the shop

on

wickenden

street

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Shop

on Wickenden Street

 

By Donna Montalbano

 

 

 

 

 

The Shop on Wickenden Street

All Rights Reserved c2008 by Donna Montalbano

 

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission by the publisher.

 

The Shop on Wickenden Street is a work of fiction. It is entirely coincidental if the characters resemble any real persons, living or dead. Events in this novel occurred only in the author’s imagination. There is no “Lost and Found” antique shop on Wickenden Street, on the East Side of Providence, and no WRI radio station in Rhode Island. The hotel which is venue to the wedding described herein does not exist in Massachusetts or anywhere else to the author’s knowledge. Some of the locations mentioned in this book are real. However, no endorsement of them by the author, either implied or specific, should be construed…and these locations did not enter into any agreement with the author to promote their businesses.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Dedicated to my parents:
Victoria Frances Jackson Montalbano and Joseph Ignatius Montalbano...
wish you were here

 

 

“I never can be tied to raw, new things,
For I first saw the light in an old town
Where from my window huddled roofs sloped down
To a quaint harbor rich with visionings.
Streets with carved doorways where the sunset beams
Flooded old fanlights and small window panes,
And Georgian steeples topped with gilded vanes--
These were the sights that shaped my childhood dreams.”

Sonnet XXX, Background, of Fungi from Yuggoth,
By Howard Phillips Lovecraft
Memorial Plaque, John Hay Library
Providence, Rhode Island

 “The place...was one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town and to hide their musty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust. There were suits of mail standing like ghosts in armour here and there, fantastic carvings brought from monkish cloisters, rusty weapons of various kinds, distorted figures in china and wood and iron and ivory: tapestry and strange furniture that might have been designed in dreams.”

From The Old Curiosity Shop, by Charles Dickens

“Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow…let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through.”

From Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll

 

          

Fox Point, between two rivers, is the birthplace of Providence. In 1636, Roger Williams set down his foot on a muddy shore off the Seekonk River, at the intersection of what is today Power and Gano Streets. He claimed the property he had purchased from his Indian friends, Chiefs Manicomus and Nanticut, and named it “Providence” because he believed God had sent him here; delivering him from his Puritan enemies in the north so he could begin his grand experiment in democracy and separation of Church and State, the first the world had ever known.

 Here between the rivers, Providence’s first port was established. In the late 1600’s, a man named Pardon Elder Tillinghast built a wharf at the edge of Transit Street in Fox Point. He is called the father of Providence shipping. In time, more than fifty wharves would line the waterfront.       
            Hundreds of years before the manufacturing mills made Providence rich, the triangle trade put Providence on the map. Ships left Fox Point for Africa with holds full of rum. Slaves replaced rum as cargo and the same ships sailed back across the ocean to the West Indies, to sell the slaves for molasses. Then back to Providence to distill more rum. So it went; round and round for seventy five years or more. Rum, slaves, molasses…slaves, molasses, rum.

            India Point, the waterfront region of Fox Point, took its name from the “Indiamen” who sailed those ships. Go to India Point Park today and gaze out onto the water at pilings that look like broken black teeth. They are the last vestiges of the India trade.

            Wickenden Street was named after William Wickenden, who succeeded Roger Williams as pastor of the First Baptist Church in Providence, Rhode Island...the oldest Baptist Church in America. William Wickenden is most famous for being one of the co-signers of the first document in the Americas which enshrined religious tolerance and the separation of Church and State, into the Constitution of Rhode Island.  William Wickenden died on February 23, 1671 in Providence.
            
            Fox Point has few fancy mansions. The poor emigrated here. The shipping trade attracted the Portuguese, the sea already in their blood: white Portuguese from Portugal and the Azores; black Portuguese from Cape Verde. The Irish settled in Fox Point, too, but were mostly displaced by an urban renewal project in the mid 1800’s. The bluff nicknamed “Corky Hill” was razed to fill in part of the Seekonk River. As a result, the landing place of Roger Williams is now at least a hundred yards inshore. 
            In Fox Point, at the present site of the Boys and Girls Club, George M. Cohan was born: not on the 4th of July as he later boasted; but according to church records, on the 3rd of July, 1878, at home at 576 Wickenden Street.

            Today the hillside enclave of Fox Point, surrounded on three sides by water, is called the Pro-ho of the city. Coffeeshops, art galleries and antique stores line the street. Tattered posters and playbills flutter from lamp posts in the stiff river breezes. Masters of graffiti have transformed featureless underpasses into urban frescoes. The view from the highway is a crowded tumble of pastel tenements, sitting cheek by jowl up against the narrow sidewalks. Most homes in Fox Point are at least fifty years old; many, two hundred years old or more. Family histories are etched into the grain of old wood and stamped in stone and brick, waiting patiently to be retold.

 

Chapter One.

          
            On a very windy, cold, and overcast Saturday in February, Angie Russo was walking down Wickenden Street, which ran perpendicularly from the very southern end of Benefit Street, on the East Side of Providence, Rhode Island. She had her chin down and her collar up, eyes squinted against the wind as she scanned the storefronts for a certain gift shop which had been recommended to her, which was renowned for its fabulously creative themed gift baskets. Angie needed something fabulous for a bridal shower for someone who meant very much to her.

            So where was it? It was supposed to be right around here, near a futon shop and a Thai restaurant. There was the Thai restaurant, delicious aromas emanating, which reminded Angie that she had skipped breakfast and now it was already half past lunch.

            She stopped in front of a narrow, faded gray clapboard building. Could this be the gift shop? Surely not. Its tattered black and white awning flapped in the stiff breeze off the river. The windows on either side of the door were so grimy that the objects behind the glass took on a sepia quality, as in an old daguerreotype.

            The window display had no obvious theme or organizing principle. A bust of Caesar sat on a threadbare needlepoint footstool...a moth eaten mink coat, with enormous shawl collar and cuffs, straight out of a Doris Day movie, swung from a brass coat rack. Leaning against a handsome walnut secretary was a depressing still life depicting half-dead flowers strewn over a crumpled pair of white kid gloves.

            Angie read the lettering etched upon the glass.

            Lost and Found
            Antiques and Collectibles

            The wind gusted suddenly and delivered a sharp, unfriendly push that felt personal. To escape it, Angie pushed open the door to the shop, and stumbled in.
            The bell over the front door tinkled as Angie entered. She shut the door hurriedly behind her as if the wind might decide to give chase. 
            The shop was one long, gloomy room with a central aisle; crammed with stuff from end to end. With no other light source but the dingy display windows and a few shaded table lamps here and there, the interior ought to have been dark as a cave. Yet the room had a kind of sullen glow. Angie immediately realized why: the long side walls of the shop were covered, floor to ceiling, with antique mirrors in every conceivable shape and size. The mirrors were framed in tarnished metal or fragile wood variously painted, gilded, enameled or polished. The old glass within was convex, beveled, fisheyed or etched; but deteriorating. To Angie, the mirrors looked like a gallery of elderly eyes, half blind; milky with cataracts.
            On a bright day, Angie imagined, this shop would be filled with light as sunbeams bounced from mirror to mirror. But on this gray day, the mirrors were overcast as the skies outside. The glass flickered and mimicked the movement on the street; the dark shadows of pedestrians hurrying along in the cold; cars flowing slowly by and branches on the stunted city trees whipping in the wind.
            Angie’s eye caught on one mirror in particular: an oval boudoir mirror in a gilt frame carved to look like a loop of thick satin ribbon. She fancied that if she gazed into it, she would see not her own reflection but her grandmother’s, who everyone claimed Angie took after.
            “Good afternoon, madam,” a voice said. “May I help you find something?”
            Angie looked around to see who was speaking. All she saw was a jumble of old furniture. Then behind her, just near the door, a silver-haired gentleman materialized. 
            “I was...actually looking for a gift shop? It specializes in custom gift baskets? I don’t know the name…”
            “You must mean ‘The Basket Case,’” he said, coming up to her. He was a distinguished looking older man, perhaps in his mid 70’s, perhaps, dressed in a tweedy jacket over a fine knit turtleneck sweater. 
            “I believe it is on the other side of the incense shop, now what’s that called?” he sighed to himself. 
            “Of course it’s really a head shop, I don’t know who they imagine they’re fooling. Filled with hookahs and pipes and that kind of paraphernalia…what is the name…? Something like ‘Inhale”… These new shops have such clever names.”
            “Your shop has a clever name,” Angie said. "Lost and Found; I like that.”
            “Thank you. I thought it a very appropriate name at the time.
            “How long have you been here? Angie asked.
            “Hmmm, the shop opened in…1951. I bought the building, well, it was a private home, then. The owner died.. well...sad story.” 
            He looked away for a moment.
            “I bought and sold a number of properties here on Wickenden Street over the years…that house with the little grocery store downstairs, painted in all the odd colors? That’s still mine.”
            “The Shagadeli?” Angie asked. “I noticed it as I came down the street.”
            “Yes, that’s the one. Those tenants have been in there a few years now, very successful from what I gather. All I know is that they are prompt with their rent.”
            “Well,” Angie said. “Guess I better go try to find that shop, ‘The Basket Case,’ it’s called? I am going to a bridal shower at five o’clock today, and I’m going to be a basket case if I don’t find something.”
             “Oh my. Five o’clock! Doesn’t give you much time.”
            “No, and it has to be something really wonderful.”
            “Gift baskets are always welcome.”
            “Yes,” Angie said, doubtfully. “I hope so.”
             “What were you thinking of putting in it?”
             “Oh. I don’t know! I was hoping the gift basket people could suggest something...candles, bath oils, I guess? This is a bride who really has everything already.”
            He held out his hand. “I am Paul Tillinghast, by the way.”
            “I’m Angie Russo,” Angie said, taking his hand and giving it a warm shake.          
            “Are you related to the famous Tillinghast family from Benefit Street? Near the Athenaeum?”
            “Let’s just say I’m perched on one of the low hanging branches of the family tree,” he said, with a little smile. “Tillinghast is a very old New England surname; lots of us scattered around these parts.
            “Do you live around here, Ms. Russo?”
            “Angie. Yes, actually I live on Benefit Street.”
            “Ah, lucky for you. Providence’s ‘Mile of History.’”
             “I am very happy there.”
             “That’s wonderful. I live over on Blackstone Boulevard myself.”
            “That is very lovely too.”
            “Yes it is. So...Angie...this bride who has everything...she intrigues me. No one has everything, of course.”
            “Oh, no, of course not. I just meant that she already has a gorgeous home, and beautiful jewelry and clothes...”
            “And of course, a wonderful man who loves her and wishes to marry her...”
            “Uh...well, it is a perfect match,” Angie said.
            “I bet I have something your bride to be doesn’t have,” Mr. Tillinghast said. “It is one-of-a-kind, nothing like it in all the world.”
            “It sounds like something I can’t afford,” Angie said.
            “You might be pleasantly surprised! I’ll get it...give me a moment to find it...” and he disappeared into an alley between lines of heavy, dark wood armoires and dressers.
            He was gone quite a while. For the first few moments Angie waited courteously in the same spot; then as the minutes dragged on she began to make cautious forays into the dense forest of objects, never venturing in too far for fear of getting lost in the maze.
            She had her nose up against a crystal ball set in an ornate brass stand, trying to see into the future, when he turned up beside her.
            “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, and held out on the palm of his hand a flat muslin bag. “Take a look inside.”
            Angie took it from him, opened the bag and drew out a piece of cloth.
            “It’s a...handkerchief!” She looked at it more closely. “A very lovely lace handkerchief.”
            “Not just any lace handkerchief,” he said. “It is antique, French in origin, vintage about 1880’s, I should say, silk bordered in blonde lace. A work of art, absolutely unique.” 
            “Blonde lace?” Angie said. “I have never heard of it.”
            Paul Tillinghast tenderly took the handkerchief from her hand.
            “Oh yes...blonde lace was a bobbin lace made in France in the 18th century, around the time of the French Revolution...usually made from unbleached pale beige Chinese silk...beige being the true color of natural silk,” he explained. 
            “This handkerchief, however, does not date back to the 1700’s, I wish! but rather from the nineteenth century, when there was a revival of the light flower motifs worked in blonde lace. See this amazingly complex floral design?”
He slid his hand underneath the lace so Angie could better appreciate the intricate petal shapes of roses and irises and lilies. 
            “This is actually known as ‘white blonde’ lace, as it was created from bleached silk,” he told her. “The depth of the lace increases its value; the border looks to be about four inches deep.”
            Angie could not take her eyes off it. “It’s exquisite...”
            “And here, do you see?” He unfolded the handkerchief and showed her. “In this corner, on the fabric itself, whitework embroidery: white on white. Can you read the words?”
            Angie recollected at least that much from her high school French. “It says...does it say, ‘I love you’?”
            “Yes...‘Je t’adore’...this is a wedding handkerchief. A bride would carry it for luck, for sentiment...do brides today still carry ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue?” he asked her.  “I am a little out of touch with such things.”
            “Oh yes,” Angie said.
            “Well, this could be her ‘Something Old’; to carry in her sleeve on her wedding day.”
            “Is it very expensive?” Angie asked him. 
            “This is absolutely pristine; Angie. Museum quality; I do not exaggerate. It would have taken many, many months to create...”
            “Yes, I’m sure it costs more than I can pay,” Angie said regretfully.
            “And did you know,” Tillinghast went on, “that often, in those bygone days, a bride would later refashion her wedding handkerchief into a baby cap?”
            “Oh. Probably not this bride, though,” Angie said.
            “Seventy-five dollars? Could you pay that?”
            “Seventy-five?” Angie made a quick calculation: the gift basket would probably have cost her at least fifty and maybe as much as sixty. Still, seventy-five dollars for a shower gift was a lot, for her. Too much. She still had to buy a wedding gift. 
            Still... 
            “Oh dear. I don’t know...” she said, her eyes still on the handkerchief. 
            “Sixty, then,” he said. “which is a steal, I assure you. And I tell you what: I’ll sweeten the deal by substituting this utilitarian bag for a lovely satin handkerchief keeper, the one I have in mind is circa about 1930...vintage fabric should never be stored in a box, by the way.”
            Angie hesitated. She watched as he refolded the handkerchief and slid it back inside the cotton drawstring bag.
            “Will you accept a check?” she asked.

 

 

Chapter Two. 

 

            Marian’s bridal shower was being held at the Westin Hotel in downtown Providence. Angie parked in the Providence Place Mall garage and raced up the escalators to the Hallmark store to get just the right color bow for Marian’s gift, then rode the escalator back down again, to the sky bridge that connected the mall with the Westin. 
            A smallish banquet room on the second floor had been transformed by the bridal decorators into what one might fantasize the throne room of an ice palace would look like: all gleaming platinum and opalescent white... frozen rose and tanzanite purple and the silvery blue of a winter solstice sky.             
            She was about twenty minutes late, and there were at least forty women already milling around, sipping champagne, laughing and chatting. A young Asian woman, dressed in a long, ivory gown, was playing light operettas on a white baby grand in a far corner; Angie recognized an obscure ditty from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado…popular way before her time, but it had been a favorite of her mother’s. Angie had a flash of memory: she and her mother sitting together on the living room couch, singing, 
            “Two little maids from school are we….pert as a school-girl well can be…”
            At first Angie could see no one she knew. She felt suddenly shy and out of place, considered how she could quickly add her gift to the mountain of exquisitely wrapped presents on the long, satin-draped table and make a speedy but discreet getaway. 
            Too late! Marian had spotted her and was on her way over to greet her.
            If this was an ice palace, then surely Marian was the Ice Princess.    
            She was dressed in a silk sheath of glacial pink, the color of ice at sunset. Her pale hair was parted at the side, falling simple and straight down to her shoulder blades, and caught behind one ear with a sparkling barrette. Knowing Marian, those were not rhinestones! She was as gorgeous and impossibly perfect as a 40’s movie star.
            “Marian, you look so beautiful,” Angie exclaimed, as they hugged.
            “Angie, you look beautiful,” Marian said. "It means so much to Beatrice and me that you're here."

            Marian’s shower invitation had seemed to Angie too elegant to be merely mailed...it was worthy of hand-delivery by a liveried footman. It had specified “winter-color dress.”
            When Angie phoned her to say that she had put her acceptance in the mail, Marian said: “I realize I’m flouting tradition by throwing my own bridal shower! But let's face it, Beatrice and I have been flouting tradition for ten years! And you know me, Angie! I want what I want just the way I want it!”

Angie, who really could not afford to go out and buy something new; ransacked her closet and found an off-white wool boucle suit, dress with matching jacket; shot with metallic thread. An obscure designer item she had found many years ago at a clearance rack at Syms and never worn: originally tagged at $750, Angie’s for only $99.
            “Where is Beatrice?” Angie asked. Beatrice Newman was Marian’s highly significant other; and Angie’s closest friend and old college roommate. 
            Marian laughed. “Angie, you know Beatrice; this is not her thing at all. She's at her office, as usual. She'll put in an appearance at the last minute.”
            She took Angie’s hand. “Come on, put that box on the pile and come with me.” 
            Marian caught the eye of a server in white and gestured him over.  All the staff, Angie realized now, were dressed in white.
            “Have some champagne, darling Angie.” Marian took a bubbling crystal flute from a cut crystal tray and handed it to her. “Are you starving?” 
            Marian beckoned over another server who was circulating with an eclectic assortment of smoked canapés on a silver platter. Angie hitched her pocketbook over one shoulder and took one; then accepted a cocktail napkin imprinted with a silvery “M&B” She tried to juggle napkin, champagne and canape all at once. Finally she popped the morsel in her mouth whole just to get rid of it (smoked salmon in port wine cream cheese, according to the server) and nearly choked.
            Marian took Angie’s free hand.
            “C’mon, there is someone here I want you to meet. She is thinking of buying a house on the East Side and I told her you could tell her all about life in Providence...”

 

            Angie spoke quite a while to the lady who was thinking of buying a home in Providence. Angie was careful to put the happiest, sunniest spin on her own experience, leaving out the unsettling parts of her first year in Providence; when, after she lost her husband Tom to cancer, she moved into an old house on Benefit Street and unpleasant things began to happen.
            The young woman’s name was Callie Price. She had matte black hair with bright red ends, cut in a kind of Jane Fonda vintage shag. Callie had gone to RISD but hadn’t graduated; she was a clothes designer and she’d recently got divorced. She and Marian had become friends after Marian spotted one of her designs in the front window of a shop in Wayland Square.
            Callie explained her fashion vision.
            “I’m into the primary colors but combined with those really demure feminine silhouettes of the 50’s; you know, the tiny waists and bateau necklines and skirts below the knee? Think Ava Gardner. Or Kim Novak, you know who Kim Novak was?"
            Probably better than you do, Angie thought ruefully, looking at Callie, who couldn’t be older than thirty.
            Marian owned a clothing boutique in downtown Newport called “Maybe” (a combination of hers and Beatrice’s names; linked by an existential “Y.) 
            According to Callie, Marian had tracked her down. Since then, a “Callie” creation was always center stage in Marian’s shop window.
            “Marian opened so many doors for me,” Callie said earnestly. In fact, she told Angie, the governor’s wife, was recently photographed by Rhode Island Monthly magazine, wearing a “Callie” from “Maybe.”
            “Marian is MY Kim Novak,” Callie said. “She’s my muse.”
            Angie wondered what Beatrice thought about Marian being Callie’s muse. Hopefully, she hadn’t heard. 
            Callie’s divorce had been protracted and rancorous. “No children, thank God!” she said to Angie.
            But they’d fought over every other asset from a Williams and Sonoma omelet pan to a ten-year-old cockatiel. Together they’d owned an apartment in Paris; for her work Callie needed, well, wanted, anyway, to be in Europe a couple of times a year at least. She said she'd done all she could to keep the flat; was more than willing to pay her ex his share of its value; but the harder she fought, the more he realized how much she wanted it and the more determined he was that she wouldn’t get it. 
            It took forever to sell because it turned out Parisians weren’t standing in line to buy a two bedroom flat in such a remote arrondissement. Finally it sold, and Callie thought it wise to invest her share of the proceeds in a place of her own in Providence, of which she had fond memories from her RISD years; and which now, had become her home base. At first, Callie told Angie, she thought she could afford a house, but after several weeks of trudging through the fixer uppers and dowdy bungalows on the fringes of the East Side that were within her price range, Callie had recalibrated her expectations and was now considering buying a loft.
            “Providence is a beautiful, livable city,” Angie told her with true sincerity. “The restaurants are fabulous. You can really walk anywhere, or take a trolley. And it’s a college town, which keeps it young and lively...” 
            “Expensive, though,” Callie said.
            “Well, it’s still affordable...not like New York or Boston...yet,” Angie said. “But yes. Expensive.”
            As the ladies chattered, sipped and nibbled, became more and more flushed and giggly; the staff arranged a ring of white chairs around a...throne; that’s what it was: a high-backed cushioned silver armchair swathed in a nearly transparent voile that had the iridescent sheen of mother of pearl.
            Suddenly the lights came up; the music, which had been subtly building in tempo in the last fifteen minutes, crescendoed. The white-clad servers, sans their trays, suggested tactfully to each knot of ladies that they drain their glasses, perhaps visit the ladies lounge, and then take a seat for the gift opening ceremony.
            
            Marian certainly got some very luxe gifts. In the aftermath, pastel tissue paper exploded out of topless gift boxes of all shapes and sizes. Sensuous piles of silk negligees and satin teddies, flacons of designer perfume, scented candles and imported bed linens lay all about. There was not a toaster or blender in sight. A quaint nod to custom was the rainbow-colored ribbon bouquet which Marian’s mother concocted from the gift bows of all the presents. 
            Marian’s mother had modeled for Collier’s magazine in the 50’s. She could have gotten modeling work tomorrow. She was thin, still straight and tall in her 70’s and effortlessly elegant, with a spiked cap of white hair and pale green eyes. She was what Marian would become, fortunate Marian. It occurred to Angie that Marian’s mother and Paul Tillinghast would make a striking couple.
            The piano serenade resumed but this time the repertoire was old show tunes. The guests were directed to the long draped tables which had been magically reset with platters of fresh fruit, rounds of brie and camembert...heaping towers of truffles, tarts and petit fours. There was coffee in silver coffee urns, tea in porcelain pots and a capucchino station. Trays reappeared; this time around bearing snifters of Courvoisier and Grand Marnier.
            Despite the quantities of lavish food and drink the guests had already consumed, many were making plans to meet up later with spouses or friends for dinner, across the street to the Capital Grille; over to McCormick & Schmidts at the Biltmore, or across the bridge to the East Side, to XO XO or Mill Tavern. 
            Callie invited Angie to join her group going to Olives on North Main, which was known for great martinis and good jazz on Saturday nights. Angie begged off. She had to go home to her dog.

            Marian, radiant, kissed her friends and family goodbye at the end of the evening, clutching her streaming ribbon bouquet in one hand, looking like the blissed-out bride she already was, in her heart.
            Somehow Angie had missed the moment when Marian opened her gift. Callie had been chattering in her ear the whole time. Or perhaps she had forgotten to put the gift card in? As Marian opened her gifts she'd made a point of calling out the name of the giver and, and thanking them personally in front of the company.
            But as Angie came up to say goodnight, Marian hugged her close, then held her at arm’s length and said:
            “That is the loveliest handkerchief I have ever seen.”
            “It’s antique,” Angie told her gratefully. “A blonde lace handkerchief from the late 1800’s...”
            “I know a bit about vintage lace,” Marian said. “Yours was the most special gift I received tonight, and that is saying something!”
            
            Beatrice came up to them at that moment. She hugged Angie hello, then turned her attention to Marian. Beatrice raised her eyebrows quizzically; Marian smiled softly; and Angie was transfixed; for the first time in all the years she had known them as a couple, Angie “got” the passionate love that defined this relationship. 
            It rocked her a little. Her heart twisted. The glance that had passed between Beatrice and Marian was like so many that she and Tom had exchanged, in those golden living years.
            A look that said, “I missed you. How have you been without me? I’m here now. Let’s go home.”

 

 

Chapter Three.

           
            Winter nights, especially, when the trees were bare, you could see the lights of Downcity from the windows of Angie’s house, and to the right, the glorious glowing dome of the Capitol. The East Side of Providence was so-called because it lay on the east side of the two narrow veins of river which ran through the heart of the city. It was a place where the land rose in gentle tiers, from Water Street to Main Street to Benefit Street and all the way up to narrow lanes, such as Congdon and Prospect Street.       

              Prospect Park was a favorite haunt of H.P. Lovecraft, horror writer and one of Providence's favorite sons. He described the view that burned in his mind’s eye, wherever he roamed:

            “The child’s first memories were of the great westward sea of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter afternoon from that great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a fevered and apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious greens.”

             Angie turned her key in the front door lock and pushed in. Immediately she heard a guilty thump (on the couch again!) and a clatter of nails against wood floor as her golden retriever Westerly bounded in from the parlor, crowding her in the narrow hall as he welcomed her home.
            “How is my smoochie poochie?” Angie said, and bent down to give Westerly a kiss on his head. Then she gently nudged him aside as she put her pocketbook down on the foyer table, disarmed the alarm, and walked into the kitchen at the back of the house.         
            It was only 9 o’clock at night, but Angie felt exhausted, and dispirited, somehow, despite how she’d enjoyed Marian’s party. She considered making a cup of hot chocolate, then realized no, she wasn’t thirsty or hungry. She didn’t feel like watching TV either, or getting on the computer, or finishing her library book. Duty called, anyway: and she took Westerly for his last constitutional of the evening. 
            She came back in, unclipped his leash, turned off the lights, turned on the alarm, and went, with Wes, up to bed.

            Angie was 56 years old. Tom, her husband, had died of cancer six years before. At some point in the last few years she had slipped over into that buffer zone between middle age and old age. A gentle gray area, no pun intended; anteroom to the next stage: the dreaded decades that can't be finessed: the 60’s, 70’s, 80’s…
            But wasn't 60 the new 40? And 70 the new 50, etc, etc? Sometimes her reflection in the vanity mirror in the downstairs bathroom (most flattering lighting in the whole house) looked so fresh and young she could almost believe it.   
            Angie hadn’t thought about sex, not really, in all the time Tom had been gone. She was menopausal, oh, face it! she was way past menopause now. She sometimes felt as if everything below her waist was dead, disappeared; as gender-neutral as a doll.
            For the most part, she told herself, I don’t care. All things considered, it was a mercy, a good thing.
            But on this night of Marian’s bridal shower Angie had an erotic dream. It was a kissing dream...and it wasn’t Tom she was kissing but a certain young movie star, somebody she had heard of but never realized she was attracted to.

            They were in a car; one of those '60's "muscle cars" like a GTO or a Buick Grandsport. He was driving and she was sitting next to him, her hand on his thigh, as close to him as she could be without being literally in his lap. (It occurred to her later, when she recollected the dream, that there were really few things in life as sexy as sitting in a young man‘s lap.) 
            They rode; leg pressed against leg, the way lovers could only do in the automobiles of her youth, with their wide leather benches. Before bucket seats were invented and killed off the art of making out in the front seat of a car.
            It was dark outside, in the dream place. The breeze blowing through the car was warm and soft and smelled faintly of the ocean. In the light from the dashboard she watched his hand on the wheel, steering expertly, his left arm bent and resting on the open window. He smelled so good! He smelled of youth and health; of a fresh haircut and a summer tan.
            They stopped in a brightly-lit parking lot for some reason; perhaps because they couldn’t bear to wait a moment longer to be in each other’s arms. Desire arced between them like an electric current; he twined his fingers into her hair, she cupped her hand to the warm curve of his neck, and they could not resist, why should they? So they began to kiss. Nothing more, nothing less: than deep, clean, sweet, single-minded kissing that left them both breathless. Seeming to last forever and ever.

            Until, of course, she woke up.

