What Goes With Blood Red, Anyway?

Either way, I don’t belong here. Never have. This fact has escaped my mother (who, at sixty-eight, is still sure that with enough pressure she can convert me into a real Long Islander) and is irrelevant to my father (who is three years her senior and who I am convinced will love me even after my third eye makes its appearance).

My parents clearly intend to take up residence in my house, judging from the number of suitcases and amount of food my father has schlepped in. I will argue them out of this later. I hope.

At the moment, I am watching out the front window of my front-to-back split level home, the one I shared with Rio, while my father paces behind me repeating that he’ll call Mel Rottman—the best lawyer on the South Shore—to talk to the police with me. Each time he says it, I assure him it isn’t necessary.

My mother, however, isn’t so sure that the innocent always go free. This is why she is telling me about a friend of hers who tried to get through customs by sewing undeclared jewelry into her brassiere and claiming it was her underwire bra setting off the metal detectors. It doesn’t matter to June that the woman wasn’t actually innocent. The point is that if a friend of hers could get frisked at JFK, I could wind up on death row.

Even when her stories are tedious, it’s still amusing to watch my mother tell them because of all the cosmetic surgery she’s had since my father’s long-term affair with our housekeeper put her in the sanitarium and him in the dog house. He’s footed the bill for more Botox, collagen and Gore-Tex than Joan Rivers has tried to deduct from her taxes. What’s really amazing is that even though the woman can’t actually frown, grimace or pout, she can still give me “the look”—the one that says “you’re a disappointment, Teddi. You’re such a disappointment.”

At the moment, I’m ignoring the look and wishing that one of my lovely children would entertain their grandmother long enough for me to finish filling out all the forms I need to send in for the decorator showcase at Bailey Manor before Detective Scoones shows up. Bailey Manor, for those who don’t know, is a decorator showcase. Every year there’s a benefit showcase and each lucky decorator or decorating firm that gets chosen gets assigned a room at a fabulous old mansion on Long Island that—provided they don’t destroy any of the existing architecture—they can decorate however they think will best show off their talents. Bobbie knows someone who knows someone who is sleeping with the brother of the guy who is married to the woman who doles out the spaces, so I am doing the breakfast nook. I can’t tell you how excited I would be if I had a stick of furniture that I thought was good enough to go in there or a way of getting some before Halloween, when it opens.

Oh, the irony of the timing of my father’s retirement from the furniture business—just months before I opened my decorating business. And months after Rio’s patience for being second in command there was exhausted and he began his scheme to drive me crazy so that he could put up our house as collateral for a loan to open an outlet center right next to my father’s store.

“Maybe you should do the dining room,” my mother says as she watches me fill in the forms. This despite having told her several times that I am lucky to have a room at all and that peons don’t get to pick. She plucks a piece of lint off my sage-green silk sweater and adjusts the chunky necklace I made myself, telling me I look very nice, considering. I am going to assume that she means considering my day and not pursue it.

She and I both keep looking out the tall bay window of my living room, watching to see if it’s a squad car that pulls up. A family of bikers rides by, all in helmets, the smallest on a pink bike with streamers and training wheels. I think they are the new people who bought the Kroll’s house.

I remember riding around with our kids and, unlike Plastic Woman, it must show on my face since she says, “It’s not too late for you to find someone decent this time and have another…”

“Way too late,” I say, and then yell upstairs for Dana. “Come down and recite your portion of the haf tarah for Grandma and Grandpa.” I realize that bringing up Dana’s bat mitzvah is dangerous territory, where my mother has set minefields regarding the flowers, the food, the dresses, and hurry on. “Jesse, show Grandpa…” Nothing comes to mind, but I see that my father is fishing around in his pocket, which no doubt means he has some new techno-gadget he wants to show me.

“Wait until you see this, Jesse,” he says as my ten-year-old bounds down the stairs. “I got a new phone for your mother to try.” From his pocket he pulls out a PalmPilot, a key chain that beeps when you clap your hands and a spanking new phone.

