Explosive Eighteen(2)

I lugged the laundry basket through the living room and dining room to the kitchen, where my mother was chopping vegetables.

“Soup?” I asked her.

“Minestrone. Are you coming for dinner?”

“Can’t. Got plans.”

My mother glanced at the laundry basket. “I just put a load of sheets into the washer. If you leave that here, I’ll do it later for you. How was Hawaii? We didn’t expect you home until tomorrow.”

“Hawaii was good, but the plane ride was long. Fortunately, I sat next to a guy who got off when we stopped in L.A., so I had more room.”

“Yeah, but you were also next to Mr. Tall, Dark, and Handsome.” Grandma said.

“Not exactly.”

This got both their attentions.

“How so?” Grandma asked.

“It’s complicated. He didn’t fly back with me.”

Grandma stared at my left hand. “You got a tan, except on your ring finger. It looks like you were wearing a ring when you got a tan, but you’re not wearing it no more.”

I looked at my hand. Bummer. When I took the ring off, I hadn’t noticed a tan line.

“Now I know why you went to Hawaii,” Grandma said. “I bet you eloped! Of course, being that you don’t got the ring on anymore would put a damper on the celebration.”

I blew out a sigh, poured myself a cup of coffee, and my phone rang. I dug around in my bag, unable to find the phone in the jumble of stuff I’d crammed in for the plane trip. I dumped it all out onto the little kitchen table and pawed through it. Granola bars, hairbrush, lip balm, hair scrunchies, notepad, wallet, socks, two magazines, a large yellow envelope, floss, mini flashlight, travel pack of tissues, three pens, and my phone.

The caller was Connie Rosolli, the bail bonds office manager. “I hope you’re on your way to the office,” she said, “because we have a situation here.”

“What sort of situation?”

“A bad one.”

“How bad? Can it wait twenty minutes?”

“Twenty minutes sounds like a long time.”

I disconnected and stood. “Gotta go,” I said to my mother and grandmother.

“But you just got here,” Grandma said. “We didn’t get to hear about the eloping.”

“I didn’t elope.”

I returned everything to my messenger bag, with the exception of the phone and the yellow envelope. I put the phone in an outside pocket, and I looked at the envelope. No writing on it. Sealed. I had no clue how it had gotten into my bag. I ripped it open and pulled a photograph out. It was an 8×10 glossy of a man. He was standing on a street corner, looking just past the photographer. He looked like he didn’t know he was being photographed, like someone had happened along with their cell phone camera and snapped his picture. He was possibly midthirties to early forties, and nice looking in a button-down kind of way. Short brown hair. Fair-skinned. Wearing a dark suit. I didn’t recognize the street corner or the man. Somehow on the trip home, I must have picked the envelope up by mistake—maybe when I stopped at the newsstand in the airport.

“Who’s that?” Grandma asked.

“I don’t know. I guess I snatched it up with a magazine.”

“He’s kind of hot. Is there a name on the back?”

“Nope. Nothing.”

“Too bad,” Grandma said. “He’s a looker, and I’m thinking about becoming a cougar.”

My mother cut her eyes to the cupboard where she kept her whiskey. She glanced at the clock on the wall and gave up a small sigh of regret. Too early.

I dropped the envelope and the photo into the trash, chugged my coffee, grabbed a bagel from the bag on the counter, and ran upstairs to change.

Twenty minutes later, I was at the bonds office. I use the term office lightly since we were operating out of a converted motor coach parked on Hamilton Avenue directly in front of the construction site for a new brick-and-mortar office. The new construction had been made necessary by a fire of suspicious origin that totally destroyed the original building.

My cousin Vinnie bought the bus from a friend of mine, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was better than setting up shop in the food court at the mall. Connie’s car was parked behind the coach, and Vinnie’s car was parked behind Connie’s.

Vinnie is a good bail bondsman but a boil on my family’s backside. In the past, he’s been a gambler, a womanizer, a philanderer, a card cheat, and I’m pretty sure he once had a romantic encounter with a duck. He looks like a weasel in pointy-toed shoes and too-tight pants. His father-in-law, Harry the Hammer, for all purposes owns the agency, and due to recent scandalous events involving misappropriated money, gambling, and whoring, Vinnie’s wife, Lucille, now owns Vinnie.