            Angie’s dreams, in the years since Tom’s death, had become so vivid, complex and marvelous, it was like going to the movies every single night, except that she never knew in advance what she was going to see. 
            The dialogue was so clever, the plots so involving! She felt as if she were sitting in the front row of a movie theater so close to the screen that she was obliged to swivel her head up and down, back and forth, to take it all in. She could feel her eyes darting around in excitement beneath her lids. 
            For a long while now, Angie looked forward to sleep, when she could get it, and to her dreams unreeling. This was her looking glass life: fantastically softened, colored and distorted, by her hopes and fears. 
            More and more frequently, it seemed, her dream life bled into her real life. Did this thing or that, actually happen? Had, for instance, a little girl in a black and white polka dot dress ever waved sadly to her from the back seat of an accelerating car? Or was that just another dream masquerading as a memory?                 
            And what would happen to her when her dream life finally took over and usurped every waking hour until there was no more reality left?
            Dreaming was often the most exciting part of her day. The night before Marian’s shower, for instance, she’d had a dream that still reverberated, and which maybe accounted for the residual sadness she was feeling. 
            In this dream, her mother was showing her photographs Angie had never seen before; of Angie as a young woman. In the pictures Angie was smiling and happy, a mane of shining black hair cascading to her waist, hair much longer than she could ever remember having in real life. 
            “I always regret you never added on to the house,” she said to her mother, in the dream. The next morning, Angie, an only child, interpreted that statement as an unconscious yearning for a brother or sister. 
            Even nightmares had a cathartic effect. Angie had always been prone to nightmares; maybe night terrors was a more accurate way to describe them. All her life, somebody had been there to soothe her when she woke up shaking, heart pounding, moaning softly in fear: her parents, Beatrice in the college years, and then, of course, Tom.
            Now she had only Wes. But Wes was her braveheart! Her sentinel and protector. He slept every night by the side of her bed on a cedar-filled black watch plaid oversized dog cushion, specially ordered from an upscale pet catalog. When Angie woke up in a panic, he appeared at the side of her bed instantly, nuzzling her face and softly licking her hand.
            In a perverse way the night terrors stimulated her emotions; made her feel more alive. 
            Mostly, though, each new day reared up before her in the morning and ebbed away behind her every night; predictably, monotonously, without really mattering much at all.

_________________________________________________      

             Beatrice phoned Angie at work the next morning.
            Angie was a receptionist at a Rhode Island talk radio station.
           “WRI Radio, 1330 AM, Providence...the Little Station with the Big Voice...this is Angie, how may I direct your call?” 
            “Have you got a minute?”
            “Beatrice?”
            “I need to discuss something with you.”
            “Is something wrong?” Angie asked anxiously.
            “That’s what I was going to ask you.”
            “Beezie, don’t be enigmatic. I beg you,” Angie said.
            “Well, it has come to my attention that you are almost two weeks late paying your mortgage. And that you are a couple of weeks late, on average, paying your mortgage every month.”
            Beatrice was a very successful Rhode Island accountant with an impressive roster of rich clients that included Greenfields Development: private real estate investors who Beatrice had somehow schmoozed into funding the mortgage on Angie’s house on Benefit Street in Providence. 
            Angie was so humiliated she was dumbstruck.
            Finally she said, “Beeze, it’s under control. I always make sure I am still in my grace period. I’ve never had to pay one late fee! What, did they call you and complain about me? That’s unethical, or something. It’s my problem, not yours.”
            “So you admit there is a problem.”
            “Beatrice,” Angie said, “there is no problem. I’ve just had some unexpected expenses lately, and so I got a little out of sync with the mortgage. But I...I will make the payment when I get my paycheck at the end of the week.”
            “By Friday, you will be past your grace period, and you will owe a late fee, Angie,” Beatrice said, sternly. “And a report could conceivably go to the credit bureaus. You don’t want that.”
            “No, Beatrice, of course I don’t. I...well, actually, I was thinking of maybe cashing in a CD, just to tide me over...”
            “That is a terrible idea! I won't let you do it. You’ll have to pay a penalty, but above all, you certainly can’t afford to touch any of your investments! You are barely surviving as it is. Remember, you can’t hide from me, I do your damn taxes.”
            Beatrice sighed her “I guess you’re just my cross to bear” sigh, and after a painful moment, said, very ungraciously, even for her: 
            “Look, do you need a loan? I will be glad--well, ‘glad’ is overstating it; but I will extend a loan to you if you need it. However, first I have to know what kind of financial bind you’ve put yourself in! What, have you loaned money to Michael again?” 
            That stung. Michael was Angie’s son. He lived with his wife and baby daughter in Chicago, and they were trying to buy a house. Even with both of them working and the baby in daycare, they just couldn’t afford it. It broke Angie’s heart. If Tom were alive…
            Angie bit her tongue. Beatrice was her oldest, dearest friend. She and Marian had done so much to help her since Tom died. 
            “Let’s face it,” Beatrice continued, oblivious and anyway, on a roll. “You are at a stage in your life where things are never going to get better, just worse.”
            “Oh thanks, Beeze. It’s always a joy to chat with you. I’ll make the mortgage payment tomorrow. Don’t worry about it. Tell Greenfields Development to chill.”
            “Angie, what the hell has come over you?”
            “Nothing, Beeze. I’m fine. It’s all fine. Thanks for the heads-up. You’re a peach. Gotta go.” 
            “Angie, this is nothing to be flippant about. I want to help you. Come to my office after work today so we can discuss this.”
            “No can do, Beeze. I have a prior engagement. Talk to you soon. Calls are stacking up. Have a great day!”
            “Angie!”

            Angie’s prior engagement was really just her regularly scheduled after-work walk with Westerly, when, weather permitting, they strolled down Benefit to Steeple Street and back again. Later, she fixed dinner for both of them. Whatever Angie had, Westerly always shared, mixed with his dry dog food, of course. Tonight it was salmon and green beans.
            After dinner, and after another walk with Westerly, Angie went into her den and turned on her computer, and logged on to her online bank account.
            She had seventeen hundred dollars in her checking account. Not enough to pay the mortgage yet, which was two thousand five hundred and six dollars and 63 cents because it included her homeowners insurance and her property taxes, which were sky-high in the City of Providence. She had only a couple of hundred dollars in her savings account.
            One month she’d called Greenfields Development to see if she could pay by credit card. The young woman who answered had actually laughed at her. 
            “No, we can’t do that! I’ve never heard of that, ma’am!”
            Ma’am.
            So Angie saw no other way to pay her mortgage before Friday except to go to the bank and get a cash advance on her credit card.
            The phone rang.
            “Angie?”
            “Marian, hi! I was going to call you and thank you for inviting me to your lovely party...”
            “Angie, is everything all right?”
            “Beatrice put you up to this, didn’t she?” Angie said, suspiciously.
            “Sweetie, she’s worried about you.”
            “She’s just worried that if I don’t pay, Greenfields Development will put cement blocks on her feet and throw her into Narragansett Bay.”
            “Angie! Now you’re being mean. Beatrice loves you and worries about you, and you know it,” Marian said.
            Angie immediately hated herself. 
            "Oh, Marian. I’m sorry. Beatrice and you, too, you're both so good to me. It’s just…I’m getting a little overwhelmed here lately. I had to upgrade the whole electrical system last month, it was like Doctor Mike and I couldn’t put a lamp on at the same time! It just had to be done. And now the boiler is on its last legs...I am going through twice as much oil this winter as last…the house desperately needs painting…” she trailed off, depressing herself by even talking about it.
            “Oh, honey,” Marian said, “it’s nothing that can’t be worked out. You know Beatrice is a genius, she’ll figure a way to make everything all right. Come to dinner Friday night, and talk to her.
            “She’ll just yell at me.”
            “No. She won’t. I won’t let her,” Marian promised. “Come on, say yes. I’ll make gnocchi...you love my gnocchi.”
            Angie did love Marian’s gnocchi. 
            “With porcini mushrooms?”
            “Need you ask?” Marian replied. “Sun-dried tomatoes, too, and I’ll put out a big dish of those garlic stuffed olives you love...and make a butterscotch flan for dessert...”

            After Tom died (How many chapters in the narrative of her new life were preceded by that simple phrase?) everybody expected her to sell the suburban house in Westerly, Rhode Island where she and Tom had raised their only child, Michael. 
            Angie got the impression from her friends and family that as a widow, she was expected to grow old gracefully (bury herself alive, was the way Angie thought of it) in some cinderblock condo development somewhere.  
            Instead, Angie did a most unexpected thing: she sold her house and sunk nearly all her net worth into a historic old house on Benefit Street, on the East Side of Providence. 
            Beatrice, her old college roommate and now a pillar of the Rhode Island professional community, was vehemently against the move. 
            “Angie, buying this house, at this point in your life, is pure folly!”
            But finally Beatrice relented in time to help Angie find a private investor, Greenfields Development, to fund her mortgage.
            Tom had left Angie some money, but not nearly enough, it was turning out, to see her through the next thirty years. Beatrice had taken charge: helped Angie settle the estate and invest Tom’s insurance money. There was a small pension, too. Very small. 
            Angie got a job. She earned about $25,000 a year. 
            Her house on Benefit Street had a one-bedroom basement apartment, which she rented to a doctor, Mike Hakkim, who had become a good friend, a second son. The rent supplemented her income. But there still wasn’t enough money, some months. 
            Her son, Michael, was living in Chicago now with his wife Colby and their daughter, Shea, whose full name was Shea Sommers Russo. Shea was Colby’s maiden name. Sommers was Colby’s mother’s maiden name. 
            Angie lavished her granddaughter with all the gifts and attention as was possible to do long-distance and on a budget.
            The little girl was just two years old, but Angie wanted to buy her the world: starting with a closetful of taffeta dresses and black patent leather mary janes; pink ribboned ballet shoes and frothy white tutus. A leather-bound  library of children’s classics. A case of collector dolls and a fat nest egg for Wellesley College.  
            “Wes, old boy, you got any money you can loan me?” Angie turned off her computer and turned to Westerly, who was sprawled out on his special faux sheepskin rug in front of the TV. He opened his eyes at the sound of his name, but was too enervated to do anything more than twitch an ear in her direction. 
            “Come on, help Mommy out here, Westy! I bet you’ve got a few bucks buried out in the backyard.”
            Angie dreaded Friday night dinner with Beatrice. She had a sick feeling about how that meeting would go. If Beatrice realized the true state of Angie‘s finances, she would try to force Angie to do what Angie most adamantly did not want to do:
            Sell her house on Benefit Street.
            Angie went upstairs to the bedroom adjoining her own, which she had converted into a dressing room/closet. She pushed aside some plastic dress bags at the far end of her hanging clothes, and plucked out an old beach tote from the back of the closet. Out of the tote she pulled a balding velvet jewelry box. 
            Not the cleverest of hiding places, she had to admit. She could imagine her mother shaking her head and saying,
            “Angie, that is the first place a robber would look!”
            She went to her bedroom, and sat on her bed, opened the box and turned it over and spilled out the contents.
            She picked out a few pieces, one by one, and laid them in a row.
            A diamond tennis bracelet. Diamond studs, perhaps a carat each. Long ago wedding anniversary gifts from Tom. 
            A sapphire ring set in platinum: her mother’s. A cameo pin: her great-grandmother‘s, originally; passed down with reverence to her grandmother, then her mother, and then to Angie. One day it would be Shea’s. It should be Shea’s.
            There was her gold Citizen dress watch with the diamond bezel; and her strand of good pearls, a gift from her parents on her graduation from college.
            Angie looked at them all for a moment and then she got up and went over to the fireplace mantel. She took down a tiny white leather baby shoe, one of Michael’s first pair of baby shoes. Where the other shoe went was a mystery. 
            She sat back down on the bed, loosened the laces of the shoe, lifted up the tongue, and drew out a small satin bag. 
Inside the bag was her engagement ring: a two carat heart shaped diamond in a simple white gold setting. No side stones; this stone needed no enhancement. She knew for a fact it was practically flawless. It had belonged to Tom’s mother.
Angie had stopped wearing it even while Tom was still alive. She had become, increasingly, irrationally convinced  that if she wore it, she would lose it. It would slip off her finger somehow, or else the stone would fall out one day. She would look casually down at her ring and find just four empty prongs.
            When Tom was alive, he would gently scoff at her fears. “Wear it, honey, don’t be silly. It’s insured.”         
            Thinking of that, Angie slipped it on her ring finger next to her wedding ring. Then she remembered that it wasn’t insured anymore; she couldn’t afford the rider on her insurance policy.  She pulled the ring off and laid it carefully on the bedspread with the rest of her accumulated treasures. She would get them all appraised, and then make a decision.
            But wait: was this her decision to make? Wasn’t she cheating Michael or Colby or little Shea by selling them? Well, Michael did have all his father’s jewelry, except for Tom’s wedding band, which Angie always wore on a gold chain around her neck. And Colby, an only daughter, would surely inherit her own mother’s jewelry one day. And in its turn, Colby’s jewelry would pass to Shea. 
            Nevertheless, Angie wanted her granddaughter to have something from her; passed down through the generations of her own family. She took the cameo brooch and put it back into the jewelry box.
            Then something else occurred to her: what if Michael and Colby had more children? She picked up the sapphire ring, put it briefly on her finger, held her hand out to admire it, then slipped it off and put that back in the jewelry box, too.
            She picked up Michael’s baby shoe. How utterly amazing that her six foot tall son had once had such a tiny foot! She turned the shoe over and looked at the sole. It was barely scuffed. Michael had worn these shoes before he was even walking. The high topped Buster Brown baby shoes were more symbolic than practical. And even when he was walking Angie still picked him up and propped him on her hip, even when she cleaned house. Michael loved the noise of the vacuum; he would open his mouth wide and imitate the sound, “AAAAHHHH.”
            “Angie,” Tom would say to her. “If you keep carrying him everywhere, he’ll forget how to walk!”
            Angie put her engagement ring back into its silk pouch, and then tucked it back into the toe of Michael’s baby shoe, and put it back on the mantel. 
            She looked at herself in the mirror over the mantel. She nearly put her hand out to wipe the mirror; then she realized her image was blurry because her eyes had filled with tears. She blinked hard; but two tears escaped anyway and rolled down her cheeks.

Chapter Four.

            
            At work the next morning, Gene James, Rhode Island’s combative, obnoxious, radio talk show host from hell, blew past Angie’s desk wearing, of all things, a Yankee baseball cap.
            What is up with that? Angie wondered. For a New Englander to wear a Yankees baseball cap was tantamount to treason. Was he cruisin’ for a bruisin’ or was this just some loco Gene James publicity stunt? He better not wear that on the air (WRI now streamed live on the internet with video) or the Red Sox Nation would rise as one and annihilate him.
            Over lunch in the break room, Angie consulted Carol, her best friend at the station; the sweetest woman on the planet; who had showed her the ropes in those first rocky days on the job and pretty much saved Angie from getting fired. 
            “I saw it too,” Carol whispered. “And I have a hunch.”
            “What? He’s leaving Rhode Island to go work in New York?” Angie asked hopefully.
            “Nope. He joined an exclusive club,” Carol said.
            “What club?”
            “The Hair Club for Men.”
            “No! You think?”

            The wearing of the hated Yankee cap continued throughout the week and the whole station was buzzing about it. Ed Mack, WRI’s sportscaster, wanted to jump Gene after his airshift and work him over. 
            “Men have been hanged for less,” Mack said grimly.
            “You can’t kill him though,” Wayne, their Harvard-educated Program Director, told him. Wayne, formerly known as Igor, had been Gene James’ producer and whipping boy before his promotion.
            “Why can’t I kill him?” Ed demanded. “Oh, I suppose you want to kill him first?”
            “No,” Wayne said. “I meant,  he can’t be killed. He’s not human.”
            Everyone in the break room sighed in dejection. Wayne was right.
            Finally, on Friday afternoon, it all came to a head. Angie wasn’t present, she was out front manning the phones as usual, but she heard all the gory details.

            During the staff meeting, without any real provocation except that he just plain hated the Yankees and Gene James, Ed Mack reached over and ripped the offending Yanks cap right off James’ head.
            There was a collective gasp. Underneath the cap, approximately where Gene James’ hairline used to be back in 1970, were rows of fat, regularly spaced plugs of bristly black hair.
            Gene James turned in fury to Ed Mack and screamed “Shut up!“ even though Mack hadn’t said a word, just gawked, like everybody else, in openmouthed amazement. Then James spun around and yelled in the face of a perfectly innocuous and innocent nerd from Human Resources. 
            “You shut up!” 
            He turned to Wayne, his face and scalp mottled red with rage. 
            “And you shut up, too, you overeducated elitist little bedwetter!” 
            He stabbed his finger randomly at this person and that. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”  Then James fled.
            After his departure,  the room went quiet. Most everybody felt a little bad. 
            But not real bad. 
            It started with a snicker, which led to a giggle, that produced a guffaw, and pretty soon the whole room was pounding on the table and screaming with laughter. Joe Bradley, the station manager, tried in vain to restore order, but he was laughing as hard as the rest of them.

            From that moment on, Gene James would inevitably and for perpetuity, be referred to behind his back as “Chia James.”

            Angie left work just a few minutes after five and instead of taking 95 northbound to Providence, she headed south to Beatrice and Marian’s house in Westerly. Angie had lived in Westerly herself for many years so she knew the territory; she stopped off at the little liquor store near her old neighborhood, and bought a bottle of wine to bring with her. A bottle of hemlock would have suited her better; that’s how much she dreaded her confrontation with Beatrice.
            Her tenant, Dr. Michael Hakkim, had promised to feed Westerly and take him out when he got home. Now that Mike was in private practice, his hours were more civilized and he often used his key to Angie’s kitchen door to feed, water and walk Westerly when she wasn’t home.
            Mike was her surrogate son, he even had the same name as her own son, and it was such a comfort to know, especially in the wee, small hours of the morning, that she was not alone in that big, labyrinthine house of hers. 
            Angie fretted about everything, the big stuff and the trivialities. She dreaded the day when Mike came to her to say he was getting married (and of course he would, such a handsome doctor!) and had to move out. In fact, Angie was sure she had seen the same pretty dark-haired woman knocking on Mike’s apartment door at least twice in the last two weeks.  
            Losing Mike was right up there on the worry checklist Angie obsessively inventoried before she went to sleep. She made sure she worried sufficiently about each item before moving on to the next. 

            This week’s list:
            Will Michael, Colby and Shea always be healthy and safe?
            Suppose Mike Hakkim moves away?
            If Mike Hakkim does move away, what if Angie unwittingly rents the apartment to a serial killer?
            Will Angie always have a job at WRI?
            Do the occasional pains in her chest mean there is something wrong with her heart?

             And now something new had bumped up the top five to the top six: 
            Can she really afford to keep her house on Benefit Street?

             No, there was no gnocchi.
             Marian apologized so profusely that Angie had to hug  her to make her stop. Beatrice was on an important call in the den, and would be out, hopefully, soon, Marian promised. Beatrice would take Angie out to dinner.
            “What?” Angie asked. “You’re not coming?”
            “Oh Angie, honey, I can’t. I’m on a flight to Paris in two hours and I am hardly packed.”
            “Paris! France?”
            “Yes, I am going with Callie, you met Callie, at my shower? The designer who wants to move to the East Side? Well, there’s a very special show in Paris, not at all mainstream, very, very off-Broadway, so to speak, by this incredibly talented young designer who just came out of nowhere...he’s Romanian, I think...and he doesn't work in fabric, he works in paper! Paper! Can you imagine?
            Angie tried. All she could think of was paper doll clothes with those little tabs to hold them on.
            "Callie predicts he will be big, huge," Marian went on. "By next year everybody will know his name!"
            “What’s his name?” Angie asked
            Marian puckered her lovely brow. “I forget. Anyway, Callie thinks I just have to see his stuff, she thinks I can scoop everybody in Providence and Boston...maybe everybody in New York! It all kind of came up at the last minute, I was lucky to get a plane ticket. I really gotta hurry, Angie dear...have fun with Beatrice...and listen, I made her promise she would not be mean...” 
            Marian sat Angie down at the kitchen table with a glass of Italian mineral water with a lime slice in it, to wait for Beatrice.           

            Ten minutes later, Angie was still waiting for Beatrice, reading a copy of Gourmet magazine and shaking her head in amazement over the glossy photographs of tiny stacks of food stuck in the middle of big plates painted with sauce graffiti. These folks could make a ham sandwich look exotic. And charge fifty bucks for it.
            She heard Marian wheeling something noisily into the foyer, opening the front door and calling out: “Be right there!” 
            Marian had her coat on: a gorgeous three-quarter Persian lamb with wide sleeves, high upturned collar and big black buttons. She was pulling on her gloves and leaned over to kiss Angie goodbye. She smelled deliciously of Jasmin by Bulgari, her signature scent.
            “Beatrice says she will be right out, honey. Good luck with everything, and don’t worry. I’ll be back in a couple of days. Bye!”
            “Safe trip!" Angie called as Marian rushed out.

            Another ten minutes and Beatrice finally emerged from her den. She did not look happy at all.       
            “I am not hungry in the least, I’m warning you,” she said.
            “Howdy to you too, Beeze.”
            Beatrice eyed the wine bottle on the table. "Did you bring that? You might as well take it back.”
            “Why don’t I open it instead, and we’ll have a friendly glass?" Angie suggested. 
            Beatrice suddenly sat down at the table and said moodily, “Whatever.”

             One glass each of chenin blanc later, Angie said, 
 “Beeze, remember when that English professor in sophomore year at URI—what was his name, Slagler, Flagler, Satyr?”
            “Slater.”
            “…asked you out? And you told him: ‘I’d much rather date your wife. Sir.’”
            Beatrice cracked a smile in spite of herself.  “I will never forget the look on his face.”
            “Have you seen the new sports center at URI, Beeze? It takes up half the state.” 
            “I never saw the old sports center,” Beatrice said.     
            Angie laughed. How true. You would never catch Beatrice at a sporting event, then or now.
            She conjured up an image of eighteen year old Beatrice. They’d first met on moving in day at University of Rhode Island, September, 1969...

            When Angie and her parents finally found the Coddington dorm and located her room, it was obvious that her as yet unmet roommate had gotten there first, thoroughly unpacked without leaving so much as a bag or a box or a suitcase behind; and taken off. 
            Following the time honored rule of first-come, first-dibs, Angie’s phantom roommate had also taken possession of the nicest desk and the biggest dresser.       
            Angie’s desk-by-default had no drawers. They looked at each other in dismay
            “Good thing we bought that bookcase,” her father commented mildly.
            While he assembled said bookcase, Angie and her mother unpacked her clothes and put shirts, pants and underwear away in the remaining dresser and hung her skirts and dresses in the mostly empty communal closet. 
            Her new roommate didn’t seem to have much in the way of clothes, but she had a calculator and brand new IBM Selectric typewriter on her desk; and sitting next to the typewriter, a camera.
            Her father went over to look at it, keeping his hands behind his back as if he couldn’t trust himself not to grab it and run.
            “Holy Jehosephat!” he said reverently, “a Nikon F…”
            “She shouldn’t leave such a nice camera out in the open,” Angie’s mother disapprovingly.
            Angie, who had always been fascinated by the books people collected, was scanning the titles in her roommate’s bookcase. There was a full set of encyclopedias (Brittanica black, not World Book red!) along with hardcover copies of The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin, The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, Nausea by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.
            Angie’s mother came over to look, too.
            “Good heavens!” she exclaimed, and put a protective arm around her daughter’s shoulders. Angie had the distinct feeling her mother would have liked to clap her hands over Angie's eyes.
            As for Angie, she had brought her dictionary, her thesaurus, her one volume picture encyclopedia, plus her entire set of Nancy Drew and Dana Girls mystery books. She told herself that they were there just for comfort; and she would open them only in the case of extreme homesickness. She hoped the childish books wouldn’t invite ridicule from her obviously way more intellectual and worldly new roommate. Then again: why would her childhood books look any sillier than the teddy bears and Raggedy Ann dolls propped up on beds in some other dorm rooms? 
            Angie’s mom had made up her bed and was beginning to unpack Angie’s books. Her dad, in the meantime, kept sneaking peeks at his watch. 
            “The traffic going south is going to be a doozy,” he said,  apparently to his Timex. “Labor Day weekend…everybody coming home from the beach. Maybe we should take the Tappan Zee…”
            Angie went over and gave him a hug. “Daddy, you guys can go home now. I’ll be fine.”
            The truth was that Angie could hardly wait for them to leave. She intended to take down all the clothes her mother had hung in her closet and somehow shove her dresser in there to give her more room. Then, alongside her Beatles posters, she would hang up the “Reefer Madness” poster her parents didn’t even know she had.
            “No, no,” her mother said. “We want to take you to dinner first. And we want to meet your roommate.”   
            “Mom, we had lunch two hours ago. And you can meet my roommate on Parents Weekend. Go on. I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise!”
            “Remember the plan,” Angie’s mother cautioned. “Call person to person and ask for yourself. Then we’ll say you’re not home, which will be the truth so we’re not really being dishonest! Then we’ll call you right back.”
            She turned to her husband. “Frank, remind me to get the number on that pay phone in the hall.”    
            “Okay, Mom, I’ll remember the plan,” Angie said. Her father packed up his hammer and screwdrivers and put them back into his battered metal toolbox. Her mother gave the lilac chenille bedspread one last quick smooth and tug. 
            When she turned to give her daughter a hug, Angie could see her eyes were wet.
            "Mommie-mia!"  Angie went over and held her close. “Don’t cry! I will be perfectly fine. And look on the bright side: now you can turn my bedroom into a sewing room like you’ve always wanted!”
            “I was only kidding when I said that!” her mother protested, stepping away and wiping her eyes. “Frank, tell her!” 
            Angie’s father was looking around the room still trying to spot something he could hammer down or screw tight before he left. 
            He obediently recited "Angie-your-mother-was-only-kidding." 
            Angie’s mom hugged her one more time, then stepped back at looked at her critically. 
            “I wish you wouldn’t wear so much mascara, Angie. You will give boys the wrong idea.”
            “Mom…”
            “And then it smudges, and you look dissipated.” 
            “I am dissipated.”
            Her mother laughed. “No, you’re not. You are just a sweet little girl from New Jersey, and you always will be.”

            The three of them stopped at the phone in the hall so Angie’s mother could write down the number in her little address book. They walked down the stairs, out of the dorm building and to the car. She hugged and kissed them both one more time, and waited until their old Buick station wagon wound its way around the maze of parked cars. She saw her father looking at all the open and still stuffed trunks and shaking his head in pity.

            On her way back to her room she passed dozens of girls and she wondered if one of them was her new roommate. 
            Her new roommate, however, was already in residence. She was standing over on Angie’s side of the tiny room, her arms folded, shaking her head at the Beatles posters tacked up over Angie’s bed. She turned around when Angie walked in.
            They sized each other up. Angie thought Beatrice looked just like the songwriter Carole King. She was tall and thin, wore round rimless glasses and was dressed in long baggy cotton pants and a man’s oxford shirt.
            It wasn’t until many years later that Angie found out what Beatrice’s first impression of her was.
            “The first thing I thought when I saw you was: ‘Oh shit! I’m living with ‘That Girl’! I took one look at your little plaid pleated skirt and your matching headband, and your tiny turned up nose and I said to myself, ‘Either me or this shiksa have got to go!’”
            Angie pretended to be hurt. 
            “I never matched my headbands to my outfits!” she said.          
            Beatrice gave her a look.
            “Well, maybe sometimes,” Angie admitted. “But hey, I liked you! Oh, sure, maybe I thought you were a little…eccentric…and that afro you had…yikes!”
            “I did not have an afro,” Beatrice said indignantly.
            “Oh girl you so did have a "fro"! Angie wagged her finger in Beatrice’s face. “Your ‘fro’ was bigger than Angela Davis’s!”              
            “Well, in any case I was not eccentric,” Beatrice retorted. “I was an activist committed to bringing about political change using non-violent means.” 
            “Beeze, you were a flag burning, no bra wearing, Marx spouting, establishment hating, card carrying commie.”
            Beatrice shrugged. They regarded each other fondly.
            “And now look at you,” Angie said. “You’re a filthy rich accountant.”
            “Capitalism happens,” Beatrice said, with a wolfish grin.

