What’s the perfect age to get married? I hear that debate a lot. Some say older because it takes a certain maturity to be married. Some say younger when a person isn’t stuck in their ways, yet. So, what do I say? I say, when you’re ready, you’re ready.
Lesson 52, Matchmaking advice from your
Grandma Zelda
I turned onto my grandmother’s street and was surprised to see Spencer standing in front of the house across from Grandma’s house. He was talking to a man who was wearing a tool belt and holding a tablet, pointing at different places on the tarp-covered house. I stopped in my tracks, scared to go on. Spencer froze, too, and as if he sensed me, turned and looked my way.
He shrugged his shoulders and smirked. I melted, and our fight disappeared from my memory. Spencer was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt. His hands were hooked in his pockets, he was barefoot, and his hair was mussed. He was the sexiest man on the planet. He would make ice melt. I walked to him.
“Gladie, this is Urijah,” Spencer said. I shook the man’s hand.
“Thank you for trusting me with your house,” he said. “I can’t wait to get started.”
“You’re welcome?” I said like a question. My house? Did I have a house? I felt Spencer’s eyes on me, but I didn’t dare look at him.
“We can start tomorrow and be done by the beginning of July.”
July. The house would be done in July. I didn’t know what that meant or what it had to do with me. Spencer and I were overdue for a serious discussion.
Spencer reached out and put his hand around my waist. “Sounds perfect, Urijah,” he said.
“Cleanup is going to take a while, and then we can sit down and go over specifics. Are you going to use the interior designer we talked about?” Urijah asked.
“We’re going to talk about that,” Spencer said.
We were going to talk about an interior designer? Was I in the Twilight Zone? I had never had an interior designer. I had never even had an interior before.
My heart pounded in my chest, but I definitely should have had a third latte because I thought I might be dreaming. Spencer and Urijah talked about retaining walls, drywall, and other kinds of walls while I drifted.
I drifted far away from thoughts of houses and commitment and even past thoughts of Spencer and his naked body. My brain moved on to safe things to think about, like Bridget’s problems and the mysterious murdered girl in the hotel room.
And Oreos. I was having lots of thoughts about Oreos.
Spencer walked home with me after the contractor left, and we didn’t say a word about “my house.”
“Clear your schedule tomorrow so I can take you out for dinner,” Spencer said, as we walked up the driveway.
“You’re taking me out to dinner?”
“Yep.”
“But Grandma. But the eggs.”
“Tomorrow for dinner, Pinky. Six o’clock just like regular people. Dress in that little red dress you have. You don’t have to wear underwear, in case you were wondering.”
“Gee, thanks,” I said.
He pulled me close and looked deep into my eyes, taking my breath away. “I love you, Gladie Burger.”
“Why?”
“Shit if I know.”
I loved him, too, but I felt out of control and overwhelmed, like my life was two steps ahead of me at all times since the first time Spencer had kissed me. I was disoriented, unbalanced, freaking out.
“Who killed the woman with the ice bucket?” I asked.
Spencer smirked his little smirk. “I’ve been wondering when you would get around to that. I thought you were broken.”
“Just distracted. Who was she?”
“Mamie Foster. She was on vacation with her new husband. He’s been arrested. They found the murder weapon in his shaving kit.”
“They found the murderer?” I asked, disappointed. That had been the first time that had happened. Normally, it was a mystery, and I would butt in and solve it.
“Disappointed, Miss Marple?” Spencer asked.
“Of course not,” I lied.
He opened the door, and waited for me to walk in. “Although, it’s a little too pat, a little too neat, finding the murder weapon in the husband’s shaving kit.”
Spencer closed the door behind us. “Pinky, don’t start.”
“I mean, why would he hide the murder weapon where it would definitely be found? Why didn’t he toss it somewhere?”
“Maybe a man who kills his wife on his honeymoon isn’t thinking too clearly, Pinky. Most killers aren’t criminal masterminds, you know.”
“And why would he kill her in our bed?” I asked, walking to the kitchen. Spencer followed me.
