High Five

little girls learn at an early age. One of them is that men don't buy goods they can get for free. Those words of wisdom hadn't stopped me from giving my goods away to Morelli, but they did stop me from continuing to give them away. That plus a false pregnancy scare. Although I have to admit, I had mixed feelings about not being pregnant. There was a smidgen of regret mixed with the relief. And probably it was the regret more than the relief that made me take a more serious look at my life and my relationship with Morelli. That and the realization that Morelli and I don't see eye-to-eye on a lot of things. Not that we'd entirely given up on the relationship. It was more that we were in a holding pattern with each of us staking out territory . . . not unlike the Arab-Israeli conflict.

I tried Morelli's home phone, office number, and car phone. No luck. I left messages everywhere and left my cell phone number on his pager.

'Well, what did you find out?' Grandma wanted to know when I hung up.

'Not much. Fred left the house at one, and a little over an hour later he was at the bank and the cleaner. He must have done something in that time, but I don't know what.'

My mother and my grandmother looked at each other.

'What?' I asked. 'What?'

'He was probably taking care of some personal business,' my mother said. 'You don't want to bother yourself with it.'

'What's the big secret?'

Another exchange of looks between my mother and grandmother.

'There's two kinds of secrets,' Grandma said. 'One kind is where nobody knows the secret. And the other kind is where everybody knows the secret, but pretends not to know the secret. This is the second kind of secret.'

'So?'

'It's about his honeys,' Grandma said.

'His honeys?'

'Fred always has a honey on the side,' Grandma said. 'Should have been a politician.'

'You mean Fred has affairs? He's in his seventies!'

'Midlife crisis,' Grandma said.

'Seventy isn't midlife,' I said. 'Forty is midlife.'

Grandma slid her uppers around some. 'Guess it depends how long you intend to live.'

I turned to my mother. 'You knew about this?'

My mother took a couple deli bags of cold cuts out of the refrigerator and emptied them on a plate. 'The man's been a philanderer all his life. I don't know how Mabel's put up with it.'

'Booze,' Grandma said.

I made myself a liverwurst sandwich and took it to the table. 'Do you think Uncle Fred might have run off with one of his girlfriends?'

'More likely one of their husbands picked Fred up and drove him to the landfill,' Grandma said. 'I can't see cheapskate Fred paying for the cleaning if he was going to run off with one of his floozies.'

'You have any idea who he was seeing?'

'Hard to keep track,' Grandma said. She looked over at my mother. 'What do you think, Ellen? You think he's still seeing Loretta Walenowski?'

'I heard that was over,' my mother said.

My cell phone rang in my shoulder bag.

'Hey, Cupcake,' Morelli said. 'What's the disaster?'

'How do you know it's a disaster?'

'You left messages on three different phones plus my pager. It's either a disaster or you want me bad, and my luck hasn't been that good today.'

'I need to talk to you.'

'Now?'

'It'll only take a minute.'

*    *    *    *    *

 THE SKILLET IS a sandwich shop next to the hospital and could be better named the Grease Pit. Morelli got there ahead of me. He was standing, soda in hand, looking like the day was already too long.

He smiled when he saw me . . . and it was the nice smile that included his eyes. He draped an arm around my neck, pulled me to him, and kissed me. 'Just so my day isn't a complete waste,' he said.

'We have a family problem.'

'Uncle Fred?'

'Boy, you know everything. You should be a cop.'

'Wiseass,' Morelli said. 'What do you need?'