“Shouldn’t bother you none, if you ain’t got anything to hide,” she said placidly.
“That’s illegal search!” he protested, and looked like he was going to launch himself at Stella, but when BJ glared and lifted himself an inch off the chintz cushions, Todd sank back in the chair. BJ was six foot three in sock feet, and Todd hadn’t yet finished growing.
“Aha!” Stella crowed, finding a can of Krylon International Harvester Red paint in the bottom of the pack among the broken pencils and empty Cheeto bags and crumpled papers. “At it again, are you?”
When Royal Groffe had undertaken a renewed effort to deliver his support payments on time, he’d apparently been so swayed by Stella’s visit that he’d begun bringing the checks in person. Sherilee had marveled that he stayed on the porch respectfully cooling his heels, his hair combed carefully and his hands clasped in front of him like a Sunday preacher. She’d asked him in out of good manners more than anything else, and while his daughters peeped curiously around the corner at this man who was barely more than a memory, Todd remembered enough about his father to be plunged into a fit of burst illusions and broken promises and forgotten birthdays.
To say that the boy was bitter would be an understatement. The second time his father had come inside for a glass of sweet tea, Todd snuck around to where Royal’s silver Mazda was parked alongside the curb and hastily tagged it on the driver’s side. When Royal came out of the house after his fifteen-minute visit, he was greeted by foot-tall red letters along the driver’s side that spelled out
I AM ANA
—which caused him no end of confusion until he rounded the corner and discovered that the cryptic message continued around the back end of the car, clear across the license plate and bumper:
SSHOLE
… which pretty much cleared it up.
Royal had begun to make a fuss about tanning his son’s hide and taking the cost of repairs out of his support payments. When his ranting turned to threats and yelling, Sherilee called Stella with a desperate plea to come get Todd before he launched his scrawny teenaged self at his father and got himself into even more trouble. Stella wandered down in a pink velour jogging suit and gave Royal a sweet smile. If Sherilee was surprised to see her ex swallow his temper and drive meekly away, she hid it well.
Still, Stella wasn’t sure she’d be able to save the boy a second time. She did a swift calculation: Friday was payday, but the support check came only twice a month, and she couldn’t remember whether this was a pay week or not.
“Todd Groffe,” she said, “what have you done now?”
“Nothing! I swear, Stella, that’s just in there from last time. I ain’t got around to putting it back in the garage, is all.”
“Young man, I best not discover that you are lying to this fine lady,” BJ said, his arms crossed over his broad chest.
Todd made an unintelligible sound, staring at the carpet with his hands jammed in his pockets. Stella suppressed a smile and allowed herself to enjoy BJ’s simmering glower before she turned her attention back to Todd. “So if I go look out the picture window, I won’t see your dad’s car over at your mom’s?”
Todd managed a look of grievous injury. “’Course not!”
Stella, however, knew better. She sighed and pushed herself off the couch.
“Less by ‘over at Mom’s,’ you mean, like, parked out front or something,” Todd added hastily. “He, uh,
might
be visiting, I guess.”
Sure enough, Stella spied the outline of the car in the quick-falling evening.
A passing car lit up the street with twin beams, and Stella was already turning away when something about the vehicle caught her attention, and she turned back.
A
sheriff’s
vehicle. Specifically, the squeaky-clean cruiser operated by the top law enforcement dog of Sawyer County, none other than Goat Jones himself.
Chapter Three
Stella practically leaped back from the window. Was he spying on her? Surely not … well, she’d been known to cruise past the sheriff’s department herself, from time to time, hoping for a glimpse of his long-legged form, but that was different, wasn’t it?
Though the idea that he might be making a check on her gave Stella a little thrill that was tempered by the thought that this particular trip over to her side of town would have netted Goat an eyeful of BJ’s truck in addition to a nice view of her sugar maple in full leaf.
Maybe Goat wouldn’t recognize it.
Right. There was no one in a thirty-mile radius who didn’t know damn well that the only such truck around belonged to BJ.
Stella gave the drapes a frustrated yank, drawing them closed across the picture window. Then she had second thoughts, wondering if closed curtains would make Goat think she was up to some sort of hanky-panky, and yanked them back open.
