five. We’ll see.”
I recalled that morning and how sweet Mrs. B had smelled, as I steered my pickup truck west on M-72 through sleet as thick as oatmeal.
I had hesitated to go, but Dingus, who probably didn’t want reporters around anyway, had assured me a nurse and a deputy would stay with Mom through the night.
I pushed my truck as fast as I safely could on the slippery road to Munson Medical Center in Traverse City. I had tried to call Darlene on the way but she didn’t answer.
My cell phone burbled as I swung south onto U.S. 31.
“Darlene?”
“Dude.” It was Soupy. In the background I heard laughter and music and clinking glass. He was at Enright’s, the bar he owned on Main Street. “Man, I’ve been trying to call.”
“Had my cell off.”
“One of your mom’s neighbors just came in.” He stopped, sounding choked up, but mostly drunk. “I’m so fucking sorry. Mrs. B was the best.”
“Yeah.”
“Who the hell would want to do that?”
“Nobody.”
“How’s your mom?”
“As you might expect.”
“Mrs. B was her best pal.”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re-Hold on.” Soupy muffled his phone but I heard him anyway, taking an order for a round of shots. He came back on. “Sorry, man. I mean, what was I saying?”
“Nothing. I’ve got to go.”
“Jesus, Trap, let’s get”-he was choking up again, one of his late-night jags coming on-“let’s get together tomorrow.”
“Right.”
I tossed the phone on the passenger seat. Two hours from closing time and Soupy was shitfaced in his own bar.
I steered along the shore of the east bay, trying to focus on the driving, trying to think of anything but how it could have been Mom instead of Mrs. B on the coroner’s table.
I imagined Mrs. B cutting through Mom’s yard in the dark that evening with her casserole in one hand, her other arm outstretched for balance as she minced through the snow in her brown galoshes with the undone buckles clacking. She would have let herself in and slipped off her galoshes before sliding the casserole into the oven. Hello, honey, she would have said. Always honey or dear or sweetheart or sweetie-pie.
Sweetie-pie.
They were the first words I had heard when I awoke in a hospital bed after getting my tonsils out. I was seven years old, somewhere in Detroit, a faraway city with big buildings and the Red Wings and doctors who promised my throat would stop hurting.
Do you want ice cream? Chocolate or vanilla or strawberry? Mrs. B asked as she held both my hands in one of hers, smiling down at me. Your mother will meet us downstairs soon. Chocolate? Would you like chocolate, honey?
My father had died barely a year before in that hospital, and Mom could not bear to go inside, so Mrs. B would go with me, and Mom would be waiting when I came out.
Can I have two? I asked. May I? May I have two? Of course, sweetiepie. Mrs. B fed me vanilla and strawberry in slow, alternating spoonfuls, telling me to let it melt in my mouth before I swallowed so it wouldn’t hurt as much. I watched her face as she fed me. I swirled the ice cream around on my tongue. I forgot about my throat.
Who could have killed that kind, precious woman?
I pounded the heel of my hand against the steering wheel. My throat constricted. A sob forced its way up. Then came another, and another, and finally I couldn’t stop them.
I pulled my truck onto the shoulder along the bay. But I veered a little too quickly, forgetting the sleet, and my rear end fishtailed left and right and then left again and I felt the truck slipping and grinding toward the blackness of the water. “Goddammit!” I shouted, stomping the brakes and wrenching the steering wheel to get one of my tires back onto the asphalt.
The truck crunched to a halt just short of the knife-edged rocks along the water, my headlight beams disappearing in the gloom beyond. “Fuck me,” I said, and dropped my head to the steering wheel, crying to the plinking of my hazard lights.
FOUR
Sorry. Hospital’s closed. Nobody’s going in.”
Sheriff’s Deputy Frank D’Alessio stood with his arms crossed in front of the double glass doors at Munson’s emergency entrance.
“Hospitals don’t close, Frankie,” I said.
“They do today. Especially to vultures.”
As he swayed to and fro on his heels, his forehead moved in and out of the light thrown by an overhead lamp.
I held up my empty hands. “No pen, no notebook. I just want to see Darlene.”
She was standing with her back to me down the corridor behind D’Alessio, talking to a nurse. Doctors and cops milled in the hall beyond her.
“Your mom doing OK?” D’Alessio asked.
“As well as can be expected.”
