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“Look who’s here,” Grandma said when she saw me at the door. “You came on a good night. We got a ham.”
I threw my laundry into the washer and helped set the table. My dad was asleep in front of the television, and my mom and my grandmother were in the kitchen. It’s not a big kitchen but it gets the job done. Refrigerator with a freezer on the bottom. A four-burner stove with an oven. Small microwave on the counter. A sink and a dishwasher. The dishwasher is a recent addition but my mom and my grandmother rarely use it. They still do dishes by hand while they review the evening meal and gossip about the neighbors.
The kitchen is like Tiki. It’s an inanimate object that seems alive. It smelled like apple pie and baked ham today. My mom had the windows open and a fan going, pulling in the scent from the geraniums in her window box. In the winter the windows will be closed and steamy from soup bubbling on the stove. It’s been like this since the day I was born and I can’t imagine it any other way.
My mom has squeezed a table and four chairs into the kitchen. My sister and I did our homework here. We ate breakfast here. And this is where important announcements were made. Engagements, pregnancies, college choices. This is also where I stomped and fumed over curfews, rolled my eyes at my parents’ antiquated ideas, and plotted how to sneak out when they were asleep. My sister never did any of those things. She was the perfect child.
I moved out from under my parents’ roof a bunch of years ago and I haven’t been completely successful at re-creating this comforting and stabilizing environment for myself. I’m hopeless in the kitchen, and I never seem to have the time to build my nest. Holidays like Christmas and Easter sneak up on me and fly by before I can decorate my apartment and wrap presents. Maybe if it wasn’t so easy to come back to my parents’ home I’d work harder at building my own. On the plus side I have a hamster and a cookie jar. Okay, so I keep my gun in the cookie jar. But it’s a start, right?
I sat at the little table across from Grandma and watched her shell peas. I could smell the ham heating in the oven with the brown sugar and mustard glaze, the ham studded with cloves and draped in pineapple rings, and I was ready to gnaw my arm off with hunger. Problem was, I couldn’t stop thinking about Susan Cubbin and the gold bar. She shouted Aha! in her husband’s office and next thing she had a gold bar. No way could I walk away from it.
“I have an errand to run,” I said to my mother. “If I’m not here for dinner don’t worry about it. I’ll stop by later and get leftovers.”
The van was in the driveway when I got to Susan’s house. I went to the door, and Susan sighed when she saw me.
“You know,” Susan said.
“I know you pawned a gold bar.”
Susan pressed her lips together, and she blinked away tears. “He’s dead,” she said. “Jerkface is dead.”
“Why do you think he’s dead?”
“It’s all here. All the money he stole from those people. It’s all still here. He didn’t run out on me. He went to the hospital, and he expected to come back. He had it hidden. It was in a place I would never have thought to look.”
“Did you tell this to the police?”
“No. It’s proof he was guilty, and I feel bad about it. I mean, isn’t it enough that he’s probably dead?”
“What about Cranberry Manor?”
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“He hated that place. He said the old people were always complaining. And he said they cheated on everything. Cards, Bingo, taxes, Social Security. Half of them are collecting on dead relatives.”
“It’s still their money.”
“I know, but I can’t be the one to tell on him. It seems mean. He was my husband, and he wasn’t so bad. He just had a lot of issues.”
“Can I help?”
“Yes. You can help me figure out a way to get the money back to Cranberry Manor without making Geoffrey look like a monster.”
“Give me some history.”
“Come on in and I’ll show you what I found.”
I followed Susan to the dining room table and looked down at what appeared to be a blueprint for landscaping her yard.
“Yesterday I was sitting out back having a glass of wine and the sun kept reflecting off something in the yard. So finally I got up to see what it was and at first I thought it was a gold button that popped off something and got smashed into the grass. I tried to get it up, but it wouldn’t come, and I kept digging away more grass and more grass, and what do you think I found?”
“A gold bar.”
“Yes. And then it hit me. I remembered Geoffrey was always talking about his big scheme to landscape the yard, and how flowers were as good as gold. Five years ago he started working on this blueprint. He’d haul it out and work on it some, and then he’d file it away and go on to another project.”
“I haven’t seen your backyard. Is it filled with flowers?”
“No! That’s the thing. He kept saying flowers were as good as gold but he only planted a few flowers. There were some bushes in the yard when we first moved in and they’re still there too, but that’s it.”
