1 Assault with a Deadly Glue Gun (3 page)

Ricardo became that proverbial last straw on my overburdened
camel's back. "You'll do no such thing," I screamed into the phone.
"I don't know who you are or what kind of sick game you're playing, but if you bother me again, I'm calling the police. Capisce?"

Ricardo's voice lowered to a menacing timbre. "I wouldn't do
that if I were you, Sweet Cheeks." The phone went dead. Along
with every nerve in my body.

And I thought I had problems before?

"If you have tears, prepare to shed them now," squawked Ralph.
"Julius Caesar. Act Three, Scene Two."

No Polly wants a cracker for this bird. Ralph spouts Shakespeare
and only Shakespeare, thanks to several decades of listening to
Great-aunt Penelope Periwinkle's classroom lectures. When Aunt
Penelope died two years ago, I inherited the parrot with the uncanny knack for squawking circumstance-appropriate quotes.

Could have been worse. At least Aunt Penelope wasn't a closet
rap queen with a bird who squawked about pimpin' the hos in the
'hood. I'm also grateful Ralph is housebroken, considering his
ability to pick the lock on his cage.

"I've already cried enough to replenish New Jersey's droughtlowered reservoirs, Ralph. So unless you know of some way to
transform tears into twenties, I've got to move on and figure a way
out of this mess."

He ignored me. Ralph speaks only when he wants to, and right
now his attention had turned to grooming himself. Like I said, I
hate whiners, but jeez! How much simpler life would be if my only
concern was molting feathers.

LUCILLE DIDN'T YET KNOW about the financial ramifications of
Karl's death. Coward that I am, I'd spent much of the last week
putting off what promised to be one of the more pleasant tasksand I mean that with all the sarcasm I can muster at six-thirty in
the morning-of my widowhood. Whether this Ricardo creep
turned out to be a crank or the real thing, the time had come to
impart the gory details of how Lucille Pollack's darling son Karl
had drained our savings and plunged us into a shitload of debt.

I confronted her as soon as she came out of the bathroom. She
accepted my penniless state about as well as Mephisto the Devil
Dog takes to cats.

"I don't believe it!" She sat down on my bed and clutched Mephisto tight enough for the dog to whimper and squirm. "Karl
would never get involved in gambling. I know my son."

"Right" Good old Saint Karl. "Believe what you want," I told
her, "but here's the deal: Either you start paying for room and board, or you can find somewhere else to live because thanks to
that son you know so well, I can't afford to support you."

"So you wash your hands of me and toss me out on the street?
How typical!"

"I never said that."

I took a deep breath and told myself to count to ten thousand.
How could she believe I was that cruel? "You have several options."

Besides her Social Security, Lucille received a meager pension
from her years as an editor at The Worker's Herald, the weekly
newspaper of the American Communist Party. The pension had
covered her now-a-pile-of-burned-rubble, rent-controlled Queens
apartment. Social Security paid for her other living expenses.

Rent-controlled apartments were a dying breed in New York
and nonexistent in New Jersey. Between the two monthly checks,
Lucille might be able to afford another apartment, but she'd have
little left to live on. For all their Workers Unite and Power to the
People propaganda, The Worker's Herald offered shit in the way of
benefits to its retirees.

"There's always senior-citizen housing," I suggested. I didn't tell
her that I doubted many would welcome Mephisto the Devil Dog,
even those that did allow pets. Aside from Lucille, Mephisto had
never met a human he didn't immediately grace with a menacing
growl.

"I will not live with prattling idiots who sit around all day watching soap operas, playing Canasta, and complaining about their aches
and pains. If my son were alive-"

"But he's not, and I'm in this mess because of him, no matter
what you want to believe. I know there's never been any love lost
between us, but I'm not the villain here. Karl left me with a moun tain of debt and without two nickels to rub together. So either you
contribute or you leave. It's as simple as that."

Neither option appealed to her. Karl had promised to subsidize
a new apartment once her doctors gave the okay for her to live on
her own again. Even though I'd hoped she'd opt to leave, no matter how much she despised me, she had it better here than she'd
have it on her own, and she knew that.

"How much?" she finally asked.

I named what I thought was a reasonable monthly figure to
cover her expenses.

"Outrageous!" she bellowed. "You're no better than a slum
lord!"

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks," squawked Ralph.
"Hamlet. Act Three, Scene Two" Both Mephisto and Lucille
growled at him. Ralph squawked back a mimicking growl.

My domestic skills would never win me the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, but my home didn't exactly qualify as a slum.
I pulled the phone book off the bottom shelf of my nightstand
and tossed it on the bed. "Fine. You'd better start calling rental
agents"

With a harrumph, she pushed the directory aside, lowered Mephisto to the floor, and stood. "For that kind of money, I want
more room. I'll move into the apartment above the garage. I need
my privacy."

She needed her privacy? This coming from the woman who'd
stuck her nose into every millimeter of our lives every nanosecond
of the day since she moved in? "Even if you could manage the stairs,
which I don't think you can, I'm afraid that won't be possible."

