Oil of Roses Ch. 30

"Earl, are you blushing?" Margaret asked.

"Yes he is, Margaret," Margo answered, "but how could you tell?"

"You mean you can't feel the heat from where you are? And by the way, since we're family now, call me 'Kissie'."

* * * * *

The rest of the evening passed delightfully as Earl and Kissie got to know their son-and-daughters-in-law.

Finally Margo said, "I hate to do this, but I have to get our escaped patient on his way back."

After a careful handshake from Earl and a surprisingly warm kiss on the cheek from Kissie, as well as hugs and kisses from his three wives, Harry was wheeled out to a waiting Handi-cab with everyone in attendance.

"When you get back, tell Mike 'thank you' for me again," Margo said.

"From all of us, my love," Harry answered, "but most especially from me."

"Why?"

"Tonight I dined on prime rib and lobster, perfectly prepared, a salad that was fresh and crisp, divinely seasoned with hand-made dressing of the finest ingredients, and a baked potato superb enough to make an Irishman weeps tears of joy. It will have to sustain me through the rest of my exile to the Gulag of Atrocious Cooking that is that hospital."

As everyone laughed, Harry said, "I understand that you'll be dining tomorrow night with the rest of our extended family. I won't be able to be there... it was hard enough getting my doctor to let me out for tonight. I look forward to visiting with you both under more comfortable circumstances."

"You won't be there tomorrow night?" Earl said. "Well then, since you can't be in attendance at what would seem to be a mini-engagement party, let me say this. Your engagement has our blessing, without reservations, as will your marriage when it occurs."

"As will your children, no matter the parentage, when they arrive," added Kissie, her smile undiminished.

As everyone's eyes misted over, and the women hugged Earl and Kissie, Harry looked at the man who had bent so far in accepting his daughter's situation. "Thank you so much Earl, not only for what it means to all of us which is more than you can imagine, but most importantly for what it means to your daughter."

"Oh don't get too mushy, Harry," Kelly said, drying her eyes. "He's just giving us his blessing in hopes of getting laid sometime this century."

Everyone broke up when Earl said, "You're not entirely incorrect, Kelly my dear."

* * * * *

After the Handi-cab had pulled away and everyone had returned inside for coffee and dessert, Margo waved over their invisible, but ever-ready, waiter.

"We'll probably want the check in another twenty, thirty minutes."

"I'm afraid I don't understand... the check?"

"Yes, the check, the bill, the tab, the list detailing expected remuneration for goods and services rendered?"

"Well, yes ma'am, not to put too fine a point on it, but I am familiar with the concept. I thought you understood. Tonight's repast is compliments of the management."

"It is, is it? Please get me the manager."

"Yes ma'am."

A few moments later she was having no better luck with her.

"I'm sorry Doctor Wohler, but my orders from higher up were very specific. Whenever you or any member of your family comes in, your charges are to be billed to the owner's account."

"I'm going to kick his ass."

"Well ma'am, you might have that privilege, I certainly don't. I simply do as I'm told. Now, is there anything else I can help you with to make your evening a pleasant one?"

"Yes please... a round of B&B's and if you could find me some Aleve I'd be most grateful. I suddenly have a splitting headache, thanks to the owner's largesse."

"Yes ma'am, he does have that effect upon people."

"Am I allowed to know what my bill would have been so I can calculate an appropriate tip for the excellent service?"

"No ma'am, he has a forty percent tip added in already on your charges."

"I'm not going to kick his ass; I'm going to kill him."

* * * * *

"No Margo, this is really too much, you're going to at least let us pay our part of the ticket," Earl said, waving his wallet at her.

"No Earl, I'm not but if it makes you feel any better, we're not picking up the check either."

"Huh?"

"One of the owners is a patient of mine... the ratfuck cocksucker- I'm very sorry... I apologize sincerely for my language... he's set it up so that we never pay here... I just found out... and I'm going to kill him."

Kissie laughed. "Oh, never mind the language... I've been married to Earl for thirty years; I've heard worse... said worse myself from time to time. But that does bring up a question. When we were talking after dinner, I noticed that you and Harry don't speak like professionals when you're relaxed, you speak a very... slang-filled and almost stereotypically Texan dialect of English."

