Page 19 of Too Old for This

Kelsie throws the envelope down on the table. Hundred-dollar bills stick out of it.

She finally showed up on Wednesday evening, one day after I gave up following her. Not once did I spot an opportunity. She was never in an empty parking garage or a deserted street, let alone in a bar, where I might’ve been able to spike her drink.

Another reason why I hate choosing someone in advance and stalking them. If you end up with someone like Kelsie, it could take forever. Opportunity has to exist. With Kelsie, it hasn’t.

She showed up at my house around seven, banging on the door instead of knocking. She is not wearing workout clothes, either. Kelsie came straight from work, dressed in a navy pantsuit with low heels, and her hair is clipped back tight. She looks like an upstanding law enforcement officer.

“Is this a joke?” she says.

We are in my formal sitting room. She is not very tall, but it feels like she towers over me, because I’m the only one sitting.

“Forty-five hundred dollars is not a joke to me,” I say. “That’s a lot of money.”

“Except you’re about forty-five thousand dollars short.”

“I’m trying. It takes longer than a week to get any kind of loan from a bank.”

“How long?”

“I’m not sure. No one wants to give you money when you don’t have income.”

Kelsie looks confused. It’s clear my lack of income has never occurred to her, and she knows nothing about owning a home. I’ve worked at a bank and know what’s possible and what isn’t, but she doesn’t. That makes it easier to lie.

“I’ve filled out the paperwork,” I say. “But loans have to go through underwriting, and it can take a while.”

“Another week?”

“Possibly. It could be longer.”

“That doesn’t work.” She paces in front of the coffee table, hands on her hips, shaking her head. Kelsie doesn’t look quite as confident as she did last week, when she sat in that velvet chair and told me I needed to pay her $50,000. Now she looks agitated.

No, worried. Kelsie is worried.

Perhaps I’m wrong about her. Maybe she isn’t an opportunist who jumped on this chance to make some extra money. It looks like she needs the money. Maybe she has a drug or gambling habit I haven’t seen. Or maybe she’s paying the bills at that full-service nursing home where her grandmother lives.

“I’m doing my best,” I say. “I just need a little more time.”

Kelsie continues to pace, not pausing one bit. I can almost feel the power in the room shift away from her and toward me. Not completely, but a little bit.

“I’ll be back next week,” she says. “Make sure you have it.”

She grabs the cash and walks out, again slamming the door behind her.

Kelsie doesn’t want to expose me to the media or the police or anyone else. She just needs money. If she had been able to control her emotions a little better, I never would’ve known how worried she is.

This changes things, though not necessarily for the better. At first, I thought she was greedy and arrogant, but she is so much worse. Kelsie is desperate. Nothing is more dangerous than that.

—

Dr.Maraj purses his lips. That means I’ve done something wrong. Many things, actually, but I expect this has something to do with those cookies. I tend to eat sugar when I’m stressed.

“Blood sugar up, cholesterol up, even your blood pressure has risen a little. Lottie, is something going on?”

I have a lot of doctors in my life. Different specialists for everything—eyes, bones, colon, skin, ears, breasts, heart, kidneys.

It feels like everything needs to be checked on a strict schedule, and it all routes through Dr.Maraj.

He’s like the project manager of my body.

Sometimes I think he knows it a little too well.

“My son is getting married,” I say. “Again. And it’s all been a bit much.”

“I’m going to increase the dosage of your blood pressure meds.”

“Please don’t. It’s just temporary.”

Dr.Maraj purses his lips again.

The last thing I need is to change my medication.

Doctors, especially young ones, don’t understand what altering the dosage can do.

You never know what the side effects are going to be.

Medications have screwed up my sleep schedule, my mood, my body temperature.

It can be just about anything. My skin might become dry, or maybe it will be my eyes.

Or I develop an itch in the strangest place.

The answer is usually another medication. One to fix the side effects caused by the first.

“I’ll come back after everything settles down,” I say, “and we’ll test again. Does that work?”

He doesn’t love that idea, but he agrees. “Now, where are you with the surgery?” He scrolls through the screen of his tablet. “I don’t see an update here.”

“I can’t think about my hip until after Archie’s wedding.”

“You’ve been putting this off for a long time now. Over a year.”

“I’ve been busy.”

Both Dr.Maraj and the orthopedic surgeon keep telling me how much better I’ll feel with a new hip. They’re probably right. I know several people at church who have had hip, knee, and shoulder replacements. Most have gone very well.

Most.

“After the wedding.” I raise my hand, two fingers up, like I’m a scout. I’m a former scout mother, so close enough.

Up until last year, I had every intention of getting that hip replacement. But my internet searching brought up all kinds of horror stories about going under anesthesia at my age. It said my brain might never fully recover, and I might not be the same afterward.

Unacceptable.

My surgeon took care of that fear by explaining that he wouldn’t use general anesthesia. He uses spinal anesthesia to block the pain.

That made me inch a little closer to getting the surgery done. But then one of our First Covenant parishioners, Valerie, had her hip replaced. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the surgery goes well. But someone has to be the 1 percent.

First, it was the infection. The new hip had to be removed until the infection was gone, and then they tried the replacement again almost a year later. Now one of her nerves is pinched, and she’s in more pain than she was before they hacked off the old joint and put in a new one.

An extreme case, the surgeon said.

Highly unusual. The odds of it happening to you are infinitesimal, Dr.Maraj said.

The odds of Archie’s father hitting his head against the faucet handle in exactly the right way to kill him were probably infinitesimal, too. But it happened.