Margaritas & a Red Herring

It’s happy hour — headline from foxnews.com: “Chili’s selling a gallon of margarita to-go, offering special deal for restaurant’s birthday.” Cue Jimmy Buffett: “Wastin’ away…”

Nothing else in the news intrigued me, so here’s an excerpt from my Class of ’67 novella. The book has two levels, thriller and life at 70. Several women have been murdered. This is chapter 19, approximately a five-minute read:
Sandy Cohen walked out of Methodist Hospital, a big smile on her face. Her youngest daughter had just given birth. She dialed her cell phone. “It’s a boy!” she told her husband, who was home with a cold.
“Hurray!” he said and sneezed.
“Good thing you didn’t come. See you soon. Try not to get in any trouble.”
“Be careful. Look in every direction.”
“Duh.”
He again sneezed. Sandy flinched as if he were standing right beside her, and muttered to herself as she ended the call. She would make up the couch for him when she got home, although he’d probably contaminated the whole house by now. He was such a baby.
She walked toward 6th Avenue. She regretted not having used the parking lot. She’d let her constant practice of saving every dollar possible rule her. She squinted into the distance. Her eyesight seemed to be getting worse each day. She especially had difficulty seeing at night when glasses were no help at all.
As she approached her car she spotted a man beside it, smoking a cigar, its fumes flowing her way. Even though Joel had smoked them for years before being forced to quit by the doctor, she’d never gotten used to the acrid odor. She waited there, hoping he would leave. She assumed he was simply a husband out for a smoke, but she wouldn’t take the chance given what had happened to her classmates. The hand inside her bag clutched a can of mace. So intent on him was she that she failed to detect the approach of footsteps behind her. She gasped as a man brushed passed her.
“Boo!” he said drunkenly into her face, then continued on his way, chuckling.
It was awhile before her heart rate returned to normal. She wiped her face with a hanky, disgusted.
Soon the man with the cigar left. She started the car from where she stood and waited a moment before
approaching. She wondered if there were a way of turning on the interior lights using the remote key. She regretted not having asked Joel, who understood those type of things. She walked gingerly, as if on eggshells. She opened the door, stepped back, and gazed into the rear seat and onto the floor.
Once at the wheel, she put the car into Drive and sped away. What’re you doing? she thought, shaking her head, decelerating; crazy. She supposed her husband would laugh once she told him about this. She decided to keep it to herself. It would be another of the secrets she’d kept throughout their forty-five-year marriage.
What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, she said to herself for at least the thousandth time.
She couldn’t wait to get out of Brooklyn and back to Long Island. She did not understand why her daughter, a corporate lawyer, and her husband, a restauranteur, chose to live here, pay more than a million for an apartment when they could have bought a huge house in the suburbs.

My thanks to the gentleman who bought two books in Russian, paying in dollar coins and creeping me out with an unmasked coughing fit. I was at least six feet away but still… I was later kicking myself for not having covered my mouth with a gloved hand. I rarely pull my mask up outdoors.

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