9
Lisa
I woke up to a cup of steaming coffee on the bedside table, along with a little pitcher of cream and a few cubes of brown sugar. I sat up in the cozy warm bed and dropped a cube of sugar into the cup, along with half the cream. I stirred it with a small silver spoon and then scooched down into the warm bedclothes.
“You up?” I heard Dave ask as he came into the room.
“I could get used to this,” I said as I snuggled in deeper.
He walked toward the bed, smiling wide. “You sleep okay?” He stood beside me and checked the cut on my head and then smoothed my hair with his strong fingers. It was doubly sweet because he was a little bit unsure about it, like he’d never really done it before.
I nodded as I sipped the coffee, which was perfectly yummy. And also surprisingly familiar. I inhaled deeply, and I tasted the coffee. There was no doubt about it. “Are these…Dunkin’ Donuts beans?”
“Hell yeah,” Dave said, sitting down on the bed.
“Hazelnut?”
He gave me a manly flick of his chin. “One of the best things,” he said as his eyes moved up and down my body, as if to say But not as good as all this.
No kidding. His hand edged up my leg, strong and sure right through the down and fluff. “Last night, Lisa…” He whistled quietly and rubbed his temples. “I mean… Jesus. Never in my life.”
I nodded at him again, this time unblinking. I silently ran through the words that might be adequate to describe it—earthshaking, mind-blowing, oh-God-oh-God-oh-God—but none of them was even close to enough. There I was, all warm and comfy, so happy and so surprised by all this that I felt like the heroine in some fantasy—all I could do was nod and smile at him. And plop a second cube into my cup. “I know.”
Dave winked again and stood up. “I washed your clothes because I wanted to make sure they were dry. They’ll be out of the dryer in…” He checked the massive, fancy watch on his huge wrist. “Just a few minutes.”
“And you do laundry?”
“Not usually. But you’re the exception.”
Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God. I set my coffee on the bedside table and flopped back into the pillows. “By the way, this mattress is fantastic.” I squeezed my buns and got a respectable bounce going. “I don’t think I’ve ever slept so well.”
And then for some reason, Dave laughed. “Glad to hear it. Come on down when you’re ready. I’ll leave your clothes in here, and then I’ll make you something to eat. How do you feel about bacon?”
“Like maybe you’re my knight in shining armor.”
“Attagirl,” he said, and I heard him head down the hallway.
Coffee in bed. Fresh laundry. Bacon. Best sex of my life. I rolled over into the comforter to wrap myself in a burrito and then went crazy with kicky-legs.
* * *
Much to my surprise, though, when I came downstairs freshly showered, warm, and comfy—led to the kitchen by the smell of bacon and feeling decidedly like a bloodhound on the trail—I realized that Dave and I weren’t alone in this great big house. Seated at the kitchen table was a very, very ancient lady, with a huge mug next to her emblazoned with the words IDRIS ELBA’S BATHWATER. Next to that was a red aerosol container of whipped cream. I was well behind her, on the far end of the kitchen, and she hadn’t seen me. She was reading something on her iPad and had a phone book next to her. She had the font on her iPad set so big that even from where I was, I could almost make out the words. And also, possibly, leaves? Whatever it was, she was intensely focused. Without looking up from what she was reading, she shook up the whipped cream, filled the mug to overflowing, and then proceeded to dig into the white fluff with a soup spoon.
In the oven was a jelly roll pan with rows of thick-cut bacon sputtering away. Next to the stove, in a bowl, were a few uncracked eggs waiting to be scrambled. Expecting to see Dave around the corner, I stepped softly into the kitchen and said, “Good morning?”
“Oh Jesus!” screeched the old woman, her arms flying up and sending the can of whipped cream tumbling to the wooden floor with a ping-ping-ping. “Who the hell are you?”
“Lisa,” I said, smiling and clutching my mug like a protective shield. Dave wasn’t anywhere to be seen, but the old lady was approaching with purposeful shuffles of her slippers. She was peering at me, holding the frames of her glittery purple bifocals, her gnarled fingers vaguely reminiscent of eagle talons. Vaguely, though. Not like exactly like that. But close. “I’m Lisa.”
