Berry was the last to arrive at the breakfast table. She quietly slid onto a packing crate and poured a bowlful of cereal, being careful to avoid looking at Jake. She was practically senseless with embarrassment. She’d gone bonkers listening to him talk about soap. She couldn’t have felt more exposed if she’d come to the breakfast table naked. She’d told him her life story. Lord, she was such a boob. She kept her eyes trained on the cereal without really seeing it. She added milk and stirred.
Pow! A kernel of cereal flew past her ear. Pop, ping, pow. Her cereal was exploding!
A kernel bounced off Mrs. Dugan’s forehead. “I’ve been shot!” Mrs. Dugan cried. “Someone shot me in the forehead.”
Mrs. Fitz dived under the table. “You haven’t been shot, you old dunce. It’s the cereal.”
Jake jumped to his feet and clamped a dinner plate over the almost empty bowl.
“What is this stuff?” Berry asked, her eyes wide.
Jake cautiously removed the plate. The cereal was bloated with milk, making soft snuffling noises. “I don’t understand this. It never did this before. Maybe it was the way you were stirring it.” He took the box of cereal and Berry’s bowl and descended into the basement with them.
Mrs. Dugan shook her head. “This never happened when we lived in the Southside Hotel for Ladies.”
Mrs. Fitz picked cereal out of her hair. “Yeah, that place was boring. Filled with old people.” She shivered at the thought.
Miss Gaspich folded her napkin. “I like it here. I wish he hadn’t taken that cereal away. I wanted to try some.”
Berry stared at the cellar door, wondering what was down there. Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory? Finally her curiosity grew stronger than her embarrassment. She excused herself from the table and cautiously opened the basement door. “Jake?”
“Mmmm.”
“Can I come down? Will anything else explode?”
“Take your chances.”
Berry looked around the cluttered, well-lit room. Kites, model airplanes, wind socks, and bicycle wheels hung from the ceiling. The walls were lined with bottle-laden shelves and crowded bulletin boards. Countertops held robot innards, computer equipment, and sacks of rice, whole wheat, and corn. There were toys everywhere: decapitated dolls, fuzzy bears, motorized skateboards, boxes of puzzles. Jake sat at a massive oak desk, intently staring at a soggy particle of cereal speared on a long skewer. Berry moved behind him. “I feel like I’m visiting Gyro Gearloose.”
“Most of this stuff belongs to my sister’s kids. I’m the toy fixer. The trouble is they break them a lot faster than I can fix them.” He looked around the room. “Some of this is mine. The kites and planes and wind socks are mine.”
Berry looked sidewise at him. “You told me you didn’t have any toys.”
“There are all kinds of toys. These are little toys. I didn’t think we were talking about little toys.”
“So you have exploding cereal and a bunch of little toys. Are there any other surprises I should know about?”
“I almost never have surprises. My life is an open book.”
“Un-hunh.”
“Go ahead, ask me anything,” Jake said.
“Did you give me that exploding cereal on purpose?”
Jake feigned outrage. “Moi?”
Berry sat on a tricycle. “Okay, so go ahead and tell me. What’s this big plan you’ve got?”
Jake leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “We’re going to get married, buy a couple dogs, and have a whole bunch of kids. Maybe a hundred. Although I’m negotiable about the kids. One or two would be enough.”
“I don’t want to get married. Been there, done that.”
“Not ever?” Jake asked.
“Maybe someday, but not for years and years.”
“I don’t want to wait years and years. I’m pretty much ready to get married now. Today or tomorrow would be good.”
The man was insane, Berry thought. Fun… but insane.
“I have work to do. I don’t have all day to stand here and talk about marriage,” she told him. “I have to make pizzas. I have to wash the floor. I have to study for an art history test. And by the way, you’re a nutcase.”
“I’m not a nutcase,” Jake said. “I’ve met a lot of women and I’ve waited a long time for the right one to come along. And you’re the right one.”
“How can you be sure?” Berry asked. “How do you know?”
“How long do we have to discuss this?”
Berry looked at her watch. “Seven minutes.”
“Not nearly long enough,” he said. “You’re going to have to go with the short version. I know, because I just know.”
Mrs. Fitz spooned sauce on the pizza rounds laid out on the paddles, and Berry added green peppers, onions, and crumbled sausage. Six large pizzas, always the same, every day, for the lunch buffet at the Hill Top B &B.
“How did you come to live at the Southside Hotel for Ladies?” Berry asked.
“When my Edward died I couldn’t see living in our big house anymore, so I sold it and bought a racehorse.”
Berry froze in mid-pizza making. “What?”
“His name was King Barnaby Von Big Bucks. Didn’t seem like I could go wrong buying a horse named Von Big Bucks.” Mrs. Fitz sighed. “Just goes to show.”
“Why on earth did you buy a horse?”
“I took one of them senior citizen bus tours of big houses with gardens and such. And this one house was a horse farm and one thing led to another and I ended up selling my house and buying a horse.”
“Must have been some horse.”
“Yeah, he was a beauty.”
“What happened?”
“Turned out he was pretty, but he wasn’t real fast. I think that horse liked coming in last. I owned him with two other people and they wanted to send him to the glue factory, but I just couldn’t do that. So I bought them out with the rest of my house money and gave King Barnaby to some nice young couple that had a lot of land and wanted a horse as a pet.”
“And then you were broke?”
“Well, I didn’t have my nest egg anymore, but I had social security and some money from Edward’s pension. It was enough to pay for my apartment but not enough to buy one of the new condos. And what with the cost of living now, it’s hard to find another apartment I can afford.”
The door to the pizza shop opened and a rangy, scraggly-bearded kid strolled in. Berry assessed him at late teens. He was wearing a lumpy, wrinkled raincoat and a navy knit hat over brown, shoulder-length hair. It was mid-morning and not a lot of people came in for pizza midmorning.
“Can I help you?” Mrs. Fitz asked.
“Maybe,” he said.
His eyes darted around the room, taking in the ovens and the workstation and the three small tables with chairs for walk-in customers.
“We don’t have any pizzas for take-out made up yet,” Mrs. Fitz said. “But we’d be happy to take an order.”
The kid took a semiautomatic out of his raincoat pocket and pointed it at Mrs. Fitz. “How about you just empty your cash register,” he said.
Berry and Mrs. Fitz froze.
“Now!” he said.
Berry carefully moved to the cash register. “We haven’t got much money,” she said to him. “We just opened up.”
“Whatever,” the kid said. “Just hand it over.”
“Honestly,” Mrs. Fitz said to him. “Don’t you have anything better to do than to rob two women? You should be ashamed.”
“And you should be dead,” the kid said. “How old are you, anyway?”
Mrs. Fitz narrowed her eyes and gripped the sauce ladle. “I’m not too old to take care of you. You need to learn some manners.”