“Not really,” Bonnie says. “It’s pretty basic.” But she flushes with pleasure. “If you dictate the core letter, I’ll keyboard it.”
“Excellent idea. Just let me think how I want to word it while I see what I can do about poor Roddy’s hands.”
“His arthritis is pretty bad, isn’t it?”
“Oh, it comes and goes,” Em says. And smiles.
Roddy is lying on their bed with his gnarled hands clasped on his chest. She doesn’t like seeing him that way; it’s how he’d look in his coffin. But dead men don’t smile the way he’s smiling at her. He is still such a charmer. She closes the bedroom door and goes to her vanity. From it she takes an unlabeled jar.
“I’m thinking we should scratch her from the list,” Roddy says as she returns to the bed and sits beside him.
“Someone has nevertheless been fascinated by firm breasts and a slim waist,” Em says, unscrewing the lid of the jar. “Not to mention those long legs.” Inside the jar is a yellow jelly-like substance. There wasn’t a great deal of fat on the late Peter Steinman, but they harvested what there was.
“Of course she’s good-looking,” Roddy says impatiently, “but it’s not that. We’ve never taken someone we’ve had a close association with. It’s dangerous.”
“I worked in the same department as Jorge Castro,” she points out. “In fact, I was questioned.” She widens her eyes. “Also, you bowled in that league, the Golden Oldies…”
“Not these days.” He lifts his hands. “As for you being questioned about Castro, everyone in your department was. It was routine. This might not be the same. She works in our house.”
This, of course, is true. Emily called the girl on Boxing Day and offered her part-time employment, updating her computer to make her correspondence easier, also to create a spreadsheet containing the names of the current Writer’s Workshop applicants.
Em swipes a finger into the yellow substance which lined Peter Steinman’s abdomen not all that long ago. “Hold ’em out, sweetie.”
Roddy holds out his hands, the fingers slightly twisted, the knuckles more than slightly swollen. “Easy, easy.”
“Just a little pain, then sweet relief,” she says, and begins coating his fingers with the lotion, paying particular attention to the knuckles. Several times he grimaces and sucks in breath, making a snakelike hissing.
“Now flex,” she says.
He closes his hands slowly. “Better.”
“Of course.”
“A bit more, please.”
“There isn’t much left, hon.”
“Just a little.”
She swipes her finger again, creating a clear glass comma at the bottom of the jar. She transfers the lotion to Roddy’s left palm and he begins rubbing it into his fingers, now flexing them almost naturally.
“Her employment is short-term,” Emily says, “and she understands that. She’ll be back at the library full-time as soon as the extended Christmas break ends and the spring semester begins. And of course she’ll be working on her writing, with my encouragement.”
“Is she any good?”
“I haven’t seen any yet, but guessing by the subject matter, I would say not.”
“The subject matter being?”
She leans close and whispers, “Vampires in love.”
Rodney actually giggles.
“But in the course of our conversations, I’ve also learned a great deal about her, and it’s all good. She’s quits with her boyfriend, and even though she instigated the breakup, it’s still painful to her. She wonders if there’s something wrong with her, a character flaw, that makes her unable to participate in a stable relationship.”
Roddy scoffs. “Based on what she’s told me—yes, she does talk to me—the boyfriend, this Tom, was the very definition of a loser. She’s well rid of him, I’d say.”
“I’m sure you’re right, but this is about how she feels and what it means to us. She also has a relationship with her mother that I’d describe as fraught. Not at all uncommon, young women and their mothers often butt heads, but also good for us. Do you know what she said to me? ‘My mother is a controlling bitch, but I love her.’ Also… keep rubbing those hands, dear, work that stuff deep into the joints… also, the head librarian at the Reynolds, name of Conroy, has fixed upon our Bonnie. According to her, he has a bad case of Roman hands and Russian fingers.”
Roddy gives a brief cackle. “Haven’t heard that one in awhile.”
“If we wait until October or November, as we usually do, she will have left our employment—our part-time, seasonal employment—nine or even ten months before. If we’re questioned, and I suppose we might be, we can tell the absolute truth.” Em ticks off the points on her fingers, which are almost as slim as they were when she was a girl wearing shin-length skirts and bobby sox. “Unhappy breakup with boyfriend. A need to escape mother’s influence. Best of all, sexual harassment in the workplace. You see how good all this is? How she might just decide to up stakes and leave?”
“I suppose she might,” he says. “When you put it like that.”
“And we know her routine. She always takes the same route from the library.” She pauses, then continues in a lower voice. “I know you like looking at her breasts. I don’t mind.”
“My father used to say a man on a diet can still read a menu. So yes, I’ve looked. She has what my students—the male ones—would call a fine rack.”
“Aesthetic issues aside, those breasts amount to almost four per cent of her body fat.” She holds up the almost empty jar. “That’s a lot of arthritis relief, honeybun. Not to mention my sciatica.” She screws on the lid. “So. Have I convinced you?”
He flexes his fingers rapidly, and without apparent pain. “Let’s say you’ve given me food for thought.”
“Good. Now give me a kiss. I have to go downstairs and resume pretending to be a computer illiterate. And you have a riot to watch.”
July 23, 2021
Jerome calls Holly at quarter past six from outside the Steinman house and tells her of his adventures. He says he had to take Vera to the hospital himself, because all of the Kiner ambulances, plus those from the city’s Emergency Services Department, were on Covid calls. He carried her to his car, wedged her into the passenger bucket seat, buckled her up, and drove to the hospital as fast as he dared.
“I rolled down the window, thinking the fresh air might revive her a little. I don’t know if it worked, she was still pretty soupy when we got there, but it saved me the expense of getting the Mustang steam cleaned. She vomited twice on the way, but down the side. Which will wash off. That stink is a lot harder to get off the carpeting.”
He tells Holly that Vera also vomited twice while she was seizing. “I got her on her side before she spewed the second time. Which was good because it cleared her airway, but at first she wasn’t breathing. That scared the crap out of me. I gave her mouth-to-mouth. She might have started again on her own, but I was afraid she might not.”
“You probably saved her life.”
Jerome laughs. To Holly it sounds shaky. “I don’t know about that, but I’ve rinsed my mouth out half a dozen times since and I can still taste gin-flavored puke. When I got to her house she said I could take off my mask, she’d had Covid and was chock-full of antibodies. I hope she was right. I don’t know if even a double dose of Pfizer would stand up to that kind of soul kiss.”
“Why are you still there? Didn’t they keep her overnight?”
“Are you kidding? There’s not a single available bed in that place. There was a car-crash guy lying in the hall, moaning and covered with blood.”