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“Well, I…”
“You don’t gotta say any more. I can tell that you got other reasons.” She put her gloved hand over her mouth and drew in a loud breath, “Did that Allison clean you out and now all you got left is this dump?” She gasped.
“Aunt Flo, relax. I’ve got plenty of money.”
“Well, at least that’s something, but for a man who says he’s got plenty of money, you sure are peculiar. You look skinny. Pale. You should eat something, you’ll feel better.”
“Thanks, but…”
“Come on out with me. We can talk and you can buy me a nice hot meal with all this money you still got.” She started toward him.
Rudy wanted to join her. He tried to get up from the dilapidated chair, but with each movement the recliner seemed to engulf him.
“Tell you what, I got my mobile phone. My Cate got it for me last Christmas. She’s a wonderful girl, that Cate. You shoulda never done what you did, but we’ll talk about that later.” She smiled, but Rudy didn’t exactly like the look on her face. “She’s beautiful and generous and good-hearted, not like some of them loser women you run with. A good-looking boy like you shouldn’t…”
She dug through the Monroe purse. “Where the heck is it? I only use the thing for emergencies, all that talk about brain tumors and stuff. Your dad thought Betty caught a brain tumor from the mobile phone. Even took her to the Mayo Clinic because she was acting so mean all the time. Turned out she was going through the change, but still, you can’t be too careful these days.” She pulled a checkbook, a notebook and an industrial-size wine opener out of her purse, peeked in and shouted, “There it is, way on the bottom.”
She plucked out the shiny red phone and showed it to Rudy, cradling it in her hands as if she were presenting it for purchase. Aunt Flo had worked at Marshall Fields ever since she was sixteen years old, and probably still did. Back when Rudy knew her, she had always prided herself on her sales abilities. “An important man like you should get himself one of these. This is the Superturbo F720k. Great little phone, even takes pictures. I haven’t quite figured out how to use that feature yet, but a smart man like you could probably figure it out without the directions.”
She went on about some of the other features while Rudy thought about his aching big toe, the absurdity of the situation he found himself in, the pain in his hip, his leg and, most of all, his neck.
Then, sometime right before he was about to let out an earth-shattering moan, Aunt Flo sat down next to him on a rickety chair. “Don’t you worry about a thing,” she told him in a vanilla voice. “Let’s see now,” she said. “I know just the person to call to come get us out of this hell hole.”
4
“MARRY ME . Tonight. Make all my dreams come true.” Henry yelled from the dining room as he set the dark-walnut table for eight, something Cate did every night. She liked being prepared for inevitable company. “A woman who can cook, these days, is a rare find. Be mine and you can cook for me every night.”
How could a woman refuse such an offer?
Cate plunked the wooden spoon she held into the tomato sauce and wiped her hands on her apron. “No, thanks, Henry,” Cate yelled back from the kitchen. “I’m not ready to get married tonight. I have to wash my hair. But thanks for asking…again.”
It had been the third proposal that week. They were coming faster now. The only reason Cate could think of for the sudden surge was that Henry was turning fifty soon. Maybe he was on a self-imposed deadline to remarry, and she fit the job description:
Wanted: desperate female who can cook and likes to be around dead people all day. Will marry for food.
Just as Cate walked into the dining room carrying a plate of ricotta-filled canolli, Henry’s favorite dessert, and picturing the ad in the Sun Times personals, Gina burst into the house along with an amazingly strong gust of wind off the lake.
The wind toppled Henry’s towering floral centerpiece. Lilies, pink carnations and roses blew across the table, and the lovely pea-green vase that Henry had brought over from his funeral home the previous week cracked with the fall. Cate turned on her heel and went back into the kitchen for a dish towel.
“Hi, Henry,” Gina said. “Too many roses, Henry. Cate hates roses. Where is she? I think we broke her ex and we need her to get the pieces out of the car.”
“What’s the matter?” Cate asked, as she walked back out of the kitchen. She tossed the dish towel to Henry, who just stood there staring at the mess on the table. His face almost always had that startled look to it, as if he lived in a constant state of surprise. Perhaps it was the way his jet-black eyebrows arched above his cobalt-blue eyes, and the contrast of his thick, totally white hair, and the way his nostrils flared like he was desperate to take in air, or maybe it was that last face lift.
“Cate, it’s not my fault,” Gina insisted. “The guy doesn’t listen to reason. He’s more stubborn than Dad. I told him not to get into the back seat.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s stuck, Cate, and can’t move. Our car ate his foot.”
