“Not the couch,” Diesel said. “There’s a game tonight. I need the television.”
“Okay,” Lula said. “I’ll take the bed.”
I watched her limp off to the bedroom and heard the door click closed.
“You just gave my bed away!” I said to Diesel.
“She said she didn’t mind sharing.”
“I’m not sharing a bed with her. She snores. Loud! You share the bed with her, and I’ll take the couch.”
“Not gonna happen,” Diesel said.
I put the leftovers in the fridge and got a half-eaten tub of ice cream from the freezer. I took it into the dining room and positioned myself in front of my laptop before remembering I had no internet.
“Crap,” I said.
Diesel sat across from me. “I like it. I can’t communicate with anyone. I can’t research anything. I have the perfect excuse to go old school and do my job without interference.”
“You still have a phone.”
“Only if I answer it.”
“Do we have a game plan for the Oswald capture?”
“Right now, I’m sitting, waiting for information. There are a lot of people in the field. Some are mine and some are Morelli’s.”
“Is Morelli communicating with you?”
“Not directly,” Diesel said.
I gave him my raised eyebrows look. “You’ve tapped into his phone?”
“Would you have a problem with that?”
“Maybe.”
“Then the answer is no,” Diesel said. “We didn’t tap into his phone.”
“Good to know,” I said.
I finished the ice cream and stood. “I’m going out. I want to look in on my parents and make sure everything is secure there. And I’m going to check in with Ranger.”
“Make sure you’re home by ten o’clock,” Diesel said.
“Curfew?”
“That’s when the match starts. You don’t want to miss it.”
I gave him a thumbs-up. I had no idea who was playing or what they were playing. Rugby, soccer, tennis, polo, checkers. I suspected this was going to be a long night that required a lot of wine. Maybe I should get some vodka. This might be a martini marathon.
I went to my living room window and looked down into the parking lot. I didn’t see anyone lurking in the shadows. No sporty black Porsche in the vicinity of my Ford Focus. No blue sedan. Good deal.
* * *
Grandma and my dad were watching television when I walked in. Dinner had been cleared from the dining room table, and it looked sadly empty without Melvin and Charlotte. My mom was in the kitchen, knitting.
“How long is it now?” I asked.
“Seventeen feet,” my mom said.
“You sound excited about it.”
“It’s an accomplishment. It’s satisfying. It’s something I can see and touch, and I know that I made it. It takes me an hour to make a pie and it gets eaten in ten minutes. When I scrub a pot, no one notices that it’s clean. People only notice when pots are dirty. My thing doesn’t disappear in ten minutes like a pie. My thing grows!” She held part of the thing up. “Look at it! I made it. I made something that’s seventeen feet long! I did it all by myself. The yarn is soft when I touch it, and I have all different colors of yarn. It’s like a painting or a sculpture.”
“Wouldn’t you rather make a sweater or a hat?”
“That would ruin it. It would have to be perfect. I’d have to think and count stitches. This way if I make a mistake, it’s all part of the beauty of it. My thing isn’t perfect because it’s a reflection of life. Life isn’t perfect. Besides, a sweater or a hat would come to an end. It would be done. My thing can go on for as long as I want. I could knit this forever.”
It was easy to take my mom for granted. She’d accepted the role of being the sane, sensible, adult member of the family. She made sure the bills were paid, the house was clean, food was on the table, and she did damage control as best she could for her crazy daughter and mother. Truth is, it was a convenience for us to convince ourselves that this was all she wanted, that she had no other needs. And then, bang, she knocks me over by discovering something as simple as knitting and turns it into her own art form, her own therapy for getting through the day, her own life philosophy. She’s making a thing because it checks a bunch of her boxes. I was jealous. I didn’t have a thing.
“Maybe I should try knitting,” I said.
“Really? You’d really like to try? I can get you started. I have extra needles and yarn,” my mom said. “You can pick out any color you want from my basket.”