Whose Number Is Up, Anyway?. Stevi Mittman

and a ball. Above the flying pins are the words The Spare Slices.

      I gasp.

      “Bad taste? Your mother wouldn’t approve?” Drew asks testily as he crouches over the body. Not surprisingly, there’s no love lost between Drew and my mother.

      “Last night,” I say, remembering seeing the team at the bowling alley. They stood out because Max, the deli guy I know from Waldbaum’s, the one who always gives my youngest daughter, Alyssa, extra slices of Sweet Muenster while I order cold cuts, was one of them. “I saw him last night.”

      “Really?” Drew asks, like this would be the sort of thing a person might make up. “When was that, exactly?”

      “All night,” I say, then realize how that sounds. “All evening. Until about eleven-thirty.” I’m about to explain that I was working on the grand opening and this guy was bowling, but Drew doesn’t ask and I decide to let him make his own assumptions. I think, alive, Joey wasn’t bad-looking. A little old for me, but hey, I’m getting older every day myself.

      “I’d like you to come down to the station,” he says, and I think he’s having too much fun busting my chops. I say something that sounds a lot like in your dreams—if you happen to be listening carefully.

      Seems the two uniforms are. Their jaws drop.

      Drew lets it roll off his back. He comes to his feet and takes my chin in his hand. “You, my dear, are a material witness. You may have been the last person to see your date alive.”

      

      AFTER EXPLAINING that the man was not with me, but with an entire bowling league, I’m released. I’m back at the bowling alley when my cell phone, announcing a call from my mother, plays the theme from Looney Tunes.

      “How do you do it?” I ask her while Mark gestures for me to show him how high I want the new dark green Formica-that-looks-like-granite paneling to go.

      “I have spies,” she says matter-of-factly, as I place my hand about hip high on the wall. We’re going ultra modern for the billiards area, with brushed steel above faux-marble wainscoting. Wouldn’t have been my choice, but all the materials were already ordered when Percy Michaels decided she was too good to decorate bowling alleys and took a powder.

      That’s when Teddi the scavenger Bayer, the hungriest (and some say most dangerous) decorator on Long Island, swooped in. I get a premium if I finish the job on time and nothing for my end of the work if I don’t. And as of today, nothing seems only too real.

      “They’re everywhere, so don’t think you can get away with seeing that Detective Spoonbreath again. I didn’t lend you my condo for two weeks so that you could come home and pick up where you left off with him.”

      “You didn’t, but I did,” my father says into the extension. “If that’s what she wants. Leave her be, for God’s sake, June.”

      I love my father.

      Not that I don’t love my mother—I just don’t like her very much.

      My mother continues as if my father hasn’t said anything at all. “Mildred Waynick said you barricaded the freezer door and were in there alone with him for twenty minutes. And you weren’t cold when you came out.”

      “Leave her be, June,” my father says without enthusiasm—probably because he knows, after all these years, that his words are falling on deaf ears.

      “Did Mildred mention there was a dead body in there?” I ask, checking on angles to make sure that the light won’t reflect into a player’s eyes when he’s taking a pool shot. “Not what you’d call romantic, exactly.”

      “It must have been very upsetting,” my father says. I hear him tsking. Or he could be cleaning between his teeth with a matchbook cover.

      “Teddi’s used to it by now,” my mother snaps back. “And it gave her an excuse to see Detective Dreamboat.”

      “My, my. He’s moving up in the world,” I say, putting my hand just under my breasts to show Mark how high the bar should be. He gestures for me to stand still while he measures. Yeah, fat chance. “What happened to Spoonbreath?”

      “Nothing bad enough, it seems,” my mother counters.

      I remind her that she’s caught me at work and tell her that I’ve got to go. Not that this stops her.

      “Who were you on the phone with before I called?” she asks. “I got voice mail.”

      I tell her it was a wrong number, which, although true, doesn’t satisfy her. So I admit it was Mel Gibson, out of rehab and looking for a nice Jewish girl.

      She makes an ugly noise and moves on. “You joke, but my reputation gets dragged through the mud along with yours,” she says dramatically. “I have a daughter who decorates bowling alleys, shops in goyish food stores and lusts after cops. And she lies to me. Can you just tell me what it was I did to you that was so awful, so terrible, that you need to punish me like this?”

      “I’m earning an honest living here, Mother. There’s no cross over King Kullen’s doors and I’m not lusting after anyone.” Okay, so that part’s a lie. “What did I do to deserve this?”

      “Be that way, Teddi.” I hear her exhale her cigarette smoke. “Go ahead. I won’t even tell you about the lottery ticket I bought for you. The mega-millions one they drew last night.”

      My heart stops. “What about it?” I ask her, having heard this morning on the radio that it wasn’t claimed yet. Though they also said the winning ticket—for thirty-seven million dollars—was purchased in Plainview and I know that there is no way my mother would shop in Plainview, just a stone’s throw (and a step down, according to her) from where I live in Syosset. Not even for a lottery ticket.

      “You didn’t win,” she tells me while I look at the phone with utter amazement. “But you could have, so don’t blame me. At least I tried to fix your life. Imagine the man you could get if you’d won that lottery.”

      I tell her to keep trying, and until she wins me either a fortune or a man, I better keep working. And that includes doing bowling alleys and any other places that will pay me.

      “Will brothels be next, Teddi? Or funeral homes? Do you get some sort of perverse pleasure embarrassing me like this? Are you getting back at me?” my mother asks. “Is that it?”

      She probably says a few other nasty things, but I don’t know, because I’ve already pressed End.

      Bobbie opens her mouth to weigh in on Drew Scoones’s place in my life, but I tell her we have work to do. Between Bobbie’s I-don’t-smoke-anymore-but-I-still-deserve-a-break breaks, her shopping, her trips to her husband, Mike’s, chiropractic office in the middle of the day to find this patient’s file or that one’s X-rays, it’s no wonder she occasionally forgets we’re actually working.

      She was not the one who was here until nearly midnight last night, measuring and leaving notes for Mark so that he could get the Formica cut at the lumber yard and ready to install before L.I. Lanes opened today. She didn’t have to fend off two drunk guys who didn’t understand any part of no even after the jukebox played Lorrie Morgan’s song twice.

      She wasn’t the one who locked up the place and had to walk to her car alone in the dark, her heels clicking on the asphalt so loudly in her ears that it nearly drowned out the sound of the men arguing in front of the bagel shop.

      I close my eyes and try to picture them because, if my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, they were The Spare Slices and they were pretty angry.

      “You okay?” Mark asks, taking my elbow. “You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

      “I may have,” I say, trying to remember what they were arguing about.

      Whatever it was, Drew needs to know.

      “I’ve got to call him,”