Untitled (42 page)

  Just before lunch, he made a break for the front door. I let him yank on it and try to break the windows. Then I made him finish vacuuming the runner in the hall before I gave him his lunch. He kept muttering
I don't believe this
over and over while he spooned up tomato soup.

  Dusting is when they usually try for the phone. I left the room briefly, just so he could get it over with. He was dabbing it with the feather duster when I came back. I wouldn't have brought it up, but he felt compelled to.

  "How come you can get calls when the phone's dead?" he asked accusingly.

  "The phone's not dead," I told him. "You just don't know how to use it."

  "Jesus Christ." He threw down the feather duster. "I want to know what's going on here. Your mother said I could stay
if I
wanted to.
Well, what if I don't want to?"

  I hefted the gun slightly. "I think you want to."

  He picked up the feather duster and finished doing the end tables and the bookcases.

  There was another fuss about changing the beds. He didn't think he had to change his, since he'd just spent one night in it, and then he tried to tell me his back was too weak for him to turn the mattresses, a charade he insisted on playing out with all three of them, so it was a slow, clumsy process. But it got done. I let him have a snack break in front of the TV before I told him to set the kitchen table for dinner.

  "That wasn't on the list," he said, unable to tear his eyes away from that skinny little game show hostess who waves her arms in front of washer-dryers as if they were miracles.

  "My mother would want you to fill out the day with something useful," I told him.

  "But really," he said, punching the couch cushion behind him, "I think I hurt my back with those damned mattresses. No fooling. I ought to get in a hot tub." He looked up at me and smiled for the first time. "God, a hot bath would be heaven right now. You could even stay there and keep the gun on me, I wouldn't mind."

  I just bet he wouldn't. But he wasn't the only one who'd seen
The Beguiled.
Still, if you don't let them try everything, they don't believe. Seduction occurred to some of them sooner, and some of them later, and the second group usually try it on my mother rather than me.

  "What did you have in mind?" I said. "A bubble bath?"

  His smile got bigger and more enthusiastic. "You got something sweet smelling? I bet you have. Something you like for your boyfriends to smell on you."

  "I wear Obsession," I told him. "Only Obsession. It wouldn't smell right on you. There's Obsession
pour Homme,
but we don't have any."

  "Obsession, eh?" His smile shrank a bit. He was looking at the barrel of the gun again and didn't realize I knew what he was staring at. "You obsessed with guns?"

"No. Cleanliness, actually."

  He threw back his head and laughed. The studio audience coincidentally laughed right along with him and he used the remote control to turn down the volume. "I can see that. All the more reason for me to take a bath before your mother gets home. So I can be as clean as the house when she comes in."

  "This house isn't clean," I said. "The windows are filthy. You do those tomorrow."

  He laughed again. "How's the old saying go? I don't do windows?"

  "Yeah, sure, Milt. But it's just a saying. You change the drapes, too, and you vacuum upstairs and you clean the cellar and I don't know what all. My mother'll leave you a list, of course."

  He slumped against the back of the couch. "Oh, come on, little lady Lynn. Are you gonna spend another whole day holding that gun on me?"

  "If I have to."

  "What about tonight? You and your mom gonna take turns guarding me?"

  "We lock you in your room. You were locked in last night, but I guess you didn't know it."

  He combed his fingers through that stringy hair. "Look . . . all this has been, you know, kinda weird and kinky and interesting, but it's gotten old. I gotta tell you, I was really wondering about your mom last might when she bypassed your old man and took me out instead. It seemed like one of those great opportunities, too good to be true. See, I know sooner or later my prints are gonna turn up with my real name and then I'm in the soup for sure. So I thought, well, I'll go with this Good Samaritan – Good Samaritanness?" He gave a little nervous laugh. "Well, whatever, I'll go with her, and I'll have a little something to eat and a good night's sleep and then I'm off to Mexico, Canada, parts unknown – " he shrugged. "Then I get dishpan hands at gunpoint."