            Finally Angie, who hadn’t eaten since lunch, took it upon herself to order a pizza.
            “What do you want on it, Beeze? How about sausage and mushrooms?”
            “Please don’t order it on my account,” Beatrice said sourly, taking a hefty swallow from her glass, her mood dark again.
            "I'm ordering it on account of that I'm starving, " Angie said. She called up and ordered a medium thin crust with sausage and mushrooms.
            Later, as Angie was nibbling on her third slice of pizza, her low carb regimen temporarily suspended, she said, 
            “So, Beeze, you want to talk about my sorry finances, or what? Believe me, I am fine with putting off that discussion.” 
            Truth be told, she was secretly relieved that Beatrice seemed so distracted by Marian’s impulsive departure. Although she felt bad that Beatrice was obviously depressed and very likely jealous that Marian was off to Paris in the company of Callie. Of course she would never dare say that to Beatrice; she'd get her head bitten off.
            Beatrice had yet to have even one slice of pizza, but she refilled her wine glass and moved to top off Angie’s glass.
            Angie put her hand over her wineglass. “No, better not. I’ve got to drive back.” She looked at her watch. “Truthfully, I should go. Wes will be worried about me.”
            She lightly touched Beatrice‘s hand. “Beeze, why don’t you come home with me and sleep over? Just like old times in our dear old dorm at URI.”
            “Hang out with you and the mangy mutt of yours and watch the House and Garden channel all night? No thanks.”
            “I guess I’ll go, then. We’ll talk about money matters another day. Don't worry; I’ll still be broke next week!” Angie said brightly.
            Beatrice was so preoccupied she didn’t even rise to the bait, so Angie grabbed her pocketbook, fumbled inside and brought out her car keys. She stood up and went over and kissed Beatrice on the cheek.
            “I’ll call you in the morning. Maybe we can do something together, what do you say? How about a movie?”
            “I doubt it. I’ll probably spend tomorrow at the office. By the way, Angie..."
            “Yeah?”
            “Did you make that mortgage payment yet?”
            Angie sighed self righteously. “Yes, Beeze, jeeze! I mailed it out Fed Ex on Tuesday.”
            “Did your check clear yet, do you know?”
            “I don’t know.”
            “Well, when you get home, go online and see. If it hasn’t, put a stop on it.”
            Angie was alarmed. “Why should I do that? Am I in trouble or something?”
            “No,” Beatrice said. “You now have a new mortgage company.”
            “What? Who?”
            “Me,” Beatrice said. 
            “How can you be a mortgage company?”
            “I bought your mortgage from Greenfields."
            “Oh, Beeze, you shouldn’t have done that!" Angie was upset. "You didn’t have to do that; I really wasn’t that far gone! My god, Beatrice, that is like saying you just loaned me $200,000!”
            “I just did.”
            Angie sat back down again, flabbergasted. She wasn’t even sure she was grateful.
            “The way I saw it," Beatrice said in that maddening matter of fact manner of hers, "it was the only way for you to keep your house."

 

 _________________________________________________
 
 

            Beatrice had formed a new corporation, B. Newman Enterprises, for the sole purpose of privately funding and carrying Angie’s mortgage. She told Angie that at first she’d tried to get Greenfields Development to refinance Angie’s loan at a lower rate. They weren’t interested. So, since there wasn’t a prepayment penalty clause, but was a clause allowing the mortgagor to sell the loan to another party, Beatrice told them she’d buy out the loan. 
            “Does Marian know about this? Angie asked in concern. 
            “Marian suggested it.”
            Angie’s interest rate went down almost two points. She would save more than two thousand dollars each year.
            Without asking, Beatrice had also arranged for Angie to get $10,000 cash out, taking advantage of the fact that the market value of 140 Benefit Street had appreciated since Angie acquired it, even in this tough market. And thanks to a large initial down payment, there was a lot of equity. 
            The cash and the lower monthly payments would keep the wolf from the door for awhile. 
            “This could be a cure or just a band aid on the problem, Angie,” Beatrice said sternly, “When I do your taxes I’ll take a look at everything and see what’s what.”

            What was what, Angie thought, was that 140 Benefit Street was falling down around her ears.
She needed a new boiler and she needed it now. All the estimates were in the five thousand dollar range. 
            The supports under the back porch were rotten and she had to make a decision to either rebuild the porch or tear it down. Lots of money, either way. 
            She need a new roof. The old fashioned wooden gutters were decayed; now nothing but artifacts from the 1900's.
            Some windows wouldn't go up, and some wouldn't go down. 
            The house needed painting, badly. The first estimate to do the job was $15,000. She actually laughed in the man’s face, thinking he was pulling her leg.   
            He wasn’t. The next estimate was $5000 higher.
            The floor of the second floor bathroom was soft and decaying. The toilet wobbled. Angie had terrible visions of  the commode crashing down into the middle of her kitchen, with her on top of it. 
            Yes, she could continue, and did continue, to live with the inconveniences that were not emergencies. The lacks: lack of dishwasher, lack of central air conditioning; lack of a proper shower in the downstairs bathroom and no water pressure in the upstairs shower. 
            The lack of sufficient electrical outlets, or outdoor plugs for the electric barbeque grill from her old house.
            Lack of outdoor spigots for watering the plants; not that there were plants to water. The path that wound its way through the little “garden” was lined with bald arborvitae, so moribund they’d gone beyond brown to orange.
            Every spring Angie was inspired to plant dozens of colorful annuals. She liked to sit out on the lone garden bench and admire her brave little blooms; doomed to perish by July, at the latest. Yet in her mind’s eye she saw the garden of her dreams: a simple yet elegant boxwood parterre, a variation of an English knot garden. She had been planning this garden since the day she moved in. 
            Knot gardens were meant to be viewed from above, and Angie’s Benefit Street house was three and a half stories high with long back windows on the upper floors and a glass enclosed raised rear porch off the kitchen.
            The views were beautiful: down the hillside were the historic buildings of North Main and in the distance, the stunning domed Capitol.
            The houses on either side of hers had high, solid, side fences, so Angie’s little patch of earth was both sunny and secluded. It was a perfect site for a secret garden. 
            Angie had done her research; she resolved that the garden design would be a tarquetra, a three-cornered Celtic knot. In its center, Angie imagined a weeping cherry tree. She always pictured it in full bloom; with fat pink blossoms clustered along its drooping branches. Underneath: a little koi pond, perhaps, or a splashing fountain. The pathway would be set with brick; she would reuse the beautiful old brick that was there now, half buried in the earth and bleached pink by time and weather.
            Angie would lay out the borders with a hardy boxwood or yew that wasn’t bothered by harsh New England winters. She would plant hostra and impatiens along the hedgepaths. Maybe she’d devote one loop of the knot garden to herbs. Wouldn’t it be lovely to be able to dash out to her garden for fresh rosemary or thyme for her sauce? (Although Angie couldn’t remember the last time she’d made a sauce from scratch.)
            Spring was just around the corner, but there was no hope of finding the money to construct her English garden this year. Or money to fix the crumbling concrete on the front steps; or replace all the missing roof shingles.
            Angie couldn’t even afford a tree service to cut down the dead limbs on the big oaks in her front yard. She couldn’t pay a handyman to put in and take out the window air conditioning units, so they stayed in the windows all year round. 
            The house was shabby, down at the heel, compared to its well-heeled neighbors. And something unexpected always seemed to come up that wasn’t in her budget.  After the last snowstorm, she had to pay a young man walking down the street, fifty dollars to shovel the driveway, the front walk, and the sidewalk in front of her house. Two weeks ago, she had to pay the vet two hundred and fifty dollars to cure Westerly’s bladder infection, and while they were at it, give him his annual exam and heartworm test and booster shots.
            She really needed a new car. Seven years ago, when Tom got sick, Beatrice advised her to pay off her Volvo wagon so she would have one less expense to worry about since Tom's income was becoming uncertain. She still drove that Volvo wagon but now it needed new brakes, new tires, and heaven knows what else. It stalled sometimes at lights and occasionally refused to start on excessively cold mornings, which meant she had to call AAA and be late for work.
            Everything came down to the lack of money.
            Her son Michael and his wife were trying to buy a house. “Mom, don’t worry,” Michael had said to her. “Colby’s dad said he would give us the money for the down payment.”
            Angie thought: oh, Tom would have been mortified that somebody else would have had to loan his son money to buy his first home!
            
            Where in the world could Angie economize? She agonized over the question every day. 

            Every month came the mortgage. And the utilities: electric, oil, gas (for her stove) water and sewer. Plus the cable bill, the phone bill, the cell phone bill, her online computer service. The insurances: car insurance, life insurance, homeowners insurance, contents insurance, and health insurance, some of which was paid by her employers, but not all. Her car was paid off, but there were the renewal fees for her driver’s license, her car registration, her AAA membership. The annual car inspection now cost about fifty bucks. Angie had a few magazine subscriptions and her Providence Journal delivery. She wished she could get the New York Times, but even just Sunday delivery cost a fortune. And she had quite a few credit card bills, too, on which lately she'd been able to make only the minimum payments. 
            The security alarm bill. The maintenance of Tom’s grave. 
            The taxes!  Property taxes. Car excise taxes. And of course, the mother of all taxes: income taxes, state and federal.  
            Food and clothes and necessities. 
            Then there were those little luxuries she craved: like going out to dinner once in a while. 
            And how could you not go to Trinity Rep to see world-class performances (specially-priced tickets on certain days if you bought your ticket at the box office an hour prior to curtain) or Broadway-caliber shows at Providence Performing Arts Center? And hands down the best entertainment deal around? The Newport Playhouse with its buffet/play/cabaret. 
            Sometimes, rarely, she met friends in New York, reserved the cheapest online hotel deal she could find. She took the bus down to avoid paying for parking. Waited in line for hours for half price tickets to a Broadway show, and prayed her friends would pick up the dinner tabs.
            Tucked away in the desk drawer in her den, Angie had an open round trip plane ticket to Chicago to see her kids. That was what made life worth waking up for.           
            Not to mention the pleasure of giving gifts to those she loved: on their birthdays; at Christmas; for weddings and graduations. Not to mention the impulsive 'I-saw-this-and-it-was-so-you' gifts; the doting-grandma gifts, that she just had to buy for her only grandchild. Every time Angie went to Providence Place Mall she wound up buying some darling little something for Shea. Before Shea, Angie had never know the pleasure of buying clothes for a little girl. 
            Tips? They added up when you added them up. Tips at the holidays for the people who go out of their way for her: .the mailman: her hairdresser; her newspaper delivery boy, who wasn’t a boy but a grown man who barely spoke English but always put her Providence Journal precisely in the middle of her front door mat and double wrapped it on rainy mornings.
            For Joey, her floor guy, another indulgence she couldn’t give up. Joey used to do her floors in Westerly. Joey was there in the old house with her on September 11th, both of them sitting, stricken, at the kitchen table, watching the little TV as one horror after another unfolded.
            Charity. The five dollars in the church plate. A check in an envelope for the poor, the sick, the hungry, the homeless. The dollars thrown in a Salvation Army kettle, or onto the tambourine of a street musician. Or the guy who stood at the entrance to Route 95 with a sign: "Help Me".
            There were times Angie thought: Why am giving away a dollar? Tomorrow I will wish I had it.

 Chapter Five.

          

Angie and Carol went out to dinner once a month. Carol was as broke as Angie, perhaps even more scarily so, since Carol had breast cancer and although she was in remission now, who knew what the future had in store for her? She’d had to take a three months unpaid leave of absence for some aggressive chemotherapy. Then her husband lost his job, and it took six months for him to find another.
            Carol and Angie never considered giving up their monthly dinner ritual, however. They just looked for bargains and in Providence, there were plenty. Lots of great restaurants with weekday two-fers, sometimes even with a free bottle of wine thrown in.            
                This Monday evening they traveled right from work to Barnsiders on Water Street in Providence. They took their own cars, since Carol had to drive back home to Warwick. They ordered their entree from the prix fixe menu, agreed on red for their complimentary bottle of house wine; then got up and headed over to the salad bar.
                It was then Angie spotted Dick Moss, her lawyer and the husband of one of her best friends, Mary Lou. He was sitting at a table against the wall in the main room, the kind of arrangement that has chairs on one side and a banquette on the other.
               He and Mary Lou were sitting together on the banquette side, very, very close. How sweet! Obviously their reconciliation was working out beautifully; they were acting like honeymooners. She couldn’t quite see Mary Lou, who was kind of hidden behind a pillar, but she said to Carol, 
                "I’ll be right back, I just want to say hi to some people I know."
                She walked in the direction of their table and saw their heads touch, their lips brush; heard them laugh, and it was then she realized that the woman with Dick Moss was not Mary Lou.
                Dick looked around at that split second, like a wild animal that senses danger. Their eyes met in mutual shock and panic.
                Angie turned and fled back to Carol at the salad bar. 
                "That was quick," Carol said. 
                "I was wrong," Angie said. "I didn’t know them, after all." 
                As they ate, Carol regaled her with more anecdotes from her ongoing domestic drama: she had both her elderly parents living with her. The kicker was, they'd been divorced for years and hated each other. 
                "Last night I caught my Mom in the kitchen spitting into Dad's soup," she told Angie. They looked at each other and then both burst into laughter.
                But Angie was mostly quiet and distracted throughout dinner. She keep thinking about Dick Moss and his dinner date. Their table was on the opposite side of the restaurant and Angie thankfully hadn't see him, or his companion, again.
                Carol finally asked Angie if she was all right.
                "You’re all flushed, don’t you feel well? Don’t go getting sick on me, girl, I am way too busy to do the phones for you this week!"
                "I’m fine, honey," Angie said, but later, over coffee, she ventured: "Carol, can I ask you something?" 
                Carol raised her eyebrows. "Oh-oh, this sounds serious."
                "No, really, I need your honest opinion. Suppose you saw your friend’s husband with another woman. What would you do? What should you do? Tell her?"
                No fooling Carol. Carol was omniscient. All seeing, all knowing.
                "You are talking about that couple sitting by the salad bar, aren’t you? The ones you went over to say hello to...I knew something was wrong! You came running back like you’d seen a ghost."
                "Yes, yes," Angie admitted reluctantly. "I won’t say the name, because I know you’ve heard me mention her, and it wouldn’t be right. But this is so bad, Carol. They just got back together after a separation. If she knew about this, it would destroy her. It really would. So I guess I’ve answered my own question. I should never tell her."
                Carol was quiet for a moment. "That is a very tough call. The only thing I can say is, if it were me, I would want to know. It would be worse, much worse, to think my husband was a big fat cheater and I was the only one who didn’t know it."
                "I see your point, but wouldn’t you wind up hating the messenger?"
                "Are you more worried about your friend hating you, than your friend knowing the truth?"
                "That is a compelling question," Angie said. She punched her fists together. "Damn, damn, damn! I wish I’d never seen it!"
                "Well, you don’t have to decide what to do right now. Think on it. Get a second opinion." 
                "Maybe I didn’t see anything," Angie said.
                Carol raised her eyebrows.
                "Well, it’s not as if I caught them in the sack. All they were really doing was sitting together..."
                Carol clicked her tongue. "Oh uh-huh, they were practically on top of each other, hello! But we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they’re just kissin’ cousins."
                "There is another angle to consider here," Angie mused.
                "What?"
                "He saw me."
                "So you think maybe that will force him to tell his wife before you do?"
                "Either that," Angie said, "or he’ll have to kill me."
                It was just too risky to mention her encounter with Dick Moss to anybody else in Rhode Island. Beatrice did business with Dick, and many of her friends knew Mary Lou. 
                Angie sought a second opinion in an email to an old friend in New Jersey. The response was instant and unequivocal. 
                "Angie, stay out of it. You know that old saying, ‘No good deed goes unpunished.’"
                But life has a nasty way of shoving you onto the railroad tracks just as a runaway freight train comes barreling around the bend.

                On Saturday night about eight o’clock, Angie was watching TV with Wes at her feet. She belonged to that solitary sorority of widows and divorcees, for whom Saturday night was the most dreaded night of the week. In her quest to find something, anything, on television that didn’t involve marriage or couples or falling in love, she was watching the Golf Channel.
                The doorbell rang. Angie jumped a mile, and Westerly scrambled up and flew out of the room and down the hall, barking furiously. Angie followed him, stopped to disarm her alarm, then went to the front door and peered through the peephole. There was Mary Lou, standing under the porch light in her mink coat, looking desperate. 
                "Oh boy," Angie said under her breath. She opened the door, and Mary Lou brushed past her as if she was being hunted.
                "Mary Lou!" Angie said.
                "Angie, have you got anything to drink?"
                "You mean like soda or coffee?" She followed Mary Lou down the hall into the kitchen. Westerly gamboled beside them like a little lamb; he loved company.
                Mary Lou sank into a kitchen chair.
                "No, I mean alcohol. Wine, whiskey, gin, bourbon, Nyquil, hand sanitizer, nail polish remover, I’ll take anything at this point."
                Mary Lou buried her face in her hands. At first Angie thought she might be crying, but she wasn’t, she was just sitting there with her hands on her face.
                Angie said quickly, "I have a bottle of champagne--"
                Mary Lou barked out a laugh. "Champagne? That’s perfect."
                She took her hands away from her face and stood up. "May I use your bathroom, Angie?" 
                "Of course, honey," Angie said. Mary Lou lurched into the little bathroom off the kitchen and shut the door.
                Angie had never opened a champagne bottle before in her life. One of the reasons it was still lying around. She was afraid of the corks. She gingerly untwisted the wire believing she had nothing to fear until she started rocking the cork out of the bottle...but she was wrong. 
                The cork immediately launched itself like a rocket, with a tremendous pop and then a ping! right into the ceiling fixture. It landed she knew not where until her floor guy Joey found it two months later behind the refrigerator. God knows what he imagined she did in her downtime. 
                From the bathroom she heard Mary Lou say bitterly: "Happy New Year!"
                Westerly ran into the den and wouldn’t come out.
                Should she pour the champagne into flutes? When Mary Lou came out of the bathroom, propose a toast? She suspected that whatever brought Mary Lou to her door in the dead of night was not a cause for celebration. She found some plain old wine glasses and poured.
                When she came out of the bathroom, Mary Lou drained her glass before even sitting down and gave herself a refill.
                "You are not driving home, Mary Lou. Call Dick and tell him you’re spending the night with me," Angie said sternly.
                "I didn’t drive, anyway, Angie," Mary Lou said. "I walked."
                "You walked here from Barrington?"
                "No, I walked from the restaurant where we were, down on North Main. And I wouldn’t call Dick if he were the last dick in the world." 
                Angie needed a drink herself, now. She took a long swallow of champagne and said,
                "Mary Lou, tell me what happened." 
                Ironically, Mary Lou and Dick had come to Providence to celebrate their three month anniversary of getting back together again for the second time.
                They’d ordered a bottle of wine; had heard the specials and were mulling over what to order, when Dick excused himself to go the men’s room. Which Mary Lou thought was a little odd. 
                She looked over the menu for a while, and then observed the other diners for a while, until it dawned on her Dick was taking an awfully long time. Maybe he was ill. She looked toward the restrooms at the back of the restaurant and spotted somebody who looked a lot like Dick, at the bar, talking to a woman.
                "Well, honey, Dick knows a lot of people, including women," Angie pointed out. 
                "Angie," Mary Lou said. "Give me some credit. This was an intense conversation! And Dick’s just a real estate lawyer, for god’s sake, not a criminal defense attorney. None of his clients are going to fry at midnight!"
                Mary Lou reached for her glass and took a deep swallow. 
                "He had his hand on her arm and they were literally forehead to forehead. Like they were all alone in the world. Like he wasn’t actually just a few feet from his own wife! It was so brazen, even for Dick, that I almost didn’t believe my eyes."
                "It wasn’t the ‘skanky ho’, was it?" Angie asked. The ‘skanky ho’ was the sobriquet that Mary Lou had given to her husband’s last mistress. 
                "No," Mary Lou said. "Not her. It was worse. This one was actually pretty. And young. Very young. And skinny. Very skinny. I probably weighed more at birth than she does now." Mary Lou shook her head. 
                "She was wearing the inevitable short black dress and those kind of shoes they wear on ‘Sex and the City.‘ She had shaggy reddish hair... about my color, now that I think about it."
                She poured herself more champagne. 
                "Hey, kiddo, save some for the other leg," Angie said, trying to lighten the moment. 
                She was pretty sure that the woman Mary Lou had seen with Dick tonight was the same woman Angie had seen him with at Barnsiders.
                "So..." Mary Lou continued. "Finally he remembers he’s there with me, and comes back to the table.
                "‘Sorry, honey,’" he says to me. ‘I took a call from Roger.’"
                "‘You two must be pretty goddamned hoarse,’ I say, and I reach down into my bag and pull out his cell phone and stick it in his lying face. He forgot he asked me to grab it when they valet-parked the car. Hah! Asshole.
                "‘Well.’" he says. What could he say? ‘Well, indeed,’ I say back at him. ‘Why don’t you just admit you spent the last twenty minutes talking to that slut at the bar?’"
                Mary Lou put her glass down and leaned back in her chair.
                "Angie, I swear to God he gave me the coldest, dirtiest look I have ever seen anybody give anybody in my life. I mean it, it chilled my blood. I knew in that instant that he just didn’t care about me at all.
                "Then he said to me: ‘Mary Lou, you are a crazy paranoid old wino, and I am getting goddamned sick of it.’"
                Angie stared at her. She couldn’t think of anything to say. She reached over and poured them both more champagne until the bottle was drained. 
                "Come on, kiddo," she grabbed Mary Lou’s hand, who was crying now, charcoal tears rolling down her cheeks. 
                "Let’s go into the parlor and sit soft, as my mother used to say."
                Angie reached over to turn on a lamp in the parlor, but Mary Lou said, "Please don’t, Angie, I don’t want you to look at my face..."
                "Don’t be silly, Mary Lou, you have a beautiful face," but she didn’t turn the lamp on and so they sat there in the ambient light from Benefit Street; Angie in the wing chair, Mary Lou on the loveseat.
"Angie?"
                "Yes, dear."
                "I am a crazy old paranoid wino."
                Angie said sharply. "Dick is the bad guy around here, Mary Lou. Do not let him pull that ‘blame the victim’ stuff on you. You are too smart for that."
                "He’s a lawyer. It comes naturally to him. Hell, he’s right. I am crazy. Sometimes I cry the day away, for no reason. And I do drink too much. All he has to do is walk through the door and I feel like running for the cocktail shaker. 
                "And I eat too much. I gained back all the weight I lost at Weight Watchers, you know."
                "So what," Angie said. "That doesn’t make you a bad person. It just makes you a hungry person."
                "I wish there were a place I could move to where smoking, drinking and eating weren’t cardinal sins."
                "There is," Angie told her. "It’s called Europe."
                "And lately," Mary Lou went on, "I have been getting really paranoid. I think people hate me. Or have no respect for me. You know how paranoid I am, Angie?"
                "No, how paranoid are you, honey?"
                "You know the little cursor hand on AOL? I always think it’s flipping me the bird."
                They simultaneously burst into big honking laughter that brought Westerly out of hiding.
                "What kind of luck do I have?" Mary Lou said. "A cheating husband and an incontinent dog?"
                "Fritzi is incontinent?" Angie said in surprise. "How can you tell?"
                "Angie, that’s mean!"
                 To be honest, Mary Lou’s ancient bishon frise Fritzi was defiantly unhousebroken. Angie often had to detour around Fritzi’s brazen deposits in the foyer of Mary Lou’s palatial home.
                "Oh, dearest Ange, what will become of me? What becomes of the broken hearted?"
                "When you find out, tell me," Angie said.
                Mary Lou began to sing. "What becomes of the broken hearted…"
                "Kittycat, you are wasted," Angie said.
                "…who has love that has now departed…"
                Mary Lou’s short red hair spiked out in all directions; her lipstick was worn off and her mascara had smudged in big semicircles under her eyes.
                "I know I’ve got to find, some kind of piece of mind…"
                "Help me!" They both wailed.
                "I think I need to lie down, Angie," Mary Lou said finally.
                "Come on, Celine. I’ll take you up," Angie said.
                At three o’clock in the morning, the phone rang next to Angie’s bed.
                She managed to get it by the second ring, panicked that something had happened to Michael or Colby or the baby.
                It was Dick Moss.
                "Angie, it’s Dick Moss. Sorry to wake you up."
                Angie did not answer.
                "Look, Angie, I know this sounds nutty, but I seem to have misplaced Mary Lou! I was wondering if you might have talked to her, I’ve called everybody, but nobody has heard from her...frankly, I’m getting a little worried...my next step was to call the police but I thought I would try you first..."
                Angie would have loved to let Dick stew at least until morning, but she was sure that Mary Lou would not want him to file a missing persons report.
                "She’s here with me, Dick. She’s sleeping; she’s not feeling well."
                "Oh."
                Neither one of them said anything for a moment. Then Dick dropped his distraught husband routine and said icily:
                "So, I guess she thought it would be amusing to just scare the hell out of me."
                "Everything isn’t always about you, Dick," Angie said, just as frostily.
                "Oh, so that’s how it is."
                "I don’t know, Dick, suppose you tell me how it is."
                "I saw you at Barnsiders."
                "And I saw you."
                "Angie, I have always liked you, but I am warning you, mind your own business and don’t meddle in my marriage."
                "What, now you’re threatening me, Dick?" 
                "A word to the wise."
                "Dick, Tom would have killed you for speaking to me like this."
                "Yeah. Well. That is what you call ‘non/applicable.’ His voice was nasty. He sounded like the callous cutthroat lawyer he was. 
                "Tell Mary Lou when she ‘comes to’ that thanks to her little stunt, my sister is hysterical thinking she’s lying dead somewhere. And our friends, a lot of whom I do business with, don’t know what the hell to think."
                "Don’t ever call here again, Dick," Angie said, and hung up. But she couldn’t sleep again for the rest of the night.
                By 7 a.m. Angie had already fed Wes and took him for a walk. She scrounged around in her freezer and found some frozen bagels and defrosted them in the microwave. She made a pot of coffee and set out a pitcher of orange juice just as Mary Lou came into the kitchen; showered and hair combed but still damp.
                "How are you feeling, honey?" Angie asked. "You want some coffee and juice?"
                "Yes, please," Mary Lou said. "And a handful of aspirin if you got ‘em."
                "How about an ibuprofen?" 
                "Make it a double. Look, Angie, I can‘t thank you enough--"
                "Mary Lou, how much have you done for me since Tom died? You don’t owe me any thanks. Thank god I was here."
                "Amen to that. You would have found me on your porch when you got home, frozen stiff."
                "Mary Lou, Dick called in the wee hours of the morning."
                Mary Lou put down her coffee cup. "Did you tell him I was here?"
                "Honey, I had to. He was ready to call the police."
                "Oh, jeeze. Well, you did the right thing."
                "He was pretty worried." 
                Worried about how this would affect his professional life, Angie thought. Naturally she didn’t say that to Mary Lou. She didn’t pass on the rest of Dick’s conversation, either.
                "I’m feeling pretty foolish this morning, Angie."
                "About what? You don’t have anything to feel foolish about."
                "I’m thinking maybe I completely overreacted at the restaurant last night. I mean, it’s not as if they were copulating on the bar..."
                "Mary Lou..."
                "Angie, maybe I should go see someone."
                "See someone?"
                "Yeah, like a shrink."
                "Mary Lou, you do not need a shrink."
                "Angie, I need an overhaul. A mental  makeover. I honestly don’t recognize myself. Who is this depressed/lost/helpless person I keep seeing in the mirror? You should have known me when I was young, Angie. I was so damned smart...so passionate about everything...did you know I wanted to go into politics?"        
                "No, really?"
                "Yeah, oh a lot of it was that radical 60’s stuff...but I could have done it, Angie. I could have done anything. When I think of that person now, that bright, happy, funny girl that I once was…I think of her as a separate person, like someone I used to know. A long-lost daughter, or something...the daughter I never had..." Mary Lou stopped and shook her head wearily.
                "Angie, I’m too old to start over. When Dick and I separated, I tried to date. But it’s a jungle out there, Angie. If you can even find a guy our age who isn’t married, he expects you to pay for your own dinner and go to bed with him, to boot." 
                Mary Lou grinned wickedly and for a moment she seemed her old self again. "Call me old-fashioned, but I still think a man should pay for sex."
                Angie giggled, but Mary Lou’s gloom was contagious. And it begged the question Angie had never asked herself before: would she, could she ever find love again, after Tom?
                "Hey, this is some heavy stuff for so early in the morning...I’m sorry, Ange." Mary Lou stood up. "I’m going to call a cab and go home and face the music."
                "Mary Lou, you don’t have to go. You can stay here as long as you’d like, and I mean that. I would love your company."
                "Oh yeah, I’m a million laughs. Thanks, Angie, but I gotta go home and try to make it right with Dick."
                "Mary Lou, what do you mean? Dick is the one who has to make it right with you!"
                "No, Ange. He’s been trying. I’ve been the bitch. The whole reconciliation thing was his idea. The anniversary dinner was his idea. Does it make any sense that he would arrange to meet a girlfriend there, too? 
                "You know, he’s been asking me for money so he can invest in this casino boat project he and his cronies have been working on, and frankly I’ve been giving him a hard time. Really making him sing for his supper…" 
                "Dick is asking you for money? Why?"
                Mary Lou smiled a crooked little smile.
                "Because I am the one with the money, Angie. Dick makes a good living, don’t get me wrong, but I am the heiress. Lady Bountiful. Barbara Hutton to his Porfirio Rubirosa."
                Lately Angie’s life was one amazing revelation after another. "You never told me you were rich, Mary Lou!"
                Mary Lou said, "I’m sorry, Angie. Dick never wanted anybody to know it was my money that bought the house on the water in Barrington, the matching Mercedes, the big boat, the Rhode Island Country Club membership. I should have told you; your friend Beatrice knows."
                "Beatrice knows?" Angie repeated. 
                "Oh yes. She’s given me some excellent financial advice over the last couple of years. She is very much into female empowerment; as I’m sure you know. She goes ballistic if I even suggest giving Dick power of attorney for anything. I don’t dare tell her about his casino boat scheme."
                Mary Lou insisted upon going home right after breakfast. Angie insisted upon driving her, and she brought Westerly along for the ride.
                When they got to Mary Lou’s house, Angie offered to come in with her for moral support.
                Mary Lou kissed her and said, "That’s okay, Angie. I gotta do this all by myself. I’ll call you, though, promise."
                As Mary Lou headed up the walk to her front door, Angie rolled down her window and called out, "Mary Lou!"
                Mary Lou turned.
                "Trust your instincts, Mary Lou. Trust yourself."
                They gazed into each other’s eyes for a moment, and then Mary Lou walked back to the car.
                "Angie, you are trying to tell me something, aren’t you?"
                Angie’s face colored. She looked away from Mary Lou and shook her head a little. 
                "Angie, what, what do you want to tell me?"
                Angie couldn’t answer; couldn’t even meet her friend’s eyes.
                "You are not going to tell me?" 
                Angie finally turned to look at Mary Lou, who had a small, sad smile on her face. 
                "Are you trying to say what I think you’re trying to say?" Mary Lou said softly. "Is it something to do with Dick?"
                Angie’s eyes filled with tears and she nodded, just a tiny dip of her head.
                Mary Lou put her hand out and brushed away a tear on Angie’s cheek. 
                "Thank you, Angie. You know what they say: ‘the truth will set you free.’"
                Mary Lou turned and walked back up the driveway. She went up to her garage and punched in some numbers on the security keypad. As the doors rolled up, she turned to look back at Angie, and gave a little wave. 
                Angie watched until Mary Lou had gone inside the garage and the doors rolled down again. Then she put her car in gear and she and Wes drove away.

