The Baby Blue Rip-Off

5

It was a month before I got back around to Mrs. Jonsen again. Oh, I saw her every Thursday evening, dropped off her Hot Supper all right. And promised her that as soon as possible, I’d make her last on my route again so we could have another chat.

Which was something I very much wanted to do; my prejudice against the aged had turned to fascination. These wonderful old ladies were memory books come to life, living, breathing bundles of the past, containing all the wisdom, folly, pain, pleasure, joy, sorrow of a lifetime. Talking to them, I felt a sense of nostalgia for days I’d never known.

But that next week was when I spent the evening hearing Mrs. Fox reminisce, and the week following was my night with the Cooper sisters, and the Thursday evening after that I had a poker game to go to, and so it was a month before I got back around to Mrs. Jonsen.

And too bad, too. Because that was that July evening I told you about; that July evening that seemed like October, where the van and the red-white-and-blue GTO were crowded around the porch of Mrs. Jonsen’s overlit little house, and I made my feeble attempt to play hero and got kicked in the ribs (among other places) for my trouble.

So the second time I came to spend an evening with Mrs. Jonsen was the last time.

And she had nothing to say.

She was, after all, dead; tied to a chair in the kitchen where all those blue Christmas plates had hung. No more. Only faded circles where they had been-every plate, like much else in the house, was gone.