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Authors: Sandy Gingras
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father was happy when I married Ed. He thought I was “settling down,” becoming normal. Or so he hoped. Well, so did I.
Except Ed turned out to be not-so-normal himself.
“I’ve been leading a totally boring life,” I tell my uncle.
“Maybe that’s changing,” he says.
“I got hired by someone to investigate this murder. Kind of hired,” I tell him.
I expect him to be shocked, but there’s no riling up my Uncle Paulie. He’s as even as they come. Plus, he always trusted in me. All he says is, “Really? Well, Squirt can help you do some background searches. You can learn a thing or two.”
I must look a little alarmed because he says, “Listen, the cops will probably have the guy who did this nailed in another day. Come on,” he pulls my arm, “I’ll show you my orchids.”
The flowers are hanging in pots from the branches of the bottle brush trees around the deck. They are purple and white and pink. “I didn’t think they were real,” I tell him. They seem waxy and mysterious and incredibly delicate.
“People handle them with kid gloves,” he says. “They sterilize scissors before they cut them and put on these plastic gloves like surgeons before they separate the roots. I just pull them apart with my hands. They like to be touched.”
I think about my marriage and how Ed got so that he wouldn’t even touch the things in his collections, how he used those plastic gloves to handle even rubber band balls. He’d tell me all the time how the human hand had oils that were damaging.
There’s a slow quiet leak out of the corner of my eyes. Tweenie comes out and we eat dinner on the deck. My Uncle Paulie and Tweenie pretend not to notice my tears. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I say. I never cry.
My uncle hands me a tissue. Then they talk among themselves about people they know and I feel the warm bath of their conversation washing over me. I eventually stop crying.
Tweenie and I clear the dishes, and I say I should go, but they want me to stay in their guest room. My uncle hugs me and his shirt smells like laundry soap. Tweenie turns my bed down. She plumps up my pillow. My uncle says he’ll take Dreamer down the street a bit before he turns in if I don’t mind. He likes a little walk before bed. He pauses by the door as he’s going out. “I love you honey,” he says.
“Mmmflvetoo,” I kind of say. I lay down in this strange bed exhausted from all this tenderness.
Chapter 13
The first thing I notice as I pull into Alligator Estates is that all of Marie and Ernie’s whirligigs are gone. It’s still really early, almost dark, but their absence is tangible. I stop the car. I look. I get out. It’s very quiet where there should be whirligigging. Dreamer pokes her nose out the window and sniffs. We left Paulie’s before anyone was up, and I scurried her into the car without even giving her a chance to pee. I have this go-go-go thing that clicks in sometimes: Post Emotional Stress Syndrome, I call it. It’s really just more running, I suppose.
Maybe Marie just got sick of the whirligigs, I think. Maybe they reminded her too much of Ernie. Nah, I think, she would have done it more neatly. Someone stole them. It has the look of a crime scene. There’s something violent in the holes left in the ground.
I get back in my car. “The great whirligig caper,” I tell Dreamer. We drive on to my still slanted trailer.
I’m just getting out of the shower when there’s a knock on my door. The trailer shakes. I see a big blue shirt through my front door window. “Hold on,” I yell and throw on some clothes.
“Ma’am,” the detective says when I open the door a minute later.
“What?” I say. My hair is dripping and I’ve got a robe on that really is a beach cover-up and my eyes are all puffy and red. This is so unfair. He looks like he’s been up for hours, running and eating egg whites and combing his chest hair.
“Can I come in?”
I almost say, “If you can
Except Ed turned out to be not-so-normal himself.
“I’ve been leading a totally boring life,” I tell my uncle.
“Maybe that’s changing,” he says.
“I got hired by someone to investigate this murder. Kind of hired,” I tell him.
I expect him to be shocked, but there’s no riling up my Uncle Paulie. He’s as even as they come. Plus, he always trusted in me. All he says is, “Really? Well, Squirt can help you do some background searches. You can learn a thing or two.”
I must look a little alarmed because he says, “Listen, the cops will probably have the guy who did this nailed in another day. Come on,” he pulls my arm, “I’ll show you my orchids.”
The flowers are hanging in pots from the branches of the bottle brush trees around the deck. They are purple and white and pink. “I didn’t think they were real,” I tell him. They seem waxy and mysterious and incredibly delicate.
“People handle them with kid gloves,” he says. “They sterilize scissors before they cut them and put on these plastic gloves like surgeons before they separate the roots. I just pull them apart with my hands. They like to be touched.”
I think about my marriage and how Ed got so that he wouldn’t even touch the things in his collections, how he used those plastic gloves to handle even rubber band balls. He’d tell me all the time how the human hand had oils that were damaging.
There’s a slow quiet leak out of the corner of my eyes. Tweenie comes out and we eat dinner on the deck. My Uncle Paulie and Tweenie pretend not to notice my tears. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I say. I never cry.
My uncle hands me a tissue. Then they talk among themselves about people they know and I feel the warm bath of their conversation washing over me. I eventually stop crying.
Tweenie and I clear the dishes, and I say I should go, but they want me to stay in their guest room. My uncle hugs me and his shirt smells like laundry soap. Tweenie turns my bed down. She plumps up my pillow. My uncle says he’ll take Dreamer down the street a bit before he turns in if I don’t mind. He likes a little walk before bed. He pauses by the door as he’s going out. “I love you honey,” he says.
“Mmmflvetoo,” I kind of say. I lay down in this strange bed exhausted from all this tenderness.
Chapter 13
The first thing I notice as I pull into Alligator Estates is that all of Marie and Ernie’s whirligigs are gone. It’s still really early, almost dark, but their absence is tangible. I stop the car. I look. I get out. It’s very quiet where there should be whirligigging. Dreamer pokes her nose out the window and sniffs. We left Paulie’s before anyone was up, and I scurried her into the car without even giving her a chance to pee. I have this go-go-go thing that clicks in sometimes: Post Emotional Stress Syndrome, I call it. It’s really just more running, I suppose.
Maybe Marie just got sick of the whirligigs, I think. Maybe they reminded her too much of Ernie. Nah, I think, she would have done it more neatly. Someone stole them. It has the look of a crime scene. There’s something violent in the holes left in the ground.
I get back in my car. “The great whirligig caper,” I tell Dreamer. We drive on to my still slanted trailer.
I’m just getting out of the shower when there’s a knock on my door. The trailer shakes. I see a big blue shirt through my front door window. “Hold on,” I yell and throw on some clothes.
“Ma’am,” the detective says when I open the door a minute later.
“What?” I say. My hair is dripping and I’ve got a robe on that really is a beach cover-up and my eyes are all puffy and red. This is so unfair. He looks like he’s been up for hours, running and eating egg whites and combing his chest hair.
“Can I come in?”
I almost say, “If you can
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