 

 

Chapter Six.

            

Mary Lou kept her promise and called Angie a couple of hours later.
            "How’s everything, honey?" Angie asked her.
            Mary Lou’s voice sounded thick and stuffy, as if she’d been crying, but her tone was upbeat.
            "Okay. Dick went out to his health club. It’s either the calm after the storm, or the eye of the hurricane; not sure which at this point."
            "How are you doing?"
            "I honestly don’t know yet."
            "Can I do anything?"
            "No, but I love you for asking."
            "Will you promise me something?"
            "Are you kidding? Anything."
            "Don’t do anything about that casino boat thing until you talk to Beatrice."
            There was a silence, and then Mary Lou said,
            "Too late, honey. I already wrote him a check. But it’s the last check I ever write him, I promise you."
            "Oh, Mary Lou," Angie said.

            The rest of Sunday stretched out emptily in front of Angie, and after she had taken Wes for his third walk of the day, she got into her car and drove down to Wickenden Street and found a parking space just a half a block up from Lost and Found.
            She walked down to the shop and turned the knob to go in, but it wouldn’t turn, it was locked. Then she noticed the little "Our Hours" sign in the window:

            Sundays: Closed.

            Suddenly the door opened, and Paul Tillinghast was standing there.
            "Angie...isn’t it?" he said, holding the door open wide to usher her inside.
            "Yes, thank you for remembering. And you’re Paul."
            "Come in."
            "But you’re closed...I don’t want to disturb you."
            "Nonsense. Come in out of the cold."
            He held open the door and Angie walked into the shop.
            "You bought a vintage handkerchief, as I recall," Tillinghast said. "For a wedding gift."         
            "A shower gift, actually. That’s why I stopped by. I wanted to tell you how much the bride-to-be loved it. She knew immediately how special it was."
            "Ah, isn’t that wonderful?" He smiled at her. "When someone appreciates the value of what they are given?"
            "Yes, it really is," Angie said. "Well, I don't want to intrude on your day off."
            "Sundays I come in to do the paperwork I don’t have time to do during the week. I never have a day off! Wish I did, there are so many things I would like to do...I should be going to auctions, I am way overdue for a buying trip to Europe..."
            "You don’t have any help?"
            "No, not for some while. I had a student from the Rhode Island School of Design here for two years. Very hard-working and eager to learn...but she left me after graduation to go work at Sotheby’s in New York. I guess I should be flattered!"
            "Oh, you should. You must have been an excellent teacher. And I’m sure you will find somebody soon." 
            Angie backed a few steps towards the door. "Well, I don’t want to keep you. I just wanted to thank you for suggesting that beautiful gift."
            "Is she going to wear it at her wedding?"
            "I haven’t asked her," Angie said. "I hope she will. Their wedding is in April, so I might stop back and look for a wedding gift."
            "I hope you do, I have several objets d’art which would make lovely wedding gifts."
            He hesitated. "Are you in a hurry?"
            Angie thought perhaps he wanted to show her something now. "Not really. I thought I might stop off at Eastside Marketplace to pick up something for dinner."
            "The reason I ask, I was going across the street for a bite to eat. Have you had lunch? If not, perhaps you would care to join me?"
            "Oh. I...haven’t had lunch, actually."
            "Well, it would be a late lunch, I guess," he said, looking at his watch. "Or a very early dinner."
            "Yes, well, either one, would be nice."
            They went across to the street to Z Bar, a little bistro at the corner of Brook and Wickenden.
            They sat at a table in the window and each ordered a glass of white wine and studied the menu.
            He is probably old enough to be my father, Angie thought, otherwise this would be very weird.
            "What do you do, Angie?"
            "I work as a receptionist at a radio station."
            That must be very interesting."
            "Hardly ever a dull moment," Angie said.
            Their wine came, and they ordered. Paul asked for the tuna steak, rare, on a bed of greens, and Angie had the pasta du jour.
            "Have you always worked in broadcasting?" Paul asked her.
             "Well," Angie told him, I am not so much in broadcasting as around it...this is actually my first job in, gosh, I guess more than thirty years."
            "Work is rewarding, in more ways than one."
            "Yes, that’s true. I had to earn some money after my husband died--"
            "Oh, I’m sorry--"
            "Thank you. I had to earn some money...but then I found I really enjoyed working," Angie said. 
            They chatted about the weather and Angie quipped that the Renaissance City seemed to have stopped "renaiciancing" since Mayor Buddy Cianci left office and went to prison. He was out now, and doing a daily radio show at WRI's rival station, WPRO. 
            Paul chuckled heartily at her remark. 
            "What the average person doesn’t understand is that it takes a little larceny to lubricate the wheels of progress," Paul declared. 
            Their food came, and they each had another glass of wine, and Angie found herself telling this man, this stranger, quite a lot about her life, especially her life as she had reinvented it, after Tom died. But she left out the strange happenings at her house on Benefit Street, that had made headlines six years ago.
            Paul was a pleasure to talk to, because he listened very intently and only made the occasional, and always perspicacious, comment. 
            Finally Angie said, "I have been doing nothing but talking about myself! I am sure your life is much more fascinating than mine."
            "Not so fascinating anymore, I’m afraid. Pretty dull, in fact. I live alone, and I seem to pursue the same daily routine, work/home, home/work...perhaps the occasional play or concert when I remember to buy tickets."
            "How did you come to own an antiques store?" Angie asked.
            "Well, I guess you might say antiques were a family business." Paul dabbed delicately at his mouth with his napkin. 
            "During the Great Depression, many people in Providence and of course, elsewhere, lost their fortunes. Went overnight from princes to paupers. My father...was one of those, however, who prospered, doing this and that, and he became known as the person to go to, if you needed to sell something discreetly for cash. Some of the most powerful families in New England sought him out...family names you would recognize; who are still here, in government, banking, real estate."
            Paul took a bite of his tuna and a sip of wine. 
            "My father owned a warehouse in Providence, over in the Armory District. That is where he stored the most exquisite, valuable things he took from all those desperate people. 
            "Well, let me clarify...not ‘took’ as in ‘stole’ but as in ‘took advantage.’ Carpe diem, he actually had that engraved on a brass paperweight. Carpe diem: Seize the Day." 
            Paul pursed his lips and shook his head. "He seized the day and everything else he could get his hands on." 
            He put his fork down and patted his lips again with his napkin. 
            "He was a brilliant, but a cold man; a man of business first, last and always. That made it easier to do what he did." 
            Paul said this matter of factly, but Angie immediately imagined an Ebenezer Scrooge kind of character. What must it have been like to have a Scrooge for a father?
            Paul went on, "Most of his clients were not the ruling class, mind you, but just ordinary people who had lost their jobs and couldn’t find work. They had managed to hold on to an heirloom or two; some family treasure: a piece of jewelry or a silver tea set that had been passed down through the generations. You can imagine that parting with such things was a last resort. Done out of desperation; to save their homes, or buy food, or make a sick child well again. I am not being dramatic, I assure you. That is the way things were back then." He shook his head slightly.
            "I will never forget the first day I saw his warehouse. Even knowing nothing at the time about antiques, I was awestruck. It was like a pharaoh's tomb." 
            Paul sipped his wine, and Angie did too.
            "My father died in 1949. He was very rich. He left everything to...me, his son. But eventually it dawned on me that the contents of that warehouse were priceless. Not because of what he had accumulated. But why he had collected it. That was the real treasure: the opportunity to understand his taste, his discernment, his acumen.
            "I was determined to learn all I could about antiques. I read, I took courses, I spent all my spare time at auctions, estate sales, even flea markets and yard sales! You would be amazed at how ignorant most people are about the value of their possessions, particularly those which have been passed down through the generations. I eventually accumulated an impressive, if I do say so myself, knowledge of antiques. I was able to truly appreciate the treasures in his warehouse. That was my turning point..."
            He smiled at Angie. Paul Tillinghast must have been a very magnetic, handsome man in his prime, Angie thought. He still was in many ways: tall, trim, impeccably groomed; hair still plentiful and parted to the side in a cut which used to be called a "Princeton." And apparently he had a penchant for expensive finely knit turtleneck sweaters; this one was much like the one he wore when Angie first met him. 
            His eyes were very blue and sharp; they glinted with amusement or scorn, Angie could not decide. 
            He was courteous in the little ways that men rarely were anymore, taking her coat, pulling out her chair, standing up when she returned to the table from the ladies room.
            "So, long story shortened," he continued, "I sold off a few of the more obviously valuable pieces, and bought some real estate here in Fox Point. I found a few foreclosures, picked them up for a song. In retrospect, I am not very proud of that. I suspect I am more like my father than I care to admit. Anyway, Lost and Found opened about a year later, stocked and replenished, over and over, with the pieces, or with the profit, from the contents of his warehouse."  
            "You must have been very young when you opened your shop," Angie remarked.
            "Young? Yes, in my twenties."
            "And how did your shop get its name, Lost and Found?’
            "Oh, that is another story. A long story for another day."
            The waiter came by. "Are you finished, ma’am? Would you like me to box that for you?"
            That of course was restaurant code for: "We loved having you but other people want this table." 
            "Oh, no, that’s fine. You can take it." Angie said. In different company she would have taken it home for Westerly.
            "And you, sir?" 
            "Yes, wrap up this little bit for me." 
            He said to Angie, "I have a cat." 
            "Oh, I have a dog," Angie said.
            "Your dog doesn’t care for pasta?"
            Angie smiled. "Actually, my dog loves pasta."
            Paul pointed to Angie’s plate and said to the waiter, "Why don’t you wrap that up for the lady."
            "Certainly, sir. Can I interest you both in coffee and dessert?"
            Angie said, "Oh, not for me." 
            Taking his cue from her, Paul also declined and said, "Just the check."
            Paul insisted upon paying the bill. It was dark when they finally left Z Bar. He walked her to her car and saw her inside, solicitously and firmly closing her car door. 
            Angie started her car so she could roll down her window. 
            "Thank you for lunch," she said. "Or dinner...it was a lovely meal whatever it was."
            "The pleasure is mine, Angie. It isn’t often I have such an attractive dining companion."
            "Thank you. I hope I see you again."
            "Yes, to look for a wedding gift. Actually I have something in mind I think you will like. I will put it aside for you."
            "Good evening, Paul. Thanks again," Angie said. 
            Paul stepped back as she pulled out of her parking space and turned up Benefit Street to home.

            The next day, Monday, Angie left work early to get a physical. She'd waited six months for the appointment. Her new HMO was over the Point Street Bridge, all the way down to the end of the street; where there was no way to turn but right; the highway just on the other side.
            When she was finally ushered into the little examining room, the nurse, a young Hispanic woman, took her blood pressure and pulse and her temperature, all without comment or small talk. Am I so unworthy of a kind word or some human interaction? Angie thought. This young woman either hated her job, or hated people, or was very unhappy in her personal life. She remembered what she would always say to her son Michael, when as a young boy he would come home complaining that his teacher had been mean to him, and he hadn't done anything wrong.
            "Michael," she would say. "Maybe there is something sad or bad in her life right now, that makes her unhappy."
            The nurse consulted her paperwork and finally said, "You’re here for a physical?"
            "Yes," Angie said. 
            The nurse handed her a paper jonny and instructed Angie to take off her outer clothes but keep on her underwear. 
            Always good news for a woman to hear. 
            "Put on the gown so the opening is in the back. The doctor will be right with you," she said, and walked out, putting Angie’s file in a holder outside, and closing the door behind her. 
            This was Angie’s first physical since Tom in four years. She’d gone about nine months ago to her gynecologist and had an exam and a pap and a mammogram and as far as that went, gotten a clean bill of health.
            She had not met this primary care doctor before. She’d picked her from a list of doctors affiliated with her HMO. It was a process as unscientific and fraught with augury as picking a lottery number or a horse at the racetrack. 
            First, Angie considered the office location. How far could she drive if she was sick with flu and running a 102 fever? Next criterion: which hospitals were the doctors affiliated with? Marian and Rhode Island Hospital were the medical centers to which she would surely be taken by the paramedics, if she had sudden chest pains or fell down the stairs and broke her leg. 
            Male or female? If male, she definitely preferred the Dr. Welby, M.D. type, comfortable and kind, with gray at his temples. If female, not the judgmental, impatient, unsympathetic type. 
            Then she considered the name, mulled it over as if she could somehow intuit from the syllables what their grades were in med school.
            She’d asked Doctor Mike for a recommendation for a primary care. He was in family practice, but they both understood that it would be an uncomfortable situation for him to be her doctor. His recommendations were two colleagues he had been in residency with. 
            Angie didn’t want a doc young enough to be her son. Apart from the embarrassment factor, doctors today seemed to have this mindset that good health was a lifestyle choice. Sickness resulted from irresponsibility and lack of discipline. If you got sick, it was because of something you did or did not do. If you never ate a french fry or a chocolate brownie...if you ran five miles a day, took handfuls of vitamins, got every diagnostic test ever invented...thought positive thoughts, didn’t smoke, got plenty of rest, drank a gallon of designer water a day; had your martinis in moderation and your leafy vegetables in abundance, well, you would live forever. Guaranteed!
            Angie knew, as all older people come to know, that it is all a crapshoot. Health or lack of it had a hell of a lot more to do with genes than greens.
            
            Her doctor was tall and bony with short gray hair, but oddly, three piercings in each ear. She wore a long flowered dress under her lab coat, and Keds sneakers of the type Angie wore for gym in high school.
            "I'm Dr. Krantz." She held out her hand to Angie, who was sitting atop the examining table in her paper gown, legs dangling like a child’s.
            "You are Mrs. Russo?" Angie nodded and didn’t say, "Call me Angie." She figured if Dr. Krantz wanted to be addressed by her title, then so did she.
            "What brings you here today, Mrs. Russo?" the doctor asked, looking down at the file. "Oh. I see. You're a new patient. A physical. Good. Excellent. When was the last time you had a physical?"
            "A few years ago," Angie said, apologetically. 
            "Oh." Dr. Krantz regarded her. "So...any special motivation for coming in now for a physical? Are you feeling unwell? Any specific complaints?"
            About a million, Angie thought.
            "Not really, " she said. 
            Okay, so you’re feeling fine? I see here you had a recent gynecological checkup. You got a Pap…normal, that’s good. Did you have a mammogram? I don’t see it here."
            "I did," Angie said. "It was normal."
            "Excellent." Dr. Krantz consulted the file again. "I see you are 56 years old?"
            "I’ll be 57 in October."
            "Right. Now, your weight...it looks like you are about twelve pounds over the recommended weight for your height." 
            She looked at Angie. "Do you find yourself overeating, out of stress or boredom?"
            Angie’s face reddened from embarrassment. "I don’t know. I guess maybe sometimes."
            Dr. Krantz pulled out a drawer and took out a leaflet and handed it to her.
            "Here is a very simple easy-to-follow diet that will help you get back on track."
            She consulted the file once again. "Have you had a stress test lately?"
            "No, I’ve never had one."
            "Well, that’s one thing we want to do as soon as possible. Anybody in your family with a history of heart disease or diabetes?"
            "Not diabetes, but heart disease."
            "Who was that?"
            "My father died of a heart attack."
            "How old was he?"
            "Oh. He was young. He was only 60."
            "And your mother?"
            "Emphysema. She was 62."
            "A smoker?" Her tone of voice was as if she had asked "A dope fiend?"
            Angie nodded, and Dr. Krantz’s lips twisted into a "well, you reap what you sow" expression. She made notes. 
            Her parents’ sad, premature deaths reduced to just a jot in their daughter’s medical record.
            Angie wanted to tell her: "When my mother was a young woman smoking was portrayed as glamorous, fun, even good for you! Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes and handing one to Bette Davis. The Lucky Strikes Hit Parade. Even doctors smoked, back then!"
            And her dearest father was descended from a long line of good men who died too soon of heart disease. After he died, a doctor told Angie and her mother that according to the X-ray’s, Frank Russo had had a "silent" heart attack years before. 
            "We never knew!" Angie’s mother said in anguish. "Maybe we could have done something!"
            "He just ignored his symptoms," his doctor said to Angie and her mother. "Men of that generation were like that. My father was like that. They fought in World War Two, so what was a little chest pain?" 
            Dr. Krantz asked Angie,"Any cancer in the family?"
            "My cousin died of ovarian cancer at 30." 
            Left a baby girl one year old, Angie wanted to say, but didn’t.
            "Uh huh." Dr. Krantz didn’t seem particularly interested.
            "And sex? Any problems there?"
            Angie blushed. "I’m a widow."
            "I see. When did your husband die?"
            "Six years ago."
]            "Well," Dr. Kranz looked at her with clinical interest. "And so you haven’t had intercourse since your husband died, you’re saying."
            Angie looked away, not wanting to meet the doctor’s eyes. "I never even think about it."
            Until lately, she said to herself.
            "Well, let’s move on. How is your digestion? Are you regular, would you say, with your bowel movements? Diarrhea or constipation? Blood in your stool?"
            "No," Angie said. "Well, sometimes constipation. Every once in a while, diarrhea. A couple of times over the last few years, blood. Just a couple of times," she quickly added, seeing the doctor’s frown.
            "Have you had a colonoscopy?"
            Angie shuddered at the very word. "No."
            "Well, you are at that age. In fact you should have had one at fifty. It is unpleasant; some people will try to tell you otherwise, but I like to be honest. It is no fun but it has to be done. My nurse will help you set it up with a gastroenterology group that we like to use; they do the procedure right in their office.
            "And...I am going to order a few routine blood tests." The doctor opened a drawer and pulled out a form, checked off about ninety things and ripped the sheet off and handed it to Angie. "This is a fasting blood test, so make sure you don’t eat for twelve hours prior."
            Angie looked at it. SGOT. CBC. TSH. She wanted to ask what all those medical acronyms stood for (she knew, at least, that CBC stood for "complete blood count") but she felt oddly intimidated. The old familiar feeling that came over her every time she went to the doctor. She always promised herself going in she would ask lots of questions, be proactive, get explanations and clarifications. But then (why was that?) her resolve evaporated and all she wanted to do was get the hell out of there as soon as possible.
            "Ms. Russo, do you drink alcoholic beverages?
            "Sometimes," Angie said defensively.
            "How often? Once a week? Twice a week? Once a day? More?"
            "Every once in a while," Angie said.
            "And what do you drink? Beer, wine...mixed drinks?"
            What was this, a survey?
            "Wine mostly."
            The doctor made a notation in the chart, and then looked up and said, "Loneliness, as a result of widowhood or divorce, can lead to excessive drinking. Just bear that in mind. And are you on any medication? 
            "Not really. I take a multi-vitamin...and aspirin, if I have a headache."
            "Do you get many headaches?"
            "No, not really."
            "How many hours of sleep do you get each night?"
            Angie considered. Eleven to seven, that was eight hours, but she woke up so frequently, thrashed around for an hour or so each time. 
            "I don't sleep well," she said.
            "Do you take sleeping pills?"
            "Not so far," Angie said.
            "Well, I don't believe in them," the doctor pronounced.  "A glass of warm milk, a dark room, no coffee at dinner, that is the best way to cure insomina."
            I really don't like this doctor, Angie thought.     
            "Do you still get menstrual periods?"
            "Not for a while."
            "How long is 'a while'?"
            Angie considered. "About four years."
            "Did your gynecologist ever put you on hormone replacement therapy?
            "She suggested it. I decided against it."
            "So you’ve had hot flashes?"
            "Actually, I still do. But at night. Maybe they‘re night sweats."
            "Night sweats? How about muscle aches, changes in bowel habits, mood swings, fatique, anxiety or depression?"
            "A little of everything."
            "Chest pain, palpitations or breathlessness?"
            Angie got uneasy. "Sometimes."
            "All of them? How often? Every day? More than once a day?"
            "Now and then," Angie said. 
            "What is 'now and then'?
            Angie was exhausted. "i don't know," she said. "Once in a while, I guess."
            "I see your blood pressure is a little high. Let me take it again, sometimes it comes from anxiety over seeing a doctor." She took down the blood pressure cuff, put it around Angie’s arm and inflated it so vigorously Angie almost cried out.
            "Hmm. Still a little high. So, you’re saying, heart palpitations?"
            "Sometimes."
            "And or pressure in your chest or jaw? Accompanied by shortness of breath?"
            "I don’t know. Maybe."
            Dr. Krantz looked at her with keener interest. "Well. I think I’ll have the nurse come in and give you an EKG before you leave. And I think our first priority should be a stress test. See the scheduling nurse before you leave and have her set something up for you." She pulled out an extension at the front of the table under Angie’s legs.
            "Now just lie back." She probed Angie’s abdomen and groin. "Does it hurt anywhere?"
            "No." Except where you stab me with your long pointy fingers.
            Then she asked Angie to slip off her bra so she could give her a quick breast exam. From long experience, Angie figured the full monty was next, but the doctor said, "You can sit up now." 
            She put her stethoscope in her ears and first listened to Angie’s heartbeat, then went around to her back and listened again.
            "Breathe in. Normally. And out. Again. Once more. Good."
            She took her stethoscope out of her ears and put it in the pocket of her white doctor’s coat. Then she felt Angie’s neck and collarbone. She looked in her ears and eyes and nostrils with a pointed gadget with a light at the end. Then she picked up an old-fashioned wooden tongue depressor from the counter and told Angie to open her mouth wide.
            "Aaah," Angie bleated, although she wasn’t prompted to. Maybe it was passe to say "aah."
            "Good. Well, we’ll know more when we see the results of the blood test and the stress test. Maybe a chest x-ray would be a good idea, too. Couldn’t hurt." She wrote out another order on her prescription pad, and tore it off.
            Angie had a fistful of paper now.
            "Well, okay," Dr. Krantz said. "Remember, stay here, you might as well remain in your gown, until the nurse comes in to give you your EKG." She gave Angie a tight professional smile. "Lose that weight now. It only gets harder as you get older. Join a gym."
            Gosh, Angie thought. How bad do I look?
            The doctor went to the door and opened it. "We’ll mail you the results of your lab work. If everything is normal, we’ll see you in a year, Mrs. Russell."
            "Russo," Angie said, stunned by the speed of the exam she had waited six months for, and her new doctor’s remarkable lack of warmth. 
            "Yes," Dr. Krantz said, and then she was gone. 
            The nurse, this time a heavy woman in her forties, came in after a little while and had Angie lie down so she could attach lines tipped with cold, jelly-smeared bandaids at strategic points. She adjusted some of the guides from time to time and paid close, but impassive, attention to the printout from a little gray machine. At one point, she raised her eyebrows at something she saw. 
            "How does it look?" Angie asked, when the nurse had removed all the lines and wiped off the jelly residue and told her to get dressed. When she went home she resolved to look at herself in the full length mirror on her bedroom door.
            "You’ll have to ask the doctor," the nurse said, apologetically, and went out.

 

 

 

 Chapter Seven.

 

 

 

            

             She’d been gone for nearly a week before Angie heard about it. A mutual friend phoned Angie at work to find out what Angie knew about the situation, and was shocked that Angie didn’t know that Mary Lou had disappeared.

            “Dick didn’t call you?”

            “No,” Angie said. She felt ill. Had there been a fight with Dick after Mary Lou’s phone call to her last Sunday afternoon? She had never heard that Dick was a violent man, but let’s face it, every day somewhere in the world husbands went berserk, killing their wives and dumping their bodies.

            “Are the police involved, at least?” Angie asked.

            “Yes, but I think just in the last day or so. Dick said he waited to call them for a few days, thinking Mary Lou had just gone to visit friends without telling him. He said she had done that kind of thing before.”

            Angie was shocked anew at Dick’s callousness. 

            “I hope they arrest him,” she said to her friend.

            “Arrest who?”

            “Arrest Dick Moss,” Angie said. “And put him in jail, and ruin his precious law practice, and let him rot until he dies.”

            “Angie, whoa! Why do you think Dick had anything to do with it?”

            “Because he is a cheating, lying murderer,” Angie said loudly.

            One of the news broadcasters was walking by when she said it, and he made a wide detour around her desk.

            “Angie! I know Dick is a jerk, but a murderer? Come on!”

            “There is a lot more here than meets the eye,” Angie said ominously.