“Again, not a genius. Not thinking clearly.”
I put the coffee pot on for Grandma. It was almost seven, and she probably wanted a cup. “Let’s think about this a moment. We saw her. She had an ice bucket and was happy, skipping down the hallway. So, what happened? Her husband got a sudden mood swing and ran after her in the ice room and then chased her into our locked room, where he killed her? Did anyone check the ice room for clues?”
I cut a bagel in half and put it in the toaster. Spencer was leaning against the counter with his arms crossed. His mouth was open slightly and his eyes weren’t blinking. “I’m sure law enforcement has done its job,” he said finally, but he didn’t sound totally convinced.
The toaster dinged, and I put the bagel on a plate. “You’re probably right.” But while I smeared cream cheese on the bagel, all I was thinking about was how to find the time to get back to the hotel and check out the scene of the crime. I also needed to talk to the husband.
“You have that look on your face again,” Spencer told me, handing me a coffee mug. I poured coffee into it and added sugar and milk.
“What was the murder weapon?” I asked him.
“A steak knife.”
“Did they have room service? A steak dinner?”
Spencer and I locked eyes. “Pinky…” he said, like he was a car changing gears. It was all the answer I needed. No steak dinner. No reason that he would have had a steak knife.
I put the food and the coffee on a tray and picked it up, shrugging at Spencer. “I’m sure that law enforcement is doing what it’s supposed to,” I said and rolled my eyes.
Spencer’s phone rang, and he answered it. “I’m on vacation,” he said after a few seconds. I walked upstairs, and he followed me as he talked on the phone. “I don’t care if she got bitten. I’ve gotten bitten more times on the job than anyone in California. Tell her to get a rabies shot and a tetanus shot and stop complaining. What? Say that again. Well, fine, so she only needs a tetanus shot. I don’t think Merry has rabies.”
He clicked off the phone. “Merry Ferry bit one of my cops.”
“Really? That’s weird.”
At some point, Spencer was going to get wind about the terror that I had been inflicting on Terri, and boy was he going to give me hell, but I was hoping that I could win her over before that happened.
I knocked on my grandmother’s door, and she told me to come in. I found her sitting on the chair next to her bed, and she was freshly showered and wearing her blue housedress and click-clack plastic slippers. From the sound of it, Meryl was in the bathroom. The television was on to a Claudette Colbert movie, and I caught Spencer looking longingly at his TV.
“You better get ready for the egg people, dolly,” my grandmother told me as I put the tray down on her nightstand. “They’re on their way, and they’re panicking.”
“Uh oh,” I said, took my bagel, and ran out of the room. Spencer ran out, too.
“I’m out of here before they arrive,” he said, as I stripped down and turned on the shower. “I’m running to Harry’s. I never want to see an egg again.”
“Okay, save yourself. I’ll take one for the team.” I took a thirty-second shower and braided my wet hair. I swiped some mascara on and dressed in slacks and a pink t-shirt. I checked on my grandmother to see if she needed anything. But she didn’t need me. Grandma was back in bed, and Meryl was sitting on the chair. The television was blaring the CBS Sunday Morning show. And, oh yeah, there was a parrot sitting on Meryl’s shoulder.
“Meryl, you have a bird sitting on your shoulder,” I said.
“Gladie, it’s a tragedy. Ishmael disappeared two years ago, and he came back this morning. He just flew through my kitchen window like nothing had happened,” Meryl explained.
“And you didn’t want him to come back?”
“Not like this! Not like this!”
I looked at my grandmother. “Meryl’s bird came back changed, dolly.”
The parrot looked like a normal parrot to me: Green. Feathers. A beak.
Then, the bird started to talk, but I didn’t understand one word. “See?” Meryl said. “When he left, he spoke English. Now, I have no idea what he’s saying.”
“What language is that?” I asked.
“No idea,” Meryl said.
“No idea,” my grandmother repeated.
