“What did Meals-on-Wheels bring you today?” he asked.
“Mac and cheese and green beans,” Etta Mae replied. “At least that’s what that nice Mr. Dawson said when he was putting it in the fridge. I do like their mac and cheese. Not as good as mine, but then I don’t have to fix it, do I.”
He went over to where she sat and kissed the top of her head. Her hair was still wiry and springy, but he was surprised by how thin it was. And how gray. He was pleased to see that she was wearing her button, the emergency alert necklace he had bought for her. That way, if she needed help all she had to do was press one button to be connected to an emergency operator.
“I’ll go heat up that mac and cheese,” he said. “You want to eat it here or in the kitchen?”
“That depends,” she said. “Will you eat some, too?”
LaShawn shook his head. “You know better than that, Momma. Those Meals-on-Wheels are for old people. I ain’t that old.”
“Then I shouldn’t eat them, either.” Etta Mae sniffed. “You’re only as old as you think you are.”
“I’ll eat at the mission,” he assured her. “The nice ladies in the kitchen know that I’m over here feeding you, so they hold back a little something for me.”
“Well,” Etta Mae said. “In that case, since you won’t join me, I could just as well eat on a tray here in the living room.”
Out in the kitchen—also built to be wheelchair-friendly—LaShawn put the macaroni and cheese into the microwave and began counting out the evening’s supply of pills. With morning and evening visits from him, they were making this work, but at some point there would be another decision to be made. LaShawn was hoping to hold that one off as long as possible. Etta Mae had told him that she’d rather die than go live in one of those awful assisted-living homes, and he knew she meant it.
He put the pills, silverware, and a napkin on the tray along with a bottle of Snapple. He was waiting for the microwave to finish reheating the food when the doorbell rang. “You stay where you are, Momma,” he called. “I’ll get it.”
Expecting to find a missionary on his mother’s doorstep, an annoyed LaShawn hurried to the door ready to send whoever it was packing. As he flung the door wide open, the first bullet, muffled by a silencer, caught him full in the gut. He never saw it coming. As he fell, the second bullet scored a direct hit on his heart. He was dead before he ever hit the surface of his mother’s newly Pergoed floor.
“Shawny?” his mother called a little later. “What was that noise? And I feel a breeze. Did you leave the front door open?”
A good five minutes after that, Etta Mae Tompkins used her emergency alert button for the very first time.
“Good evening, Mrs. Tompkins,” a disembodied voice called from somewhere behind her. “How can we help you?”
It took a moment for Etta Mae to realize it was the emergency operator speaking to her from the box in the living room. “My son!” Etta Mae wailed brokenly. “My poor baby son Shawny is dead. Somebody’s murdered him. They shot him right here in my front door!”
CHAPTER 1
I was standing in my own bedroom minding my own business and knotting my tie when Mel Soames hopped into the doorway from her room down the hall. She was wearing nothing but a bra and a pair of panties, and she was doing a strange ostrichlike dance as she attempted to put one foot into a pair of panty hose.
“So what are you going to do about a tux?” she asked. “Buy or rent?”
Some questions posed by half-naked women are more easily answered than others. This one had me tumped. What tux? I wondered.
Since I quit drinking, I find I’m in fairly good shape when it comes to remembering things. For example, we had spent most of the weekend on the road, driving down to Ashland, Oregon, to see my month-old grandson, Kyle Roger Cartwright. I remembered the eight-hour ride down, including our post-midnight arrival at the Peerless Hotel in the wee hours of Saturday morning.