Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Pretty much everything from the time my mother abandoned us until around Thanksgiving is a blur.
I was probably a zombie, and I’ve never heard anyone say zombies have good memories, so there you go.
I’d gotten a prescription for Ativan and, as promised, it smoothed over the edges of withdrawal.
Or at least I think it did. Taking care of a new baby and quitting Oxy are not as different as you’d think: anxiety, sleep disturbance, yawning, body aches, vomiting (only twice), shaking and rapid breathing.
See? Hard to tell which was causing all that.
To be fair, we did have a lot of help the first few weeks.
The baby bunch, as I began to think of them, was there for a lot of that time, changing diapers, feeding Emerald, swaddling her, rocking her, and just about anything else they could think of…
and they brought food. Massive amounts. Not that I could eat much of it, but it did make it easier to feed Nana Cole.
All too soon, they weren’t coming as often and most of Emerald’s care fell to me and my grandmother. Well, me.
I had significant, and logical concerns about leaving Nana Cole alone with my sister. Mostly, I was afraid she’d drop the baby and, as nearly as I could tell, infants don’t bounce. A theory I did not want to test.
Eventually, I found what I thought might be a solution.
Nana Cole had most of my mother’s baby things, and most of mine.
In the sixties, she’d used what amounted to a picnic basket to carry my infant mother around.
Hard no. And in the eighties, she’d driven me around in a car seat that looked more like a gaming chair than anything that might protect a child.
After assessing the situation, I did the reasonable thing and stole my grandmother’s credit card from her purse.
FYI: Theft for a good cause is completely moral. Ask Jean Valjean.
Anyhoo… I snatched the card, went to Target, and got the most expensive baby car seat/carrier they had.
It had the word ‘system’ in its name, so it seemed perfect.
It had a handle so you could secure the baby indoors and then carry the whole contraption out to the car.
And then, if it was a nice day, you could carry your baby around with you—or at least that’s what it showed on the box.
It looked sturdy as a tank—well, as tank-like as molded plastic can be.
And, of course, Emerald hated it.
It wasn’t terrible when I used the car seat in the car.
The visual stimulation and the movement all kept Emerald amused (or terrified into silence, I’m not sure I could tell the difference) for long periods.
But, when I’d set the car seat on the kitchen table, or anywhere else that wasn’t moving, I’d have maybe five minutes before she started to fuss and ten before she outright began to scream.
Which didn’t mean I wasn’t bound and determined that my plan would work.
The day after Ham’s call, an hour before Jan arrived for her shift I got the baby into the car seat and left her with Nana Cole, while I went upstairs to make a call to the only actual almost friend I’d made since I got to Michigan nearly a year ago, Opal.
“Do you need a ride?” she asked when she picked up.
“No. I have a car.”
“I’ve seen your car. ‘Do you need a ride?’ is a legitimate question.”
You can probably see where the ‘almost friend’ part comes in. I snapped back, “Your car is an insect with eyelashes.”
Opal drove a new Beetle with black plastic eyelashes on the headlights.
She’d named it Ladybug. And that wasn’t the worst of her crimes.
About my age, she was a bisexual prone to abusing hair dye.
Not that the two are connected. Bisexual people don’t dye their hair anymore often…
Whatever. The point is, from time to time, my almost friend Opal proved useful.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I need to go to Three Friends winery and thought you might want to go with me. I’ll drive.”
“Why do you need to go to a winery?”
“I’m a private investigator.”
“Is that a joke?”
“Is it funny?”
“Kind of.”
“I just don’t want to look suspicious.”
“Are we going undercover?”
“No. I just don’t want to scream PI.”
“I can imagine a situation where you might scream but not one in which you’d look like a PI.”
“Do you want to come or not?”
“Yeah, I’ve gotta see this.”
Downstairs, as I was putting on my boots, I said to Nana Cole, “Jan will be here in five minutes. Don’t touch the baby.”
Ignoring me, she said, “Check the mail on your way out.”
“Fine,” I said, though I didn’t want to do that. Our mailbox was at the end of our very long driveway on M-22. In the summer it was a pleasant little walk—birds and sunlight, and wildflowers at the curb. But in the winter. Well… you didn’t just walk down there.
