Page 4 of A Winter of Discontent for Henry Milch
“Kind of.”
“I just don’t want to look suspicious.”
“Are we going undercover?”
“No. I just don’t want to scream PI.”
“I can imagine a situation where you might scream but not one in which you’d look like a PI.”
“Do you want to come or not?”
“Yeah, I’ve gotta see this.”
Downstairs, as I was putting on my boots, I said to Nana Cole, “Jan will be here in five minutes. Don’t touch the baby.”
Ignoring me, she said, “Check the mail on your way out.”
“Fine,” I said, though I didn’t want to do that. Our mailbox was at the end of our very long driveway on M-22. In the summer it was a pleasant little walk—birds and sunlight, andwildflowers at the curb. But in the winter. Well… you didn’t just walk down there.
I got into my car—a popsicle blue, eleven-year-old Geo Metro convertible—which was frigid inside. Not because the heater didn’t work, it did, it just didn’t work well enough to keep up with the hole in the canvas top. I drove to the end of the driveway and jumped out to get the mail.
It was snowing lightly, or maybe it was just the wind picking up snow and redepositing it. The lake had formed a crusty edge of ice, which the heaving waves kept breaking up. It was cold and desolate and made me feel like I was in a Bronte novel. And those never ended well.
I snatched the mail from the box and brought it back to my car. Nothing interesting. Our power bill, one of my credit cards telling me my payment was late, and a brochure from a local funeral parlor. I’d make sure to pass that along to Nana Cole.
Driving over the six inches of snow crumbles the plow had tossed into our driveway, I headed toward Masons Bay, about a ten-minute drive. When I got to the quaint village, Opal was standing in front of Pastiche where she worked. The first thing I noticed was that she was wearing a lavender faux fur coat that I wanted to steal and her hair was covered in a big, bulky pink hat. I was curious to see what color it was underneath. In the past, it had been orange, purple, green and yellow, and black and white (squares). I had no idea what she was going to do with it next.
The hat, though annoying, was necessary since it was about fifteen degrees. I myself was wearing my grandfather’s corduroy hunting cap with ear flaps hanging down. I looked like a chic Bassett hound.
“Don’t you have gloves?” she asked me, as I pulled away from the curb.
“I lose them.” Mostly because I put them down and then don’t bother to look for them. I mean, there was a vent on eachside of the steering wheel so I could warm my hands up if it got really cold. Which reminded me, and so one at a time I held my hands over the vent.
“You don’t have a scarf either.”
“My scarf is… somewhere.” Not a brilliant thing to say, everything is somewhere. “You know, I don’t really think in those terms. I’m a Californian. Through and through.”
“Remind me not to go to the Arctic with you.”
“Unless George Bush starts exiling gay people to the Arctic, I willnevergo there.”
“You know, if you get frostbite they cut your fingers off.”
“Shut up.”
Could you get frostbite when the temperature was, like, in the teens? I had no idea. I’d have to look it up on the Internet when I got home. If I still had fingers.
“So, Henry Milch, PI, what’s the case?”
“An old lady fell down in the bathroom and now she’s suing for a million dollars.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, that’s what she said when she broke her arm.”
Three Friends winery had once been a farm of some sort. Sitting in the midst of a snow-covered twenty or twenty-five acres, was a quaint farmhouse similar to my Nana Cole’s: a wooden barn and a brand-new pole barn. The original barn had been converted into a tasting room.
A few days before, it had been close to forty and then quickly dropped well below freezing. The dirt parking lot had frozen into deep ridges. As Opal and I picked our way over to the tasting room, she said, “I think it’s warmer outside than it is in your car.”
