So Much Bull, page 2
part #1 of Penny Post Myth Agent Series
“You always say that.”
“And you always get your money.”
He inhaled hard. I recognized the sound of him winding up to deliver an insult. “You’re a loser, Penny.”
“Well, you’re the loser mommy’s boy that married me.”
“I told you up front that Mommy and I are close! You don’t get to complain—”
I stabbed the red button before he could wedge another word in and face-planted on the table.
“What are you doing?” Yiayia wanted to know. The rest of the family trickled into the dining room.
“Trying to slump down deeper into the table, but the wood won’t let me. We should get a different table. Something softer. A repurposed mattress, maybe.”
“What’s wrong with the table?” Grandpa said. “I made this table.
Yiayia leaned over. “What is that malakas saying?”
Given that she had lived in Oregon for forty years, Yiayia understood and spoke better English than the average person on the street. But she frequently got her kicks faking ignorance, mostly to get under my grandfather’s skin.
“He said he made this table,” I said, playing along.
“Tell him it looks like it,” she said in English.
“I’m not telling him that.”
“I can hear you,” Grandpa said.
“Funny, because he cannot hear his own klasimo.”
“This here is America.” Like a microwaved marshmallow, Grandpa puffed up. It was all an act. This twisted game was what my grandparents did for entertainment instead of bingo. “Speak English.”
Yiayia hurled the translation at him. “Fart!”
I slid out of the chair and waited while Mom finished the salad. When she was done, I ferried the bowl to the table then went back for our plates.
“Foreign food,” Grandpa muttered. That didn’t slow him down any. He slumped down behind his phone screen and began forking food into his mouth.
“This is almost as good as mine,” Yiayia said.
Mom’s eye twitched. She picked at her own pasta.
I gave Dad a pointed look. He slid down behind his newspaper, perched on his uncomfortable fence. No matter whose side he took, things wouldn’t go well for him. Dad left his office and came home for lunch every day, mostly to make Mom happy—and because he enjoyed naps. His office was conveniently located in the spare bedroom. Dad was in the design arm of construction.
“You know what I think of this?” Grandpa said.
Nobody answered. He didn’t care. He raised his cheek off the chair and farted.
“That is your father’s father,” Yiayia said.
My mother jumped up out of her chair. “I can’t take this,” she muttered. “I need cake, brownies, cookies, anything.”
Now that was a can-do attitude I could get behind.
My phone rang again.
“Ah-pah-pah! Young people today, always on their phones,” Yiayia said like she wasn’t addicted to social media. “In my village we had one phone at the post office and my mother’s mouth.”
“In America everyone’s got a phone,” Grandpa said. “It’s in the Constitution.”
I was pretty sure that wasn’t true, given that cell phones weren’t a thing when Congress tacked on the Twenty-Seventh Amendment in 1992.
This time it was my boss. Salome/Marilyn didn’t waste time asking how I was doing after I almost went up in flames.
“We have to let you go.”
“You’re not talking about a business trip, are you?”
“Fired. F-i-r-e-d.”
“But it wasn’t my fault Betty Sue lit a cigarette! You’re not even supposed to smoke indoors. There are laws about that. There was a whole campaign. Secondhand smoke and all that. You had a sign up!”
“This isn’t about the fire. You suck at doing hair.”
“That’s not true, and it’s just mean.”
“It’s not mean if it’s the truth.” She ended the call.
I shoved my plate away. Mom’s delicious pasta looked as appetizing as chickpeas now.
“I need cake,” I said to nobody in particular.
“On it,” Mom called out. “Brownies okay?”
“Brownies are great.”
“Nuts?”
“I don’t think they want any brownies,” I said.
There was a snuffling sound from the kitchen as Mom stifled a laugh.
Yiayia blew out her cheeks.
“Someone wants to die,” Dad said.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “What did you say?”
He raised his paper to cover his face. “Nothing.”
