Catering to Nobody (Goldy Schulz Series)

underhand punch to Arch’s stomach.

“Hey!” I yelled through the glass. No one turned around. “Hey!” I yelled again.

“I’ll show you,” Arch was hollering. “I’ll hit you with a fatal curse!” He was bent over, holding his stomach. With his free hand he was feeling along the ground for a rock to throw.

“Hey, stop!” I yelled again and looked around wildly for Marla, who had gone into the kitchen for more coffee.

The boys fell on top of Arch. The three of them squirmed and punched and thrashed. I turned, hit my head on an ivy geranium, then tripped over an exotic orchid, and cursed being lost in an indoor jungle for the second time in a week. Finally I made my way out to the front door.

“Arch! Arch!”

“You’ll see!” he was yelling. “Just wait!”

“Na-na-na-na-na-na!” the boys mocked back. They disappeared down through the evergreens.

“What in the hell—”

“Let’s just get out of here,” Arch said without looking at me. He dusted off his shirt and rubbed his knee where his pants were torn.

“Just tell me why you’re having so much trouble,” I said.

“I don’t know, Mom,” he said. “They hate me. I’m small, so they can pick on me. Can we go home? I need to call Todd. It’s very important.”

After hasty thanks to Marla, we swung down toward Korman and Korman where I prayed Patty Sue was waiting on the pastry shop bench engaged in the peaceful activity of sunbathing. No luck. I went into the shop. No Patty Sue and they hadn’t seen her. We drove back up to the front of the building and the office entry.

“I’ll go in and get her,” Arch volunteered.

He returned in a few minutes with the look of a young canary-swallowing cat.

“No Patty Sue,” he announced.

The nurse-receptionist whom I had disrupted when I went searching for the files came charging out the front door of the office.

Arch and I both groaned. I said, “Patty Sue’s probably dead.”

“I hope she is,” muttered Arch. “Then she won’t be able to wreck any more cars.”

The nurse banged on my car window.

“I want to speak to that young man,” she said. “I want him to give back what he took.”

Arch moaned and climbed out. He and the nurse stepped away from the car and began a low-pitched but heated discussion. Then Arch withdrew a packet from inside his shirt and handed it to her. The nurse stomped off and Arch skulked back to the car.

“You want to tell me what that was all about?” I asked.

“Oh,” he said in a bored tone, “I just wanted to borrow one of those surgical packs from Dad’s office for Halloween. Big deal.”

“Why?”

“I thought I could use one of those tools for, like, a weapon. Not to really do anything, but to scare people. That dumb nurse wouldn’t let me take it. I even told her my father was one of the doctors but it didn’t work.”

“Judas priest,” I said, “that nurse is going to think we’re a bunch of nuts.” I got out of the car and went into the office, demanding to know from the loony-detector if Patty Sue had finished her appointment.

“I don’t know,” she said crisply. “Here’s her bill. If she went out I didn’t see her.” She gave me a withering look and I left.

“Damn that Patty Sue,” I said when I slammed back into the car.

“Why don’t you check around the other side?” asked Arch.

“I already did,” I said. “You were just thinking so hard about what you were going to lift from your father’s office that you didn’t notice.”

“Not down below,” said Arch. “On the deck on the other side. By the back door.”

“Where, smarty-pants? I’ve only been coming to this office since before you were born. There is no back door.”

Arch gave me his exasperated look. He said, “Mom, you can drive to it.”

“How?”

He pointed. “Don’t you even know where Dad and Fritz park when they get here early? There’s a little paved part over on the right side that goes through to the back.” He laughed under his breath. “Dad says sometimes he plays hooky that way, going out for a snack or something while a patient waits.”

A snack or something. I started the car. All this time, and I had never known about this other parking area. Perhaps the Jerk had not wanted me to know how he got out for his snacks. I pointed the Chrysler in the direction Arch had shown me.

The OB- and GYN-plated Jeeps glistened in the sunlight. And there was Patty Sue sitting on a bench, her chin lifted to the sun.

“You could have told the receptionist you were leaving,” I said as I walked up. “You haven’t even paid your bill.”

“I don’t have any money to pay a bill,” she answered me. She got up.

I said, “How’d you get out here, anyway?”

“Through there,” she said. She waved a hand at the back doors of the office.

“Well, how about that,” I mused softly as I studied the exits. There were two doors, one coming out from John Richard’s side, one from Fritz’s. I remembered now from my visit to Fritz’s plant-bedecked office. There had been a back door, but it had been draped with ivy.

“He usually lets me out that way,” Patty Sue offered. “It’s like a secret.”

So that explained how Patty Sue could get down to the pastry shop without my seeing her, as had happened a number of times before. I looked at the doors. A secret. I wondered who else the doctors might have escorted out this way.

CHAPTER 19

Pluto to Mom. Come in, please.”

We were home. How long I had been pressing the button on the coffee grinder I did not know. The beans were pulverized, tit to make hot mud.

In the distance Patty Sue was running a bath.

“You okay, Mom?” came Arch’s voice again. “I need to talk to you about Halloween.”

I looked at the would-be surgical-pack thief.

He said, “You want me to make you some coffee?”

“Sure.”

Arch dumped out the dust I’d made of the beans, measured more, whirred the grinder, lined the filter with paper, ran fresh cold water. Then I remembered that I had not talked to him about what I had taken from his desk. He had been to school today. Had he noticed anything missing? And what was the bigger picture of my son and Laura Smiley, anyway? I studied him.

“Arch. Halloween. I heard you,” I said. “I need your help to do the party at the athletic club that night.”

“You look half-dead, Mom.” He grinned. The coffee maker bubbled and popped. He said, “Coffee will be ready in a sec. Raising the dead is my favorite spell.”

Right, with surgical packs. I said, “You’re not going to go stealing my knives, are you? For some curse or something?”

“No.”

“Did you ever play raise the dead with Laura Smiley?”

“Mom!”

“Well?”

He looked out the window. Then he said, “You’re hassling me again.”

I opened the cupboard. John Richard had given me one of those mugs that said BITCH BITCH BITCH on it. Why I had kept it all this time I did not know. I dropped it into the trash and picked out one decorated with