I sat down a few seats away. His frown got a little deeper.
“Go ahead,” I said to him, “eat.”
“I’m going to. This is my lunch.”
“Go ahead.”
He did, reluctantly. Old manners die hard. At the surrounding tables elderly people lingered over their coffee or tea and were joined by people who looked to be volunteers. I felt like an interloper in an entirely alien place. Tolerated, but not really welcome.
Hodges got me a cup of coffee to go with his. I told him I’d found Jimmy Maddox. He seemed a little interested. Then we talked about fishing for a while before I asked him if anyone in the room had hung out with Regina Broadhurst. He squinted his big frog eyes and looked around the room, but shook his head.
“Not that I can remember.”
A big woman, late forties, with a huge head of jetblack beauty parlor hair and a blunt hatchet of a nose, strode toward us. She wore some sort of undefinable casual clothes and a red knit sweater that clung to her body like chain mail. Behind her plastic-rimmed glasses her eyes were sharp and on the move. She looked like an overfed predatory bird.
“Hello.”
Her hand thrust forward to shake mine. It reminded me of a karate chop.
“Hello,” I said back, taking her hand.
“I’m Barbara Filmore. The executive director.”
“She runs the place,” said Hodges, helping me out.
“Sam Acquillo. I’m with him.” I nodded toward Hodges. She kept her eyes on me.
“I understand you were trying to get a list of our clients,” she said, neither as a question nor a statement. By then I’d forgotten that I had.
“No ma’am, not exactly. Just trying to look up a few old friends.”
“Like me,” said Hodges.
“We don’t keep those sorts of records. Are you connected with the state?”
Only someone from Social Services would call a bunch of old geezers clients.
“No ma’am. I’m just looking for old friends of my mother. She passed away recently.”
“I’m sorry.” She didn’t move much, and stood very close to where I was sitting. I got the vague feeling that she’d tackle me if I tried to make a run for it. “Who are you looking for?”
“Regina Broadhurst and Julia Anselma. Know ’em?”
Her face was immobile.
“They’ve passed away as well. Very recently, in fact. I’m sorry to have to tell you. What was your name, again?”
“Sam. I guess you should expect it. They weren’t kids.”
“They hadn’t been well.”
“Really.”
I slid my chair away from the table. Her head turned to follow me, but the rest of her stayed in place. She took off her glasses and stuck the tip of a temple in her mouth. She slid her weight over to her right leg as if to relax her posture, but I noticed her move even closer to where I was sitting. At that distance I could see she’d had some kind of facelift. They wiped off the character lines around her eyes and pulled back the skin at her throat. It helped explain the hawkish mask.
“Anybody here know those two? Julia and Regina?”
“I’ll ask.” She didn’t look like she would. “Is there anything else? We’re about to rearrange the tables for this evening’s activities. We’ll be asking everyone to let our volunteers get to work.”
“They’re clearin’ us out,” said Hodges, still in a helpful mood.
Miss Filmore smiled mechanically but didn’t look over at Hodges.
“Okay, I guess we’ll let you go,” I said, standing up. “Just have a question.”
She might have arched an eyebrow if she’d had enough skin left around her eyes to do it. Instead she put her glasses back on and cocked her head.
“Yes?”
“Do you ever ask family, or anybody, about clients who, you know, pass away?”
“We don’t like to discuss it. For obvious reasons.”
“They just don’t show up for bingo one night,” said Hodges.
“I wouldn’t characterize it that way,” said Miss Filmore, without looking at Hodges. “We simply feel that dwelling on mortality is not a constructive pursuit for people of maturity. We stress life and looking forward.”
I looked over at Hodges and he shrugged. Give a man a square meal once in a while and I guess you can stress anything you want. He stood up to leave with me.
“Why do you ask?” she asked me.
“It’s a long story.”
“Certainly.” She said the word the way you’d drop a heavy bag on the floor.
We moved around her and would have left right then, but she wasn’t quite ready to have us dismissed.
“You’re welcome to visit anytime you’d like. But please check in with us occasionally. My office is just inside the front entrance.”
“Certainly.”
We walked out together, and Miss Filmore escorted us all the way to the front door. She wanted to shake hands again.
“It’s wonderful to have people show some interest in the elderly,” she said by way of seeing us off. “They have so much to offer, but tend to get lost in the shuffle.”
“Yeah, so I’ve noticed.”
Hodges climbed into a rusty Ford Econoline after looking over the Grand Prix. As I drove off, I looked back at the Senior Center and saw Barbara Filmore still standing at the door, a trained professional, alert to threats and poised to seize opportunity.
Amanda’s car was in my driveway when I got home. I didn’t see it at first because it was raining hard and silver Audis aren’t normally parked in front of my house. She was in the driver’s seat, her head back on the headrest. I thought she might be asleep, but she jumped out of the car when I pulled up and ran behind Eddie and me through the rain and into my kitchen.
The cottage filled up with the smell of wet dog. Amanda’s hair was all flattened out, which made it more obvious that she had a very pretty face. It was still strained, and there were dark semicircles under her eyes. She clutched her windbreaker close to her throat and shivered. I looked up at her from where I was drying off Eddie with an old beach towel.
“Sorry. I’ll turn up the heat.”
“That’s okay.”
Eddie sniffed at her knees and wagged his tail. She rumpled the top of his head.
“My, aren’t you a handsome boy. What’s your name?”
“Eddie Van Halen.”
She kept scratching his face.
“Are you a guitar player?”
“He gave it up. No money in it.”
I switched on the furnace, hoping there was some oil left. I only ran it once in a while to keep it from rusting up, or when I couldn’t keep the house above freezing with the woodstove in the living room. The radiators clanged into action.
She stood in the doorway between the kitchen and living room and watched me bunch up newspapers and toss kindling into the stove. I overstocked it with split red oak and opened up the dampers.
“You want some coffee?”
“You drink a lot of coffee.”
“Yeah, too much. Want some?”
“I drink too much coffee, too. Sure.”