She rounded on Todd, catching herself before she unleashed the full force of her irritation on the boy.
“So that
is
your dad’s car I see out there.”
“But I
swear
I ain’t done nothin’ to it. Promise.” Todd gave her a look of such tremulous conviction that Stella’s doubts receded a little. Maybe the boy had learned his lesson last time. Maybe Royal truly was trying to be a better man. Maybe there was a chance, if not for reconciliation, at least for a thawing of relations between father and son, and that was nothing to sneeze at. A boy needed a father figure, after all.
“All right,” Stella sighed, wondering if she’d regret it later. “But you leave now and get your ass home and make sure you please-and-thank-you your way through your dad’s visit, hear?”
Todd nodded vigorously. “Yes, ma’am.”
He slipped out the door before Stella could wonder too much about that particular leave-taking comment. She didn’t remember Todd Groffe ever uttering another “yes ma’am,” a discrepancy that bore further investigation. Now wasn’t the time, though—when the phone rang for the third time and without even having to glance at it Stella knew it had to be Gracellen. Her sister was persistent, and there was no better way to get her ire up than to ignore her, which Stella had spent much of their childhood doing, the four-year difference in their ages being just long enough to make Gracellen a constant pest.
“Do you mind if I take this call?” she asked as demurely as she could manage. “I won’t be but a second.”
“Why sure, Stella.” BJ settled back against the sofa and regarded her with a little smile that implied that watching her talk on the phone was his idea of top-notch entertainment.
“Hello, Gracie,” Stella said pleasantly.
“Stellie, Chip’s ear’s come in the mail!”
There was no static this time, but Stella took the phone away from the phone and stared at it, confused, before trying again. “What’s that you said?”
“In a little box like what might hold a necklace, wrapped up in plastic, it’s his
ear
!”
Her sister’s voice dissolved into a tremulous wail. Despite many decades among wealthy Californians, all it took was the first trace of upset and the Missouri returned to Gracellen’s voice in full force.
“Gracie, have you been drinking?”
“Stella, I have just drove us all the way down the durn mountain cause Chess’s got one a his tension headaches on account a the ear and I am right clear at the end of my wits here and I would appreciate if you would—”
“Okay, okay, Gracie,” Stella said. “Let’s take this step by step. Now when you say Chip, you mean Chester the third, right?”
Gracie’s husband Chess was actually Chester Papadakis the second, and his son—by a first wife—was Chester the third. With all those Chesters running around Sacramento they’d had to be a little creative with the nicknaming.
“Yes, yes, of course that’s who I mean.”
Stella squeezed her eyes shut and took a breath. She pressed the phone against her shirt and composed herself before opening her eyes and smiling sweetly. “BJ, if it’s all right, I might just take this…”
“Sure, sure, sure,” BJ said, beaming even more broadly, as if she’d announced a plan to do a striptease rather than take a private call.
Stella hurried down the hall to the most private room in the house. Once she got the bathroom door locked, she hissed into the phone. “So Chip’s ear … you mean his, um, actual—”
“The thing he
hears
outta,” Gracie wailed with renewed grief. “Or used to hear outta anyway, ’cause now I reckon he’s hearin’ outta a hole in the side a his head seein’ as he ain’t got a
ear
anymore.”
“I’m still having a little trouble here, Gracie. What makes you think that the ear is, you know, Chip’s?”
“Oh, Stella, you know how he had those piercings that made Chess so darn mad?”
Stella knew well. The relationship Gracie’s husband had with his son was stormy, to say the least. After fathering the boy and subsequently leaving his mother, Chess had spent a number of years pretending to have forgotten the two of them existed, not unlike Royal Groffe’s treatment of his children, except for the check-writing part. Chester the first had built up a considerable fortune in the nut business, buying up orchards all around California’s Central Valley before Chess was five years old, so that by the time he was an adult his father’s pecans had supplied him with a nearly endless well of cash to get him out of scrapes.
