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“If I was you I’d be taking a nap this afternoon so I could keep up with Ranger on your midnight rendezvous.”
“It’s not a rendezvous. It’s a workplace orientation.”
FIVE
I LEFT THE bail bonds office in Chambersburg and drove the short distance to my parents’ house. They live in a small two-story duplex that shares a wall with its mirror image. The mirror image is occupied by an elderly woman who bakes coffee cakes all day and feeds them to the birds that leave droppings all over her back stoop. My parents’ house has a postage stamp front yard, a narrow front porch spanning the width of their house, and a bare-bones unused backyard.
There are three small bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. Downstairs has a shotgun living room, dining room, and kitchen. The rooms are crammed with comfortable, unfashionable furniture. End tables are filled with photographs, candy dishes, and assorted treasures brought back from vacations at Seaside Heights, Atlantic City, and the Poconos. The kitchen has a little wooden table with four straight-back chairs, a ten-year-old Kenmore stove that turns out perfect pineapple upside-down cake, and enough room along one wall to set up the ironing board.
My Grandma Mazur lives with my parents. She moved in when Grandpa moved into Hotel Heaven, and she never moved out. Sometimes at the dinner table my father’s knuckles turn white as he grips his fork and sneaks a look at Grandma, and we all keep a close watch on him that he doesn’t launch himself across the table at her. I like Grandma a lot. Of course, I don’t have to live with her.
I parked in front of the house, and Grandma Mazur appeared at the front door before I even got out of my car.
“I had this feeling,” she said when she let me in. “I said to myself I bet Stephanie’s going to stop by. And here you are.”
“That’s amazing,” I said.
“It’s not amazing,” my mother called from the kitchen. “She’s been standing staring out the door for hours.”
“Well, you never know,” Grandma said.
Grandma Mazur is a slightly shrunken, slack-skinned, gray-haired version of my mother. She keeps her hair short and curled. She wears bright lipstick and white tennis shoes, and she’s one of only two women in America still wearing pastel-colored polyester pantsuits. She carries a purse that is big enough to hold her .45 long-barrel S&W.
“Did you already have lunch?” Grandma asked. “We got fresh olive loaf from Giovichinni’s if you want a sandwich. And we got some cookies from the Italian bakery.”
“Cookies,” I said, hanging my messenger bag off the back of a kitchen chair. “I had lunch with Lula.”
“The phone’s been ringing all day,” Grandma said, bringing the box of cookies to the table. “And we had a photographer from the paper take a picture of the front of the house. You’re famous. I wouldn’t be surprised if you got a call from Geraldo.”
My mother was furiously ironing a shirt.
“How long has she been ironing that shirt?” I asked Grandma.
“At least an hour,” Grandma said. “She started just after the photographer showed up.”
When my mother’s blood pressure goes into the red zone she irons. Thursday morning is her usual ironing day. If you see her ironing any other time it’s not a good sign.
“You ran over Eddie Gazarra’s cop car,” my mother said. “He’s married to your cousin Shirley. You grew up with Eddie. What were you thinking?”
“It was an accident!”
My mother pressed the iron into the shirt, and a cloud of steam rose off the ironing board. “His mother called me this morning. She’s all upset. She thinks you should be locked up in jail. She said you’re one of those crazy cop-hater people.”
“I wasn’t even driving the truck,” I said. “Lula was driving the truck, and she miscalculated the brakes.”
“It was stolen,” my mother said. “You stole an ice cream truck!”
I sat down and took a cookie from the box. “Actually Larry Virgil stole it. Lula and I sort of commandeered it.”
“You should marry Joseph and have a baby,” my mother said. “What are you waiting for?”
Good question. I didn’t know the answer. I ate cookies while I thought about it. After five cookies I still didn’t have an answer. It was one of many questions without answers.
“If it was me I’d marry Ranger,” Grandma said. “I go for those dark guys.”
My mother flicked a glance at the cabinet over the sink. This was where she hid her stash of whiskey. I was sure my mother was thinking it was so close and yet so far. Too early for a drink. There were rules to be followed in the Burg. One didn’t imbibe until four o’clock unless it was at a wake. Wake drinking began early in the morning. There were times when you wanted to kill someone just so you could have a Manhattan for breakfast.
“Ranger doesn’t want to marry me,” I said. “He has issues.”
