Tales of the City 07 - Michael Tolliver Lives

got a few days at the most. She seems to know it, too. She asked him to make her look pretty.”
    Ben’s Adam’s apple bobbed. For a moment I thought he was going to cry, but he just charged toward his office. “I’ll book the tickets, then.”
    “No.” I caught him by the arm. “You don’t have to, sweetie.”
    “Those flights fill up fast.”
    “I mean, you don’t have to go. I can do this myself. You’ve got work to do, and you’ve put up with enough already.”
    “You don’t want me to?” He looked almost hurt.
    “No…of course not. I just didn’t want to make you—”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. This is what husbands do.” He started heading for the office again. “We don’t have to stay with Irwin and Lenore, do we?”
    “God, no.”
    “I’ll find us someplace nice. Does it have to be gay?”
    “I don’t care. Just no orchids in the toilet.”

    The rain lingered as the day wore on, so I called Jake from home and told him I wouldn’t need him for a job in the Marina that afternoon. “Anyway,” I added, “I’ve got some loose ends I need to tie up in the office today. My mother’s pretty close to the end, so Ben and I are leaving on the red-eye tonight.”
    “Shit…I’m sorry, boss.”
    “You think you could hold down the fort for a few days?”
    “Sure. No problem.”
    “There shouldn’t be much to do, with all this rain. Mrs. Langston wants her hedges trimmed, and you know how she gets, so…if there’s a break in the weather today—”
    “I’m on the case, boss. Don’t even think about it.”
    “Good man.”
    “Will you be on your cell?”
    “Yeah…and the house’ll be empty, so…if you and Connor, or whoever…wanna come hang out and use the hot tub…consider it your spa.”
    “You serious?”
    “You bet. It’ll be nice to think of life going on back here. You know where the key is, and there’s some extra towels under the bathroom sink. Just turn off the hot tub when you leave. And don’t forget to cover it or the raccoons will have a field day.”
    “No sweat,” said Jake. “I’ll tell the roomies.” His failure to mention Connor made me wonder if that romance had faded because of the aforementioned plumbing issues, or if Jake was just being his usual private self. “We’ve got our poker game tonight,” he added. “We’re cooking paella. Anna’s coming up for it.”
    “Since when does Anna play poker?”
    Jake chuckled. “Since a few weeks ago. Marguerite and Selina taught her.” (Those were his roommates, the teacher and the investment counselor, both trannies in their thirties.) “Damn,” I said. “She never fails to amaze me.”
    “She said her mom used to play it in Winnemucca.”
    I could picture little Anna—or Andy, as she was back then—watching her mother deal cards to her “girls” at the Blue Moon Lodge during the flapper era. Mona, lucky devil, actually got to see that ancient brothel (and live there briefly) before her grandmother—widely known in those parts as Mother Mucca—passed away in the early eighties. The place was deserted for years, then finally torn down to make room for a casino/hotel complex, though some clever soul with a sense of history saw fit to preserve the name. Grasping for atmosphere where I’m sure there’s none to be found, the placemats at the Blue Moon Bar and Grill make coy reference to the “colorful house of ill repute” that once stood on that spot.
    Anna learned all this from Bobbi, the youngest of Mother Mucca’s brood, when Bobbi came through San Francisco toward the end of the millennium. Anna remarked at the time that her mother would have pitched a fit at the notion of her house being one of “ill repute,” almost as much as she would have denounced the clinical sound of “sex worker,” the newest politically correct euphemism for hookers. Mother Mucca was an old-fashioned gal.
    Bobbi was in her forties by then and no longer a hooker. She was married and living in Houston, finally making an honest living. She worked as a receptionist at Enron.

    I called Brian at the nursery to tell him about Mama—not for comfort, really, just to keep him in the loop. I was already feeling guilty about not having shared Irwin’s crisis with Brian, since I know he would have gotten a kick out of the whole gruesome mess. But telling that story—and the solution I’d offered—would have brought Shawna into the picture, and that would not have amused her father nearly as much.