Читать книгу Whose Number Is Up, Anyway? - Stevi Mittman - Страница 9

Service men (or women) can make or break your project. Always investigate their qualifications, check their references, and let reputation guide you. Remember that when they finish a job is more important than when they start it, and you’ll have to live with the results for a long time.

—TipsFromTeddi.com

“This is a joke, right?”

My ex-husband, the bane of my existence, the pain in my butt, the rain on the parade of my life, the—well, you get the general idea—is standing with Steve when I get to L.I. Lanes in the morning.

Now, this morning has been bad enough already. Dana’s window will cost me almost two hundred dollars to fix. I want to have the boy’s parents pay for the repair, only Dana insists there is no boy. And no boy’s parents. She’s beyond adamant and she has no trouble looking me in the eye about it.

Jesse, who has probably never ratted on anyone, appears unwilling to start now and all I can get out of him is a shrug.

And I learned from Alyssa that Drew isn’t Daddy and that Daddy should live with us.

Which brings me back to Daddy, otherwise known as Rio the rat Gallo, standing in my place of business, chatting up the owner.

“Hey Teddi,” he says. “You see my new truck?” He points with his chin toward the bowling alley doors through which I’ve just come without noticing anything except that I have a message on my cell phone from Rita Kroll, that friend of my mother’s who is moving up to Woodbury.

Or down to Woodbury, in my mother’s eyes.

I bother looking—against my better instincts—and outside is a big white truck with the words Rio Grande Security written on the side. The O in Rio is a camera and a wire snakes its way through the words. It’s actually a nice logo. Not that I’d tell him so if my life depended on it.

I put two and two—and two—together and hope I’m not getting the right sum. There’s Rio’s name on the truck, the truck is here at L.I. Lanes and I think Steve casually mentioned something to me the other day about putting in some security cameras.

Steve asks if Rio and I know each other. I pray that Rio doesn’t answer “in the Biblical sense.”

Do I have to tell you?

I didn’t think so.

Before Steve gets ideas, I tell him that we were once married, a long, long time ago.

Rio corrects me and tells him we’ve only been divorced a couple of years.

“Rio’s putting in a system for me,” Steve says.

I bite my tongue so that “well then, I’m out of here,” can’t slip out. “Great,” I say instead, drawing out the word like I’m drowning.

“It’ll be like old times,” Rio says, throwing an arm around me and hugging me against his side. “Remember when we did Lys’s room? You doing all the painting and me wiring up her lights?”

“How could I forget?” I say with a weak smile. I doubt the fire department has forgotten either. And in the damp weather you can still faintly smell the smoke in her room.

He’s still hugging me against him when the phone on the counter rings and Steve turns to answer it.

“Please don’t blow this for me,” Rio whispers. “I gotta pay Carmine back for the truck and I’ve got—”

Carmine? He borrowed money from my mother’s old boyfriend to start his business? The old boyfriend who is so blatantly mafioso that he could give James Gandolfini lessons?

“Problem?” Steve asks, hanging up the phone.

I consider my options. I can either tell Steve how inept Rio is, how, when he tried to get naked pictures of me to sell to a girly magazine, billing me as Long Island’s Most Dangerous Decorator after poor Elise Meyers, my first client, got murdered, he didn’t know the camera had to be attached to anything. I could tell him that Rio and wires in the same vicinity can only lead to disaster, thereby lousing up his new business and any chance I might have to be free of his constant requests for financial assistance so that he can fulfill the ridiculous promises he makes to our children. And in the process come off like a bitchy, vindictive ex-wife—not unlike the one Steve is always complaining about.

Not so good. And that’s not even considering what my mother’s old boyfriend, Carmine De’Guisseppe, would have his goons do to Rio if he couldn’t make his payments.

Since I really don’t want to see my children’s father castrated…

Oh, wait.

Let me think.

No. Despite some sort of poetic justice for his misdeeds, I can see clearly that my only viable option is to oversee his job myself and simply check on his work after hours when no one else is around. Maybe with a little help from Drew, even. He knows surveillance inside and out, so to speak. And the idea of testing it with ourselves—in a pool hall, no less—just might appeal to him, too.

I GET MARK SET doing the steel squares, which I’ve tested to my satisfaction, and then attempt to convince Bobbie to spend a couple of hours helping me win Rita Kroll as a client before my appointment with the pool-table salesman.

Rita no doubt remembers me as the dumpy little girl around the corner who had no sense of style. The girl who wore black for six years running and even went goth before it had its moment in the sun.

