Tim Wynne-Jones - The Uninvited

“What are we celebrating?”

“The first of the month.”

“Cramer, are you stoned?”

He was almost offended, but he thought he could hear just the tiniest bit of excitement in her voice, as if she had caught some of his own excitement.

“You have a fantastic day,” he said. It was something Hank Pretty said to customers, and it sounded like the exactly right thing to say. Then laughing, he hung up. He expected her to phone back, but she didn’t. So he got a deluxe pizza with pineapple and ham, because he knew that was her favorite.

She was there when he arrived, waiting at the door. He smiled and hoisted the extra-large-size pizza box high for her to see. She was standing just inside the screen door, and she didn’t open it even when he was standing right on the step. She looked odd-frightened.

“Mom? You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, staring at the box in his hands. “What’s going on, Cramer?”

He had hoped she might have set the table in anticipation of him bringing home takeout. Especially since he had to head off to the plant in an hour or so. He’d imagined on the way home that she might even pick some flowers and put them on the table the way she used to do sometimes when there was something to celebrate-any old thing. But the table was cluttered with mail and half-finished cups of coffee and a plate with toast crumbs on it that had been there for days.

Still, she seemed pleased with the pizza. So he set the table around the mess, and when they were finally sitting across from each other with their plates filled, he reached into his pocket and handed her a folded envelope.

“Here,” he said.

She took it from him gingerly, glancing suspiciously at the offering.

“What is this?”

“Open it,” he said.

She did, reluctantly, and he just about wanted to scream, he was that excited. But he held it in and watched as she took out five crisp, new one-hundred-dollar bills.

She stared down at the money, and Cramer waited breathlessly for her to respond. He wondered, after a bit, if she was crying, but when she finally raised her head, her eyes were dry and cold and hard.

“Where’d you get this?”

He had rehearsed this moment all day, and it sure hadn’t been like this.

“What do you mean, where did I get it?” he said.

“Hank’s away, isn’t he? Did you take this from the till?” Her eyes were large, troubled.

“Do you think I’d steal from Hank?”

“I don’t know what you’d do.”

“Jesus! What do you even care where I got it!” He was immediately angry at himself-at the irritation in his voice.

Her eyes skittered away from him. She looked haggard. He wondered suddenly if she was ill or something.

“Mom,” he said, his voice soft. “I got a bank loan, okay?”

She looked at him with surprise. “You did what?”

“I got a bank loan. Hank cosigned for me.” She looked down at the money sitting on the open palm of her right hand. He reached across the table and closed her hand around the money. She stared at her fist. “There’s a pretty good chance I’m going to get hired on full-time at the plant,” he said quietly, as if he was talking to a sick person. “That’ll mean a raise and benefits and all that kind of stuff. And so I thought, why wait? You need the money now and you’ve got it.”

She didn’t look up, and since the aroma of the pizza was driving him crazy, he launched in, with one eye on her waiting for the smile, the thank-you. He had no idea what was going on in her head. No idea whether she believed him or not, and he didn’t even really care at this point. She had managed to siphon just about every drop of joy out of the moment. It hadn’t been easy to lay his hands on that kind of money. He didn’t want much in return. But damn it all, she could at least acknowledge it.

And then she did in a most unexpected way. She started laughing. He looked at her and saw the smile on her face and started laughing as well. This was more like it. But he stopped laughing eventually and was well into his second slice of pizza before she stopped. And by then, he was really seriously beginning to wonder whether his mother was losing her mind.

A week passed with no word from the cops on the missing guitars or the JVC. Roach did phone back to say he had talked to Peters. The old man had been at a farm auction all the way down in South Mountain on the Saturday, or so he said. He’d bought a new UTV-had the dated receipt to prove it. When Roach told him what he was looking for, Peters invited him in, without a search warrant. Let him search his truck and his car as well.

“He could have hidden them anywhere,” said Mimi when Jay reported the call to her. “He’s got a pile of outbuildings up there in Paradise.”

“Roach admitted that, but he doubts Peters is the culprit. Apparently, he only just made it back from the auction, hauling the UTV because of car trouble. When the cop was there, the car was up on blocks with the motor stripped down.”

“What about his truck?”

“The license plates are from 1976. He’s not supposed to take it on the road.”

“Yeah, but he does.”

“Only out here. He’d get pulled over for sure if he took it on any main roads.”

“So the car-on-blocks thing is a trick.”

Jay looked hard at her. “Do you really think Peters is that smart?”

No, she didn’t, but the police investigation sounded pretty dumb.

“Phone them back,” said Mimi a few days later. Jay threw up his hands. So she contacted Constable Roach herself, who filled her in on the latest details.

“We’ve expanded the search to Toronto and Montreal,” he said. “Plus we’re checking eBay. We’re still looking. The items are on all kinds of databanks now. The serial numbers are a big help.” Thanks for reminding me, thought Mimi, but she didn’t say anything. “Sometimes stolen goods turn up months later. There’s a big bust and when we sort through the goodies-voila!”

“And what about Stooley Peters?” Mimi asked.

But he had nothing on Peters. The man had no record. And he had been forthcoming with the police. “I went back a second time,” said Roach, which surprised Mimi. “I have to say that Peters seems like a dead end.”

Mimi didn’t argue. It seemed like a pretty good description of the old fart.

Jay was fatalistic. “Maybe it’s the gods of music telling me to get serious.”

“What are you talking about?”

He shrugged. “I want to be a composer, not a pop star. I want to be taken seriously. The electric guitar is… it’s adolescent.”

“It sounded great to me.”

“Thanks, but that’s not the point. I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and the only valid way you could incorporate a guitar solo into a piece of serious music is ironically.”

Mimi looked perplexed. “Or how about because it sounded good?”

He threw up his hands. He was doing a lot of that lately. “You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not that simple.”

And Mimi was about to remind him that the name of his new piece was Simple, but he wandered off. She had wanted to add that the real point was someone owed him a few thousand bucks. And she had also wanted to say that what were the gods of cinema trying to tell her by letting her movie camera get stolen?

“And then he crawled off somewhere to be morose” was how Mimi described the scene to Iris. The two of them had stumbled on a craft fair down by the basin in the heart of Ladybank. It was a hot and sunny summer afternoon, with just enough breeze off the water to convince Iris that a craft fair was a better option than the air-conditioned coffeehouse by the park. It was more of a rummage sale and pretty chintzy, but Mimi loved it and only wished she had her camcorder with her.