food. Then you can start putting it away while I surf.
Meanwhile,” she added, pointing to Joe and Bill, “we’ll
leave General Eisenhower and General Patton in here to
beat the stuffing out of the Fuhrer all over again.”
Five minutes later Renie was at the computer in the
kitchen while Judith staggered past, carrying a load for
the freezer. Directly behind Renie’s chair, two of the
boxes fell over and hit Renie on the back.
“Yikes!” she cried. “Watch the shoulder! I’ve had
surgery, remember?”
“How can I forget?” Judith muttered. Favoring her
artificial hip, she bent over to retrieve the boxes and
dropped two more.
Renie jumped out of the chair. “Let me help. You
can’t carry all that at once.”
“I guess not,” Judith admitted. “How are you doing
on the Internet?”
“I just got into one of the main sites,” Renie said as
she scooped up the fallen boxes. “I had to eat a little
something first. Like the steaks.”
“Those I could have frozen,” Judith said, leading the
way down the basement steps.
“I didn’t really eat them,” Renie admitted. “I had
some of that field-green salad, a few tempura prawns,
a piece of fried chicken, and some excellent lox on an
outstanding bagel.”
Arriving at the freezer, Judith shook her head. “All
that in five minutes. How could you?” She always marveled at how much—and how fast—Renie could eat.
She also wondered why she couldn’t have inherited
Renie’s metabolism instead of Aunt Deb’s compassion.
“You’re right,” Renie said as Judith opened the
freezer. “You don’t have much room. Maybe we
should take this stuff out of the boxes and put it in
freezer wrap.”
“There’s some right up here,” Judith said, reaching
for a roll on the shelf above the freezer. “So did you
learn anything about Bruno’s background yet?”
“No, I just got started,” Renie replied, removing
four prime New York steaks from one of the boxes. “I
only learned his age, which indeed is fifty-three as of
March ninth. The next thing I knew, I was being
crushed by your cartons.”
“Here,” Judith said, moving some of the items in the
freezer, “I’ve made some room. We can put those
steaks in this corner by the—” She stopped and sucked
in her breath.