I got into my car—a popsicle blue, eleven-year-old Geo Metro convertible—which was frigid inside. Not because the heater didn’t work, it did, it just didn’t work well enough to keep up with the hole in the canvas top. I drove to the end of the driveway and jumped out to get the mail.
It was snowing lightly, or maybe it was just the wind picking up snow and redepositing it. The lake had formed a crusty edge of ice, which the heaving waves kept breaking up. It was cold and desolate and made me feel like I was in a Bronte novel. And those never ended well.
I snatched the mail from the box and brought it back to my car. Nothing interesting. Our power bill, one of my credit cards telling me my payment was late, and a brochure from a local funeral parlor. I’d make sure to pass that along to Nana Cole.
Driving over the six inches of snow crumbles the plow had tossed into our driveway, I headed toward Masons Bay, about a ten-minute drive.
When I got to the quaint village, Opal was standing in front of Pastiche where she worked.
The first thing I noticed was that she was wearing a lavender faux fur coat that I wanted to steal and her hair was covered in a big, bulky pink hat.
I was curious to see what color it was underneath.
In the past, it had been orange, purple, green and yellow, and black and white (squares).
I had no idea what she was going to do with it next.
The hat, though annoying, was necessary since it was about fifteen degrees. I myself was wearing my grandfather’s corduroy hunting cap with ear flaps hanging down. I looked like a chic Bassett hound.
“Don’t you have gloves?” she asked me, as I pulled away from the curb.
“I lose them.” Mostly because I put them down and then don’t bother to look for them. I mean, there was a vent on each side of the steering wheel so I could warm my hands up if it got really cold. Which reminded me, and so one at a time I held my hands over the vent.
“You don’t have a scarf either.”
“My scarf is… somewhere.” Not a brilliant thing to say, everything is somewhere. “You know, I don’t really think in those terms. I’m a Californian. Through and through.”
“Remind me not to go to the Arctic with you.”
“Unless George Bush starts exiling gay people to the Arctic, I will never go there.”
“You know, if you get frostbite they cut your fingers off.”
“Shut up.”
Could you get frostbite when the temperature was, like, in the teens? I had no idea. I’d have to look it up on the Internet when I got home. If I still had fingers.
“So, Henry Milch, PI, what’s the case?”
“An old lady fell down in the bathroom and now she’s suing for a million dollars.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, that’s what she said when she broke her arm.”
Three Friends winery had once been a farm of some sort. Sitting in the midst of a snow-covered twenty or twenty-five acres, was a quaint farmhouse similar to my Nana Cole’s: a wooden barn and a brand-new pole barn. The original barn had been converted into a tasting room.
A few days before, it had been close to forty and then quickly dropped well below freezing. The dirt parking lot had frozen into deep ridges. As Opal and I picked our way over to the tasting room, she said, “I think it’s warmer outside than it is in your car.”
“It is not,” I said, though she might have been right.
I opened the glass door that led into the tasting room.
On one side of the large room there were several banquet-sized tables, on the other a bar.
The room was bright and sunny, large glass windows had been cut into the barn wall and looked out at the snow-covered vineyard.
Most importantly, it was warm, very warm.
There was a fireplace in one corner crackling away.
“Let’s sit at a table,” Opal said.
I ignored her and walked over to the bar, slipped off my puffer jacket and put it on the back of a stool.
I was wearing a lime green sweater I’d found at a resale shop.
I had to make some concession to the weather.
And my grandfather’s clothes, though they fit and were usually well made, were mostly gray and brown.
Grumbling, Opal crawled onto the stool next to me and wiggled out of her faux fur coat.
“I wanted to sit by the fire.”
I shrugged.
There weren’t a lot of ‘tasters’ at that moment. An older couple at a table and three middle-aged women at the bar. Behind the bar was a thickset woman with broad shoulders and curly blond hair. Loitering nearby was a girl who looked young enough to make me wonder if she should legally be there.
The barmaid—winemaid?—gave us tasting menus.
“We also have mulled wine.”
“I’ll have that,” Opal said.
The woman looked at me. I shook my head. I couldn’t stand mulled wine. It was like drinking a cinnamon flavored puddle.
“I’ll go get that and let you look at the menu.”