Tips for Living(47)

“I spoke with them briefly, but I don’t think it helped them very much. Where do you keep your scissors, Aunt Lada?”

“In that drawer by the stove.”

I walked to the cabinet next to the stove and opened the drawer.

“What’s your bra doing here?”

Bunched up between the garlic press and the chicken shears was one of Lada’s military-grade brassieres. I lifted the white nylon bra out with two fingers. Lada gaped at the dangling DD cups, and her expression darkened.

“I’ve been looking for that! Someone put that in there. Someone is playing tricks,” she said angrily.

Someone.

She grabbed the bra out of my hand, shoved it in the pocket of her sweater and sat back down in a huff.

“What if you’d put it in the microwave, Aunt Lada? It has metal in it. You could’ve blown yourself up!”

There was no way around it. I’d have to talk to The Cedars about graduating her to supervised care. It would cost.

Lada muttered words I couldn’t make out before she went silent, as if a storm had passed. She stood up, walked to the refrigerator, took out a jar of kosher pickles and picked up where she left off.

“Do the police think you killed them?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, that’s good.”

She opened the jar, stuck her fingers in and eased out a big, fat pickle.

“Do they have a suspect?”

“They’re working on it. I’m sure they will.”

She snorted and took a big bite. “Don’t count on it,” she said, chewing. “They never even looked into your father’s death.”

“But Daddy wasn’t murdered,” I said gently. “He fell down the stairs in that basement apartment, remember?”

“Eat, bubbala.” Lada offered me the jar. “They’re delicious. Kosher.”

I shook my head. She shrugged.

“I think someone maybe pushed him,” she said.

“What?”

This level of delusion was new and worrying. No one pushed him. I’ll never forget that day. I was working at New York Spy when I got the call from my father’s landlord, who lived upstairs from him. He told me he had seen my dad come in with groceries. Seconds later, he heard the tumble and shout. He rushed down to help, but death was instant. A broken neck. My chin trembled for a second thinking of it.

“They should have investigated,” Lada said.

I wasn’t sure how to respond in a way that wouldn’t agitate Lada further. Should I challenge her? Ignore her? If she could think logically enough to play gin rummy, she couldn’t be that far gone. Maybe it made sense to explore her fantasy first, and then appeal to her powers of reason.

“Who would kill him, Aunt Lada? Who do you think would do that?”

“The men he stole from. The mobsters.”

“But he paid them back. You know that. That’s why he lived in a basement. He was broke. He had nothing.”

“What if they killed him anyway? To pay him back.”

“That didn’t happen.”

“That’s what some people are like, you know. Some people never forgive a betrayal.”



A tall, brown metal dumpster sat at the back of the main building near the health clinic service entrance. Filled with God knows what. Ensure cans. AARP magazines. Empty pill bottles. I set the cardboard box on the ground, opened the top and stared inside at our wedding invitation and wedding photos, and the framed pressed daisy from my bouquet. For a second, I saw Hugh at the reception, laughing as friends lifted my chair into the air and the white satin train of my wedding gown covered their heads. I heard my father’s sad refrain.

Here’s a big tip, kiddo. A tip for living. This world is rough. It’s going to keep throwing things at you.

I should have done this a long time ago. I reached into the box and began hurling the wedding mementos over the high brown wall. Then I tossed in the pictures from our summer vacations to Maine and Nova Scotia, winter escapes to Mustique, art jaunts to Europe for Hugh’s exhibitions. I crumpled a paper napkin from Harry’s Bar in Venice and lobbed it in along with a book of matches from our Valentine’s dinner at Les Halles. I was ruthless, scrapping the tinfoil ring Hugh made me that summer in the Pequod barn. If the police saw me doing this, they’d think I was acting out of anger. But that wasn’t the case. The past was just too painful to hold on to any longer.

Don’t let them break your heart.

I picked up the final item: an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven spiral notebook. On its cover was a photo of Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia wearing her bikini slave outfit. It was the kind of notebook an adolescent boy might buy from a Walgreens drugstore stationery section.

Hugh occasionally used cheap books like this to sketch out ideas when he began a series. He said their tackiness helped him feel free to play around. Some covers featured pop music figures: The Jackson Five, Madonna, Ringo. He also had a Ronald McDonald and an Indiana Jones. All in all, I’d say Hugh filled about ten of them, and he never showed the notebooks to anyone. Except me. “They’re a little like diaries,” he said. Carrie Fisher contained sketches for a series he called Loving Nora.

I wondered if Hugh had shown the books to Helene? Had he made one for the series he painted of her?