Which is why it’s so important that Bobbie come with me. She exudes a certain air of confidence which, to be honest, I lack. It’s not that I don’t know I’m talented, professional and competent. It’s just that, from her perfectly-styled-and-colored hair (red with gold highlights this week) to her freshly-pedicured toes (with French tips, of course), Bobbie’s whole persona seems to shout that she knows what she’s doing. And if you have any desire to appear the same way, she’s who you’d hire.

Not that Bobbie knows a thing about decorating or anything beyond the right person to hire to acquire “the look.”

I’m the one with the degree.

Bobbie’s the one with panache.

We’re a good team.

While it takes me a good half hour and the promise that we can stop at DSW (Designer Shoe Warehouse) to look for Jimmy Choos—which I can guarantee won’t be there—on the way back, she does agree to go with me. At which point I remember that there is a message from Rita waiting for me on my cell phone.

Punching up the message, I listen to a tearful voice canceling our appointment. Great. I really can’t afford to lose clients, especially ones I don’t even have yet. Even if they are referrals from my mother and sure to be disasters.

I reach Rita to tell her that I’ve gotten her message. Okay, I admit that I thought about pretending I didn’t receive it and just showing up because it would be really hard for her to send me from her doorstep. But I don’t.

“It’s a bad time, Teddi dear,” she tells me.

I offer to rearrange my schedule and see her later in the week, if that would help.

It won’t. “It’s not that I’m avoiding you,” she says. “You know I’d do anything for your mother. It’s just…” She sniffs and I hear her blowing her nose before she continues. “I lost my brother last week. We just finished sitting shivah the day before yesterday. I really can’t think about decorating now.”

I make all the requisite noises, tell her I’m so sorry for her loss, that of course I understand, that whenever she’s ready to reschedule, just let me know.

“Call me next week,” she says, taking me by surprise. My mother must have really put the screws to her.

As for me, I’m relieved to have the extra time to put in at the alley without losing a potential customer.

And no, that does not mean I’m glad the woman’s brother died, for heaven’s sake. She’s a sweet old lady. Her brother was probably a hundred and two.

“Good,” Bobbie says when I tell her. “Then I’m off to get gorgeous shoes while the sale is still on.”

Mark clucks as Bobbie leaves. He’s up on a ladder and he asks me to hand him a few squares.

“A man is dead,” I say as I hold up the pieces of steel and he leans down to take them. “Doesn’t anybody care?”

“I don’t know, Teddi. Maybe they’re used to it. With you, there’s usually a body, beautiful.”

His eyes stray down my cleavage and because I’m reaching up and my hands are full there isn’t much I can do about it.

“Or maybe I should say, ‘With you, there’s usually a beautiful body.’”

Before I can tell him that teasing an old lady isn’t nice, someone sidles up from behind and reaches around me. “Want me to help you hold those?” a deep voice asks and I realize it’s Rio.

Ordinarily, Mark would think the remark was funny…it’s the kind he’d make. But he dislikes my ex-husband almost as much as I do, and almost as much as he dislikes Drew.

I take a hard step back, right on Rio’s instep, and get him in the ribs with my elbow, apologizing profusely as I do, claiming I didn’t realize he was there.

“Do give these to Mark,” I say, trying to hand him the steel sheets, but he’s busy looking for a chair or maybe a sympathetic witness.

THIS AFTERNOON, my little one, Alyssa, is going home with Jill Roseman. My big ones are meeting me at L.I. Lanes. Dana will be thrilled to see her dad. Jesse will be morose.

They will both be watching for signs that I might be softening toward their father—Dana hoping, Jesse dreading.

Before I head for the alley, I stop by Bobbie’s to pick up some carpet samples I left there. Under the pretext of not knowing where she’s put them, she drags me up to her bedroom, where she’s got several outfits laid out on her bed.

“Try this,” she says, holding her shortest skirt up in front of my jeans. “It’s stretch and it’ll go perfectly with my little strippy strappy Manolos.”

Looking down, I notice that—ta da—I’m already dressed. And I point this out to Bobbie, who looks me over and simply says, “Not.”

“Try the skirt,” she insists.

I remind her that I am going to work, and not as a streetwalker.

“Part of your work is attitude,” she tells me. I swear she and my mother have read and reread the same chapter of that Secret Handbook of Long Island Rules a hundred times. “And to exude attitude you’ve got to feel it—feel in charge. More than in charge. You’ve got to feel and project superiority. In this skirt and a pair of stilettos, you’re too good for the likes of your ex-husband and for decorating bowling alleys and for everything—except me, of course.”

