“I encourage you to start again,” Henry said. When I didn’t answer, he added, “Maybe I can help. Why not stop by my studio so we can discuss it further. I assure you, I’ll be a perfect gentleman.”
I wondered what his idea of gentlemanly behavior was. I had a rough time believing he’d act any differently than he had in the past, which was positively rude. And as for my painting, how could I trust a man like him to be straight with me?
“I’m glad you’re here,” Lois said as I approached her desk. She opened the desk drawer a few inches, dropped in a nail file, then closed the drawer with her knee, checking afterward to make sure she hadn’t snagged her panty hose. “Not to worry, but there’s a glitch in the Henrick deal.”
My left eye twitched when I heard the word glitch. “What’s happened?”
“Old Mr. Troutman fell yesterday and broke a hip. It may be serious.”
I hate to confess this, but the first person I thought of was myself. My clients, my sale, my commission. But then I envisioned an older man stumbling off a curb and not getting up again. “The poor man.”
“Now his wife’s contemplating moving into a retirement center instead of another house.”
“A broken hip can be disastrous at his age.” I thought of my own parents: Mom balancing atop a step stool to change a light bulb, and Dad wandering about the house reading his paper, not watching where he’s going. If either fractured a bone, even twisted an ankle, who would care for them? Mom was used to catering to Dad, but she wouldn’t be strong enough to lift him, let alone get him to the bathroom. And Dad? He would have no clue about how to take care of Mom. He could flip burgers on the gas barbecue on the Fourth of July, but I wasn’t sure he even knew how to scramble an egg.
Lois lay one hand on her desk and glanced down at her plum-colored nails. “Oh well, in our business, if it’s not one thing, it’s another, right?”
I didn’t know how she could act so jolly. Even Lois Grimbaldi couldn’t mend a broken hip in time to complete the deal by closing.
“I’m running over to the hospital right now to check it out,” Lois said. She pushed her chair away from her desk and stood. “If Mr. Basetti calls, would you talk to him? We’ve been playing telephone tag for days.”
When she returned several hours later, I’d given Mr. Basetti the price and other details on a home his wife had driven by. No sweat. With him, I had nothing to lose, so I didn’t get rattled.
“Great,” Lois said. “We can work on this together if you like.”
“All right.”
She noticed my serious expression. “It’s still too early to assess Jim Troutman’s condition. What a trooper. He was in good spirits, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.” She wrapped her middle finger around her index finger, then gave her hand a small shake. “It’ll all work out somehow.”
When I got home, I found a message from Phil waiting for me. “Give me a jingle, okay?” I phoned him back, and Darla answered in her purring voice.
“Hi, this is Marguerite.”
Silence.
“I’m returning Phil’s call.”
“Just a moment, I’ll get him,” she said with hostility.
I waited several minutes for Phil to come to the phone, making me wonder if she’d even told him I was on the line.
He finally picked up the receiver. “Have you talked to Rob yet?” he said. “I can tell there’s something wrong, but I can’t pry it out of him.”
Clamping the phone against my ear with my raised shoulder, I began sorting through the mail while I listened. I ripped open my gas bill, which I imagined would soon skyrocket now that the weather was cooling. I couldn’t bring myself to think about Rob struggling with his classes, or about his following in his father’s footsteps. Phil came close to graduating, but dropped out during his senior year. I remembered his lame-brained dispute with a professor. The man was trying to encourage Phil to produce some decent work, no doubt, but Phil had been too pigheaded to accept his help. He’d snatched up his canvases, huffed out of class, and never returned.
Following Lois’s strategy, I told Phil it would “all work out.” It had to.
After checking in at the office the next day, I stopped by my parents’ house. Mom, dust rag in hand, came to the door wearing an unflattering tan-colored blouse and a beige skirt. Looking into her pale face, I noticed she wasn’t wearing makeup. I still considered my mother to be a beautiful woman, but I’d never seen her look more dowdy.
“You and I should go shopping together and buy you some new clothes,” I said.
“I’ve already got a closet full of things I never wear.”
“Then keep me company. We could have lunch afterward, like we did when I was a girl.” I would take her by the cosmetic counter too. “Where’s Dad?”
“Out somewhere.”
My hand reached for the banister, and I took the first step up the staircase. “I’m going to run upstairs and weed out some of my old books.” My father had asked Nicole and me to empty the floor-to-ceiling bookcase in our old room so he could store his ever-expanding collection of National Geographic magazines there.
“That should make Dad happy,” I added. When Mom didn’t answer, I turned to see her shuffling into the living room. She’d always been on my case to stand up straight, but her shoulders rounded like an old lady’s. She was even developing a hump on the back of her neck.
I continued to the second floor and headed into the bedroom Nicole