            “But the latest is, the police don’t think there was any foul play," her friend told her.  “Apparently Mary Lou cleaned out her bank accounts and moved some investments around before she left.”

           

            Beatrice!

           

            When Angie hung up, she had to field some calls, but as soon as there was a lull, she phoned Beatrice’s office.

            “She’s not here, Angie,” the secretary said. “She flew to New York for a board meeting.”

            “Okay, thanks, Doris. I’ll try her on her cell. If you hear from her, tell her to call me as soon as possible. It’s urgent.”

            “Angie, are you all right?”

            “Oh, Doris, thank you for asking; but I’m fine. I just need her to call me. Thank you so much.”

            Angie tried Beatrice on her cell phone but just got a message to leave a message.

            “Beatrice, call me immediately. I don’t care if you have a board meeting with God. This involves Mary Lou Moss. She’s missing.”

 

            Beatrice finally called her back at 4:30.

            “What do you mean, Mary Lou Moss is missing?”

            “Beeze, she is gone. Gone for a week now! The police are involved, but they’re saying that she left of her own accord, basically, because Dick told them her bank accounts are cleaned out and some of her investments have been moved around.”

            “Hmmm,” Beatrice said noncommittally. "I'm more interested in how he knew all that."

            “Beatrice, Mary Lou told me you had been giving her financial advice. Do you know anything at all about this? Because if you do, you have to tell the police.”

            “Angie, are you suggesting I helped Mary Lou make a clean getaway? I’m flattered. If I had known that was what she was planning, I would have been happy to help.”

            “So you didn’t know? You swear?”

            “I didn’t know and I am not involved. But I wish her good luck and Godspeed. Dick Moss is a nasty little vonce who would have taken every last cent she had.”

            “What’s a ‘vonce’?”

            “In Yiddish it means: a bedbug. Come to think of it, calling Dick Moss a bedbug is an insult to bedbugs.”

            “Beatrice, what if Mary Lou didn’t run away...what if...something happened to her?”

            “Her actions would suggest she did this of her own accord, Angie, and for her own no doubt compelling reasons.”

            “Beatrice. A couple of weeks ago I saw Dick Moss at a restaurant in Providence with another woman. A week later, Mary Lou showed up on my doorstep after a fight with Dick. She told me she suspected he was cheating on her. She also told me that he’d been asking her for money for some kind of floating casino scheme.”

            A silence. Then Beatrice said,

            “I hope to god she didn’t give him any.”

            Angie didn’t dare tell her the truth. That night she mulled over whether she should go to the Barrington police, but the next day a postcard came in the mail. On the front was a picture of downtown Buenos Aires and on the back, a corresponding postmark and this message:

            “Don’t cry for me, Angelina! I love you and will be in touch...ML”

            Angie made herself a cup of tea, and sat in her living room overlooking Benefit Street; savoring the image of Mary Lou on the lam, free at last, the wind at her back and the road rising up to meet her. 

            Go, girl.

           

Angie first met Mary Lou Moss in early 1991, at a fundraiser dinner for Bill Clinton at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence. Mary Lou had been seated next to Angie and Tom.

Although she was acquainted with several people at the table, Mary Lou had attended alone. After introductions, she explained that her husband was a Republican and refused to spend one red cent to help elect a Democrat.

“His exact words,” Mary Lou said cheerfully, “was that the country, and especially Rhode Island, was already lousy with Democrats.” She turned and gave Angie a big grin, and Angie liked her immediately.

            Mary Lou was zoftig, brown-eyed and red-haired. She wore her hair short but teased high on top. She had long blood red fake nails, wore false eyelashes and lots of black eyeliner and maroon lipstick. She was salty and funny and irreverent, even about Bill Clinton, who back in 1991 was very much their darling, despite the incipient murmurings about bimbo eruptions. She reminded Angie of Stockard Channing’s character, Rizzo, in the movie Grease. 

            Mary Lou chain-smoked and chain-drank, and she kept ordering wine for Angie, too, so by the time the speeches started they were both giggling helplessly. Tom was a little nonplussed; seeing his wife suddenly behaving like a preteen at a slumber party rather than a contributor at a $300-per-plate political banquet (his company had paid, but still) but he handled it with good humor and couldn’t help laughing himself at some of their more outrageous remarks.

 

            Angie, a Jersey girl at heart, and Mary Lou, the quintessential kid from the Bronx, became instant best friends, meeting for lunch; going to art films and  plays like the Vagina Monologues they could never drag their husbands to.

            Inevitably, they began to go out as couples on a Saturday night. Tom and Dick interacted as many husbands do when it’s their wives who are really the friends; their relationship with one another was cordial but superficial, and never deepened in all the years of their acquaintance.

            In general, Angie believed, men don’t want intimacy with other men and don’t seek it; so Tom and Dick stuck to safe, manly topics like sports, power tools, cars and the stock market. They avoided politics, since Tom was a Democrat to his bones and Dick was a hidebound Republican.

            Yes, Dick: arrogant, pompous, contemptuous of women (they shouldn't be allowed to be judges or cops) minorities (they should go back to where they came from) the poor (driving around in Cadillacs bought with welfare money) the elderly (hurry up and die!). That was Dick, looking down on everybody who wasn’t as smart and lucky and rich as he.

            Tom was his polar opposite: thoughtful, honest, egalitarian, generous, never petty, always the one to apologize first whether it was his fault or not. Tom was in Vietnam, came home in one piece and then volunteered for the Peace Corps and was sent to Guatemala, where he had seen abandoned babies too young to walk, crawling through garbage heaps.

            As for Dick and the draft, he conveniently broke his ankle in a skiing accident a week before he got called up; dodged the bullet, and hurriedly enrolled in law school.

 

            Mary Lou and Dick had no children. Mary Lou had a miscarriage but a year later she gave birth to a full-term infant, a son, who had an unfixable heart defect and lived only two days.         

            Years later, she told Angie, Dick confessed to having an affair while she was pregnant. She recovered a memory which revealed itself in quick flashes of illumination, like the fitful flickers of a dying florescent light. She recalled being on the gurney in the hospital corridor after giving birth. She was watching Dick make a phone call at a pay phone down the hospital corridor. Remembering the  odd way he turned away from her, keeping his voice low; not gleefully trumpeting the joyful news; (this was before they knew how sick the baby was) she realized he'd phoned his girlfriend. Called his girlfriend while she was lying a few feet away, under a slightly bloodstained sheet, still drugged and dazed from the delivery. 
            As soon as the nurse brought her into her room, he went home, promising to come back with her suitcase, which had been forgotten in the rush to the hospital. He hadn't come back that night, made some excuse she couldn't remember. 

           "Oh, no!" Angie exclaimed. And she meant it; at the time she had trouble believing that even Dick Moss could be that heinous.

                Now, however, she believed.

            Yet childlessness, not infidelity, came to be the abiding sorrow which defined Mary Lou as the years went by;  the empty space in her life she tried to fill by eating too much, drinking too much, laughing too loud. This was the reason she cried silently into her pillow at night. Little by little, her inability to have a child of her own robbed her of joie de vive and stole her cherished hopes for the future. 

            Once, in her cups, Mary Lou told Angie that Dick blamed her for their childlessness. When he was feeling particularly nasty, he would stab a finger at her and say:

            “You took away my legacy! There is no one to carry on my family name, because of you!"

     “Instead of crying, I should have laughed in his face!” she said to Angie.

     “His legacy? Dick Moss’ legacy would be 1001 Ways to Screw Your Fellow Man.”

Dick’s latest marital affair, well, at least the last Mary Lou knew about, was with a real estate broker. This was the woman Mary Lou and Angie would ultimately dub “the skanky ho.”

One day Dick asked Mary Lou to do him a favor and take some papers over to the office of a certain real estate agent. Mary Lou thought it an odd request; Dick had plenty of assistants and a courier service to deliver documents. But, what the hell, she was going to Providence anyway and so she agreed.

Looking back, Mary Lou told Angie, it must have been some kind of sicko scheme cooked up by Dick and the "skanky ho" so she could get a look at the unsuspecting wife. Even so; the broker was absolutely the last woman Mary Lou would have ever imagined Dick would be attracted to. She was older, brittle, strident, kind of a Joan Rivers type, made up like a kubuki, wearing tight black pants, spike mules and was weighted down from head to toe ring with gold jewelry. When Mary Lou commented on a framed picture of a Mercedes convertible on the wall, the woman said: "That's my baby." 

"I thought, 'that's your baby'? Who talks like that?”

Angie wondered how a marriage as malignant as Dick’s and Mary Lou’s managed to survive as long as it did.       
            One afternoon, years ago, Angie and Mary Lou decided on the spur of the moment to go tour the Breakers, the Vanderbilt mansion on Bellevue Avenue in Newport. They lagged behind the tour group and struck poses in the grand rooms, Angie pretending to be Mrs. Astor, while Mary Lou was mistress of the house; Gertrude Vanderbilt. Recalling the day, Angie smiled and shook her head at that and their many other silly antics and escapades over the years. 

                "We're BFF's, she told Angie that day, as they sat in the sun on a rock at the Cliff Walk, overlooking Long Island Sound and the Atlantic.

                "What's BFF?" Angie asked her.

                "Best Friends Forever!"

            After the Breakers, they’d found a quaint old storefront restaurant and had an early dinner.

Out of the blue, Mary Lou said to her, “Angie, I know I said we were 'BFF's but sometimes I get so jealous of you I think I have to stop being your friend for the sake of my sanity.”

            “Jealous of me? Are you kidding? You’re the Mrs. Richie Rich around here,” Angie said.

            “Money don’t buy me love, Angie. Why do some women, perfectly nice women, just have bad luck with men? I mean, I know you’re prettier than me, and thinner than me, and sweeter than me, but don’t I deserve a man who loves me even half as much as Tom loves you?”

            “Dick does love you! You do things together, you laugh together, you’re always kissing and hugging! You guys travel, you have a beautiful house, so many blessings in your life! And what is this prettier-than-you stuff? I see men staring at you all the time!”

            “Staring at my breasts,” Mary Lou corrected. “They stare at your face. You have a Botticelli face.”

            “Are you saying I look like Edna Botticelli in the deli department at the Stop and Shop?”

            Mary Lou started to laugh. Then she shook her head, and changed the subject, but it was still there, behind her eyes.

 

            Many days passed after that postcard and Angie did not hear from Mary Lou again.  Mary Lou was now in second place on Angie’s worry list, just below

            Will-Michael-Colby-and-Shea-always-be-healthy-and-safe.

 

     She pictured her friend traveling alone, first-class; incognito, perhaps, on the QE2, sailing around the world.

            Angie liked that image a lot: the unsinkable Mary Lou Moss, leaning against the top deck of some massively grand ship, gazing down at the foamy white and turquoise wake. A cigarette in an ivory holder in one hand; a martini in the other; her face hidden from the sun beneath a wide brimmed hat.

            Angie had interrogated Beatrice again and again, still convinced that she was holding something back. Maybe Beatrice had engineered the whole thing! But Beatrice revealed nothing except her growing annoyance with Angie’s questions.

            “For the last time: Mary Lou Moss got smart and walked out on that s.o.b. She is not dead, she is making a new life for herself. She will contact you when she is ready.”

            Beatrice did mention that recently Dick had called her at her office, attempting to be menacing. His mask had slipped, and his desperation was showing.

             He told Beatrice that he had reason to believe that his wife had embezzled substantial joint marital assets.

 “I promise you I will devote the rest of my life to getting every last cent back and putting Mary Lou in jail,” he told Beatrice. “And if I find out you had anything to do with it, I will put you in jail with her, although you’d probably like that, wouldn’t you?”

            This amused Beatrice, but she was having a busy day and was in no mood to be threatened by the likes of Dick Moss. She told Angie that before she hung up on him, she casually dropped the name of a scandalous real estate debacle that had taken place a couple of years ago but was still under federal investigation. A scandal to which Dick’s name had not been attached...yet.

            She told Angie his cowardly little voice squeaked when he responded “What did you say?”

            “And I told him: ‘Oh, you heard me. Dick.’”      

             

            On a dark and stormy Friday night, while a sleety rain pelted the roof and coated the windows of her house on Benefit Street, Angie opened her computer and emailed Mary Lou at her old address: pinotnoir@ether.com.

Dearest ML,

            just sitting here thinking about all the good times we had. Will we ever have more?
Remember the ferry to Newport when we taught those teenaged boys how to play gin rummy? And the time we found the badges in the trash at the Convention Center, and we sneaked into the home show but kept worrying that we would meet somebody who knew the people whose badges we stole? 
            How about getting loaded in first class on the Acela to New York and almost getting kicked off for laughing too loud? 
            Hey, don't mind me. I’m getting all nostalgic. Stay safe and strong; meet a handsome prince; and write me when you can,

Love,

Angie

            P.S. How about Paris in September? I have a week’s vacation I have to use before the end of the year. I’ll find a cheap fare and a cheap hotel and meet you!”

            She pushed Send. A moment later, the email popped back up in her inbox. Undeliverable. 
            Angie pulled up another blank email page.

My precious love! How are you? How's the food up there? Nectar and ambrosia or rare T-bones and mashed potatoes? Darling, I don't want to be a drag, but I miss you so much and it never gets any easier. A lot has happened since you’ve been gone. Of course you know you have a granddaughter and she's BEAUTIFUL! But I can't help it, I miss you so much! There are so many things I want to tell you but I don’t want you to worry. I love you. If you can, send me a sign that you’re thinking of me. Buena sera from your Angie.”

            
            She addressed it to tom@heaven.com and pushed Send. Then she turned off the computer, quickly, before the email bounced back to her, undeliverable to Tom in Heaven, even though that was certainly where he was.
            Angie didn't want to walk Wes in the filthy weather, and if Wes could talk he would have wholeheartedly agreed; but she did let him out the back door. He hurriedly took care of business and came bolting back in. 
            "Good boy!" she told him, and toweled him down and wiped his paws.

            She set the alarm, turned off the lights and they both went up to bed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter  Eight.

        

 

 

 

Angie's son Michael and his wife Colby had been invited to Beatrice and Marian’s wedding. They were flying with little Shea into Greene Airport outside of Providence. Angie would pick them up and they’d all drive up together to the Berkshires hotel where the wedding would take place. 
        Beatrice was Michael’s godmother.
       “No pun intended, but let me get this straight,“ Beatrice had said in amusement, more than thirty years ago, “You want me to be Michael’s “Yiddische fairy godmother?”
         Beatrice was an exceptionally handsome woman, especially when she smiled, which wasn’t often. But when she did, her eyes got soft and a dimple deepened in her cheek. With a faint sheen of moisture in her eyes, or perhaps Angie imagined it: Beatrice said,
        “I would be honored.”

 

        Marian phoned Angie one afternoon at work. She was crazy-busy, she told Angie, consulting almost hourly with her bridal team. The reason she'd called: she wanted Angie's granddaughter Shea to be her flower girl.

        “I know it’s awfully short notice,” Marian apologized. “I should have thought of this before. The theme of my wedding is a spring garden…so how could I not have a flower girl, especially one who is as beautiful as a rose?"

        "Oh, Marian," Angie said. "That would be so lovely! But...Shea is so little; I don't think she would walk down the aisle by herself..."

        "Oh, no," Marian said. "Colby would walk with her. I was thinking of having matching, or at least, complementing, dresses made for them."
        This is the perfect solution, Angie thought. Since Angie and Michael were both in the wedding party, Colby and Shea would otherwise be sitting alone during the ceremony. 
        “Oh!” Angie said excitedly. “I’ll have to call Colby and Michael and see if they agree...but it would be fun, wouldn’t it? What were you thinking for their dresses?"
        “Callie and I already have done some rough designs, in the hope that Colby will say yes," Marian told her. And you know Manuela, my dressmaker. She is milagros; a miracle worker. If Colby and Michael agree, and you too; then please have Colby email me hers and Shea's measurements. And speaking of measurements,  Angie, we need to do your final fitting. I won't make you drive down here or to the Newport shop. Callie and I will come to you. What night is convenient?"
         Marian and Callie had designed all the attendants’ gowns; even Marian’s mother’s dress. However, Marian designed her wedding herself; using sketches she’d drawn when she was just fourteen years old.
        “That’s how long I’ve been dreaming of my wedding day,” she told Angie. 
        The dress was a state secret, even from Callie, and especially from Beatrice. Only Manuela knew what it looked like. 
        Marian’s seamstress Manuela was making all the dresses; no money out of anybody’s pocket. That was a great relief to Angie, who was still fretting about the cost of a wedding gift. When she hung up with Marian, Angie remembered that Paul Tillinghast had promised to put something aside for her to look at, in his shop on Wickenden Street. 

 

        She dropped into Lost and Found the following Saturday morning around eleven o’clock. To her surprise it was quite busy; a dozen or so people were wandering through the shop, opening drawers, turning lamps on and off, turning vases upside down to see their maker’s marks, and squinting in the dim light to read price stickers.
        Tillinghast, dapper and lean and this time, wearing a black turtleneck, topped with a camel blazer; both of which looked to be cashmere, was standing at his desk, talking to a blonde woman of Angie’s age, who was expensively dressed; nicely coiffed; toned and tanned.  She was holding something out to Paul. Angie walked towards them but stopped a discreet distance away, not waiting to intrude on a sale. 
        She heard the woman ask: “I found this in the back. Any movement on this price? It is in really poor condition.”
        Paul took it from her. “Where did you find this?”
        “Way in the back, on a top shelf. How much will you take for it?”
        “Hmm,” Paul said, turning it over. “It’s a very unusual mirror.”
         “It’s filthy and I wonder if it would even clean up properly,” the woman said.
         Angie could see that Paul Tillinghast disliked this woman; saw him stiffen, and his smile turn cold. Clearly, he could rethink the price, but Angie had a feeling he wouldn’t.
        “Oh, madam, the fact is that I can’t sell it to you at any price. I realize now that I promised it to another customer. I should have taken it off the floor. My fault.”
        The woman clicked her tongue in disgust.  “You shouldn’t put a piece on display if you don’t intend to sell it.” 
        Angie saw Paul give the woman a small, tight smile and shake his head. “Again, my apologies for the inconvenience.” He looked guilelessly into the woman’s eyes and shrugged.
        The woman's cheeks turned crimson. She hiked her Louis Vuitton bag (genuine, Angie could tell) over her shoulder and turned to leave the shop, but couldn’t resist a parting shot over her shoulder. 
        “Excuse me for mistaking this for a place of business.”
 “Have a wonderful day, ma’am,” Tillinghast said cheerfully to her back as if she had not spoken. “Come again soon.”

        The bell jingled loudly as the woman almost, but not quite, slammed the shop door on her way out.
        Paul shook his head and turned to Angie, recognized her, and with a broad but weary smile, as if he had spotted, finally, an oasis in the desert, said, “Angie! So nice to see you again.”
        “Hello, Paul. I was hoping to see the item you put away for me. For the wedding present? But I see the shop is very busy, I’ll come back another time.”
        “No, don’t go,” Tillinghast said, putting a hand on your shoulder. Just let me help those folks over there. Can you wait just a moment?”
        “Of course,” Angie said. 
        “Good,” he said, giving her shoulder a pat. He went off to help a couple who were trying to extricate a brass coat stand from the front window display.
        While Angie waited, her gaze fell on the object the blonde woman had been holding. It was a little mirror about the size of a trade paperback book. Its glass was beveled and framed in black laquered wood.  Angie picked it up and turned it over, and saw that on the back was an inlaid carving of a man and woman, in old fashioned dress, sitting on either end of a garden bench under a blooming bower, gazing rapturously into each other's eyes. There was something about it...in their profiles, their rapt expressions, that made her think of Tom and herself.

        The blond woman had been right, it was very dirty. Angie got a Kleenex out of her pocketbook and began to wipe away some of the grime.
        “I didn’t mean to put you to work,” said Paul’s voice in her ear.
 Angie put the mirror back down on the counter, embarrassed. “Oh, no, not at all, it’s just that it’s so lovely, I wanted to see it as it truly is.”
        He picked it up again. “This is something special. She’s got a good eye, I’ll give her that.” 
        He ran his finger across the relief. "Ivory inlay, obviously. But definitely early to mid twentieth century before the import of ivory became illegal. Not that ivory pieces aren't smuggled in from China all the time. In any case, it's not particularly valuable, but unusual. 

       “It’s beautiful.”
       “Do you know what this is? This is a traveling mirror. Sometimes referred to as a picture mirror. See the hanging loop on top? It's reversible. Ladies could use it as a mirror, or turn it over and hang the picture side up on the wall of their hotel rooms. Back in the days when hotel stays stretched out for months; not the weekend getaways you see nowadays."
        “You said you had a buyer for it?”
        “I lied.”
        “Why?”
        "I know that woman. All the antique and art dealers on Wickenden know her, but she doesn’t know we know her. Her daughter recently opened an antique store in Wickford," he said, naming a picturesque and historic waterfront town in Rhode Island's South County.
        "These ladies, these women, buy pieces from local dealers,” he went on. "Can't even be bothered to do the legwork it takes to find inventory the way the rest of us do at flea markets and estate sales and auctions. They make the rounds, then nickel-and-dime us for our pieces. She would have bought this mirror from me, marked it up two hundred percent, and say she’d bought it in an alley in Florence from the bastard son of an Italian count.”
        “Is that illegal?”
        “We all sell and swap pieces with each other. We all inflate our prices, and frankly, none of us are above a little embellishment. But these gals, for some reason, want to be sneaky about it. It’s just not the way you do business in a small place like Rhode Island.”
        “Would you sell it to me?” Angie asked him impulsively.
        “Are you thinking of it for that wedding present? Because I have something I'd like you to look at first."
        “No, for myself,” Angie said.
        Paul squinted at the sticker on the mirror side. “These old eyes of mine,” he said ruefully. “Looks like I marked it a hundred and twenty five dollars.”
        He smiled at Angie. “For you, seventy five.”
        What am I doing? Angie thought. Buying antique mirrors when I can barely pay my bills?
        “I guess I’ll have to think about it,” she told him. But this carving is of Tom and me! As if we had posed for it.
        “Of course,” Paul said. "I'll put in the back. But let me show you that item I put aside for you.”
        The shop was still busy, and Angie insisted Paul take care of the customers who were waiting. Another couple came wandering in the front door, and without thinking, Angie told them:
“Please have a look around and we’ll be right with you. We’re having a bit of a busy morning...”
        Gradually the shop cleared out; those who wished to purchase, did so, and those who were merely browsing, moved on, to the other antique shops, art galleries, clothes boutiques, music stores and coffee houses and restaurants that lined Wickenden Street.

 

        Paul disappeared into the back and returned bearing a tall opaque black glass vase, about a foot and a half high, curvaceous, exotic, its mouth curled back like the petals of an orchid. It had an art nouveau sinuousness but a contemporary presence, and Angie knew immediately it would be perfect in Beatrice and Marian’s living room; which was modern and minimalist without being stark. Every piece in their house was a carefully chosen work of art. She could picture the vase on their steel and marble coffee table, filled with Calla lilies or blood red bromeliads. 
        “This is not deco or nouveau although it will fool a lot of people,” Paul said. “It was made by an Italian glassmaker, Scarvetti, who created his first pieces back in the late 50’s. He’s a highly collectible artist today; you should go on Google and look him up. Not in any museums yet, that I know of, but I predict he will be. His designs are still relatively affordable; in part because he is still creating today. He must be in his nineties. You like it?”
        Angie asked, “How much?” and held her breath.
        “Three hundred and fifty. I promise, that is very nearly what I paid for it.”
        Angie let out her breath. “Oh, I can’t.”
         Paul said nothing for a moment or two, and then said: “Well, I have a proposition. I hope it doesn’t offend you.”
        Oh no, where was he going with this? Angie wondered in alarm and dismay.
        “You can see,” he began, “That I desperately need help around here, especially on Saturdays.”
        Embarrassed and even amused, now, at what she had imagined, Angie smiled and said, “I did notice.”
        “Well, I propose that you work off, for lack of a nicer phrase, the price of this vase, by assisting me here in the shop for the next few weeks. If you worked six hours each Saturday, from 10 to 4, and if I were paying you, you would make about sixty dollars a day. Forget about taxes and such nonsense, this would be our private arrangement. In about a month and half the vase would be paid for. I’ll even throw the picture mirror into the bargain. You would be doing me a huge favor because I need somebody and I have no time or patience for newspaper ads and interviews. And who knows? Maybe you might like working here...and want to stay on; in that case we can renegotiate.” 
        “But the wedding is less than six weeks away,” Angie said.
        “Angie,” he said, smiling. “I feel confident I can trust you. Take the vase and the mirror with you today, if you wish.” He smiled at her. “So what do you think?”
        "But I don't know a thing, really, about antiques," Angie said, doubtfully.

        "You'll learn," Paul assured her. "Just as I did."

         Yes, Angie thought to herself, it might be fun to work in this little old curiosity shop so close to home. Learn the histories of pretty and odd old things, and pass my Saturdays making money, not spending it…

        Paul smiled. "We have a deal, then. “I’ll just go in the back and hunt up some boxes. Would you mind the shop until I get back?"

        "Of course," said Angie, smiling back at him.

 

        When Angie got home, she took a long walk with Westerly, down Benefit to Steeple Street, then up Thomas to the imposing entrance arch to Brown University. They turned right, then left, and made their way over to the bohemian enclave of Thayer Street, which was a counterpoint, as Wickenden Street was, to the ‘other’ East Side. 
        The “other” East Side was Wayland Square, with its upscale shops, Blackstone Boulevard lined with tony mansions, and historic College Hill where moneyed professionals and multi-lettered academics dwelled in pre-Civil War splendor, in mullioned manses protected by overwrought iron gates. 
        Angie and Westerly threaded their way through the crowded sidewalks. The kids fell into roughly three categories: college students, suburban high schoolers trying to look cool, and ragged bands of disaffected youth that lurk in the doorways of every city.  
        The adults on Thayer Street were also easily pegged. They were either tweedy professors or out of towners who fell into two sub-categories: tourists, or parents with their sullen collegiate offspring trailing behind. 
        Angie put a dollar in the basket of a guitar-player sitting on the cold pavement at the corner of Thayer and Waterman. He nodded in thanks and kept on strumming.  
        Thayer Street bordered the campus of Brown University and was geared to the tastes of its main demographic. Storefront falafel stands, pizza joints, second story Thai and Indian restaurants and Johnny Rockets, neo-retro symbol of fifties fast food. 
        It had its cynical, ironical side, too. Vintage clothes stores sold twenty year old torn Levis for seventy bucks. Shoe stores displayed platform boots for $200 and up. Trendy emporiums like Urban Outfitters did a booming business. 
        Angie loved Thayer Street. It reminded her of the Village in the ’60’s. Strangers of all stripes stopped to pet Westerly:
        “What kind of dog is this? Golden retriever, oh yeah, I thought so. Hey, buddy!”
        “Do you live around Wayland Square? No? Omigod, there is a golden retriever who lives off Wayland that is the exact twin of your dog!”
        Westerly was a city dog. He was capable of lying patiently alongside Angie at an outdoor restaurant table without begging or lunging at passersby. Wes also possessed a fine delicacy about where and when to relieve himself even after a long day cooped up in the house. 
        Streetwise Westerly knew that a walk among people meant lots of petting and sweet talk. He was docile and patient with children. The only time he lost his dignity was when men gave him the kind of rough attention he loved and didn’t get at home. Sometimes he would roll belly up on the sidewalk and paw the air, ready to play. 
        With women, he was flirtatious.
        “Can I pet her? Oh, it’s a him? Oooh, you’re a handsome boy, yes you are!”

