On What Grounds

Thirteen

The demanding voice came out of a killer body.

Tailored designer slacks on mile-high legs. Gucci boots and a black jacket of butter-soft leather over a white silk blouse. Blond hair tied back into a tasteful ponytail. Coach bag and skin too tan for a New York autumn with makeup applied in artful layers—lipstick, eyeliner, mascara—like talismans meant to ward off the curse of lines, creases, shadows, and any other betrayer of an otherwise youthfully slender appearance.

I’d seen this blonde at the hospital, I realized: Anabelle’s stepmother.

“You the one owns this place?”

The accent and phrasing were rough—lower-middle-class, not quite what I expected to hear coming out of such a finished and fashionable façade.

The voice was deep and rattled a bit in her throat, signs of a hardcore lifelong smoker, the sort of woman I used to see laugh-coughing amid marathon gossip sessions back in the hair salon next to my grandmother’s grocery in Pennsylvania.

“Well,” I began, “I’m a part owner, and the full-time manager—”

She cut me off. “I want the owner. Now.”

The increasing volume on that last statement drowned out the various conversations that had been buzzing all over the room. I glanced around to find dozens of pairs of eyes blinking in our direction.

A scene. Great.

Years ago, my grandmother gave me the best advice when dealing with hostile people—a situation she encountered quite a bit during her lifetime, given the hot tempers of her grocery’s working-class clientele and her son’s (and my father’s) knack for bringing more trouble to her doorstep than a barrel full of bad luck charms.

I didn’t realize until later, after the two years of college I managed to finish before becoming pregnant with Joy, that my grandma actually had a lot in common with Socrates, not to mention Abe Lincoln.

“Clare,” she would say, “if you want to win an argument with angry people, don’t argue. Just ask the kind of questions that will make them think you agree with them. Pretty soon, you’re both on the same side.”

That part was Socrates.

She also liked to say—“Remember, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Try to make them see you as a friend.”

That part was Lincoln, the president who’d said over one hundred years ago, “It is an old and true maxim that ‘a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’ So with men, if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart; which, say what you will, is the great high road to his reason.”

I stepped closer to the blonde to (hopefully) discourage her from yelling again—and in a calm, quiet voice asked: “You’re Anabelle’s stepmother, aren’t you?”

Her bloodshot blue eyes with perfectly applied brown/black liner and mascara stared, the slight surprise for a moment unbalancing her predetermined indignation. “How did you know that?”

“I saw you at the hospital—”

“I’m her stepmother, that’s right,” she said. “I’m her closest relative, too. And that’s why I’m here—”

“Do you mean Anabelle sent you?” I asked excitedly. “She’s awake?”

The woman’s shoulders drooped a bit. “No. She’s still in her coma…But I heard she got that way because of your crappy managing of this place.”

“I’m sure you’re tired,” I said as soothingly as I could manage between clenched teeth. “And I’m as worried about Anabelle as you must be. Wouldn’t you rather we go somewhere more private to discuss this?” I gestured to the crowd of staring eavesdroppers. “What do you say?”

The woman glared back at the audience. “Screw them,” she said.

“How about a fresh cup of coffee?” I asked.

“I drink tea. Not coffee.”

“We have tea. How about a nice Earl Grey—”

“Green. Decaffeinated. Better for the skin,” she said as she began to dig into her Coach bag for a pack of Camels.

A chimney. Great. There was no smoking in the coffeehouse. Or in any coffeehouse, for that matter, ever since the city’s new statutes against smoking in public places. So I thought fast.

“How about we go up to the second floor?” I suggested. “We don’t open it up until evening. It’ll be nice and private.”

And, I added silently, I can sit you and your pack of Camels beside an open double-pane window to prevent your smoke from driving out half the customers down here.

“Fine,” she said. “But I don’t have all day.”

So far so good, I told myself. At least four yeses and she hadn’t once threatened fisticuffs—a routine occurrence in my old neighborhood, where use of brawn was preferred to use of brain by a margin of at least two to one.

After I prepared the coffee and tea, we settled in at a table on the deserted second floor. I learned her name was Darla Branch Hart. I told her my name was Clare Cosi. And the accusations instantly resumed—

“Anabelle is in the hospital for one reason—negligence,” the woman said, stabbing the air with her unlit Camel. “She had a workplace accident. So I expect you to pay Anabelle’s hospital bills.”

“Anabelle’s covered, Mrs. Hart,” I said, watching her place the cigarette between her lips and fire it up. (Why was I suddenly picturing the small burst of flame igniting the fuse of a cannon?)

