Catering to Nobody (Goldy Schulz Series) Page 3

  “Do you realize the mess you made by tearing into this?” I demanded after knocking and entering and offering the bag as evidence. He told Todd to hang on and cupped his hand over the phone.

  “Please, Mom,” he said as he held up a book, something about TV facts. “Let me talk. Besides, I didn’t do that. See,” he said as he tongued forward a wet pink mass, “I had bubble gum.”

  I cocked my head at him. “Arch, alibis are like food service. They have to do more than look good and hold up. They have to be palatable. And yours,” I added, “doesn’t even look good.”

  “Sorry, Mom,” he said. “Really. I’ll clean it up.”

  I wanted to open his head and look in, to see what he was really thinking, how he was dealing with everything. I wanted to say, Are you okay? And have him say, Yeah, Mom.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “I swept it. Just be more careful, all right?”

  He nodded solemnly and said nothing. And then I turned away. I did not know what the right grieving behavior should be from a boy whose favorite teacher ever, Laura Smiley, had only six days before slashed her wrists and bled to death.

  CHAPTER 2

  I’m starving,” said Patty Sue as she tiptoed into the kitchen in a ruffled pink housecoat the next morning. I finished slicing the strawberries and offered her a bowl. A lanky twenty-year-old who had a twig-like figure and the metabolism of an athlete, Patty Sue Williams had been my roommate since August tenth at Vonette Korman’s request.

  “She just doesn’t have anywhere to live while she’s here, Goldy honey,” my ex-mother-in-law had said, “and she needs Fritz to treat her medical problems. Take her in for a while. Give her a job. She’s never done anything out there in eastern Colorado except live with her folks. This gal wants to learn, Goldy. You can teach her.”

  This I had come to doubt, I reflected as I pushed down on lemon halves to ream out their juice for the lemonade. Patty Sue had been so sheltered by her parents that her approach to any new endeavor was timidity, confusion, or both. She had attended a local community college “for a while,” she said vaguely, as if that, like everything else in her life, had not quite panned out. When she first arrived she had told me all about herself, including the fact that she was a virgin. Dr. Fritz Korman, John Richard’s father and the other half of Korman and Korman Ob-Gyn, was treating Patty Sue for amenorrhea. Which meant she hadn’t had a menstrual cycle for the last year.

  “This is a bad thing?” Marla had asked at the last meeting of Amour Anonymous, our women’s group.

  “It needs to be treated,” I replied. “Her doctor out in Fort Morgan sent her to Fritz, who claims to be some kind of specialist with it. It’s serious enough that Patty Sue’s mother let her come out and live with me, although she calls once a week to make sure I’m not corrupting her.”

  “Not a chance of that, I’m afraid,” Marla said. “Maybe we could bring her into the group as a special assignment.”

  I doubted if Patty Sue would have recognized herself in any of the literature about love-addicted women, which the Amour Anonymous group reads religiously. Sometimes I wondered if she recognized herself as anything. She was tall, lovely, and unsophisticated to the point of never having operated a dishwasher. She wanted to learn to drive a car but was intimidated by crown roast of pork. At first she had been quite eager to learn the catering business. She had made cementlike loaves of bread and overcooked hamburgers with the brightest of smiles. But just when she started mastering the skills, she had detoured into a state of distraction.

  In September she’d started avoiding my eyes and my questions. Perhaps she was thinking about her sickness. It was strange because she didn’t look sick. In fact, physical fitness was her one obsession. She had even asked that her first wages as a caterer’s helper go to adding her to my athletic club membership. Despite the mood shift, which she unfortunately could not blame on PMS, she still worked out at the gym. But her energy had become feverish instead of enthusiastic. And her cooking abilities, such as they were, had gone to hell.

  “That was great,” Patty Sue said now as she licked her fingers from the strawberries. “This kitchen always smells super.”

  I set the bowl aside and broke three eggs into an iron skillet, then went back to squeezing lemons until it was time for the over-easy part. These days, nothing was easy for Patty Sue until it was over. My attempts in the last two weeks to teach her to cook anything more complicated than toast, much less eggs, had not gone well. Words like marinate and braise were beyond her. I had asked if she was homesick. She’d said no, and gone on to leave the top off the food processor when she worked with flour, generating small blizzards.

