“Not a problem,” he told her. “The doctors tell me to do what I feel I can do, and stop when I can’t. Pretty simple.”
“Well, I know this case you’re spending most of your time on involves Gloria’s friend, but your health is more important.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “Which friend are you talking about?” Just because you don’t like me doesn’t mean I don’t have lots of friends was my slightly misleading message.
“The undertaker, of course. Isn’t it her daughter who’s in trouble?”
Jean made the mortuary business, a great service to society in my admittedly biased opinion, sound sordid.
I kept my composure, but barely. “The ‘trouble’ is that a young woman has been murdered,” I said. “And your brother is the RPD’s best homicide detective.” Argue with that.
She sipped the espresso Matt had prepared for her, which she declared the perfect strength. “I thought Matt said he had to rescue a young friend of yours who has some kind of problem.”
I couldn’t imagine Matt had put it that way. He groaned and shook his head. “Not what I said, Jean.”
Jean screwed up her nose, crossed her thin legs in a direction away from me. “I knew what you meant. You wouldn’t be out there killing yourself if she weren’t implicated.” A tilt of the head toward me.
“I’m just doing my job. You should know that.”
“Well, all I know is, you were always the picture of health, until … recently.”
In other words, Teresa would never have let him get cancer.
Matt put his head in his hands.
My head was splitting, my vision clouding from anxiety, tears at the brink of erupting.
In a couple of days, Matt would get measured for a Styrofoam cradle, as if he were a piece of delicate equipment ready for shipping. I wanted desperately for him to have no further stress over my relationship with his sister.
I stood up, brushed my skirt into place. “Why don’t I let you two talk,” I said. “I just remembered I promised Rose I’d drop over this evening to help her with …” I stumbled. “A project.”
Matt walked me to the door, kissed me good-bye. “Trust me, it will be different when you get home.”
I could hardly wait.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Frank’s mother didn’t like you at first? How come I never knew that?” I asked Rose.
As I’d expected, Rose had welcomed my surprise visit, pulling out our favorite espresso cups and three kinds of biscotti. We sat in Frank’s den, the coziest room in the house, with dark paneling and brown leather furniture, while he was fast asleep upstairs. Frank had had to make an early pickup that morning, Rose told me, since Robert was at a casket show out of state. Horse shows, casket shows—no end to the uses of large convention halls I’d assumed were only for the different branches of the American Institute of Physics.
“You knew how my mother-in-law slighted me at every turn. I complained constantly at the time; you just forgot.” Rose shook her head slightly, probably thinking, correctly, how hopeless I was at history. “Don’t you remember when I’d whine about how the family would stop playing cards as soon as I showed up? That’s just one example. All the Galiganis—Frank’s parents, Rico, Muffy, all the brothers—they’d be playing poker in the back room of the old house on Oxford Park. I’d come in and old lady Galigani, God rest her, would say, ‘Hokay, boys, there’s a-no-mo tonight.’ And then she’d say to Frank, ‘How longa she be he’?’ Meaning me.”
Rose’s parody of our old relatives’ dialects brought back memories of our immigrant parents and grandparents, all deceased, and I finally did remember the tension with her in-laws in the early days.
“The issue of the flowers,” I said, smiling.
Rose nodded and laughed. “Frank would bring me these lovely bouquets he’d put together from the sprays around the caskets.” She moved her hands gracefully, forming a bouquet in the air. “And Ma Galigani thought it was a sin. It was stealing from the dead, she’d say, and she thought I put him up to it. I was a near occasion of sin, as we said in those days. Me, a temptress!”
“But eventually Mrs. Galigani loved you, Rose, like the daughter she’d always wanted. How did you finally win her over?”
I was ready to take notes. If Rose could bring around a stubborn old Italian mother-in-law, surely I could do the same with an educated, professional woman who was my peer.
I’d always thought Realtors had to have excellent people skills, and that they’d be logical in their communications. Certainly they had to know a combination of mathematics and finance that eluded me. The one time I bought a house, my condo in Berkeley, I felt completely at the mercy of my real estate agent, who talked glibly about fixed rates, points, balloon payments, equity. And I gave up on trying to understand the distribution of mortgage payments toward principal and interest. A payment should be a payment, I thought, the way subtraction usually worked. Real estate arithmetic was more economics than pure mathematics, I decided, and left it to my broker.