Page 9 of A Winter of Discontent for Henry Milch
CHAPTER THREE
When I walked into the kitchen, Emerald was squirming in Jan’s arms. She picked me out and smiled at me. Whether she knew it was me or not, I wasn’t sure. I was getting the feeling she liked me—which suggested a lifetime of bad choices waiting for her.
“Is the plow guy coming?” I asked. It had snowed most of the time I was gone. “I could barely make it up the driveway.”
“He comes when there’s four inches, you know that,” Nana Cole said. “You could have taken the Escalade. It’ll drive through most anything.”
I took the baby from Jan, and Emerald let out a tiny squeal. The sound that meant she was happy.Yup,I thought,if I’m what makes her happy, the kid is doomed.
The kitchen smelled like spaghetti sauce, and in one corner Riley was asleep in a dog bed I’d gotten him.
“Did you let Riley out?” I asked my grandmother who was standing by the stove stirring a giant pot, her cane in one hand.
“Oh yes, he did a nice big number two,” Jan answered for her. She was the youngest of Nana Cole’s friends and the most religious. She wore a big fuzzy sweater buttoned to her neck. Even for January she looked over-dressed.
“Thank you.”
“Well, I should get going. I’ve got my own dinner to make,” she said, standing up. She was single, a spinster, as my Nana Cole called her behind her back, so she might have been fishing for a dinner invite. It didn’t come.
Jan was over by the coat hook next to the back door. I decided to sneak something in before she left. “Nana, have you heard from my mother?”
She gave me a sharp look and said, “She calls when she calls.”
I glanced at Jan, trying to read her face. If my mother had called, I wouldn’t be surprised if Nana Cole told her friends and not me. Jan looked a little cowed, but that might have been the tension in the room.
“I’ll see you Friday, Emma,” she said, then slipped out the door.
I put the baby in the car seat. I really wanted the seat to work, because if I did something crazy like go the bathroom and Nana Cole managed to knock the whole thing off the table, the baby would be fine. The seat was so sturdy, I was sure the whole house could fall down and Emerald would be just fine sitting in the seat amid the rubble.
I said I had to go upstairs and make a phone call, so I scurried out of the kitchen before Emerald could begin to fuss. On the way, I worried about my mother. A few days after New Year’s, a Christmas a box had arrived with a Chicago postmark and no return address. Inside were some baby clothes that wouldn’t fit Emerald for at least a year, a couple of toys she could have choked on, and a photograph of my mother and her boyfriend, David Hounsell. She wore a silky pale blue dress and held a small bouquet in her hands while he stood there, three-piece suit and slicked back hair looking like a poor man’s Michael Douglas. On the back it said, ‘Mr. and Mrs. David Hounsell, 12/21/2003.”
They were standing in a living room. The furniture was covered in a dusty pink fabric and the end tables were made of thick, whitewashed wood. I could see bits of the floor, which was tiled in terra cotta. They weren’t in Chicago. They were somewhere in the Southwest. So why the Chicago postmark? Did they go to Chicago on their honeymoon? That didn’t make sense. It was the middle of the winter. My mother hated winter.
She’d told me they weren’t getting married because things were complicated. Now that they were married, were things uncomplicated? And how did they get uncomplicated?
In my bedroom, I got out my cell phone, scrolled through until I found Ham’s name and hit send.
“Yeah.”
“It’s me. Henry.”
“Yeah, I know. What’s up?”
“I went to Three Friends and spoke to Melanie.”
“What did you think?”
“There’s a discrepancy.”
“Okay. We like those.”
“In her statement Roberta said she was walking from the toilet to the sink when she may have slipped on some water. But Melanie said the water was running in the sink. That suggests she made it to the sink and didn’t fall until after she’d turned the water on.”
“Good, that’s exactly what we’re looking for.”
“Should I go talk to her and see what she says about it?”
“No. Don’t go anywhere near her. The lawyers will ask the questions. They’re going to want her answers under oath. And we don’t want to give her time to come up with any plausible lies.”