"You don't need all that space. You can move your things into
the basement."
"

I plan to," I said. "I'm renting out the apartment. You'll have to
stay where you are."

"Absolutely not. It's too small."

"For what? You lost everything you owned when your apartment burned to the ground."

She offered no rebuttal. Her entire argument had been an exercise in pushing my buttons. Argument for the sake of argument.
Standard Lucille discourse.

"By the way," I said to her departing back, "that amount includes cut-rate kibble for Mephisto. If the rest of us have to live on
mac and cheese to get by, he's going to have to make do without
his gourmet canned cuisine."

She stopped, pounded her cane on the carpet, and glowered at
me over her shoulder. "His name is Manifesto, and he has a delicate constitution."

So delicate that he'd scarfed down an entire doorstop-heavy
fruitcake several weeks ago when no one was looking. At least Mephisto's thievery had spared the rest of us from dealing with the
annual Christmas gift from Hell.

"We all have to make sacrifices," I told her.

"Don't you lecture me about making sacrifices, missy. I lived
through the Great Depression. A depression brought about by
greedy capitalists, I might add. I know all about making sacrifices.
Unlike some people."

Then she launched into one of her very own communist manifestos, which set an orchestra of percussion instruments pounding
between my temples.

Over the years I've tried my damnedest to foster a congenial
relationship between me and my mother-in-law. Lucille had pulverized all my attempts under her size-ten orthopedic heels. At
least I knew I wasn't the sole beneficiary of her wrath. The Daughters of the October Revolution, all of whom have similar curmudgeon-like personalities, are the only people I ever recall warming
up to my mother-in-law-probably because they're all as curmudgeonly as she is.

"I'm late for work," I said, interrupting her dissertation of all
that's wrong with the world. This time I closed the door in her
face.

I tried not to think about Ricardo's phone call as I made my way to
work. Maybe it was a crank call. One of Karl's lowlife Neanderthal
clients with a warped sense of humor. And maybe pigs really can
fly, Anastasia.

Sitting astride a winged Miss Piggy would have been a preferable mode of transportation at the moment. Making the daily rush
hour trek to and from work had been somewhat tolerable while I
still owned my Camry. My new state of pauperdom had forced me
to sell the comfortable silver car with its multitude of amenities
back to the dealer. In its place I'd purchased a used, strippeddown, bottom-of-the-line, eight-year-old mud-brown Hyundai.

The balance of the money from the car sale had paid for shipping Karl's body back from Nevada and the cremation expenses.
Cremation is cheaper than burial, and after what my husband had
done to me and his kids, we didn't need the expense of a cemetery plot. If anyone wanted to visit Karl in the future, they could talk to
the urn on the bookcase shelf.

I'm not a large woman, barely five-two. And as I've mentioned
previously, I don't like to whine. Although, I suppose that's hard to
tell lately. Anyway, years ago I learned to accept the God-dealt
genes that landed me Mama's stubby legs, Grandma Sudberry's
below-the-navel spread, and Grandma Periwinkle's training brasized boobs, making me a height-challenged, cellulite-dimpled,
flat-chested brunette Bartlett pear.

And although I refuse to take responsibility for the additional
ten pounds I haven't been able to shed since the birth of my last
child-thanks in part to both my Carbo Junkie Gene and my
Chocoholic Gene-I still managed to squeeze into a size eight. On
good days. Still, in the sub-sub compact Hyundai, I felt like The
Incredible Hulk shoehorned behind the steering wheel.

After an hour of creeping along Routes 24, 78, and 287 at a
pace slower than the average snail, I pulled into the parking lot of
Trimedia's new headquarters, situated in the middle of a former
cornfield in Morris County. Builders planned an entire business
complex for the area, but at present our only neighbor was the
new parking lot and commuter rail stop built across the road to
accommodate the expected influx of corporations fleeing New
York.

Prior to September 11th, we were located in lower Manhattan,
an easy commute for me via public transportation. Our building
had sustained minimal damage from the terrorist attack, and after
a short stint in temporary offices, we'd returned to our headquarters. However, a few months ago our new owners were lured across
the Hudson by cheaper real estate and huge tax incentives.

Few staff members at American Woman were happy about the
move, but then again, even fewer were happy about any of the
changes Trimedia had instituted since gobbling up the familyowned Reynolds-Alsopp Publishing Company-least of all our
former owner, Hugo Reynolds-Alsopp.

Hugo remained publisher in title only. The real power now
rested in the hands of the Trimedia Board of Directors, a parsimonious group of bean counters who sacrificed editorial content for
the almighty bottom line.

I worked in a cat-claw-cat environment, but unlike most of my
coworkers at American Woman, I was content in my position as
crafts editor. I had no desire to scheme and plot my way up the
monthly magazine's editorial ladder to the Holy Trinity, better
known as Decorating, Beauty, and Fashion.