Bubbles All The Way Read online

  I winced. I would have to send Flossie a huuuuge bouquet in the morning.

  “Mom? Is that you?”

  Jane appeared on the stairs. She looked the same: grungy low-riding jeans, royal blue hair, a supertight Green Day T-shirt and studs all around. But she was clinging to the doorjamb and staring at us with almost palpable anxiety.

  “Buffy the fun slayer,” Genevieve grumbled.

  My loopy daughter skipped down the stairs clutching the cell phone Dan had purchased for her. She never went anywhere without that stupid cell phone—in case the phenomenal Jason should call.

  “Finally. A Christmas tree. I wondered if you were ever going to get around to buying one.”

  I gave her a dirty look.

  “Are we going to decorate it?”

  “Soon, hon,” Mama said. “First, there’s chicken you made today. And it’s already six o’clock. Late.”

  Disappointed, Jane turned her attention to today’s latest delivery of wedding gifts.

  “You’ve got to open them, Mom. It’s not polite to let them sit there. People will be expecting thank-you notes.”

  Mama was plunking on the table a lemon-roasted chicken with rosemary, a bowl of canned green beans and a tub of mashed potatoes. Genevieve lined a plastic basket with waxed paper and tossed in slices of Wonderbread. It was nutrition galore at the Yablonsky household.

  “Maybe tomorrow I’ll open the gifts. I have to go on assignment tonight.”

  “Again? You just can’t wait to leave me, can you? Guess I’m not worth being around.”

  In the old days, I would have laughed off that kind of snotty teenage line. Not now. Thanks to Dr. Caswell’s report, I was supersensitive to any allegations of maternal inadequacy. Jane’s quip opened up a nice, fresh wound.

  Ignore her, Genevieve mouthed.

  “I can’t wait until you and Dad get married. Then maybe you’ll be at home more and I can have a real family for once instead of a television, Grandma and . . . that.” She cocked her head at Genevieve, who, having distributed the Wonderbread, was spying out the window with her military-issue infrared binoculars, looking for Commies or whatever it was that got her so excited.

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  “Dinner’s ready!” Mama barked.

  “Where are you going?” Jane asked as I headed toward the stairs.

  “I have to get dressed for this fund-raiser I’m covering.” It was hard to get out the words. My mouth had gone dry, realizing that Stiletto probably had some plan to get us alone so we could be together with no one else for the last time ever.

  “You seem stressed,” Jane said, pulling out her chair at the table. “Everything go all right at work today?”

  “Um, okay.”

  “Nothing exciting happen?”

  I was forbidden by Dr. Caswell from mentioning anything disturbing that might cause Jane to suffer a flashback. So even though there were a couple dozen housewives outside waiting to comfort a man whose wife had dropped dead right before my eyes, murdered by hair extensions, even though I’d been shot at by the violent wing of the anti-Christmas lobby, all I could say was “Not really, sweetie. Everything is hunky-dory.”

  “Good.” Jane joined Mama and Genevieve, who were already engaged in passing, buttering, cutting and scooping.

  There was a knock at the door. I stopped with one foot on the bottom step. Immediately, a shadow fell across Jane’s face. “Should I get it?” she asked.

  “No, Jane.” I reached the door first. “It’s okay. I’ll get it.”

  Jane ran from the table and pushed me aside. “No, Mom. Let me. It’s part of my therapy, learning not to be afraid to open my own front door. That’s what Dr. Caswell wants me to do. Besides, you’re here and Grandma and Genevieve and there’s a peephole. Perfectly safe.”

  She pressed her eye against the peephole and sighed with relief. “Oh. I’m such an idiot. It’s nothing.”

  “Who is it?”

  She unlocked the door. “Nobody. Just Santa Claus.”

  Chapter Nine

  “NOOO!” I threw my body against the door and flipped the latch.

  Jane stepped back. “What’s wrong? It’s only some guy dressed as Santa Claus. Probably from the Salvation Army.”

  “It’s a Santagram.” Mama wiped her lips and pushed back from the table. “Let him in, Bubbles. Don’t be so queer.”

