Authors: Etienne
After dinner we settled down in the den and patiently listened to Robbie reading the requisite ten pages. “Very good,” I said when he had finished.
“Okay,” Mike said, “now you have to take care of that Christmas card you picked out for your granny.”
We set the card on the desk and waited while Robbie laboriously printed “Love, Robbie” on the card for his grandmother.
“Good,” I said. “I’ll address it right now, and we’ll put it in the mailbox tomorrow.”
“When will Granny get it?”
“In two or three days,” I said. “When you see her at Christmas you can ask her about it.”
“Can I take my keyboard and play for her?”
“You bet. Maybe you should go practice right now.”
“Yes, Sir.”
As it was a school night, the deadline for bath and bed arrived early, and we got Robbie tucked in with his two favorite stuffed animals, Andy the alleged Panda (alleged because he was too old and bedraggled to positively identify his species) and Raff the Giraffe.
In the den, I said, “Now, what do you know about the new kid?”
“Not a thing. All I know is that a new kid transferred in, and Robbie somehow managed to find out that he had two daddies. That’s it.”
“That’s it?” I said.
“Babe,” Mike said, “unlike yourself, I’m not a trained investigator.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “but surely you can find an excuse tomorrow to pump the teacher for details.”
“I’ll give it the old college try. If anybody has the scoop, it ought to be Mrs. Green.”
“One can only hope. Are we set for Saturday?”
“You bet.”
On Saturday morning we were scheduled to fly to Atlanta so Robbie could have his weekly session with Lydia.
“He’s shown a lot of improvement since he started his sessions with Lydia,” I said.
“No argument,” he said. “Are you getting tired of all the running back and forth?”
“In a word, no. Not if it helps him get over the trauma of having witnessed his father beat his mother to death. Why, are you getting tired of it?”
“Hardly. You know I love to fly, and we both enjoy visiting the Barnett family, but I realize that the sessions have to end at some point.”
“No argument there,” I said. “On the other hand, we did make a six-month commitment.”
“Point taken.”
“See if you can find an excuse to talk to Mrs. Green tomorrow. I’m curious about this kid with two daddies.”
“Can’t it wait ’til the class Christmas party next week? All of the parents will be there.”
“Probably,” I said, “but try anyhow.”
“Okay.”
He left the room, and I turned to the computer and became totally engrossed in the task of entering checks and receipts in Peachtree accounting software. Eventually a glass of wine appeared on the desk beside the keyboard, and a friendly mouth nuzzled the back of my neck.
“You about done with that?”
“Two ticks.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
I turned just in time to see his naked butt disappear through the door, so I closed the program, grabbed my wine glass, and followed him. Later, we lay side by side, propped up on the king-size pillows, sipping our wine and talking. Finally I hopped out of bed, grabbed my glass, and started to leave the room.
“Where are you going?”
“To get a refill,” I said, “and then back to the computer to finish what I was doing.”
I padded naked to the kitchen to refill my glass; then I went to the den and sat down at the computer. I finished my accounting tasks and opened an Excel spreadsheet to transfer some numbers to the spreadsheet, then I sent a few reports to the LaserJet and closed both programs. Mike was sprawled in the recliner, so I retrieved the printouts and handed them to him.
“Something to study,” I said.
“I’d rather study this,” he said, reaching for my groin.
I jumped back and said, “Reports first, fun later.”
He examined the reports carefully and said, “Are we going to have a huge tax liability this year, do you think?”
“Probably not,” I said. “I ran the third-quarter reports past Jim last month, and he did some quick calculations. You know how a CPA hesitates to make absolute predictions; he thinks we look okay, but it’s going to be close.”
“So what’s the bottom line?” he said.
“We ought to buy one or two more rental properties,” I said. “Also, we need to think about getting rid of one set of wheels.”
“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve thought about that. Now that you have a department car, we don’t really need both my car and your truck. What are you thinking?”
“Your car is getting some age on it, and we’re beginning to outgrow a truck with an extended cab,” I said. “I’m thinking we’d look good in a small SUV, something like an Explorer.”
“I can live with that.”
