Moving Can Be Murder (2 page)

Chapter 1

If a husband speaks in the wilderness, and
his wife

is not there to hear him, is he still
wrong?

“Turn the thermostat down to sixty-three,”
My Beloved barked at me. “That’s plenty warm enough for this time
of year.”

Sixty-three was warm enough for this time of
year? In New England? It was January, in case Jim hadn’t noticed.
There was snow on the ground and a cold wind was blowing through
our drafty front door.

I decided not to argue with him, pushed the
thermostat down, and went to add another sweatshirt to my layers of
clothing. I hoped I’d still be able to bend my arms.

The furnace protested. It clanked,
shuddered, sighed, and finally shut off. Maybe the furnace was
cold, too.

“The way this old house bleeds money, it
should be owned by a millionaire,” said Jim, who’d followed me into
our bedroom to continue his tirade. “You know that since I retired
we need to be careful with our finances, Carol. I shouldn’t have to
keep reminding you.”

Yeah, yeah. I’d heard it all before. Often.
In fact, I heard the same complaints before My Beloved had retired.
I knew we weren’t millionaires, and we sure didn’t live like we
were.

“I think we should seriously consider
putting the house on the market in the spring. It’s getting to be
too much to take care of.”

I’d heard that one before, too. But I knew
he wasn’t serious. Moving meant Jim would have to organize and
clean up all his clutter, now piled high in two unused bedrooms.
This was a task he’d been successfully avoiding for years. And
besides, except for his weekly newspaper column for the Fairport
News, what else did he have to do with himself besides putter
around the house doing necessary – and sometimes unnecessary –
repairs?

He’d never move out of here.

We’d owned our antique house in Fairport,
Connecticut -- a hop, skip and quick commuter train ride from New
York City -- for the past 34 years. While Fairport didn’t have the
“cachet” of other Fairfield County,

Connecticut towns like, say, Greenwich or
New Canaan, it was still considered a desirable bedroom community
for those who traveled daily to jobs in Manhattan. I absolutely
loved the town, and had no intentions of selling my wonderful
house.

Still, I had noticed Jim reading the real
estate section of the paper more often these days. And once or
twice, when I logged onto the computer after him, I realized the
last web site he’d looked at was Realtor.com.

Hmm. This could be more serious than I
thought.

Rummaging around in the back of my walk-in
closet, I grabbed the first thing I could find, which turned out to
be a hooded sweatshirt that proclaimed, “I decided to bake some
anatomically correct men. Didn’t give them any brains.”

“Very funny, Carol,” said Jim as I struggled
to put my head through the opening.

“Did you wash this in hot water and
deliberately shrink it?” I tried not to sound like I was accusing
him of a crime, but since Jim recently assumed the family laundry
duties, several articles of my clothing have registered complaints.
“It wasn’t this tight the last time I wore it.”

“Maybe you’ve just gained a few pounds,”
said My Beloved.

Ouch. That really hurt. I swiveled around to
face him and give him a smartass answer, but he’d already stomped
out of the room and headed to the kitchen.

Being me, hardheaded to a fault, I couldn’t
let his remark pass so I stomped right after him. I found him with
his head stuck in the refrigerator, rummaging around for a
snack.

“It seems to me, dear, that you’re the one
who always has his head in the refrigerator.” Among other places.
“I’ll have you know that I weighed myself this morning and I
haven’t gained an ounce. What do you think about that?”

“Ha,” said Jim, unwilling to let it go.
“Scales aren’t always accurate. I just know what I see when I look
at you. Let’s just say there’s a little more to love than there
used to be.”

Jeez. He was the one who, since his
retirement, hadn’t been able to fasten the top button on his
favorite jeans.

“Play nice, kids,” said our daughter Jenny,
home from teaching at Fairport Community College a little earlier
than expected. “I can’t leave you two alone for a minute.” She
hugged us both, then said, “Now, kiss and make up. Or I’ll have to
send you to your room without supper.”

“How the worm has turned,” I said, laughing
just a little to let our daughter know that her dad and I weren’t
really mad at each other.

I gave Jim a quick peck on the cheek, and he
gave my arm a squeeze. Probably checking to see if there was any
extra fat on it, but thanks to all the layers I was wearing, he
couldn’t tell.

“Here’s the mail,” said Jenny. “Since when
do you subscribe to Retirement Relocation magazine, Dad?”

Huh? My Beloved had paid actual money for a
magazine subscription on places to retire? When he could have read
it at our library – for free?

This was beyond serious. This was a
crisis-in-the-making.

Chapter 2

I can only please one person a day. Today is
not your day.

Tomorrow’s not looking good either.

Dinner that night was strained. Not the
food, the atmosphere. (We may be older, but we can still chew.) I
wanted to confront My Beloved about his real estate musings – I had
a right to know, after all. But I didn’t want to have an argument
in front of Jenny. And somehow, I knew Jim and I would have an
argument.

I chewed thoughtfully, oblivious to the
conversation Jim and Jenny were having about the courses she was
involved in this semester. Jenny had returned home last summer
after spending a few years in L.A. pursuing a graduate degree in
English, and being pursued – and sometimes caught -- by a variety
of highly unsuitable young men, in my humble opinion. Especially
the last one, Jeff, whose controlling attitude had finally driven
Jenny back to the East Coast.