“I lost my job,” I announced. “So the good news is that there’s no good news.”
Everyone looked at me.
Yiayia clutched her chest. “You were fired? Again?”
“It’s only the second time,” I said, mustering at least half of my indignation. “This year.” Keeping a job hadn’t been easy while I was married to Chaz. At any given time, I’d juggled three while attending to his constant needs.
“No problem,” Yiayia said. “Go see Androniki Remi. Her grandson Loukas works for a company that has an opening right now. You remember Loukas, yes?” A cunning light appeared in my grandmother’s eye. “She told me this morning when we were stringing beans.”
Androniki Remi. Luke’s yiayia.
The bottom fell out of my stomach. Of all the people in the world I didn’t want to work with, Luke Remis was at the top of the list. Well, second from the top below my ex-husband.
“I can find something on my own.”
“Malakies! I will call.” Before I could beg, plead, and fake my own death, Yiayia had her phone out, holding it out a mile from her face so she could see the numbers. “Androniki? It is me, Penelopi. My granddaughter was fired from her job because she burned the building down. She needs work, otherwise she will be moping around the house, sad, getting chubby like her mother.”
Hey now, that wasn’t precisely how it happened. There were circumstances. Betty Sue and her cigarette and lighter took all the blame, from where I was sitting.
She listened for a moment. “Okay, I will send her.” Yiayia dropped the phone in her apron. “As soon as you finish eating, go see Androniki.”
“Do I have to? She hates me.”
Yiayia patted me on the cheek. “Oh, my love. She hates everyone.” She rooted around in her apron and pressed something into my palm: a crumpled one-dollar bill. “Take this. For chocolate.”
The concept of the pecking order was originally observed in chickens. The biggest, strongest, bossiest hens literally stab and jab their way to the top by flaunting their pecking prowess.
Androniki Remi, Luke’s grandmother, possessed the local Greek community’s largest, sharpest beak. Can opener nose. Hide-piercing tongue. Bodies of countless opponents littering her past. Sticks and stones could break bones, but Luke’s grandmother could shred a human soul with a few well-placed words. If given the choice, I’d rather shove my arm in the wrong end of a crocodile than ring the doorbell of her colonial-style home. Sadly, crocodiles didn’t prowl the streets of Salem, so I was left with the more terrifying option.
Thoughts paraded through my head as I parked at the curb and slunk up to the house. Mostly it was me wondering if I should have made a will. I didn’t want Mrs. Remi to tear off my head before Chunky bit me one last time. Chunky was the only reason I was braving the gauntlet. I didn’t want him to go without.
Before I’d left the house, I’d showered the smoke and failure away. I swapped my work clothes for a simple dress that even Luke’s grandmother couldn’t find fault with. If you ask me, by the time I pushed her doorbell and the Greek anthem rang out, I looked downright prim and proper.
She opened the door with a wooden spoon in one hand.
So it was true, then. I’d heard rumors she kept the spoon by the door to hit solicitors and other unsavories. I held my ground. No way would I flee while piddling like a terrified puppy.
Mrs. Remi scraped her black gaze over me. Luke’s grandmother had eyes like coal pressed into a leather pillow that had been dumped on the roadside near Athens seventy years ago, and left to fend for itself in the elements. She was approximately the same size and shape as Yiayia, and they shopped at the same places: anywhere that sold cheap black clothes with stretchy waistbands.
“You better come in before someone sees you dressed like that. Are you not cold?”
My confidence plummeted. “It’s July.”
“Did I ask what month it is? I know the months. I have bones that tell me the weather. Today is going to rain. I feel it in my hip.”
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t going to rain until September, probably. But who was I to argue with her hip?
She ushered me into the house with her spoon. Like Mom and Dad’s house—and Yiayia’s second-level abode—Mrs. Remi decorated with Jesus and Pals and their band of crocheted doilies. Her furniture was covered in plastic, except for a threadbare glider in the living room.
