One Foot In The Gravy by Delia Rosen Page B

for my dad. I was wondering how that worked out for him.”
    Thom paused and smiled. It was different from her usual big smile for the customers, or her sassy smile for the staff, or her wouldn’t-itbe-wonder ful-if-you-did-some-more-work-aroundhere smile for me. This one was honest.
    “Your uncle may have been a dabbler, and he may only have been Luke-level good on his keyboard, but he loved making his melodies. He carried that keyboard everywhere. And I mean everywhere, sometimes to the john. Went through six Double-A batteries every two days. I know ’cause I ordered them by the case.”
    “Did you like what he composed?”
    “Not a note of it. But I liked that he liked writing it. He came alive.” She looked at me. “Sort of like you did when you got yourself another little mystery to pick at.”
    “Yeah, I guess that’s sort of what I was asking,” I said. “Somebody asked me why I cared who killed Hoppy Hopewell and I made up some shi—some sugar about it being bad for business that we catered the death gig.”
    “But that’s got nothing to do with it. In fact, we got calls yesterday to cater two other parties.”
    “Did we?”
    Thom nodded. “A confirmation and a bachelor party. I asked them how they heard of us. The confirmation was from your online menu. The other was from the news reports of Lolo’s party.”
    “How about that.”
    The world suddenly seemed a little brighter. I wasn’t incompetent. Some part of me had made a right decision, however ill-advised my romp with Grant may have been. Or maybe wasn’t. I had no idea. Heart sulked about that, but Brain was rightpleased with its business decisions.
    “Your uncle made us his family,” Thom went on. “Music was his girlfriend. He dated now and then, but if the gal wasn’t into music, he lost interest. If she was, she lost interest.”
    “His stuff was that bad?”
    “Not so much bad as completely awful.”
    I thought about that for a moment, and it still didn’t make sense. “You’re going to have to explain that.”
    “His tunes weren’t bad but he thought he would sell songs, if they were—” She looked for the proper word, gave up. “Check out these titles. White Christmas Shoes. When Doves Fly. Great Vibrations .”
    “Seriously? He wrote those songs?”
    “He wrote them, shopped them around, played them here when I let him—when there weren’t enough customers to scare away—but was so, so sincere about them. He never saw that there were . . . problems.”
    My heart was happy to be distracted. It hurt for Uncle Murray.
    “How did my dad put up with that?” I wondered.
    “I’m guessin’ he just loved his brother and was happy to see him happy. I never met your father, but from what I hear, that was something that eluded him.”
    Now my heart hurt for my father. It was more like an emotional bungee jump: it pained me to think that he was chronically unsatisfied. What a sad fate for both my parents. Unhappy together, unhappy apart.
    I hadn’t realized my head had dipped. Thom bent and looked up into my eyes. “You okay?”
    “Sure,” I lied. There were tears on the way, so I turned to flick on the heat lamps. Thom probably knew better, but she let it go.
    “You can’t let yourself dwell on what was or wasn’t,” she said, “on opportunities people missed or were afraid to take. I spent a lot of time doin’ that, regrettin’ how I threw myself at men or family members or employers who didn’t respect me.”
    “Then you found Jesus,” I said. I wasn’t being sarcastic; she had.
    “Yes, but He was only part of what saved me. The other part was your Uncle Murray. He had this joy about him, this love of each day and each hour in that day. He was a positive man. Whatever delusions he had about his music, he had those same delusions about the folks around him. He thought I looked pretty and smelled nice and treated customers better than they deserved. He saw me fuss about how lettuce or a pickle looked on a