Page 37 of A Matter of Pedigree
That was the last thing Carole wanted to think about. “Mom, why don’t you call an Uber?” she asked, lighting on a solution to the problem.
“An Uber! Who do you think I am? Some college kid, coming home for the weekend?”
Carole took a look around the apartment and decided she was wasting her time. She could spend the rest of the morning searching, but she wasn’t going to find anything, and there was no point in keeping her mother waiting at the airport. The sooner she got her settled, the better. “I’m on my way,” she said.
“What about the cleaning?” asked Mom, as Carole headed for the door.
“Do you really think they’ll notice?” asked Carole, waving her hand at the hallway. “And we did most of it, anyway.”
“Okay,” said Mom, picking up her bucket of cleaning supplies. “Let’s go.”
But when they got to the Corolla, they discovered they weren’t going anywhere. An ugly yellow boot had been fastened to the rear wheel.
“What am I going to do?” wailed Mom. “Christina Fornisanti has to babysit her grandkids this afternoon over in Warwick.”
Carole was tapping her foot, but it didn’t have the same effect in her flat, dog-walking boots as it did in her Louboutins. “Okay, Mom, this is what we’re going to do. You call Ginny Ferrara—she knows somebody in the park ing division, or maybe she knows somebody who knows somebody. I know there’s some sort of connection. Here, take this,” she added, stuffing a bunch of fifties in Mom’s hand. “For expenses. Meanwhile, I’m calling an Uber.”
They both got busy on their phones, Mom working through her network of contacts and Carole heading for the corner, where she waited for a silver Mercedes SUV. Her mother wouldn’t settle for less, she knew.
When the car pulled up, she hopped inside and sailed off, giving Mom a parting wave.
Carole realized she was still in her cleaning lady disguise and probably looked as if she didn’t have two cents to her name. “This isn’t how I usually look …” she began.
“Whatever,” said the driver, with a shrug. “Your card went through; that’s all that matters to me. So is this some sort of prank? Like that old TV show? You know, the one where they pull tricks on people?”
“No. This is actually my life,” said Carole, with a sigh. Things were certainly not going her way; she had a lot on her plate, for sure, but she wasn’t about to bare her soul to an Uber driver. “Can you kind of hurry up?” she asked. “My mom’s waiting at the airport.”
“Once we’re through town, things should open up,” he said, referring to the stop-and-go traffic. He was right; they made good time, but Polly had been waiting close to an hour by the time Carole arrived. She was standing outside the terminal, impatiently drumming her fingers on her crossed arms, alongside a small mountain of Louis Vuitton luggage. She despised the current trend for wearing a comfy track suit for travel and was wearing instead a classic black-and-white tweed Chanel suit, complete with patent-leather Chanel pumps and the trademark quilted bag. She even smelled like Chanel, having doused herself liberally with Coco.
“Carole?” Polly pulled back when Carole jumped out of the car and attempted to embrace her.
“Yeah, it’s me, Mom. I mean, Polly.”
“What did you do to your hair?”
“It’s a wig,” said Carole, pulling it off.
“And why are you dressed like this? Has the IRS finally caught up with Frank?”
“I’ll explain later,” said Carole. “Hop in the car.”
Polly slid gracefully into the back seat, looking like Catherine Deneuve. “I have quite a bit of luggage,” she told the driver, expecting him to load it.
“I’ll pop the hatch,” he said.
“Well, really,” declared Carole, who had joined her mother in the back seat. She was pretty sure that he wouldn’t have dared to treat her like this if she weren’t dressed like a cleaning woman, and she wasn’t going to put up with it.
“Bad back,” he said, with a grimace, leaving Carole no option but to climb back out and load the suitcases into the car. When the cargo area was full, she put the rest in front, next to the driver, who was looking increasingly miserable. No doubt he was thinking he’d priced the trip too low.
“Look, this is for you,” said Carole, slipping him a fifty.
“Okay, where to now?”
“The Esplanade,” said Carole.
Fortunately for her, Will, the nice concierge, was on duty when they pulled up at the entrance, and he hurried out to help her unload the bags onto the luggage cart.
“Nice place,” said Polly, leading a little procession across the lobby to the elevator. “How long have you been here?”
