Mrs Fritz didn’t like it, but she could see it was simply going to be one of those inconveniences one had to put up with, so grumpily she said, ‘Very well. But I don’t want to be tripping over them.’
‘Oh, no, Mrs Fritz,’ Jeddings promised, and spoke into the phone: ‘Very well. Come in.’ And she pushed the button to open the outer doors.
Mrs Fritz could see that the burly man said something else, but this time Jeddings had not pressed the loudspeaker button. ‘That’s fine,’ Jeddings said, and hung up, and the big wooden doors out there began to roll open.
Mrs Fritz said, ‘What did he say?’
‘He said thank you, Mrs Fritz.’
‘Polite, in any event. That’sa rarity.’
‘Yes, Mrs Fritz.’
‘I’ll come along, see where you intend to place these things.’
‘Yes, Mrs Fritz.’
They went out to the front hallway, with the double curving staircase and the pink marble floor, cool in the hottest weather, and Jeddings opened the front door as the van came crunching across the gravel around the curving drive to roll past the entrance and then back up. “Shore Fire Delivery” was not very professionally printed in white on the doors.
The two men got out and came around to the rear of the van, the burly man smiling up at Mrs Fritz and saying, ‘Afternoon, ma’am. Sorry about the inconvenience.’
‘That’s all right,’ she said, to be gracious, though everyone present was well aware it was not all right.
The driver was a smaller man, skinny, sharp-featured, with very large ears. The two were dressed in normal workman’s clothes, dark shapeless pants and Tshirts, the burly man’s advertising beer, the driver’s advertising the Miami Dolphins.
Why did the underclass so enjoy turning itself into billboards?
When the van doors were opened, two very large black boxes became visible inside, along with a hand truck, which the burly man brought out first. Then the two of them wrestled one of the boxes out of the van and onto the hand truck, and Mrs Fritz and Jeddings backed out of the doorway as the two men thumped the thing up the broad stairs and into the house. It had the usual dials and switches across the top, and black cloth across the front, and the brand name Magno in chrome letters attached to the front near the bottom.
Jeddings led the way through the house, the burly man wheeling the hand truck ahead of himself, the driver walking beside him with one hand on the amplifier to keep it from falling over, and Mrs Fritz brought up the rear, looking to be sure their wheels didn’t hurt the parquet.
Fortunately, the placement of the display tables for the jewelry and the auctioneer’s dais had already been determined, and tables and dais were now all in place. Mrs Fritz had not wanted to worry about details like thaton the day. So they’d be able to place the amplifiers where they would not be underfoot while the rest of the preparations were being made, and would not be in a spot where it turned out something else had to be put.
It was the burly man, in fact, who suggested where to put the amplifiers. Pointing to the corner farthest from the display tables, he said, ‘Ma’am, if we put them over there, I don’t think they’d bother you.’
‘Good,’ she said, ‘do that, then.’
They did, and repeated the operation with the second amplifier, placing it beside the first. Then they wheeled their hand truck back to the front door, the burly man smiled his way through another set of apologies Mrs Fritz was gracious again and then she went into the vestibule to watch on the monitor as the van drove away and the big doors were shut once more.
Jeddings said, ‘Mrs Fritz, I’ll have staff put a tablecloth over them you won’t even notice them.’
‘Good. You do that.’
Jeddings did do that, and the amplifiers disappeared under a snowy damask tablecloth, and nobody gave them another thought.
8
‘I don’t want to,’ Loretta whined. Loretta always whined, but her whines were different, sometimes merely expressing her general attitude toward life, other times standing for specific emotions, like anger or fear or petulance or weariness. This one right now was her bullheaded stubborn whine, with that extra twang in it, and rumbles of mutiny.
Time to put a stop to that. Lesley turned to her mother, across the table. ‘Mom,’ she said, ‘I don’t ask much.’
Her mother, Laurel, put down her fork and frowned deeply, her leathery beige face creasing like a supermarket paper bag, because she never liked to have to mediate disputes between her daughters, between Lesley the quick one and Loretta the slow one, slightly retarded, badly overweight, never quite grasping what was going on.
The three were seated together at the dinner table on Wednesday evening, and Lesley knew she had to force the issue now because tomorrow would be the last day to try to get Daniel Parmitt out of the hospital. She’d thought and she’d thought, and this was the only idea she’d come up with for a way to slip him out of there, and it just simply required Loretta’s cooperation. No other choice.
But her mother was making trouble, as well. ‘Lesley,’ she said, ‘if only you’d tell us whyyou want to do this.’
Which, naturally, she could not. But why should she have to? Shewas the provider in the family, she was the one who held it all together, how dare they question her?
‘Mom,’ she said, forcing herself to be calm and reasonable, ‘this man is a friend. Not a lover, it’s not like that, a friend. He’s in trouble, and he asked me to help, and I’m going to help, and I need Loretta.’
‘I don’t want to get in trouble,’ Loretta whined.
