Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [41]
Traumatized, Stacey was half-asleep, still sniffling. Houser slowly rocked, his chin on his chest. Gwen folded clothes automatically. I took my freshly laundered jeans, t-shirt, underwear, and socks, and went into the bathroom. Through the door I could hear Odd ask, probably to Houser, “What’s wrong with her?” He could have been asking about any one of the three females under that roof.
I turned on the blower so that I wouldn’t hear them talk and they couldn’t hear me pee.
Gwen’s claim to being a good cook was more or less true, though I suspected her range was narrow. The scope of her recipes, not the stove she cooked on. We had mac ‘n cheese with little cut up smoked sausages inside, the top nicely browned and crusty, and a cucumber and sour cream salad. My mother used to do the same meal and serve it with her homebrewed iced tea in the summers. Here, I had another Molsons. We sat at a little round dinnette, and Odd had to go get a couple folding chairs from Frank. He had been gone awhile for that and I knew he was pursuing his case, which I had all but forgotten since my spontaneous combustion earlier.
Gwen put on some of the CDs from Houser’s bag and we all sat down to dinner. Before digging in, we joined hands and Stacey, as the youngest, said Grace while we bowed our heads. Houser was on my right, his left hand cuffed to the chair, so I reached down and took the cuffed hand.
It was a grim little dinner at first, but the homey hot mac and the refreshing cool cuke salad soon restored us and before long we were like a family with issues that might never be resolved but at least could be put on hold longer enough to get through dinner.
“The secret,” said Gwen, “ is the Velveeta. I’ve tried ‘tillamook but the good cheddars don’t bind the mac like Velveeta.”
I mumbled some words of interest, like the world is full of wonders, and why shouldn’t Velveeta turn out to be one of them. I did not want to shut down any semblance of normality, but on the other hand I did not want to encourage more stupid talk. I asked Gwen what she did for a living, single parent and all that.
“I work construction,” she said.
“Really?” She didn’t look the type, woman in a man’s world. I was the type.
“Highway construction. I’m the one with the orange vest and hardhat and the two-sided sign, stop and slow. I either wave you through or make you stop and wait.”
“Is that a good job?”
“When it’s not raining or freezing or you’re almost taken out by some driver in too big a hurry, talking on their cell phone and all. It pays the rent, but to tell you the truth, all I ever wanted to be was a homemaker.”
“Mother,” whispered Stacey, a warning.
“But you need the right partner for that job,” she went on, “and I could never quite swing it. Tried it three times. Stacey’s father was number two. He was a long-distance hauler who one day just couldn’t find his way back.”
“Do you always have to tell everybody every lousy detail, mom?” said Stacey. “Couldn’t you just chill out?”
“The last husband was working out okay, ‘til he started getting fresh with Stacey.”
“Mom!”
“Well, it’s true!”
“That’s all right, Gwen,” I said, “you don’t have to talk anymore.”
I knew she felt obliged. She’d washed our clothes, made our dinner, and now thought she had to fill the dead air, so that the imposition of her and her virgin daughter might be made a tad more palatable.
I changed the subject and asked Odd what the other incurable romantics had to say.
“Who?
“Frank and Angie.”
“About what?”
“You know what. You were gone a long time for a couple of folding chairs.”
“They told me that Jeannie’s father is dead. He died a few years after, of a broken heart, everyone says. So it’s just the mother. She lives not far from here, in the same house.”
“Everything is not far from here, we’re on an island. Everything but the world.”
At the mention of Jeannie, both Stacey and Houser perked up. They looked