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I put the meatballs in the oven, cut up some potatoes and set them to cooking, and opened a can of creamed corn and dumped it in a bowl so I could heat it up in the microwave at the last minute. Cooking wasn't so bad, I thought. In fact, it was a lot like sex. Sometimes it didn't seem like such a good idea in the beginning, but then after you got into it . . .
I set the table for two, and the phone rang just as I was finishing.
“Yo, babe,” Ranger said.
“Yo yourself. I have some news. The car that came to visit Hannibal last night belongs to Terry Gilman. I should have recognized her when she got out of the car, but I only saw her from the back, and I wasn't expecting her.”
“Probably carrying condolences from Vito.”
“I didn't realize Vito and Ramos were friends.”
“Vito and Alexander co-exist.”
“Another thing,” I said. “This morning I followed Hannibal to the house in Deal.” Then I told Ranger about the older man in the Town Car, and the smack in the head, and the appearance of a younger man who I thought was Ulysses Ramos.
“How do you know it was Ulysses?”
“Just a guess. He looked like Hannibal, but slimmer.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Do you want
me to keep watching the town house?” I asked.
“Do a spot check once in a while. I want to know if anyone's living there.”
“Don't you think it's strange that Ramos would smack his son?” I asked.
“I don't know,” Ranger said. “In my family we smack each other all the time.”
Ranger disconnected, and I stood without moving for several minutes, wondering what I was missing. Ranger never gave much away, but there'd been a moment's pause and a small change of inflection that had me thinking I'd told him something interesting. I reviewed our conversation and everything seemed ordinary. A father and two brothers gathered together at a time of family tragedy. Alexander's reaction to Hannibal's greeting had seemed odd to me, but I got the impression that wasn't what had caught Ranger's attention.
Grandma staggered through the front door. “Boy, have I had a day,” she said. “I'm all done in.”
“How'd the driving lesson go?”
“Pretty good, I guess. I didn't run anybody over. And I didn't wreck the car. How was your day?”
“About the same.”
“Louise and me went to the mall to do some senior citizen power walking but we kept getting sidetracked into the stores. And then after lunch we went looking at apartments. I saw a couple I might settle for, but nothing that really floated my boat. Tomorrow we're gonna look at some condos.” Grandma snooped into the potato pot. “Isn't this something. I come home from a hard day of running around and here's dinner all waiting for me. Just like being a man.”
“I got a banana cream pie for dessert,” I said, “but I had to use the pie plate for the meatloaf.”
Grandma peeked at the pie in the refrigerator. “Maybe we should eat it now before it defrosts and loses its shape.”
That sounded like a good idea to me, so we all had some pie while the meatloaf was baking.
When I was a little girl I'd never thought of my grandmother as the sort of person to eat her pie first. Her house had always been neat and clean. The furniture was dark wood and the upholstered pieces were comfortable but unmemorable. Meals were traditional Burg meals, ready at noon and at six o'clock. Stuffed cabbage, pot roast, roast chicken, an occasional ham or pork roast. My grandfather wouldn't have had it any other way. He'd worked in a steel mill all his life. He had strong opinions, and he dwarfed the rooms of their row house. Truth is, the top of my grandmother's head comes to the tip of my chin, and my grandfather wasn't much taller. But then I guess stature doesn't have much to do with inches.
Lately I've been wondering who my grandmother would have been if she hadn't married my grandfather. I wonder if she would have eaten her dessert first a lot sooner.
I took the meatballs out of the oven and set them side by side on a plate. Sitting there together they looked like troll gonads.
“Well, will you look at these big boys,” Grandma said. “Reminds me of your grandfather, rest his soul.”
When we were done eating I took Bob for a walk. Street lights were on, and light poured from the front windows of the houses behind my apartment building. We walked several blocks in comfortable silence. It turns out that's one of the good things about a dog. They don't talk a lot, so you can go along, thinking your own thoughts, making lists.