  So I had put her to work serving to pay for her rent, food, and right to exercise indoors. For Laura Smiley’s wake she was in charge of the strawberry shortcake buffet. This would mean little beyond keeping a platter stacked with scones and replenishing bowls with sliced strawberries and whipped cream.

  “Where’s Arch?” I asked as I placed little glasses of orange juice next to each placemat.

  Patty Sue said, “On the phone, I think.”

  Since she obviously was not going to get him, I started down the hall to his room. On the way I glanced at the drawings of mountain flowers he had done last spring. Laura had encouraged his artwork after he’d produced the sketches of high-country animals. These delicate pen-and-ink works were of bluebell, fireweed, daisy, lady’s slipper—all part of a project on nectar producers. Arch had chewed his tongue and furrowed his brow while drawing the details of tendrils and stamens.

  Arch was the other problem-in-residence. Never gregarious, he had seemed even more isolated since the beginning of school. Twice he had come home with a black eye and a note from the principal saying he had been in a fight. I knew better than to pry. Or worse, rescue. I just wanted to understand what was going on.

  Since Laura’s death he had become even more withdrawn. Whenever I was near he spoke on the phone in a hushed tone. His eyes glazed more and more in indifference, as if he were taking lessons from Patty Sue. Our days of counting spoons, of telling stories, of loitering next to the hill of pumpkins at the grocery store to choose just the right one for a jack-o’-lantern—these were over. Immersed in fantasy role-playing games, he prepared and embarked on elaborate paper adventures, the purpose of which eluded me. As I edged away from the drawings and approached his room I could hear the authoritative voice he invariably used when directing one of these adventures. I slid his door open.

  “… and since you have trespassed the space in front of their lair,” he announced, “you will be attacked by a low-flying straight line of stringrays—”

  “Arch!” I stuck my head into his room. “Hate to interrupt. Breakfast.”

  He looked up at me from his neatly made bed. He was already wearing his white shirt and black pants. Soon he would cover this outfit with one of our white chef’s aprons.

  “To be continued,” he said, and hung up. Behind the glasses his eyes were inscrutable.

  “You’re all right?” I said, half statement, half question.

  “I’m not hungry,” he said with straight-lipped calm. “For eggs or anything. Let’s just go.”

  And so we did. Patty Sue ate all the eggs. We packed the van and set out.

  The air was cool but calm, quite different from the snarling frost-blowing beast an October day could be. At eight thousand feet above sea level, snow and cakes fell unexpectedly. After eleven years I’d learned how to adjust the recipes, but driving the van through storms and over ice remains a challenge. This day the aspen leaves moved languidly as the van sputtered out of the driveway’s dust. Above, the sky was deep blue and cloudless, as if nature were holding her breath before the first storms. Starting the descent to Main Street, we passed a vacant lot and had a glimpse of the far distance.

  “Oh,” said Patty Sue, “what is that?”

  She was pointing to the town’s namesake, the Aspen Meadow, now a large patch of gold in a green-an
d-brown quilt of trees about seven miles away. This patchwork of fall color nestled at the base of mountains already blanketed with white. I explained to her that that area was known as the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve. There, I added as we turned onto Main Street, the forest was so thick that during dry spells even hikers were barred entry, for fear of forest fire.

  “Arch knows all about the Aspen Meadow,” I announced, hoping to invite him out of his silence. “He’s done drawings as part of his school work.”

  “You do?” said Patty Sue as she turned to face him. “You have?”

  “Oh, I guess,” said Arch in a flat voice. “The Webelos hike in for the last pack meeting of the year,” he said. “The woods are real deep. We see a lot of deer and elk and foxes and stuff like that. But to get in you have to go down a long dirt road. Fritz fishes the upper Cottonwood in the summer, and Pomeroy Locraft raises bees.” He thought for a moment and then explained to Patty Sue, “I used to help Pom with the hives, last spring when I was studying bees.”

  “And flowers,” I added.

