The Dearly Departed (23 page)

Dr. Ouimet stood up, put on his baseball cap with something resembling panache. “I hate you, Christine,” he said.

 

Life Is Simpler Than You Think

 

 

N
ot until they were seated at Pizzeria Roma and had negotiated separate his-and-her toppings did Sunny state, “I think, without putting too fine a point on it, that you're probably right.”

Fletcher, frowning at the wine label, looked up. “About?”

“About your paternity campaign. About Miles Finn.”

He raised his juice glass of Chianti and said solemnly, “This is truly great news.”

“As long as you know that it doesn't change anything.”

Beaming nonetheless, he asked, “What did I say that convinced you? The grandmother who golfed? I thought I hit that one out of the park, not to mix metaphors.”

“It wasn't you. I knew what Miles looked like. The possibility crossed my mind a hundred times. You just happened to be the first person to say it aloud.”

“Which
fascinates
me,” said Fletcher. “The whole idea that the father of your mother's—forgive me—bastard child is right under her nose and, if one believes the wedding rumor, about to make an honest woman of her. Yet nobody, not one goddamn person until I came along, was willing to say, ‘Excuse me? But isn't it obvious to all concerned that Miles is the father of the wispy-haired Sunny with the low handicap?' Hel-lo?”

Sunny shook her head. “If you knew my mother, you wouldn't find it strange. She was very conventional, and very worried about what other people thought. Above all else, she wanted to fit in.”

“What fabulous irony,” he said, “that it was so important for her to fit in, even in a place that's barely on the map.” His gaze ended at their arriving pizzas, which absorbed and silenced him.

“What's the matter?” she asked.

He called back the waitress, a woman in a red Pizzeria Roma apron and nurse's shoes, who had the no-frills manner of someone related to the owner. “I ordered the Deluxe Carnivore, which is billed as having five meats,” said Fletcher. “I'm not sure I got them all.”

The waitress flexed her pinkie above each item: “Pepperoni, sausage, meatball, prosciutto, and salami.”

“Salami! Mystery solved. It looked like the pepperoni. Excellent.”

“Anything else? Your mushrooms all there?”

“Looks great,” said Sunny.

“You two related?” asked the waitress.

“No,” said Sunny.

“We're working on it,” said Fletcher.

Sunny waited until the waitress walked away. “Must we discuss this with everyone?” she hissed.

“Life is simpler than you think,” said Fletcher. “When a waitress in a pizza joint innocently asks, ‘Are you two related?' she's looking for a yes or a no. She's not trying to trace your roots or out your mother.”

“Like your father didn't keep it all a big secret? He could have stepped forward. He could have asked for my birth date and done the math. He also could have paid for my college education.”

“I thought you went to Delaware on a golf scholarship.”

“Maryland. I did. I meant the gesture. He could have helped with the bills, helped with rent on a real house. I hope it's true what Joey said this afternoon, that Miles renovated the cabin for her, because I know how much she wanted her own home.”

Fletcher said, “It has a certain updated rustic charm, but believe me, it's no place for a woman.”

“And why is that?” asked Sunny.

“It's too secluded. Too far from civilization.”

“I'm sure it's all yours, if that's what you're looking so distressed about—sharing your spiffy new lakeside property and your apple-green Volkswagen.”

“Don't take it out on me,” said Fletcher. “I love the idea of a half-sister. You're all I have now, except for one completely annoying mother. I would have encouraged Miles to do the right thing decades ago if I had had an inkling that you were out there.” He leaned in to confide, “I think I always assumed he had some shady dealings rather than some big personal secret. I mean, there
was
something slippery about him—some holes in his various stories. Annoying, but at the same time mysterious.”

“And now you know why,” said Sunny. “Me.”

Fletcher pried coins of meat from a slice and rearranged them as he talked. “My mother always suspected there was a woman up here, but he denied it.”

“Are you going to tell her about me?”

“Interesting question.” He squinted into the distance. “It's not like she's his grieving widow. I mean, she claimed to hate him. I wasn't allowed to mention his name, which of course I dropped all the time.”