I wasn’t worthy of the Good Room, but she did offer coffee and sweets because a Greek woman’s reputation as a hostess is constantly at stake. Because even a half-Greek woman’s reputation as a guest is also always being judged, I accepted.
While I hovered in the living room, trying to avoid eye contact with the religious icons, she prepared a tray and placed it on the coffee table.
“How is your family?” I asked politely.
“Terrible.” She slapped the air in a downward motion. “They never come to see me. One of these days I will be dead and they will be sorry. Come. Sit.”
I perched on the offered chair’s uncomfortable edge. The moment my backside hit the seat, the old woman’s slipper came off and she swung her foot up into my lap.
“Rub it. Po-po, my feet hurt.”
“Have you considered a podiatrist?”
She cupped her hand to her ear. “Eh?”
“A podiatrist. A foot doctor.”
“A foot doctor cannot help me. They want to do the surgery. My cousin had the foot surgery, and do you know what happened? She went in with two feet and left with no feet and an extra hand.”
“That seems … not entirely true.”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
Panic swept over me. “No, Mrs. Remi.”
Her eyes tightened. The lumps of coal turned to hard, brittle beads. “Your grandmother says you were fired.”
“Only because the shop burned down.”
“You know what I hear from other people? That you made the fire, and a woman died.”
“What? No! Her hair burned, yes, but she’s still alive. It was her fault! I told her not to light a cigarette while I was spraying her hair, but she didn’t listen!”
“Victim shaming, po-po-po …”
My nervous system was desperately clawing at my muscles, trying to force me into fleeing. But my muscles were locked in place, held in bondage by fear. Coming here was a massive mistake. I’d be better off remaining unemployed forever, or joining a circus.
Mrs. Remi swapped one foot for the other. “Penelopi tells me you need a job. Today is your lucky day because my Loukaki and Nikoula’s workplace is hiring a new janitor. Nikki called me this morning to tell me that her boss told her to look for someone.” Nikki Remis is Luke’s cousin. I’d forgotten that they worked for the same organization.
“I was kind of hoping for something more than a janitor.”
“Are you too good to clean? It is respectable work.”
Not only was I not too good to clean, but I’d done it professionally in the past, back when I was married to Chaz. Someone had to pay the bills.
“No, Mrs. Remi. Cleaning is … fun.”
“Besides, what else can you do? With those hips it is cleaning or raising children, and I do not see any children. What are you now? Forty?”
Yikes! “Twenty-eight.”
Her beady eyes inspected me. “Hmm …”
“I’ll go apply for the job,” I whispered.
“Good. Probably they will give it to you. I will tell my grandson to tell them you are Greek and you know our family.”
“No! It’s fine. Don’t say anything to Luke.”
“Why not?”
I calculated quickly. “Because I want to get the job on my own merit?”
She laughed. “You are very funny. What merit? Go. I will give you the address.”
The Labyrinth Agency, whatever that was, occupied space in a Northeast Salem strip mall. Its neighbors were a martial arts studio and a restaurant that sold Thai cuisine. Next week it would be a Mexican joint. The week after that, who knew? This was one of those locations where eateries went to die.
The gap between the two businesses was empty. No sign. No nothing except a big window and one door—also glass. Definitely no business that was hiring.
Maybe Mrs. Remi had the address wrong. I was too scared to call her to double check. She would twist the story like a pretzel, until I was a monster, accusing an old woman of lying.
Greek DNA comes imbued with an extra serving of curiosity. The Greek half of my genetic makeup grabbed my shoulder bag and propelled me out of my car to take a closer look. It wanted to be sure nothing gossip-worthy was happening here.
Gripping my bag like a security blanket, I pressed my nose up against the storefront window.
Empty. Nothing inside except the building’s bare bones. Nobody was hiring. By the looks of things they weren’t even close to a grand opening.
The door swung open.
“You, girly. Get in here,” a male voice said.