I heard the door open and shut downstairs. I didn’t have time to worry about a bird who had left the country for two years or had taken some kind of intensive Berlitz course. “I’m sorry for your loss,” I told Meryl, handed her my bagel, and went downstairs.
Josephine was setting up the chairs in the parlor. She had brought a coffee cake, and I went to the kitchen to get the coffee pot and plates for the cake. “You’re staying for the meeting, right?” Josephine asked me, walking into the kitchen. I nodded. “Because Cannes is going to be ground zero for World War Three. This egg thing has already made people psychotic. I know one woman who hasn’t slept for twenty-four hours. She just keeps boiling eggs and repeats ‘Eggs, eggs, eggs’ over and over.”
I hadn’t boiled one egg, yet, and I was feeling guilty about it. “How many eggs have they boiled so far?”
“Fifty thousand. We’re never going to make it.”
By the time that I brought the coffee into the parlor, it had filled up with ten committee members and the two co-chairs. There was a lot of talk about how impossible it would be to prepare five-hundred-and-one thousand eggs within one week. And it wasn’t just boiling. The eggs had to be dyed and hid.
“I was up all night, making the egg map,” Griffin, the co-chair, announced, holding up a giant map, drawn onto brown butcher paper. He laid it out on the coffee table after we cleared away the cake and coffee. It was a crude representation of Cannes with little X’s marked in red all over it.
“We’re going to hide eggs in the orchards?” one of the committee members asked. “Normally, we only hide eggs in the Historic District. Actually, just the park.”
“It’s over five-hundred-thousand eggs,” Griffin said, as if that explained it all.
Josephine studied the map. “You’ve got eggs on the roof of the pharmacy.”
“Pretty much every roof. Kids are going to be falling off roofs like it’s raining children,” someone pointed out.
“Again, it’s over five hundred thousand eggs,” Griffin said.
“The gas station? The lake? How does that work with the lake?”
Griffin whipped the butcher paper off the coffee table and ripped it in two. “Everyone’s a critic! Fine! You find five-hundred-and-one-thousand places to hide a goddamned egg!”
At this point in the breakdown of any town meeting, my grandmother would calm the masses and force everyone to make nice. Since I was her replacement, it was my job to turn down the tension. How could I do that? Xanax would work, but the only person I knew with Xanax was Lucy, and she wasn’t there. And how could I force feed a group of elderly townsfolk to consume Xanax? I mulled it over, trying to figure out what elderly people did to relax. Buffets were good. And knitting. Actually, wasn’t all of the Greatest Generation booze hounds? Didn’t they like to drink sidecars and gimlets?
What the hell was a gimlet?
What the hell was a sidecar?
Oh, geez, I was out of ideas.
Griffin continued to rip the map into tiny pieces. Josephine was standing, screeching, and throwing her hands up. Various other committee members complained to each other that this was the dumbest thing the town had ever done.
That was saying a lot.
Xanax or no Xanax, I had to tamper this down in hurry. I stood up. “Now, now,” I said. Nobody paid attention to me. It was like I was invisible. “Now, now!” I yelled.
“Hiding eggs in the lake?” Josephine shrieked. “Are we giving the kids diving gear to hunt for eggs this year?” She swung around, wildly, and caught me with her bony knuckles right on my chin. I flew back and hit my head on the wall and then crashed down onto the floor.
Lying flat on my back, I tried to catch my breath. Cannes’s high society, meanwhile, leaned over me, giving me a good look at their droopy faces and what was left of their molars. “Why did you do that?” Josephine demanded. “You threw yourself in front of my hand. You practically broke it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. With the group finally quiet and not fighting, I took my chance to get control over the meeting. “Can’t we all be friends? We’re trying to accomplish something meaningful for our town, something to be proud of. Sure, it’s hard, but it’s worthwhile.”
I had no idea what I was talking about. It was a stupid Easter egg hunt. Kids went around, looking for colored, hard-boiled eggs. Who cared?
“She’s right,” Griffin said, looking down at me. “This is the biggest thing we’ve done in years. If we can’t do it, nobody can.”
“I agree,” Josephine said and shook his hand.
