The Broken Teaglass (8 page)

Mona gave me a skeptical smile as she left.

“I thought you were gonna spend
all night there in your car,” Tom said. He and Jimmy were watching me come up the walk. “What’s going on?”

“I was listening to a song. I wanted to finish it.”

“What song?” Tom asked.

“‘No Woman No Cry.’”

“Hmm,” he mumbled. I lingered by my door, expecting him to supply his opinion about Bob Marley. He didn’t.

“Plans tonight?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Tom replied. “Watching an investigative documentary about the October Surprise. Feel free to join me, if that interests you.”

“Actually, I kind of have a date tonight.”

“Ahh,” said Jimmy. “Congratulations. Where you bringing the lucky lady?”

“Well, we’re just gonna hang out at her place. We’re investigating a little work-related problem together. A dictionary puzzle.”

“Pray tell,” said Tom. “This sounds interesting.”

“Maybe after tonight,” I said. “It’s all a little unclear still.”

“C’mon,” Tom insisted. “I love word games.”

“It’s not
a game
—”

“Then what is it?”

Jimmy snorted. “Tommy. Quit bothering him about the stupid
words
. If you have to bother him, ask him about the
girl.”

Tom sniffed. “That doesn’t interest me so much.”

“Yeah, right,” said Jimmy. “She must be smart, huh, Billy? Since she works with you there at Samuelson?”

“Yeah, she’s pretty smart. Listen, I wish I could chat with you longer, but I’ve got to get ready and then run to the liquor store. I’ve gotta get a flask of rum.”

Jimmy hooted. “You need a little something to nip on during your date? Is the girl that ugly?”

“No, she just likes rum and Coke.”

“That’s one of my wife’s favorite drinks.” Tom nodded knowingly.

“Is it?” I said, absently. Then: “Wait. Tom, dude, you’ve got a wife?”

“Yep.”

“You’re joking.”

“It’s not something to joke about. Not a laughing matter, my marriage.”

“You’re hanging out at her place with a bottle of booze? On a first date?” Jimmy shook his head. “I wish I was part of your generation, Billy boy. Good luck.”

Mona’s place was classier than mine
. It took me a while to find it—a set of old stone buildings called Somers’
Mill. I wasn’t used to this tree-lined side of the city, where most of the storefronts were occupied and no one was walking around with an open beer can.

I rang her buzzer, and she appeared almost immediately.

“Hi. Oh my God, Billy. I found one. I found another one.”

“You started without me?” I followed her up the stairwell.

“I started last night. But who cares? It’s working!”

“What’s working?”

“Nineteen fifty!”

Her apartment was on the third floor. She led me into a small but immaculate kitchen. Off the kitchen, I could see a large old-fashioned pantry. Boxed macaroni and cheese, rice pilaf packets, and ramen noodles were arranged in an elaborate pyramid.

I handed her the paper bag with the Coke and rum in it, but she set it on the kitchen table without looking in it.

“You want to see what I found?” she asked.

“Aren’t you going to give me the grand tour first?”

“C’mon. Sit down.”

She sat down with me at her kitchen table and pushed a little white paper toward me. “So read it.”

I did:

I read it over a couple of times. Mona went to the refrigerator, got out a beer, and quietly placed it next to my hand.

“That’s yours,” she said. “You can drink it, if you’re so inclined.”

“I think that’s a good idea. Now that we’re dealing with a corpse and all.” I snapped open the can.

“I
know
.” Mona sounded pretty thrilled. “Isn’t it great?”

“Great? Well, I don’t know about
great
, but—”

“You know what I think is interesting about this one?”

I took a long sip.

“What?” I said.

“Don’t you find the mention of the corpse a little casual? I mean, it’s mentioned almost like an afterthought.”

“I wouldn’t say that—”

“Come on. Corpse? Mixed up in some conversation about junkie slang? I think this is supposed to be amusing.”

“Amusing?”

“You know, like British humor.”

“British humor?”

“Yes.”
Mona was growing irritated. “Like someone uncovering the corpse you buried is just a
bother
. Just a dreadful
bother.”

“I don’t read it like that,” I disagreed.

“You want to know what I think this is, Billy?”

“What?”

“With all the washed-up English master’s degrees that pass through Samuelson, there’s got to be a half dozen wannabe novelists floating around the editorial office at any one time, right?”

“I guess.”

“Yeah. A
corpse?
With some telltale clue next to it? I think someone decided to write a pulp mystery novel and have it take place at Samuelson.”

“Okay. And that’s interesting to you? What’s so great about that? A bored editor writing a trashy novel?”

“Well, obviously with this 1950 thing there’s got to be some kind of additional inside game to it.”

“Mona, do you want a drink? I brought you some stuff.” I showed her the little bottle of rum. “Where do you keep your glasses?”

Mona hopped up again.

“I’ll take care of it,” she said. “I prefer to mix my own drink, thank you.”

“Well, make it a strong one.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because I have a theory for you. And it might be a little much for you.”

“Lay it on me,” challenged Mona. She poured a little trickle of rum onto the bottom of a drinking glass.

“Maybe … Maybe it’s not a
story
. Maybe … maybe you should put more rum in that?”

“I’m not a hulking frat boy like you. I’m a lightweight.”

“I’m not a frat boy,” I said, considering whether I should be offended by
hulking
as well.

“Sorry.”

“But anyway. Suit yourself. I was saying. Maybe it’s real. Maybe they’re talking about a real corpse.”

Mona gulped her drink and shook her head.

“Wouldn’t that be cool, huh?” she said. “But no. Some of our fellow dictionary people are somewhat lacking in street smarts, but I don’t think any of them are dumb enough to kill someone and then write down little clues to drop in the cit file like little Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs. I could be wrong.”

