Shy (24 page)

I stroked the back of Frank’s neck and leaned in to give him a hug. Then, with our sandwiches made, I helped him put the sandwich makings back in the fridge. “I think you’ve got a bigger problem than groceries, babe.”

“Like what?” Frank asked, turning to me. I could see the weariness in those fabulous green eyes. He looked exhausted. What with his dad’s illness, and all the hard work which never seemed to get caught up, and now Stanley’s arrival, it’s a wonder Frank was still on his feet.

“Like the will,” I said, lowering my voice. “Stanley isn’t going to be too thrilled when he finds out the farm is going to you alone. I think maybe if I were you, I would find out where that will is and make sure it’s safe. Put it in a safe deposit box where Stanley can’t get at it.”

“I don’t have a safe deposit box.”

“Then get one. I’ll even spring for it. My treat.”

Leaning up against the sink, Frank took a huge bite out of his ham and rye. “I’m sure Pop’s got that all taken care of. He knows what Stanley’s like. And maybe Stanley won’t stay that long. I guess we’ll just have to try to make the best of things until he leaves. I wonder how he found out Pop was sick. I sure didn’t tell him. And we know Pop didn’t.”

I tried not to shuffle my feet or look guilty. “I think I might have had a hand in that. I told Jerry I was coming here. And I told him why. He must have told Stanley. I’m sorry.”

Before Frank could comment, Stanley strode into the kitchen like he owned the place, peeked in the fridge, and pulled out all the sandwich makings we had just put back in. “Starving,” he said to the ham. I guess he was talking to the ham. He certainly didn’t seem to be talking to us. He laid it all out on the kitchen table, grabbed a plate and utensils from the cupboard, swung his long legs into a chair, and commenced building the biggest sandwich I had ever seen in my life.

Satisfied with his construction, he finally tore off a mouthful, and while he was chewing he aimed a few words in my direction. “Sorry about what, Tom?”

“Huh?” I asked.

“You were just telling my brother you were sorry. Sorry about what?” He was striving to appear casual, but he looked a little intense about it all the same. I got the feeling Stanley
really
wanted to know what Frank and I had been talking about. Assholes always think people are plotting against them. Of course, in this case—

Frank came to my rescue. “Tom was just saying how sorry he was that we didn’t get you a ‘welcome home’ cake.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Something with hemlock in it. And maybe a sprinkling of gunpowder for kick.”

Frank elucidated. “He means poison with an explosive chaser. Yummy.”

Stanley just kept on chewing, nodding a little, looking first at me, then at Frank, then back to me. “Couple of wise guys,” he sneered.

Stanley turned to Frank. “I guess Pop’s about done for. Cancer, huh?”

Frank turned to the sink and rinsed off his plate. Then he dried it and tucked it back into the cupboard. His shoulders were stooped with either weariness or sadness or both. Like his dad, Frank looked like he didn’t have the energy to fight any more. “He’s got a few weeks left, at the most. The cancer is in both lungs and spreading. Surgery won’t help, so don’t be talking to him about it. He’ll just get upset.”

Frank dragged a chair out from under the dining room table and parked himself in it across from his brother, elbows on the table, his hands splayed out flat in front of him. I moved to his side and rested my hand across the back of Frank’s neck, just so he would know I was there.

“Stan,” Frank said, reaching back to hold my hand, “this ordeal we’ve got coming up is not going to be pleasant. Please don’t do anything to make it worse. Don’t hassle Pop about doctors. Please. He’s too weak to argue with you, but he’ll fight you tooth and nail if he thinks he has to.”

Stanley polished off his sandwich and pushed the plate away. “I’m not here to cause trouble, bro. I’m here to help. Honest. You can’t close out the farm on your own.” He cast a supercilious glance in my direction. “And I don’t imagine Tom here is much help.”

Frank’s shoulders tensed, and his grip tightened on my hand. “Tom does just fine, and what the hell do you mean by ‘closing out the farm’?”

