“Mmmph.” Her husband made a fist and hammered at the ice inside the freezer. With a satisfied grunt, he wrestled a plastic bag free. Inside, barely discernible through a coating of frost, were breaded chicken fillets. “Explain it to me again.”
“Well, the day before the party, when Jan and Rufus went over to Callahan’s, he’d made a salad.” Plink, plonk. “He’s quite a gourmet, you know. Anyway, he was raving about this salad freshener, and how it keeps the lettuce from wilting. Jan was interested, since their party was the next day. He gave her his bottle. Jan agreed that it might offend Mrs. Reiss, so she added it herself. Of course, it was full of live staph.”
“So why didn’t they get sick on Saturday?” Plato dumped the bag’s contents into a bowl and placed it inside the microwave. “For that matter, why didn’t I get sick? I had salad Sunday.”
“Yes, but staph needs something to grow on. Crab Louis is a sauce over a base of lettuce.” Plink-beep. “It grew in the mayonnaise of the crab Louis, but not in the ordinary salad.”
He opened the microwave, turned the bowl, then closed it again. “So how did Callahan know what crab Louis contained? And how could he be sure they were serving it?”
“Silly,” she chided him. “He’s a gourmand. And in case you haven’t noticed, that dish is Mrs. Reiss’s specialty. She’s made it for the hospital appreciation dinner for years now.”
“No. I hadn’t noticed,” Plato pouted. “If you’ll recall, I didn’t have any. I just had salad.”
“Uh-huh.” Cal stretched her arm, patted her husband’s ample waistline. “Salad and prime rib — don’t act so shocked. It’s my job to notice things.”
“Well, fine, Sherlock. Just fine.” Plato couldn’t think of a better rejoinder until he recalled his own bit of deductive genius. “Going back over the case today, I figured something out. About Felicia.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, she must have realized that she and Rufus were the sickest. And she must have wondered about it.” Plato gave a satisfied smile. “See, she wasn’t saying ‘Jan’ at all when she died. She was saying ‘ginger.’ ”
“Good work,” Cal praised. “Well, aren’t you going to put that in your report?”
She hesitated, then pointed at one of the sheets. “It already is in. On page four.”
“Oh.”
“Cheer up, honey. At least you’re a better cook than I am.”
She was right. The chicken smelled wonderful. Plato pulled the bowl from the oven again. Inside, the breaded fillets floated in a bath of melted frost.
“Chicken soup,” he announced.
“Really? I’m famished!” She tore the last sheet from her typewriter, peered at the concoction. The breading had separated from most of the pieces, leaving a crusty scum on the surface of the water.
She squeezed his shoulder gently.
“We haven’t saved enough money for a vacation yet.” Cal smiled at her husband. “But I think we can afford a new microwave.”
A Little Bit of a Jigsaw Puzzle
by Pauline C. Smith
Mama never liked me very much. Mostly, I suppose, because with my birth she became a mother, and she certainly didn’t care much about being a mother. Anyway, she never tried it again. Then, when I had the nerve to grow up and have a couple of kids of my own, making her a grandmother, she liked me even less.
Mama, you see, always thought of herself as a winsomely young and frolicsome lass, which Papa, who was almost twenty years older, enthusiastically fostered by calling her “Little Bit” and never allowing a whit of sadness or responsibility to come her way until he died this spring, and he certainly couldn’t help that.
“Oh, hell,” moaned Jeff when we got the news. “She’ll probably have to come here and live with us.”
I was too busy packing a bag and telling the kids, Steve, fourteen, and Carolyn, twelve, to take care of their father and Jeff to take care of the kids to think about the dire probability until I was out on the freeway. Then I thought about it during every one of those three hundred and fifty miles, all through the funeral, and afterward.
When I suggested the new living arrangement to Mama, she stood there, her pointy toes and very high heels solidly dug into her Persian rug in her plush living room, surrounded by her majolica and porcelains, and said in her little-girl treble that she would do very well right where she was, and I realized that now I’d have to worry about her long distance instead of close up.
“But, Mama, not all alone,” I cried.
She could get along great, Mama said, standing there in all her five foot, ninety-eight pounds of bleached blonde black-veiled glory, ticking off on her gloved fingers her pillars of strength: Mr. Merrick to send her monthly check, Joe Gomez to mow her lawn, and Mrs. Herter to flick a dustcloth over the house twice a week. She didn’t even want any help in selling the car, a venerable Cadillac she couldn’t drive; as a matter of fact, she didn’t think she’d sell it at all.
“Why not?” I screamed faintly, and she informed me, with great dignity, that she just might learn to drive it, so I screamed again.
“Now why don’t you run along, Margaret,” she directed me. “Run along to your husband and children...” This right after the funeral! I had spent only two nights and a day and a half at the side of my bereaved mother in mourning for my deceased father! What could I do? I ran along.
Before I ran very far, though, I stopped at the office of Mr. Merrick, who said with a banker’s smile that Mama was in fine shape financially, which was all that mattered to him. It was the same with Mrs. Herter, who considered any widow with a roof over her head a lucky widow indeed, and Joe Gomez promised to mow and fertilize weekly.
Even Jeff, when I arrived home shattered, wondered what all the flak was about. “Sounds to me as if the old girl is taking it very well,” he said in his ad man’s hearty we’ll run her up the flagpole and see if she flies voice.
So I, feeling this genetic responsibility for a wisp of sixty-one-year-old girlhood who still wore pointy stilt-heeled pumps and pointy padded bras, was the only one concerned. “She’s always had someone to take care of her,” I worried.
“It’s time, then, she took care of herself,” said Jeff.
“But she doesn’t know how,” I agonized.
Jeff laughed as he said, “She knows how to get what she wants.”
It turned out, I guess, that we were both right.
Since Mama was the I-won’t-call-you, you-call-me type, I called every week, and our shortwinded telephone conversations went about like this:
Me: “How are you, Mama?”
Mama: “Just fine, dear,” in her tinkling voice.
Me: “Is Mrs. Herter doing her job?”
Mama: “Yes, dear.”
Me: “Is Joe Gomez mowing the lawn?”
Mama: “Yes, dear,” succinct and uninformative until a couple of months after Papa’s death when she let drop a surprising bit of news: “I am learning to drive the car.”
“Mama!” I screamed. “Who is teaching you?”
“Why, a young man from the driving school,” she said.
I told Jeff, “She’s too old to learn to drive,” and he said he’d heard of women older than she who learned to drive, and I said I thought I ought to go down there and see what was going on, and he told me not to be a fool, that Mama was doing her thing and she not only wouldn’t like interference, she wouldn’t stand for it.
I figured he was right, knowing Mama, and knowing how she didn’t like me much anyway.
Our telephone exchanges became a bit more lively with the driving lessons, which she took daily. “How are you getting along?” I asked. “Oh, fine,” she said, and after a couple of months of this, I asked her if she wasn’t about ready to take her driver’s test.