We grunted our greetings. That’s more than can be said for most sisters who don’t get along and have good reason for feeling crabby when they meet. My crabbiness was understandable, of course. As to the origin of Susannah’s, I didn’t have a clue.
“Get up on the wrong side of my bed?”
Susannah sat down and began picking at the remains of Billy Dee’s breakfast. “I wouldn’t have gotten up at all if the idiots above me had kept the noise down.”
“What do you mean?” The idiot above my bedroom happened to be Garrett Ream.
Susannah, the true scavenger, sucked at a strip of Billy Dee’s half-eaten bacon. “What I mean,” she said irritably, “is that Mr. Big-shot Congressman and his goody-two-shoes, Barbie-doll of a wife were having a knock-down, drag-out fight.”
“He hit her?”
“How should I know? I didn’t see it. I heard it.”
“What did they say?” Contrary to what you may be thinking, I have a right to know what goes on in my establishment.
“What’s it to ya, Mags?”
“A fresh stack of pancakes and all the bacon you can suck—I mean, eat.”
“Deal.” Susannah took Shnookums out of the nether reaches of her billowiness and set him down on Billy Dee’s syrupy plate, which he proceeded to lick clean.
“Well?” I asked, after a great deal of patience had expired.
“Well, he accused her of having a thing for that cute aide of his. What’s his name?”
“Delbert James.”
“Yeah, him. Of course she denied it. But that wasn’t the interesting part.”
“What was it, then?”
“I’m getting to it! The interesting part was when she said something about him having had an affair with Ms. Bitchy-Pants. You know, the one with the red hair.”
“Jeanette Parker?”
“Mags, would you stop interrupting me? Anyway, I nearly fell out of bed laughing when I heard that. I thought I might even have heard wrong, but no, she said it again.”
I was sure Susannah had heard wrong. As obnoxious as they both were, I couldn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, see the Congressman being attracted to a woman like Jeanette. Not when he had the charming Lydia for a wife. I decided to push my luck with Susannah. “What exactly were her words?” I begged.
“See, you don’t believe me!”
At that my baby sister scooped up her sticky-footed stowaway and stashed him back in the nether reaches from whence he’d come.
“I do believe you!” I protested.
“How much?”
I can only be pushed so far. “Enough to not kick you out of my room and make you sleep on the floor in the parlor.”
Susannah stuck her tongue out at me but cooperated nonetheless. “Her exact words were: You’re the one who slept with Jeanette Parker, maybe it’s you who should pay the price.’ Something very close to that at any rate.”
I sat down heavily, like the proverbial ton of bricks. “Anything else interesting?”
Susannah took a minute to coo at Shnookums in his dank and undoubtedly dreary hideaway. “Yeah,” she said finally. “Lydia Ream said something about Jeanette being Linda’s mother.”
“Aha! So they’re not, uh, I mean—”
“Lesbian lovers?”
“Susannah!”
“Oh, Mags, you are so provincial. This is the nineties. Why don’t you get with the times like I am!”
“You are a wanton woman, Susannah.”
“And you’re egg drop soup.” Susannah laughed heartily at her own little joke. Her bony, braless bosom bobbed up and down like a fishing cork on Miller’s pond. From somewhere within the powdered plumage of her cascading costume Shnookums sneezed.
“Bless you.”
“Thank you,” said Susannah on Shnookums’s behalf. “What’s more, Magdalena, you don’t even know the half of it. What else I heard will really knock your socks off. It did mine.”
“Enlighten me,” I begged. Susannah watches “Geraldo” and reads those magazines that describe two- headed aliens mating with farm animals. Nothing short of amputation could separate her from her socks.
“Can I borrow the car this morning if I tell you? I want to go shoe shopping in Somerset.”
I cringed at the mention of shoes. “Susannah, don’t you think it would be prudent to save your pennies, especially at the moment?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean... because... well... you know, there might be a lawsuit.”
Susannah laughed so hard that I truly feared for Shnookums’s life. “You don’t honestly believe there is going to be a lawsuit, do you, Mags?” she finally managed to say.