 

        Angie and Wes walked a few blocks north on Thayer, circled back to Waterman, and turned down the hill to Benefit Street and home.
        Dr. Mike Hakkim’s car was in the driveway, and she spotted him bringing some grocery bags into his downstairs apartment. 
        Michael Hakkim was a handsome, stocky Lebanese-American with the most brilliant white, warm smile Angie had ever seen. After September 11th, many Middle Easterners encountered some pretty vile prejudice, but Dr. Mike had suffered, perservered and prevailed. He now had a healthy family practice and lots of loyal and well-looked-after patients.
        “Mike, hi!” she called. She had a sudden impulse to invite him to join her for a bite to eat. She had never done that before, despite their affection for each other, their relationship had always been formal, in a kind of old-world way. That was Mike's way, he was a son of very wealthy parents, born and reared in Beirut, Lebanon, that exquisite and ancient city which had become a tragic crossroad in the endless Middle Eastern conflicts. 
          This evening Angie just felt like going out and sitting across the table from someone she cared about, and having a nice conversation. 
        “Mrs. Russo, hello! I haven’t seen you in days...everything all right?”
        For years Angie had tried in vain to get Mike to call her Angie. Though he always promised he would next time, he could never seem to bring himself to address her so familiarly.
        Westerly immediately bounded over to Mike, and Angie walked over to the outdoor stairwell at the side of the house, which led down to Mike's one bedroom apartment. He put his grocery bag down and knelt to scratch Westerly vigorously behind his ears.
        “How did the physical go?”
        “Oh, I am waiting for the results of the blood tests...she wants me to have a stress test, you know, the usual stuff when you get old like me!”
        “Stress test? Nuclear?” Mike asked, his eyes narrowing a little in concern. So typical of dear, serious Mike, that he didn’t protest, as most people would, that no, of course she wasn’t getting old! 
        “I’m not sure,” Angie said. “I don’t think so, just says ‘stress test’ on the paper.”
        “Well, that is a good idea, anyway. Let me know how it comes out...”
        “I will. I promise.”
                “Mrs. Russo, may I ask you, how do you cook a leg of lamb?”
        “A leg of lamb. Well, I like to do it very simply, Mike. Cut some slits into the lamb and put in slivers of garlic...”
        “Ah, yes, I did buy cloves of garlic,” Mike said.
        “Good, then put slivers of garlic cloves here and there under the skin,” Angie advised, “and then rub it lightly with oil, salt and pepper it, that is all you need to do, and roast it at 325 degrees for about eighteen to twenty minutes a pound...how big a lamb did you buy, Mike?”
        “I believe about four, nearly five pounds.”
        “That should take under two hours then. Are you having company?”
        She could see him flush a little. “Well, just one person...”
        Angie felt her heart sink, just a little. Not only because this meant another lonely meal with just Wes to keep her company, but because it reminded her: it wouldn't be long before Mike got married, and left her house on Benefit Street.
        She smiled and said, “That’s so nice, Mike. Good luck with your dinner. If you need any more cooking tips, just give me a call.” She started to walk back around the house to her front door.
        “Let me know about your tests,” Mike called after her.
 
        Later that night, after she and Wes had supped on broiled turkey burgers and Campbell’s French onion soup, Angie put the boxed wedding vase for Beatrice and Marian in her closet to wrap another time, and unboxed the mirror.
         She brought it into her bathroom and cleaned it really well with a moist washcloth. She used a little Windex on the glass. The ivory inlay was slightly chipped but mostly intact. It was in remarkable condition for its age. She tried to imagine the woman, or women, who had owned it. How were they dressed? As they gazed at their reflections, were they pleased with what they saw? These ladies...were they young or old, happy or sad?  Were they brides, new mothers; divorcees or widows? 
        Angie grasped the little mirror in both hands and studied her reflection. In the last few years the lines that ran from her nose to her mouth, from her mouth to her chin, had deepened. The lines didn't trouble her. It was the expression on the face of her mirror image that troubled her. It looked so forlorn. Not hopeless, but without expectation. 
        'Mirror Angie' looked as if she believed, in her heart of hearts, that nothing wonderful would ever happen to her again.
         
        Hanging on the wall next to her bed was a wedding picture of her mother and father in a silver frame. She took it down and hung up the travel mirror instead. 
        She said, aloud, to the portrait, “Don’t worry, my dears, I am putting you right on my night table,” and she did, propping the photograph up against her lamp. She sat at the edge of the bed and smiled back at their smiling faces. 
        The picture had been taken in that era before color film; when black and white photographs were color tinted by hand. A long lace mantilla framed her mother’s dark hair; her eyes painted china blue and her cheeks a washed peach. Where did her mother, Sophia, Italian on both sides going back for countless generations, inherit such beautiful blue eyes? Angie had asked her mother that question once. 
        Her mother replied, with a hint of a smile, "Our family was from Milano," she told Angie. "So very close to Switzerland..." 
        Her father, in the photograph, was strikingly monochromatic, dark brown hair and eyes, olive complexion, dark suit. He was beaming from ear to ear as if he just won the greatest prize on earth. And hadn’t he?  
        Angie turned her gaze up to the little hanging mirror. She got up and turned it around; picture out, looking glass to the wall.

 

        As Paul had suggested, Angie did some online research on the creator of the vase, Scarvetti. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Paul Tillinghast, she just thought she might download something about the artist, print it up in a pretty way, and tuck it in the gift box along with the vase.
        She found the artist immediately, and read his biography. She clicked onto some other links, galleries and auction houses, where Scarvetti’s had been bought and sold. Judging from the pictures of his other works, her vase was unmistakably authentic. The identifying mark of Scarvetti was on her vase. She’d gone back upstairs, took it out of the box, and double-checked.
        Angie noted that all the sale prices of Scarletti vases were in the thousands. The least expensive Scarletti vase was listed on the website of a New York gallery for eleven hundred dollars. 
        Apparently Paul Tillinghast had given her quite a bargain. She resolved to work all the harder for him, in his shop on Wickenden Street. 

 

 

Chapter Nine.

 

Marian and Callie came over one evening for the final fitting of Angie's matron-of-honor dress.
Callie had never seen the house, so Angie took her on a little tour; careful to bypass the attic, the cellar and any mention of the bizarre secret contained within the heart of her house on Benefit Street. Often weeks went by without Angie giving a thought to what had happened here. Until a creak of the floorboards or a shadow seeping under the door reminded her. The house on Benefit street held a mystery still unsolved, and a little boy, still lost.

Instead, Angie dusted off some of the brighter anecdotes of life in an old house. Marian had heard them a thousand times before, but they always made her laugh. The attack of the downstairs showerhead. The paint blisters on the walls that burst without warning and plopped into your coffee cup.

"In this house," she told Callie, "you turn on the kitchen faucet, and the toast pops up!"

Of course, they chatted about the wedding. It was a lighthearted discussion until Marian turned serious    about the giant step that she and Beatrice were about to take. Equality for us is not merely a myth, she told Angie and Callie; it is a fantasy. True marriage between same-sex partners was still not possible anywhere else in America, she explained, except Massachusetts, California and just recently, Connecticut. And if the political winds reversed themselves, poof! even those havens could disappear. In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts the law allowing same sex marriage included an odd, cruel little caveat. Out of state couples could only get married in Massachusetts if their home states did not specifically prohibit same sex marriages. Fortunately, Rhode Island did not. Same sex marriages were not legally recognized throughout the country. Once they crossed certain state lines, Beatrice and Marian would revert, like Cinderellas after the stroke of midnight, back to the way they were, nothing more than two women who lived under the same roof.
          "We could go on as we are. But we want more. Or at least as much, as other couples can aspire to," Marian told her. "Do you realize that as it stands now, if Beatrice or I were hospitalized, the other wouldn’t be considered immediate family? And if one of us died, and left money or property to the other, she would have to pay inheritance taxes?
          "We thought about waiting until laws changed in Rhode Island. But that could take years, maybe forever, and we didn’t want to wait any longer. I am nearly forty-two, Beatrice is fifty six. We are tired of waiting."
          Marian tossed her head defiantly and said, "And if nothing else: it’s an excuse to throw one helluva party!"

        And a helluva party it promised to be. On the last Saturday in April, inside the early twentieth century conservatory wing of a nineteenth century five-star inn nestled in a verdant valley of the Berkshires, in the southwestern corner of the state, Beatrice and Marian planned to be spectacularly united in the sight of one hundred fifty friends and family members.
They had taken over the inn, all ninety rooms, plus an indoor pool, health spa, tennis court, eighteen-hole championship golf course, two gourmet restaurants, theater and nightclub.
        If you were so fortunate as to be invited to the wedding of Marian and Beatrice, you would never have reason to pull out your wallet from the moment of your arrival to the day of your departure, except perhaps to buy a souvenir or two in the quaint village square.
        Your accommodations and meals and recreation were compliments of the hosts. Tennis, anyone? Reserve a court. Golf? Make a tee time. Peckish? Phone for room service, or come down to dine on French or Northern Italian cuisine…or an elegant breakfast or lunch in the hotel's windowed verandah with its long views across the valley to the near-distant mountains.
          All thanks to the generosity, and the considerable combined net worth, of Beatrice Newman, a lifelong Rhode Islander, and Marian Boudreau, born and bred in New Orleans, Louisiana.
          The inn was booked from Friday noon until Sunday at three p.m. Angie hoped to play at least nine holes of golf with her son Michael; April weather in the mountains permitting.
Colby didn’t play golf, but she liked tennis, and Marian had made sure babysitters were available.
        Mike Hakkim would take care of Westerly.

        Colby had happily agreed that she and Shea would be flower girls. Marian had faxed Colby sketches of the dresses planned for her and Shea, and Colby quickly emailed back their measurements along with enthusiastic compliments on the designs.
        Angie could hardly wait for the wedding; especially because it presented an opportunity to see Michael and Colby and get reacquainted with her granddaughter. Two and a half days to talk to Shea; read to her; sing to her, walk with her, hug her and kiss her and enjoy her. Angie had a full shopping bag of goodies she’d picked up here and there, little by little, since Shea’s birthday in January: books, stuffed animals, socks, hair ornaments, a Raggedy Ann doll and a Beatrice Potter mug and plate and a tiny white wool beret she had found in a darling little children's shop on Hope Street in Providence.

          On the first Saturday of her new job at the shop on Wickenden Street, Angie came in at nine o’clock, although Paul had specified ten. She hoped to learn a little something about how the shop operated before the doors opened for business.
          The front door was locked, but Paul spotted her before she had to knock, and came over to let her in.
          "Ah, Angie, you’re early! I’m glad. There are a few things I want to show you before we open. Follow me, and I’ll show you where you can put your coat and bag." Angie followed him down the narrow center aisle, towards the back of the store.
          He pointed out the alarm pad that was just outside the main front room. "I’ll teach you how to arm and disarm it next week. No sense in overwhelming you today."
           It turned out that Paul Tillinghast had an inventory system that made things very simple, if not easy. Each tag on each item had a number, a price, and a brief description.
          If a customer fell madly in love with an item and would pay whatever it said on the tag, then it was all very straightforward. Ring it up, wrap it up, thank them; and wish them a nice day.
          But, Angie worried, suppose they wanted details? How old is it? Which style, what period? What kind of wood? Solid or veneer? Is this a real Wedgwood candy dish? Is that a genuine Limoges box? Could this be an honest-to-god Faberge egg?
          "Don’t be afraid to say you don’t know," he told her, as if he had read her mind.

"Then come ask me, or go look it up yourself. Let me show you where to look," and leading the way to a small storage room, Tillinghast opened the door and waved his arm with a flourish.
          "Voila!" he said to her, "Low tech to be sure, or maybe no tech is a better description! The key is to be conscientious about keeping the records up to date! I am good about recording the sales, but I've gotten lax about going back to cross reference the sale with the original acquisition..."
          The "archives," as he called them, were a series of metal bookcases crammed with loose-leaf binders…hundreds of them, one for each month of each year that Lost and Found had been in business. The notebooks were arranged on the shelves chronologically and numerically. The number on each tag of each item in the shop corresponded to an entry in one of those black binders. The entries included both sales and purchases. Any given piece would be cross-referenced by original date of purchase and date of sale. 
          The entries, Paul explained, could be pages long or just a sentence or two. The point was to relate the history of the transaction in pertinent detail: when it was purchased, where it was purchased, from whom, for how much. What was known about the piece: its age, its provenance, and above all: what it was. What it had been represented to be, what it was accepted as being, and even, what it actually, probably was. The tag price was recorded, and the actual sale price eventually noted, along with, of course, who, when and sometimes why, it was purchased.
          Paul reached up and took down a book: January 80, the label on the spine said. 
          He opened it at random and read from the hand-written notes.
"No. 5974. Sterling flatware, Gorham, c: 1950's. "Renaissance" pattern. Service for 12, plus salad fork and spoon, cake server, serving fork, soup ladle, two large serving spoons, butter spreader. 20 pcs. total. Good condition but heavy tarnish. Original box; velvet lined. Serving pieces in felt pouch with ties.
'Seller: John Reese, 36, 4787 Elmo Avenue, Pawtucket, RI. Said they belonged to mother, passed down from her aunt. Mtr. is sick and doesn’t want them anymore. Spk. to mtr. on phone: confirms. Pd: $100, 6/5/80.
          "I recall this transaction. Can’t remember what I had for dinner last night, but I can remember most of my purchases and sales over the years. This fellow, Reese, he was a dodgy character. I remember I didn’t trust him, I suspected he might have stolen the silver. So I insisted on speaking to the mother...she sounded legitimate, sounded as if she really was at death’s door...who knows, though," he shrugged, and handed the book to Angie.
          Below the remarks he had just read, in the same handwriting but different ink, it noted:
Sold, 12/10/80. $675. Benjamin Ross, (Ross Clothiers, Westminster St, Pr. RI) home: 14 Morris Street, Providence, RI. Anniversary gift to wife. Wanted engraving; referred him to G.M.S. silversmiths, Boston.
          Angie looked at the bookshelves in awe. Hundreds of books filled with thousands of entries. And imagine: every entry represented a life story; of sick mothers and greedy children; reversals of fortune. Objects lost; and objects found. "Lost and Found" was an appropriate name for a place such as this.

          "I know it looks like an unwieldy system," Paul said, shaking his head at the rows and rows of ledgers. "But I am proud to say I am slowly moving into the twenty-first century! I have started a database, and I hope to switch over completely to online records by the beginning of next year."

          Angie gazed again at the height and breadth of the metal bookshelves. It would take an army, she thought, to enter all that information into a computer! She hoped that he wouldn’t ask her to help. All those sad stories hiding between the lines of these simple transactions.
          "But I still think the old way is the best way," Paul said. "It has served us well. After all, this isn‘t a pancake house! Turnover is slow, measured in years, sometimes. There will be many occasions when you will have to look an item up in these books, or go back and make a note of sale. Take your mirror as an example. I had to go back to the 1952 book to look it up. Then cross reference the entry in the current ledger in which I recorded the sale. Care for a cup of tea?"
            Paul led Angie back down the back hall, past two closed doors on the left which Paul did not comment on and Angie did not ask about. He turned into a small room beyond the records room, a bright space painted a sunny yellow and hung with framed Toulouse Lautrec posters. The room was furnished with a wrought iron ice cream parlor set that had two chairs and a round mosaic-topped table; plus a sink, microwave and small fridge. A door on the other side of the room led to a small lavatory.
             "Sit down, Angie," he said, and pulled out one of the chairs for her. "We have a little time."
On a small side table was a silver tray. On the tray was a lovely flowered porcelain tea set.
Tillinghast filled a tea ball with loose tea from a canister and hooked it over the side of the teapot. Then he poured water from an electric kettle into the pot.
             "Bad habit, this," he said. "I keep this kettle plugged in all day and sometimes I forget to turn it off before I go home. One of these days I am going to burn the place down!"
             "Paul," Angie said, anxiously, "I was thinking…that a lot of people like to bargain over prices, especially when they’re buying antiques. Would I have any discretion over price? Or should I consult you if a customer wants to haggle?"
          "Angie, trust me, they will want to haggle until you will want to punch them in the nose! Tell you what: let's establish a twenty per cent rule. You can offer the customer twenty per cent less than the tagged price. If they still balk, but you believe they are serious buyers, refer them to me."
          He poured the brewed tea into a pair of matching teacups.
          "Milk or sugar, Angie?"
          "Lemon, please, if you have it. No sugar."
          “I don’t have fresh lemon, I apologize,” Paul said. “I believe I have lemon juice, though, in that squeezy lemon thing? I use it on my salads.” Paul went to the mini fridge and took out the plastic lemon and brought it to the table with Angie’s tea and set them in front of her.

          "I take mine with milk and sugar," he told her. "I've spent a lot of time in England, and learned to take tea the way the English do." He tipped milk from the elegant creamer into his cup, and with tiny silver tongs, added three lumps from a matching bowl filled with sugar cubes.
         "Napkins!" He jumped up and fetched two folded white cloth napkins and handed one to Angie.
          "What a lovely tea service," Angie said.
          "Thank you," Tillinghast said. "This is actually part of a service for twenty. Occasionally I feel festive for no particular reason, and set out a high tea for my customers. There’s a bakery on Federal Hill that makes the most sumptuous little tea sandwiches."
          He took a sip of tea. "I have always believed that beautiful things are meant to be enjoyed. What is the point of having them if you never use them?"
          Angie thought about all her lovely Lenox china and stemware. She couldn’t even recall the last time she’d set a table with it. With no dishwasher, dining alone, she often used paper plates. What a barbarian she had become!
          "I have some scones and blackberry preserves, if you’re hungry," he said.
"Oh, thank you, no," Angie said.

         Tillinghast showed Angie where he kept the key to the desk drawer where the cash box was. He showed her how to run a credit card; told her what to do if somebody wanted to pay with a check. Local checks had one set of criteria for acceptance, out of state personal or business checks he frowned upon as a general rule, unless it was a regular customer.
         "I have several decorators who come in here. Most from New England or Connecticut…the occasional New Yorker. Sometimes they’re looking for something specific for a client. Or I’ll invite them to stop by when I have something that might interest them. You get to know their tastes after a while. Usually they will stop by on their own, making the rounds on Wickenden."
         Paul sat down behind his desk, pushed his chair back and crossed a leg over a knee. Angie sat across from him, wishing she had taken notes, especially about how to process the credit card transactions.
        "If it can be said that I specialize in anything," Paul said, "it is: I specialize in everything. People come to me when they are furnishing their homes and offices or summer houses. Not for what I have here in the shop, but for what I can procure for them."
        He sipped his tea. "And then, when they inevitably decide they are bored with eighteenth-century French or whatever, and are now enamored of Scandinavian Modern...well, then they come back to me to dispose of their unwanted items. I usually find a buyer, sometimes a private collector, sometimes another dealer, or I might buy the item myself, and turn it down the line.
        "Pianos, for instance. An astonishing number of people come to me wanting to sell their pianos. For a variety of reasons: nobody plays, it takes up too much room, doesn’t match their decor...the fact that it is a marvelous awe-inspiring musical instrument means nothing to them. Of course, sometimes, they just need the money.
        "Now I don't handle pianos, oh, occasionally something small such as a spinet or harpsichord; but I am really not set up for the logistics of moving grand pianos around. So I will take on the role of middleman, so to speak, and refer them to some reputable piano dealers I know. In those circumstances, I collect a commission from the client, and often a finder‘s fee from the dealer."
        Paul smiled with a certain smugness. "That’s what makes the world go round. Not love, as the song says. Money!
        "That, and my appraisal work, are the bulk of my business. I do a lot of appraisal work. A great many local attorneys call me in to consult on estates left by death or divorce. If you can get away some day, perhaps you would like to come with me when I do an appraisal. Very interesting."
        Paul stood up and Angie stood up, too. She was beginning to feel uneasy. How did the simple sale of a vase evolve into a gallivant around the countryside looking at wealthy estates with a man she hardly knew?
        When she didn’t reply, Paul said briskly, "Well, the fact of the matter is, if I didn‘t own this building, ‘Lost and Found’ would be permanently in the red!"

        They walked up and down the aisles as Paul pointed out this and that.
       "So many mirrors!" Angie remarked, looking around at the walls. Although the shop's windows were westward-facing and it would be afternoon before the sun streamed in, the mirrors on the walls were already bright with morning light.
        Paul stopped and regarded the dozens of hanging mirrors, no two alike. "I guess I am fascinated with mirrors."
        He was quiet for a moment, and then softly quoted: "'So, friend, when I first looked upon your face, our thoughts gave answer each to each. Opposed mirrors each reflecting each, although I knew not in what time or place, methought that I had often met with you, and each had lived in other's mind and speech.'"
        Angie looked at him. "I like that. Who said it?"
        "Tennyson," Paul said, and his cheeks colored. He seemed embarrassed. He started walking again and back to business, told her, "There is nothing in the shop that is exceptionally valuable. Those things I store or I deliver to the client as soon as I’ve examined them. I think the highest priced item I have in here at the moment," he stopped again in the narrow aisle, "is this eight-piece dining room suite which includes that sideboard over there. Solid mahogany...a beautiful reproduction from about 1920. I have it tagged at $10,000."
        He ran his hand over the gleaming tabletop. "I could get twice as much if I held out. Some rich East Side doctor’s wife might wander in, today, tomorrow, next month...and pay $20,000 if it took her fancy."
        The bell over the front door jingled at ten o’clock sharp, and a middle-aged couple walked in: they had the bone-tired but doggedly cheerful look of out-of-towners.
        Her new job had begun.
        Paul looked at her with a smile. "Ready to get your feet wet?"
        "Ready as I will ever be," Angie answered, squared her shoulders and walked over to the couple.
        "Welcome to Lost and Found. Please feel free to browse, and if you have any questions or if you’re looking for a particular item, I’ll do my best to help you. My name is Angie."

        The out-of-towners didn’t buy a thing, but the rest of the day was very busy and by four o’clock closing, Angie had facilitated six sales. A young girl who went to Rhode Island College was looking for vintage tie-dyed fabric; Angie had to go ask Paul if there was anything like that in the shop and he said no. Angie suggested to the girl she try on Thayer Street. The girl was very sweet and grateful and wound up buying a small silver plated hand mirror.
        The owner from the futon shop next door stopped in and said hi to Paul at his desk, then went over to Angie to ask for her help finding a decorative picture easel.
        She sold an antique perfume bottle to a woman who was buying a birthday gift for her friend, a small Tiffany-like lamp, and a framed photograph of the Eiffel Tower.
        She invoked the twenty per cent rule only once. At about three o’clock, during a lull in the action, Angie was walking around with a cloth dusting this and that, when she turned around and saw Carol’s grinning face.
        "Hey, Miss," Carol said, "You have a lot of mirrors in here, but I am looking for a Magic Mirror that will make me look twenty pounds thinner and thirty years younger, or is it the other way around? Anyway, got anything like that?"
        "Just sold the last one this morning," Angie said. "But we have some magic beans, if you’re interested."
        They both laughed and hugged.
        "I had to see this with my own eyes to believe it. A second job? You don't think you work hard enough during the week?"
        Carol was holding a pair of lucite salt and pepper shakers and told Angie she wanted to buy them.
        Angie snatched them out of her hands. "I will not let you buy these. You are just trying to be nice."
        "Me, nice? Hey, I didn‘t come here to be insulted!"
        "I know for a fact you have nothing that will match these."
        "Do too."
        "Do not."
        "My mother-in-law does. So there! Give them back or I’ll buy something even more useless," Carol threatened.
        Angie deducted twenty per cent from the price and rang it up, feeling vaguely guilty, and she and Carol hugged at the door.

        After Carol left, Angie went over to Paul at his desk, who was busy on the computer. He looked up and smiled.
        "So how are you liking your first day, Angie? I think you’re doing great."
        "I have a confession to make."
        Paul raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"
        "Did you notice the lady who was just here?"
        "Yes, the lady with the very short hairdo. She bought the salt and pepper shakers."
        "She is a good friend of mine. I work with her at WRI."
        "Yes, I got the impression you were acquainted."
        "I gave her twenty per cent off. Frankly, I did it because she is my friend and she bought something she didn’t really want just to be nice. The discount came to four dollars. I am going to put that amount back into the register."
        "Well, of course," Paul said. "If you insist. But I assure you, it is not necessary. I gave you discretion, you have the right to exercise it."
        "Thank you, Paul. But I think it’s the right thing to do."
        "Well, if you insist. I’ll make a note to remind myself when I count out the drawer." He regarded her with a little smile and a shake of his head.
        "You know," he said, "you are quite a special person, Angie Russo. I am very glad to have you here."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Ten.

 

        Sunday was Angie’s favorite day. She usually woke up in a fine mood; vaguely anticipatory as if a favorite Jane Austen classic or Masterpiece Theater production was coming on TV later, even if it wasn’t.
       On Sunday the upcoming workweek was just an abstraction. Sunday was an airlock. A decompression chamber. An elipsis separating what had been from what would be.
        The best thing about Sunday is that everything could wait until Monday.
        When Tom was alive, it was their favorite day, their anything-can-happen day. On a fine Sunday afternoon, they might take a drive or play golf. Go to a street fair or sit on the stone wall overlooking Narragansett Beach. Have an early dinner at a new restaurant; new to them, anyway.
        On gloomy days or snowy winter days, they would stay in their pj’s or their sweats until late afternoon, light a fire in the fireplace and watch TV. Angie would make her famous Mystery Stew, a dish inexplicably more tasty than the sum of its parts. Once Tom swore he saw an “I Like Ike” button in his bowl, but when he tried to find it again, it had disappeared.
        On Sundays, since Tom died, Angie did not go near the computer. She didn’t let the real world in if she could help it. She screened her calls, not that there were many, if any, to screen. She puttered around, watching old movies or the Home and Garden channel. She might read or scrapbook.
        Sunday was the only day she could sustain the illusion that Tom was still with her. He’s down in the basement, taking a shower; ran out to the store. And no one was around to say he wasn’t.
        It wasn’t as crazy as, for instance, sitting in a restaurant pretending he was across from her. If, in the privacy of her own home, Angie wanted to believe that Tom was in the den, right now, watching a ballgame, what was the harm? 
        Okay, yes, she might call out his name. She might even hear his faint reply.  Magical imagining, so what? If that made her crazy, so be it. Being occasionally crazy was the only thing that kept her sane.

 

        Angie had read about scrapbooking in a magazine and decided to put together a scrapbook for Shea. She couldn’t decide if she would actually give it to Shea or keep it here at the house. She was leaning towards keeping it here so when Shea visited, they could sit and turn the pages together, and Angie could answer all Shea’s questions, and tell her who everybody was, and add more and more pages as the years passed.
        At first Angie couldn’t understand what the difference was between “scrapbooking” and just sticking pictures in a plain old photo album ...except that scrapbooking cost a bloody fortune. There were scrapbooking magazines, and scrapbooking books, TV shows and websites and supply stores for the serious scrapbooker. You needed grommets and acid free paper and mattes and exacto knives and some level of skill with page design.  
        Angie once asked Carol if she’d heard of scrapbooking.
        “Oh yeah,“ Carol told her. “My sister goes to scrapbooking classes. As far as I can tell, it’s basically a bunch of ladies packing glue guns and dishing dirt. Think ‘quilting bee‘ with a side of Krispy Kremes and you’ve pretty much got the gist.”

 

        For the first page of Shea's scrapbook, Angie had found just the perfect font on her computer and printed out, “I Am Born”...a la David Copperfield. She cut it out and pasted it over a birth picture of Shea, a rosy babe in a pale pink nursery cap, looking flabbergasted at the abrupt change of scene. 
        Shea had Michael’s brow. She had Colby’s heart-shaped face and pretty mouth. But she had Tom’s essence, harder to pin down than shape of eye or nose or cheekbone. Angie saw Tom looking out of Shea’s big, bright, golden brown eyes and it made her heart sigh. 
        Angie had also started a Tom scrapbook, although she never worked on it on Sundays. At first it seemed a crass idea; reducing Tom’s life to a series of snapshots. But even if she made a movie of Tom; even if the movie ran as long as the years Tom was on the earth; could it ever do justice to the boy, the man, the son, the husband, the father and the friend that he was? No. It would be like a statue in the park. Not Tom. But a place to go, now and then, to gaze upon his memory.
        Sundays were set aside for Shea's scrapbook; and as much fun as it was to do, how bittersweet to paste in the pictures of the family Shea would never know: her grandfather and great grandparents. Some of the pictures she had already shown Shea at Christmas. 
        “This is my mommy, your great grandmother! On the boardwalk in Atlantic City...and this is me in the carriage!”
        “Ba-bee!” 
        “And this is Grandpa Tom with your daddy at Disneyland in California!”
        But Shea was looking past Grandpa Tom and her daddy at a shadowy face in the background. 
        “Miggy Mow!”

