“I sold a couch online once. And I bought an office chair from some guy named Todd last summer, so I guess I have some experience.”
The man squeezed my shoulder, a gold ring on every finger. “I’ll be in your office bright and early tomorrow morning.”
Ruby gave me a look that said,Well, you did that to yourself.
When we arrived at Ta Molly’s, a restaurant that claimed to have the cheesiest tamale in the desert, it took about ten minutes to unload all the residents, wheelchairs and all. But the restaurant staff was more than prepared for the crowd and Ruby was even on a first-name basis with our adorable waiter, Tally.
“Tally uses they/them pronouns,” Ruby explained as she introduced us, as though my grandmother even knew what that meant a few months ago.
“Sounds good,” I said, hoping this didn’t quickly veer into awkward territory for poor Tally.
“Thanks, Rubes,” Tally said.
“You tell me if that dick Ralph forgets,” Ruby said. “I tried to convince our driver to leave before he showed up, but no dice.”
I felt weirdly jealous of this waiter and the easy relationship they seemed to have with my grandmother. It was baffling, actually.
Tally smiled. “Pitcher of margaritas for you three?” they asked.
“I’ll actually have a sangria swirl if that’s okay,” I said.
Ruby turned to me, her brows arched impressively.
I shrugged. “I’m celebrating, right?”
“Indeed. Sangria swirls for the whole table!” Ruby said, and those of them that could hear her cheered loudly. And then to Tally, she whispered, “Put those on Ralph’s tab, would ya?”
The rest of my night was spent doing more listening than talking, and I wasn’t bothered by that at all. In fact, listening to Ruby’s lore was something I was very familiar with.
Ruby broke out onto the scene in the sixties as a scream queen in creature features. She had Mom in 1967 and then kept on working through the seventies in mostly slasher films that were more concerned with her willingness to go topless than her acting chops.
It was the early eighties before she got her big break withIn the Family. Critics called it the feminist response toThe Godfather, which at the time was not a selling point. Ruby played the matriarch of an Irish crime family when her husband fell ill and she continued to run the family business behind closed doors.
Industry talking heads were sure she’d sweep awards season, but in the end, the only nominees from the film were for the actors playing her ailing husband and one of her meathead sons. Since then, there had been a handful of guest spots or cameos, but it seemed that no one was interested in seeing a sometimes-topless horror starlet having a Hollywood Cinderella story of her own.
And so, Ruby’s face hadn’t graced a movie poster in over thirty-five years, but I wasn’t about to be the one to remind my grandmother of that. Or of the fact that she was a grandmother at all.
The moment Ruby found out that Mom was pregnant with me, the first thing out of her mouth was “No oneis calling me Grandma.” The second thing was “Who’s the father?” My mother’s answer was “Not someone who plans on sticking around.”
Anyway, I never did call Ruby by any other honorific than her name. Unless I was trying to annoy her or make a point. The wordgrandmainvoked the same response as calling someone by their full name.
But for the most part, Ruby had always simply been Ruby.
Chapter Nine
My office had no windows and smelled like chlorine. I was the first room from the indoor pool. The smell was oddly comforting and reminded me of the indoor community pool where Mom used to do water aerobics when I was a kid.
“The outdoor pool is basically boiling in the summer,” Morgan explained. “So, the indoor pool is a hot commodity while temps are in the hundreds. We get some slips and falls in the hallway, so if you hear one of the fall alarms go off, just pop your head out and make sure everyone’s breathing. An orderly should be there soon.”
I nodded. “Breathing. Got it.”
“A lot of the residents split for the summer, so the ones that are here are the ones who don’t have second residences or really involved families. You’ve got to keep an eye out for heat exhaustion. Through the summer, we prefer the residents to only walk outside after dark and will have golf carts with misters running from their bungalows to the main building.”
“Smart,” I said with a nod, and managed not to tell her how I was a fragile LA flower and didn’t handle fluctuation in weather well. Or at all.
“And that’s your name tag. You don’t actually have to wear it, but sometimes no matter how many times you tell a resident your name, they’ll call you whatever they’ve decided your name is. One former resident called me Lydia for a year. She even left some of her designer costume jewelry tome, but no one knew who Lydia was so it took the family a while to figure that one out.”
“Lydia isn’t even close to Morgan,” I said as I began to shuffle through the paperwork left behind from the previous coordinator.
