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“If I let myself believe it I get hysterical.”
“Any idea where he went?”
“No,” I said. “No idea at all.”
“I’m kind of sidelined today, but I’ll be back at work tomorrow, and I might be able to find out more. Are you staying at Rangeman again tonight?”
“No. I’m going back to my own apartment. Rex gets lonely when I’m away.”
Lula returned to the car and I said goodbye to Morelli.
“Who were you talking to?” Lula asked. “Did you get any more information about Pooka?”
“I was talking to Morelli. He’s off today, so he doesn’t have much information.”
“We heard he was having a colonoscopy. I don’t know why anyone would want one of those. First off you get a camera stuck up your butt. A camera! It might as well be a rhinoceros.”
“It’s a small camera,” I said.
“Don’t matter. It’s a camera. Not only do you gotta get it stuck way up there, but it takes pictures. I mean do you want people looking at pictures of the inside of your butt? Isn’t it bad enough everyone’s looking at the outside?”
“It’s not like it gets put on YouTube.”
“You don’t know that for sure. And that’s not even the worst part. I read about it. If they see something sticking out on the inside of your butt they knock it off with the camera. If you got one of them polyp things the camera knocks it off. And then what happens to it? Do they stick a vacuum up your butt and suck the polyp up? I mean how much stuff can you stick up there, right?”
I turned the radio on. Loud. If the radio didn’t drown Lula out I was going to crash the car into a telephone pole.
“What are we going to do now?” Lula yelled at me. “Do you want to go after the lawnmower man?”
“I’m taking the afternoon off. I need some downtime.”
“I get that. Me, too. I’ve been traumatized by my flea experience. And that’s my word of the day, by the way. Traumatic. I thought it was an appropriate word of the day. I bet I get to use it a lot today.”
•••
> I dropped Lula at the office and I turned into the Burg. No doubt my mother had already gotten a bazillion phone calls about me getting checked out at the hospital. I needed to show her I was okay, and it was all not a big deal. It would take some acting on my part, because it felt like a big deal to me. I was thinking that maybe I should give the pastry chef thing one more try.
I parked in the driveway and tried not to limp on my way to the front door. My knee hurt, and my elbow didn’t feel all that good, either. My mother was in the kitchen ironing. Never a good sign. My mother ironed when she was upset. She’d iron the same shirt for hours if she had nothing else to iron. My grandmother was at the kitchen table on her laptop.
“Tweeting?” I asked her.
“Nope,” she said. “I’m checking out bubonic plague. We heard you got it. And I have to tell you I’m not finding much good about it.”
“I don’t have the plague. I feel fine.”
My mother looked up from her ironing and made the sign of the cross. “Good heavens, just look at you!”
“I don’t think she looks that bad,” Grandma said. “I was expecting a lot worse. I saw this movie once where a guy got dragged down the road behind a pickup truck and Stephanie don’t look nearly that bad. And her pimple looks a lot better than it used to.”
“I thought I’d stop around for lunch,” I said. “I’m starved.”
“Hear that, Ellen?” Grandma said. “You can stop ironing now.”
“In fact I have a terrific idea,” I said. “Let’s go out for lunch.”
“I don’t know,” my mother said. “I’m not dressed.”
“We don’t have to go someplace fancy,” I said. “We could go to the diner on Route 33 or we could go to Cluck-in-a-Bucket.”