Unlike most voices, this one didn’t come with a body.
Oh heck, was this a ventriloquist situation? Nobody warned me about ventriloquists. Mind you, dummies and puppets were a step up from mimes and other clowns, so that was something.
“Are you Oz the Great and Terrible?”
“Who?”
Okay, so he wasn’t a reader or a movie buff, and he’d avoided pop culture for more than eighty years.
“Do you know Androniki Remi?” I clutched my bag tighter, hoping I wouldn’t have to use it as a shield. “She told me you have a job opening. Her grandchildren allegedly work here.”
He made a shuddering sound. “Can you not say that name too loud? I don’t want to invoke her. That woman scares me.”
“She scares everyone. That’s kind of her thing.”
“Come inside before she hears her name being used in vain.”
Normally I’d run. Today I felt vulnerable. I’d been fired, blamed for a fire, called a loser by my ex-husband, and forced to massage Mrs. Remi’s cracked and calloused feet. Because I couldn’t see any red balloons hovering over a grate—a dead giveaway that murder and horror were afoot—I eased inside.
The door closed behind me.
I gave it a small push, half expecting it to be locked. It opened easily.
“I’m not trying to trick you.” The voice was coming from inside the empty store now. “The door is unlocked and you can leave at any time. You know the Remis family, then?”
“I know them.”
That got some enthusiasm out of him. “Great! Run along and find Luke for me, would you?”
“What?”
“I’ll give you some money for your trouble.”
My brain was already struggling, and now he’d thrown Luke Remis into the mix?
“You want Luke? Luke Remis? Doesn’t he work for you? What do you need me for? You should have his number and address on file …”
“Ah, yes. Bit of a problem there. We seem to have misplaced the Remis boy. Be a shame if we don’t find him. He’s one of the agency’s best agents.”
I turned in a small circle, checking out the bare walls, the naked pipes, the dusty concrete floor. “What is it you do here?”
“Consulting,” the voice said.
“And you consult …”
“Companies, businesses, people that require consultants.”
“And what do your agents, like Luke, do?”
“They consult,” he said, his patience blatantly threadbare.
“Then why call them agents instead of consultants?”
“Has anyone ever told you you’re pedantic?”
“Why do you want me?”
“It doesn’t have to be you, per se. You’re not special. I just need someone who knows Remis, with some insight as to where he might be hiding out.”
“Why? Did he do something bad?” I liked that idea. “Is he in trouble?” I liked that even more.
“Moving on,” he said quickly. “Can you find him?”
“Maybe.”
“Then it’s a deal. You find Luke, I give you money. Or rather, I’ll have the girl give you money. That’s what she does. Hands out money and mocks me. Be here tomorrow at 8:00 A.M. and the girl will give you what you need.”
“So this isn’t a janitorial position?”
“Does this place look like it needs cleaning?”
“Maybe a good sweeping …”
He blew out a sigh. “Just locate Luke Remis and you can sweep it all you like.”
“What do I do with him if—”
“When.”
“—I find him?”
“Whatever you want, as long as you make sure he’s alive. I’ll never hear the end of it if he doesn’t make it to his grandmother’s place for lunch Sunday. She’ll show up waving her wooden spoon. Do you know how much damage an old Greek woman can do with a wooden spoon?”
I could think of a lot of things I wanted to do to Luke Remis. Wringing his neck was high on the list. Ditto slapping the snot out of him.
“Can I crush his balls with my heel?”
“That’s between you two.”
One more question. Probably the most important. I wasn’t born yesterday; the pay was high for a reason. “Is it dangerous?”
“On a scale of one to ten, it’s like trying to beat three elderly Greek widows onto a city bus.”
CHAPTER 2
A pang of longing struck me as I peered through the window at the empty tables in the Thai restaurant. Once I had a paycheck again, I’d swing in and order a thirty-gallon drum of tom kha gai and a bucket of pad thai. If they stayed in business that long.
