Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?

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I take a hard step back, right on Rio’s instep, and get him in the ribs with my elbow, apologizing profusely as I do, claiming I didn’t realize he was there.

“Do give these to Mark,” I say, trying to hand him the steel sheets, but he’s busy looking for a chair or maybe a sympathetic witness.

THIS AFTERNOON, my little one, Alyssa, is going home with Jill Roseman. My big ones are meeting me at L.I. Lanes. Dana will be thrilled to see her dad. Jesse will be morose.

They will both be watching for signs that I might be softening toward their father—Dana hoping, Jesse dreading.

Before I head for the alley, I stop by Bobbie’s to pick up some carpet samples I left there. Under the pretext of not knowing where she’s put them, she drags me up to her bedroom, where she’s got several outfits laid out on her bed.

“Try this,” she says, holding her shortest skirt up in front of my jeans. “It’s stretch and it’ll go perfectly with my little strippy strappy Manolos.”

Looking down, I notice that—ta da—I’m already dressed. And I point this out to Bobbie, who looks me over and simply says, “Not.”

“Try the skirt,” she insists.

I remind her that I am going to work, and not as a streetwalker.

“Part of your work is attitude,” she tells me. I swear she and my mother have read and reread the same chapter of that Secret Handbook of Long Island Rules a hundred times. “And to exude attitude you’ve got to feel it—feel in charge. More than in charge. You’ve got to feel and project superiority. In this skirt and a pair of stilettos, you’re too good for the likes of your ex-husband and for decorating bowling alleys and for everything—except me, of course.”

She isn’t kidding.

“Try it on. See if it doesn’t make you feel like an authority.”

“On what?” I ask, slipping out of my jeans and holding the skirt up in front of my ratty underwear—which I really ought to replace if Drew Scoones is back in my life.

I can barely make myself put the skirt on, but I know that Bobbie won’t let me refuse it until I do. Meanwhile she roots around in the closet, no doubt looking for shoes I could break an ankle in.

“Perfect!” she shouts when she reemerges from the closet and takes a look at me. I look in the mirror, trying to see what she sees, while she straightens my shoulders before taking a step back. “What do you think?”

I stare at the woman in the mirror. “I think I’d never again be able to tell Dana any of her clothes were out of the question.”

“Maybe, but Rio will eat his two-timing, scum-sucking heart out. Here, you need these, too,” she says, throwing a pair of fishnet pantyhose at me. I don’t make any effort to catch them. “Don’t you want—”

No, I don’t. It’s been a long time since I cared what Rio Gallo thought about me. And while Bobbie fusses around, picking up piles of discarded clothes, I tell her as much. I have a job, I have kids, I have more important things to worry about.

“My, my,” Bobbie says, tsking when she looks at her watch. “Don’t you have to meet some salesman over at the Lanes? Where does the time go?”

I look at my watch. It’s a half hour later than the clock on her nightstand—the one I’ve been carefully watching—reads.

“I wonder where your jeans are,” she says. I look down and the carpet is completely devoid of any clothing—including mine. “I know they were here earlier.”

I tell her that this isn’t funny, that I’m late and that I can’t go to the alley looking like I want to have a tryst in one.

She offers to loan me a pair of her jeans, knowing that I couldn’t get them up higher than my knees, and I order her into her closet to get mine.

Instead, she comes out with high boots and a white shirt to wear with the little skirt.

“Couldn’t find them,” she says.

I look in the mirror. Another job well done by Bobbie Lyons, I think to myself. Not.

SO THIS IS HOW I come to be standing in L.I. Lanes in very high-heeled boots, a very short skirt, a blouse with very few buttons and a pair of very red cheeks.

“Wow,” Steve, standing behind the counter counting cash, says, and adds a whistle. Mark leans over on his ladder to see what has Rio’s tongue hanging out and nearly topples over.

