Iced Tea (2 page)

“Just because you think about something doesn’t make it happen Cara.
 
The more I think about it, the more I don’t believe in that crap.”

“Doesn’t matter.
 
If you chose not to believe in blue, blue would still be out there.
 
Unless I missed the memo, it isn’t just your reality that we are living in.”

“Don’t start.”

“I’m not starting anything.
 
All I’m saying is that if you’re going to manifest something for me, make it winning the lottery, not some whacked out cop looking for me.”

“I’m gonna get out of here.
 
I have a bunch of errands to run.
 
I haven’t been at work for a while, and I need to get back into going to work every day mode.
 
I’m going to do a full afternoon at the salon.
 
You want to come?”

“No thanks.
 
They wouldn’t know where to start.
 
I’m more a home-based beauty person.
 
I prefer to do my own pedicure and stuff.”

“You can’t give yourself a proper facial.
 
My treat.”

“I appreciate it, but I’m gonna pass.
 
I’m going to take flowers out to the cemetery, do some grocery shopping, fix a nice dinner, and hang out here with AJ tonight.”

“Suit yourself.”

“Teagan, I really appreciate all the help you’ve given me trying to get me started on a new career, but I ate up all your vacation time.
 
I’m sorry about that part, although having you around has been a good thing.
 
Is there anything I can do for you, to help you get back to work, make that whole thing easier?”

“Nope, I’m good.
 
It was nice to get away from the office.
 
If you hadn’t kept me busy, I’d probably have gone back to work a week ago.
 
That would have been a bad thing, on several levels.
 
As it is, I still have lots more time coming to me, so I might be back to play sooner than you think.”

With that, Teagan was out the door.

TWO

I decided to drive over to Bernie’s house and pick some of her flowers instead of buying them at the store.
 
I think Bernie would like that.
 
My sister Troya is living in the house now, so I didn’t need to call for permission or anything.

I drove up to the little house, my sister’s car nowhere to be found.
 
Knowing Troya, she wouldn’t have it in the garage, because the garage would be full of stuff she hasn’t unpacked yet.
 
Troya is a staging person and it has only gotten worse since she started nursing school.
 
I’m pretty sure she’s using the garage as a triage zone, sorting through her belongings, deciding which should be attended to first.

I leaned over to grab my scissors out of the glove box.
 
What does it say about me that I carry a pair of scissors in my glove box?
 
I guess it says I have a history of needing scissors in my car.
 
Mostly for wrapping last-second gifts on the way to a party.
 
Being that I am normally very organized, the whole last minute gift thing is an exception, not an eccentricity.
 

I understand it would appear to most people who know me that I’d be the kind of person who would have the gift shopping and wrapping done well in advance of the actual gift-giving event.
 
I’ve had this conversation with Teagan, more than once.
 
The reason I end up wrapping gifts at the last second is that I enjoy finding very personalized gifts for the people I care about, and there are times those gifts come to your attention when they are least expected.
 

A stuffed church mouse for my nephew.
 
You can always tell a church mouse from a regular mouse, their arms are slightly longer, so they can fold their hands in prayer, and they have teeny tiny calluses on their knees from kneeling a lot.
 
That was a well-planned gift and sat in my house for a while.

Another time it was a hooker for a 16-year-old male friend of the family.
 
You should have seen the look on his mother’s face when I told the kid that I’d paid for a hooker since he was officially on his way to man-dom.
 
I guess it says something about me that his mother panicked for just a second.
 
A hooker is fishing tackle in this case.
 
I saw the package, thought that it was the perfect gift, and wrapped it up in a bigger box, along with a savings bond, because if you have something as exciting as a hooker to brag about, you should also have something a little more conservative to balance it out.

Then there are the gifts you get just because.
 
Not for a birthday or an occasion, but because you see the perfect thing for someone, so you grab it, and sometimes that means you wrap it up last second, in the car.
 
I have an all weather mat in my trunk; I keep several different sheets of beautiful wrapping paper laying flat under it, so that I have appropriate paper for just about any spontaneous gift giving need, out of the way, and protected by the mat.
 

I have tape in the storage thingy between the seats, for two reasons, wrapping gifts, and if you ever get a ding on your windshield from a flying rock, as long as the damage is smaller than a dollar bill, they can fix it without replacing your whole windshield.
 
I know a guy that does this for a living and he told me that especially if it’s a little chip, if you put a piece of tape over the ding right away, it will keep dirt out of it and the repair will be more invisible.
 
I’ve never actually gotten a ding in my windshield, but I’ve got the tape ready if I ever do.
 
My primary tape need is gift giving.
 

I think the best no reason gift I’ve ever given was something I happened across for my mom.
 
Mom has this really old picture of her grandmother and great-aunt.
 
I’ve only seen it a few times.
 
In the picture, on the table between the two of them, there was a beautiful teacup and saucer.
 
The cup looked very dark, with flowers on it.
 
I asked my mom about it, as I’d never seen a dark teacup before.
 
She said it used to sit on her grandmother’s sideboard.
 
That the cup was black, with gold painted around the rim, that it was fluted, had exotic looking flowers painted on it, was fine bone china, and that she was pretty sure that it was English, not Irish, which knowing my family, was a whole big story I knew nothing about.

