4-1
637 Words
4
LUELLA SAT AT THE BREAKFAST table, staring at the kitchen phone. She knew she ought to call the police. That’s what any responsible citizen would do.
She rose from her padded vinyl chair, leaving the dregs of her morning coffee to keep her toast crumbs company on the table. Her husband would have had a thing or two to say about that, but he wasn’t around to obsess over things like buttering toast directly on the counter, or eating it without the aid of a plate, and Luella couldn’t be bothered.
It was freeing to be a little messy, but she wondered if she did it simply to rebel against Gianni’s memory. At the end of the day, she still had to wipe up crumbs. It would probably be easier to wash a dish.
Perhaps her husband had been right all along.
No, it wasn’t a matter of right or wrong. Some things were more complicated than right or wrong.
Luella picked up the telephone. She stared at its gummy push-button numbers. This, she still thought of as the “new” phone, though it had to be twenty years old by now. She still had a rotary phone upstairs, and another in the den.
She set the phone back in its cradle.
Luella had her reasons for shying away. Police officers in the real world weren’t at all like the ones on TV. The real ones had a knack for blaming the victim rather than the criminal. If she called to say this woman, Mrs. Rankin—who had, according to Chandelle, been taken directly to the mortuary after an expedited visit from Meadowlark’s doctor-on-call—had not died of natural causes, would the police not suspect her of the murder?
The phone rang, and Luella jumped back as though it had come alive.
Could the police read her thoughts now? Were they phoning her?
Reluctantly, she picked up the phone and held the receiver to her ear. “Hel...lo?”
“Is this the lasagna lady?”
The voice was bright and young, undeniably familiar.
“Chandelle gave me your number.”
Luella could have been knocked over with a feather when she realized who was on the line. “Eugenia, is it?”
“Sorry for calling so early,” the girl said, implicitly confirming her identity. “My parents have to do the funeral arrangements, so they sent me to the retirement place to start going through my grandma’s stuff. But, like, I get here and the lady says I can’t go in on my own. I need adult supervision.”
“Oh dear.”
“So here’s my question...”
“Oh dear.”
“Will you be my adult?” Eugenia asked, her voice spirited and hopeful.
Luella looked around the kitchen. If she’d spotted anything odd or out of place, she’d have thought this was a dream. “Where are you?”
“At the retirement place,” Eugenia said. “Meadowlark. Where I met you. You were with Chandelle. Remember?”
“Yes, yes, I... and what is it you’d like me to do?”
“I don’t know anybody in this neighbourhood—besides Chandelle, but she’s got class in, like, five seconds.”
“Oh yes,” Luella said, absently. “It’s Monday, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, well, exactly, but Chandelle said she didn’t think you had a job or anything.”
“Indeed,” Luella replied through gritted teeth.
“And you live nearby, right?”
She relaxed somewhat, feeling sorry for the young girl who’d just lost her grandmother. “That’s true. I do.”
“So could you be my adult? They won’t let me into my grandma’s room unsupervised, so if I can’t find an adult I have to go all the way home again, and it already took me an hour and forty-seven minutes to get here, so...”
Eugenia let her exasperation hang on the air, and Luella latched on like a sap. What choice did she have? These young people certainly had high expectations of a relative stranger, and Luella couldn’t help but feel somewhat put-out, but it’s not like she had anything better to do.
“Sit tight,” she told the girl. “I’ll be right there.”
* * * *
- Writer
