Page 87 - Vol. VI #3

was licking the double scoop to keep it symmetri- cal, Mama Leone began to bark and tried to run back in the direction they’d come. She pulled on her leash, thinking she was only attempting to chase pigeons, but suddenly she felt something jolt her into the street directly in front of a bright yellow taxi—
of owners who’d let her sign the official papers under her maiden name. Finding the staff incom- petent, she complained and got several nurses fired, and in three months ran every Bingo game they held, charging an entry fee on every card played. Her Bridge deck was deadly; she swept all the tournaments, taking huge tricks. It wasn’t long before all living in the Home either feared or respected her. Those had their wits about them simply avoided her.
Dosvidanya, babushka! she’d heard someone shout. Eat death, Yankee Jewess!
After that, she remembered nothing but the bang of the car against her hip and the chocolate splotching the windshield—both scoops—then darkness and Mama Leone, who she never saw again, yapping as if from an ever-growing distance. When she woke in the hospital a week later, no one
Unfortunately, Olivia became addicted to the Oxy- codone shortly after arriving in Florida—although she’d been taking the medicine ever since waking in the Brooklyn hospital. She managed the ad- diction better than her distress or useless anger, dealing discretely to a couple residents just to get her pills free. But when she started selling to their grandchildren too she realized the possibilities and used old connections to meet Dr. Fang, who would get her as much as she wanted as long as the price was right. She cut deals with the guards and nurses, and not only was soon running the nursing home but was one of the most active deal- ers in the region; her pills sold in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale too.
“Like many residents at the Home, she
nurtures a healthy obses- sion with death.”
could tell her where her darling girl went. Instead, they told her she would never walk again.
And yet, Olivia knows she cannot do this forev- er—but is there life after crime, after the nurs- ing home? For years she’s dreamed of going on a neverending cruise, a cruise plotted and charted through various lines—Carnival and Royal et al.—a cruise that will not only never end but also take her to Florence, then Venice, like she’s always wanted, and from there all over the globe. She will cling to the equator like a wedding band, married at last to her freedom. She almost has enough to keep cruising through her early nineties, but what then? She’ll buzz her wheelchair right off the deck into the sea—through the safety rails if she has to.
Her therapy sessions were hell, but she attacked them with the same tenacious rage she expressed when confronted by all previous life challeng- es—which she viewed as affronts to her dignity. Regardless, the doctors said she simply could
not care for herself, and since she had no family or employees she truly trusted, she chose to fly south to West Palm Beach and take up residency in this Home. Her first response on arriving was disgust, her pride revolting at finding herself cor- ralled with a bunch of half-senile kooks smelling of mothballs and sour milk. They did little but talk about their abysmal domestic lives and the dead people they had known. Still, the Russian Mafia couldn’t get her here, she thought—es- pecially since she knew someone on the board
Like many residents at the Home, she nurtures a healthy obsession with death. What is death, she sometimes thinks, if not in some sense the ulti- mate freedom?
Olivia sighs, dropping the brochure and staring
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