“Dad, you have to stop doing this.” I try to look annoyed with him, but it’s hard. I mean, is it so awful for a man to spend his days in Best Buy, Circuit City or on the Internet buying the latest whatever? When you think about what else he could be doing? And he can afford it, so really is it so terrible that he shows up at my house a few days later with whatever he’s bought, saying it a) doesn’t work, b) isn’t user friendly, c) doesn’t do what the guy in the store—or the pop-up ad on the Internet—promised it would or d) isn’t worth what he paid for it?

My it’s-too-small-for-anyone’s-fingers-to-use BlackBerry is Bluetooth. (He didn’t even know what that meant, but before the salesman was through with him, he was convinced he needed it. I tried to make him understand it was a way computers and handhelds and phones could all communicate with one another and it worked like infrared, but when it didn’t work for him on the first try, he lost interest.) My you-take-it laptop is Wi-Fi. (No, he doesn’t know what that means, either.) My absolute-piece-of-crap phone sends photos across the country or across town so that my clients can see potential pieces of furniture or room settings as soon as I do.

“Video,” he says, showing the new phone to Jesse. “That’s what they told me, but I got home and thought, who the hell am I gonna send video to? It’s not like I have the store anymore to watch how they waste my money.”

“The store” is Bayer’s Fine Furniture (The Home Of Headache-Free Financing And Hassle-Free Furniture Buying), which my father opened in the late 1950s after he married my mother. I think he’d have actually kept it if only I’d agreed to come work for him. But there comes a time in everyone’s life when they need to grow up and stand on their own two feet. At least that’s what Ronnie Benjamin, the psychiatrist who helped me prove I wasn’t crazy last year, says. She’s helped me a few times since then, and it seems to me she’s always right.

“Oh,” Dana coos, her purple-polished nails reaching out for the phone while she confirms that someone at school has one that does indeed send streaming video, and her brother Jesse adds that the kid got it confiscated for broadcasting from the locker room before gym class.

“You can give the other one to Danala…” my father suggests “…if you can get this one to work.”

“Mom can do it,” Jesse, ever my champion, says. “And then I get Dana’s phone, right, Grandpa?”

“And then there’ll be one more person who won’t take my calls,” my mother accuses.

“I’ll take your calls,” little Alyssa says, smiling coyly at my mother. “If I get the phone I promise to never say, ‘Oh shit, it’s Grandma June.’ I’ll say ‘Oh good!’ I promise.”

I’m supposed to yell at Alyssa for using the S word, but pointing that out will only lead to who she may have heard saying it, and I don’t want to go there.

There is silence and then Dana starts to giggle. Jesse swats at her and then we all give up and laugh, except, of course, Grandma June, who huffs a bit before saying how we’ll all miss her after she’s gone.

If that sounds like a threat, don’t be alarmed. I’m ashamed to admit that not only don’t we take my mother’s suicide comments to heart anymore, we don’t even hear them. The days of her feeble attempts are, thankfully, behind us, or so we try to believe. My father gently gives her hand a pat, and I shoot her a not-in-front-of-the-children look. And just as I am about to try to video the kids with the phone, a car pulls into our driveway and my three children rush to the window like it’s Trading Families and their new mother is going to get out of the car and come strolling up the walk.

The car is low and sleek and if I knew sports cars the way I know SUVs and minivans, I’m sure I’d recognize what it is. Detective Scoones, Drew, gets out of the car and adjusts his sunglasses. He has on pressed jeans and a casual sports jacket over an Izod sort of shirt in deep green, a favorite color of mine. I know it’s not just me who can’t breathe at the sight of him because my mother gasps and my daughter’s jaw drops.

June beats me to the door, proving that when she wants to she can move like lightning, and introduces herself, establishing immediately that 1) she knows all about everything that happens in my life and 2) that she is staying over to protect her grandchildren from whatever he might have in mind. Marty, his protective instincts in full gear, manages to mention the best lawyer on the South Shore twice before the man has both feet in the foyer. The good detective makes a point of taking note, nodding his head and muttering something about the lawyer’s reputation.

He bothers to murmur compliments as he looks around at my house, noting that the dark green walls make the place look cozy and the salmon color of the bedroom, which he can glimpse from the hall, looks inviting. Yes, that is the word he uses. He says I look nice, too. A lot better might be what he actually says.