“And I’m Grandma. Just that. Like Cher. Grandma,” she said, still eyeing at me and inching closer. She leaned toward me and sort of…sniffed. But I was pretty sure she wasn’t sniffing the bacon—she was sniffing me. I noticed her sweatshirt had someone who looked a lot like Vladimir Lenin silk-screened on the front, but it was pretty faded out, so I couldn’t be sure. She held up a skinny, big-knuckled finger. “Where’d you come from?”
Suddenly, it occurred to me that she probably heard me last night—I had a feeling I screamed the house down, and I grimaced at the memory and clapped my eyes shut.
I felt a cold finger press into my cheek. “Why are you doing that? Last time I saw someone with their face that way, they had end-stage tetanus. It was in El Salvador in 1979. Bad business.”
I dropped the grimace and summoned my best impression of the traffic girl on the local news—pure sweetness, pure smiles, even in the face of a twenty-car pileup and a three-hour delay. Nothing to worry about, folks. Nope. “I live in Rhode Island. I crashed my car last night in the storm. Your…grandson? Dave? He helped me.”
Grandma nodded and did the sniffing thing again. “No, I mean, where did you come from? Originally, honey! Where are your people from?”
My people? I felt like I was in some unused scene from The Godfather. “Um…outside Detroit.”
Grandma grumbled. She inched closer to me, and I got the very definite sense she was assessing something about my jawline. Or my hairline. Or both. “Name?”
“Lisa!” I said, this time louder, like I sometimes had to do when I brought cupcakes to the nursing home for Christmas. I figured she hadn’t heard me the first time, so I went at it with guns blazing. “I’m Lisa! Leeees-ahhhh!”
“Stop shouting, honey!” she hollered back, waving her iPad stylus in my face. Without dropping her voice, she added, “Before Detroit, where were your people?”
“Oh! Baltimore!”
“Christ! I mean, your heritage! You’ve got a kinda bohunk nose. Know what that means?”
I hadn’t the faintest. I automatically moved my hand to the bridge of my nose, though, because I wasn’t sure how a word like bohunk could be anything but bad.
“Never mind the schnoz!” she shouted again and hobbled back to the kitchen table and took a seat in front of an iPad. “Name! First and last!”
“Lisa…Smith?” I said tentatively.
“Unclear about Smith? Why does that sound like a question?”
“Smith!” I said, this time with much more certainty.
Grandma turned to me, making Lenin’s face contort like some psychedelic video montage in a David Bowie music video. “You’re shitting me.”
“Umm, no?” I said.
“Middle name!”
“Anne.”
Grandma slapped her sweat pants with her liver-spotted fists. “Lisa Anne Smith? That’s worse than Jane Doe! What am I gonna do with that?”
I looked at her iPad. And the God’s Eye over Lenin’s face. And the row of mood rings on her fingers. “What were you planning on doing with it?”
“Looking for royal heritage, honey! But with a name like Lisa Anne Smith, fuck it. And Dave wonders why I resort to the phone book.” To demonstrate this, she flipped one of the tissue-thin pages with such fury that she tore it clean in half. Apparently, it wasn’t the first time, because she produced a roll of Scotch tape from her sweatshirt and went to work repairing it immediately.
But before I could ask her what I wanted to ask, which was, of course, Hang on one sec, did you just say “royal heritage”? Dave came around the corner, and I watched his gaze bounce from me to Grandma and back again. He put two fingers against his temple and shook his head at the floor. “Lisa, meet Grandma.”
“We’ve met!” Grandma bellowed. “Girl’s got a name like a placeholder ID in a half-priced TJ Maxx wallet.” With that, Dave moved both hands to his head, like he was in an ad for Excedrin, as Grandma went on, “Lisa Anne Smith! Christ!”
Dave looked up at the ceiling and shook his head and then refocused on me. We had a sort of tender, quiet moment, in which his eyes said, So sorry about my insane relative. I waved it off and took a sip of my coffee. I shook my head and mouthed, It’s fine! He guided me over to the far end of the kitchen, which was absolutely enormous. I hadn’t really realized it last night, not in the half-light and focused as I’d been on making hot toddies. But now I noticed, and I saw that on one counter there was a special marble top for rolling out dough. Be still my beating heart.