  Genevieve waved a slice of Wonder. “My musket’s right there by the door, Sally, if you’re hankering.”

  I grabbed the rusted musket, surprised by how heavy it was. I had no idea how to fire this thing or if it was already “tamped and loaded,” whatever that meant.

  Knock. Knock. Knock.

  My heart was pounding at breakneck speed. What to do? It might be Ern Bender or my stalker in the Mercedes. I simply couldn’t take the risk.

  Jane was regarding me quizzically. “Mom? Is something going on that you’re not telling me?”

  Knock. Knock.

  Dampness spread into my underarms. “Noooo. I’m just being careful, sweetie. That’s how mothers are.”

  “Careful about Santa Claus?” Jane scrunched her mouth, as if such a thing weren’t possible. “Maybe I’m not the only one who needs to see Dr. Caswell on Tuesdays and Thursdays, hmm?”

  “Miss Yablonsky?” It was a man’s voice. He might have been the stalker, but he was more sober sounding than Ern Bender. “Do you have a minute? It’s me, Phil.”

  Phil Shatsky. Debbie’s husband. Whew! Feeling like an idiot, I unlatched the door and let him in.

  Phil was, indeed, dressed like Santa Claus and he appeared more frightened than any of us. “You always answer the door with a gun?”

  I dropped my gaze to the rusted musket in my hand. “Sorry. Precaution.” Then I pointed to his duds. “You always dress like an elf?”

  “I do when there are customers filling my house with tuna noodle casseroles and I need to escape.” He smiled a broad, sad smile.

  Okay, so he wasn’t textbook handsome or particularly built. Still, Phil Shatsky had a kind face and a swollen nose, probably from crying.

  “I’m sorry about the note,” I said, leading him to the couch. “I should have waited. I mean, this must be so confusing right now.”

  “What’s so confusing?” Jane asked. She was standing over us with her arms folded and eyebrows raised.

  “Nothing’s confusing, honey,” I said. “This is a personal matter. Maybe you should go to your room.”

  “My room! I haven’t been sent to my room since I was nine.”

  Mama got the message. “Come on, Jane. Let’s go out for dessert.” She grabbed her coat off the hook by the door. “Your mother has work to do.”

  Jane stamped her foot. “No. Something’s going on and no one’s telling me. There are all these women outside and our neighbor shows up in a Santa suit and Mom’s throwing around a musket. What happened?”

  “My wife . . .” Phil started, before I could put up a hand to stop him.

  “What happened to your wife?” Jane wanted to know.

  “Jane!” Mama frowned the frown that still terrorizes me in my nightmares.

  Mama’s glower did the trick. It got my pesky daughter to back off, but not willingly. She was suspicious and for good reason. A woman across the street had been murdered, had died in front of her mother. This was not the kind of crisis we were used to in our neighborhood. This was way worse than untrimmed front doors and no Christmas trees.

  This was the kind of crisis that even marrying Dan might not be able to set right.

  “How can I help?” I asked, after Mama, Jane and Genevieve had hustled out to the Lehigh Diner for their famous peppermint stick ice-cream pie.

  Phil took off his Santa cap and fingered the pom-pom between his thick, grease-stained fingers. “Tell me what happened. I want to know everything.”

  I couldn’t see how describing Debbie’s death would hurt anyone or hamper an investigation, so I started at the beginning, making sure to
play up that Debbie had been singing his praises right until the end.

  “Really? She said all that stuff about me?”

  “You should have seen her, Phil, how proud she was to have a husband who watched the Lifetime Channel and folded laundry.” I nudged him. “Said you made terrific love afterward, too.”

  A big tear rolled down Phil’s flaccid cheek. He brushed it away and sniffed. “My grandmother taught me that real men cry. That’s a lesson that kinda came in handy today.”

  “She’s a good woman, your grandma. A good woman.”

  “Debbie is”—he paused and closed his eyes—“was a lot like my grandma. Too bad they never got to know each other.”