“Is the pool-table salesman here yet?” I ask, feigning that superior attitude the skirt was supposed to give me.

“Back here,” Mark says, only his voice breaks and it sounds like he’s croaking. “With your kids,” he adds, like it’s a warning.

I walk carefully, because if I don’t, I’ll wind up showing even more leg, not to mention my underwear, when I fall flat on my face.

The pool-table salesman is facing me, leaning over the table, intent on his shot. His fingers make a bridge through which the cue goes back and forth, back and forth.

“Oh, God!” Dana, just coming in from the back door of the alley, says when she sees me. She looks quickly around the joint. Her eyes are wide, her jaw drops and out comes a very plaintive “Mo-om! What if my friends or someone who knows me, saw you in that?”

Which causes Jesse to look up and gasp, which makes the pool-table salesman glance away from his shot and wind up seeing me. That causes him to nearly rip the table with the cue, sending the cue ball over the rail, which hits me in the chest and nearly knocks me over.

All in the house that Jack built.

Mark hurries down his ladder, Rio comes running, no doubt to massage my wound, and the pool-table salesman rushes toward me telling me he can’t say he’s sorry enough. Only, with everyone coming at me so fast, I lose my balance on Bobbie’s idiotic shoes and stumble backward.

Steve, reaching out to catch me before I go down, winds up providing a soft landing as the two of us slip down the two steps and slide past a bunch of kids trying to figure out how to score a second spare in the settee area. We don’t stop until we’re halfway down the alley where, with Bobbie’s skirt around my waist, the heel of her left boot wedges in the gutter.

Dana dies on the spot. I wish I could, but everyone is making a fuss over me so I can’t just cry and run out of the bowling alley the way she does.

Jesse is staring and trying not to stare at the same time.

Rio’s holding up his new camera phone and I just know he’s snapping pictures.

And Mark is laughing his head off as he heads toward me, taking off his overshirt as he comes.

“You might wanna…” he says as he drops it in my lap.

“Wanna what?” I ask him. “Die?”

He helps me up, despite Steve’s offer to let me stay where I am as long as I’d like.

The pool-table salesman slicks back his hair and smiles at me. His eyes go up and down any parts of my body he hasn’t gotten a good enough look at. I can’t imagine what parts those could be.

“Don Pardol,” he says, offering me his hand.

Ignoring his outstretched hand I scoot past him to the ladies’ room, cursing Bobbie Lyons and her stupid shoes the entire way.

In the restroom, another area that needs redoing before the grand opening, I tug at my belt until it’s a skirt again, put Mark’s shirt on, grateful it comes down to my knees, and take a look at myself in the mirror.

I am a wreck, but things could be worse.

Oh, wait. They are.

Someone sticks her head into the ladies’ room. “Are you Teddi Bayer?”

I try pleading the fifth.

She tells me there’s a policeman outside who wants to talk to me.

Have you ever heard God laughing? I mean, yeah, it’s possible what I’m hearing is just thunder, but under the circumstances…

Drew is leaning up against a pole when I emerge. His hair is slightly wet, the shoulders on his jacket are sprinkled with rain. He looks like a commercial for a Jeep or Irish Spring.

He pushes himself off the post and tells me he caught Dana walking in the rain and gave her a lift home. Okay, it’s more like “that kid doesn’t have the sense to come in outta the rain. And stubborn? Had to nearly drag her ass into the car. Don’t know where she gets that from.”

And all the while he’s talking, he’s taking in my outfit.

“I can’t imagine what you did to piss her off,” he says and he’s measuring the height of my heels with his eyes while he talks. “Noticed your ex is here, too,” he adds.

“Everyone’s here but my mother and the press,” I tell him. And the way my luck is going, one or the other will be next.

Unlike the usually cocky Drew, he almost seems self-conscious, standing there—like he’s trying to be casual, but knows he isn’t pulling it off. “So, you want to maybe grab something to eat when you’re done here?” he asks me.

