“He must have followed us from the office.”
“I didn't see him. And I was looking.”
“I didn't see him either.”
“He's good,” Lula said. “He might be someone to worry about.”
“HOW'S THE POT roast?” my mother wanted to know. “Is it too dry?”
“It's fine,” I told her. “Just like always.”
“I got the green bean casserole recipe from Rose Molinowski. It's made with mushroom soup and bread crumbs.”
“Whenever there's a wake or a christening, Rose always brings this casserole,” Grandma said. “It's her signature dish.”
My father looked up from his plate. “Signature dish?”
“I got that from the shopper's channel on TV. All the big designers got signature this and that.”
My father shook his head and bent lower over his pot roast.
Grandma helped herself to some of the casserole. “How's the manhunt going? You got any good leads on Fred yet?”
“Fred is a dead end. I've talked to his sons and his girlfriend. I've retraced his last steps. I've talked to Mabel. There's nothing. He's disappeared without a trace.”
My father muttered something that sounded a lot like “lucky bastard” and continued to eat.
My mother rolled her eyes.
And Grandma spooned in some beans. “We need one
of them psychics,” Grandma said. “I saw on television where you can call them up, and they know everything. They find dead people all the time. I saw a couple of them on a talk show, and they were saying how they help the police with these serial murder cases. I was watching that show, and I was thinking that if I was a serial murderer I'd chop the bodies up in little pieces so those psychics wouldn't have such an easy job of it. Or maybe I'd drain all the blood out of the body and collect it in a big bucket. Then I'd bury a chicken, and I'd take the victim's blood and make a trail to the chicken. Then the psychic wouldn't know what to make of it when the police dug up a chicken.” Grandma helped herself to the gravy boat and poured gravy over her pot roast. “Do you think that'd work?”
Everyone but Grandma paused with forks in midair.
“Well, I wouldn't bury a live chicken,” Grandma said.
No one had much to say after that, and I felt myself nodding off halfway through my second piece of cake.
“You look all done in,” Grandma said. “Guess getting blown up takes it out of you.”
“I didn't get much sleep last night.”
“Maybe you want to take a nap while your grandmother and I clean up,” my mother said. “You can use the guest room.”
Ordinarily, I'd excuse myself and go home early, but tonight Bunchy was sitting across the street, two houses down, in the Dodge. So leaving early didn't appeal to me. What appealed to me was to make Bunchy's night as long as possible.
My parents have three bedrooms. My grandma Mazur sleeps in my sister's room, and my room is used as a guest room. Of course, I'm the only guest who ever uses the guest room. All my parents' friends and family live within a five-?mile radius and have no reason to stay overnight. I also live within five miles, but I've been known to have the occasional disaster that sends me in search of temporary residence. So my bathrobe hangs in the guest room closet.
“Maybe just a short nap,” I said. “I'm really tired.”
THE SUN WAS slanting through the break in the curtains when I woke up. I had a moment of disorientation, wondering if I was late for school, and then realized I'd been out of school for a lot of years, and that I'd crawled into bed for a short nap and ended up sleeping through the night.
I rolled out of bed fully dressed and shuffled down to the kitchen. My mother was making vegetable soup, and my grandmother was sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, scrutinizing the obituaries.
Grandma looked up when I came in. “Weren't you at the garbage company yesterday, checking on Fred?”
I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat across from her. “Yep.”