  "You don't have dishpan hands," I said. "Dishwashers have made dishpan hands obsolete. You've got busy hands."

  "Yeah, right. What is that. 'Busy Hands' where your mother works – maid service?"

  "You're exactly right. It's a maid service. My mother cleans houses for a living. But it's that old story – who shaves the barber? In this case, you do."

  He stared at me, baffled. Apparently, he'd never heard that old chestnut about the village where every man who didn't shave himself was shaved by the barber, so who shaved the barber. I guess they don't get much parlor philosophy in jail.

  "Never mind," I said. "Break-time's over. Set the table."

  He hesitated, ready to argue further, and then thought better of it. "You'll have to talk me through this," he said, leading the way into the kitchen. "I can never remember which fork goes on the right."

  "That's easy," I said, "you never put forks on the right. You don't want to risk accidentally piercing a dinner companion."

  He looked over his shoulder at me. "Really?"

  I just shook my head. "Oh, dammit. We forgot to run the dishwasher. Well, you'll have to wash a few dishes by hand. There isn't time for a complete cycle before my mother comes home." I had to poke him in the ribs with the gun a few times to get him in the right frame of mind. "See, now I am gonna get dishpan hands," he said grumpily as he stood at the sink.

  "Not with Softi-Bubbles," I said, sitting at the table. "It's specially formulated to leave your skin sweetly soft while it cuts the grease. You can also wash your fine linens in it and even use if for a bubble bath."

  He snorted. "Yeah. The bubble bath I'm never gonna get."

  I was really tired of his whining. "You can take a bath after dinner if you really want to."

  He stacked the dishes in the rack and let them drain. "You can make me clean, but I gotta tell you, I can't cook, even with that gun to my head. You can blow my brains out if you want, but there's nothing I can do."

  "That's okay. My mother will be bringing dinner home with her. She's got a friend in the catering business."

  "Great. Rubber chicken."

  "You could always go on a diet." As I'd figured, that shut him up fast. After experiencing bail my mother's way, he didn't want to know what her idea of a diet would be. He was stubborn, but he was learning.

  When he finished setting the table, I decided to let him go back to watching TV in the living room until my mother came home, rest his weary back. I was pretty sure my mother would be pleased with the job he'd done on the house, so she wouldn't mind my giving him a little extra relaxing time.

  And I was right. My mother walked through the house beaming with pleasure, while Milt and I trailed behind her in a little parade. I still had the gun on him, of course – there was no telling if he'd be stupid enough to try attacking my mother. But her effusive praise caught him off guard. After a day with me, he'd been expecting almost anything but that.

  "I especially like the way you made the beds," she told him as we trooped back downstairs to the kitchen. "Is that how they do it in prison?"

  "How'd you know I'd been in prison?" he asked

  "Get real, Milt," I said.

  "Well, jail, yeah, but just about everybody's been in jail – "

  My mother laughed. "Good heavens, where did you come by that idea? Young man, there are people who go their whole lives and never see the inside of a
jail.
Let alone the big house. Lynn's father was in the big house. We've learned to tell ex-cons by body language. And tattoos, of course." She ran a finger up his left arm as she ushered him into the kitchen. "Some of those are jailhouse tattoos. You really ought to have them worked on, covered over with better designs if you don't want to have them removed altogether."

  All he could do was stare at her as she sat him at the table and took her place to his left.

  "Lynn, you may serve now," she said, waving a hand at the white bags she had set on the counter. "And then afterwards, it'll be time for your treat," she added to Milt, wiggling her index finger in his stupefied face.

  Tonight's offering was a stroganoff. I'd rather not eat so much red meat – in fact, I'd often thought of going vegetarian – but my mother wanted to keep me big. I worried about what the insides of my arteries looked like, even though my mother insisted that was no worry at all at my age.

  "Jesus!" Milt said as the aroma hit him in the face. "I'm starved! Your daughter didn't give me much for lunch."

  "Eating heavily in the middle of the day would have made you sleepy," my mother told him. "Now, chow down. You've earned it."

