“Why do you want him?”
“I don’t want him,” she told him. “Why would I want him? I had an obligation to another. Now I shall deliver him, and then my obligation shall be done.”
The newspaper fluttered, and Fat Charlie was alone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
IN WHICH ROSIE LEARNS TO SAY NO TO STRANGERS AND FAT CHARLIE ACQUIRES A LIME
FAT CHARLIE LOOKED DOWN AT HIS FATHER’S GRAVE. “ARE YOU in there?” he said aloud. “If you are, come out. I need to talk to you.”
He walked over to the floral grave marker and looked down. He was not certain what he was expecting—a hand to push up through the soil, perhaps, punching up and grabbing his leg—but nothing of the kind seemed to be about to happen.
He had been so certain.
Fat Charlie walked back through the Garden of Rest feeling stupid, like a game show contestant who had just made the mistake of betting his million dollars on the Mississippi being a longer river than the Amazon. He should have known. His father was as dead as roadkill, and he had wasted Spider’s money on a wild goose chase. By the windmills of Babyland he sat down and wept, and the moldering toys seemed even sadder and lonelier than he remembered.
She was waiting for him in the parking lot, leaning against her car, smoking a cigarette. She looked uncomfortable.
“Hullo, Mrs. Bustamonte,” said Fat Charlie.
She took one final drag on the cigarette, then dropped it to the asphalt and ground it out beneath the sole of her flat shoe. She was wearing black. She looked tired. “Hello Charles.”
“I think if I’d expected to see anyone here, it would be Mrs. Higgler. Or Mrs. Dunwiddy.”
“Callyanne’s gone away. Mrs. Dunwiddy sent me. She wants to see you.”
It’s like the mafia, thought Fat Charlie. A postmenopausal mafia. “She’s going to make me an offer I can’t refuse?”
“I doubt it. She is not very well.”
“Oh.”
He climbed into his rental, followed Mrs. Bustamonte’s Camry along the Florida streets. He had been so certain about his father. Certain he’d find him alive. Sure that he’d help…
They parked outside Mrs. Dunwiddy’s house. Fat Charlie looked at the front yard, at the faded plastic flamingos and the gnomes and the red mirrored gazing ball sitting on a small concrete plinth like an enormous Christmas tree ornament. He walked over to the ball, just like the one he had broken when he was a boy, and saw himself distorted, staring back from it.
“What’s it for?” he said.
“It’s not for anything. She liked it.”
Inside the house the smell of violets hung thick and cloying. Fat Charlie’s Great-Aunt Alanna had kept a tube of parma violet candies in her handbag, but even as a chunky kid with a sweet tooth, Fat Charlie would eat them only if there wasn’t anything else. This house smelled like those sweets had tasted. Fat Charlie hadn’t thought of parma violets in twenty years. He wondered if they still made them. He wondered why anyone had ever made them in the first place…
“She’s at the end of the hall,” said Mrs. Bustamonte, and she stopped and she pointed. Fat Charlie went into Mrs. Dunwiddy’s bedroom.
It was not a big bed, but Mrs. Dunwiddy lay in it like an oversized doll. She wore her glasses, and above them something that Fat Charlie realized was the first nightcap he had ever seen, a yellowing tea-cosy-like affair, trimmed in lace. She was propped up on a mountain of pillows, her mouth open, and she was snoring gently as he walked in.
He coughed.
Mrs. Dunwiddy jerked her head up, opened her eyes, and stared at him. She pointed her finger to the nightstand beside the bed, and Fat Charlie picked up the glass of water sitting there and passed it to her. She took it with both hands, like a squirrel holding a nut, and she took a long sip before handing it back to him.
“My mouth get all dry,” she said. “You know how old I am?”
“Um.” There was, he decided, no right answer. “No.”
“Hunnert and four.”
“That’s amazing. You’re in such good shape. I mean, that’s quite marvelous—”
“Shut up, Fat Charlie.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t say ‘sorry’ like that neither, like a dog that get tell off for messin‘ on the kitchen floor. Hold your head up. Look the world in the eye. You hear me?”
“Yes. Sorry. I mean, just yes.”
She sighed. “They want to take me to the hospital. I tell them, when you get to be hunnert and four, you earn the right to die in your own bed. I make babies in this bed long time back, and I birth babies in this bed, and damned if I going to die anywhere else. And another thing…” She stopped talking, closed her eyes, and took a slow, deep breath. Just as Fat Charlie was convinced she had fallen asleep, her eyes opened, and she said, “Fat Charlie, if someone ever ask if you want to live to be hunnert and four, say no. Everything hurt. Everything. I hurt in places nobody ain’t discover yet.”
“I’ll bear that in mind.”