Not that I would have ever voiced that to my
daughter, of course. I do have a big mouth, but I’m not that
stupid. Both Jim and I were delighted that she now was pursuing a
graduate degree and supporting herself (with a little help from
good old Mom and Dad) with a part-time teaching assistant’s job at
the local college.

And I was over the moon about Jenny’s new
relationship. Her boyfriend du jour, whom I hoped would be The One,
was Mark Anderson, who had been a classmate of Jenny’s way back in
grade school. He was also a local police detective, and he and
Jenny had become reacquainted last summer when My Beloved had been
(falsely, of course!) suspected of committing a homicide. I was the
one who had finally figured out who the real culprit was, but
modestly, I let the police department take all the credit.

“Carol, are you ever going to swallow that
food? We’re not having a blackout meal tonight, are we?” Jim
interrupted my daydreaming with a feeble attempt at humor.

Blackout meals used to be my specialty. Our
part of the country was subject to power failure after power
failure in the mid-80s. The family used to tease me that I’d take
advantage of the situation by cleaning all the leftovers out of the
refrigerator and slapping them together into some sort of makeshift
meal before everything spoiled. Frequently, no one could identify
what they were eating. Jenny and our son Mike called them blackout
meals, and always eyed them with great suspicion.

I admit that I did come up with some pretty
unusual combinations – leftover hamburger with a side order of
pineapple Jello was one of them. I never claimed to be a gourmet
cook; I just hate to waste food.

“No, Jim,” I replied, washing down my food
with a dainty sip of chardonnay, “I can assure you that a blackout
meal is not the menu tonight. Nor is all-day meat, in case you were
wondering.”

If you don’t understand that phrase, think
of chewing a tough piece of meat forever and ever – all day, in
fact. Hey, in those days Jim had me on a pretty strict grocery
budget. No filet mignon for us.

Come to think of it, not much had changed on
that score.

Sensing a tad of tension in the air once
again, Jenny tried to lighten the mood by going down memory lane a
little more. “Mom, one of my all-time favorite meals is your
meatloaf. We haven’t had that in ages. Maybe now that I’m a
grown-up, you’ll finally share the secret ingredient with me so
mine will come out as good as yours does.”

I laughed. “The secret ingredient is pretty
simple, Jenny. It’s adding a pinch of allspice to the meat mixture.
You know,” I went on, getting into the spirit of things a little
more, “I remember the night we did the meatloaf poll.”

“The what?” asked Jim, clearly confused by
this reference.

“It was one of those nights that you were
out of town on business,” I said, thinking that those were the good
old days. “Mike never liked meatloaf, and he used to grab his
throat and roll all over the kitchen floor whenever I served it.
Just getting him to eat one forkful was a major event.

“This one night -- I guess you were about
twelve, Jenny, so Mike must have been ten -- I got sick and tired
of his antics and I challenged him to call his friends to see how
many of them liked meatloaf. We made a deal that he could call
eight of his friends, and if five or more of them liked meatloaf,
he had to clean his plate.”

“Pretty clever, Carol. Did it work?”

“It sure did, Dad,” Jenny chimed in. “Mike
was really mad when he found out so many of his buddies liked
meatloaf. In fact, I think a lot of them wanted to know the next
time Mom was making it so they could come for dinner. I wonder if
Mike remembers that. Maybe I’ll e-mail him a little later and ask
him.”

“But he did take two hours to clean his
plate,” I reminded Jenny. “And there was a lot of eye-rolling and
coughing, too. I always wondered how much he actually ate, and how
much he snuck under the table to feed Tuppence. She was such a
great dog.”

By now I was in a much better mood. I guess
living in the past makes me feel better.

I briefly wondered if I could use the same
technique on My Beloved. What if I phoned some of our friends and
took a poll about the merits of moving into an active adult
community? Nah. This time, I was afraid to take the chance, unless
I knew I could stack the deck and win.

“Need any help cleaning up?” Jim asked.

“Not tonight, Dad. I can do it. Mom and I
need to catch up. I could tell she wasn’t listening to me at
supper. And you know how she hates to miss anything,” said our
daughter.

“Guilty as charged,” I admitted. “On both
counts. I promise I’ll hang on your every word, sweetie. I’ll
scrape and rinse and you load the dishwasher.”

Jim grabbed the evening paper and shambled
off toward the family room, Lucy and Ethel at his heels.

This is nice, I thought to myself, as Jenny
and I worked companionably for a few minutes.

But Jenny wasn’t saying anything.

I was immediately apprehensive. Call it
mother’s intuition, but I had a feeling that what she wanted to
talk to me about was more important than just catching me up on
school stuff.

“Um, Mom,” she finally said. “I wanted to
tell you this first, before I told Dad. I found a condo to rent
today. It’s in the same complex as Mark’s. I’m moving out of the
house at the end of the month.”

Chapter 3

If we can put a man on the moon,

why can’t we teach him to pick up his
socks?

Whoa. Talk about surprises. I wondered if
there was going to be a full moon tonight. What was it with my
family and moving all of a sudden?

Fortunately, I was facing the sink when
Jenny made her big announcement, so I had a chance to compose
myself before I responded. I was never any good at hiding my
feelings when I was a child, and since I’ve gotten older, that’s
one of the few things about me that hasn’t changed. I knew she was
hoping for a positive response from me. I channeled the fantasy
that what Jenny had really said was, “Mom, Mark and I are getting
married,” and reacted accordingly by putting a big grin on my face
and hugging her. I hoped she didn’t see that my eyes were brimming
with tears.