We had turned a corner. Someone helped me up, and the committee was reinvigorated with the challenge before them. The committee broke up into smaller groups. One worked on the logistics for boiling the eggs, another for the dyeing, and the last about the hunt itself. I wandered among the small groups, nodding, like I knew what they were doing. They never drafted me for a specific task, which was a plus. I just had to look like I was busy, and like that, I never actually needed to be busy.
“You’re the murder girl, right?” one of the committee members asked me. It was Alice, a widow with an unusual amount of chin hairs. She only had three, but they were at least two inches long. Thick and black. It was hard to pay attention to anything except for her chin hairs when she spoke to me. She was part of the dyeing group, and she had suggested that the eggs be painted in three colors, patriotic red, white, and blue.
“I’ve seen a couple murdered people. No more than the average person,” I said.
“Are you kidding? The way I heard it you’ve stumbled, tripped, and fallen over a good dozen of them. I’ve never seen one murdered person. I’ve never even seen a murdered cat, and cats are murdered every day.”
“They are?”
She nodded, and I watched her chin hairs move with her head. “It’s mass murder out there for cats. Everyone knows that.”
I didn’t know that. “Oh, sure,” I said.
“I would never kill a cat, but it wouldn’t take much for me to kill a person,” she continued, smiling. She looked into space, as if she was visualizing herself murdering some good for nothing human. “I could do it, easily,” she explained. My arms sprouted goosebumps, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. “Look at these muscles,” she said, flexing her arm. Sure enough, she had a big bicep. “That’s from seventy-five years of making homemade bread. So, I’d beat a man with my rolling pin. That would get him good. I probably could do it with one whack.” She blinked. “Or I could stab him to death. I have a great knife set.”
Josephine moved closer to me and whispered in my ear. “I saw a murdered person once in a very weird place. But I never told anyone. I can’t tell you about it, but trust me, I know how you feel.”
I moved on to the map group. They had started a new map and decided to ask the local businesses to hide eggs inside so that they wouldn’t have to hide eggs on roofs or in the lake. “It’s looking good,” Griffin told me, taking a sip from a mug. “Great coffee by the way. Have you tried Buckstars, yet? I went in, and they gave me a Caramel Buckstarsiato a day before their grand opening. It was okay. But I wanted to go in and see the drama.”
At first I thought he was talking about the war between Ruth and Buckstars. But the gleam in Griffin’s eye was about something bigger.
“What drama?” my nosy self asked.
“I’m not one for gossip,” he said, and the map group leaned forward to get an earful of Griffin not gossiping. “There’s been some fooling around and cheating happening with those Buckstars owners. Kinky, scary stuff. Like that book that everyone bought, but with older people and not as much money.”
“Fifty Shades book,” one of the map group members supplied. “Best book I’ve ever read.”
“What about you? You like that book?” Griffin asked me, winking.
“I need to check on the boil group,” I said, moving away from Griffin.
Luckily, the doorbell rang at that moment, and I went to answer it. “You Zelda’s girl?” a man asked me. He was wearing a jumpsuit with Pete’s Pesticides written in red on his chest.
“I’m her granddaughter, Gladie.”
He put his hand out, and I shook it. “I’m Bruce. Bruce Coyle. You’re supposed to find me my soulmate.”
I started to sweat. Big rolling beads of sweat popped out of my pores and instantly drenched me from my head to my toes. I would never be comfortable with the pressure of matchmaking. I wasn’t good with commitment or responsibility, and the idea that I was responsible for another’s lifetime of happiness or misery choked me and made me perspire.
But this was me, my career, and supposedly I had the gift. “Of course, Bruce. Come on in,” I said and wiped my forehead with the back of my hand.
The moment he walked in, another man appeared at the doorway. It was the sumo wrestler, and he was dressed in another finely tailored suit. “I filled out your grandmother’s questionnaire,” he told me, waving a packet of papers.
I figured that he must have been a difficult match if my grandmother made him fill out a questionnaire. Normally, she went by instinct and at most, jotted down notes on notecards.