“Think you can get it up again, big boy?” I said.
“Race you,” he said, and we hurried to our bed.
The next morning at six we left for the Y in two vehicles as usual. We dropped Robbie off in the Y’s KidZone section and completed our daily workout. I drove from there to work, and Mike took Robbie to school. By five thirty I had made enough of a dent in my never-ending paperwork that I felt comfortable heading home. Our elderly neighbor, Mrs. Tumblin, came over a little after six to stay with Robbie, and Mike and I went down to the wine shop at Five Points. The usual crowd had already begun to gather and sample two bottles of wine.
As we were enjoying the third bottle, Jackie, one of the regulars, said, “Whatever happened with the film those people were shooting?”
“I believe it’s scheduled to air on one of the cable networks in late January,” I said. A reporter and cameraman had followed both myself and my team around for months, recording how we worked, along with details of our personal lives, and they had joined the group at the wine shop many times.
“Yeah,” Mike said. “George has been promised a preview copy, but we don’t know when he’ll get it.”
We went to dinner with the group, but Mike declined to share any more wine during our meal, given that he was flying early in the morning.
The next day we were in the air before eight, and Lydia picked us up at the little airport in Marietta and drove us into Atlanta and to the Barnett home. At the house, she took Robbie upstairs to the room that Charles and Philip used as an office, and we went to the sunroom to visit with Mrs. Barnett. We always looked forward to these visits, as the old lady was well educated and kept herself up-to-date and informed on current affairs. Charles and Philip were out of town for the weekend.
Lydia came downstairs to talk to us after she’d finished with Robbie and he had gone up to the playroom with the Barnett children. We discussed Robbie’s progress from her viewpoint, and we brought her up to date on how school was going. He was still a little remote and withdrawn at times, but the progress that had been made since summer was encouraging, and we had just finished our conversation when its subject came into the room.
“Hi, big guy,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Nanny told me it was time for me to come down here,” Robbie said.
“So it is,” Mrs. Barnett said, “and here comes Mrs. Goodman with our lunch.”
“When will the Barnett children eat?” I said.
“In a bit,” she said, “and the oldest two will join me for dinner.”
We had a nice lunch, which Mrs. Goodman served in the sunroom. Then Lydia drove us to the airport. Robbie had by now become an experienced traveler, and once the plane was in the air, he went to sleep as usual.
Monday afternoon, my lieutenants came to my office for our weekly staff meeting, and they laid out brief summaries of their ongoing cases in order of importance. Janet Sanchez summed up the meeting, saying, “It’s kind of been a slow week for crime around here, Captain.”
“Yeah,” one of the guys said, “we need some excitement.”
“Be careful what you wish for,” I said. “I seem to remember having similar thoughts during a slow period a couple of years ago.”
“And what happened?” he said.
“A series of convenience store robbery/murders happened,” I said.
They left and I got back to work. Wednesday I left the office at noon so that I could accompany Mike to Robbie’s school party. Mike still hadn’t managed to extract any data from Mrs. Green about the new boy and his parents, and I was rather looking forward to meeting them. We arrived at the school and went straight to Robbie’s classroom. There were a total of ten kids in his first-grade class, six boys and four girls, and we had by now met all of the kids and most of the parents. Robbie led us to where a little boy was standing, kind of awkwardly, with two men, whom even I, with almost zero gaydar, recognized as being family.
“This is Sandy Fisher-Price,” Robbie said, “and his daddies.”
“I’m Ronald Fisher,” one of the two men said, “and this is Warren Price.”
We introduced ourselves and shook hands. After five minutes of conversation with the two men, I realized that despite Robbie’s connection with Sandy, we were destined not to be friends with his daddies. The party lasted about an hour… and then school was over until January. We were in the truck, so we used the rest of the afternoon to acquire a Christmas tree, take it home, and get it decorated. Robbie thought it was the best tree he’d ever seen.
“Just think,” I said, “we get to do this all over again when we get up to the cabin.”
“Are we going to have a tree there too?” Robbie said.
“You bet,” I said.
“Cool.”
