A Farewell to Legs: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,2
yard? Remember, we have no, um, soil in the back yard.”
“The pet store. Then we keep them in the refrigerator.”
“The same refrigerator where we keep our food?” She nodded, and I think actually looked a little nauseated.
I stood up and put an arm over my wife’s shoulder. “Is there any power on heaven or earth that can stop this?”
“No.”
“Any chance I can get some sex out of saying yes?” I figured it was worth a shot.
“Not tonight. I’ll be asleep long before you get home.”
From downstairs, I could hear the doorbell ring, followed by Leah’s shrill shriek. “It’s Uncle Mahoney!” Abby and I started wearily toward the stairs.
“All in all,” I told her, “this night is not starting out terribly well.”
Chapter
Two
“Remind me why we’re going to this thing.”
Jeff Mahoney, all six-foot-whatever of him, was scrunched into the passenger seat of my 1997 Saturn four-door. He had pushed the seat back as far as it went, and still his knees were threatening to hit his chin.
“It’ll be fun,” I said unconvincingly. “We haven’t seen these people in twenty-five years.”
“And we didn’t like them then,” he reminded me.
“You’re not going in with a terrific attitude,” I pointed out.
“And you expected. . . what?”
I grumbled something under my breath and shoved a cassette into the car radio. John Mayer. Room for Squares. He grimaced, but didn’t say anything. To him, any music recorded after 1979 is suspect.
He was right, of course, although not about the music. There was no reason for me to have anticipated anything but a sour attitude from him, since it had been my idea for us to go to our 25th year high school reunion. Overcome by a sudden, inexplicable wave of nostalgia, I had responded to the invitation in my mail (along with the inevitable bills) by convincing him that we would spend the evening drinking and making fun of our former classmates. Well, he could drink, anyway. I’d appointed myself designated driver. The major effect of alcohol on my system is to make me sleepy.
I don’t know what it was that convinced me to go. At Bloomfield, NJ’s prime example of a high school in the mid-1970s, students divided themselves into the usual cliques: the jocks, the cheerleaders (who existed mostly to sleep with the jocks, thus serving to doubly tweak the rest of us), the brains (this was years before nerds were invented, and decades before computer geeks), and the remedial students.
And then there was Us. Myself, Mahoney, Friedman, Wharton, and McGregor. We were a group because we didn’t fit in with any of the other groups—we fell between the cracks. And we got along because we expected nothing of each other, and got exactly that. Besides Mahoney, who was still my closest friend, I had-n’t seen the others in at least 10 years.
So maybe it was that kind of reunion I had been trying to manufacture. I’d blackmailed Mahoney into going by telling him I wouldn’t go without him, and had emailed Bobby Fox, who was coordinating the reunion (and who was still, at 43, calling himself “Bobby”), to be sure Friedman, Wharton, and McGregor would be there. But I hadn’t told Mahoney, and I didn’t know why.
Now, he listened thoughtfully to the music, wrinkled his brow, and turned it down a notch. “This guy’s not bad,” he said. “But he’s never going to replace Jim Croce.”
“I’m sorry. I left my Bad Company tape back home in my white double-knit leisure suit.”
Mahoney grinned. “Somebody get up on the wrong side of the bed this morning?”
“I can’t remember why I wanted to go to this thing, either,” I admitted.
“It’s because Stephanie Jacobs is going to be there,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’ve had the hots for her since Gerald Ford was president.”
Stephanie Jacobs! I hadn’t even thought of her. Would she be at this miserable wing ding?
“Everybody had the hots for Stephanie Jacobs,” I reminded him. “And when I say ‘everybody. . .’”
When Mahoney and I were seventeen, all of us considered Stephanie Jacobs the ideal woman. Built so that she looked naked even in a down parka, Stephanie was rumored to have caused cardiac arrest in middle-aged men of, say, 30 or so.
“Not everybody,” said Mahoney.
“Your memory fails you,” I told him. “I remember a time you gave Stephanie Jacobs a ride home in the Mustang, and you talked about nothing else for six weeks.”
“Bullshit,” he said. “It was only four weeks.”
“Nonetheless. You had just as many hots for Stephanie Jacobs as everybody else.”