Stanley waved a hand around, encompassing his surroundings. “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Frank, when Pop is gone there is going to be a lot of work to do to get this place ready to sell. Public auctions will have to be arranged for the equipment and the livestock. A real estate agent will have to be found to handle the paperwork and help us advertise the property. We’re sitting on two hundred acres of prime Indiana farmland. With a perfectly good house and farm buildings on top of it. It won’t come cheap to whoever buys it. We may not be set for life, dear brother, but the proceeds will keep us in clover for a while. We have to do it right.”

I waited for the bomb to fall, but I guess Frank wasn’t quite ready to disclose that little oops moment quite yet. Oops, as in, “Oops, I forgot to mention that you aren’t even
in
the will, dipshit.”

Gee, and I was so looking forward to seeing the look on Stanley’s face when Frank told him.

But all Frank said was, “I guess you’re right.” And that was it.

Later, I decided Frank had taken the right approach. Joe would have to be the one to tell Stanley that being an insufferable peckerhead for the major part of his life had pretty much precluded him from being named cobeneficiary of this handsome parcel of prime Indiana farmland (as Stanley put it), and more’s the pity. If he had just been a little nicer and not such a snot for the past decade or so, things might have turned out differently, but alas, they had not.

“I’m always right,” Stanley flatly stated. He unfolded himself from the dining room chair and sauntered off to the living room where he plopped himself down in Joe’s recliner with a groan and hit the on button on the TV remote. He looked like he planned on parking himself there for a while. The incredibly annoying voice of Judge Judy suddenly echoed through the house.

Frank glowered at Stanley’s dirty plate and silverware still scattered across the kitchen table where the schmuck had left them and sadly shook his head. He finally heaved himself to his feet, gave me a peck on the cheek, and together we cleaned up Stanley’s mess and mine and tucked all the food back in the fridge for the second time. Then we headed off to finish the milking.

I didn’t know about Frank, but I was really looking forward to the moment when his brother learned the truth about his nonexistent inheritance. I hoped I would be present when that glorious moment unfolded in all its pyrotechnic splendor.

It might even be
better
than clocking the guy in the puss. Sometimes wallet smacks hurt even worse than head smacks.

Just thinking about Stanley’s upcoming comeuppance made the scowl on my face do a happy somersault and transform itself into a scoundrelly grin. I love it when scowls do that.

“You’re gloating,” Frank said, without even looking at me. But he smiled when he said it. I’m pretty sure he was looking forward to those pyrotechnics too.

Chapter 13

S
TANLEY
turned out to be just as useless as Frank predicted he would be. He spent his days glued to the TV. He gobbled up food like the ass-end of a garbage truck, all the while lounging around on Joe’s recliner like a fat, lazy lizard on a rock. He also made an inordinate number of phone calls for someone without any friends, although if either Frank or I walked into a room while he was in the middle of one of these mysteriously whispered conversations, Stanley would execute a hasty good-bye, slam down the phone, kick the footrest up on the recliner, and go back to watching
Jeopardy
. Or
Days of Our Lives
. Or
Cops
. Or head off to the kitchen to forage for more food.

Stanley rarely went in to visit with Joe, and when he did, they would inevitably end up arguing.

Poor Joe. As if he didn’t have enough to contend with. Now he had Stanley too. Frank and I weren’t too thrilled about dealing with Stanley either, but we tried to manage it with a minimum of fuss. We didn’t have much choice. Frank kept hoping Stanley would leave, just go back to San Diego and the life he had there, the life he had carved out of meanness and spite and being a slut and a home-wrecker and a first-class dick. But I knew better. Stanley was entrenched. He wasn’t going anywhere. For all intents and purposes, he was here for the duration. I knew it for a fact, even if Frank wouldn’t admit it.