  My chest tightened. I would have given him a hug then and there if I wasn’t afraid it would lump me in with the other desperate housewives outside. I could definitely see the attraction to Phil Shatsky. Under different circumstances, I, too, might have been tempted to pour some celery soup over chicken pieces for him.

  “Look at it this way, Phil. Maybe they’re getting to know each other right now.” I patted his hand. “Now that your wife and grandma are together in you know where.”

  “Boca Raton?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s where Grandma is. In Boca Raton, Florida. She doesn’t like to fly or drive long distances, so she didn’t make it to our wedding. And Debbie never had a chance to get to Florida, what with all the other traveling she had to do for business.”

  Bells went off. A granddaughter-in-law in the travel business who didn’t make time to visit her husband’s elderly grandmother. A woman with enough frequent-flier miles to start her own airline? That wasn’t right.

  I added it to my growing list of facts that made Debbie weird, including once being married to a sallow pharmacist who went to jail, harassing by phone a self-absorbed hair stylist with two first names and running an alleged scam she co-opted from her ex-husband.

  “You know how we met?” Phil asked, not waiting for my answer. “Debbie had a stopped-up toilet. A toothbrush she’d been using to clean the grout in her bathroom had been in a bucket. She emptied out the bucket into the toilet, the toothbrush got stuck and, the next thing she knew, she was up to her ankles in water.”

  Yuck.

  “She was so cute. So bubbly and full of life. I never met a woman who could giggle like that.” He smiled to himself. “She was wearing a bikini. Polka dots. Said she always wore a swimsuit when she cleaned the shower.”

  Or was trying to seduce the most successful plumber in town.

  “What about her former husband?” I prodded.

  Phil rested his chin on his hand. “That guy couldn’t find the business end of a wrench. He was useless. Used to fall asleep in front of the TV every night. Guess that’s because he was a drug addict, too. Do you know about that?”

  I played innocent. “I heard he went to jail for drugs. Don’t know what exactly.”

  “You name it, he did it. Had the whole pharmacy to himself, like an alcoholic owning a bar. Valium. Per-coset. I don’t know what else. Debbie never put him down, though. She always referred to him in the best light, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “She tried to get him into rehab but he refused to admit that he had a problem. Finally, when she found out he was hurting other people and not just himself, she went to the authorities.” Phil looked at me. “It was the right thing to do.”

  “Absolutely.” I thought of Ern’s protestations that he was innocent and that Debbie had set him up. She had a lot to gain by getting Ern out of the way. She had a scam to profit from—and a chance at Phil.

  “How long after Ern left did you two marry?”

  Phil blushed. “The day he was shipped off to the penitentiary, Debbie and I drove to Maryland. She didn’t want to. It was my idea. She refused to . . . you know . . . until she had a ring.”

  Ah, yes. That old trick. Holding out until the ink on the marriage certificate is good and dry. It’s surprising more women who want to get married haven’t figured out all they have to do is claim a vow of chastity.

  “I have to ask you, Bubbles,” he said, after an uncomfortable moment of silence had passed. “Was there anything else Debbie said today?”

  There was a lot Debbie said, most of it obnoxious bragging, but this was not the appropriate occasion to go into detail. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I guess . . . ” He played with the pom-pom on his hat some more. “When she knew she was . . . uh . . . having an attack. Did she say anything? I wouldn’t ask except that I have this burning need to know, for some reason.”

  “She said something about having a deadly wheat allergy.”

  Phil shook his head. “She’s not allergic to wheat. She’s allergic to latex.”

  Was, I thought. “I know. I must have misunderstood.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She said she felt dizzy. And hot.”

  “But what were . . . what were her dying words?”

  I sat back. In the span of only a few hours, I’d been asked that question twice, first by Ern Bender and now by Debbie’s own husband. Though, between both of them, Debbie’s husband made the most sense.

  “She said she loved you, Phil. Those were her dying words.”

  “Really?”

  “Honest.” And it was true, sort of. Okay, so Debbie hadn’t specifically croaked, “I love you, Phil,” before collapsing, but she’d said as much.

