Sing Goddess

Part 3

“Yes! They’re coming! Now we have to find out when.”

Her shout alerted my mother to our location. “Riley Anne — I know you’re down there,” she shouted from the top of the stairs. “You and Rosabella come up here and pay your respects.”  

Bella would have rather eaten a can of dog food. “I’m not going up there.  I hated Grandma Sauer.  She was a mean old bitch.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’ll wait for you down here.”

“Maybe you should just go home...”

“It’s not eight. I can’t go home until the time I told my mom I’d be home.”

“Why not?”

“She’ll think you sent me home cause I did something wrong.  I’ll leave after we find out when they’re coming.  I promise.”

The good thing about the wake was the food.  Pizza, KFC, chips and cheese platters brought in and laid out on the table  as the so-called mourners — mostly older people, a few neighbors, and the minister — crowded into the dining room. Mother had pulled all manner of booze out of the pantry and laid the bottles on the kitchen counters.  No one was at all shy about helping themselves, reaching in the cabinets, pulling out glasses, fetching ice from the fridge and mixing their drinks.  They’re probably talking about who was going to get the old lady’s money, I thought as I made my way over to the food.  I know it’s kind of a mean thing to say, but no one in that crowd had a teardrop in their eye.  Most of them didn’t even know who I was and looked at me like I was an idiot when I told them how sorry I was for their loss. It was absolutely ridiculous. But there was the food and I was hungry. 

I’d almost reached the pizza when Mrs. Noland swooped in for the kill.  She’d spotted me from across the room and lickety-split, had to scurry over to find out what perfectly stupid thing I was doing these days.  

“Hello Riley Anne.”  She began, looking every bit the JC Penney version of Jacqueline Kennedy she aspired to be.   “What are you studying in school these days?”

“Pretty much the standard stuff I guess, Mrs. Noland.”

“What exactly is the standard stuff, Riley Anne? Are you taking college prep courses?”

Gads, how I hated to be called Riley Anne.  Almost as much as I hated being asked about college.

“College is a waste of time. I’m going to write songs and sing them.”

“Oh,” she laughed.  “That’s quite an idea.  Have you taken song-writing classes?”

The bitch. 

“No but the Beatles didn’t take song-writing classes and look at where they are.”

“The Beatles, hey.  So you, Riley Anne O’Tannen are going to be just like the Beatles.”  

I wished at that moment I had the guts to wipe the evil smirk off her face with a nasty retort. John Lennon would do it.  He’d tell her off no matter what. 

“I gotta go,”  I told her rudely.  “I’ve got homework.”  I did not need to be told I was stupid by a woman living in a tract home in Reno Nevada.  No sirree bob, as my grandma would say. No sirree bob. Some day she would be sorry when I was rich and famous.  Well, on second thought, she probably wouldn’t.   But I wouldn’t care because after I left Reno I knew for a fact, I wasn’t coming back.  Also I knew I was never going to live in a tract home or work in an office.  Never.  

In the short time I’d been upstairs, Bella’d managed to sneak into the kitchen and steal a bottle of gin from right under my mother’s nose.  I have no idea how she’d done it, with all those mourners milling about. But she had, and not only that, she was drinking the stuff right out of the bottle. Alcohol was another thing forbidden at the Muselik’s.