His son’s marriage to wife number one—whose name was Iola—was viewed by Chester as a misstep. A serious one, certainly, since the divorce cost him a great deal of money. However, that was nothing compared to what Chester considered his son’s greatest mistake of all: discovering a two-bit cocktail waitress in a St. Louis bar while bringing Must-Be-Nuts to the Midwest, and then compounding the error by marrying her.
There was talk of disownment, of tossing Chess right out of the family business. Stella was a young wife with a baby back then, and she received Gracellen’s cross-country phone calls with a great deal of sympathy but little in the way of advice, having never dealt with wealthy Greek-American in-laws. Gracie did her best to be a good stepmother on the weekends when Chip visited, and a respectful and helpful stepdaughter at Sunday dinners at her in-laws’ house. Eventually her sweet nature swayed the old man and a sort of détente was reached, especially when Chess’s mother took ill and Gracie, who had not returned to work once she was ensconced in the enormous family ranch, cared for her until she died in the bed Gracie had moved under a window so the old lady could look up into the blossoms on a wisteria vine that clung to an arbor outside. The old lady blessed her before she passed, and Chester the first tearfully declared her the daughter of his heart at a funeral service that went on for nearly two hours and was attended by every member of Sacramento’s Greek-American community.
Everyone, that is, except one. Iola stayed away, the years of being ignored by Chester having drained any warmth Iola might have retained for her ex-father-in-law. It made no difference that, after his wife passed, Chester had a change of heart and decided he wished to enfold his grandson back into the family, especially since Gracellen and Chess had no children of their own. By then, Chip was a sullen teenaged ne’er-do-well, the sort whose misbehavior rarely rose above brawling and bad grades and speeding tickets but certainly did not leave a lot of room for heartwarming reunions with estranged relatives. To an invitation to visit his grandfather, the source of the child support checks that were about to come to an end, Chip extended a colorful variation on “No thanks.”
Iola, on the other hand, sensed an opportunity of the financial sort. Her own support payments were due to go into a dramatic slump, given that Chip was practically an adult, and, perhaps aided by a listlessness that was enhanced by her prescription drug habits, she had never bothered to find a job or an alternate source of income. Iola beseeched her angry son to find it in his heart to forgive his father; instead, the boy took the last of the support money and lit out for Wisconsin, where he intended to live simply but promptly got himself embroiled in a gambling habit instead. In the decade since, Chip’s ever-changing schemes to support himself alternated with desperate pleas for money, made through calls that skirted his father and went straight to his source. Chester Senior finally had what he wanted: a grandson who was pleasant to him—at least when he wanted money.
“I do remember those piercings,” Stella said cautiously. “I believe he had more than most
ladies
I know.”
Every two years Chess and Gracellen sent Stella a plane ticket to come spend Thanksgiving with them, and if Chip happened to be in one of his cash-poor episodes, he could be found at the holiday table. This last visit, his head had been practically shaved and his ears had been studded like a leather club chair; he glowered at the end of the table and said very little to anyone.
“Yes, and then he went and got these little bitty rings through the cartilage, three on each side—oh, it was just terrible looking, Stella. But at least that’s how we know it’s his. Although it’s awful wrinkled up and stale and it has a smell on it—
oh
.”
“So let me get this straight—a box with Chip’s ear in it came to the cabin? Was there a note?”
“Well of course there was, Stellie, that’s how we know Chip’s gone and done it this time, they’re going to kill him if we don’t send them thirty thousand dollars!”
Stella sucked in her breath in dismay. “Gambling again?”
“Of course it’s gambling. That boy ain’t never knowed a card game or a roll a the dice he could pass up. He used to bet on what color dress his teacher was going to wear and was the mailman coming before noon and how many saltines in the package would be busted. Used to be kinda cute till we figured out it was going to be the ruin of him.”
“Well, can’t you just call Chester and have him send the money?”
“He don’t have it, Stella!” Gracellen was wailing again.
“What do you mean, Chester’s loaded!” The one time the Papadakis family patriarch had deigned to come to the holiday dinner, he’d arrived in a glowering snit and looked around the table at all the fixings as though he were looking for country mice to come dancing down the table waving little bitty pitchforks. Stella was pretty sure the diamond in his pinky ring cost more than her car, and the gold weighing down his wife looked like it would topple her over at any moment.