  “You don’t know how much better that makes me feel. Debbie and I loved each other more than you could imagine. A lot of people doubted that because she travels so often and I’m always making house calls late at night. The thing is, they don’t know. They couldn’t know how special our relationship was.”

  “I know,” I said, though I didn’t. And I never would.

  Chapter Ten

  The unfortunate thing about Phil Shatsky showing up at my door weepy and flattened with grief was that I couldn’t very well launch into the fourth degree about his affair with Marguerite and whether what Ern Bender had told me was true.

  I mean, there he was sobbing and sobbing after I lied that Debbie’s last words were that she loved him. He used up all my tissues and one roll of toilet paper, which happened to be my last roll. And then he moved on to paper towels. His nose was bright red and raw.

  Meanwhile, I was keeping one eye on the clock, picking over what was left of the chicken and cold mashed potatoes on Jane’s plate and trying to come up with an easy exit line so I could take a shower to get ready for the fund-raiser.

  No matter what I said, Phil wouldn’t leave. “I can’t go back there. Oh, no,” he moaned, wistfully parting the shades to see his house across the street. “I can’t be there among her things, alone.”

  “You won’t be among her things alone,” I said. “There are twenty women crowding your living room right now.”

  “Yes. But they’re not Debbie. Can’t I stay here? It’s so homey and warm. There’s so much dusting to do. I promise I won’t get in your way. And I’ll help around the house.”

  In the end, I agreed to let him stay until I left for the fund-raiser. Can’t say it was the most comfortable arrangement, me taking a shower with Phil clanking pots and pans downstairs in the kitchen, playing the score from Rent full-blast. For one thing, I was treated to a jet of cold water whenever he turned on the faucet. For another, he was making a lot of noise.

  And crying. Crying. Crying. Crying. It was enough to make a healthy adult woman rethink the virtues of creating more sensitive men.

  When I emerged a half hour later in the silversequined halter-top dress I’d bought from Almart, my hair in a classic twist, my feet stuffed into black pumps, I found that Phil had dried his tears and completely transformed my kitchen.

  It was spotless. Not a dish was in sight, not even a Tupperware container of leftovers. The counters were scrubbed clean. The refrigerator gleamed. Even the decades-old grime ringing the burners was gone. The air smelled
of cinnamon and fresh nutmeg.

  Phil was rearranging my spice rack. I never even knew I had a spice rack.

  “This is incredible.” I ran my finger along the banister. “It’s totally clean.”

  He tossed a jar of Mama’s Butter Buds into the trash and shuddered. “It’s my therapy. Some men have football and beer. Some men get rid of their stress on the links. Others go hunting or fishing. I organize. I can’t tell you how much better I feel.”

  I could have made a crack about my home being in a lot better shape if more people in his life died more often, but decided on second thought that might be tasteless.

  “My, my.” He put his hands on his aproned hips. It was the blue flowered one Mama used on special occasions; it went nicely with his red Santa pants. “Look who’s all dressed up and ready to party.”

  “I’m going to the Help the Poor Children Fund-raiser.”

  “Not in those shoes you’re not.”

  I glanced down at my shoes. Basic black pumps. “No?”

  “They’re just fine . . . if you like looking like the church secretary.”

  I brought my hand to my mouth. “The church secretary!”

  “How about red? You have anything in red?”

  Of course. I had everything in red.

  I ran upstairs, dug out a pair of red sparkled high-heeled stilettos from the back of the closet, blew off the dust and returned. Phil was done organizing the spice rack, and he was frowning at my cluttered refrigerator. He also might have had a batch of Christmas cookies going. Explained the cinnamon.

  “I thought you were going to a fund-raiser, not off to see the wizard,” he said when he saw my red sparklies.

  It took five tries for Phil to be satisfied with a pair of silver slingbacks. I’d forgotten I’d bought them last fall for Mickey Sinkler’s wedding.

  “Now about those lips . . .”

  “Phil. I have to go.” I gave him a quick hug.

  Phil held on to me. “You have saved me tonight, Bubbles. I didn’t know how I was going to make it. You’re an angel.”