“So,” my father said to Fred. “You pretty well fixed?”
“I do okay. I get disability from the army.” He tapped a finger against his right eye. “Glass,” he said. “World War Two.”
“Were you overseas?” my father asked.
“Nope. Lost my eye at Camp Kilmer. I was inspecting my bayonet, and then next thing you know I’d poked my eye out with it.”
“The fact he’s only got one eye don’t slow him down none,” Grandma said. “I’ve seen him handle ten bingo cards and never miss a single call. And he’s an artist, too. He hooks rugs. You should see the beautiful rugs he makes. He made one with a picture of a tiger on it.”
“I imagine you got a house of your own?” my father asked him.
Fred gummed some of the gray glop. “Nope. I just got a room at Senior Citizens. I sure would like to have a house though. I’d like to marry someone like Sweetie here, and I’d be happy to move right in. I’d be quiet too. You wouldn’t hardly know I was here.”
“Over my dead body,” my father said. “You can take your teeth and get the hell out of here. You’re nothing but a goddamn gold digger.”
Fred opened his eyes wide in alarm. “I can’t get out of here. I haven’t had dessert yet. Sweetie promised me dessert. And besides, I don’t have a ride back to the Seniors.”
“Call him a cab,” my father ordered. “Stephanie, go call him a cab. Ellen, wrap up his dessert.”
Ten minutes later Fred was on his way.
Grandma Mazur helped herself to a cookie and a second cup of coffee. “There’s plenty more where he came from,” she said. “Tell you the truth he was kind of old for me anyway. And he was creeping me out with that glass eye…the way he’d tap on it all the time. It was okay that he took his teeth out, but I didn’t want to see that eye rolling around next to his soup spoon.”
The Rangers were playing Montreal, so I stayed to see the game. Watching the game also involved eating a lot of junk food since my father is an even worse junk food addict than I am. By the time the third period rolled around we’d gone through a jar of cocktail wieners, a bag of Chee•tos and a can of cashews and were working on a two- pound bag of M&M’s.
When I finally waved good-bye I was considering bulimia.
The upside to lacking self-control was that the threat of masked men paled in comparison to worry over the Chee-tos working their way to my thighs. By the time I remembered to be afraid I was inserting the key in my front door.
My apartment felt relatively safe. Only one phone message, and no cocktail wieners tempting me from cupboard shelves. I punched up the message.
It was from Ranger. “Call me.”
I dialed his home number and received a single-word answer. “Go.”
“Is this a message?” I asked. “Am I talking to a machine?”
“This is very weird, babe, but I could swear your friend Lula is trying to tail me.”
“She thinks you’re a superhero.”
“Lot of people think that.”
“You know how you give everybody that vacant lot as your home address? She thinks that’s a little odd. She wants to find out where you live. And by the way, where
I waited for an answer, but all I heard was a disconnect.
I woke up feeling guilty about the junk food binge, so for penance I cleaned the hamster cage, rearranged the jars in the refrigerator and scrubbed the toilet. I looked for ironing, but there was none. When something needs to be ironed I put it in the ironing basket. If a year goes by and the item is still in the basket I throw the item away. This is a good system since eventually I end up only with clothes that don’t need ironing.
Bucky had said my car would be ready at ten. Not that I doubted Morelli or Bucky, but I’d come to regard car repairs with the same sort of cynicism I’d previously reserved for Elvis sightings.
I parked the green Mazda against the garage fence and saw that my pickup was waiting for me in front of one of the open bays. It had been freshly washed and was sparkly clean. It would have been slick if only it didn’t have a big crumple in its hood and a big dent in its back bumper.
Bucky sauntered out from the other bay.
I looked at the pickup skeptically. “Is it fixed?”
“Emission control valve needed a doohickey,” Bucky said. “Two hundred and thirty dollars.”
“Doohickey?”
“That’s the technical term,” Bucky said.
“Two hundred and thirty dollars sounds high for a doohickey.”
“Mr. Fix It don’t come cheap.”
I drove back to my apartment building without a hitch. No stalls. No backfires. And no confidence that this would last. The honeymoon period, I thought skeptically.
I returned to my building and parked in my usual Dumpster spot. I cautiously got out of the truck and looked for possible assailants. Finding none, I crossed the lot and swung through the door into the lobby.
Mr. Wexler was in the lobby, waiting for the senior citizens’ minibus to pick him up. “You hear about Mo
