SIDETRACKED

This week my goal was to write a mystery in 250 words. Here goes:

SIDETRACKED
“What you got there?” asked the old man.
“Spray paint,” said the kid. “Found it in the trash by the ticket window.”
“Put it back. And wipe your prints.”
“Like they’re going to dust the trash,” mumbled the boy.
“Don’t argue. Train’s coming.”
Harry hated working with kids. Still, there’s nothing like a cute little tyke to part suckers from their dough. They’d made a decent haul at the church social. He glanced at the briefcase by his foot.
Kids were more trouble than they were worth if you worked them too long though. Harry figured to ditch this one up the track. Why suffer the aggravation - or split the take?
“I should have swiped us a car,” said the kid.
“Told you, they’ll be watching the roads.”
“Won’t they watch the trains?”
“Who takes trains these days?”
The boy looked around the empty platform. Much as he hated to admit it, the old man might have a point.

“Our witnesses said the old man traveled with a boy.” said Detective Kirby.
“Yeah,” said Sergeant Phelps.
“Where do you suppose he is?”
“Ran off scared when the old man fell in front of the train. Uniforms are searching the woods.”
“Anything else?”
“Missing briefcase.”
“Maybe the kid stole it.” Kirby knew the station master undoubtedly filched it but he liked to needle Phelps.
“Yeah,” smirked Phelps. “And then he drove off in a stolen car.”
Kirby eyed the scary forest. “Poor little tyke,” he mused.
“Yeah, poor little tyke.”
###

Second Story

Okay, last week's story was a bit on the serious side so this week's offering is more fun.

CANARY YELLOW

“Strike!” yelled Keith, pumping his fist.
“Don’t get excited, you got no chance of catching me. You’re buying dinner tonight.”
“There’s a lot of frames left, Dougie old man.”
“You wish.” Doug lifted his black pearl ball, taking his stance at the line.
“Did I tell you Fran picked out her engagement ring?” said Keith as his brother fixed his eyes on the end of the lane.
“Nice try,” said Doug launching the ball in a precision trajectory for the sweet spot left of center pin.
The ball arched from right gutter, left into the notch where it detonated pins in all directions.
“Yes! How’s that for pin action, kid?”
“Not bad for an old geezer,” said Keith. “I could use a beer.”
“Quit stalling. Get it over with so you can buy us some burgers.”

“You said you wanted burgers, Doug.”
“You’re buying so I’m having steak. Got to keep up my strength for the next time you need your clock cleaned, kid.”
“Next week you’re buying me a monster pepperoni with double cheese.”
“Dream on,” said his brother. “Hey, what was that you said about an engagement ring?”
“Fran found one she wants. Look.” He flipped open his cell, scrolled, handing the phone to his brother.
“You got to be kidding! She wants a pee colored diamond?”
“It’s called a canary diamond. Fancier than plain white.”
“More expensive too I’ll bet. Fran’s got you where she wants you.”
“She should have the one she wants. She’ll wear it forever.”
“You’re setting yourself up to be a whipped man for life, kid. You’re as crappy with women as you are a bowler if you let her play this game.”
“Fran doesn’t play games.”
“They all play games. This yellow diamond thing is a test, take it from me. You hand over the plastic and you’re a keeper. Don’t and you’re history.”
“You’re wrong.”
“You think so? Tell her she’ll have to be satisfied with a plain white diamond and see how fast she heads for the exit.”
Keith chewed slowly, then swallowed.
“Dougie old man,” he said at last. “You’re a guy who lives like he bowls, sighting on the goal, following through to score - but you can’t see the bigger picture.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You know I’ve had my eye on that ‘65 T-Bird in Tacoma, right?”
“Sure. Mint condition, rebuilt eight,” said Doug. “Kiss it goodbye if you bankrupt yourself springing for a yellow rock, kid.”
“Okay, let’s say I talk Fran out of the canary yellow. She loves me so she’ll marry me anyhow. But, what are the chances she’ll ever let me forget she made the sacrifice?”
“Hmm. Zero to none, I suppose.”
“Right. And what are the chances I’ll ever be parking that sweet T-Bird in my garage?”
“Have to say, you got a hell of a hook, kid, but it’s got some pin action on it. Maybe you’re not such a crappy bowler after all.”
“Pass the steak sauce, big brother.”
###

A Short, Short, Short Story

In the last post I set a goal to write a piece of "flash fiction" each week - I find that's not quite as easy as it sounds. What a struggle to keep it short and sharp. Still I did come up with one this weekend - a rather grim little tale but I promise to lighten up for the next one!

