undoubtedly to say that no woman could truly be thinking of nothing, so I jumped ahead of her. “I fired Marcia.”
“You . . . what?” She stuck her mittened index finger into her ear and twisted it around. “Did I hear you correctly? Tell me true, dear heart.”
Marina had been on a Shakespeare kick lately. The Southern belle of last year was sooo twelve months ago. I’d spent half a morning dreaming up what she might do next and had come up with possibilities too horrible to consider. Fractured and inaccurate Shakespeare was preferable by far to affecting fake street slang. Or speaking in tongues.
“You heard me the first time,” I said. There were reasons I hadn’t told Marina yet, and most of them had to do with the very real possibility of hearing “I told you so.”
“Forsooth, verily.”
“That’s redundant.”
“If you hadn’t given me such good news, I’d call you a nitpicker, but today I won’t.” She took a couple of quick steps to get ahead, then turned around to face me. Walking backward, she said, “Did you really get rid of that leech on the store’s profits? That personality-challenged clerk who couldn’t sell a Harry Potter book to a kid with a lightning bolt tattooed on his forehead? That incompetent present wrapper? That”—she groped for a suitable epithet—“that
“She didn’t want to work the week of Thanksgiving.”
“Or the week of Christmas. Or the week after.”
“Away, you moldy rogue, away!” Marina made sweeping motions with her hands.
“Since I’m a mother, she thought I’d understand that she wants to spend a lot of time with her grandson.”
“Pish!”
“That’s not Shakespeare.” I stopped walking. “And quit going backward or you’re going to trip and land on your keister.”
She patted the body part in question with both hands, but slowed to a halt. “Lots of cushion. And I never said ‘pish’ was Shakespeare.”
“Then you need to wave a flag when you’re out of the William S. zone.”
“Where are you going to find another clerk?”
“Aye, there’s the rub.”
Marina clapped her mittens together. “Beth’s playing? Hooray!”
I winced. “It was an accident.”
“You are no fun. But I bet that has much to do with the unlamented but certainly painful departure of your former employee. Tell me when I’m wrong.” She threaded her arm through mine and we started walking again. Ahead, the kids had jumped into the gutter and were scuffing through the last leaves of the season. “Your hands were shaking. You had to take deep breaths. Your mouth was dry.” She patted my arm. “Do I have the symptoms right so far?”
“Three for three. Am I going to live, Doctor?”
“Only if you promise not to torture yourself for firing her. This was a long time coming, and the only thing you should regret is not doing it sooner.”
“But—”
“Promise.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Good.” She did the arm pat thing again. “Luckily, I have a surefire guaranteed cure.”
“I don’t have time for a pedicure.”
“Now, now. Let the doctor finish.”
I looked at her. For years Marina’s guaranteed solution to anything had been a pedicure. “Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s a good patient. Dr. Marina knows best.”
“What about the time she prescribed dinner at that run-down restaurant because it would be good for me to see the seamy side of life, and I got food poisoning?”
“You ended up losing a few pounds, as I recall. Would you like to thank me now or later?”
“I still can’t eat hamburgers.” The very thought made my stomach heave.
“Thanking me later will be fine.” She hopped a step to make our footsteps match. “The current situation requires a serious level of doctoring. Please pay attention.”
This game had gone far enough. Withdrawing my arm from hers, I stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk.
“Uh-oh,” Marina said. “I went a little too far, didn’t I?”
“About twenty feet ago.”
“Oh, dear.” Her face drooped into lines of sorrow. “It’s the bane of my existence. The Devoted Husband says that’s why the older offspring never visit. That they’re afraid of their mother’s games.”
“The kids never visit because one of them goes to college in Boston, one is stationed in Germany, and the other is in Africa with the Peace Corps.”
“Why, that’s right, isn’t it? I should have known the DH was teasing.”
“You do, however, tend to get carried away. It’s irritating that I always have to be the responsible one.”
“I know.” She hung her head. “I promise never to do it again.”
While on the surface it sounded like a great idea, on the whole the idea was a chilling one. No spur-of-the- moment Marina excursions? No more coin-flip trips? Some of my favorite adventures had played out from the flip of a coin. We’d pack the kids into the car and, whenever we came to an intersection where we were required to stop, someone would flip a coin. Tails, we’d go left, heads, we’d go right. If the coin was lost on the floor or in the upholstery, we’d go straight. Jenna still talked about the “best root beer float ever” we found on a coin-flip trip. A year later we tried to find it again, but couldn’t. Marina’s theory was that things appeared magically for a coin-flip trip and faded away like Brigadoon when we left the premises, and I almost believed her.
“If you keep a promise like that,” I said, “you’ll wither away to mere normalcy, and no one wants that.”
“Not even Zach?” She indicated her youngest son, who was showing inclinations that he might be taking after his father, a civil engineer. I was reminded of the old joke: At a party, how do you tell the difference between the introverted engineer and the extroverted engineer ? The extroverted one stares at your shoes instead of his own.
“Zach loves cooking night,” I pointed out.
Marina brightened. “He does, doesn’t he?” She’d begun cooking nights last winter. We gathered together leftover ingredients from both of our refrigerators and, with the kids’ help, brewed up a meal. Some dinners were hits, and once we’d had to order out pizza when not even iron-stomach Jenna could eat the unappetizing mix of corned beef, eggs, hot dogs, and chicken noodle soup, but overall, cooking night was a great success.
“Yes, he does,” I said. “And once you tell me what you have planned for me, I’ll try and be more spontaneous myself.”
“Promise?”
I tried not to think about what I might be getting myself into. Though as I almost always went along with Marina’s ideas after short bouts of dragging my heels, I didn’t see that I was taking much of a risk. “Promise.”
“Hot diggity!” Marina jumped into a little dance, humming what might have been an Irish sea chantey. “Then I will relent and taunt you no longer. You will be glad to know that I have solved all of your problems.”
“It’s about time someone perfected cold fusion.”
“That’s next week. This week I found you . . .” She spun around. Then, with a stomp of a foot, arms outstretched, she presented her announcement. “Ta-dahh! I found you the perfect bookstore clerk.”
“You did . . . what?”
“You heard me. She’s my new neighbor and she’ll be perfect for the job.” Marina smiled widely, sure that her offering was the best present I’d ever received.
“I’ll find my own employees, thank you.”
“Now, don’t go all annoyed at me,” Marina said. “What’s this?” She stretched her arms high and stood on her tiptoes.
