His dad curled a lip at him. “Was the only thing at the grocery store.”
“Yeah, right.” Jake grinned and took a gulp of the iced tea he’d poured.
“Besides—you haven’t brought me any of yours for a while.”
“I haven’t made any, but I’ve got some ready to bake tomorrow,” Jake replied. “Been working on the main bathroom, you know? The tile’s on backorder, of course.”
“You shoulda let me call my guy,” Pop said, jabbing his sandwich at Jake. A caper fell out and rolled onto his place.
Jake knew all about his father’s “guys” back in Grand Rapids and was very glad he’d declined. He might’ve ended up with the tile on time, but someone could’ve also been stuffed in a trunk getting it here. “Anyway, Mom would be proud of you, eating seeds in your bread and all.”
Pop snorted. “She’d have just found something else to nag at me about. Never stopped—even to her dying day, she nagged at me to pick up my socks and eathealthy. Nothing wrong with a good pasta and some white bread to sop it up with, but she’d get on me about that too! Well, my poppa and mynonnoboth lived over ninety and ate as much damned pasta as they wanted every day of their lives!”
Jake merely nodded. This was an old refrain, a familiar argument. Pop made it sound like he and Mom were at each other’s throats all the time—and though they often were, they’d also loved each other well enough to stay married for over fifty years and raise four children.
“I know you miss her,” he said after a few minutes of Pop grumbling about how his wife had cut back on the amount of red meat he’d eaten (“You can’t have Bolognese without any damned veal! And it has to be soaked inwhole milk—none of that two-percent crap.”). “I know I do.”
“It’s been over a year, Elwood. I’m old, she was old, all our friends are old—and we’re used to it. Gets so I don’t even want to look at the newspaper from up in Grand Rapids anymore to see all the obituaries.” Beneath his orneriness was a layer of grief, though, and Jake felt another little stab of his own.
“Well, don’t look at the paper, then,” he responded tartly to cover the moment.
“Well, how’m I supposed to know if I gotta go to a funeral if I don’t know who ate it?”
“Well, if you hadn’t moved away seven years ago, you could just go to church and ask Father Stan who died,” Jake said with a grin.
“Your mom wanted to live away from the city and by the water,” grumbled Pop. “Got half of it right—no city—and close enough to walk to the lake on a good day.”
Jake smiled, even though his eyes stung a little. “You always gave her whatever she wanted.”
“I did—and so why did she always want to take away my beef and bread and cheese? At least she let me keep my Chianti and olive oil.”
“There are a lot of studies about how one glass of red wine a day is healthy.”
“So speaks the doctor,” said Pop—but the jest was said with a layer of pride.
“Right. So you should listen to me when I tell you not to climb on the damned roof. That’s why I moved back here, Pop, remember? So I can help you with some of that stuff? And you stay away from that beehive I saw—all right? I’ll take care of it.”
“Don’t need your help,” he snapped. “I’m not an invalid.”
“You’re almost seventy-eight years old. You have no business crawling on the roof—or climbing on a ladder for any reason. All right?”
“I suppose you’re going to tell me I can’t mow my own lawn now, aren’t you? You better not try and take away my car keys, sonny, or—”
“So tell me about this play you’re doing,” Jake interrupted quickly. He didn’t need to hear that lecture again.
And fortunately, he didn’t need to have the battle about car keys yet. His dad could keep them so long as he didn’t drive at night.
“I told you already. That damned Juanita Acerita bullied me into agreeing to play some guy named Gibbs. I didn’t know he was a damnedPresbyterian.” He shook his head woefully, staring at the single caper on his plate. “She and Maxine are two giant boils on my ass.”
“What? The great Ricky DeRiccio is afraid of two old ladies?”
“You haven’t met them yet, have you?” retorted his pop. “Just you wait, Elwood. That Maxine Took—she’ll chew you up and spit you out if you don’t give her enough respect. And Juanita is just as bad. Everyone thinks she’s so nice and sweet—well, compared to Maxine, I suppose she is—but she’s got this little dog she likes to sic on people, and—”
“So, Pops, about this play you’re going to be in— Oh, here we go.” His phone alerting with the special chime from work cut him off. “I’ve got to get my laptop and take care of this.”
“Just like always—when it’s time to do the cleaning up, you’ve always got something to do,” said Pop, pursing his lips and pretending to be annoyed.
Jake ignored the familiar teasing and went out to grab his laptop, which he’d left in the car when he’d been trying to save his dad from falling off the damned roof. Fortunately, the little one-story cottage Pop and Mom had bought ten years ago was on a small side street just off the main drag of Wicks Hollow. It had a narrow view of Lake Michigan between trees and a couple of buildings, and there was a mile-long path that led to the lakeshore. Fortunately, their quiet residential street didn’t have a lot of tourists coming through, so the laptop was safe in his unlocked car. Whew.