"I blame my exposure to Harry, his partner Karen, and his best friend Eddy, both of whom you'll meet tomorrow evening. They're all very much 'fighting conformity' in their own ways and one of the common methods seems to be a refusal to speak proper English if not required to do so. Since this is the pack I run with, I've fallen prey to their bad habits."

"Makes sense to me," Kissie said, smiling, "better to rebel with language than by expressing your nonconformity through unusual group marriages and... oh wait, you do that too."

"Mother..."

"She's teasing, Kelly, don't worry... yes Kissie, better through language. It would make for fewer tense evenings like earlier tonight."

* * * * *

"Kissie... I know I don't deserve it... but would you relent on the six months? I'm feeling... awfully lonely... right now... losing our little girl.... not so little anymore... and I'd like to curl up in your arms... and you know as well as I do where that would lead."

Kissie sat in the bathtub of their hotel room, listening to her husband through the door. She heard his pain... she heard his loneliness... she knew how much he'd had to fight himself to accept Kelly's situation... she knew what he'd swallowed to ask her what he had... and to be truthful, she needed him as well.

"Earl, bring me my phone... if the four of them agree I should let you off the hook, then you're off the hook."

* * * * *

Two hours later, after holding had turned to petting, and petting to loving, and loving to crying, and crying to holding, the two of them lay together, Kissie curled up in Earl's arms, head against his chest.

"Earl?"

"Yes my love?"

"There's a school in town for physically challenged students, including the blind. We're leaving our resumes with them before we go back home."

"What? Why?"

"Earl, it isn't going to happen tomorrow, or next week, probably not even next year, but there will be babies and I damn well intend us to be close enough to be proper grandparents... best to start preparing now."

"Yes dear."

* * * * *

The next night they were at Chez Bubba's in the room that looked like a converted mobile home. Kelly and Earl were both hoarse from describing the restaurant's oddities to Kissie and the evening had so far been an unqualified success.

Kissie had loved the rest of the family from the start, although Karen had made Earl a little nervous at first. But after a couple of beers and a few stories, he felt right at home with them all.

"...so here's Harry, not the world's most mechanically apt individual," Karen said, "trying to change the tire because that's what guys do, they change their tires when they go flat. It's 3:30 in the morning, we're tired as hell, still got another hundred or so miles of road to cover on our way back from our meeting in Bossier City and we've both got to be at the office by 8:30 for another meeting.

"So me not being in any better shape than him, I'm groggy as all get-out, it's raining, we're both miserable... it's not registering that the shoulder we're parked on is on an incline... a rather steep incline... and we're parked facing up it... it was raining, but I'm not picking up what that could mean as far as traction. I'm just standing there, watching him try to keep enough of his head focused on the job to get it done without falling asleep right where he sat... and the car is slowly starting to slide back down the hill... but the jack isn't sliding with it."

"Oh God, you're kidding me?" Margo said.

"Nope... and there's Harry, head under the wheel well, working on the tire and I'm trying to find in my sleep-deprived brain the words to tell him what's going on and pretty much everything I say comes out gibberish and he keeps responding with 'we all right' so I grab onto the jack stand and I'm pulling back on it as hard as I can... and I ain't doing shit because my feet can't get any traction on the slick shoulder. The car is still creeping down the incline and about to fling the jack forward, come crashing down on Harry's little punkin' head so I put my feet on the foot of the jack, throwing my full weight backwards, using everything up to and including sheer force of will and stunning good looks to pull the damn car back up the hill and firmly onto the jack, still babbling incoherently at Harry, still getting 'we all right, we all right' back from him."

"So... how'd you keep... Harry from breaking... his silly fool skull?" Earl gasped through his laughter.

"Oh, as the jack was about to go, I pulled out my drill instructor voice, barked 'Grimes, get the fuck away from that tire!', hopped to one side and watched the jack shoot forward about twenty feet and the car crash down. Harry's sitting on the roadway about four feet from the tire, looking at me like I just came off a flying saucer and said 'Let me eat your sponge cake'. Says to me 'Why didn't you tell me the jack was slipping?' I thought I was going to tear off his nut sack and shoot me a game of marbles."