        She thought she had finally begun to appreciate what scrapbooking was really all about: taking inventory of what mattered and keeping it all together where you could find it.
        For today's scrapbooking session, Angie got the notion to find a poem; something that would express the joy and precious innocence of childhood.  Maybe Wynken, Blynken and Nod.    

            Angie scanned her bookshelves for volumes of poetry; she knew she had a few. She plucked out a green leather bound book entitled The Treasury of Best-Loved Poems. There it was in the table of contents: written by Eugene Field. She read it for the first time since her mother had read it to her: 

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe---
Sailed on a river of crystal light, into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring fish that live in this beautiful sea;
 Nets of silver and gold have we!"
                     Said Wynken,
                     Blynken,
                     And Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
And the wind that sped them all night long ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
 That lived in that beautiful sea---
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish---
 Never afeard are we";
 So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
                     Wynken,
                     Blynken,
                     And Nod.

All night long their nets they threw
 To the stars in the twinkling foam---
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
  Bringing the fishermen home;
'T was all so pretty a sail it seemed
 As if it could not be,
And some folks thought 't was a dream they 'd dreamed
 Of sailing that beautiful sea---
 But I shall name you the fishermen three:
                     Wynken,
                     Blynken,
                     And Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
 And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
 Is a wee one's trundle-bed.
So shut your eyes while mother sings
 Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
 As you rock in the misty sea,
 Where the old shoe rocked the fisherman three,

Wynken, Blyken and Nod.

Angie continued to leaf through the pages of the book; reading a verse here and there. She’d forgotten what balm indeed was poetry for the soul. She could almost feel her blood pressure stabilizing.

The book had a thin red ribbon attached for a bookmark. She turned, curious, to the page marked by the ribbon. On the righthand page was a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

 What lips my lips have kissed and where, and why,

I have forgotten, and what arms have lain

Under my head til morning but the rain

Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh

Upon the glass and listen for reply,

And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain

For unremembered lads that not again

Will turn to me at midnight with a cry,

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,

Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,

Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:

I cannot say what loves have come and gone,

I only know that summer sang in me

A little while, that in me sings no more.

 

Who had marked this page with a ribbon? Not me. I have never seen this poem before.
        She turned to the front of the book and found a bookplate sticker on the inside cover.

From the Library of Sophia Dellaria Barone.

Fall, 1982.

Her mother had bookmarked that page. Two years after her father died.

           

_________________________________________________

       

 Angie had been working at Lost and Found for three Saturdays, now. By her calculations, she now owned about nine inches of the Scarvetti vase. She enjoyed her time in the shop, enjoyed interacting with the customers. She came to understand that people liked to be schmoozed into buying, which is what she must have done without realizing it, when she sold the $10,000 eight-piece dining room set.
        “Congratulations,” Paul said. “You did a masterful sales job with those folks. I confess I eavesdropped.”
        “I did?” Angie said. “All I did was talk to them.”
        “Yes,” said Paul, with relish. “That’s what you did.”

 

        They were an Eastside couple, older, perhaps Angie’s age or a little younger. They had done something very similar to that which Angie had done: sold their contemporary suburban home and moved to a historic house on Power Street. 
        “Our old new furniture just won’t work,” the woman confided to Angie. 
        “I know what you mean,” Angie said. “The only furniture from my old house that worked was my dining room set because it was cherrywood; not antique but very traditional.”
        “My old dining room furniture is way too modern. Formica!”
        “Oh, dear,” Angie said sympathetically. She thought, formica?
        “But this,” the lady said, putting her hand on a chair back, “this would be perfect." She turned to her husband, who was looking at a chipped, faded and larger than lifesize blue duck decoy.
        “What do you think, hon?”
        Her husband's head snapped up guiltily, as if he'd been gazing at a nude woman instead of a wooden duck.
        “What? Yes, very nice.”
        “I love these chairs. The seats are so big and comfortable,” Angie said. “Have you noticed that the dining room chairs they make nowadays have such hard, narrow seats! Why is that?”
        “I know! Isn’t that ridiculous? I mean, you spend hours sitting at a dining table...when you have a dinner party or at the holidays...”
        “I can picture this table set for Thanksgiving,” Angie said. “Plenty of space for a beautiful centerpiece and the turkey, too!”
        “Yes,” the lady exclaimed, “How many times have you had to remove the centerpiece when you bring out the turkey! Or make the turkey your centerpiece? Which looks awful once it’s been carved!”
        “Oh, so many times,” Angie agreed. “This table is wider, it seems to me, than today’s tables. You could set your table with all your beautiful china and flatware, and your wine glasses...and still have room for serving dishes.”
       “And chargers!” the lady added, excitedly. “I have huge gorgeous gold chargers but I can’t use them, my table is so narrow!” 
        They both stood there for a moment in silence, lost in their own reveries of linen topped tables set for company, with fine bone china, cut crystal and sterling silver sparkling in the candlelight.
        “Well, I think this is just what we’ve been looking for, this is just perfect,” the lady said. “Hon?”  She turned to her husband, who was staring into space, hands in his pocket, lips pursed in a silent whistle. 
        "Hon, I think this is what we want." She turned back to Angie. "Depending on the price of course."
        “Oh!” Angie said. "I forgot to mention that the suite includes that sideboard over there.”
        “That piece, there? Really! Oh, hon, that beautiful sideboard is included!” She rushed over to examine it, pulled out the felt-lined drawers, opened the cabinet doors and peered inside and traced her fingers over the decorative carvings.
        Suddenly Mrs. Eastsider became all business.
        “Let me ask you, is there any movement in this price?”
        “Well,” Angie said.
        “No, no, I understand...I know a thing or two about antiques...I can tell when I am NOT getting ripped off! What about delivery, though?”
        “Free delivery,” Angie instantly replied; although truth be told, delivery was not free at Lost and Found. However, she knew that delivery, which Paul contracted out to a small local moving company, would be far cheaper than the twenty per cent discount she had been poised to offer.
        “Well, that’s great!” She turned to her husband. “See, honey, you won’t have to carry it your back after all!”

 

        At three o’clock that afternoon, after Angie had just rung up a small sale, Paul hung up the phone at his desk and turned to her. 
        “Angie, I have a favor to ask.”
        “Of course.”
        “I need you to lock up tonight, I have to leave early. Could you do that?”
        She must have looked apprehensive, because he said, “There is really nothing to it, Angie. You don’t have to cash out the register, or do any entries, just leave that to me. I’ll be back in tomorrow. Just turn off the lights, set the alarm and lock the door as you go. That’s it.”
        Angie had been alone in the shop before. She and Paul went to lunch at different times. Paul usually ducked out for a bite somewhere on the street, and Angie used her hour to hurry home and let Westerly out, and fix a quick sandwich.
        She knew where the panel of switches were, where the alarm box and the safe were.
        “What about the day’s receipts? I shouldn’t just leave them in the register,” Angie asked.
        “No...good point...tell you what. I will leave the safe open. Just put them in, close the door and twirl the knob. That will be fine.”
        “All right,” Angie agreed, “but do you have a cell phone number or something you can give me, just in case?”
        “Of course, I am glad you reminded me. You should have it anyway.” Paul took a business card from the cardholder on his desk and wrote on the back. 
        “Here is my cell and my home phone, although I won‘t be back home tonight until very late. I’ve put down the alarm code, too; very simple, just push the numeral sign, the number ‘2,’ and then ‘Away.‘ You will only have 30 seconds to get out the door, so I suggest you set the alarm before turning off the lights, then turn off the lights and make your way to the front door.”
        "What lights should I turn off? Angie asked. She was thinking that when she went away, she always left a light or two burning to fool people into thinking she was home. But that probably didn’t apply to shops after business hours.
        “Come back with me now, I will show you which switches to hit on the panel. And we will do a dry run with the alarm. And you’ll need a key, of course," he opened a drawer at his desk, took out a ring of keys and flipped through them until he found the one he was looking for. He detached it from the ring, then rummaged around in his desk drawer again until he found a long, thick rubber band. He looped the band through the hole in the key.
        “This is the front door key, this locks it from the outside. When you are sure it is locked, push the key through the mail slot and let it fall inside. I’ll retrieve it when I come in tomorrow.”
        Angie accepted the key and the card and thought about putting the rubber band keychain around her wrist. That would look silly. She pushed it and the business card deep down into the right pocket of her slacks.
        “Don’t worry, Angie. You’ll do fine. Oh, and before I forget this, too...” Paul went back to his desk and lifted his blotter and took out a check and handed it to her. 
        It was a Lost and Found business check, made out to Angie Russo in the amount of five hundred dollars. 
        “Pay day!”
        “What do you mean?” Angie asked him, surprised and confused. “I thought we were doing a kind of barter thing for the vase...”
        “This is separate, Angie. This is your commission check for the sale of the dining room suite today.”
        “I didn’t expect a commission...”
        “I should have mentioned it. I am getting ridulously forgetful in my old age. This has been my policy with all my salespeople. Five per cent commission on all items sold over five thousand dollars. On these big ticket items I usually do very well. Only fair to share the profit with the person who closed the sale.”
        This check meant Angie could get the brakes on the Volvo fixed right away. 
        “Thank you very much, Paul. Frankly, this will come in very handy. I thank you.”
        “You earned it, Angie.”
 
        Paul left about a half an hour later, at about four o’clock. It was a chilly, overcast day on Wickenden Street, typical March weather in Rhode Island. Only a few people straggled in before the close of business at five o’clock, but nobody bought a thing. At a few minutes past five Angie locked the front door and turned the “Open” sign around to “Closed.” 
        She opened the register and gathered together the cash, the checks and the credit card receipts and zippered it all into a canvas bank pouch. She went down the center aisle to the back, to the little room where the safe and the inventory books were kept. 
        The safe, a big old-fashioned lead-lined model bolted to the floor, was slightly ajar. Angie knelt down and opened the door wider. The safe was completely empty. She put the pouch inside, shut the door, spun the knob a couple of times, then tugged on the door to be sure it was locked. 
        She straightened up, her knees cracking a little, and her gaze fell on the bookshelves that held the inventory binders which represented the entire commercial history of Lost and Found. 
        On an impulse, feeling a tiny bit sneaky, she went over to the shelves and tried to remember the inventory number for the dining room set she had just sold.
        400 something, she thought. 40018? She scanned the spines of the black binders, feeling as if she were at the library searching for a book via the Dewey decimal system. Finally she found the binder marked 40006-40111; took it down and flipped through it. She found the entry for 1418, but the item was a Rockwell print, signed and numbered. She kept hunting and then stopped at item 40081. 

October 22nd; 8 piece solid mahogany dining room set, Duncan Phyfe repro., circa 1920. Paid $800     
to: estate of Mary Warren, Coventry, Rhode Island. Salvi and Grace, Attnys, Westminster St.  Providence. 
Provenance: "AIF" (which after puzzling over, Angie figured must mean 'Always in Family.') One table w/2 leaves, pedestal legs, 6 ivory silk upholstered chairs, 2 arms, 4  sides and sideboard, poss. depression era; complementary but not matching. Gen.condition good: expected wear on upholstery, minor scratching and dull patches on tabletop.
Armchair needs reglueing. Note: Manny p/u 10/23; repaired and refinished tabletop; delivered L&F 11/05; pd. $200.  
 
        So, Paul bought the set for $800; paid Manny $200 (Angie had met Manny, a sweet old guy with only four fingers on his left hand. Manny repaired and restored furniture; his sons did pick-ups and deliveries.) Five months ago Paul laid out $800 for the dining room suite, and five months later, realized a profit of nine thousand dollars.
        That's how it works, Angie thought. The $500 commission was a windfall to her, but judging by this enormous profit, to Paul, just a...tip.
        Angie replaced the binder on the shelf and turned off the light in the little room as she left. She stopped in the break room to retrieve her handbag, and turned off the light to that room, too.
 
        At the entrance to the main room, she went to the alarm box and pushed #2 and ‘away’ to set it. 
Then she turned to the row of light switches and hurriedly flipped them off as Paul had instructed. There were eight in all, but she turned off only the last six, two by two.  She had no idea what the first two switches controlled. 
        The store was plunged, incrementally, into blackness. She couldn't see two feet in front of her. Her eyes, with their myriad new afflictions including night blindness and the occasional (like right now) black snowfalls of  feathery specks; added to their lifelong myopia and astigmatisms, had no time to adjust to the dark. She now had less than thirty seconds now to get to the front door. 
        The mirrors hanging at the back of the store were no help; they might as well have been painted black. The mirrors near the front of the store emitted only a sallow illumination; as if their glass surfaces not reflecting, but ingesting the bright bustling evening on Wickenden Street, swallowing its light and life. 

        How, she wondered, am I going to get to the front door without breaking my neck? The circuitous path to the door lay between a dense wood of breakfronts and armoires and dressers; past shadowy shapes of lamps and vases and statues set atop tables and desks. The darkness transformed the familiar shapes into humanlike silhouettes and populated the silence. A lamp on top of a highboy was a lady in a wide brimmed hat. A globe on a desk? A bald man, sitting patiently, waiting for Angie to stumble by.
        Angie was suddenly apprehensive. She wanted to sprint down the aisle to the front door, but she could barely see. The aisle was there, but objects encroached upon her path. She stumbled over the claw foot of a settee and then hit her knee on a table as she advanced. 
        Take it easy. There’s plenty of time. She had a feel for how long thirty seconds was because that was the length of the delay on her alarm at home.  Angie stretched out her arms to either side to keep her bearings. She was walking as warily as a blind person. Her right hand groped thin air, and she waved it back and forth to locate the tall dark object she sensed was right there, very close.
        She found it. Her hand closed on it. She felt something rounded.  Fabric-covered. Warm. 
        Warm? 
        Like someone’s shoulder.
        Then it shifted under her touch, confirming the unthinkable.  She had touched a real live person who was hiding in the dark, still as a statue. 
        Adrenalin galvanized her brain and Angie bolted to the front door, fumbled frantically, almost comically, with the inside lock, unfastening it finally and propelling herself outside. She slammed the door behind her. Stood, trembling, with hammering heart and rasping breath; her back against the door, facing the street. 
        Cars were crawling by. A young man in a Red Sox baseball cap looked at her curiously as he drove past. It was not full dark, but the gunmetal clouds pressing down had robbed the sky of its last light.
        Already her mind was spinning the event. Doing its job to protect her; reprocessing, reevaluating, rationalizing and finally, in a split second, constructing a version that she could live with. 
        What had really happened was that Angie’s hand had grasped the crocheted shawl draped around the knob of the cheval mirror, causing the mirror to tilt. 
        Of course.
        But: wasn't the rounded thing soft? And warm?
        Warm? Soft?  Ridiculous.  Get that out of your head!
        Angie’s inner voice protested.    
        The cheval mirror isn’t there. It’s up at the front of the store by the stacks of paintings.
        No, you're thinking of another mirror. Stop thinking. Go home. 
        Angie turned around and peered through the door and saw nothing moving inside. She pulled the front door key from her pocket, and with it, brought out Paul’s business card. 
        Call Paul. 
        And tell him what, exactly?
        Angie pushed the card back into her pocket, turned the key in the lock; twisted the knob to be sure it wouldn’t turn. Then; very, very gingerly, as if rabid jaws were waiting inside to snap off her fingertips, she quickly pushed the key back through the mail slot. She heard it drop to the floor inside.

 Chapter Eleven.

         Sometime during the overnight hours of Wednesday of the following week, Angie’s boiler finally expired. She awoke to a freezing house. And no hot water.
        Over and over, she turned the thermostat down low, and then, with the kitchen and basement doors ajar, turned it up slowly, listening in vain for the boiler to kick on. She prayed that she was merely out of oil, but in her heart she knew that her boiler had finally given up the ghost, collapsed like a faithful old horse who’d been driven to death.
        Mike Hakkim’s downstairs apartment would be all right since he had electric baseboard heat, but he wouldn’t have hot water either. She phoned him to tell him but got no answer, and then remembered he’d gone to a medical conference in Miami. She wished she were in Miami, too.

          Angie had a gas stove, so she did what people in tenements do: she turned on the oven and left the door open a little to take the chill away. It was not yet eight o’clock, but she phoned Carol at home and told her the problem.
         “I’m trying to take the chill off with my oven,” she told Carol. “I may be late, or I may not be able to come in at all if I can get somebody to replace this boiler today. Honey, can you cover? I am so sorry to do this to you…”
         “Don’t worry about it,” Carol said. “I’ll do the phones when I get in. If you can’t come in at all, I’ll ask Joe if that new intern can possibly do something to earn her college credits besides flirting with all the men and talking on her cell phone.” 

 

         “We can’t do it until tomorrow,” the man from the oil company told her when he finally called her back at 9:30.
         “We would have to pick up the new boiler sometime today from our supplier. But we could be out there first thing, around 8:30. And I just want to warn you, it is an all-day job.”
         “How much?” Angie asked, a question that rolled trippingly off her tongue nowadays.
         “If we don’t run into problems, you’re looking at about $5000 for parts and labor.”
         Angie had the $10,000 cash out from the remortgage. She’d used three thousand of it to pay down some credit cards and put the rest into her savings account just two weeks ago. Now she would have to take out most of it.
         “We could do some terms,” the man told her as the silence stretched.
         “Terms?”
         “Yes, three thousand up front and then we could spread the rest out over a year.”
         Fiscal death by two thousand cuts. “No,” Angie said. “I’ll pay in full.”
         Angie called Carol at the station, who was still manning the phones.
         “I’m coming in,” Angie told her. “They can’t replace the boiler until tomorrow.”
         “Okay, hon, I’m sorry,” Carol said.
         “I’m just worried about Westerly. How can he be in the house all day without heat? I can’t leave the stove on while I’m gone. I have a space heater, but it’s dangerous to leave that on too when no one’s home. And Mike’s gone, or I would ask him if I could leave Wes down there.”
           “Ange, don’t worry, it’s supposed to get up into the high 40’s today. Why don’t you crank up the stove for about a half an hour, get the kitchen nice and toasty, and then shut all the doors to the kitchen to keep the heat in? Westerly will be fine.”
         “That’s a good idea, Carol. I will see you in about an hour.”
         Angie closed all four doors that led to the kitchen: the back door, the den door, the bathroom door and the door to the front hall, and cranked up the oven to 500. She put an old quilt down on the floor for Westerly next to the stove and fresh water and a little bowl of dry food, and went upstairs to take a quick freezing sponge bath and get dressed.
         When she came down, the kitchen was almost uncomfortably warm. Angie turned off the stove. Westerly had already made himself quite comfortable on the quilt and didn’t even bother to get up.
         Angie turned on the radio for company for Westerly. It was tuned to WRI.
         “I hope Gene James doesn’t give you a headache, Westy.”
 She locked up and alarmed the house, and went to work.

 

         After the start of her lunch hour Angie knocked on Joe Bradley’s office door. He said, “Come,” and when she opened the door she saw he was talking on the phone and vigorously chewing gum at the same time.
         He held up a finger and kept talking and while Angie waited, she noticed a package of nicotine gum on his blotter. It didn’t take a sleuth to figure out that this was one of Joe’s latest desperate attempts to stop smoking. Finally, she heard him say,                
         “Well, keep me up to speed on this, not like the last time, buddy,” and he hung up.
         “Angie! What’s up?”
         “Oh, nothing major, Joe. Just wanted to let you know I won’t be in tomorrow, but Carol will cover.”
         “Oh, sure, okay, nothing wrong, I hope.”
         “No, my boiler is kaput and they’re installing a new one tomorrow, it is supposed to take all day.”
         “Whew, that’s pricey,” Joe winced. “We put a new boiler in my mother’s house last year. What’s it setting you back, about six thousand?”
         “They said around five thousand.”
         “Yeah, that’s what they say,” Joe said. “Then the bill says something else. Maybe you should get another estimate.”
         “But I have no heat or hot water.”
         “I‘d give you the name of the company who did my mother‘s boiler,” Joe said, “but frankly, they did a crappy job. Still, you should call around. Get some ammunition.”
         Angie knew Joe was right. She also knew she wouldn’t bother. Tom would have, of course, he would have asked his friends, made a few calls, then negotiated down the price. These were the times when Angie wished Michael lived close.  
         Of course, if wishes were boilers, everybody would have heat.          

“Well, good luck, Angie,” Joe said, and Angie turned to leave, but then Joe said, “Oh, Angie, hang on, something I keep forgetting to talk to you about. Sit down a minute.
         “Excuse me,” Joe said, and turned his head a little and took the gum he’d been chewing out of his mouth and dropped in his wastebasket.
         “Nicotine gum,” he said. “They make it taste too good. Now if it tasted like a Marlboro, it might be more effective.” 
          Then, out of nowhere, he said, “Angie, you probably know Gene James is between producers at the moment.”
         Angie knew. The whole station knew that Gene James went through producers the way rich men went through wives. She nodded.
         “We’ve got a couple of the board ops picking up the slack for the moment, but Gene needs a real producer.”
          Angie waited to see what this had to do with her.
         “He specifically asked for you,” Joe said.
         “For me!” Angie repeated in amazement. "Why me? I know nothing about producing a radio show! I can’t even run a board!”

         Joe Bradley shrugged his shoulders as if he, too, couldn't fathom why her either.
         Angie had nightmarish images of four hours of dead air. Of cutting off callers and playing the wrong commercials. Accidentally leaving mikes open so all of Rhode Island got an earful of Gene James’ off the record rants.
         “Running the board is the easy part, trust me,” Joe assured her. “Angie, do you remember the...ah...incident of the Yankees cap?”
         “I heard about it,” Angie said. “I wasn’t there.”
         “Exactly. You weren’t there. Gene has a vendetta against everybody who was there. Including me.” His office chair squealed as he leaned forward urgently.
         “Angie, this station cannot afford to lose Gene James. Say what you will about him, his ratings are blockbuster. My worst nightmare is a major market station will make him an offer he won’t refuse. Or that he will syndicate. Frankly, I don't know why he hasn't already. And either one of those scenarios would be a disaster for WRI and for me. I would lose my job if that happened.”
         “No, I can‘t believe that!” Angie protested.
         “Oh, yeah,” Joe said grimly. “Believe it. So, anyway, Gene wants you to produce his show. He is aware of what you do for me, writing speeches, all the research, scheduling, the PR stuff, the FCC stuff...etc, etcetera... You already know the phone system, how to vet calls, that's a big plus, you’re ahead of the game already.”
         “But, Joe.” It had just occurred to her, “What if it doesn’t work out? And you’ve already replaced me? Gene James would only be out a producer, but I would be out of a job.”
         Still, Angie thought, despite her misgivings: a radio producer, me! She felt a thrill of excitement and confidence. 
          I can do it. Why can't I do it?
         “Obviously,” Joe continued, “you will need board training, and you will need to familiarize yourself with what’s involved with producing a show...especially his show.”
         “But Joe, there’s another thing: Gene James and I despise each other!”
         “Well,” Bradley said. “Apparently he doesn’t despise you.”
         “Oh, Joe.” Angie said. “I don’t know.”
         “It would mean a big hike in pay, Angie. You would get what Wayne was making. In fact, Gene insisted on it.”
         Angie didn’t know what Wayne got paid when he was Gene James’ producer, but she assumed was a lot more than she earned now as a lowly receptionist.
         Money, money, money, money!
         She sighed. “When do I start?” Just saying the words gave her a sick sinking feeling.
         “We’ll ease you into it. I warned him that if you agreed, I need a couple of weeks to find a replacement. But you will still have to spend a couple of hours with him every afternoon until you take over. Carol can cover.”
         Poor, long-suffering Carol! Angie thought. She is the one who needs a damn raise. 
         “The person who really deserves a raise around here, is Carol,” Angie said.
         They looked into each other’s eyes. Bradley broke the silence and said, with a little grin, “Are you trying to extort me, Ms. Russo?”
         “I’m just saying. Carol’s got a lot on her plate these days,” Angie said meaningfully, and she didn’t smile back.
         “Well,” Joe said, and shook two pieces of nicotine gum loose from the package, popped it in his mouth and started chewing vigorously.
         “I will take that under advisement.” 
 
         Bradley buzzed her later that day at her desk.
         “I gave Gene the good news. He wants to see you in his office at four thirty."
         “Joe, before I see Gene, I want to have a word with Wayne. Is that all right with you?”
         “Sure, it’s a free country,” Joe said. “But remember there is no love lost between Wayne and Gene. Take what both of them say with a grain of salt.”
 
         Wayne Fletcher was a Boston Brahmin. A Harvard graduate, with a masters in business administration from U Penn. He had started out at WRI as a summer intern but by that fall, he was Gene James’ producer. They were joined at the hip, at the beginning; one obnoxious brat with two heads. Behind his back, some people at WRI called Wayne The Mouthpiece; and Gene James The Mouth. But mostly people called Wayne Igor.

One memorable Christmas party, Joe Bradley got uncharacteristically loaded and did his impression of Wayne as Igor, dragging a foot behind him and calling to Gene James holding court across the room: "Master, master...!"
        Gene, self-obsessed as he was, didn’t pick up at first on the boundless ambition of Wayne Fletcher, who was a great/great/great grand scion of robber barons. Wayne didn’t want Gene’s job, however. He wanted Joe Bradley’s job, and that was just for starters. Ultimately he wanted to fatten up WRI, get rid of costly on air talent like Gene James, and replace them with wall to wall syndicated programming. They already had Rush Limbaugh and Dr. Laura; plus numerous brokered hours including a vitamin peddler; a pet doctor; a financial planner and an astrologist. 
         As salaries declined and profits rose, Wayne would make a deal to sell the station to the big boys, Clear Channel or Verizon, and worm his way into their upper echelons. With the help of his insanely rich father, who owned a nice chunk of downtown Boston, and sat on the Clear Channel BOD.

        So, for two years Wayne endured James’ insults, his condescension, his sulks, his vitriol and his paranoia. On the flip side, he reveled in the reflected power that came from being the producer of New England’s foremost independent radio talk show.
        Then one day, thanks to a phone call by Wayne’s father to the owner of WRI, a fellow Skull and Boner, an edict came down from on high. 
        Joe Bradley, with little choice in the matter, delivered Wayne from bondage and made him WRI program director. 
        Now, technically, he was Gene James’ boss. 
        Although practically speaking, nobody ruled Gene James.

        Gene James was a paradox. He was a megalomaniac wrapped in mysogyny inside an enormous ego. He was neither fish nor fowl. He was whatever you were not. He was today what yesterday you’d have bet the farm he wasn’t. On Tuesday, he loved the cops, the firemen and the unions. On Wednesday he eviscerated them, called them lazy, witless, corrupt and incompetent.
         James used to hate the last mayor of Providence. His was the most strident voice in the state; calling daily for him to be stripped from office and sent to jail. Which is what eventually happened. 
         Now he loved the old Mayor, fresh out of prison, as a mother loves her errant child. His honeymoon with the current administration was way over. James claimed that the new mayor was so busy kissing minority and East Side liberal butt, he forgot to grow the city. 
         Every day from two to four, Gene James's mouth roared.
         “Did you hear what he said about the mayor today?” Bradley would say desperately to Angie and whoever else would listen. His fast-graying hair stood straight up on his head. He paced like an animal in a cage. Sometimes he appeared to be smoking two cigarettes at once.
          Just last week, Bradley came bolting out of his office, which was just behind Angie’s desk and said wildly, “I’ve already had six calls and he’s been off air five minutes! One of them was from the Mayor's office, telling me I've got to rein him in. As if!" Bradley snorted and at the same time took a big hit from his cigarette, which made him choke.   