CUTTER
“How you doing back there, Jen?” Her daughter had quit whimpering. That was either good or very, very bad.
Megan kept her eyes forward and away from the rearview mirror. She knew she shouldn’t be worrying about the blood soaking into the car seats but she couldn’t help it. How will I get the stains out? And what does that say about my priorities?
“You okay? If you don’t answer I’m pulling over.”
“Go ahead. What do I care? I didn’t want to come anyhow.”
Megan ran the tail end of a yellow at Boren Avenue.
“Are you all right or not?”
“Peachy. How much longer?”
“Not long if the lights cooperate.”
“You should have left me there.”
“Sure, that was going to happen.”
“Seriously, why bother? I’ll just do it again you know.”
“Look, what choice did I have? What was I supposed to do, leave you bleeding all over the kitchen?”
“I only agreed to come with you because you threatened to call the cops.”
“I wasn’t calling the cops. I was calling 911 for an ambulance.” She changed lanes, signaling a right hand turn. “What did you expect me to do when I find you sitting in a pool of blood?”
“I didn’t expect anything from you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Leave me alone.”
Traffic had slowed to a crawl around a two block stretch of pothole repair. Damn, if Jennifer had let me call an ambulance we’d be there by now.
“What did you want anyway?”
“Can’t I visit my own daughter without ulterior motives?”
“For once, just give me a straight answer. What did you want from me?”
“I hadn’t heard from you since . . . well, must have been Christmas. I was worried.”
“If you were so worried you could have phoned.”
“Okay, so I wanted to see for myself you were all right. Which, as it turns out, you weren’t, were you? Cuts all over your arms and judging from the scars this isn’t the first time you’ve done this, Jennifer. Are you on drugs? Is that why you’re doing this?”
“Sure, blame it on drugs, Mother. That way you won’t have to deal with the real reasons your daughter cuts herself.”
“Now who’s not giving straight answers?”
“I’m not in the mood for this anymore.”
Megan followed the signs pointing the way to the emergency room, pulling the car up to the curb near the entrance.
“I won’t go in,” said Jennifer.
“Don’t be silly. You might need stitches.”
“I don’t have insurance.”
“They have to treat everyone who comes in.”
“I’ll go in if you tell me why you really came to see me.”
Does it matter any more?
“I’ve left your dad,” said Megan.
“Good,” said her daughter. “But you’ll go back.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Because you always do. You can’t get enough of the pain.”
Megan helped Jennifer out of the car, noting that the blood stains weren’t nearly as bad as she had imagined.
###

2009 Blog Goal

In a few hours I will be off down the street to this week's Writers Workshop - which got me thinking that I really had better set my writing goal for this year. Last year I started the blog as a way to bludgeon myself into hitting the computer at least once a week - the theory being that a rock-solid deadline would lock me into a healthy habit of practicing what I preach to my workshop. And I did pretty well, posting faithfully every week (more or less). That's one heck of a lot of words! The initial format was to post a poem, a few comments, and a plant care tip. But after a while the blog developed its own notions and morphed into a grab bag of all sorts of projects - including an entire Summer spent reading and commenting on Jane Austen! I learned quite a bit - especially that I have no desire to read Austen ever ever again.

This year I'll focus on short fiction - my intention is to post a piece of flash fiction each week (around 500 words). To start things off I'll cheat by offering a story I published last year in our workshop collection since the topic relates to last week's post. The story was inspired by an actual telephone conversation between my mom and her brother, Bud, who recently passed away after years struggling with Alzhiemers.