* * * * *

"...so there's Kelly, maybe ten months old, already toddling around and getting into everything. We were living in Lawrence, Kansas and it was a good neighborhood so everybody was watching out for everybody else and I start having neighbors knocking on the front door, returning my daughter to me," Kissie said. "And not just returning her, but returning her naked. So Earl and I searched the back yard from one end to the other, high and low, trying to find how in the world she was getting out. We already knew we couldn't keep clothes on her... and your silence tells me that might not have changed."

Amidst the group's laughter, Eddy said, "Oh no ma'am, Kissie, that ain't changed at all. I sometimes look forward to goin' out to eat with the crew just to see Kelly when she IS wearin' clothes."

"Well," Kissie replied with a laugh, "I had gathered that your family's dress code might be a bit casual," she touched her husband's face and felt his ease and good humor, "but as I was saying, we couldn't find any way out. One Saturday morning I'm in the kitchen, I look out, there's my baby, naked as a jaybird, playing in the sand, eating-"

"Do not go there, Mama!" Kelly said.

"-pillbugs by the handful, normal for her." She paused until the laughter died down. "And then when I looked back a few minutes later, she was gone. So I went out the back door, looked all over the yard, no sign of Kelly. I picked up the little tin pail she collected those pillbugs in, held it up and said 'Kelly, got some more pillbugs for you, baby!' and out through what we thought was a solid mass of bushes came Kelly, just a-crawling to beat the band, all covered in spider webs and dead leaves. I put her in her room, went back out, ignoring the screams of my pillbug-deprived child, looked behind the bushes and found out there was a loose board back there that let her in under the house. She'd been crawling under the house, leaving through an access door in front and wandering the neighborhood."

"At ten months? Good lord girl, we're gonna have to put any children of yours behind locked doors," Carol said.

"I'd watch 'em twenty-four-seven, even then," Earl commented. "Kelly never had an ounce of fear... and a lot of times, I used to swear she didn't have an ounce of common sense either." He reached over and stroked Kelly's hair. "But I think she's gotten over that 'common sense' deficiency."

"She ate freakin' pillbugs?" Karen asked. "You mean the little rolly-polly's, doodlebugs, those things?"

"Oh yeah," Kissie said. "By the bucket full... area around the house was kind of sandy and we had thousands of them, seemed like all the time. When I saw what she was doing, the first time, I got on her about it, took away her bucket, but she kept doing it again, no matter what I said, no matter how many spankings she got... what broke the camel's back for me was when I went out, took away her bucketful one day, went back into the kitchen and turned around just in time to see her calmly take out another bucketful she'd stashed under the stairs. At that point I figured if eating them hadn't hurt her yet, it wasn't going to and I knew when I was beat."

"Mama, really, thank you from the bottom of my heart for telling that story," Kelly said, staring into her coffee, blushing.

"That's okay Kelly; you want we should tell them some of the stories we have about you?" Eddy asked, grinning.

"Don't you dare you misanthropic, evolutionary throwback! I will beat you within an inch of your life and feed you to the coyotes!"

"What about Tamara?" Eddy asked innocently.

"Oh, don't worry," Karen said, "one family or the other will take her in, we promise."

* * * * *

That night in bed, Earl stroked his wife's belly as he spooned with her from behind.

"They're good people, aren't they?" he asked, his voice revealing it wasn't a question at all.

"Yes they are, Earl, they certainly are. Our little girl is going to be just fine," Kissie replied, moving his stroking hand a little lower down her front.

* * * * *

Days later...

"So he not only left you his collection of vinyl, and the quarter of a million and change... he left you his notes on a lifetime of live performances?" Nicki asked, paging through the sheaf of paper Carol had handed her.

"Yeah... and the more I've looked through them, the more I've realized that not only did he see all the greats, he was a pretty decent writer as well. I don't know... Tony poured so much of his life into those pages, his real life, not his mob activities, but music, his obsession with it, the way it gave his life meaning."