Sunny noticed, as he turned his head, that no light glinted off his fashionable eyeglasses, small ovals of black wire. “Are you wearing frames without any glass in them?” she asked.

He answered by sticking his index finger, to the first joint, through the frames.

“Did the lenses break?”

“No. I just like them. I think I look good in them. They're titanium. Here. Let me see them on you.”

Sunny took them. The earpieces were pliable, and hooked around her ears.

“Wow,” he said. “Amazing.”

“Don't say it.”

“What? ‘Separated at birth'? I wasn't going to. I was merely going to suggest that you go into the ladies' room and take a look in the mirror.”

Sunny removed the glasses and held them up for inspection. “You know what they remind me of?” she asked. “The prop closet at the theater, which had lots of eyeglasses—on the theory that the right pair could turn an ingenue into a librarian, or a real-life furniture salesman into a college professor.”

She was twirling them absentmindedly by one stem. Fletcher reached over and took them back.

“Seriously,” said Sunny. “Were you thinking a touch more intellectual? Professorial? What effect were you going for?”

“I'm nearsighted, and I have a prescription,” he grumbled. “I just haven't had time to fill it. I saw these in a mall, and I bought them before I saw the eye doctor, so don't go looking for any symbolism.”

Sunny smiled. “Interesting. People who need glasses are paying for laser surgery, yet you're moving in the opposite direction: fashion accessory.”

“The only direction I'm moving in is better eyesight. These are my training wheels. I'm getting using to wearing glasses at the same time my audience gets used to me in them.”

Sunny lowered her voice. “It's a little strange, Fletcher. If you want to wear glasses but don't need them, you might consider nonprescription lenses.”

“Do you see what's happening? You're getting sisterly: criticizing me and giving me advice. Which I think is great. Keep doing it. It's
your
orientation,
your
training wheels toward full-fledged siblinghood.”

“That is exactly the kind of fake fraternal declaration I was afraid of. I'm not in the market for
siblinghood
—”

“With
me
! I'm the stumbling block here. I know it. I'm hard to take. In a mate, you don't want someone who's hard to take. But that's not a fatal flaw in a brother.”

“And it doesn't take any getting used to for you? No seven stages or twelve steps? No old scars? What about your parents' breakup? Nobody comes through a divorce unscathed.”

Fletcher shrugged. “In the beginning I was told it was mutual and amicable and all that crap, because I was in high school when Miles left and they didn't want to damage my delicate adolescent psyche, not to mention my SAT scores. But I wasn't blind. It was clearly my father's doing.”

“So you must have hated him, too.”

“I took my mother's side, but at the same time she was such a pain in the ass that I wondered how he could stand her as long as he did.”

“Give me an example,” said Sunny.

Fletcher drummed his fingers on the table, then grabbed a laminated menu. “Okay—this: When she orders in a restaurant? She has to read back every word. So she'll say, “I'm having the ‘crisp-tender rings of ocean-fresh calamari, served with our own tangy marinara.' ”

Sunny took a sip of wine, then another. “If she died tomorrow? You'd give anything to have her back, even parroting adjectives from a menu.” She looked down at his shirt pocket, where a red light was flashing through the white fabric. “I think your phone's ringing,” she said.

He followed her gaze down to his chest. “Oh, right. Shit. I shut off the ringer for the funeral. No wonder I haven't gotten any calls.” He snapped open the phone, barked, “Finn!” then mouthed a few unrecognizable syllables to Sunny. Next he pantomimed “pen,” which she produced from her pocketbook. Fletcher scribbled on his place mat, “The cand.!!!”

Then back into the phone, approximating concern: “Seriously. I
do
want to talk. I'm at a restaurant and will be finished in . . .” He looked at Sunny, who ignored the cue.

