“Oh, you’re joining us? That’s great.”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Dr. Kavorkjan is amazing. He’ll make you look and feel at least a decade younger.” She arched an eyebrow. “Which, in your case, will make you look like a teenager again.”
Odelia laughed. She liked this friend of Opal. She was funny.
“Have you seen Hank?” Gran asked me.
I shook my head. “I’m afraid I haven’t seen him since yesterday morning, Gran,” I said.
“He didn’t come home last night,” Gran explained, looking pained. “And he’s not answering my calls.”
“He probably hit the town hard last night and is still out partying,” I suggested.
“Possibly,” she allowed, “but at least he could pick up the damn phone.”
“Or he could have been hit by a car or been killed in a mugging,” said Dooley.
Gran frowned at him. “Not helping, Dooley! Not helping!” she said, and walked off in the direction of the main house, presumably to have breakfast. Or to pester more people in her endeavor to find her lost boy toy.
The four of us were seated on a bench that had been placed in front of the guesthouse. It was a great spot to watch the world go by, and to keep an eye both on the goings-on at the guesthouse, and the main house. In other words: the perfect cat spot.
“Poor Gran,” said Harriet. “She just got her boy toy and now she lost him again.”
“That’s what happens with boy toys,” said Brutus. “Now you see them, now you don’t.”
“Is he a real boy?” asked Dooley. “Or is he a real toy?”
“He’s a real person, if that’s what you’re asking,” said Harriet, a little snappishly.
“But why do they call him a toy if he’s a boy?”
“Oh, Dooley,” said Harriet, who has a lot less patience than I have when dealing with Dooley’s tendency to ask a lot of difficult questions.
“I’ll bet he’s gone off to become an actor,” said Brutus. “This town is contagious that way. Anyone who comes here catches the acting bug within hours of their arrival. Maybe they came here to be an accountant or a plumber or a ballerina but soon after they get into town they all switch careers and become wannabe actors instead. I guess it’s something in the air—or the water.”
I’d never heard Brutus turn philosophical like this before, and we all stared at him in surprise.
“What?” he said. “I have deep thoughts, too, you know.”
“I think it’s because you were cloned, Brutus,” said Dooley. “I’ll bet the original Brutus never had deep thoughts.”
“And how would you know?” said Brutus a little brusquely. “You probably never had a deep thought in your life, not the original Dooley, and definitely not this carbon copy.”
“That’s a mean thing to say, Brutus,” said Harriet. “Apologize to Dooley.”
“I’m not going to apologize for telling an obvious truth.”
“He’s right, you know,” said Dooley. “I never have deep thoughts.”
“That’s simply not true, Dooley,” I said. “You have deep thoughts all the time.”
“Give me one example,” Brutus said. “One example and I’ll happily apologize.”
“Um… well, like last night, for instance, when Dooley said humans can change colors just like chameleons. I thought that was very deep.”
“That wasn’t deep,” said Brutus. “He got that from watching the Discovery Channel.”
“It was deep,” said Harriet. “Now apologize to Dooley.”
“Never!”
“Or how you figured out that Brutus is cloned, because now he has deep thoughts and the old Brutus probably didn’t have deep thoughts to save his life,” I continued.
“Max,” Brutus said with a hint of menace in his voice.
“Brutus!” Harriet snapped, and directed a steely glance at her mate.
“Oh, all right,” said Brutus, rolling his eyes. “I’m sorry, buddy. I’m feeling a little grumpy this morning. All this talk about clones and cloning has got me on edge.”
“But why, Brutus?” asked Dooley. “Why are you on edge?”
“Don’t you see? Soon we’ll get to meet our original selves, and discover that we are just a bunch of carbon copies. Doesn’t that make you feel anxious?”
“No, why?”
“I think I see what you mean, Brutus,” I said. “If we are merely carbon copies of our original selves, it kinda makes you wonder if we’re as screwed up as Prunella.”
“Exactly! Maybe we’re all as nuts as she is, and we simply don’t know it.”
It gave us food for thought, and when Prunella came traipsing up to us, and suddenly halted in her tracks and asked, “Who are you, and why are you trespassing on my territory?” the four of us shared a look of horror, and promptly burst into loud laments.
“I don’t want to be a clone, Max!” Dooley howled.
“Me neither, Dooley!” I cried.
“I’m nuts. I’m a nutcase!” Brutus bawled.
“I knew it,” Harriet sniffed. “I knew there was something wrong with me!”
“Oh, don’t cry, strangers,” said Prunella. “Eat a banana. You’ll feel much better.”
She was probably surprised that her words merely made those four strangers cry even harder. It’s tough having to look in the mirror and realize you’re a little screwy.
Chapter 23
Immediately after breakfast, the entire company departed for Hollywood Boulevard, where the beauty salon and spa that counted Opal and Marilyn amongst its patrons was located.
In the limo, only women were present: Opal, Marilyn, Odelia, Gran and Marge. Tex had been left to his own devices, though Odelia was pretty sure he wouldn’t be bored. Five cats were also present and accounted for. Prunella usually got a special treatment while her human got a special treatment, and she loved it, Opal assured them, and so would Odelia’s cats. She didn’t specify what this special treatment entailed, only that it was, well, special.
Opal was in excellent spirits, and had decided to forget about the harrowing events of the previous day and to enjoy this day out with the girls, as she called it, and have fun!
“So how long have you two known each other?” asked Marge, curious about the special bond between the two friends.
“Oh, how long, Marilyn?”
“Feels like a hundred years,” said Marilyn, checking out a spot on her left hand.
“Thirty, thirty-one years? We were colleagues at our first-ever job. A local news network in Tennessee. That’s where we met.”
“I was the weather girl,” said Marilyn, “and Opal had just been hired as a reporter to cover such fascinating and world-shaking events as the local bridal show.”
“Or the pumpkin patch run,” said Opal with a deep chuckle.
“We bonded over our mutual lack of a decent paycheck.”
“And the way we were treated by the men in that place.”
“It was a real boy’s club,” Marilyn confirmed. “The women were window dressing.”
“The manager used to call us out for not showing enough cleavage.”
“Can you imagine? Doing the weather forecast in a low-cut top? I felt like an idiot. And all of my family watching every day, and telling me I looked like a painted tart!”
“Not nearly tartly enough, according to the manager,” said Opal.
“Oh, those were the days.”
“And look how far you’ve come!” said Marge.
“Yeah, we did good,” said Opal.
“You did a little better than me,” said Marilyn.
“Oh, shush. You can’t complain, Marilyn. You’ve got a top job at a top network. The kind of job only a guy would have landed thirty years ago.”
“Thirty? How about fifteen years ago—ten, even.”
“We broke through that ol’ glass ceiling all right.”
“And no low-cut tops required!”