We had dinner and finally got an excited Robbie settled down in his bed for the night. Mike and I sat in the den with glasses of Pinot Grigio.
“Well?” he said.
“Well, what?”
“Don’t be coy,” he said. “What did you think?”
“Think about what?”
“The hyphenated kid’s parents, of course.”
“Babe,” I said, “those guys are way too gay for us.”
“Yeah,” he said. “If we register as a one on a ten-point scale, they’re somewhere around six or seven.”
“At least they don’t gush like Deborah’s buddy Lamar,” I said.
“You know what’s going to happen, don’t you?”
“Probably, but tell me anyway.”
“Robbie’s already latched onto the kid,” he said, “which means we’re going to be interacting with his dads from time to time.”
“If and when that happens,” I said, “we’ll take it as it comes and deal with it.”
I had been plugging away on the Internet during most of this conversation. “Look here,” I said.
“At what?”
“Just look.”
He got up, stood behind me at the computer, and said, “What’s this? Delinquent taxes. Oh shit, that’s Robbie’s grandmother’s property.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I was curious to see how much land she actually had with her house and stumbled over this.”
“How much does she owe?”
“Just under $150 for each of the past two years.”
“Is she that hard up?” he said.
“I have no idea, but I think the woman who stays with her during the day is some sort of church volunteer. And for all I know, she could be getting some government help—there’s just so much that we don’t know about her situation.”
“I think we need to pay them as a Christmas present,” he said, “and maybe we should inquire more deeply into the state of her financial affairs.”
“Too right,” I said. “We asked Lucinda if the woman needed anything, and she didn’t seem to think so.”
“Maybe we’d better have another conversation with her,” he said. “We can’t have Robbie’s granny tossed out of her home for nonpayment of taxes. Who knows what other problems she might have.”
“I’ll put it on the list of things to do,” I said as I printed out the pertinent information.
“Have you checked the public records up there,” he said, “to see if she has a mortgage to worry about?”
“If she does, I couldn’t find it.”
“We could ask our Waynesville lawyer to have a title search run on the property,” he said.
“Are you thinking we should offer to buy it from her on Robbie’s behalf?” I said.
“Not really, but that’s not a bad idea.”
“Let’s check things out thoroughly before we get too involved,” I said.
“Okay.”
•
13 •
C
HRISTMAS
fell on a Friday, and we planned to make a long weekend of it. We drove to Atlanta Tuesday afternoon, arriving at the Barnett home by bedtime. Lydia came over for breakfast and an early session with Robbie, while we spent some time with our hosts. We had brought small gifts for the adult members of the family, as well as Lydia, and placed them under the huge tree in their library, and when we left, we were loaded down with a number of packages from the Barnetts. We had an early lunch and were on the road to the mountains by one. In Waynesville, we stopped to acquire our usual list of perishable grocery items and a nice six-foot tree.
Robbie had taken a long nap on the road from Atlanta to Waynesville, so he was full of energy and helped us get the tree set up and decorated. We had two large plastic containers filled with packages in the back of the truck, and we carried them up to the great room and piled them under the tree. We spent the next day unwinding and enjoying the ambiance of the Christmas tree, a nice fire in the fireplace, and the excitement felt by our six-year-old. We took Robbie over to see his grandmother after lunch on Christmas Eve, and she didn’t appear to be any better or worse than she had been the last time we had seen her. Robbie gave her a gift that he had selected and wrapped all by himself, and then we handed her an envelope.
“What’s this?” she said.
“A little something to brighten your day, we hope,” I said.
She opened the envelope and took a few long minutes to digest its contents. “You paid my taxes,” she said. Tears ran down her cheeks.
“We can’t have Robbie’s granny turned out of her home by the tax collector, now can we?” I said.
“George and I aren’t rich,” Mike said, “but if there is anything you need that we can take care of, please let us help.”
He was talking to Mrs. Pickens, but he was looking at her caregiver, a middle-aged lady named Mary Hart. The woman nodded in understanding.
Robbie pulled his keyboard out of its carrying case, set it up, and played two or three simple little pieces upon which he had been working for weeks. His grandmother was very impressed and told him so at length.