Flying Solo(43)

“That is a beautiful picture,” Laurie said, handing it to Nick. “How’s your team doing, Ginger?”

“So far, so good,” she said. “They lost to Freeport the other day, but only because some lucky bastard put a little grounder past my David. Utter luck, it was a terrible bounce. You have to come to a game, Laurie. They’re just such fun.”

“Do they still run the cereal-box race?”

“Oh, yes.” Ginger sat in a green wing chair. “You know, they added a box. There are four now. There’s one for Raisin Bran. Raisin Bran hasn’t won yet, but people are going to go crazy when it happens. The little girl, Lily, who’s running in Raisin Bran next weekend, is supposed to be a real pistol, so we’ll see. How are things at Dot’s, my love?”

To her own surprise, for the briefest moment, Laurie thought she might burst into tears. God, how were things at Dot’s? She had cleaned out maybe a third of the closets. She had stacked books. She might have given away a priceless antique after being swindled by a man who somehow understood precisely the variety of kindness to which she would immediately overreact. “I’m doing my best,” she said, running her finger along the rim of the mug. “I’m afraid I’m going to miss something important that my mom or my aunt would want. I don’t know if it’s enough, what I’m doing, but I’m really trying.”

“It’s plenty,” Nick said. “Gran, she’s touching every piece of jewelry. Tell her it’s enough.”

Ginger frowned. “Of course it is. She knows it is. She just isn’t sure if I know it is, because I’m an old lady, and someday you and your cousins and whoever else are going to be looking at my stuff, too.” She leaned toward Nick. “You listen, the last thing on my mind is what’s going to happen to the spoons when I die. Now, my baseball team? That, I care about. You make sure somebody takes that team and treats them just as nice as I do now, okay?” Nick nodded. “But spoons are spoons, and you can keep them or throw them in the ocean.”

“You should see all Dot’s pictures,” Nick said. “Boxes and boxes and boxes of them.”

“Oh, I imagine,” Ginger said. “Dot and her cameras, clicky-clicky-click. I’m not sure I ever saw her without a camera in her hand. I think I have a Polaroid on the refrigerator that she took at my friend’s daughter’s wedding. All those boxes, but I tell you, she probably gave away as many as she kept.”

“Were you friends?” Laurie asked. “I feel like you would have been friends.”

“We were friendly. We didn’t go to the same church, of course, since she was a Methodist and we’re Baptists. And by the time I moved here, she was near retired, and she traveled so much after that. We used to make jokes that she’d show up with a sticker on her behind that said PARIS. It wasn’t mean, of course, we were just jealous. I don’t think I ever knew a lady my own age who had so many adventures, not even me. And boyfriends, of course. She’d go out to dinner with somebody she met at a play or a talk or something—I set her up with my first-base coach once. She was just a beauty, had a nice figure until her very last day, and she was just so funny. And wild.”

“Tell me about her boyfriends,” Nick said, sliding back in his seat. “Maybe we saw their pictures.”

“Oh, well, she had a little thing with Frosty, you know.”

Nick’s eyes widened. “From the hockey rink?” He turned to Laurie. “Frosty rode the Zamboni.”

“His real name was Felix,” Ginger said. “They called him Frosty because he got gray hair when he was thirty.”

“Wait, they didn’t call him Frosty because he rode the Zamboni at the hockey rink?” Nick said.

“No, no, that was a coincidence. And oh, she had a fellow for a while who worked at that bar, that tourist bar with the buoys out front where Betsy’s husband got arrested that time.” She looked at Laurie. “He popped a young man in the mouth for what I’m sure were very good reasons.” Ginger paused as if she were considering her next move. “I did hear a bit about another boyfriend of Dot’s, maybe. I don’t know if I should say, though.”

Nick rolled his eyes. “Well, if you weren’t going to tell, you wouldn’t have started to tell, so you might as well just go ahead and spill it.”

“Do you hear how he talks to his grandmother?” Ginger asked Laurie, who nodded sympathetically. “Well, I did hear,” Ginger said, smoothing the fabric of her pants over her knee, “that she might have once been involved with someone who was married, but that did not seem like Dot at all. I think it was just gossip, honestly. Like I said, a single woman who can take herself to Paris attracts a lot of attention from a lot of people who have to wait around to be taken places, and not all of it is positive.”

Laurie leaned forward a little bit. “Did you hear anything else about this guy? Was he from here, or out of town, or what?”

“Well, this would have been a long time ago if it even happened, before I lived here. And I let those things sit, mostly. If everybody in this town who ever had an affair had to talk about it with their grandchildren, I will tell you right now, they would not recover.”

“You think it’s that hard for people to talk about something like that even when they’re so far past it?” Nick asked.