Lynne Heitman - First Class Killing

My place, since I was older, was always at the sink, washing, rinsing, and directing the operation. Jamie cleared, stacked, and dried, never fast enough to match my pace. He would stack each piece of silverware in the dishwasher one by one, asking me things I didn’t know. Who was faster, the Flash or the Green Hornet? What would happen if the earth started spinning the opposite way? What caused emphysema? Why was everyone smarter than he was? Sometimes I got frustrated with him and just did the job myself. Later we found out his disability made it hard for him to focus on specific tasks.

“You can let that soak,” he said, standing next to me in the kitchen of his brand-new mansion. He had worked ahead and was waiting for me to finish scrubbing the pot roast pan. It was the last, the biggest, and the most obstinate.

I used the nonsudsy back of my hand to push the hair off my forehead. The humidity from the hot water and the exertion of trying to scour the pan had moistened everything above the collar of my shirt.

“I will not be defeated by a crusty pan. Never.” With one last furious effort, I scraped the last of the crust, rinsed, and handed it off in triumph.

Jamie dried it quickly and began searching his new kitchen to find the place where it lived, opening and closing cabinet doors high and low and mumbling to himself. He gave up and set it across two of the six gas burners. Then he turned and searched the countertops. “Where’s my cup?”

“I washed it.”

“I wasn’t finished.”

“It was on the counter. Fair game.”

He dried his hands with the dishtowel. “Still as obsessive-compulsive as ever.” He was kidding, but there was an edge to his tone.

He opened a cabinet, took down another mug, and filled it with what was left of the coffee Gina had brewed.

A scattering of crumbs still littered the surface when we went back to the table to sit, mostly where Sean had been sitting. I brushed the offending specks into one of the napkins. Oh, for one of those nifty crumb sweepers possessed by waiters at fine restaurants everywhere.

Jamie looked almost prayerful as he sat with his arms extended in front of him. He could be praying. Jamie still went to church. I could feel sadness in him, something pressing hard. It made me anxious.

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Sure.”

He wasn’t. He knew I knew, and the silence that followed was awkward. In the quiet, I could hear Maddie and Sean’s sweet voices floating down from upstairs, where they were getting ready for bed.

“Maddie looks like Mom,” I said. “She does that thing with her mouth, where it pulls down at the corners as if she’s about to tell you a secret or a joke or…” I rummaged around for the words to capture my mother’s face, but I didn’t need the words. He already knew.

“You’re the only other person who could see that.”

“I saw it at dinner,” I said. It had reminded me of her voice. My mother’s voice that used to tease me for being so serious.

Gina came down the stairs and scoped out the clean kitchen. “You two are awesome. You can wash dishes in my house anytime.”

“Just don’t let Jamie near the gravy boat,” I said.

“Gravy boat?” She gave her husband a cunning glance, and I sensed an opportunity.

“Jamie, you never told her about the gravy boat?”

“No.” His voice was dull, and he didn’t look as if he wanted to tell her now, but Gina hustled over and settled in with us, pulling one foot up on the chair with her.

“Tell me,” she said. “I never get to hear the family stories.”

I leaned in. “It was Christmas night after we’d had this big dinner. Jamie and I were helping Mom wash the dishes,” I said. “How old were you?”

“Five.”

“He was five, so I was ten. We’d had people over for this big extravaganza. They were members of my father’s family whom we didn’t really know. Now, my mother was wonderful, but she wasn’t the greatest cook. She could never get organized, and she was really nervous about this dinner. She wanted so much to make a good impression, so she pulled out the one and only gravy boat from her set of good china. It was a wedding gift.”

“From someone at the dinner,” Jamie said.

“Is that true?” I hadn’t remembered that.

“Aunt Bobbie. She was married to the guy who wore the sweater vest and smelled like cigars, so I guess she was technically a cousin, or cousin-in-law, but she wanted us to call her Aunt Bobbie.”

“Right, right.” I thought back on the evening, trying to see the house in my mind. It was one that we didn’t live in for long, so I had to reach for the details. “So, everyone is lolling around in the living room, gorged and half in the bag from drinking wine all afternoon. Everything is quiet, until Jamie reaches up to put something on the counter and bumps the gravy boat. I was across the kitchen,” I said, “but I saw the whole thing. It teetered on the brink just for a second, before it went over. Everything switched into slow motion. It was like a John Woo film. There should have been doves flying.”

Gina was delighted. “And long coats flapping.”

“Exactly. It’s important to appreciate that the floor in that kitchen was tile. It was like a gravy bomb had gone off. There was gravy on the cabinets, on the walls, on my mother’s dress, on my new shoes.” I felt an ancient twinge of regret, remembering how I’d had to throw those gravy-drenched shoes away. “We were finding gravy boat pieces well after Easter dinner, at which, of course, we couldn’t have any gravy, because, well…”

Gina laid her head against her knee and peeked around it at Jamie. “Someone broke the gravy boat.”

He shook his head. “Everyone came running in. Dad was yelling and screaming about why was I in there to begin with. I’m standing in the middle of all this mess, crying, thinking…I ruined everything.” He looked down into his coffee cup. He reached up and rubbed his thumb across his eyebrow. “Mommy got down on the floor with me, right down in the gravy, and gave me that look like…” He nodded to me. “Like the one you were talking about on Maddie. She told me to take five deep breaths, and she would tell me a secret.”

He paused, and I remembered him standing there when he was five years old, trying so hard to stop crying when he felt so bad, and my mother with her hands on his shoulders.

“Then she whispered so I would have to stop crying to hear. She said she never liked that gravy boat anyway and that my help was worth more to her than a hundred gravy boats.”

Gina reached over and grabbed hold of his thumb. “I wish I’d known your mom,” she said. “She sounds cool.”

I stared down at the tablecloth, where a renegade crumb had managed to remain on the loose. “She was,” I said. “Our mom was very cool.”

Gina kissed Jamie on the forehead. She came around the table and gave me a hug. “I’m so glad you’re here.” Then she went back upstairs to the kids, leaving Jamie and me alone again.

“Are you sure you’re-”

“I’m fine.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and checked his watch, which prompted me to check mine. It was only seven forty-five, but it seemed later because it was already dark outside. I was thinking of going out to the car to get my overnight bag, when I heard the muted call of my cell phone. It was in my backpack, which was in the other room at the bottom of the stairs. I got to it before it rolled to voice mail. The spy window said it was from an out-of-area caller.

“Hello.”

“What did you tell her?” There was panic in the voice and a solid infusion of cold, hard anger but nothing at all that was familiar.

“Who is this?”