“Okay. Of course it probably wasn’t a
murderer
who wrote these cits. But maybe there was something shady going down. Maybe someone was secretly writing about what they knew.”

Mona took the cit from me.

“You know, I hadn’t even considered that possibility. Call me naive. I guess I just like to think of lexicographers as essentially a gentle people. Shall we?”

She motioned me into the living room, small and empty but for a simple but expensive-looking black couch, a little wooden coffee table, and a tall, skinny bookcase. A single framed Ansel Adams poster hung behind the couch. On the table there were two pairs of shoeboxes.
Unchecked
was written in blue marker on two of the boxes, and
Done
written in red marker on the other two. Two of the boxes already had banded batches of cits lined up inside.

“I made a pair of boxes for you,” she said sheepishly.

“I see that,” I said. It was both disturbing and flattering, the mental image of Mona sitting down at her kitchen table, carefully fashioning me a set of makeshift “In” and “Out” boxes for my maximum productivity at her place. Probably
she was doing her careful colored lettering just as I was selecting her bottle of rum.

“Got your cits in your bag?” she asked.

“Yup.”

Mona sat cross-legged on the floor. She picked up a stack of cits from her little coffee table and removed the rubber band.

“I just flip through like this, see? You barely have to look at the bottom right-hand corner to see if it’s got
‘Broken Teaglass’
written on it. See, a word like ‘melon baller’ goes by really fast. Not many cits for ‘melon baller.’ Kind of a shame, don’t you think? Anyway. No
Broken Teaglass
cits. I just band them back up, put them in the ‘Done’ box, and check off ‘melon baller’ right here.”

She pointed at the stapled printout of 1950 words, on which she had begun a neat row of check marks, and put a star next to
maven
.

“This won’t just help us keep track, it might also help us see if there’s a pattern to which words have
Teaglass
cits.”

“That’s a good idea.” I sat on the couch and dumped a bunch of citations from my backpack into my “Unchecked” box. “Especially since I probably won’t be doing this in alphabetical order.”

Mona looked like she was considering saying something else to me. Instead, she just swallowed some more rum and Coke. I picked up a thin pile of citations for
American pit bull terrier
, and started to flip through them.

One of them was from an article entitled “Fourth of July Tragedy,” from some women’s magazine. It seemed to be from an article about a kid attacked by a dog at a picnic.

“I can’t think of much worse of a nightmare than to see your kid mauled by a dog,” I said.

“Don’t
read
, Billy. We’ll never get anywhere if you’re going to read everything.”

I flipped through the rest of the pile, put a rubber band around it, and chucked it in my empty “Done” box. Mona pushed the list and pen toward me without looking up from her cits.

Fffft. Fffft. Fffft
. She shuffled through her citations like a banker counting cash. I watched her for a moment before reaching for my next stack of cits.

“So this is it for the evening?” I asked. “Just plowing through these cits as fast as we can?”

Mona looked up. “We’ll take a break for pizza. I’ll call the pizza place after we get through a few piles.”

“You don’t want to even … put on some tunes or something?”

“That’s a good idea. Get through a couple more piles and I’ll bring my CD player in here.”

We didn’t find anything in the
first half hour. When Mona decided we’d earned it, she went into the kitchen to order the pizza. I took the liberty of making her another drink.

“Thank you,” she said as she sat back down. She took a big gulp of her cocktail. If she noticed that it was significantly stronger than her last one, she didn’t mention it.

We worked silently until her buzzer rang. She ran downstairs for the pizza, and I got up from the couch and wandered over to her bookcase. The top shelf was full of Norton literature anthologies and classics. Propped in front of these books was a picture of Mona at her graduation, surrounded by what had to be her family—an attractive woman, taller
than Mona, but with her hair pulled back in a style similar to Mona’s, a shorter man with gray hair and glasses, a little girl, and two young men who looked a little older than Mona. On the second shelf was another photograph. This one was of Mona looking a little younger and sitting on a picnic table with a man with an overgrown mustache. Mona was wearing cutoff shorts whose length almost qualified them as Daisy Dukes. I wondered if Mona’s legs were still that skinny under all the gray and black clothing.

Behind the photographs was a flat hardcover book:
The Hindenburg
. Next to that was a paperback titled
When We Were All in Bed
. There was kind of a kinky ring to that title, so I pulled the book out of the shelf and looked at the cover.
When We Were All in Bed: Accounts of the Chicago Fire of 1871
. Maybe not so kinky. Next to that was
A Night to Remember
by Walter Lord, which I remembered reading in high school. It was about the
Titanic
.

Mona came creaking back up the stairs. The large pizza box in her arms dwarfed her.

“Let’s eat,” she said. “I’m hungry.”

“You want something to drink with your pizza?” I asked her.

“Yes. That’d be great, thanks.”

Mona sipped away at another rum and Coke as we ate our pizza at the kitchen table. I drank another beer.

“Is that your family with you in that graduation picture on your bookcase?” I asked.

“Yeah. That’s my mom and my stepdad. With my stepbrothers and my half sister. The guy in the other picture is my father. In case you were wondering.”

“Yeah, I kind of was,” I said.

“It doesn’t ever seem right to put up a picture of one side of my family where I’m not going to put up another.”

“Shouldn’t it be enough just to have an equal
total
number of pictures of each side in the house?”

“No.” She shook her head. “The people you put in your living room are the ones you’re proud of. The people you put in your bedroom are the ones you have the most intimate, emotional relationships with. I don’t want to compartmentalize my family like that.”

I decided to change the subject. “Gotten any good letters at work lately?” I asked.

“Oh. Yeah.” She slammed down her glass and laughed. “Didn’t I tell you about the ‘poon’ letter?”

“No, I think I would have remembered that if you did.”