“Come on in,” I said, and stepped behind Bruce Coyle. As I began to shut the door, the mayor drove up the driveway and parked. I turned toward my two matches. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen in a minute,” I told them. “Help yourself to the Danish on the table.”
The mayor stepped out of his car, and another man stepped out of the passenger side. He was an average-sized man with a receding hairline, and a trim mustache. He was wearing a gray suit, and he carried a briefcase.
“Gladie,” the mayor yelled, waving. “It’s me, and boy, do I have a surprise!”
He walked into the house, and the other man nodded to me. “I’m Gregory Jones,” he said.
“Don’t tell her, yet,” the mayor said. “I want it to be a surprise.”
He followed the mayor inside, and I finally shut the door. “Townspeople, I have wondrous news!” he announced.
“We’re busy. What is it?” Josephine grumbled.
The mayor chuckled. “Oh, Josephine. You’re such a side-slapper! All right, everyone gather around. Move the chairs so you’re all looking at me. Boy, oh boy, do I have a surprise. We should have balloons,” he said, looking around, as if balloons were going to appear in the parlor. “Oh, well, I guess this will have to do. How are we doing today? Lovely morning, we’re having. Don’t you love the fresh spring air?”
“Get on with it,” Griffin growled. “We have five hundred thousand eggs to deal with.”
“Hear that, Mr. Jones?” the mayor said to the man with the briefcase. “We’re going all the way with this thing. It’s the most exciting world record since Evil Knievel jumped the Grand Canyon.”
“What a moron,” Alice grumbled. “Evil Knievel never jumped the Grand Canyon.”
“Who’s Evil Knievel?” a man asked.
The mayor chuckled, again. “We should have a drumroll. Gladie, could you do a drumroll?”
Everyone looked at me. “I don’t have drums,” I said.
“You don’t need drums,” a man shouted at me. “You pretend. Haven’t you ever done a drumroll before? Are you one of those millennials? They don’t know anything.”
“They all got an award at Little League, just for showing up,” another man agreed.
“You know what I got for showing up at Little League?” another man asked. “Nothing.”
“And my mother washed my mouth out with soap if I talked back,” Alice chimed in. “Millennials don’t even know what bar soap is, and they sure haven’t ever had it in their mouths.”
“But they should!” another woman shouted.
“If it’s not in a video game, they don’t know what it is,” Josephine said.
“Pretend it’s a video game,” the mayor told me. “Do a video game drumroll.”
I didn’t play video games, and I had never been in Little League or had gotten a show-up award or any kind of award. But I didn’t think they would believe me, and I didn’t think they would be satisfied until I did a drumroll. Besides, I needed to hear the big news quickly because I had two matches waiting for me in the kitchen.
I slapped my hands against the wall, getting faster. It was my first drumroll, and it wasn’t bad. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the mayor began. “Let me introduce you to Gregory Jones from the Paramount World Record office!”
I stopped my drumroll. “What the hell kind of cockamamie world record is that?” Griffin demanded. “What happened to Guinness?”
“This is better than Guinness.”
Gregory Jones cleared his throat. “Paramount is a much better deal for Cannes. Let me explain.”
That was my cue to duck out. I tip-toed to the kitchen. My matches were in deep conversation, while they scarfed down Danish. They were hitting it off. If only they were gay, I could have killed two birds right there and then.
Speaking of birds, Meryl’s parrot flew into the kitchen, landed on a chair, and said something that no one could understand.
“What language is that?” the sumo wrestler asked.
“No idea.”
“No clue,” Bruce said.
“Maybe Slavic. I have a grandmother from Hungary,” the sumo wrestler said.
“I don’t know much about birds,” I said, eyeing the bird and not making any sudden movements. “Do they bite? Do they have teeth?”
“They have teeth, but only about four or five,” Bruce said.
The parrot talked at me again. “No, that’s not Hungarian,” the sumo wrestler said. “Maybe it’s Hindi?”
“Both H languages. That makes sense,” I said.
