Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?

“I’m earning an honest living here, Mother. There’s no cross over King Kullen’s doors and I’m not lusting after anyone.” Okay, so that part’s a lie. “What did I do to deserve this?”

“Be that way, Teddi.” I hear her exhale her cigarette smoke. “Go ahead. I won’t even tell you about the lottery ticket I bought for you. The mega-millions one they drew last night.”

My heart stops. “What about it?” I ask her, having heard this morning on the radio that it wasn’t claimed yet. Though they also said the winning ticket—for thirty-seven million dollars—was purchased in Plainview and I know that there is no way my mother would shop in Plainview, just a stone’s throw (and a step down, according to her) from where I live in Syosset. Not even for a lottery ticket.

“You didn’t win,” she tells me while I look at the phone with utter amazement. “But you could have, so don’t blame me. At least I tried to fix your life. Imagine the man you could get if you’d won that lottery.”

I tell her to keep trying, and until she wins me either a fortune or a man, I better keep working. And that includes doing bowling alleys and any other places that will pay me.

“Will brothels be next, Teddi? Or funeral homes? Do you get some sort of perverse pleasure embarrassing me like this? Are you getting back at me?” my mother asks. “Is that it?”

She probably says a few other nasty things, but I don’t know, because I’ve already pressed End.

Bobbie opens her mouth to weigh in on Drew Scoones’s place in my life, but I tell her we have work to do. Between Bobbie’s I-don’t-smoke-anymore-but-I-still-deserve-a-break breaks, her shopping, her trips to her husband, Mike’s, chiropractic office in the middle of the day to find this patient’s file or that one’s X-rays, it’s no wonder she occasionally forgets we’re actually working.

She was not the one who was here until nearly midnight last night, measuring and leaving notes for Mark so that he could get the Formica cut at the lumber yard and ready to install before L.I. Lanes opened today. She didn’t have to fend off two drunk guys who didn’t understand any part of no even after the jukebox played Lorrie Morgan’s song twice.

She wasn’t the one who locked up the place and had to walk to her car alone in the dark, her heels clicking on the asphalt so loudly in her ears that it nearly drowned out the sound of the men arguing in front of the bagel shop.

I close my eyes and try to picture them because, if my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, they were The Spare Slices and they were pretty angry.

“You okay?” Mark asks, taking my elbow. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

“I may have,” I say, trying to remember what they were arguing about.

Whatever it was, Drew needs to know.

“I’ve got to call him,” I say, and neither Mark nor Bobbie needs to ask who.

“What a surprise,” Bobbie says, rolling her eyes and holding out her hand, palm up, to Mark.

“Thanks,” Mark tells me sarcastically, taking out a five and putting it in Bobbie’s hand as I dial Drew’s number from memory.

“I just remembered something,” I say when he answers the phone.

“What’s that?” Drew asks.

“Okay, we need to talk…”

There’s a beat before he answers me. “Sure,” he says. “Tomorrow.”

CHAPTER 2

Anyone who has ever repainted a wall or replaced a carpet or even gotten a new set of kitchen pots knows one thing just leads inexorably to another. The bright walls make the ceiling look dull. The new light to make the ceiling brighter reveals the wear spots in the carpet. The carpet installation wrecks the molding. As long as the base molding is being replaced…

—TipsFromTeddi.com

I may not love decorating a bowling alley, but I have to admit there are certain perks to it. Like that the owner has agreed to let my kids and their friends bowl free whenever I’m on the job. This makes my eleven-year-old son, Jesse, very happy. It ought to make all the moms in the neighborhood happy, too, since I’m making sure the place is really kid-friendly so they’ll all have a viable alternative to the usual weekend mall-ratting.

L.I. Lanes isn’t just a cheaper way for the kids to spend a Saturday afternoon, it’s also only a good, hearty walk from our house. Not that Dana, my thirteen-going-on-thirty daughter will admit it’s walkable. She’s the original princess, requiring chauffeuring everywhere. If she’d been born a century or two ago in China, she’d be demanding her feet be bound so that no one could expect her to go as far as the refrigerator to get her own ice cream.