“Call cousin Charlie. He’s pushing three-hundred pounds. He’ll get your boyfriend out of the car.”
“He’s not my boyfriend, Cate. He’s yours. And Charlie’s already out there.”
Henry looked over at Cate. “You have a boyfriend?”
“Why didn’t you say so?” Cate grabbed her coat and hurried out the front door ahead of Gina. Henry followed but stopped in the doorway, holding on to part of his floral centerpiece. “Wait,” he yelled. “Was it the roses? Women love roses. Don’t they?”
As soon as Cate stepped out into the cold night air and took one look at the twisted man caught inside the classic, faded orange-colored VW Beetle, she knew he was in real trouble. Complete sympathy overtook her like a mud bath and swirled in thick waves of human compassion.
Cate and Gina shared the car, but it was actually Cate’s, only she hardly drove it anymore. Most of the time she would grab a bus or a train to get where she was going. Gina had commandeered the Bug to get back and forth from school on a daily basis.
Cate only caught a glimpse of Rudy’s tortured face as cousin Charlie pulled on Rudy’s arms, apparently attempting to rip them right off his body. It was the high-pitched yelp that gave the painful maneuver away.
“Stop it,” Cate yelled as she stood in front of the car parked next to the curb. They were all there, most of the neighborhood, and most of her family, each trying to unwedge the unwedgeable from both sides of the car.
In all the chaos, she noticed that Aunt Flo and her dad were actually holding hands…almost as if they were a couple. She immediately turned away and pushed her attention to Rudy. The thought of Aunt Flo and her dad as a couple was absolutely ridiculous, and she didn’t even want to consider it.
When she looked again, they had stopped holding hands. Now they stood well apart from each other.
That was better. She thought perhaps it had been a lighting thing, or maybe she hadn’t seen it at all? Convincing herself that it was just the confusion of the moment, she went on to more urgent issues.
“You guys have to stop,” she told everyone. They instantly backed off.
When Cate stuck her head in the car, Rudy smiled up at her like a helpless puppy. He sat in the back seat, sideways, with one leg stretched out along the seat and the other one hidden somewhere in front of him. His arms draped over the front seat as if they were no longer part of his body.
“Hurt much?” she asked.
“Only while I’m awake,” he said.
“So, tell me, only kids and small animals fit in this back seat. Which did you think you were?”
“I got hungry.”
“Rosebuds delivers.”
“Aunt Flo had other plans.”
“Oh, so this is Aunt Flo’s fault. Then why isn’t she in the back seat?”
“I was being a gentleman.”
“Don’t say that too loud, I might hear you and get the wrong idea.”
He smiled. “Look, Cate, I’ll do anything you want, just don’t let cousin Charlie near me.”
She had to smile back. He looked too cute. “So tell me, Sir Gallant, aside from your general maladies, why can’t you get out of here?”
“My foot is stuck under the front seat.”
“Not quite as much room back there as your limo, huh?”
“Do you ever stop?”
Cate dropped her gaze for a moment and took a breath, and that’s when she remembered the problem with the front passenger seat. It had a bolt missing and a gaping hole in the slider thing. If you put anything near it or around it when someone slid the seat back, that anything would get gobbled up. She’d lost a new pair of shoes once and it had torn a pair of Gina’s best pants right off her leg just two weeks before.
Both Gina and Cate had intended to have their dad fix it in his body shop, but neither of them had made the effort to get it over to him, and as long as no one sat in the back seat…so much for that theory.
She looked up again, and was about to tell him the missing-bolt story, but he was staring at her. He had the most gorgeous eyes, with thick long eyelashes, and the way his hair fell across his forehead reminded her of the reason she had fallen in love with him in the first place. Rudy had the ability, with just one sweet look, to make a girl believe everything he said.
It was that other Rudy, the evil-twin Rudy, who had been in her office earlier; aggravating her temper, causing irrational behavior in an otherwise completely rational person. He was the Rudy she knew.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry. So…you’re stuck.”
“A temporary condition, I’m sure.” He twisted himself around to face the front.
Aunt Flo stuck her head in the car. “Your dad says we’re gonna have to call the fire department. Vinney McCally is on tonight. He knows how to work them Jaws of Life.”
“That might be a little extreme and I’ve got…” Cate said, but before she could finish her sentence the sound of sirens echoed through the neighborhood.
“Oops, too late,” Aunt Flo declared and pulled herself out of the car to look down the street. Cate stepped out, as well.
“Ya know, it’s times like these that I don’t blame Rudy for leaving this place,” Cate told her aunt.