“I’ve had a terrible time dating,” Bruce complained, changing the subject. “I need professional help. Women just don’t get me.”
Bruce’s confession sparked a tidal wave of heartfelt confessions of their needs and desires with love. They didn’t want anything out of the ordinary, and my heart went out to them for coming to a point in their lives where they wanted love more than they wanted anything else. It was a turning point in their lives, and they had come to my grandmother for help, and now I was going to help them.
Wait a second. What did Josephine mean by saying she found a murdered body? How did she know it was murdered? Why didn’t she tell anyone about it? And why was she telling me now?
“She doesn’t have to be a model,” the sumo wrestler was telling me. “I just want a girl who understands my passion for sumo and who knows how to cook.”
“She does have to be a model for me. I mean she has to at least look like a model,” Bruce insisted. “A beautiful, gorgeous woman. Perfect, thin body with a beautiful face and thick, flowing hair. Oh, and she needs to like cats. I have six cats. I love cats. If she doesn’t like cats, that’s a deal-breaker, even if she’s Gisele. You know what I mean?”
Cats. Cooking. No fat. Sumo. I got it. Sure, there was a touch of magic in falling in love, but the bare facts, dirty details went a long way. Finding a model for Bruce would take some doing, but I was getting a good vibe about finding a sumo wrestler fan.
The parrot squawked something unintelligible, and the men looked behind me. I turned around. A blond woman in a tall, bouffant hairdo and four pounds of makeup smiled and pointed her long fingernail at me. “You must be Gladie Burger,” she said in a thick New Jersey accent. “I’m Liz Essex. I own Buckstars.”
“Nice to meet you,” I said. “I met your…”
“Husband? Ford? Yes, that’s him. Anyway, I heard that this is the hub of happenings in Cannes. So, I said: ‘Liz? If you were a smart woman, you would go to that hub of happenings and hand out coupons to our new and fabulous establishment.’ So, here I am,” she announced, holding up a handful of coupons. “Do you like coffee? Hot chocolate?” she asked my matches, handing them coupons for a free hot beverage. “We’re having a big grand opening party tomorrow. Everyone’s welcome!”
She pranced into the other room, and we followed her out. In the parlor, the egg meeting was still going on. The three groups were wrapping up their strategy session on how to manage hundreds of thousands of eggs. The mayor was giddy with joy at the town trying for a celebrity and even happier about his coupon for a free hot beverage on Buckstars grand opening the next day.
“Hate coffee, but love new business,” the mayor said. “Coffee gives me the runs. How about you, Mr. Jones? Does coffee give you the runs?”
The representative from the Paramount World Records organization took a step back and his eyes bugged out. It was a typical reaction to our mayor.
“Tea doesn’t give me the runs, but I don’t like tea,” the mayor continued, not waiting for an answer from Mr. Jones. “Then there’s soda. That doesn’t give me the runs, either, but soda is supposed to give a man diabetes. Or is it shrunken balls? Yes, I think that’s it. Shrunken balls. Anyway, time to show you the Historic District to give you an idea of where the action is.”
The poor man didn’t seem to want to see where the action was. In fact, he seemed like he wanted to flee, and I didn’t blame him. But I guessed that a job was a job, and so when the mayor went to leave, Mr. Jones followed him. When he opened the door, Bridget was there. She caught my eye, and I was immediately struck with panic.
She was pale, like she had been punched in the gut and couldn’t catch her breath. Something terrible had happened to Bridget. I was struck with a strong fight or flight response, but it turned inside me into a protective, mama bear response.
“Everyone out!” I ordered. “I need to clear the house! Important business!”
There were a few complaints, but the tone of my voice was pretty definite. They grabbed their notebooks, which were full of their plans of attack and Buckstars coupons and shuffled out of the house. I closed the door and hugged Bridget to me.
“Bridget, what’s wrong? Do you need a doctor?”
“He’s here,” she whispered in my ear, her voice gravelly, unnatural, and full of fear. “The baby’s father. He’s here.”