“Jamie, if you want to go to Career Day I suggest you go help your sister,” her voice raised.
“Your wish is my command, Mom.”
Yeah right.
When Jamie left, Veronica hesitantly asked, “Do you have a problem with it?”
Eddie shook his head. “My brother has been dead over a year. I think it’s time to start boinking again.”
“Have I mentioned I’m surprised a woman hasn’t locked you up?”
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t get to be the overprotective brother-in-law. So where’d you meet this guy?”
“It’s bad enough I live next door to my mother. I really don’t need this.”
“You know I’ve gotten drug kingpins to …”
“Fine—I met him at one of my classes at Pace.”
“Class? Like a student—how old is he?” Eddie asked, smirking.
“Age is all relative.”
“That means he must be real young. Let’s put it this way, could he legally drink or did you have to order him a Shirley Temple?”
“He’s twenty three … are you happy?”
Eddie began choking on his pizza. Veronica was pretty sure he did it for effect, but if he really needed a Heimlich he wasn’t getting it from her. He miraculously survived long enough to say, “Maggie’s mom has got it going on. You could be his mother!”
“If I had him when I was fourteen. Are you finished?”
“I work in the South Bronx. By fourteen, most chicks already have two kids in prison. So where did you and Sparky go on your date?”
Veronica didn’t waste her breath with another in a long line of PC-scoldings; he was a lost cause. “It was just a date. There was a film festival at the Jacob Burns Center and then we had dinner at that Japanese place, Hanada. No boinking.”
“Very disappointing,” Eddie said, seemingly losing interest. “So where’s Maggie?”
“She’s out in the backyard burying a time-capsule for her Heritage Paper that she put together with Ellen.”
Eddie jumped off his seat. “This I gotta see.”
Chapter 4
Veronica watched as Eddie came up behind Maggie, and shouted, “Freeze, Maggot—you’re under arrest for being late to school!”
Maggie turned, and a big smile came over her face. She tossed the final shovelful of dirt onto her time-capsule and ran to Eddie. The kids were always so affectionate with him. Maybe because in so many ways he was still a child himself. She even let him call her Maggot—nobody else got away with that.
“Did you see the pictures I sent you?” Eddie asked.
“Yeah—they were great. Blood spattered everywhere!”
Veronica cringed, not liking where this was going.
Maggie pulled out her phone—the one Ellen bought for her last Christmas, despite Veronica’s insistence that she was too young—and they studied the images that Eddie had sent her. He turned to Veronica. “Couple of dead drug dealers we found in a loft apartment last night.”
Most parents worried about their kids text messaging too much with their friends—her kids got dead bodies. No wonder she was constantly meeting with their principal. “You sent my children pictures of dead people?”
“Not people—drug dealers. Best anti-drug commercial going. You should thank me.”
Eddie’s focus changed back to the time-capsule, and he began peppering Maggie with questions about it.
She swelled with pride as she went on a tangent about the contents. Eddie tried to get a sneak peak, but Maggie warned him that it couldn’t be opened for thirty years. This made him all the more eager to see inside, but Maggie didn’t relent. She did give him a rundown of the contents—family photos, copy of the Heritage Paper, family tree, and a memoir of Ellen’s life that they wrote together, expanding beyond the scope of the Heritage Paper. A record of her life that according to Maggie, Ellen hoped to pass down to future generations of the Peterson family.
Eddie began laughing. “Memoir? Only Oma could be narcissistic enough to think that anyone would want to read the story of her life. Who wants to read about some whiny housewife from New York?”
“She had a very interesting life,” Maggie contended. “I think you’d be surprised.”
It was almost two different lives, Veronica thought. As a young girl, Ellen had survived a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. Then when the war ended, she came to America, where she married a policeman named Harold Peterson. They had one child named Harry Jr., but when he and his wife died tragically, Ellen took in her grandchildren, Carsten and Eddie, and raised them. Maybe it wasn’t worthy of a movie, but she would have to agree with Maggie, it was in interesting life.