Dana and Jesse bound down the stairs, Alyssa lagging slightly behind, and he introduces himself to them, assuring them this is just routine and that their mother is in no way a suspect (as in: your mom’s just helping the police out) and this is not any sort of date.

There are now seven of us occupying approximately four square feet of floor space in my foyer. I invite him into the living room and the group moves like we are bound by bungee cords. I motion for him to sit but after the kids jump onto the sofa and my parents take the club chairs, he remembers that he actually hasn’t had a chance to stop for dinner and wonders if I would mind if he held the “interview” in a restaurant.

“Isn’t that a bit irregular?” my elder daughter asks. Her tone hints that she thinks the handsome detective is up to no good.

“A bit,” he admits with a smile that appears to win her over. “But pretty soon my stomach will be talking louder than my voice can cover.”

When Alyssa starts to list all the Yu-Gi-Oh cards she has, I acquiesce because going to dinner with Drew Scoones is not exactly abhorrent. And because the alternative—spending an evening with my mother—has the potential of landing both of us back at South Winds Psychiatric Center. And then, too, there are a few things I’d like to tell the good detective that I don’t want my kids to overhear.

Somehow we extricate ourselves, my father yelling down the walk after us to have a nice time and my mother fussing at him that we should do no such thing. Drew opens the car door for me, waits while I pull in my flowery skirt and wrestle with the seat belt. Then he closes me in.

As he slides into the driver’s seat, he says, “I just wanted to check up on you and see if anything else might have occurred to you now that you’ve had some time to come to yourself.”

“And you can’t get in trouble for this?” I ask.

“For what? Eating?” he says, trying to push me into defining it as something more than that.

I fumble with a few words and then, more forcefully, say that I don’t think there’s anything else, though I have thought about what might be important. I don’t tell him that I’ve also thought a lot about what might not be, like the rants in Elise’s journals.

“Well, let’s just grab a little something to eat, have a couple of beers, talk it out a bit,” he says. “Sometimes a little memory jog can produce the smallest thing. It’s always the smallest things that solve the biggest cases, you know.

“And you’re sharp,” he says. “Like about the dog knocking over the pills, and the alarm.”

“You knew all that,” I say, not about to be swayed by flattery. “Why pretend otherwise?”

He smiles shyly. “You never know. Sometimes it pays to be dumb.”

“Play dumb,” I correct. “Like on Columbo, when he asks all the murderers ‘Why’ and they come up with explanations that innocent people wouldn’t bother with?”

“I’ve got a wrinkled raincoat in the trunk,” he says with a shrug.

He pulls out of the driveway, his hand on the seat behind me as he backs up. If I sit any more erect, I’ll be kissing the windshield. He drives up to Christiano’s, a little Italian place in town that is supposedly the little Italian restaurant that Billy Joel made famous. Actually, I heard that after they’d put it on their menu and everything, one night Billy did a concert at Nassau Coliseum and refuted the whole rumor, just like that.

Everyone still believes it though. Sometimes people have a hard time letting go of mythology.

Anyway, they are nice to the regulars there, and I’ve been going there for years. The hostess’s eyebrows rise when she sees me without the kids or Bobbie. I suppose it’s Drew that’s raising her eyebrows. She says something like, “Don’t you look nice?” and gives me a covert thumbs-up behind Drew’s back as she takes us to a secluded table in the corner.

On the way, we pass half a dozen families I know, and they all notice Drew, and frankly I enjoy every minute of it. They don’t know that Drew isn’t interested in me, but only in what I might know.

For that matter, I don’t know that, either. I don’t stop at any of their tables and I know that at least three of the women will call Bobbie before I get home and just casually mention that they saw me. Is that Teddi’s cousin from L.A. I saw her with? So what are you having for dinner? I was just at Christiano’s. Yeah, I saw Teddi there…

He asks if I have any more pictures of the Meyers’s place, and I tell him that they are in my computer and that I can forward them to him at the precinct. He tells me his e-mail is on the card he gave me yesterday. I offer to give him my e-mail address, but he says he’s already got it.

Once we’ve ordered (linguini with clam sauce for him, a salad, which I won’t touch, for me), I ask if he ever thought I really was the murderer. He says they aren’t sure yet that there’s even been a murder. That’s the second time he’s evaded answering me about whether I’m a suspect.