She isn’t kidding.

“Try it on. See if it doesn’t make you feel like an authority.”

“On what?” I ask, slipping out of my jeans and holding the skirt up in front of my ratty underwear—which I really ought to replace if Drew Scoones is back in my life.

I can barely make myself put the skirt on, but I know that Bobbie won’t let me refuse it until I do. Meanwhile she roots around in the closet, no doubt looking for shoes I could break an ankle in.

“Perfect!” she shouts when she reemerges from the closet and takes a look at me. I look in the mirror, trying to see what she sees, while she straightens my shoulders before taking a step back. “What do you think?”

I stare at the woman in the mirror. “I think I’d never again be able to tell Dana any of her clothes were out of the question.”

“Maybe, but Rio will eat his two-timing, scum-sucking heart out. Here, you need these, too,” she says, throwing a pair of fishnet pantyhose at me. I don’t make any effort to catch them. “Don’t you want—”

No, I don’t. It’s been a long time since I cared what Rio Gallo thought about me. And while Bobbie fusses around, picking up piles of discarded clothes, I tell her as much. I have a job, I have kids, I have more important things to worry about.

“My, my,” Bobbie says, tsking when she looks at her watch. “Don’t you have to meet some salesman over at the Lanes? Where does the time go?”

I look at my watch. It’s a half hour later than the clock on her nightstand—the one I’ve been carefully watching—reads.

“I wonder where your jeans are,” she says. I look down and the carpet is completely devoid of any clothing—including mine. “I know they were here earlier.”

I tell her that this isn’t funny, that I’m late and that I can’t go to the alley looking like I want to have a tryst in one.

She offers to loan me a pair of her jeans, knowing that I couldn’t get them up higher than my knees, and I order her into her closet to get mine.

Instead, she comes out with high boots and a white shirt to wear with the little skirt.

“Couldn’t find them,” she says.

I look in the mirror. Another job well done by Bobbie Lyons, I think to myself. Not.

SO THIS IS HOW I come to be standing in L.I. Lanes in very high-heeled boots, a very short skirt, a blouse with very few buttons and a pair of very red cheeks.

“Wow,” Steve, standing behind the counter counting cash, says, and adds a whistle. Mark leans over on his ladder to see what has Rio’s tongue hanging out and nearly topples over.

“Is the pool-table salesman here yet?” I ask, feigning that superior attitude the skirt was supposed to give me.

“Back here,” Mark says, only his voice breaks and it sounds like he’s croaking. “With your kids,” he adds, like it’s a warning.

I walk carefully, because if I don’t, I’ll wind up showing even more leg, not to mention my underwear, when I fall flat on my face.

The pool-table salesman is facing me, leaning over the table, intent on his shot. His fingers make a bridge through which the cue goes back and forth, back and forth.

“Oh, God!” Dana, just coming in from the back door of the alley, says when she sees me. She looks quickly around the joint. Her eyes are wide, her jaw drops and out comes a very plaintive “Mo-om! What if my friends or someone who knows me, saw you in that?”

Which causes Jesse to look up and gasp, which makes the pool-table salesman glance away from his shot and wind up seeing me. That causes him to nearly rip the table with the cue, sending the cue ball over the rail, which hits me in the chest and nearly knocks me over.

All in the house that Jack built.

Mark hurries down his ladder, Rio comes running, no doubt to massage my wound, and the pool-table salesman rushes toward me telling me he can’t say he’s sorry enough. Only, with everyone coming at me so fast, I lose my balance on Bobbie’s idiotic shoes and stumble backward.

Steve, reaching out to catch me before I go down, winds up providing a soft landing as the two of us slip down the two steps and slide past a bunch of kids trying to figure out how to score a second spare in the settee area. We don’t stop until we’re halfway down the alley where, with Bobbie’s skirt around my waist, the heel of her left boot wedges in the gutter.

Dana dies on the spot. I wish I could, but everyone is making a fuss over me so I can’t just cry and run out of the bowling alley the way she does.

Jesse is staring and trying not to stare at the same time.

Rio’s holding up his new camera phone and I just know he’s snapping pictures.

And Mark is laughing his head off as he heads toward me, taking off his overshirt as he comes.

“You might wanna…” he says as he drops it in my lap.

“Wanna what?” I ask him. “Die?”

He helps me up, despite Steve’s offer to let me stay where I am as long as I’d like.