  “Did you get stung?” Patty Sue asked. “Did you catch fish?”

  “I caught some trout,” said Arch. He thought for a minute. “The bees never stung me.” I looked at him in the mirror. He was shaking his head at Patty Sue, as if he were twenty and she eleven. He explained, “You learn how to be careful. Pomeroy taught me stuff like wearing white around the bees.” Arch sighed. “He taught me a lot.”

  “This Pomeroy,” I said to anticipate Patty Sue’s next question, “teaches driver ed over at the high school and does the apiary in the summer. Pomeroy is also recently divorced.” I stopped at Main Street’s one red light and smiled at my housemate. “A new single person in town can be an interesting part of the landscape, too.”

  “Oh,” said Patty Sue.

  “Will Dad be at Ms. Smiley’s?” asked Arch.

  “Yep,” I said, and pushed the van’s grinding gears into first. “Vonette and Fritz, too. Plus all the teachers from the schools.”

  Patty Sue said, “I’ve never seen a dead person.”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured her, “we’re not going to the church at all. Plus it’s not that kind of wake. They’ll have the funeral and the interment while we’re setting up. All we’ll see is live people.”

  Patty Sue paused and then said suddenly, “I never knew anyone who killed herself.”

  I did not answer but glanced again at Arch in the rearview mirror. He was looking out the window, but sensed my eyes.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” he said. “You can talk about it.”

  “All I know is,” I said quietly, “what I’ve heard. She was out doing errands Saturday morning. One week ago today. On Monday she didn’t show up for school and didn’t call in. They got a substitute.” I coaxed the van into second and turned onto Homestead Drive before going on. “Apparently one of the teachers came over at lunchtime to check on her and to bring some papers that needed correcting. The door was open. Laura was in the bathtub. Dead. Razor in her hand and dried blood all over, I guess. No note, but no sign of a fight or anything. There was an autopsy.” I cleared my throat. “I think that’s routine. Anyway, the guy said suicide.” I paused. “Except that it just seems so sad. Premature.”

  I glanced at Arch. He was intent on the view out the window. The van released another cloud of dust as we turned onto Piney Circle, a dirt road where wood-paneled houses peeked out from behind stands of ponderosa and lodgepole pine.

  “So did you know her?” Patty Sue asked.

  Alicia’s question. Why did people inquire so suspiciously about your prior acquaintance with a suicide victim? Were they trying to ascertain guilt? If you had known her better, she wouldn’t have done this? If you hadn’t known her at all, you were off the hook?

  “She was Arch’s teacher last year and two years ago. I saw her at conferences,” I replied. “Sometimes I saw her in exercise class. That’s it.” I thought for a minute. “She was funny. She could make you laugh talking about how she was going to be a taxing person for the IRS, things like that. And she was a special person for Arch.”

  I looked again in the mirror. My son was holding his hands over his eyes. I pulled over onto the graveled shoulder and turned to face him.

  “Arch,” I said. “You don’t have to do this. Listen, we can manage with just Patty Sue and myself serving. You don’t even have to come at all.”

  Patty Sue and I sat as Arch sobbed quietly. I handed him a tissue. I shouldn’t have talked about Laura Smiley, after all. Arch blew his nose and coughed as people do when they want it to look as if the real problem is sinus congestion, not heartache.

  “It’s okay,” he said. He cleared his throat. “Let’s go. Please.”

  I said, “You really don’t have to.”

  “Yeah,” he said, “I do.”

  We turned off Piney Circle and onto Pine Needle Lane. Whoever had named the streets wanted to remind us we were in the mountains. The lane was a dirt road that would take us to Laura’s house. She had lived close to the center of town, in a hilly area once peppered with log cabins. In the Forties, Aspen Meadow had been a rustic retreat from Denver for the well-to-do. Now the largest portion of residents made the hour-long commute to Denver to work. In Laura’s residential area small A-frames and wood-paneled houses built in the Fifties and Sixties were sandwiched between a scattering of remaining cabins. The resulting architectural mishmash made the area not a good investment for the commuters, but a haven for teachers, artists, waiters, and others who could not afford a ritzier neighborhood.

