‘The guy’s a dickwad,’ she snarled.
‘Richard! His name is Richard. Richard Kent.’ Christie blushed to her white roots. ‘But he prefers that I call him Dickie.’ She scowled darkly and began tapping keys, but, judging from the mumbled curses, without much success at restoring the connection.
‘I’ll bet he does,’ Angela muttered under her breath, just loud enough, I calculated, for her mother-in-law to hear. ‘Little Dickie Dickhead.’
Christie bristled. ‘You wouldn’t know true love if it came up and bit you on the butt, Miss Smarty Pants.’ She gestured at the monitor where a beefcake photo of her true love shirtless and flexing his tats was displayed, as big as a screensaver. A blue angel wrapped its wings around Dickie’s right bicep and rays of light shot toward his shoulder where gothic letters spelled out, ‘St Michael the Archangle Defend Me in Battle.’
Angie frowned at the screen. ‘Where is spellcheck when you really need it?’
I stifled a laugh.
‘You just don’t believe that somebody this handsome could want me,’ Christie said.
I suspected Angie’s mother-in-law didn’t have both oars in the water. ‘What do you suppose he does see in her?’ I whispered. ‘Not to cast aspersions on Bill’s Mom, Angie, but she’s got to be fifty years that’s guy’s senior.’
‘And she keeps her teeth in a glass of water by the bed.’ Angie sighed. ‘May-December romance, my foot!’ she hooted. ‘January-December is more like it.’
‘Nobody thought anything of it when Anna Nicole Smith married that oil baron,’ her mother-in-law chimed in. ‘And he was in his nineties. You’re a sexist, Angela, pure and simple.’
‘And look how well that relationship worked out,’ Naddie reminded us. ‘There hadn’t been so much gold digging since 1849. And, in case you’ve forgotten, everyone ended up dead.’
‘The French have a good rule for judging appropriate relationships,’ I said, dredging up from the spot in my brain where arcane facts were stored. ‘Half your age plus seven.’
Angie furrowed her brow, working it out. ‘Mom’s eighty-four and Dickie-boy is thirty-two. So half her age is forty-two, add seven and you get forty-nine. In seventeen years, he’ll be forty-nine, at which time Mom will be one-hundred-and-eleven.’ She rolled her eyes.
Higher math had never been my friend. Just trying to follow along with Angie’s lightning-speed calculations made my head explode. ‘I’ll take your word for it,’ I told her with a grin.
‘And it’s none of your beeswax, anyway,’ Angie’s mother-in-law grumbled, pounding on the keyboard with a balled fist as if trying to beat it into submission.
I drew Angie aside, leaned close to her ear and whispered, ‘Dickie can’t get into your mother-in-law’s bank account, can he?’
‘No, thank God. We sold the house and invested the proceeds. She has life interest in a trust which amounts to about a thousand dollars a month. She gets a bit of spending money for bingo, movies, trips to the museum, things like that, but her capital is all sewn up. There’s no way Dickie could clean her out.’
‘That’s a relief.’ I had a sudden thought. ‘Where’s Dickie Skyping from, anyway?’
‘He says he’s in Afghanistan.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘He claims he’s an army vet, working for a government contractor, but who knows. I can see that he’s Skyping from an office – a room with bookshelves, anyway – but he could be anywhere, really.’ Angie clutched her lightweight sweater, drew it more closely around her and shivered. ‘I hope he’s telling the truth about being in Kandahar,’ she said. ‘That’s far enough away for comfort. But what if he’s not? What if he comes calling? I have nightmares about that.’
‘Is he an American?’ Naddie wanted to know.
Lips slightly parted, Angie stared. ‘Except for the atrocious grammar in his emails, his English is perfect. I sort of assumed he was. Why?’
I knew where Naddie was headed. ‘What if he’s after a green card?’ I said.
Angie’s eyes grew wide, then narrowed. ‘Thanks, Hannah. Dickie-boy as my father-in-law, grandfather to my children. I know I shall sleep more soundly just thinking about that.’
I snaked an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. ‘Sorry, Angie. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
Angie stared daggers at her mother-in-law. ‘The way I feel right now, Dickie’s welcome to her. False teeth, Depends, and that horrible little dog, too.’
FOUR
‘“Most people think that senior food is like cafeteria dining,” said Filomena Buccho, catering services manager at Calvert Colony, Anne Arundel County’s new fifty million dollar waterfront retirement community. ‘We give our residents a true four-star dining experience. We offer menus to suit every taste, from steak and potatoes to carpaccio of smoked beef with marinated aubergine, prepared by Raniero, our master chef, who received his training at the Culinary Institute of America.”’
Annapolis Gazette, July 5, 2013, Section B, p. 1.
In the days of tall ships and iron men, sailors went off to sea carrying hardtack and a jug of rum. When I deposited Paul at the Naval Academy sailing center on Wednesday he had a carton of power bars and two six-packs of designer water crammed into his sea bag. But farewell kisses hadn’t changed much over the centuries. Like wives and sweethearts long years before me, I planted a good one on my husband, holding him close and making it last, until we both had to come up for air.
‘Keep your phone on?’ I said as he hugged me one more time.
‘Promise.’
‘Don’t forget the cooler,’ I nagged cheerfully. ‘I didn’t spend a week freezing casseroles for the mids just to have you leave them thawing on the dock.’
‘Plebe detail!’ he called, waving to a firstie who seemed to be in charge. Seconds later the cooler had been whisked away by an underclassman, vanishing below decks.
As one of the coaches for the Naval Academy’s varsity offshore sailing team, Paul was heading up to New York City aboard Resolute, one of the Navy 44s participating in the annual Around Long Island Regatta. ‘Take care, you,’ I said as he stepped aboard the sailboat.
‘You, too, Hannah. And no dead bodies, OK?’
I shrugged. ‘Naddie is threatening to rope me into volunteering at Blackwalnut Hall. That should keep me out of trouble and off the streets.’
‘Hah! The last time you two were together…’ He let the thought go. ‘Two peas in a pod, if you ask me, but give her my love,’ Paul said as the midshipmen began to untie the lines that secured the vessel to the dock.
I stood by as Resolute eased out of her slip under power and turned, heading east down the Severn River. The crew hoisted the main and sailed from the mouth of the river and into the bay. Depending on the weather, I might not see Paul again for weeks.
He was right about Naddie and me, I thought with some amusement as I watched the young sailors haul up and set the jib, the grinders and tailers working the winches like madmen in the brisk breeze. Before our last little adventure was over, I’d managed to get myself and Naddie locked up in a posh wine cellar by a couple of thugs. Paul had been off sailing when that caper began, too. No wonder he worried.
Resolute’s enormous sails gradually receded into the distance. I waited until they were a speck of white on the horizon before returning to the parking lot where I’d left my car.
I’d arranged to meet my erstwhile partner in crime for an early lunch at Blackwalnut Hall. When I arrived, the lounge was hopping. I’d clearly walked into the middle of a book club discussion. Six women sat in a conversational grouping around a square table littered with coffee cups and plates – licked clean of all but telltale crumbs – three well-thumbed paperback copies of McHenry’s The Kitchen Daughter and two Kindles. A chess game was in progress at a table set into a window nook, and another pair of residents sat in overstuffed chairs that flanked the fireplace, that – in deference to summer – had been filled, not with firewood, but with a pyramid of colorful glass balls.