“An hour,” he said confidently. “Our pizzas just arrived, looking surprisingly good, I might add—thin crust, with those nice charred blisters you get on the real stuff?—and then I'm driving her back to town . . .
Sunny
. . . no,
I
am. I inherited a VW Bug—apple-green. Granny Smith with a touch of lime.” He shot Sunny a look that apologized for his feminine parsing of exterior hues. Then, “You remember—the one whose mother died with Miles?”

“His fiancée,” said Sunny.

Fletcher put a finger to his lips. “I'm really glad you kept trying. . . . Em, you're breaking up. I'll call you from my father's house as soon as I get there. You on the cell?”

Fletcher looked startled. He grimaced, waited it out; Emily Ann was, apparently, uninterruptable. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Fine. Same plan. I'll call from my father's.”

He returned the phone to his breast pocket.

Sunny said, “You were looking positively robotic—a red light blinking where your heart should be.”

“You won't believe this,” he said, “but Emily Ann didn't go home. She went as far as Boston, then apparently came straight back here this afternoon.”

“Where was she calling from?”

“That stupid motel!”

“And why is this so terrible?”

“She fired me yesterday! So if she's back, she wants to discuss it or rehash it or, God forbid, reinstate me.”

“And that's not what you want?”

“Not at this juncture. Unh-uh. No thank you.” He asked if she was merely resting or was she going to finish her pizza.

“Help yourself. I'm done.”

“It's not that I don't like mushrooms per se, but I once heard that mushrooms were grown in manure and that killed it for me. These look washed.”

Sunny pushed the tray toward him. “Why do you think she returned if she already fired you?”

“Truthfully? The woman has feelings for me—of an erotic nature, I believe.”

“And?”

“I have to finesse it. I don't want any public fallout, so I'm trying to be as nice as the situation dictates.”

“What's she running for again?”

“Congress.”

“Do you like her at all?”

“
Like
her? No, I do
not
like her. I purposely fucked up so she'd fire me, and I had every confidence that she'd drop out of the race. And now she's back with her . . . her
issues
and her wounded feelings and her feminine problems.” He grunted his disapproval.

“What feminine problems?”

“Like I care? If she put some meat on her bones, she'd get her stupid period.”

“Why in the world did you take this job?”

“Money.”

Sunny laughed.

“It's true. I wasn't exactly supporting myself in the style to which I'd hoped to become accustomed.” He glanced at his watch. “Want to escort me? It'll be a huge favor, because she'll be stunned by the resemblance and she'll want to know what that's all about, and second, if she's still ballistic, she'll be restrained in the presence of two grief-stricken survivors. Because after all is said and done, Emily Ann Grandjean is a very well brought up young lady.”

“What did you do to get yourself fired?” Sunny asked.

Fletcher said, “Trust me. You don't want to know.”

“Did you embezzle campaign funds?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Were you a spy for the opponent's camp?”

“Nope. Nothing like that. Nothing big-time. Nothing disloyal.”

“Then what?”

Fletcher stared at what was left of the pizza. “First, let me put it in context.”

“It can't be that bad if she's back in town waiting for you at the motel, unless of course she's waiting with a loaded gun.”

“One of my hands brushed one of her breasts,” Fletcher said simply. “The left one, I think.”

“Accidentally?”

“You mean as opposed to romantically? Because it was neither. It was pragmatic. A means to an end.”

Sunny motioned to the waitress—
we're done; a box
—then asked, “Why couldn't you just quit, like a normal person?”

“Contractually, the only way to quit the campaign was to be fired. And I couldn't do something merely inept because I am the only one in the Grandjean camp who recognized ineptness. And I didn't want to do something criminal. I mean, more criminal than a little randy act.”

“Can't she sue you? Or at the very least prevent you from ever getting another job?”

“I don't want any more shoestring jobs running losing campaigns. I want to do something completely different.”

“Like?”

“I'm going to decide. Here.” He pointed toward the floor. “At my father's house, feet up, gazing out over the lake, such as it is. Make some decisions. Scribble some notes. Collect my thoughts.
Our
thoughts. I'm not contemplating a career that involves getting letters of recommendation from angry employers. And if I do? I'll simply leave the Grandjeans off my list of references.”