  The van shook as we started down the steep, dusty driveway to Laura’s bungalow. The aunt from Illinois had flown in and rented a car. It stood outside the open garage, as she had planned to take a limousine to the funeral. She had left us enough room so that I could just edge the van in next to the garage door.

  Fortunately the aunt also had remembered to leave the door unlocked. We pushed in with our crates, boxes, foodstuffs, bowls, and cups.

  Once inside I took a deep breath. A professional service from Denver had been in to clean. Their assignment included, Laura’s aunt had crisply informed me, disinfecting and regrouting the bloodied bathroom tile. This was about the fifth time I’d done a postfuneral meal in the home where a person had died. I shivered in anticipation of any lingering smell or sense of death.

  But here there was none. Large bouquets of flowers, florist’s mixtures of carnations and gladioli, snapdragons and baby’s breath, crowded the counters in the brightly wallpapered kitchen. Only the cinnamon smell from the carnations and the piney scent of disinfectant lingered in the air.

  The house was small. We carted our boxes through the garage into the kitchen, which adjoined a larger dining-living room combination. The guests would be parking around the side near the aunt’s car. On that side there was a walkway to the front door, which opened into the dining-living area. I surveyed the room to figure out how to set up the tables and arrange the flowers between the plates and food. Like an investigator at a crash site, I did not want to think about the tragedy that had happened here. We had a job to do. The living had to eat.

  Nevertheless, pacing off the living room for measurement, I kept expecting to feel some eeriness in the house. What was actually discomfiting was that the whole place seemed so terribly cozy. Two of the living room walls paneled in diagonal beetle-killed wood glowed green-gold in the sunlight. Shelves and cabinets dotted the other walls. There was a wall of photographs. Deep blue carpet covered the area where the floor was not wood. In addition to the photos there were painted pictures of snowy mountains and snowy fields and brooks with snowy banks. Laura’s two wing chairs looked newly reupholstered, as did the two old but not antique love seats. The fabric on the furniture and several throw pillows was a print of spring flowers—periwinkle blue, kelly green, sunshine yellow. With the blue rug and rows of wooden shelves and cabinets, the big room was lively with color. Nowhere in sight were the browns and grays and blacks, the fi
lth or lack of care one would expect of a suicidal personality.

  The three long tables ordered from Mountainside Rental lay piled like slabs of rock on the blue rug. They would all fit. We pushed the love seats and chairs into conversational groupings, then cracked open the tables and arranged them in a horseshoe shape. Arch unfurled the tablecloths while Patty Sue and I began to unpack the food.

  “Listen to this,” I said a few moments later. I had just closed the refrigerator and was perusing the homemade magnets and cartoons with which Laura had festooned the door. Arch and Patty Sue were in the living room setting out silverware and plates in the areas between the flower baskets.

  I read, “ ‘This refrigerator is cooler than Dave Brubeck.’ Uh-huh. ‘A woman should be more than a cute dish in the Cabinet. She should be Secretary of State.’ Very funny. ‘The only time I COOK is on the highway.’ Ha!” I turned to the dining room, where Patty Sue and Arch had begun unraveling extension cords for the coffee machine. “How could a funny person get so depressed?”

  After a minute Arch said, “Oh Mom, you know. She was always making jokes. ‘A school is for fish,’ stuff like that.”

  “Right,” I muttered, then read above the stove: “When is a pig a canine? When it is a hot dog.” By the sink: “I went to plumbing school and told them to make me into Farrah Faucet.”

  Patty Sue joined me. Her face was paler than usual. She said, “I feel kind of spooky. Please tell me again what you want me to do. I mean, when the people get here.”

  I explained her duties once more, then showed her the bathroom, in case folks asked for directions. To my relief the aunt or the cleaning service had put up an opaque white shower curtain, whose new-plastic smell was overwhelming. It was drawn across the tub. I couldn’t help it: I poked my head around the curtain while Patty Sue checked her lipstick in the mirror. The bathtub was spotless. What I had expected to find I did not know. I hustled Patty Sue out to the kitchen to show her where everything would be. Arch was busy slicing lemons to float in the lemonade pitcher.