GranCel by Leah Mullen

Wednesdays were egg salad.  Strong opening gambit from Linda: she was testing the waters.  She and Clint were meeting for the first time.  Her carer Lupe had shown her how to use the app which paired her with Clint, she explained, “just before she had to go back where she came from”.  That left Linda alone, at the tail end of hip surgery recuperation, still prone to falls but with wits enough about her to click on Clint’s profile.  Lucky for both of them, Clint was a fan of egg salad.

The GranCel appwas “a wonderful thing, a lovely idea”, Linda told him.  “Been through so many nice young ladies who moved on after a few months.  And a few bad eggs, stealing from me.” 

The app paired elderly people in need of in-home support with struggling incels in need of a stable living environment.  Clint’s living environment had become a lot less stable after he had used a baseball bat to try to teach his next door neighbour’s daughter how it would feel to go through life unattractive, unlovable, always hitching up to shadows and being shot down in flames by members of the opposite sex.

Linda poured him more of her special-recipe tea punch.  “My son used to love this,” she said, “before he turned gay.  Well now, it’s been so many years since I’ve spoken to him I sometimes wonder if I made him up.” 

The room she’d made up for Clint was bright and anonymous.  There was plenty of room in there for everything he’d taken with him, even his collections, which were admittedly bulky.  He helped her to the bathroom in the middle of the night, made sure she took her medicine at the right time, did her shopping.  Times were he’d have to carry her into her room if she fell asleep in her chair after dinner.  And she supported him too. She was sorry to hear about his troubles with my parents.  The loss of his job with Uber and the way passengers twisted his remarks. 

She was sorry to hear about his troubles with women.  She agreed they were all “shameful”, and she clucked at him and patted his hand with fingers that daily crept closer to the curved shape of a bird’s claw but were always meticulously manicured.  Repulsive.  Comforting. 

Saturdays were fluffernutters, and Clint’s lectures on the Deep State or on proper gun care.  After he’d cleared plates and washed dishes, Linda always listened with her handbag in her lap, pastel cardigan buttoned squarely and brightened up with a brooch, just as if she’d gone out to a paid lecture.

Sundays were a bit special so they had what her great grandmother had called High Tea, and it was finger sandwiches and biscuits with raisins which she called scones, and little round cookies that she got from a Royal Dansk tin which had never seen thimbles and thread packets. Those Sundays she would encourage him.  Her voice all butterscotch and mothballs.  “See, when you’ve got someone at home to look after you, you can accomplish plenty.  You’re not a bad man.  You’ve just had a hard time.”  He didn’t protest. “Maybe now you can start thinking about job interviews?”  A few weeks back she’d found his only suit abandoned at the bottom of the spare room closet.  She’d ironed it and sprayed it with Febreeze and hung it in pride of place on the mantle in the front room.  She never mentioned the collections he’d used it to camouflage. 

Mondays were BLTs, which is why it was a shame that it was on a Monday he found her dead. 

He had an interview that morning.  Had no idea which stress to tend to first.  Dialled 91…and hung up three times.  Rifled through Linda’s junk drawer for a funeral home card, didn’t find one, called 91cancel again. 

The interview time arrived, passed.  Another hour.  And he started to worry about rigor mortis, the thought like a dim bulb on a porch in the fog.  He wanted to lay her flat.  He picked her up like he’d done those nights she’d conked out in front of Columbo reruns and brought her into her bedroom, and he lay down next to her at a ninety degree angle because he had his shoes on.

Maybe he slept.  It was some time before he watched himself successfully call emergency services, and he was groggy and disoriented when they arrived later that evening. 

It was dark.  The house was too hot.  Clint was hungry.  And he told the girl with the gurney that it wasn’t a good time to take her, that she should stay in her own house a little longer, they could find her son and see if he’d want to come.  But it was as if she hadn’t heard him.  Like the women perched on barstools in redlit clubs who would cold-shoulder him when he offered to buy them drinks.  Like the girl at 88 who never closed her blinds properly but lashed out like a polecat when he approached her one night.

Sure, he was angry at the EMT and her blind focus on her work.  But he had his own work to do.  A lot of people who’d done him wrong.  And he didn’t want to waste the ammunition.  So he picked up the best pieces from his collection, cracked her on the head with the butt of his AR as he passed her in the hall, watched the line of blood well from her temple and wondered briefly if there were now two corpses that needed dealing with. 

Clint left Linda’s house.  He was still hungry.  But he figured he’d pick up a sandwich on the way.  

Leah Mullen

Image by Andy Walther from Pixabay – plate of egg salad with lettuce, and boiled egg. Yum.