hand.'
'Got any plans for today?'
'Not until tonight. Joe Loosey is still laid out. I only got to see his penis, you know, so I thought I'd like to go see the rest of him at the seven o'clock viewing.' My father was in the living room, reading his paper. 'When I go, I want to be cremated,' he said. 'No viewing.'
My mother turned from the stove. 'Since when?'
'Since Loosey lost his Johnson. I don't want to take any chances. I want to go right from wherever I fall to the crematorium.'
My mother set a plateful of scrambled eggs in front of me. She added a side of bacon, toast, and juice.
I ate my eggs and considered my options. I could sequester myself in the house and do my protective granddaughter thing, I could drag Grandma around with me while I did my protective granddaughter thing, or I could go about my business and hope Grandma wasn't on Kenny's agenda today.
'More eggs?' my mother asked. 'Another piece of toast?'
'I'm fine.'
'You're all bones. You should eat more.'
'I'm not all bones. I'm fat. I can't button the top snap on my jeans.'
'You're thirty years old. You have to expect to spread when you hit thirty. What are you doing still wearing jeans, anyway? A person your age shouldn't be dressing like a kid.' She leaned forward and studied my face. 'What's wrong with your eye? It looks like it's twitching again.'
All right, eliminate option number one.
'I need to keep some people under surveillance,' I said to Grandma Mazur. 'You want to tag along?'
'I guess I could do that. You think it'll get rough?'
'No. I think it'll be boring.'
'Well, if I wanted to be bored I could sit home. Who are we looking for, anyway? Are we looking for that miserable Kenny Mancuso?'
Actually, I'd intended to hang tight to Morelli. In a roundabout way I suppose it amounted to the same thing. 'Yeah, we're looking for Kenny Mancuso.'
'Then I'm all for it. I have a score to settle with him.' Half an hour later she was ready to go, wearing her jeans and ski jacket and Doc Martens. I spotted Morelli's car a block down from Stiva's on Hamilton. Didn't look like Morelli was in the car. Probably Morelli was with Roche, swapping war stories. I parked behind Morelli, being careful not to creep too close and knock out his lights, again. I could see the front and side door to the funeral home, and the front door to Roche's building.
'I know all about how to do this stakeout stuff,' Grandma said. 'They had some private eyes on television the other night, and they didn't leave out a thing.' She stuck her head into the canvas tote bag she'd hauled along. 'I got everything we need in here. I got magazines to pass the time. I got sandwiches and sodas. I even got a bottle.'
'What kind of bottle?'
'Used to have olives in it.' She showed me the bottle. 'It's so we can pee on the job. All the private eyes said they did this.'
'I can't pee in that bottle. Only men can pee in bottles.'
'Darn,' Grandma said. 'Why didn't I think of that? I went and threw away all the olives, too.'
We read the magazine and tore out a few recipes. We ate the sandwiches and drank the sodas.
After drinking the sodas we both needed to go to the bathroom, so we went back to my parents' house for a potty break. We returned to Hamilton, slid into the same parking place behind Morelli, and continued to wait.
'You're right,' Grandma said after an hour. 'This is boring.' We played hangman and counted cars and verbally trashed Joyce Barnhardt. We'd just started twenty questions when I glanced out the window at oncoming traffic and recognized Kenny Mancuso. He was driving a two-tone Chevy Suburban that looked to be as big as a bus. We