Turning on the stove with one hand, he expertly cracked the eggs into a bowl with the other. “Sorry about that. There’s coffee in the pot, if you’d like some more.”
From the other end of the room, Grandma leered at me. My initial thought about her talon-hands wasn’t totally off the mark. Only, less like an eagle and more like…a molting falcon. I whispered to Dave, “Did she say royal heritage?”
“I mean, it’s not…” Dave glanced at me and then set to scrambling the eggs with a fork.
“Wait…” I stared at him. “Are you famous?”
“No, no,” he gasped. “Exiled, like five generations ago. The opposite of famous. It’s so totally mundane. Not worth mentioning, really.” He sprinkled some salt into the eggs and then cracked some pepper from an antique silver grinder, which had something that looked a lot like a family crest carved into the front.
What was happening to me? Was this a dream? Was I actually still unconscious in my Jeep on the side of the road, clutching my frog charger and waiting for the National Guard? “Are you a prince or something?”
He stopped scrambling the eggs and stared at me. “I sell mattresses. That’s pretty much the most interesting thing about me.”
I glanced around the kitchen, at the rows of heavy-bottomed copper saucepans hanging neatly from the rack above. At the matching set of chef’s-quality chopping knives in a block. At the walk-in pantry and the enormous Sub-Zero refrigerator. “I had no idea mattress sales paid this well.”
“I don’t sell them, really. I own a company. I’m in mattresses.” Dave opened a nearby cabinet and handed me a mug. A swirly, fancy logo wrapped around the ceramic front.
ROYAL MATTRESS
Sleep like a queen.
You deserve it.
“Oh my God,” I said, giving him a shove on his rock-solid upper arm. “You’re the Royal Mattress guy! You were in People magazine!”
Dave waved it off. “That was totally a PR thing. I had no idea I was going to be on that list.”
“Pfffft!” I shoved him again, and he mock-stumbled, as if I were way above his weight class. He glanced at me for one second and then looked away again. But now I really was a bloodhound on the trail, and it had nothing to do with bacon. “Most eligible bachelors, yada yada yada? And no wonder the bed was so comfy!”
But then I noticed he was actually blushing. A rosy glow was reddening his rugged cheeks, and he couldn’t even face me. He really was just so stinking adorable. And handsome. And wearing an apron and scrambling me eggs while a dozen pieces of bacon cooked in the oven. “Seriously, though, are you royalty? Are you…a prince?”
He gave me a stare to say stop it. “I’m about as much a prince as you are a princess.”
I noticed his eyes on the logo on my hoodie. A cupcake with a frosting tiara. Feeling a bit embarrassed—it seemed somehow ridiculous, given that I was talking to an actual prince—I clapped my hand to it. I was suddenly very self-conscious about my little bakery, named after every girl’s fantasy. But in truth, I was just barely scraping by. As if there was any doubt, I knew it then for sure—I was way, way out of my league. My efforts to hide my logo had made it so I’d inadvertently perked up my girls from below, giving him an accentuated view of my cleavage, and I clapped my free hand over that. I was clutching my chest like I was having a heart attack, and I might as well have been. “I’m no princess.”
He gave me the up-and-down again, and not just zeroing in on my cleavage either, but lingering on my lips and my throat. He glanced over at his grandma and snuck a little grab of my ass when she was looking away. And Dave said into my ear, “I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” as he sprinkled some cheese into the eggs.
* * *
Just as Dave was turning off the burner, the lights flickered. For one startling second, everything went silent—all the appliances going dead at once sounded like a sound effect from a cartoon—but as quickly as everything had gone quiet, it whirred back to life again. “Goddamn it,” Dave growled, carefully arranging my omelet on my plate and adding a few strips of bacon to the side, along with a sliced orange. Goodness. He popped a slice of bacon into his mouth and wiped his hands off on a dish towel. “You stay here. I’ll go make sure the generator is ready to go.” As he moved away, he left me with a perfect view of You-Know-Who, spraying some whipped cream directly into her mouth.
“I’m a good shoveler!” I added, not at all halfheartedly as Grandma shook the container, making the pellet inside sound a lot like a ricocheting BB.
“No way am I letting you go out there,” Dave said, and off he went toward some far corner of the house, where surely there were shiny cars in a row in an immaculate garage.