  He'd finished half his plate before it occurred to him that I wasn't holding the gun on him anymore. But I did have it in my lap, and it was pointing at him before he could make so much as a twitch in my mother's direction. She frowned at me and then gave Milt a look.

  "Let's not fight at the table, you two." She turned back to me. "Okay?"

  I shrugged. "He started it."

  Milt's fork plopped in his food as he buried his face in his hands. "My God, my God," he moaned. "How did I get here? What's happening? What kinda crazy deal is this?"

  My mother gave his forearm a small push. "Elbows off the table, Milt."

  He peeked at her from between his fingers. "Lady, I don't know what's going on here with your locked doors and your unbreakable windows and your dead phones and your gun-toting daughter, but I think I wanna go back to jail."

  "Oh, no, you wouldn't like that," my mother said. "Jail's so risky. My friend Carol the caterer might bail you out then, and you'd like that a lot less than this, believe-you-me. She bailed out Lynn's father around lunch-time." My mother shook her head, going
tch-tch-tch.
"She'll forfeit the bail, of course, but it was a last-minute thing, this dinner she had to do, and they insisted on stroganoff. The Royal Lodge of the Mooses said they'd pay oneand-a-half times the normal fee for it, so even minus the lost bail money, Carol still makes out like a bandit."

  "Carol
always
makes out like a bandit," I said. "She's the Robin Hood of the testimonial set."

  "Yes, but catering is
so messy
," said my mother. "I much prefer to clean up a mess than make one." She paused, contemplating a noodle on the end of her fork. "You know, I also think I prefer weather that's too cold to too hot. What about you, Milt?"

  Milt's expression was completely despairing. "Huh?"

  "Do you prefer your weather too cold or too hot? Or, let's put it this way – if you could, would you go to Canada or Mexico?"

  "Why?" he asked tonelessly.

  "This is just
dinner conversation
," she said, a little exasperation creeping into her voice. "Everyone should know how to make small talk. Small talk's got a bad rap. If you could see the way some of the more bashful guests suffer sitting next to each other at one of the banquets my friend Carol caters, you'd understand the virtues of being capable of superficial conversation." She put down her fork and wiped her fingers on her napkin before laying a hand on Milt's arm. "Milt, this is
your
civilization, the one
you
have to live in and you have
got
to get civilized."

  "Okay," he said, "okay, okay, anything you say, whatever you like, lady. Just take me back to jail so I can plead guilty, pay my debt to society, and when I get out, I'll go get civilized."

  "Well,
that's
the
good
news," my mother said brightly. "I was going to save it for after dinner, but I'm really impressed with those beds. The shoplifting charges have been dropped."

  His mouth fell open. A very unoriginal reaction, but at least it was harmless. "How?"

  My mother spread her arms. "How do you think?" She leaned toward him, beaming like mad. "You have a job! With Busy Hands!" She grabbed both his hands in hers and gave them a little shake. "You passed the audition! You aced the try-out! You made the team! But you know, I really thought you would." She turned to me without letting go of him. "Lynn? Dissenting opinion? Comments?"

  I was still holding the gun on him while I ate. "You know me, Ma. I bow to your superior judgment. Do you have a uniform that will fit him?"

  "No," he said, snatching his hands away. "I won't do it. Blow my brains all over this kitchen if you want, but I won't do it. I won't be no crazy lady's slave. You can chain me up in the cellar, you can lock me in your attic, you can kill me. But I know my rights and you're violating them. Ain't no way you can kidnap somebody from jail and make them be a slave for you.

  "How do you kidnap somebody from jail?" I said. "Ma, do you know?"

  "No, I don't." She chuckled. "Kidnapping's illegal. I've got all the official papers and everything – they signed him over to me, and he went of his own free will. What' s the matter, Milt, housework got you down? I know you won't believe this, but it's actually easier to clean somebody else's house than your own.

  "That's why this place looked the way it did, before you went to work on it. Tomorrow, you can do the windows and take care of the draperies, there' s the laundry – "