TOAST

Peggy was just waking up in her daughter’s guest bed, anticipating a wonderful two week visit in sunny California when she heard a soft knock on the bedroom door.
“Mom, are you awake?” said her daughter. “Uncle Bud is on the phone for you. He sounds upset”
Oh no, thought Peggy. Ever since Bud’s wife of fifty years had died a few months before, Peggy had worried about her younger brother. How would he manage all on his own for the first time?
She reached for the phone, nearly knocking it off the bedside table.
“Bud, what’s wrong?” she said. “Has something happened?”
“Um, Peggy, I think I have a problem.” His voice was tight and small.
Peggy went cold with fear.
“Peg, are you there?”
“Yes, go ahead. Tell me what’s happened,” she said, imagining floods, blood, tornadoes. All sorts of disasters descending upon her poor “little” brother in Oregon.
“Well, I was thinking I’d like a piece of toast this morning.”
Peggy looked at the phone as if it had suddenly grown tentacles.
“I’m sorry, Bud, there is something wrong with the phone. I thought I heard you say something about toast.”
“I was wondering if you could tell me how to do it.”
“How to do what, Bud? What are you talking about?”
“About making toast,” said her brother.
“It’s five o’clock in the morning, Bud!”
“That’s why I thought toast sounded good. So, what do I do?”
Peggy was suddenly quite angry that Bud’s wife, Sigrid, had been such a passionate homemaker she hadn’t let her husband enter her kitchen except to place the weekly grocery bags on the counter.
“Bud, do you have the toaster plugged in?”
Peggy felt it was always a good idea to start with the obvious.
“Uh yes, it’s plugged in.”
“Did you put the bread in it?”
The silence was overlong.
“Mmm. Yes. Got it. But nothing is happening.”
“Put your hand over the slots. Is it getting warm?”
“Uh no.”
“Did you push down the lever on the side?” asked his patient sister.
“Just a minute. Okay. Yep, there’s heat coming out now.”
“Wonderful! Well, enjoy your breakfast, Buddy!”
“Wait, Peg! How do I know it’s done?”
Oh my lord, thought Peggy.
“Bud, it pops up when it’s done!”
The line was eerily quiet.
“Bud, is that all you needed?”
"Um. Peg?,” said her brother.
“Yes, Buddy?”
“You don’t by any chance know where Sigrid might have kept the raspberry jam, do you?”
###

End of an Era

Sorry for my month long absense! And thank you to all who have emailed me with your speculations as to my mysterious disappearance. No, I have not fallen off the earth or wrecked my pretty new auto (whose name, by the way, is SU-Z-Q the Subaru - thinking of getting a vanity plate next year).

What actually happened was my mother's younger brother (at 92 years old) died a few weeks back. He had suffered from dementia and Alzheimer's disease for the last few decades. And though his death was not unexpected, it was nonetheless a trying time for us all. Since last Fall I've been working on a novel roughly based on events and circumstances surrounding his illness - it was the novel I wrote for National Novel Writing Month. My uncle's death has pushed the project ahead - as well as prompted me to write a memoir of my six year stint as his trustee/caregiver. I will be posting some of it as a kind of cautionary tale - the story of a family tragedy. Like Dickens' "Bleak House", it involves a trust fund and the distruction of a family. Here is the first draft beginning:

This is a cautionary tale and a mystery - it’s also a story of deception, confusion, elder abuse, exploitation, and neglect. My part of the story started in the Fall of 2003 when I became my uncle’s trustee.
His wife had died the previous Valentines Day and my mother, his elder sister, began to suspect that the old man was not coping very well on his own. Uncle had always left domestic matters to his wife. She was keeper of the check book and manager of the household. Now that she was gone Mom felt her “little” 87 year old brother could use someone to make sure bills got paid etc. She “volunteered” me, saying that all I would actually have to do was collect rents from Uncle’s rental properties, make deposits, mail checks. Sure, what the heck, I thought. I’m pretty good at financial practicalities so I’d pitch in and do my part. How hard could it be? (You can see it coming, right?)
One thing to understand is that Uncle lived half way down the coast in Oregon, five hours drive from Mom and me. We had seen him at most twice a year during the previous fifty years - talking on the phone and exchanging Christmas cards of course but not much more. In the Spring Mom attended Aunt’s funeral and seeing how lost and flummoxed her brother seemed, she easily slipped back into her childhood role of bossy big sister.
In retrospect it’s clear that we knew next to nothing of Uncle’s true situation. We had accepted as true the elaborate fiction he’d woven around his life for half a century. Not that he had consciously, deliberately lied to us - Uncle was utterly incapable of guile and probably would have been amazed had anyone pointed out that there was a disconnect between who he thought he was and who he really was. He had wanted everyone to think well of him so the image he presented to the world was one of a successful independent business man, owner of rental properties, investor in oil wells - in other words, if not a wealthy man at least a man comfortably well off. He often told us he was making lots of money in the market and his duplexes were producing healthy cash flow. We had no way of knowing none of it was true.
As a child I heard what the family said of Uncle: that he was well-to-do but something of a cheapskate. He never picked up a check at the restaurant even though he could afford to, never left a tip unless someone reminded him and, even when reminded, he was not a big tipper. And he seemed to think no one noticed how slickly he had fumbled his way out of paying. We kids thought it was terribly funny. The adults would shake their heads when they were once again stuck with the bill. Everyone saw Uncle as cheap as Jack Benny - an eccentricity at once aggravating and comical.
There were times though when his perceived miserliness could cause pain to members of his family - times of hardship and trial when a monetary bailout would have saved the day yet he never did offer. Several family members wrote him off as cold and cruel. I learned much later he was neither but it hardly mattered by then. Some wounds don’t heal.
All I really knew that Autumn of 2003 was that Uncle was a sad elderly widower in need of my assistance. Whatever I personally thought of him I couldn’t turn my back on family - nor was I about to refuse when my mom asked me to help. No one turns down Mom. So I signed on as trustee of my uncle’s “Family Trust”, though at that point I wouldn’t have known a “Trust” if it bit me on the behind. (I capitalize Trust, the legal entity, to destinguish it from trust, as in belief in the honesty and reliability of another.)
Most people, even when they are talked into setting up Trusts, don’t understand what a Trust is - how complicated they are, how much work they generate. They are sold the idea of setting up Trusts as a way to avoid probate but, believe me, probate creates nowhere near the misery of managing a Trust.
I called the attorney in Oregon who had set up the Trust ten years before - learning in the process that there were two Trusts, not one. There was Uncle’s, which was a “revocable living trust”. There was also my aunt’s “irrevocable trust”. (When a person dies their revocable trust becomes irrevocable.) My uncle had been trustee of them both - when he passed the baton to me I became trustee of both Trusts. I also found out that every cent and every property Uncle supposedly possessed were held within the Trusts. His only personal income was a tiny monthly Social Security check - tiny because as a self employed man he had paid nothing into the Social Security system. He called this $500.00 monthly check “free money” he could just have fun with - “mad money” - he didn’t understand that he had nothing else.
That was as much as I learned from the attorney because as he pointed out he had no attorney/client relationship with the Trusts - he was my uncle’s personal attorney, not the attorney for the Trusts. And who then was the attorney for the Trusts? I asked. As far as he knew there wasn’t one. Not good news.
He explained that a Trust is like a corporation, a legal entity with its own strict demands and restrictions. A person who sets up a Trust has no further access to the assets of the Trust beyond what the trustee determines is a reasonable monthly or yearly distribution to the Trust’s beneficiary. The purpose of a Trust is to preserve wealth, therefore a trustee is not legally allowed to speculate with assets or divert Trust assets to personal use. In other words if you put your house in Trust it is no longer your house - it belongs to the Trust and what happens to it is up to the trustee, not you. You had better have yourself one heck of a trustworthy trustee!
Unfortunately, for ten years Uncle had not had a trustworthy trustee - though he certainly hadn’t realized it. He had appointed himself as his own trustee. Which is very like a dentist filling his own teeth. No doubt Uncle had been lured by media hype touting the benefits of Trusts as a way of avoiding taxes and probate. He would have thought he was being very clever - kind of like dodging the dinner check at the Olive Garden Restaurant.
The Trusts now squarely my responsibility, I got on the internet to learn everything I could on properly managing them - the first thing being that it was not for amateurs. I would need to immediately hire an attorney and a C. P. A . - especially since I lived a state away from where the trust properties were located. Being an out of state trustee complicated already muddy matters. So, next day I hired an attorney who specialized in elder law and also hired a very savvy accountant - both of which earned their keep from the first day by pointing out that the trusts needed bank accounts to receive rent deposits from the duplexes. (Each trust owned three of the six duplexes, thus splitting the rental income evenly.)
The banker asked me to produce legal documentation of my authority to act as trustee - a one inch stack of legalese which the banker photo copied and stuffed into a matching pair of clean white folders. By the end of an hour I had two checking accounts and a large safe deposit box. I was now ready to deposit rent checks and pay the attorney and accountant - had there been money to deposit. But my uncle’s tenants were still depositing the monthly rent payments into Uncle’s personal checking account. I’d have to contact all the renters and ensure they sent me, a total stranger in another state, their money from here on. How on earth would I do that, I wondered. There was also the issue of collecting the trusts’ financial records, files, tax returns etc. Which, I was beginning to suspect, probably did not exist. I had no recourse but to get into my car and get myself down to Oregon. There are some things you just have to do in person. There was no way I could sort the mess out without sitting down with my uncle for a good long talk. That would prove to be impossible. (To be continued)