"Yeah Carol, but on the flip side, this is also the story of his days in the mob... where he was, who he was working for, what he was doing... I mean, he leaves out a lot of last names, sometimes uses just initials, but I'm not even that familiar with mob history and I can decipher some of this with no problem.

"Carol, these notes... they're the story of the two sides of a man's soul... have you thought about having them published?"

"Yeah... but Nicki, I don't have any idea how to even start... I just know that I can't see letting these molder somewhere, never see the light of day... he deserves better than that."

"Carol... would you like some help? I mean, I'm a journalist, not an author, but I'm not without contacts and I'd be more than willing to do whatever I can."

"Nicki... I'd appreciate it more than I can say." She threw her arms around her sister-in-law. "There's just one more piece we'd need to have fall into place..."

* * * * *

"Based on what you told me on the phone," Nick said, sitting at his desk with some discomfort, "I asked my father to be here today."

As the old man was wheeled in, Carol nudged Nicki. "Our day may have just gotten a lot worse," she muttered.

"Little Carol Grimes now, is it?" the old man said. "And you must be Harry's sister... it's a pleasure," he said, taking Nicki's hand and bringing it briefly to his lips. "I've got to tell you," he added as he was wheeled back to Nick's side, "your... partner... Margo, she's something else. Balls bigger than most of the men I've known. There's one thing I have to know though... before we go any further..." He sat for a moment, breathing. "Tell me about the look on her face when she opened that 'black banana'."

The nervous tension Carol had been feeling was released and she busted out laughing. "Oh Vic... I thought she was going to come hunt you down and make you eat it... until, you know, those rocks did their hypnotic routine... on all three of us. Then she just called you everything but a white Protestant child of God."

The old man laughed, every breath a strain on his system. "Well, even if she had called me that, she'd'a only been right about one o' the three."

"And even though she probably never will, I want to thank you for her and for Kelly and me as well. We all look lovely in them."

"Hard for you not to... necklace like that on any lovely lady... can't help but accentuate her charms, and charms the three of you got plenty of.

"But enough feeding an old man's ego... I believe you had some business with Don Philouma."

Both Nick and his father listened attentively as Carol laid out their plan, unable to hide her passion for bringing Tony Juliana's observations on and love of music to the world, unable to hide her love and respect for Tony either.

And when her presentation was done, Nick looked to his father. "Father, Tony retired in the early nineties, didn't he?"

"'92... May of '92."

"So almost none of his observations would be about anyone still active, not with what he was doing, not with the way the Family has changed."

"Nick... there's still the Code."

"Omerta? Come on, Father, that's a leaky sieve of a boat these days. We have made men turning state's evidence, writing books for Christ's sake! Everybody in the whole goddamn world knows our business but they all only know it from the side of the law, doing their job by painting us as evil incarnate, or from traitors and rats, squealing anything to get them a better deal or sell more books.

"Maybe this is our chance to just let some of our story speak for itself."

"Your words are not without wisdom, Don Philouma. I know that if it were my decision, there would be no Family business mentioned in the book and if the ladies weren't prepared to hand over the notes to have those portions excised, we'd take them and they'd have nothing... possibly not even their lives.

"But it isn't my decision... and it isn't my time."

"What I propose is this," Nick said, templing his fingers together in front of his face, "you go back and put the right names in, wherever you can. If you need help, talk to me and we'll see what we can do. I get to look at the manuscript before anyone other than your family and evaluate it for potential damage to our Family interests, not just here, but anywhere. If I see such potential, the manuscript is abbreviated back to initials only in those sections... possibly to no names or initials at all in severe cases. When you publish it, after such scrutiny, I will make it known among our associates here and abroad that you do so with my blessing, and under my protection."

"And w-what would you w-want in return, Don Philouma?" Nicki asked, realizing for the first time just how deep the bear pit she found herself in was.

"That purely on the basis of a handshake deal between the three of us, ten percent of any royalties go into a fund aiding and promoting music education in the public schools of our city."

"No," Carol said, flat and hard. "Not ten percent. Twenty-five percent."

Nick looked across his desk at her, and then stood up, wincing slightly from the pain. He extended his hand across the desk towards them. "Fine, then we have a deal."