“What do you mean, she’s covered?”

“When I promoted Anabelle to assistant manager,” I said, “she received health insurance and hospitalization coverage under our HMO plan. The bills will be paid. Except for the fifteen-dollar copayment. And there might be some deductibles—”

“Well, you have to cover all that. In fact, I’d like that fifteen-dollar copayment. Right now.”

I stared at her. “Fifteen dollars?”

“Yes,” she said, sucking in a lungful of tar and blowing it out the side of her perfectly lined lips. “Now.”

I suddenly found myself reconsidering the use of fisticuffs as a conflict resolution strategy. After all, as I’d already mentioned, it was preferred two to one in my old neighborhood. And in the words of Joe Pasquale Cosi (aka my father), who was often forced to collect his fair share of earnings from one deadbeat business partner or other: “Cupcake, you just can’t beat the purity of communication in a simple punch to the nose.”

But Grandma would have disapproved.

“Mrs. Hart, I’ll gladly give you fifteen dollars if it will make you feel better.” I dug into my Old Navy jeans and came up with a ten and a five. I moved to place them on the table between us. She snatched them up and stuffed them into her Coach bag before the worn green bills even touched the coral-colored marble.

“Where’s my daughter’s things?” Darla next demanded. “The hospital told me she didn’t have a purse when they brought her in—and her roommate, that ethnic-looking girl, what’s her name? Esther? She told me Anabelle must have left the purse here.”

“The police have it,” I told her, trying to hold my temper (“ethnic-looking” could pretty much describe me as well as Esther and I didn’t appreciate the insulting tone she’d used in stating it).

“The police?” Darla Hart’s face looked stricken. I made a significant note of that. “Why would the police have it?”

Why would you look stricken at the mention of the police? I wanted to ask, but saved that question and instead asked—

“Why do you think the police think Anabelle’s fall wasn’t just a workplace accident?” I asked. (Okay, so I fudged the facts—the police did think it was a simple accident. But the Petty-Cash Queen here didn’t know that.)

Darla’s mouth turned down, her eyes widened, then shifted to stare out the open window. She took a long drag. The white of the cigarette paper against the blood-red polish of the woman’s manicured nails reminded me of a line from Clare Booth Luce’s play The Women: “Looks like you’ve been tearing at somebody’s throat.”

“What do they think?” she asked, still staring into the afternoon rain clouds. Her fingers were slightly trembling.

“Well, the police called it a ‘crime scene,’” I said. “They took fingerprints, collected evidence, that sort of thing. Seems like she could have been pushed.”

Darla turned back, stared hard into my face. “Who do they think would have pushed her?”

I didn’t know, of course. So my instinct was to turn away, but I didn’t. I forced myself to hold her gaze. “Whoever they suspect. They wouldn’t tell me.”

Darla frowned again. Abruptly, she rose to her feet, almost spilling her untouched green tea. “I have to go.”

“Where can I reach you?”

“The Waldorf.”

She searched the table a moment and, after finding no ashtray, carelessly dropped the burning butt into her teacup. I grimaced, watching the pale rolled paper rise to the top of the green liquid and float there, dead and cold.

“I want you to know—and you can let all the owners of this place know—I’m hiring a lawyer,” she said. “I don’t care if all Anabelle’s hospital bills are covered by insurance. My stepdaughter deserves some money for her pain and suffering, and I’m gonna see she gets it.”

With that, Darla shoved the short handles of her fashionable Coach bag onto her shoulder, turned on her Gucci boot heel, and headed for the exit.

I watched her go, noting that her movements were as graceful as her stepdaughter’s. A former dancer, no doubt.

I leaned back, averted my eyes from the cold, dead butt floating in the green tea, sipped my house blend, and considered the fact that Darla was staying at the Waldorf yet snatching up a worn ten and five like she was down to her last dime. And I remembered Esther had said something about Darla showing up a few days ago to take care of some sort of “business.” I needed to find out what exactly that “business” was.

As I cleared the table, I quietly thanked my Grandma Cosi. I guess her method (not to mention Socrates’s and Abe’s) was really the best way to go—at least when you were trying to gather information from an angry source. Hostility handled and channeled through reason and strategy—

“Clare? Are you up here? It’s dire I speak with you!”

It was Matteo. Back from god knows where, doing god knows what. And using the dreaded D word again.

I sighed, wishing my grandmother were still alive—then maybe she could tell me why, when it came to my ex-husband, I almost always wanted to use the more straightforward conflict resolution strategy my father employed—and (need I add) preferred two to one in my old neighborhood.