Which, of course, left me alone with Grandma. I wasn’t sure what to compare it to, really—maybe being left unexpectedly with a surprisingly dangerous animal at the zoo. And so, as if I were in a cage at the zoo, I moved slowly. Very slowly. Do not disturb the ostrich. At first, I thought she didn’t realize we were alone, but when the triple beep of the security system announced Dave had opened the door, she sprang to life mid-thought like someone had just plugged her back into the wall. “To hell with Baltimore! I’m talking old country! I want percentages! Irish? Scottish? Austro-Hungarian?”
Though I admired them, I just wasn’t able to dice my family history into slices of a pie chart—50% Italian, 25% Swedish, 7.5% Finnish, 1.25% Cherokee… “As far as I know, I’m just good old-fashioned, Apple-Pie American,” I said, jamming a piece of bacon into my mouth to stay busy.
“American! Bullshit! That’s a continent, not a nation!” She unfolded herself from her chair and made a new approach, stylus extended. “Anybody every mention Moravia? Anybody have an almost superhuman knack for cooking lamb? Anybody do weird things like get a daily newspaper in Slovenian while saying they were from Austria?” Inexplicably, she put both Slovenian and Austrian in air quotes and then went on, “Because that—” she tapped her hooked nose and pointed at my slightly curved one “—is a dead giveaway for something!”
I shook my head and shoveled in a mouthful of eggs, which were delicious. “No, no, and no.”
“Anybody ever plan a coup? Active or passive? Anybody ever sketch out the downfall of an existing government on a paper napkin?”
I choked on my eggs and shook my head, pressing my palm into my mouth. “No to that, too.”
“Your heritage sounds like Yawnsville, hon.”
“Pretty much,” I said, with my mouth still half full.
Grandma ripped open a packet of hot cocoa and filled up her mug partway with the boiling water spigot on the faucet. “Mmmm.”
“I was adopted,” I told her. “So what I know about my adoptive parents has nothing to do with…” Now it was my turn to give some scare quotes. “…my people.”
She narrowed her rheumy eyes at me and fished a tiny sad marshmallow out of Idris Elba’s bathwater. “Adopted,” Grandma repeated, slowly chewing the marshmallow. “So, you could be from…anywhere?”
I nodded vehemently, feeling delighted that I was probably out of the running for a full-on royal heritage examination. Is there a test for royalty? Is it like witches? Is she going to put me in the tub and see if I float? Grandma sighed and dabbed at her nose with a tissue that she produced from inside her sweatshirt sleeve. Desperate for a subject change, I opted to steer clear of Lenin and pointed at her mug. “I’m a fan, too. You know there’s a new season of Luther coming soon? Might even be out now. I could check online if you wanted.”
“I do love me some Idris,” Grandma said wistfully, staring longingly at nothing in particular, it seemed, somewhere in the middle distance. “What a hunk of man he is. Why they didn’t cast him as Bond, I’ll just never know. Fools!”
“And how,” I agreed, thinking to myself, But he’s got nothing on your grandson!
Grandma did look tempted by my offer about Luther, but just as quickly as she looked lured, she redoubled and shook her head. “No, honey. I can’t be watching television this early in the day. It’ll put me into a stupor like an epileptic dachshund. How do you feel about board games?”
The truth was, Not awesome. For the life of me, I could never win a round of Monopoly, and no matter how many times someone tried to teach me chess, it never stuck. But in that moment, I felt better about board games than whatever other plans Grandma seemed to have on tap. Like putting my hair into a potion or something. We were up to our eyeballs in snow, and I figured we’d have to do something to pass the time. “Sounds good to me.”
“Excellent,” Grandma said. She shuffled off to an antique hutch at the far end of the kitchen and crouched down to open a cabinet. She made pained noises as she did and gripped one knee.
“Here, let me help you,” I said, putting down my coffee and going to help her. I knelt and put my hand to her bony back. The air smelled strongly of baby powder, mixed up with Bengay.
“No need, honey! I got it right here,” she said, standing up and beaming. “Maybe we can ask the powers that be about your heritage!”
She gave the box in her hands a shake. And that’s when I saw it.
A Ouija board.
Oh no.