do that.”
I found the Tylenols, closed the drawer, and got the cap off.
“Tell me you’ll at least think about coming back to work,” I said. “KF’s about to have a nervous breakdown.”
I shook two pills out onto the counter. When I’d get headaches on the road with Sheila, and didn’t have water to wash down the pills I kept in the glove box, she’d insist we stop somewhere so I could get a drink.
“You can’t take them dry,” Sheila’d say. “They’ll get stuck in your throat.”
So I said, “Glass?”
“In the drying rack,” Sally said.
I looked at the rack next to the sink. There were a couple of glasses there, a single plate, some cutlery. As I reached for the glass, I saw something I wasn’t expecting to see.
A baking dish.
The lasagna pan I hadn’t seen in over three weeks. Browny-orange in color.
What Sheila always called “persimmon.”
SIXTY-THREE
I carefully lifted the pan out of the rack and set it on the counter.
Sally laughed. “You gonna drink out of that?”
“What’s this doing here?” I asked slowly.
“What?”
“This lasagna pan. I recognize this. It’s Sheila’s. What’s it doing here?”
“Are you sure?” she said. “I’m pretty sure that’s mine.”
Sheila and I had a routine over the years. She cooked dinner, I cleaned up. You spend year after year cleaning the same dishes and bowls and glasses and baking dishes, you get to know them like the back of your hand. If this dish had come from our house, it would have a smudge on the bottom near one corner, where the residue from a price tag had never worn away.
I turned the dish over. The smudge was there, right where I expected it.
“No,” I said. “It’s ours. This is the dish Sheila always made lasagna in.”
Sally had gotten out of the chair and walked over to have a look. “Hand it over.” She examined it. She looked inside it, flipped it over, and checked the bottom. “I don’t know, Glen. If you say so, then I guess it is.”
“How’d it get here?” I asked.
“Jeez, I don’t know. I know it didn’t fly in through a window. I guess Sheila must have brought lasagna over sometime and I forgot to return it. So shoot me.”
“Sheila made up a lasagna the day of her accident. She left two plates of it for Kelly and me. But there wasn’t any more of it. I decided to try making lasagna the other day and I couldn’t find the pan.” I held it up. “Because it was here.”
“Glen, please. Is there a point to this?”
“Your father died the same day Sheila did. I remember telling Sheila on the phone, just before she was going out, that your dad had passed away. She said we’d have to think of something to do for you. But the minute she hung up, she must have decided to take you the rest of the lasagna. That’s what she did. When people died, she’d always take food to the family. Even people she didn’t know all that well. Like her business teacher.”
“Honestly, Glen, you’re starting to scare me here.”
“She came here, didn’t she?” I said. “She came here to see you, to comfort you, and that’s why she didn’t go into the city. That’s why she didn’t have the money with her, why she hid it in the house.”
“What money? What are you talking about?”
“She didn’t want to be carrying it around. She came here to bring you a lasagna, to help you deal with losing your father. That afternoon. She thought it was more important to look after a grieving friend than run an errand for Belinda. If she came by here that day, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Glen, Jesus,” Sally said, and with the pan still in one hand, pointed with the other to the Tylenols on the counter. “Take those. I think there’s something wrong with your head.”
It was pounding more than ever as I tried to figure out why the baking dish was here. I looked away from Sally, just for a second, at the pills, then thought of something else I wanted to say to her.
I turned back and said, “I was going crazy, trying-”
All I saw was the baking dish, coming at me. And then everything went black.
I was at the doctor’s, getting my flu shot.
“This isn’t going to hurt a bit,” he said as he put the needle into my arm. But the moment it pricked my skin and he found the vein, I shouted out in pain.
“Don’t be such a baby,” he said. He injected the serum and withdrew the needle.
“Now,” he said, producing another syringe, “this isn’t going to hurt a bit.”
“You already gave me my shot,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t be such a baby,” he said. He injected the serum and withdrew the needle.
“Now,” he said, producing another syringe, “this isn’t going to hurt a bit.”
“Wait, no! Stop! What are you doing? Stop it! Get that motherfucking needle away from me you son of a-”
My eyes opened.
“Oh good, you really are alive,” Sally said, close enough to me that I could smell her perfume. I had to blink a couple of times to bring her, and the rest of the world, into focus.
That world was sideways, and above me. I was lying on Sally Diehl’s kitchen floor. A few feet away from me, scattered across the linoleum, was Sheila’s lasagna pan, or what used to be Sheila’s lasagna pan. It had shattered into countless pieces.
“You got one hard head,” Sally remarked as she knelt over me. “I was afraid I hit you too hard, killed you. But now, I can make this work.”
She moved back from me and I could see that she was holding a syringe in her hand. “I think that’ll be the last one,” she said. “You’re full up now. You put it straight into the bloodstream, I don’t think you need as much as if you were drinking it.”
I attempted to roll over so I could look behind me, but there was an obstacle at my back. I realized after another second that it was my hands. They were bound behind me. I could feel something stuck to the hairs on my wrist. Duct tape. Lots of it.
Sally had crossed the room, grabbed a chair, and dragged it back across the floor toward me. She sat on it backwards, her legs straddling it. She rested her arms on the chair back. In one hand she held a gun.
“I’m sorry about this, Glen. Between you and Sheila, fuck, you guys. She was too nice, and you, you’re a dog with a goddamn bone.”
My head was pounding and I could taste blood in my mouth. I sensed I had a pretty good wound in my forehead and the blood had run down my face.
In addition to the headache, there was something else. A different kind of feeling. Woozy. The room seemed to be circling around me. At first, I figured that was the head injury. But now I wasn’t so sure.
I was feeling… I was feeling a little drunk.
“It’s hitting ya, right?” Sally asked. “Starting to feel a little three sheets to the wind and that kind of thing? Got pretty used to giving my dad his insulin. But that’s not what I shot you up with. You’re full of vodka.”
“Sheila,” I said. “This is what you did to Sheila.”
Sally didn’t say anything. She just kept looking at me, then at her watch.
“Why, Sally? Why did you do it?”
“Please, Glen, just let it kick in. You’ll be feeling pretty good very soon. Nothing’ll seem very important then.”
She was right. I was already feeling woozy in a way that had nothing to do with getting hit in the head with the lasagna pan.
