Chapter DCCXX.

 Chapter DCCXX - Raw Liver and Lime Sherbet. 

Before last time. Well before last time. A week or more before last time,

     Roz said, “What are we going to do about Uncle A?”

     “What do you mean?” I said.

     “What do you think I mean?”

     “What you call the pan(dem)ic.” She spelled it out, “pan-parenthesis-dem-unparenthesis-ick.”

     “Oh,” I said. And waited, hoping for more. But she was also waiting - for me. “Do you mean, ‘What am I going to do’ about him?” I asked.

     “No, definitely not. You haven’t thought about it, have you?”

     “No,” I said. “I guess not,” thinking (but not adding): “Things don’t always have to change, do they, because they ought to?”

     “Well, I talked to Maggie. You met Carl and Zenobia?”

     “Yes, her friend from the college and the mechanic-is-it?” (See here.)

     “Truck driver. Well, she went to Roanoke last weekend to see her boyfriend, the nurse, and she decided not to come back. And he’s stuck in Bolivia - he was on a mission trip.”

     “So, she’s by herself, Maggie?”

     “No. Her mother’s come up from Smithfield.”

     I nodded as if I understood.

“They’d be happy to have Albert stay, but . . . ,” she trailed off, and I could hear Maggie trailing off at the same place in the same sentence, an echo in a lower register.

     “He’ll have to climb the stairs,” I said after a minute.

     “He has to climb the stairs there,” Roz said.

     Yeah. Right.

     “He’s doing fine with them,” she says. “Slow but fine.”

     “He doesn’t like cats,” I said.

     “Tough. Besides, we don’t let Flap in the guest room.”

     “I didn’t say he was allergic to cats. I said he didn’t like them. He says they smell funny.”

     “They don’t smell at all.”

     “Like raw liver and lime sherbet, he says.”

     “I’m going to call anyway.

“Is he ready?” I asked Roz when she came back from the kitchen.

     “He’ll be on the porch,” she said. “Two suitcases,” she added.

     “Did you tell him about the cat?”

03.24.20