Chapter 15
The rest of supper passed in a surreal blur. Malone, who might not actually be Malone, charmed Mrs. Q. I had to admit the hot sauce did wonders for the casserole, as did the pitch-perfect screw-top sauvignon blanc Malone had brought over.
I was beginning to wonder if he was an android designed to lull women into a false sense of security.
Hot sauce to salvage a bland meal, the perfect white wine already chilled—who was this man?
If I hadn’t already known he wasn’t Blake I-don’t-like-casseroles-or-talking-to-women-over-thirty-five Malone, then I would’ve figured it out by this meal alone.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Q was certainly enjoying herself.
“Oh, you,” she said with a giggle as she listed to one side.
Huh. Her one glass of wine must’ve hit her hard, because her cheeks were rosy, too.
“Almost forgot. I also brought chocolate. Truffles, anyone?”
He had brought wine and chocolate. Definitely an android—designed by a woman, at that.
The universe was sorely tempting me, and now I didn’t have the marriage thing as a barrier.
The most galling part of all was that Salcedo, a mere babe in the woods, had been right, while I had been wrong.
I could hang my hat on two things: One, the fact that he was lying about his identity.
Two, that I couldn’t afford to pay Havisham fifty bucks.
Even worse, my intuition suggested he had a really good reason for pretending to be someone he wasn’t.
Probably because my intuition would like to get laid.
“I never turn down chocolate,” Mrs. Q said, jarring me back to the present. My foot tapped underneath the table as a way to soften my impatience about the fact she was still with us. I had questions that needed to be answered. Wasn’t it almost time for freaking Wheel of Fortune?
“Sometimes,” Malone said, as he chose one with a caramel center, “the brain needs sugar to function.”
“Truer words were never spoken.” I selected a dark-chocolate truffle, and we each savored our mini desserts.
“What is it that you do, Mr. Malone?” Mrs. Q asked. “I hate that I’ve been living upstairs this whole time but don’t know anything about you. I used to know all the neighbors.”
“Just call me Malone,” he said. “Mr. Malone is my father.”
Mrs. Q collapsed into giggles disproportionate to the scale of the joke. Malone held up the bottle to top off her glass, but she put a sinewy hand over it and shook her head. He angled the bottle toward me, and I nodded to indicate he could pour away.
“As for what I do? That’s classified, and if I told you, I’m afraid I’d have to kill you.” He softened the sentence with a lopsided smile, and I had to mentally tip my hat at his deft use of humor to evade the question.
He wouldn’t be so lucky with me once I got him alone.
I was about to lay the groundwork for my inquisition, the threat to my life notwithstanding, when Mrs. Q’s expression changed abruptly. She belched, then put a hand over her mouth.
“Goodness, Stella, darling, could you help me upstairs? The room is spinning.”
“Absolutely.” I frowned. She couldn’t be feeling well if she’d just asked for help.
“Are you okay, Mrs. Q?” asked Malone, his brow furrowed with concern. I loved that he’d picked up her nickname just from listening to me address her.
“I’m doing a little too well,” she said, her words ever so slightly slurred. “This has been so much fun, and I hope you won’t hold it against me that I’m such a lightweight. I’m afraid being old and taking eleventy billion medications means you become a party pooper.”
“Not at all,” Malone said. “It’ll give me a chance to do the dishes.”
And he does dishes. Of course he does dishes. The universe hates me.
With me to steady her, Mrs. Q climbed the steps quicker than her usual pace, but it was still a slow-motion struggle.
Once we reached the top of the stairs, it took her three tries to get the key in the lock because she kept swaying.
The whole experience reminded me of college.
I’d often been the “responsible one” who got her friends home and safely tucked into bed.
Once we were finally inside, Mrs. Q said, “Oh, Stella, I’m so sorry I harshed your mella . . . er, mellow.” She giggled at her own rhyme. “I know better than to have a glass of wine. Bad enough with some of my medication, but I must’ve forgotten to eat lunch today and—”
She belched loudly.
I tensed, ready to race her to the bathroom, but she leaned back into the couch, where she’d plopped, and looked relieved rather than green. At least I wouldn’t have to hold her hair since she kept it cut short?
“Would you like for me to help you to bed?” I asked.
“That would be lovely,” she said with a slur as I helped her to her feet.
“And then I’m going to need you to grab a stack of Bibles from the bookshelf over there and swear upon them that you won’t tell my children that their mother got inebriated.
Especially not on one glass of wine. And you can’t tell them I skipped lunch, either.
I didn’t do it on purpose. Sometimes the days run into each other.
Hours run into each other. It’s dreadfully dull being old and alone, Stella. ”
By the time she finished this cautionary tale, we’d reached her bedroom at the end of the hall.
“But you,” she said, while trying to point at me but actually pointing more toward the closet behind me. “You should go back down there and kiss that nice young man. Wine, chocolate, and he’s doing the dishes? He’s a handsome one. And funny. That’s a keeper if I’ve ever seen one.”
