“Lucy never bought the reason for trimming the pot roast,” he recounted. Her mother had offered other reasonable explanations. The smaller end tended to be too fatty, for example. The bit they trimmed away always served up too bitter or too tough. Whatever the case, her mother had reasoned, this was how she’d been taught by her mother, Lucinda’s grandmother, so this was how she meant to teach her own daughter.
“And still”—Foster shrugged and offered up both hands helplessly—“Lucinda insisted they call her grandmother and keep asking.”
So they’d called Lucinda’s grandmother. A woman dead of cancer for three years now. And they’d asked why it was so important to trim the smaller end off the pot roast.
Here he wound up to deliver the story’s payoff.
“It wasn’t because the meat cooked unevenly or dried out,” he said. “It was because the only roasting pan they’d had—so long ago—had only been so-big.”
A lesson in perpetuating a mistake across generations. A dozen valid reasons, all wrong.
Lucinda, their smart, beautiful daughter had been the skeptic who’d brought their family to the final truth.
He looked up to see Lucinda’s mother listening intently.
Among the seated mourners more telephones rose to record his words as Foster pressed forward. A small voice in the crowd said, “Harsh, dude,” but faintly. Another small voice, the shout of a tiny man said, “He’s not your daddy.”
A laugh rippled through the chapel. The bereaved hunched forward, touching buttons, texting.
A louder voice, a man’s voice, shouted, “That man is a child pornographer!” It was Foster himself. It was his voice, shouting from a different phone, “You don’t have to be his sex slave. Not anymore.”
They were watching the airport video. Someone was. It had gone viral and made him a freak show celebrity, and they’d found him.
So many phones were recording, watching to catch his reaction. And Foster craned his neck and struggled to see past the forest of raised arms. To see Lucinda’s mother, but where she’d sat was an empty chair. Amber had fled.
Truncated bits of his voice shouted, “Pot roast!” Shouted, “Pot roast!” Somebody laughed and others shushed him because they were still recording. People wanted an encore.
Lucinda was dead, but no one cared. Lucinda had lived, but no one cared. Building inside him was the rage he felt when he dreamed of beating down child molesters. The machine-gun him.
Bumping inside his jacket, like a heavy weight bouncing against the thud of his heart, was the gun.
Mitzi went to the window in her nightgown. Her new headache proved she wasn’t dead. As did Jimmy snoring behind her. In the office building across the way only one window glowed. A single night owl like herself, the dad-shaped nobody studied something on his computer screen. A celebration it had to be. He was slugging back a whiskey-looking something from a bottle of something brown. Slugging it straight from the bottle.
Unseen, she toasted him with her own sticky glass of wine.
Jimmy simply wasn’t working out. Not that he hadn’t tried. He’d literally stood on her neck without breaking it. Stood balanced on one foot, even. And all she had to show for it was a sore neck, not so much as a slipped disk. She’d have to plumb deeper depths, maybe drive as far as Bakersfield or Stockton to find a replacement. Go trawling weight rooms for a steroid case. Her busted nose notwithstanding, Jimmy hadn’t the killer instinct.
Behind her a snort sounded. The snoring from her bed stopped.
Jimmy, leathery, long-legged Jimmy with all of his Riverside bad-boy swagger and hustle, he said, “You okay, baby?”
Mitzi didn’t turn to face him, but she asked, “Would you like to be in a movie?” It wasn’t her imagination, her breasts had grown. Her nipples had started to ache.
He told her, “Don’t shit me.” But his voice had a smile in it. There was so much silence around him she knew he must be frozen in disbelief.
She studied the man in the office. He tapped his keyboard and squinted into the glow of the monitor. She asked, “Do you know what the Goofy holler is?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy lied.
“It’s a yodel recorded by an Austrian ski racer named Hannes Schroll,” she explained, “first used in a 1941 cartoon called The Art of Skiing.” The yodel had since been used in hundreds of films and thousands of television productions and video games. It’s quite possibly the most famous recording of a human voice. Schroll never earned a cent from it.
Jimmy shifted on the bed. Springs squeaked. “Never heard of the man,” he said.
Mitzi sighed. “My point, exactly.”
“Well,” he huffed, “if I’m going to work, I’m going to get paid for it.” He fumbled something and it slipped off the bedside table. Glass broke. An ashtray or stemware. Mitzi heard the snap of a cigarette lighter and smelled smoke drifting her way. The Fontaine was a smoke-free co-op, but he already knew that.
Mitzi gauged how much wine was left in her glass.
And then, there, afloat in the lonely well-lit office across the street, the man heaved forward in his chair. His glasses slid from his nose, and he vomited onto his desk.
Tonight he’d hide in his office. Tomorrow Foster would be arrested for the funeral. He’d surrender himself to the police. On every news website he was tonight’s top story. On video after video, each shot from a different distance and angle, each video shot from some phone at the funeral, he withdrew the gun from his jacket. On his computer screen the tiny video version of him wheeled on the crowd, his arms straight out in front of him, the gun clutched in both hands. Folding chairs clattered and fell backward, spilling each row of people into the laps of the row behind. Mourners climbed each other, clawing away at a kicking pile of legs and thrashing arms. Through the computer’s tinny speakers came their wails and the rip of yanked fabric pulled to shreds. Fingers grabbed collars and
