One #2
Frances almost gasped with alarm. If Marjorie had set her up, she would strangle her.
The last time she’d do-si-doed was in the fifth grade.
Her partner, Bobby Brick, refused to touch her hand.
It was amazingly difficult to square-dance without touching hands.
“I’m sure not. She would have mentioned it. ”
“I’m surprised she’s not! It’s one of our most popular activities.”
Well, that was sobering. Frances looked around for the elevator.
“Who is your friend?”
“Marjorie Cohen.”
“Oh, Marge! She’s one of our favorites around here.
You can get a five percent rental discount for the first year with a referral from a current resident.
You look like you’d fit right in! If you’d like to stop by and see what else we have to offer, my office is right there, next to the koi pond.
We have one of the best catalogs of activities for a facility of this size. ”
Forget the activities, Frances looked like she “fit right in” exactly how? she would like to know. And then again, she would not like to know.
“It’s just there,” Gloria said, pointing to her office.
“Yes, I see,” Frances said. “Could you point me to the elevator, please?”
Gloria swung around so fast that her square dance skirt helicoptered into Frances’s leg. “Right past the barber shop. We have a full range of spa services, too. I can show you.”
“Thanks,” Frances said, and headed for the elevator before Gloria could shove a rental agreement at her.
Marjorie’s apartment was easy enough to find, as the resident names were printed in big block letters on the wall outside their door.
She had a pleasant little single-bedroom apartment with a view of a parking garage.
She’d decorated her rooms in suburban kitsch—lots of LIVE LAUGH LOVE–type signs around.
She said the living here was great and offered Frances a martini.
“It’s only two o’clock,” Frances pointed out.
“And? Happy hour is at three-thirty, dinner at five. We’re pregaming, that’s all. You would love it here, Fran. There are so many things to do! Bingo and a bridge club and a singles dance every Friday night. But you won’t be single here for long, Franny girl,” she said, wagging her eyebrows.
Frances inwardly shuddered. She was not a bingo person, and she most definitely was not into the singles scene. Until this moment, she didn’t know that a singles scene existed in her age range.
“I’m so glad you’ve come to visit,” Marjorie said as she cut a slice of the coffee cake she’d made fresh this morning to go with the two olive martinis she’d whipped up. “I have news. Look at this.” She waved her fingers in Frances’s face.
Frances reached into her bag for her glasses, put them on, and leaned forward. “It’s a ring.” A plain, thin gold band.
“Not just any ring. A forever ring.”
“What’s that?”
Marjorie stopped waving her fingers in Frances’s face. “Essentially, a promise ring.”
“A promise ring? Like when we were kids?”
“Yep. Dan Stefano lives across the hall, and we’ve been dating.”
Frances didn’t know why she should be so surprised, but she’d built her life around Nick Deluca and their son, and the thought of casually dating after his death had never entered her mind. No one could top Nick. And Paul had only been dead a year. “You’re … How?”
Marjorie giggled like a girl. “Well, he was dating Ellen Hurkle when I first moved in, but her Alzheimer’s got bad, so her kids sent her off to memory care. I would go around to see her in the afternoons, and he was usually there, and we sort of hit it off.”
Putting aside that Marjorie and Dan had allowed something to develop while poor Ellen Hurkle lost her mind, what was Marjorie doing? “You’re getting married?” Frances exclaimed.
“No! But we’re going to be together forever. Marriage is too complicated at this age. You know, the kids have opinions, and they worry he’s after my money.”
“Is he?”
“Of course not.” Marjorie airily waved her hand. “Never mind that. We don’t need to get married, that’s the point, but we are promised to each other forever. Cheers.”
Frances did not lift her glass. “You told me you were worried about getting an STD from a toilet seat here. You said senior living was the Hotbed of Herpes.”
“Dan doesn’t have an STD. Not that it’s any of your business.” She thrust her glass forward.
Marjorie was right. Frances realized she didn’t want to know a single thing about Marjorie’s sex life. “Forever, huh?” she asked, and clinked glasses. “So, what are we talking, a year? How old is this guy?”
“Frances! That’s not very nice,” Marjorie scolded her.
“But they do tend to drop like flies here. At our lunch table, two have died in the last month. Just like that, one two.” She snapped her fingers.
