one last glimpse of sun along with a whole wad of purple-and-gold-bedecked rowdy Husky fans on their way to a U Dub/U of A football game.
When I reached my row, I discovered I was in the back of the plane in the middle seat, squashed between two very large men. I’m not exactly a lightweight, but these two guys dwarfed me. One was a twenty-something weight lifter with massive shoulders. The other was in his mid-to-late seventies and had probably never been in a gym in his life. His shoulder muscles had come about the old-fashioned way – by doing hard physical labor. He was an old codger with several missing teeth and amazingly bad breath. He read every word of his in-flight magazine, moving his lips constantly and showing off those missing teeth as he did so.
Resigned to two and a half hours of misery, I settled into my seat as best I could, closing my eyes and hoping to nap my way to Arizona. I willed myself into unconsciousness and thought about the previous evening’s night on the town with Naomi Pepper.
We’d had a nice-enough dinner. The food at Bis on Main was wonderful and the service impeccable. Even so, the evening hadn’t turned out to be the complete success either Naomi or I had envisioned. I could tell when I stopped by the mall to pick her up after work that Naomi wasn’t a happy camper.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It’s my mother,” she said.
In the month or so that Naomi Pepper and I had been hanging out together, I had gleaned bits and pieces of information about her mother, Katherine Foley. Putting those pieces together, I had determined Katherine was something of a handful. Twice widowed and once divorced, she had now been abandoned by her most recent boy toy.
Some of Katherine’s wilder antics – like insisting on doing her weekly shopping at midnight in her local Albertson’s in full evening-wear regalia – verged on Auntie Mame behavior. It’s easier to deal with Auntie Mame when the person in question is some distant relative, preferably a second cousin. When the kook turns out to be your very own mother, all bets are off. That evening I realized that being Katherine Foley’s daughter had turned into tough duty for Naomi Pepper.
“What about her?” I asked.
To my surprise, Naomi’s eyes filled with tears. “Let’s not talk about it right now,” she said. “We’re having a fun birthday celebration. I don’t want anything to spoil it.”
“Tell me about your mother,” I insisted.
“She wants to move in with me,” Naomi said finally, after taking a deep breath. “She’s just this week been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. She’s worried about continuing to live on her own now that Geoff has taken off for parts unknown. I don’t know much about Parkinson’s disease, but I suppose she has a point. But she’s so incredibly bossy, Beau. She’s forever trying to run my life by remote control. If I let her move in…”
Naomi’s voice trailed off, and I could guess at what
Gary hadn’t quite finished divorcing her when he was diagnosed with liver cancer. His girlfriend wouldn’t look after him, so he had dragged his dying butt back home to Naomi. And, because she’s a nice person, she had taken him in and cared for him until his death several months later.
Then there’s Naomi’s daughter, Melissa. She may not be Gary’s biological daughter, but she’s still a chip off the old block. The hair-raising stories I’d heard about Missy’s formative years put her in a class with the rotten little kid in that old movie
What I thought Naomi Pepper herself needed right then was a vacation from troublesome relatives. Here, though, was her mother, prepared to waltz into Naomi’s life as yet another patient in need of nursing and attention.
Let me be clear: I wasn’t being totally altruistic. I know the younger set is under the impression that adult sex drives disappear completely somewhere around age thirty-seven. But that’s not true. At least mine hasn’t. Still, the idea of having a sexual interlude in a bedroom where someone’s aging mother might possibly burst in on the scene at any moment encourages a degree of sexual malfunction that no amount of Viagra can fix.
In other words, I wanted Katherine Foley to live somewhere else, but I was hoping for subtlety. I tried to avoid saying it in so many words. What I said instead was, “Are you sure you want to do that – take her in, I mean?”
“I don’t have a choice,” Naomi said. “I’m an only child.”
“Does your mother have money?”
Harry I. Ball isn’t alone in asking nothing but questions for which he already knows the answers. It’s one of the oldest ploys in an experienced interrogator’s bag of tricks, one I myself utilized to good effect during the years I worked as a homicide detective at Seattle PD. In this case I happened to know that the answer to my money question was an unequivocal yes. Naomi had mentioned on several occasions – occasions when the mother- daughter guilt card wasn’t faceup on the table – that Katherine Foley’s various ventures into the world of holy matrimony had left her fairly well off, much better off financially than her daughter, who still had to go to work at The Bon every day to earn her keep.
“Some,” Naomi allowed now.
“Couldn’t she move into an assisted-living place? Beverly and Lars live in one of those, you know. They’re in Queen Anne Gardens, up at the top of the Counterbalance. It’s very nice. At least it seems nice to me.”
Beverly Piedmont, my widowed, eighty-six-year-old grandmother, had recently married Lars Jenssen, my AA sponsor, who’s a spry eighty-seven. After their wedding, they moved into a retirement center on top of Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill, where they seem to be enjoying themselves immensely. The common areas of what they call “the home” resemble the lobby of a posh hotel. The rooms and corridors are brightly painted and well-lit. The floors are covered with bluish-green carpets that look new and smell clean.
At Queen Anne Gardens, Lars and Beverly had signed up for a plan that comes complete with linen service as well as three hot meals a day. The food is plentiful and palatable, with no need to shop or cook beforehand or to wash up and put away dishes afterward. Beverly Piedmont Jenssen had spent more than five decades cooking and serving three meals a day, with little or no help from my now deceased grandfather. As far as she’s concerned, being relieved of KP duty qualifies as nothing short of heaven on earth. And, since Beverly is happy, Lars is happy, too.
“Does your mother have any pets?” I asked.
Naomi nodded. “A cocker named Spade,” she said. “He’s eleven.”
“According to Lars, some of the residents have pets,” I hinted. “There may be a size restriction. You probably couldn’t get away with bringing along an Irish wolfhound, but I’m sure a cocker spaniel would qualify.”
“Mother won’t go,” Naomi said flatly.
“How do you know that?” I said. “Have you asked her?”
“No, but I know my mother,” Naomi replied. “She’d rather die than have to go live in a place like that.”
Alaska Air Lines Flight 790 had reached what the pilot called a “comfortable cruising altitude.” That was easy for him to say. He wasn’t jammed into the middle of a three-seat row. About that time the guy in front of me leaned his seat back all the way, crushing both my kneecaps. Is it any wonder I’m not much of a fan of air travel? I don’t know many people over six feet tall who are.
The weight lifter next to the window – the guy whose humongous shoulders overlapped my seat by a good three inches – suddenly needed to get up. Climbing over both me and Mr. Moving Lips, he removed a laptop computer from the overhead compartment and turned it on. I thought he was going to work on something interesting. Instead, he began playing solitaire. The only time he paused was during the couple of minutes it took