Anyway, my kids have found that if they stay on the school bus past our stop, they get dropped only a few blocks from the bowling alley and Carvel. And in they walk now, separately so that, God forbid!, no one thinks they came in together.

“Is it true?” Dana asks me. She’s connected to my mother by more than simple DNA. They’ve both read the elusive Secret Handbook of Long Island—the one everyone tries to tell me doesn’t exist—and I’m sure their spy networks overlap.

I feign ignorance. “Is what true?” Of course, I know what she knows. I just don’t know how she could already know it.

“You found another dead guy and the cops want to question you.”

Note there is no question mark at the end of that sentence.

“It is getting to be a habit,” Jesse adds as he checks out where the new pool tables are slated to be, making fake shots with an imaginary pool cue and checking behind him to see if I’ve left enough room.

I have my doubts myself, but I’m pretty sure I can get in the four tables I’m planning. And I’ve finally found someone who can get them for me within my rapidly shrinking time frame.

Anyway, I assure my children that while a man was found dead, it in no way means—

And then a cop walks in the door. We watch him stop at the desk and talk to Steve, the owner of L.I. Lanes. Steve points me out and, with a nod, the cop heads in my direction.

“Detective Scoones wants you down at the precinct tomorrow at nine a.m.,” he says, handing me one of Drew’s cards.

“Sure,” I say, trying to be offhanded about it as I shove the card in the back pocket of my jeans.

“Guess it’s not just in his dreams,” he says. He snickers and heads for the door.

“This is so embarrassing,” Dana announces loudly, in case anyone has missed the entire episode, which, judging from the stares, no one has. “Why do I have to have a mother who is a murder magnet?” She storms out the back door to the alley, headed, I suppose, for someplace where she can actually spend money.

Not too long after I’ve embarrassed my children, my mother calls, because life was just a bowl of cherries until now. It’s like that foul they’re always calling in football—piling on.

“I forgot to tell you that I got you a new job,” she says when I answer my cell. I remind her that I have a job and that I’m actually doing it at the moment.

“That?” she asks. “The bowling alley? That’s not a job, it’s penance. This is a real job. And I’m still in shock, so listen carefully. You remember Rita and Jerry Kroll from around the corner?”

How could I forget the Krolls? They had a son, Robert, who, despite being at least a decade older than we were, used to ride around the neighborhood on his bicycle every day, all day, in any kind of weather, speeding up behind little kids and honking his horn, scaring the wits out of us. He was Cedarhurst’s answer to To Kill a Mockingbird. Our very own Boo Radley. And it wasn’t until we’d grown up that we learned he wasn’t scary at all, just mentally disabled. Robby, as his parents called him, was simply never going to grow up.

“They bought a house in Woodbury last month and she wants you to decorate it. Can you believe this? What can she be thinking?”

“Excuse me, but I’m a good decorator, Mom,” I remind her. “Of course people are going to want to hire me.” That is, if my mother doesn’t convince them otherwise.

“Sure, sure,” my mother says dismissively. It comes out like we can discuss the possibility that I might have talent some other time. “But moving from the South Shore to Woodbury? From Cedarhurst yet? I mean, leaving Mel the butcher? Dominick at Tresses? The World’s Best dry cleaners. For Woodbury?”

I assure her that we actually have overpriced hairdressers and butchers and dry cleaners on the North Shore, too. Especially in Woodbury, which borders Syosset on “the good side”—which is to say the side that isn’t Plainview or Hicksville. Up, up, up the social ladder you go as you get closer to the Long Island Sound.

My mother reminds me that you get what you pay for.

“Which is why you have to double your prices for Rita. She’s used to being overcharged. It’s how she knows what something’s worth.”

Sometimes I believe that Cedarhurst is just north of Bizarro Land and just south of Topsy Turvy.