The pool-table salesman slicks back his hair and smiles at me. His eyes go up and down any parts of my body he hasn’t gotten a good enough look at. I can’t imagine what parts those could be.

“Don Pardol,” he says, offering me his hand.

Ignoring his outstretched hand I scoot past him to the ladies’ room, cursing Bobbie Lyons and her stupid shoes the entire way.

In the restroom, another area that needs redoing before the grand opening, I tug at my belt until it’s a skirt again, put Mark’s shirt on, grateful it comes down to my knees, and take a look at myself in the mirror.

I am a wreck, but things could be worse.

Oh, wait. They are.

Someone sticks her head into the ladies’ room. “Are you Teddi Bayer?”

I try pleading the fifth.

She tells me there’s a policeman outside who wants to talk to me.

Have you ever heard God laughing? I mean, yeah, it’s possible what I’m hearing is just thunder, but under the circumstances…

Drew is leaning up against a pole when I emerge. His hair is slightly wet, the shoulders on his jacket are sprinkled with rain. He looks like a commercial for a Jeep or Irish Spring.

He pushes himself off the post and tells me he caught Dana walking in the rain and gave her a lift home. Okay, it’s more like “that kid doesn’t have the sense to come in outta the rain. And stubborn? Had to nearly drag her ass into the car. Don’t know where she gets that from.”

And all the while he’s talking, he’s taking in my outfit.

“I can’t imagine what you did to piss her off,” he says and he’s measuring the height of my heels with his eyes while he talks. “Noticed your ex is here, too,” he adds.

“Everyone’s here but my mother and the press,” I tell him. And the way my luck is going, one or the other will be next.

Unlike the usually cocky Drew, he almost seems self-conscious, standing there—like he’s trying to be casual, but knows he isn’t pulling it off. “So, you want to maybe grab something to eat when you’re done here?” he asks me.

Actually, he asks my legs.

I tell him what I really need is for him to help me check over Rio’s work after hours. He tells my legs that sounds okay and then his cell rings.

“Gotta run,” he says, and he tilts his head slightly at the hem of my skirt. “She’s probably just jealous,” he says over his shoulder as he leaves.

That was a compliment, I think. I’m not flattered and the last thing I want is for my thirteen year-old to feel in competition with me.

But at least I know she’s home and safe, even if she is pissed.

Not something I can worry about now, I figure, so I go back to the billiards area, where Don is anxious to show me how to play pool.

“Your son’s got a natural aptitude,” he tells me, being careful to keep his eyes averted when he thinks I’m looking. Rio, who is supposed to be working on the wiring for the security system, puffs out his chest, as though hanging around in a pool hall and being a pool shark is the avocation he had in mind for our son.

It might be.

“Dad’s getting me my own stick,” Jesse says as he sinks three balls in a row. Gently, Don corrects him and calls it a cue. I call it a bribe and can see the writing on the wall—Rio earning some money means that he’ll be buying the kids’ favors before his paycheck even makes it into his pocket.

While Jesse impresses his father and a bunch of boys who have gathered around to watch, I explain to Don that I need the new tables, four of them, in two weeks. He promises that he can deliver.

Two of the boys whistle as Jesse hits the white ball into the red one, causing it to hit the yellow one into the pocket.

“Combination shot,” Don says. “Boy’s good. How long has he been playing?”

Jesse looks at his watch.

“No,” Don says. “Really.”

Jesse looks guiltily at me. “Dad and I have played a few times,” he says.

This, of course, is news to me. All I’ve heard is how much he hates his father.

“How much would a pool table for the house cost?” I ask Don. If Jesse is going to play pool, I figure it’s better if I know where and with whom. Jesse’s eyes light up like it’s Christmas and immediately I regret asking in front of him.

Don tells me that I can get “junk” for under a thousand, or a good one for a little over that.

“Just sold a gorgeous antique one for seventeen big ones,” he tells me. “But the guy froze to death before the deal was done. How’s that for rotten luck? Almost sixty degrees out and a guy freezes to death.”

“Seventeen thousand?” Rio asks, and his voice cracks. He’s standing on a ladder with a bunch of wires in his hands and I’m hoping he knows what to do with half of them. “You can get that much for a pool table?”

“Nope,” Don says, “for a billiards table.”

“What’s the difference?” Jesse asks him.

“About ten grand,” Don says with a laugh.

“The man who froze to death,” I say, wondering out loud. “His name didn’t happen to be Joey, did it?”

Don looks at me and nods. “It sure did.”