Rudy rolled down the back window. “Tell me there’s an actual fire somewhere and that sound isn’t for me,” he said with genuine concern in his voice.
Cate smiled down at him, then turned away as the hook-and-ladder pulled up alongside the tiny car and three burly firemen jumped out, Vinney McCally being one of them.
“It’s for you,” she told Rudy.
Rudy sat back and sighed.
Vinney walked over to Cate, dressed in complete catastrophe gear. “Cate, is it the old man? Don’t worry about a thing. I’m here now. Where is he, Cate? It’s gonna be all right.”
Vinney McCally was one of those short but powerful kind of guys. The gymnast type who worked out more than he should and had to buy his clothes three sizes too big just to fit across his double-wide chest.
Cate had dated him for a little while until he started talking marriage. That’s when a tree fell on him one Sunday afternoon in Lincoln Park while he walked his mother’s schnauzer.
The schnauzer got away without a scratch, but Vinney was pinned under a limb for two hours. When it was all over and he was lying on a table in the emergency room with a fractured pelvis and a broken arm, Vinney whispered into Cate’s ear, “I’m breaking up with you. Please go home and take your curse with you.”
It was during that time, while he lay there in a broken heap, that he decided to become a Chicago fireman. He told everyone that if he could survive dating Cate Falco, he could certainly survive fires and dangerous accidents.
“It’s not my father. It’s Rudy Bellafini. He’s trapped in the back seat,” she explained.
“Get out!” Vinney said as he hunkered down to get a better look inside.
Rudy smiled and finger waved.
“What d’ya know. Now, that’s a guy I never thought I’d see in this part of town again. But what’s he doin’ in the back seat of your car?” Vinney asked and waved back at Rudy. “You got him trapped in there or somethin’? Trying to get your revenge?”
“No. He did it on his own. His foot is stuck.”
“Geez, Cate. That curse thing just don’t want to let you go, huh? He didn’t propose again, did he?”
Cate’s temper reared up and she lashed out.
“No, Vinney. There were no proposals. He’s just stuck. Can’t a guy get his foot stuck without it being related to some damn curse?”
“Hold on. Don’t have a coronary. I was only kiddin’.”
He leaned inside the open door on the driver’s side of the car. “Hey, man. How ya doin’? It’s been a while.” They shook hands.
“Been better,” Rudy said. “Can you get me out of here, dude?”
Cate had to smile watching laid-back Vinney deal with uptight Rudy.
“Oh, sure, man. Don’t worry about a thing. We’ll have you outta here in no time.”
“Can we do it before the press finds out?”
“They ain’t gonna find out if I don’t tell ’em, now are they?”
“Thanks, dude. I owe you one.”
“Just doing my job, man. Now let’s see what’s going on under there.” He turned around and yelled for one of the other firemen to get a light, and suddenly the whole street lit up like the sun had just come out.
FOR THE NEXT TWO HOURS, Vinney and his rescue team from the Loomis Street Station worked to set Rudy free.
In the end the front passenger seat had to be removed through the roof, which, of course, required a hole. Cate actually cried a little when she saw the roof come off and the seat come out in tiny pieces.
“Don’t worry about it,” Aunt Flo said, as chunks of Cate’s car hit the pavement with a sharp clank. “Rudy told me he’s still got plenty of loot. He’ll get you a brand-new one of them bug cars.”
The ’79 classic Beetle had more sentimental value than retail value, so the replacement idea had little impact. Cate had bought it secondhand when she was a teenager. She had worked a whole year in a hot bakery and saved every dime. She loved that car and had a hard time lending it to her sister…who had promised to take good care of it, which, until Rudy Bellafini came along, she had.
But it wasn’t her sister’s fault, it was Cate’s. She was sure of it now.
When Rudy finally came limping out of the car, using Vinney’s right arm for support, the group, which now consisted of the entire neighborhood plus a couple of lost tourists, cheered.
A male paramedic checked out Rudy’s foot. Cate could tell Rudy was anxious about something, which was good. The sooner she could get him into that ambulance, the better.
“Can you walk?” the paramedic asked.
“I think so. I just want to get inside somewhere.”
He started to take a step but he stumbled. Vinney grabbed Rudy under one arm for support, and the paramedic grabbed the other.
“Easy there, fella. Put your weight on me,” Vinney commanded, his tone official. That was something Cate wasn’t used to. It gave her a new sense of respect for her former boyfriend.
“I guess I’m in worse shape than I thought,” Rudy said with a slight edge to his voice.