Actually, he asks my legs.

I tell him what I really need is for him to help me check over Rio’s work after hours. He tells my legs that sounds okay and then his cell rings.

“Gotta run,” he says, and he tilts his head slightly at the hem of my skirt. “She’s probably just jealous,” he says over his shoulder as he leaves.

That was a compliment, I think. I’m not flattered and the last thing I want is for my thirteen year-old to feel in competition with me.

But at least I know she’s home and safe, even if she is pissed.

Not something I can worry about now, I figure, so I go back to the billiards area, where Don is anxious to show me how to play pool.

“Your son’s got a natural aptitude,” he tells me, being careful to keep his eyes averted when he thinks I’m looking. Rio, who is supposed to be working on the wiring for the security system, puffs out his chest, as though hanging around in a pool hall and being a pool shark is the avocation he had in mind for our son.

It might be.

“Dad’s getting me my own stick,” Jesse says as he sinks three balls in a row. Gently, Don corrects him and calls it a cue. I call it a bribe and can see the writing on the wall—Rio earning some money means that he’ll be buying the kids’ favors before his paycheck even makes it into his pocket.

While Jesse impresses his father and a bunch of boys who have gathered around to watch, I explain to Don that I need the new tables, four of them, in two weeks. He promises that he can deliver.

Two of the boys whistle as Jesse hits the white ball into the red one, causing it to hit the yellow one into the pocket.

“Combination shot,” Don says. “Boy’s good. How long has he been playing?”

Jesse looks at his watch.

“No,” Don says. “Really.”

Jesse looks guiltily at me. “Dad and I have played a few times,” he says.

This, of course, is news to me. All I’ve heard is how much he hates his father.

“How much would a pool table for the house cost?” I ask Don. If Jesse is going to play pool, I figure it’s better if I know where and with whom. Jesse’s eyes light up like it’s Christmas and immediately I regret asking in front of him.

Don tells me that I can get “junk” for under a thousand, or a good one for a little over that.

“Just sold a gorgeous antique one for seventeen big ones,” he tells me. “But the guy froze to death before the deal was done. How’s that for rotten luck? Almost sixty degrees out and a guy freezes to death.”

“Seventeen thousand?” Rio asks, and his voice cracks. He’s standing on a ladder with a bunch of wires in his hands and I’m hoping he knows what to do with half of them. “You can get that much for a pool table?”

“Nope,” Don says, “for a billiards table.”

“What’s the difference?” Jesse asks him.

“About ten grand,” Don says with a laugh.

“The man who froze to death,” I say, wondering out loud. “His name didn’t happen to be Joey, did it?”

Don looks at me and nods. “It sure did.”

CHAPTER 6

It only takes one piece to upgrade the look of an entire room if that piece is the focal point. Rather than evenly allotting a strained budget, concentrate the bulk of your spending on the area that is going to have the greatest impact—a fabulous rug, a fireplace mantel, an impressive painting. Make sure, though, that you love it, since it’s what your eye will be drawn to.

—TipsFromTeddi.com

“You tell me how a deli-counter man could buy a pool table for seventeen thousand dollars,” I ask Drew when I finally reach him by phone after I’ve gone home to change.

“You tell me how you wiggled into that skirt,” he says. “There are still some mysteries left in the universe, I guess.”

Does the word irritating mean anything to you? I hold a biscuit up for Maggie and tell her she’s got to promise to bite Drew the next time she sees him if she wants her treat.

I swear she nods, but she’s a slut for biscuits and I’ve found that sometimes she’ll lie.

“All I’m saying,” I tell Drew, “is that you need to check into what else Joey Ingraham was buying and where the money was coming from.”

“And all I’m saying,” he parrots back, “is that even if this case wasn’t closed, it wasn’t my case to begin with. I can’t just go investigate some other cop’s case.”

When I ask why not, he tells me it would imply that the cop wasn’t doing his job.