It’s a patio: flowers and garden furniture, umbrellas over tables. At first I think no one is there, but then I see the top of a red straw hat peeking over the back of a chair. I smell cigarette smoke. A voice says, “Well, don’t just stand there.” The voice is a bad imitation of the one I heard when I watched part of Dead Letter Office last night. That one was kind of smoky and sexy; this one sounds as if Jer has been going at it with the paint scraper.
I walk around in front of the chair. A tiny old lady is perched in it. Under the red sun hat she’s got enormous sunglasses, and the rest of her face is makeup and wrinkles. Platinum blond hair— it must be a wig—grazes the gigantic shoulders of her white jacket. She’s got one elbow on the arm of the chair and a cigarette between her red fingernails. Silvery bracelets with blue stones droop down her skinny arm and into the sleeve of her jacket. Her head moves a little. I guess she’s looking me over from behind the glasses. I think about calling Jer again.
“You the one who wrote?” she croaks.
“Uh, yeah,” I say. “Spencer O’Toole.”
“How old are you?”
“Seventeen.”
“What was your grandfather’s name again?”
I feel as if I’m taking a test. I push up my glasses again. “David McLean.”
“You don’t—never mind.” She waves the words away with her cigarette. Bracelets clank. “Why didn’t he come himself?”
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “Maybe because he died.”
She sits up straighter at that and her lips bunch up. “What’d your grandfather say about me?”
“Well, uh, nothing. He just said you were his favorite actress and for me to get a kiss on the cheek from you, for him.”
“Just on the cheek?”
“Uh, yeah.”
She laughs. It’s another horrible paint-scraper sound that ends in a cough. “Probably all I’m good for these days anyway. I used to be pretty hot stuff, you know. Not a bombshell, but a looker. And none of that enhancement crap either. You ever see my movies?”
“Sure.” I nod. It’s kind of true. Like I said, I saw a clip from Dead Letter online. And I’m definitely putting Swamp Creatures from Zorgon on my list. Any movie on all those worst-movies-of-all-time lists has to be too cool to miss.
“All me,” she says. “The real thing. They didn’t even have to cap my teeth. And legs? To die for.”
“Uh-huh.” What else can I say? I notice her feet don’t reach the ground. I wonder how long this is going to take, and how weird it’s going to be. Talking boob jobs in a retirement home isn’t really moving things along. Problem is, I don’t know what to do to move them along. Kneel down, maybe? Before I can, she changes direction.
“And is that what I think it is?” She pokes her cigarette at the camera bag. She still hasn’t smoked any of it.
“It’s a video camera. My grandpa wanted me to film us—I mean you—giving me the kiss.”
“What for?”
I shrug again. “So my family can watch it? And think of him?”
She snorts. “Sounds a little kinky if you ask me.”
“I don’t know,” I say. I can hear my voice getting a little desperate. “He left me and all my cousins tasks to do. This is mine.”
“The kiss or the movie?”
“Both. So, anyway, if I could just, uh…” I take a step forward.
Gloria Lorraine hoists one marked-on eyebrow over her sunglasses. “Hold your horses, Spunky.”
“Spencer.”
“Whatever. I’m not that kind of girl. First we’ve got things to do.”
I stare at her. She says, “What, you think I kiss every kid that comes mooning around with a hard-luck story? You’ve gotta work for it.”
She flicks away the cigarette and hoists herself forward and out of the chair. She’s surprisingly fast for an old lady. “Get those bags,” she orders. She slips her purse strap over her shoulder. Beside her chair are a straw beach bag that matches her hat and a plastic bag from some store. As I stare, she grabs a cane that was hooked over the arm of her chair and starts motoring across the patio.
What can I do? I pick up the bags. They’re heavy. I follow her along a walkway that runs around the outside of Erie Estates Lodge.
“What are we doing?” I ask.
“Just running a few errands. Where’s your car?”
“In the parking lot. Errands? I guess my dad could drive us, but—”
Gloria Lorraine stops dead and doesn’t turn around. I have to hit the brakes so I don’t run her over. “Your father’s here?”
“Well, yeah. He’s waiting in the car,” I say to her back.
“Can’t you drive?”
“Sure, I can drive. I just—”
“Your grandpa—his father?”
“No, my mom’s. His dad—”
“Never mind,” she snaps. She turns around and whips off her sunglasses and glares up at me. Her eyes are brown with little blue flecks, and right now they’re hard enough to shrink my gonads. “I thought I told you to come by yourself.”
“Well, I did. He waited in the car.”
She hisses a word I can’t believe she knows. “Now I see why your grandpa wanted you to have the camera: to prove that you can do something right.” She turns away and lets out a few more F-bombs, then finally says, “All right, come on, come on.”
We pass some bushes and come out at the front of the building. Across the parking lot I can see our rental car, facing away from us. The windows are down and I can hear that Jer’s found a classic rock station on the radio. I say, “It’s over there.”
“Never mind,” she says, looking somewhere else. A smile cracks her makeup. “We’ll take mine.”