          But Rhode Island, home to a million mavericks, adored crazy Gene James. It might be the bluest state in the country, but it was a contrary place. After all, Rhode Island was the first colony to declare its independence of England. First to draw blood in the Revolution. Last to sign the Constitution. Not for nothing that astride the statehouse dome stood the quintessential  Rhode Model:  the Independent Man.
             As was the case with most talk show hosts, Gene James was not interested in real debate. He preferred to preach to the choir.
             Angie knew James’ calls were caller ID’d; scrupulously screened, cross referenced by the producer and after that, capriciously accepted or denied by Gene James.

Every weekday Angie fielded calls from inflamed listeners who had mistakenly phoned the station’s main line instead of the caller line; so anxious were they to give James a piece of their minds.
         It was the producer’s job to answer the caller line and then stack the calls on four designated lines like an on-air traffic controller.

         “Would you like to speak to Gene?” was the first question to callers who were either in their kitchens jazzed on caffeine or stewing in bumper to bumper traffic on Route 95.
         “What did you want to say to Gene?” Callers could hear the tic-tic of the computer keyboard as they opined.
         The callers who supported his point of view usually got on; those that didn’t, were put on hold, then many minutes later, found themselves listening to a dial tone. Sometimes they tried to call back but always got a busy signal. Finally they got the hint.
         Some days Gene was in the mood to take a call from Al in Warwick, who had terminal cancer and called nearly every day. Sometimes he indulged Sister Mary Catherine, his old English teacher at Sacred Heart High School. Sometimes not.

         Angie knew it was also the producer’s job to think like Gene James; assess his mood on any given day and triage the callers according to criteria that changed as fast as James changed his mind. The producer of The Gene James Show, who also operated the board, watched through a glass partition, trying to get a read on James’ state of mind that day; finger hovering over the dump button, ever ready to deep six a caller when James got annoyed or bored. James was the most unpredictable when he was bored.

         The producer did all this, mind you, while flawlessly, expertly, parking the calls in the right order, fitting in the commercial and newsbreaks, and making sure it all went down with split second timing. Two hours a day, five days a week. Not to mention prep work.

        Some callers went bonkers when James baited or ridiculed them, which always amazed Angie; what did they expect would happen when they called the Gene James show? Put-downs were  his schlock-in-trade.

Often, despite the mandated five second delay, some expletives, threats and insults got through anyway.  Letting them out over public airwaves could result in fines and worse from the FCC. But sometimes, even the most honed reflexes couldn’t react in time.

“Well, Gene,” a caller might say in a perfectly calm and reasonable tone, “I get what you’re saying but…you’re a  f*****ing a**h**e!”

            Yikes! What have I let myself in for?

         Wayne was all phony smiles when Angie stopped into his office.
         “What brings such a pretty lady to my lair?”
         He grinned boyishly but his body language read: why is this old lady receptionist intruding on my valuable time?
         “Gene James would like me to be his new producer,” Angie said, without preamble. “Be honest with me, Wayne. Do you think I can do the job?”
         Angie saw Wayne’s shock blaze behind his mild blue eyes.
         He recovered in a nanosecond and held a glad hand out to Angie.
         “Well, well, well! Congratulations!”
         Angie shook his hand. He didn’t get up or invite her to sit so she stood in front of his desk, feeling awkward.
        “Be honest with me, Wayne,” she said earnestly. “Do you think I can do the job?”
        “Angie, what, are you kidding? Of course you can! You’re smart as hell, and everybody here knows it. The real question is: do you want to do the job?”
         “I see this as a great opportunity, Wayne.” Angie said. “And it means a lot more money, which I certainly could use.”
         “Have you already made up your mind?”
         “I think so.”
         Wayne gave her an openly assessing stare. Part of his takeover strategy was to eventually dump Gene James. Everybody at the station, including Gene James, knew what his plan was. 
         Angie could tell that behind the fake enthusiasm Wayne’s brain was also calculating the impact of her announcement. He was debating whether Angie was now the enemy, and if so, was she even a worthy opponent? Or maybe he was thinking: best case scenario: could he could turn her into a sort of Trojan horse and roll her into Gene James’ domain carrying the seeds of his destruction?
        “I say, go for it, Angie,” Wayne said with what passed for sincerity to those who didn't know him. “Gene knows talent and ability when he sees it.” He smiled ironically at the self-compliment.
         “And you’re right;” he went on, “it is a wonderful opportunity. Please feel free to come to me anytime for advice or commiseration. I promise I’ll do everything I can to help you.”     
         He stood up, not in belated welcome but in abrupt dismissal, and held out his hand to shake hers again. “I mean that. My door is always open.”
         Angie shook his hand again.
        “Thank you, Wayne. I might take you up on that offer.”
        Wayne looked suddenly serious.
        “Just let me remind you, Angie, that if you take this job, Gene is just your defacto boss. I am your real boss. If you have a problem with James, come to me. Secondly, which I am sure you already know, Gene is a helluva tough guy to work for. Don’t let him intimidate you. If you take a position on something, and you’re sure you’re right, then whatever you do don’t back down or he will never respect you. And if Gene James doesn’t respect you, he will make your life a living hell.”
         That last remark, at least, Angie thought, was honest. But a position? I only hope to know enough to even have a position! But going behind Gene James's back to Wayne.
         Never happen, Angie resolved. She hated Gene James much less than she distrusted Wayne Fletcher.
         “Thanks, Wayne. Thanks for your time.”
         “Not at all, Angie.” He had already mentally kicked her out of his office and was picking up  papers on his desk.
         As she got to the door, she turned around and asked him: “You want your door open or closed, Wayne?”
         “Closed, thank you, Angie,” he answered, without looking at her.
         Life is strange, Angie mused as she closed the door. She had made her decision. A receptionist walked into this office, and a producer walked out.  

         At three o’clock Angie stood in front of Gene James’ closed office door, her hand poised to knock.
         You are a grown woman, she told herself. Gene James doesn’t scare you. He’s just a snarky little vonce, as Beatrice would say.
        She knocked briskly.
        “Enter,” James’ voice commanded, in surely the same tone as Caligula used when his mother came to call.
        Angie opened the door and stood at the threshold.
        “Ah. Nancy,” James said, with his trademark smirk. “I expected you an hour ago.”
       “Angie,” Angie said, ignoring his remark. An hour ago, he was still on the air.
       “Before we begin, how about a cup of coffee?”
       “Oh, no thank you,” Angie said, pleased and surprised. “I’ve reached my caffeine quota for the day, I’m afraid.”
         He stared at her. “I meant,” he said, “how about getting me a cup of coffee.”

 

 

 

C

hapter Twelve.

On the next Saturday, Angie hurried into Lost and Found with just a few minutes to spare. She had overslept, which was unlike her, but the night before she’d gone back to the station and spent several hours trying to learn the board from one of the engineers. She’d tumbled into bed about midnight and dreamed of Time. Seconds clicking; minutes whirling, hours sprinting.  
            Angie worried that she would never learn, could not learn.

She and a nice, incredibly patient young kid named Tito performed simulated Gene James programs over and over. Although the music buffers, station ID’s, news, traffic and weather; commercials and PSA's were already programmed into the computer by the traffic department, she had to remember the order in which they aired. If breaks were off by even a second or two they had to be tweaked. Angie needed to know every button, switch and dial on the board and their functions, whether she would have occasion to use them or not.  The board itself was an old-school relic despite the fact that WRI was one of the more successful indie stations in the country and could have afforded state-of-the-art. 
            Angie had to learn which switches to flip off and when to flip them back on again; which mikes to pot down during breaks and then turn up again when they came back live. The weather, traffic reports and some national news segments were remote and had to be punched up precisely. Angie had to coordinate all that while screening calls, parking them in the right order, and IMing Gene James in his studio to let him know who’s on first.

“I feel like a one-armed paperhanger,” she told Tito.

Angie felt fairly confident that once she got the drill down and the board opping became second nature, she’d be all right. But as it was; if these practice runs had been live shows; they’d have been unmitigated disasters, and Angie would surely be looking for a new job.

           

            “Good morning, Angie!” Paul was seated as his desk in the shop on Wickenden Street, tapping at his computer. "Guess what: I’ve been doing the math and after next Saturday we’ll be all square.”

            “You mean, with the vase?”

            “Yes, all square with the vase. I think you might even have some change coming. But I was hoping I could persuade you to stay on. I have a lot of business travel I’ve been putting off and it would really help if you could run the shop on Saturdays. Of course you would receive a salary, in addition to the same commission arrangement as before.”

            Angie thought about it. She had grown accustomed to spending her Saturdays in this little shop. She could certainly use the extra money.

            “I would love to stay, Paul. But I have taken on some extra responsibilities at work and I’m just afraid...”

            Angie stopped. She was getting tired of being afraid.

            “Never mind. Thank you for your offer to stay on, and I accept.”

 

            It was a busy day at Lost and Found. Angie sold a forties-era Sylvania radio; an old, though not first edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and to the owner of a new Downcity pub who was browsing the street; six black and white matted photographs of 1950’s Providence.        

A little after two, during a lull, Paul told Angie he was going across the street to Tokyo for lunch, and offered to bring back some takeout for her. She said no thanks, and when he was gone she began obsessively/compulsively tidying up the cash drawer, turning all the bills and checks right side up, all facing right. She heard the front bell tinkle and looked up to see a heavyset woman walk in.

“Good afternoon,” Angie called to her. “Can I help you with something?”

“Oh, I’m just looking,” the woman called back.

“If you need help, just shout out,” Angie said, and then she went back to what she was doing.

A little while later, she looked up and the woman was standing there. She was dressed in the gypsy garb of many overweight women: ankle length black dress, long coat of many colors, at least two bright flowing scarves and dangling silver hoop earrings.

            She was also one of the most exquisitely lovely women Angie had ever seen. Angie fell into a kind of openmouthed trance, as people do in the face of great beauty.

            “I would like to purchase this mirror,” the woman said.

            “Oh! Of course! I’m sorry,” Angie said. She took the object from the woman’s hand and noted the sticker price: one hundred dollars. It appeared to be made of black glass. It was gilt-trimmed in an interlocking geometric pattern. It had the substance and craftsmanship of something unique and special. The woman had called it a mirror, so Angie turned it over to see the looking glass side. Then she twisted it around again in confusion. It was opaque black on both sides.

            “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said. “I believe this is a decorative plate, not a mirror.”

            The woman smiled at her, showing milky white teeth as flawless as a debutante’s first string of pearls.

            “This is a scrying mirror. It does not reflect images. It reveals them.”

            Holy smoke, Angie thought. Beautiful and crazy.

            “I’m Maren,” the woman said, laughing. “But you obviously think I’m crazy.”

            Angie laughed, too. “I’m Angie. And as a trained retail professional, I know better than to call a customer crazy.” She looked again at the plate, or mirror, or whatever it was, and asked, “What is scrying?”

            “It’s a form of divination. Gazing into certain objects to receive visions.”

            “Like a crystal ball?”

            “Many people use crystal balls. I prefer the black mirror. I have more luck.”

            “We have a crystal ball here in the shop,” Angie told her.

            “I noticed it,” Maren said. “Not to be rude, but it is merely decorative, useless for scrying. I’m surprised Paul even bought it. Especially since the occult was really his brother’s thing.”         

“His brother? I didn’t know Paul has a brother,”  Angie said in surprise.

“Had a brother. Peter. I never met him. He died many years ago. Peter and Paul ran the shop together.”

“Oh,” Angie said. “How long have you known Paul?”

            “In years, about five. In lifetimes, we go way back, at least two reincarnations that I know of!”

            Angie said, “Pardon me?”

            “Just kidding!”

            “I think you’re right about the crystal ball,” Angie confided. “I never see anything in it.”

            Maren raised her perfectly arched brows. “Is there something in particular you are trying to see?”

            Why she replied as she did, Angie would always wonder.

            “Not something. Someone.”

            “Ah,” Maren said. “Yes. I had a feeling. You have sad eyes.”

            She looked at Angie for a moment and said, briskly, “You know what? I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want the mirror after all.”

            Angie was dismayed. “Was it something I said?”

            “Oh, no. Well, actually, yes. I have so many scrying mirrors and bowls. You should take this one for yourself. It is very…authentic, I think.”

            “Authentic?”

            “Well, not to say that this is an old mirror. The oldest were made of obsidian. This is relatively new. But it is said that some black mirrors are still made using the ancient arts. Dusted with gold and moonstone, anointed with herbs, and blessed under the light of a full moon. Then coated to seal in the energy they contained. Such black mirrors are very powerful. This might be one of those.”

            She was smiling, and Angie could not tell if she was serious or joking.

            “There are no guarantees in magic. But take it home, and see what you can see.”

            After Maren left, Angie picked up the black mirror, and looked into it. Nothing. She held at arms’ length, then up close, keeping her eyes wide and unfocused as if it were one of those magic eye pictures and a 3-D image would suddenly jump out at her.

            When Paul came back from lunch, she asked him if she could buy it. He took it from her hands and looked at it, then looked up at Angie, amused.

            “You want this? Do you know what it is?”

            “Yes,” Angie said,  “Maren told me.”

            “Oh. Maren. She was in?”

            “She said the crystal ball in the shop was…merely decorative.”

            Paul laughed. “Maren is such a purist. She forgets I am a businessman, too.”

            A businessman, too? Angie thought. What else are you? A warlock?

            “Take it,” Paul said, handing it back to her. “A gift from me.”

            “Really?” Angie said, relieved. A hundred dollars for a black dish was a lot, even it was dusted with gold and blessed by the light of the moon.

            “Just be careful,” Paul said to her. He didn’t smile, and his eyes glinted like shards of broken blue glass.

            “Is it very fragile?” Angie said.

            “No, you’re very fragile.”

            Angie looked at him, shocked. It was the first personal remark he had ever made to her. Does my face reveal so much? she wondered. First Maren, now Paul.

            He walked over and sat behind his desk in the handsome old oxblood leather wing chair he used as an office chair.

            “Paul?”

            He looked up at her inquisitively.

            “Once I asked you why you have so many mirrors in the shop. You said mirrors fascinate you. May I ask why?”

            He shrugged slightly.

            “Actually, it is the myths of mirrors that fascinate me.”     
            “The myths of mirrors? What do you mean?”

            “Every ancient culture believed in the magical powers of mirrors. Some of the earliest mirrors were burning mirrors.”

“Burning mirrors?”

“Yes. Metal mirrors with a concave shape that captured the rays of the sun and turned it into fire. People didn’t understand how it worked; all they knew was that a burning mirror could ignite a pile of cold kindling and turn it into a source of light and heat. Imagine their awe! It had to be magic!

“Have you ever broken a mirror and worried about seven years of bad luck?”

            Angie nodded.

            “That superstition comes from the Romans.”     
            “Seven years is a long time to wait for a change of luck.”

            “Slaves in the South, of the United States, that is, figured out a shortcut. They put the shards of the broken mirror in a south running stream and reversed the curse in seven hours.”

            Angie laughed. “American ingenuity.”

            “The Romans were the first to invent glass mirrors, by the way. Before that, mirrors were silver and brass. Trimmed in gold; studded with precious gems. Only the rich could afford to see their reflections.”

            “Paul?” Angie was going to ask him about his brother. Then she changed her mind.

            “Is it okay if I take lunch now?”

 

            On Monday morning Angie found a note at her desk at work, scrawled on a Del’s Lemonade napkin, and all it said was: “Honeymoon’s over. Time to earn your pay.”

            Angie went in to see Joe Bradley as soon as she could break away from the phones. The room had an odd odor, not tobacco smoke; more like singed hair.

            She showed him the napkin.

            “James.”

            “I surmise.”

            “Well, Angie, I guess he’s chomping at the bit. He’s going on two months without a producer. Can’t really blame him.”

            “Joe, I’m not ready!”

            “How are the board lessons coming along?”

            “Not good,” Angie said grimly.

            “Well, how about this: we’ll get Tito or somebody else to stay with you until you’re confident.”

            “Joe, am I making a mistake here? Be honest.”

            “Angie, hell no. If I thought so, I would not have let you do it. Gene James is too important to this station to take a chance.”

            Joe sounded very convincing, but as he was giving her his vote of confidence, he was rummaging through his desk drawer until he found was he was looking for. A butt. The sure giveaway that he, too, was freaking out.

            “Joe!”

            “Angie, this is not what it looks like.”

            “It looks like a cigarette, Joe.”

            “It’s not a cigarette,” he said earnestly.

            “It’s not?”

            “Well, not a cigarette per se. It is made from vegetable fibers and...other stuff. Perfectly harmless.”

            He lit up, inhaled deeply; gagged slightly, but immediately took another frantic puff.

           

            Angie waited until Gene James wrapped up his show and went to his office. His door was open and he looked up when she tapped on the doorframe.

            “Well if it isn’t Margie, erstwhile receptionist and producer-in-pay-only! Come the hell in. What do you want, a raise?”

            “Gene, I understand your frustration. Just give me another week of board training before I officially start.”

            “A week? That’s impossible! Look, either you can do it, or you can’t. Don’t bullshit me. I got a show to do two hours a day five days a week, I’ve got no time for this crap.”

            Angie realized it was useless to point out to James that the deal from the beginning was supposed to be a slow ease into the responsibilities of producing.

            She almost told him to forget it, find somebody else. Then she realized she really wanted to do this job.

            “Gene, my replacement at the front desk is starting next Monday. I’ve been working hard with Tito learning the board.”

            “Tito?” James sneered. “He played the same commercial back to back last Friday and cut off like five callers. It’s like the blind leading the blind!”            

“Maybe in the meantime I could help you with the other stuff,” Angie said to him reasonably. “Like booking guests, or research?”

            James glared at her for a moment, nonplussed that he hadn’t managed to ruffle her.        

            “Well,” he said grudgingly, “Since you’re so anxious to be helpful: get me a list of potential guests for the next month. By tomorrow. I want to see the way you think. But here are my rules: no authors unless they’re famous, and no fiction writers, I don’t care how famous they are. No celebrities unless we’re talking Arnold Schwartzenegger. Or Bill O’Reilly. I like O’Reilly.”

            Figures, Angie thought.

            He stabbed his pen at her face.

“With a national story always look for the local angle. I like victims; they’re always good. Defendants can be good, but they’re usually gagged by their lawyers so that’s no fun. Politicians, yeah, of course, but never at election time, if they want airtime let them pay for it. So, politicians only if they’re in the thick of something local, scandalous or criminal. All three, and we got us a dream guest. You getting this?”

            “Got it,” Angie said. A drop of perspiration rolled down her temple. She couldn’t feel her legs.

            “How many papers do you read every morning?”

            “Uh, .the Providence Journal…”

            “The Journal is crucial. Read it cover to cover. USA Today, that’s good for an overview but it’s like fast food for the mind. I want you to subscribe to USA Today, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe. Get up at the butt crack of dawn and read 'em.  If I don’t have a guest, and frankly I think guests are overrated; I fly by the seat of my pants. I like to throw out a topic like a chunk of raw meat and let the callers fight over it.

            “Every morning I want to see your five picks for topic of the day. Plus a backstory on each of them so I know what the hell I’m talking about. They don’t always have to be front-page. I want controversial, polarizing. I live to piss people off.” James gave her a Grinchy grin. 

            “I’ll keep that in mind,” Angie said.

            Gene James was on a roll.

            “Consider this: Rhode Island is the most Democratic state in the country. I am a Democrat’s worst nightmare. So how come I have the most popular radio talk show in New England?” 

            Beats me, Angie thought.

            “You brought up research. Be careful what you wish for. I’ve been working on something for a couple of years now. A retrospective on Rhode Island government corruption going back a hundred years. Maybe you’re thinking, oh that’s been done. Well, hell no; not the way I’m gonna do it. I am turning over rocks, my friend. Connecting dots that have never been connected before. I’m bucking for a Pulitzer. I've got some incredible stuff. I tried some of out on the show last year. I got death threats!”

            “Death threats?” Angie echoed.

            “Yeah,” James said, slapping the top of his desk with glee. “That’s how you know you’re getting close to the beating heart, when some bent-nose calls you up in the middle of the night.”                  

            Angie didn’t care for the bent-nose appellation. After all, she was of Italian descent on both sides. The last thing she would do, she resolved, is help Gene James revive this project. It sounded like nothing but trouble.

 

            That evening was hers and Carol’s designated monthly night out. They went to Andreas, a Greek restaurant on Thayer.

            “Did you know Jackie Kennedy used to come here?" she told Carol.

            “Why did Jackie Kennedy come here?”             
            “John Junior went to Brown.”

            “Oh, yeah," Carol said. “Well, that’s quite an endorsement, considering she married the richest Greek on the planet.”

            Angie ordered a glass of retsina, but Carol just wanted ice water.

            “Gonna make me drink alone?” Angie said teasingly.

            “Oh, I’m just feeling a little tired.”

            “It’s my fault,” Angie said guiltily. “You’re doing your job and mine too, half the time.”

            “Angie, I really don’t mind; going up front breaks up the day. And guess what: Joe told me he’s giving me a raise! Imagine that! I didn’t even have to grovel.”

            “Get outta town!” Angie exclaimed.

            “Yup, miracles do happen. And Joe even hinted he might make me office manager. Which sounds like a thankless job, but I guess he thinks it’s a promotion of sorts.”

            “Honey, you don’t sound so happy about it.”

            “Ange, I might as well tell you.”

            Angie knew what was coming. “Please don’t say it.”

            “Yeah. They found another lump under my right arm.”

            “Carol.” Angie felt like bursting into tears.

            Neither one of them had much of an appetite, after that.

                                   

            As Angie pulled into her driveway after work the next day, she saw a young woman standing near the steps to Mike Hakkim’s downstairs apartment.

            The girl looked around, startled.

            Angie turned off the car, grabbed her handbag and climbed out.

            “Hi,” she said. “Are you looking for Mike Hakkim?”

            “Uh, yes...do you know where he might be?”

            “Probably at the hospital this time of day. He does rounds after his office hours. He’s usually home by eight, I think.”

            “Oh, of course. I should have remembered that.”

            This was the first time Angie had seen Mike’s elusive girlfriend. She looked to be in her late twenties, with glossy dark hair to her shoulders and wide blue eyes. She was dressed in jeans and ankle boots and a short black leather jacket.

            How pretty and confident she is! Angie thought. What young man could resist her?

            Any day now, Mike will give me the news that he’s leaving.

            “I thought we were supposed to meet for dinner, but maybe I got the day confused,” the young woman said. “Maybe I should try to page him.” She put her hand in her jacket pocket.

            “Oh, I don’t have my cell with me, I forgot. Oh well...guess I’ll just call him when I get home.”

            “Do you want to use my phone?” Angie asked.

            “I don’t want to put you out.”

            “Not at all,” Angie said, “come on in.”

            “My name is Susan...Novak.”

            “Hi, Susan, I’m Angie Russo.” They shook hands, and Angie walked up the front steps to her front door and unlocked it, and Susan followed her in.

            Westerly was beside himself with joy: his mistress was home and she’d brought company! He could look forward to a run in the yard, plus lots of extra attention, and then...dinner!

            “You can use the phone in the kitchen. Follow me.”

            Angie stopped to disarm the alarm, which was persistently beeping.          
            “What a beautiful house, Ms. Russo.” the girl exclaimed. “It must be very old.”

            “More than a hundred years.”

            “I dream of owning an old house! Something really historic. There are so many magnificent old homes on the East Side! Have you toured the Henry Lippett house on Waterman?”

            “No, I am ashamed to say I haven’t yet,” Angie said. “Definitely on my to-do list, though. By the way, can I offer you a cold drink, Susan?”

            “Oh, no thank you. I’m fine.”

            “Well, there’s the phone, help yourself. Please excuse me but I think my dog is dying to go out, he’s been cooped up all day.”

            “I’ll be just a minute, Ms. Russo. Thank you so much.” She picked up the phone.

            “Take your time. And call me Angie,” Angie said, and she opened the door to the kitchen and went through the small hallway and out the back door with Westerly.

            When they came back in, Susan was standing in front of her refrigerator.

            “You have the cutest magnets. I like the little bread and butter one!”

            “I have a friend who always sends me silly ones,” Angie said. “Did you get hold of Mike?”

            “They paged him but he didn’t come to the phone. I don’t want to take up any more of your time, Ms. Russo. I’ll call him when I get home.”

            “Are you sure?”

            “Yes, I better go.”

            “Well, all right. Do you want me to tell him you were here?”

            “That‘s all right, I slipped a note under his door before.”

            “Oh, okay.”

            The young woman bent down to pet Westerly, and when his tail started wagging, she scratched him under his ears and he practically swooned.

            “What her name?”

            “It’s a he. Westerly.”

            “One day I want a cute doggie just like Westerly.” 
            The girl patted his head one last time and said, "You're a good boy!”

            “Yes, Wes is my man around the house,“ Angie said.

            The girl started down the front hallway, then paused and peeked into the parlor.

            “Oh, I love how you’ve done this room! The Queen Anne wings and the Edwardian love seat are perfect in here. So many people overfurnish period rooms. Less is more. Do you have fireplaces in every room?”

            “No,” Angie said. “Just this room and the one above, my bedroom.”

            “A fireplace in your bedroom! How romantic!"

            Susan poked her head in the dining room on the other side of the hall.

            "Ms. Russo, I really admire your taste. Your dining room furniture looks like it was designed just for that space. And the cherry wood looks gorgeous with the sage walls.”

            “Thanks, it did turn out nicely,” Angie said.

            They came to the front door, and Angie said, “Let me get the door for you, sometimes it sticks,” and she reached around the young woman to pull open the front door. The alarm contact on the door beeped three times.

            Susan looked up and down the street before stepping out.

            “I love Benefit Street,” she sighed. “This is where I want to live someday.”

            “It’s a beautiful street,” Angie agreed.

            “Well, Ms. Russo, thank you for letting me use your phone.”

            “Nice meeting you, Susan. I’m sure I’ll see you again.”

 

            Angie watched the young woman, who was walking north on Benefit and rounding a corner. She was a perfectly lovely girl, but something about her rubbed Angie the wrong way. She had big ambitions for a woman so young: a big historic house on Benefit Street, a cute doggie just like Westerly...and a doctor husband who could make it happen.

            That’s not nice, Angie. You are just jealous and resentful that Miss Susan Novak is going to take Mike away.   

            Angie fixed dinner for herself and Wes: broiled chicken and salad and fresh fruit, and that was it. She mixed some chicken with Westerly’s dry food and he gobbled it up and then turned his head around as if to say, “is this all there is?”

            She was still trying to lose the fifteen pounds her doctor said she should. Today was her first day on a kind of modified low carb diet. More South Beach than Atkins. Atkins had proved too punishing: no bread, no potatoes, no pasta? Cruel diet!
            

            She was also eyeing the classifieds for a used treadmill. New ones cost up to a thousand dollars, she could think of better ways to spend that money.

            She decided to take Westerly on a short but brisk walk around the block. That was exercise, and it was free.

            The night was chilly, it might be April on the calendar but in New England it was still winter. She and Wes speed-walked down Cady to North Main, then up South Court Street back to Benefit. As they passed the old Brill house next door, which was up for sale for the second time in two years, Angie noticed a couple of vans in the drive and lights on in the house, and heard faint hammering.

            The lettering on one of the vans said: Novak Plumbing and Heating. Coventry, Rhode Island.

            Hmmm. That’s funny, Angie thought. Mike’s girlfriend’s last name was Novak, too. Only in Rhode Island do you keep running into the same names, over and over.

 

            Speaking of names, Gene James hated all but two of the five names on the guest list she had submitted to him that morning. So she got on the computer about eight o’clock that night to work on some more names...digressing first to check her email.         

            There was a message from thefugitive@ether.com. Subject line: don’t delete, it’s me!

            Spam, she assumed, but then, her finger poised to click it away, she pressed Read instead.

 

            “Dearest Angie. It’s me. Sorry it’s taken so long to get in touch. I hear my loving husband is on a rampage. Apparently he’s trying to get a criminal charge against me for theft of marital assets, ain’t that a kick in the head? He’s the one who’s been draining my assets, financial and every other kind, for years!