One day I was driving down the street and I saw this huge garage sale.
 
I’m not really a garage sale kind of person, which is a good thing, because if I’d been paying attention to the stuff on the lawn, instead of watching where I was going, I might have run over the little kid that flew out from between two cars.
 
I stopped, waited for a second, expecting a parent to come flying out behind the kid, but he just stood there.

I put on my emergency flashers, jumped out of the car, grabbed the kid, leaving him there to be smooshed would have been rude, walked him over to the yard sale and tried to figure out which person could have been spending the rest of their day, or life, devastated because their child had been bumped, squished, or kidnapped.
 
I was stunned that it actually took some effort to find the parent.

Actually, I was pissed beyond words - don’t get me started on the issues of parenting in this society.
 

I was walking back to my abandoned car, when I saw two teacups identical to those my mother had described.
 
I didn’t have much cash on me, the lady wouldn’t come down on the price, at a garage sale, what an idiot, so finally the parent of the kid whose life I’d just saved, came up with the difference between what I had and what the garage sale lady insisted on, and I drove off with the cups.

I didn’t even wrap the cups in the car.
 
I took them home, washed them, went to the store, got a couple of place mats, a basket, some of that straw stuff, a couple of cloth napkins, a couple of different kinds of cookies in tins, and put it all together with the cups.

Mom still has the cups sitting in the curio in her living room.
 

Not sure how I got off on that tangent, but it made me think of the serendipity of life, if that little kid hadn’t walked in front of my car, or if I were the kind of person that just honked the horn, or if the child’s parent were the kind of parent that actually watched their child, I wouldn’t have been able to get those cups for my mom.

That thought led me to think about all the stuff that had been happening in the last couple of weeks.
 
Me deciding to try and earn a $100,000 reward for figuring out the truth behind a murder I’d read about online.
 
That led me to the idea of writing eulogies for a living, then Bernie died, and I thought Mom was going to ask me to write Bernie’s eulogy, but instead, she asked me to clean out Bernie’s house, which led the family priest to ask me to clean out Louis’s condo, which brought to my attention that the lady I’d read about online, and Bernie, and Louis all shared three letters of their car tag, which brought me to the attention of a crazy cop, and hopefully not anyone else, like a serial murderer, if in fact all three of them were murdered by the same person, and we weren’t even sure that two of them were murdered at all.

All those things also led to Teagan looking up a guy from the past.
 
They immediately took up where they’d left off, and then some.
 
My old roommate’s brother moved in when she moved out, and now, well, serendipity is a very good thing.

All those thoughts reminded me that my talent in life isn’t so much following a logical path, but rather, looking at things sideways.
 
It dawned on me that instead of standing back and letting all the weird and wonderful happenings of the last couple of weeks speak to me, I’d been trying to wrench them into something I could understand.
 
Not smart.
 
When something works for you, it’s just not bright to try to change it all around for no good reason.

Back to basics.

For now, I’d collected a bunch of flowers, almost got molested by a rather huge bumble bee, got bitten by at least a couple of fire ants, which I’m allergic to, so the next few days my feet are going to be miserable, but although I carry wrapping paper and scissors in my car, I don’t carry any of that bug bite stuff, so by the time I get home, my toes are going to look like pigs in a blanket.
 

A fire ant doesn’t just bite it also stings and when those little boogers sting me, I get a bunch of little white bumps that look like zits, and whatever they bit swells up, and it lasts for a couple of weeks.
 

Can I just say that those little suckers do not travel alone?
 
When one of them gets you, all his friends come and join the party, and by the time you feel the first sting, you’re trying to dislodge a bunch of tiny little ants, while they are each trying to inflict as much damage as possible.
 

I looked it up.
 
It’s a pheromone thing.
 
Amazing all the roles pheromones play in the lives of breathing creatures.
 
Some for good, very good, and some for evil.
 
I guess the fire ant doesn’t see it that way, she is just trying to protect the farm, but that’s a whole other issue.

I drove out to the cemetery and went directly to Bernie’s spot.
 
When you see something shiny and new it’s a happy time, a new car or a new wedding ring always brings a smile to your face, but at the cemetery, a shiny new headstone is sad.
 
The cemetery provides a metal cylinder in the ground, just at the bottom of each headstone.
 
They always get stuck and they are always slimy, but I assumed because Bernie’s was new, it wouldn’t be a problem.
 
I’ve lost enough people in my life to know it was a small miracle that the headstone was already in place.

The simple fact is that it is a Catholic cemetery and Bernie was very involved in all things Catholic, so there was probably someone right here on earth pulling strings for her, she needn’t have counted on a guardian angel or anything.
 
I’d have to remember to ask my mom about that.

I was convinced that luck was on my side, and the shiny new flower cup was just waiting for my flowers.
 
Wrong.
 
The sucker was stuck in the ground as if with superglue and wouldn’t budge.
 

I trudged back to my car, got my scissors, dug the thing out of the grass, walked over to a hose bib they have for such needs, washed the thing off, filled it with clean water, and headed back to Bernie’s property.
 

I sat on the grass, right next to where Bernie was placed, and arranged the flowers.
 
A pathetic but heartfelt bouquet was the result.
 
Note to self, there’s no future in flower arranging, at least not for me.