Stanley was protecting his interests, you see, or he thought he was. He figured his interests included half of the farm and everything on it. All he had to do was wait for Joe to die to get his hands on what was coming to him. Then he would sell out fast, gather up as much money as he could in the transaction, and skedaddle. And in a perfect world, this might have been true. Unfortunately, Stanley still did not know he had been excluded from the will for being a poophead. Frank and I saw no reason to break the news to him while Joe was still alive. It would only create more drama. And drama was one thing Joe could do without. Hanging onto life by your fingernails, day after day after day, was drama enough for anyone to cope with, thank you very much.

I turned out to be almost as useless as Stanley, at least as far as the milking was concerned. I simply could not get the hang of it. So now, when morning and evening chores rolled around, morning and evening chores being cow milking and egg gathering, Frank and I had a whole new system in place. Frank went off on his own to do the milking, and I went off on my own to gather the eggs. He had the cows and I had the chickens. The goddamn chickens. Twice a day. Every single frigging day of the week. Chickens, chickens, chickens, and more chickens.

A normal person would have gotten used to the little fuckers after a while. I said a
normal
person. Apparently, I’m not among their ranks. Consequently, me and those nine hundred chickens drew a line in the sand—scratch that—drew a line in the chicken poop and chopped up corncobs, and squared off twice a day in a grudge match of epic proportions. They didn’t like me and I didn’t like them, and neither of us was averse to demonstrating the fact.

In the barn, I had found a massive pair of leather gloves that looked like something Hagrid might have worn while handling dragons. These I commandeered as my egg-gathering gloves, and no chicken could have drawn my blood through them with anything short of a nine millimeter Glock. I found an old lace curtain in the attic with jonquils appliquéd around the hem that I laboriously sewed onto the brim of a beat-up straw hat I discovered under a bed. This I wore as a sort of veil to keep the feathers out of my mouth and the chicken mites out of my lungs. Combine this with Velcro ankle straps to tie my pant legs down, hip boots to wade through the chicken shit with, and a long-sleeved leather jacket I snatched from Joe’s closet when he wasn’t looking, just on the off-chance that I would fall down and a gang of pissed-off pullets would jump me in retaliation for stealing their children, and you have a fair idea of the egg-gathering garb I donned twice a day to get the job done.

Actually, it took longer to get dressed for the job than it did to
do
the job. But that is neither here nor there. The point is the job got done. Without bloodshed. And when I say bloodshed, I mean mine.

While I groped around under their butts and snatched their offspring, all decked out in my bizarre ensemble of leather and lace and rubber and straw, I rattled off an endless litany of possible consequences for the chickens to ponder which I thought might keep the little blighters on their best behavior and quell any ideas of future rebellion.

“Chicken and dumplings, chicken à la king, chicken salad, chicken fricassee, chicken tacos, Kentucky Fried Chicken, chicken burritos, chicken marinara. Sound good? How about this, you little peckerheads. Chicken and rice, chicken almondine, chicken croquettes, spicy chicken wings, sweet and sour chicken, chicken fried rice, chicken florentine. Yummy, huh? That could be you, you know. Oh yeah. Mess with me, you clucky fuckers, and you’ll be chopped up in little pieces and wearing a garnish of parsley and parmesan and crusted up to your eyeballs. Your kids’ll be omelets. You know why the chicken crossed the road?
To get away from me!
”
And on and on I’d ramble and rant as I gathered up the eggs, nest after nest after nest, leaving tiers of childless, squawking mothers behind. Did it bother me? Hell, no. Like I might have mentioned before, I
hated
the little bastards.

My death threats and my long string of recipes certainly seemed to keep the chickens civil. Whether it was because they were appalled by my culinary bloodthirstiness or simply enthralled by the melodious timbre of my homicidal ravings, who knows? When I ran this by Frank, he told me he thought the calming effect I was having on the chickens had more to do with the fact they were either stunned I was talking to them at all, or trying to be polite and not cackle uproariously at the getup I was wearing.