“Anyway, why aren’t you dating? Nick has been gone for three years.
You have a lot of life left, girl. And you look great.
Nice and thin. I love your silvery bob.”
Frances put a hand to her hair. She was trying something new. New clothes, new hairstyle—searching for the thing that would suddenly make her life interesting. “Nick ruined me for other men. What I need is a fulfilling hobby and I’m not having any luck finding one.”
“Hmm.” Marjorie frowned as she thought about it. “What was your job again?”
Planning big heists. Stealing priceless artifacts and art and money. Deceiving people. More generally, thievery and swindling. Thieves and swindlers didn’t square-dance as a rule. “Accounting,” she said, choosing a profession out of thin air.
“Oh,” Marjorie said, clearly disappointed. “I don’t think I ever knew that, did I? Well, I can’t think of any hobbies that involve accounting.”
Neither could Frances. And after the visit, she couldn’t think of moving into Silver Oak Towers to square-dance and be pressured to date, for God’s sake. She was not like Marjorie; she couldn’t be satisfied with bingo and a new beau.
So, what was next for a world-class thief?
Granted, she hadn’t been a world-class thief in a long while, but she had been once upon a time.
She missed that old life. She missed the days when she, Edie, Joan, and Irene were a girl gang before girl gangs were cool.
They’d started out in their twenties to avenge a wrong and, as it happened, discovered they were good at vengeance.
Frankly, they’d been surprised by just how good.
And it was fun. So, they’d carried on, figuring out how to take from men who needed to be taught a lesson.
Because they weren’t thieves just for the sake of stealing; they had standards. Most of the time, anyway.
Frances missed the adrenaline, she missed the danger and excitement, she missed the camaraderie, the travel, the attention that came with being young and pretty.
She missed the satisfaction of being underestimated because they were women and then blowing the doors to a good heist wide open with their cunning.
Even those times they didn’t really know what they were doing.
It just went to prove that working together, women can accomplish anything.
She would love to feel that rush again, that joy when the puzzle pieces of a good plan fell into place.
Alas, the gang hadn’t been together in more than forty years, not since Edie had betrayed them all.
And now, it felt as if too much time had passed.
It wasn’t like she could call them up and suggest they do a heist to see if they still had it.
And then make Edie promise not to betray them this time and, moreover, trust her.
Even if she could call them together for a last heist, they were as old as she was.
They probably had families and full lives and weren’t very limber anymore.
Hell, she’d bet Joan was still using a flip phone.
She had to face the fact that the days of thrilling adventure were behind her, and the next best thing had been pickleball. Now that was behind her, too.
Trying to sort out her life on top of a two-martini cake lunch was exhausting.
But on the way home from Marjorie’s, Frances had to stop at the grocery store.
They were having a sale on plums and prunes, and anyone over the age of seventy knew it was wise to keep high-fiber fruit on hand.
This was something else she’d begun to do—wander the grocery store aisles, reading labels.
In the middle of the afternoon. It was frightening that, one, she was adopting such a senior citizen habit, and two, the preservatives they put in food these days.
An instrumental version of John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” was wafting out of the store’s sound system as she grabbed a cart and went in.
She wandered into the produce section, humming along.
She remembered this very song was playing the time she and Edie scammed a convenience store clerk by tipping over some water bottle pallets and putting Edie under—
Wait.
An idea burst into Frances’s brain, freezing her so suddenly that a young man behind nearly collided with her, muttering under his breath as he swept around her with his handheld basket.
Why hadn’t she thought of this before? She and Edie had scammed the guy behind the counter because he was a prick and because they could.
It had been a spur-of-the-moment thing that had netted them a nice little payday in the end.
Frances could still do spur-of-the-moment.
She was perfectly capable of pulling a scam on her own.
Sure, she missed the girls, and it was obviously more fun when you had friends along for the ride.
But she was missing more than her friends.
She was missing the thrill of the heist like some people missed a drink.
She could stage a fall in this store and sue the bejeezus out of them. (Was her old fix-it lawyer, Sal Bernard, still alive? She’d check for an obituary later.) She raced through the logistics in her mind. It was too easy. So easy she could pull it off alone.