“So it would seem,” I said with a sigh.
She frowned at my lack of enthusiasm. “What’s wrong with you young women today?”
“I’m not sure I want another relationship so soon, Mrs. Q.”
She grimaced as I sat her on the edge of the bed, still swaying while I tried to remove her shoes.
I wasn’t surprised to find she was wearing knee-high stockings with her slip-on sneakers.
Where did one even buy knee-highs these days?
And didn’t they defeat the purpose of having shoes you could step into?
“Bah. No one is ever ready for a relationship.” She tilted her head, considering. “No one’s ever ready for one to end, either.”
“My last boyfriend was definitely ready to end ours,” I said.
She blew a raspberry at me and fell on her side so hard I was afraid she might wake up with a bruise.
At least she’d fallen on her bed? “Everyone needs relationships. You’re right to be choosy, but you’re going to have to put yourself out there eventually.
In the meantime, surround yourself with good friends. ”
I thought of Havisham and Salcedo. “That’s sound advice.”
“You’re damn right it is! If I haven’t figured some things out by now, then I’m never going to.
I should’ve had more girlfriends . . . friend girls .
. . oh, you know what I mean. Harold was so jealous of anyone who took my attention away from him.
Then what friends I had started moving away, but we didn’t have money for me to take trips to see them.
And people didn’t do that anyway, not like today’s young people, gallivanting all over creation at the drop of a hat. It wasn’t like that . . .”
She kept talking, her eyes closed, and I let her chatter while I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water for her. She didn’t notice that I’d left, much less that I’d returned.
“By the time I started looking up my old friends on Facebook, half of them had had the audacity to die on me. You have no idea how weird it is to have people you know dropping like flies. In your mind, you still see them as they were in their thirties, or maybe even as teenagers. It’s .
. . well, it’s disconcerting, Stella. When the philosophers say life is short, they aren’t lying. ”
How I understood all this, I’ll never know, because the slurring became progressively worse. I scrutinized Mrs. Q for any signs of a stroke, but no, she moved one hand and then the other, both sides of her face animated as she spoke.
“Maybe not philosophers. Aren’t they the ones who said God was dead?”
“That was only Nietzsche.”
She scoffed. “I’d love to hear from him now, see what he thinks.
I bet he’s had a nice long chat with the God he thought was dead.
But anyway, what I’m trying to say is not to waste time like I did.
Wasted it with Harold. Wasted it with my children.
One minute they were bugging the snot out of me for sugary cereals or cheaply made toys, and the next thing I knew, they’d moved out and were too busy to call.
All very ‘Cat’s in the Cradle,’ you know. ”
She paused for a breath, and I bit my tongue to keep from giving a “Well, actually . . .” response about how Nietzsche only meant that the role of religion in the Western world had declined.
She didn’t care. She wouldn’t remember it.
Sometimes it did a person good to have something to be indignant about.
“Oh, the room is spinning, but it’s not so bad. Kinda fun. Like the Tilt-A-Whirl. Feels like that time I let Harold talk me into three Old-Fashioneds. Whew, I was younger then.”
I had almost sneaked out of the room when she said, “Oh, Harold. That man could curl my toes.”
I backed up another step. Definitely didn’t want to know more about Harold’s toe-curling skills.
“I put a glass of water for you on the nightstand, Mrs. Q. Need anything else?”
“No, dear. I’m good. Now you go downstairs and make hay while the sun is still shining.”
“I think I’ll leave my field fallow, Mrs. Q.”
She blew another raspberry but then sat up suddenly. Or tried to.
I rushed over to make sure she stayed in her bed, and she grabbed my hand.
“Stella, darling, there’s a book on the shelf by the door. I want you to read it.”
So help me, if she tried to get me to read Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, I would leave this apartment and never come back. I had been nine or ten years old when Mom brought home that drivel. Even so, I braced myself for her eventual answer. “What book is that, Mrs. Q?”
“Daring Greatly by Brené Brown.”
“Okay, I’ll pick it up,” I said.
She squeezed my hand, then held on when I moved to let go. “Promise you’ll read it.”
“I will,” I said, confident she would never remember her drunken epiphany.
She released my hand and lay back on her bed.
I tiptoed down the hall and to the door.
Sure enough, I found a dog-eared copy of the book on the shelf by the door.
A casual page flip revealed sentences she’d highlighted and notes in the margin.
Despite my cynical tendencies, I was touched she would lend me a book she obviously esteemed so highly.
Down the steps I went, thinking about how Mrs. Q really needed to live in a place without stairs and also how much of my life I’d already wasted on Ken. I shoved those second thoughts away because there wasn’t anything I could do about that now.
When I entered my apartment, the entire kitchen had been tidied and the dishwasher hummed. Malone sat on my love seat, reading one of my Nora Roberts books with the kitten in his lap. He looked awfully at home for someone who swore he was only in town temporarily.
When he looked up, I said, “Person who is not Blake Malone, we need to talk.”