the pineapple cake. A Plum would suffer a lot of abuse for a good dessert.
Grandma Mazur glared out at Bernie. “Who are you?”
“I’m Bernie Kuntz.”
“What do you want?”
I looked the length of the hall, and I could see Bernie shift uncomfortably on his feet.
“I’ve been invited for dinner,” Bernie said.
Grandma Mazur still had the screen door shut. “Helen,” she yelled over her shoulder, “there’s a young man at the door. He says he’s invited to dinner. Why didn’t someone tell me about this? Look at this old dress I’m wearing. I can’t entertain a man in this dress.”
I’d known Bernie since he was five. I’d gone to grade school with Bernie. We ate lunch together in grades one through three, and I would forever associate him with peanut butter and jelly on Wonder bread. I’d lost touch with him in high school. I knew he’d gone to college, and that after college he’d gone to work selling appliances in his father’s store.
He was medium height, with a medium build that had never lost its baby fat. He was all dressed up in shiny tassel loafers, dress slacks, and sports coat. So far as I could see, he hadn’t changed much since sixth grade. He looked like he still couldn’t add fractions, and the little metal pull on his zipper was sticking out, creating a tiny tent with his fly.
We took our seats at the table and concentrated on the business of eating.
“Bernie sells appliances,” my mother said, passing the red cabbage. “He makes good money at it, too. He drives a Bonneville.”
“A Bonneville. Imagine that,” Grandma Mazur said.
My father kept his head bent over his chicken. He rooted for the Mets, he wore Fruit of the Loom underwear, and he drove a Buick. His loyalties were carved in stone, and he wasn’t about to be impressed by some upstart of a toaster salesman who drove a Bonneville.
Bernie turned to me. “So what are you doing now?”
I fiddled with my fork. My day hadn’t exactly been a success, and announcing to the world that I was a fugitive apprehension agent seemed presumptuous. “I sort of work for an insurance company,” I told him.
“You mean like a claims adjuster?”
“More like collections.”
“She’s a bounty hunter!” Grandma Mazur announced. “She tracks down dirty rotten fugitives just like on television. She’s got a gun and everything.” She reached behind her to the sideboard, where I’d left my shoulder bag. “She’s got a whole pocketbook full of paraphernalia,” Grandma Mazur said, setting my bag on her lap. She pulled out the cuffs, the beeper, and a travel pack of tampons and set them on the table. “And here’s her gun,” she said proudly. “Isn’t it a beauty?”
I have to admit it was a pretty cool gun. It had a stainless steel frame and carved wood grips. It was a Smith and Wesson 5-shot revolver, model 60. A .38 Special. Easy to use, easy to carry, Ranger had said. And it had been much more reasonable than a semiautomatic, if you can call $400 reasonable.
“My God,” my mother shouted, “put it away! Someone take the gun from her before she kills herself!”
The cylinder was open and clearly empty of rounds. I didn’t know much about guns, but I knew this one couldn’t go bang without bullets. “It’s empty,” I said. “There are no bullets in it.”
Grandma Mazur had both hands wrapped around the gun with her finger on the trigger. She scrinched an eye closed and sighted on the china closet. “Ka-pow,” she said. “Ka-pow, kapow, ka-pow.”
My father was busy with the sausage dressing, studiously ignoring all of us.
“I don’t like guns at the table,” my mother said. “And the dinner’s getting cold. I’ll have to reheat the gravy.”
“This gun won’t do you no good if you don’t have bullets in it,” Grandma Mazur said to me. “How’re you gonna catch those killers without bullets in your gun?”
Bernie had been sitting open-mouthed through all of this. “Killers?”
“She’s after Joe Morelli,” Grandma Mazur told him. “He’s a bona fide killer and a bail dodger. He plugged Ziggy Kulesza right in the head.”
“I knew Ziggy Kulesza,” Bernie said. “I sold him a bigscreen TV about a year ago. We don’t sell many big screens. Too expensive.”
“He buy anything else from you?” I asked. “Anything recent?”
“Nope. But I’d see him sometimes across the street at Sal’s Butcher Shop. Ziggy seemed okay. Just a regular sort of person, you know?”
No one had been paying attention to Grandma Mazur. She was still playing with the gun, aiming and sighting, getting used to the heft of it. I realized there was a box of ammo beside the tampons. A scary thought skittered into my mind. “Grandma, you didn’t load the gun, did you?”
“Well of course I loaded the gun,” she said. “And I left the one hole empty like I saw on television. That way you can’t shoot nothing by mistake.” She cocked the gun to demonstrate the safety of her action. There was a loud bang, a flash erupted from the gun barrel, and the chicken carcass jumped on its plate.
“Holy mother of God!” my mother shrieked, leaping to her feet, knocking her chair over.
“Dang,” Grandma said, “guess I left the wrong hole empty.” She leaned forward to examine her handiwork. “Not bad for my first time with a gun. I shot that sucker right in the gumpy”
My father had a white-knuckle grip on his fork, and his face was cranberry red.
