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“Callyanne’s gone away. Mrs. Dunwiddy sent me. She wants to see you.”
It’s like the mafia, thought Fat Charlie. A postmenopausal mafia. “She’s going to make me an offer I can’t refuse?”
“I doubt it. She is not very well.”
“Oh.”
He climbed into his rental, followed Mrs. Bustamonte’s Camry along the Florida streets. He had been so certain about his father. Certain he’d find him alive. Sure that he’d help…
They parked outside Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house. Fat Charlie looked at the front yard, at the faded plastic flamingos and the gnomes and the red mirrored gazing ball sitting on a small concrete plinth
like an enormous Christmas tree ornament. He walked over to the ball, just like the one he had broken when he was a boy, and saw himself distorted, staring back from it.
“What’s it for?” he said.
“It’s not for anything. She liked it.”
Inside the house the smell of violets hung thick and cloying. Fat Charlie’s Great-Aunt Alanna had kept a tube of parma violet candies in her handbag, but even as a chunky kid with a sweet tooth, Fat Charlie would eat them only if there wasn’t anything else. This house smelled like those sweets had tasted. Fat Charlie hadn’t thought of parma violets in twenty years. He wondered if they still made them. He wondered why anyone had ever made them in the first place…
“She’s at the end of the hall,” said Mrs. Bustamonte, and she stopped and she pointed. Fat Charlie went into Mrs. Dunwiddy’s bedroom.
It was not a big bed, but Mrs. Dunwiddy lay in it like an oversized doll. She wore her glasses, and above them something that Fat Charlie realized was the first nightcap he had ever seen, a yellowing tea-cosy-like affair, trimmed in lace. She was propped up on a mountain of pillows, her mouth open, and she was snoring gently as he walked in.
He coughed.
Mrs. Dunwiddy jerked her head up, opened her eyes, and stared at him. She pointed her finger to the nightstand beside the bed, and Fat Charlie picked up the glass of water sitting there and passed it to her. She took it with both hands, like a squirrel holding a nut, and she took a long sip before handing it back to him.
“My mouth get all dry,” she said. “You know how old I am?”
“Um.” There was, he decided, no right answer. “No.”
“Hunnert and four.”
“That’s amazing. You’re in such good shape. I mean, that’s quite marvelous—”
“Shut up, Fat Charlie.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t say ‘sorry’ like that neither, like a dog that get tell off for messin‘ on the kitchen floor. Hold your head up. Look the world in the eye. You hear me?”
“Yes. Sorry. I mean, just yes.”
She sighed. “They want to take me to the hospital. I tell them, when you get to be hunnert and four, you earn the right to die in your own bed. I make babies in this bed long time back, and I birth babies in this bed, and damned if I going to die anywhere else. And another thing…” She stopped talking, closed her eyes, and took a slow, deep breath. Just as Fat Charlie was convinced she had fallen asleep, her eyes opened, and she said, “Fat Charlie, if someone ever ask if you want to live to be hunnert and four, say no. Everything hurt. Everything. I hurt in places nobody ain’t discover yet.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
“None of your back talk.”
Fat Charlie looked at the little woman in her white wooden bed. “Shall I say sorry?” he asked.
Mrs. Dunwiddy looked away, guiltily. “I do you wrong,” she said. “Long time ago, I do you wrong.”
“I know,” said Fat Charlie.
Mrs. Dunwiddy might have been dying, but she still shot Fat Charlie the kind of look that would have sent children under the age of five screaming for their mothers. “What you mean, you know?”
Fat Charlie said, “I figured it out. Probably not all of it, but some of it. I’m not stupid.”
