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The Comeuppance

or The Day of the Underdog

By Helen Havlin O'ReillyPublished 3 years ago 9 min read
1

"Oh. I do like your notebook. Yes. Very petite et bijou, one might say."

Reggie shifted in her seat, puffed up with pleasure as if it were she who was petit et bijou (she was NOT). Reggie's peculiarities included accepting compliments on items she'd purchased or obtained as if they were items she'd crafted herself or as if she'd conquered some extraordinary challenge, like qualifying for the Olympics. Still, she had allowed me to persuade her into signing up for this amateur writing workshop so I wouldn't feel self-conscious about attending alone. My mother used to say that good friends are always of service, and I have to say, I agreed.

"It's not really mine," Reggie responded. "It belonged to Ron's mother."

"Really? It looks so new."

"Well, that was Ron's mother. She was so meticulous. She had things she'd gotten for her First Communion that looked like she got them last week!"

"I remember her now. The way she looked at me always made me nervous."

"That was probably just her cataracts... ."

"No! It was the way she looked right through me."

"Oh, that! Yeah, I know. Like she was judging you all the time. It felt like that to me too. Her floor was cleaner than my face. Who could compete with that?"

One of Reggie's peculiarities was that she insisted on describing things for humorous effect. Some people did find this funny. I found it annoying. The remarks about her mother-in-law's meticulousness were not funny to me. Rose's meticulousness was not what had made me nervous, either. There was something about her bold, penetrating gaze. She was too old for that stare to be called insolent . . . but it was if she were looking, not at but into me. I'm not at all given to fanciful thinking but were I, I might have thought that Reggie's M-I-L was a sorceress, deciding what spell to cast.

The room was filling. I nodded to the people I recognized. As a published poet, I knew I was more advanced than the usual workshop crowd, but I enjoyed the atmosphere.

I enjoyed observing the mode of dress that announced each wearer's free-spiritedness. Lots of earrings, scarves and jangling bangles on the women. Old men wearing suspenders ready to burst, stretched to the limit over pot bellies. Young men smelling of cats and patchouli, with tattoos up to their chins. But I saw no need to change my normal style to attend one of these events.

Today I looked fine, in my freshly pressed shirt under a yellow crewneck, over Ralph Lauren jeans, with a blue blazer over all. I felt perfectly at ease and apropos. Reggie, of course, was in one of her coveralls, looking as if she'd come to change a light bulb and wandered into the workshop by mistake. At least she was clean, her face as pink and glowing as if someone had just slapped it.

I nodded to participants I knew from other workshop sessions, then regarded Reggie. Had it been a mistake to invite her? It wasn't hard to imagine her blurting out something indelicate, or worse, braying with laughter at somebody's awkward writing. (A thing I'd often wanted to do, but had never done.)

"You come to these often?" Reggie asked, looking around.

"Once in awhile."

"Hmm."

"Let me ask you; how did you get Ron's mother's notebook? Did she leave it to you?"

"In a way. You remember she moved in with us towards the end?"

"Oh. Yes. Frank and I put his mother in one of those assisted whatsits. I don't know how people can stand it otherwise."

"Well, you have to stand it if you don't have money. And Rose wasn't as bad as all that. She was actually interesting; the life she'd lived. Anyway, it sounds awful, but we were just married, and we wanted to be alone, and we used to just avoid her. It seemed like all we did was go to work, come home, run upstairs, and order pizza. We lived upstairs like a couple of hostages! The whole bedroom was filled with empty pizza boxes!"

"But surely she had to go upstairs sometimes herself, to sleep?"

"We converted the downstairs office to make her a bedroom."

"Ah! Well, a lot of old people have trouble with stairs, but surely..."

Reggie looked at me slyly. "You remember how germophobic she was? Well, one day, the stair-cleaner attachment on the vacuum broke, so we just stopped vacuuming the stair carpet. It got really filthy. I mean black. We knew she wouldn't go near it in a hazmat suit."

This struck me as a revolting solution. I tried not to show my disgust.

"But what stopped you throwing the boxes out?"

"Well, whenever we brought some downstairs, she'd pop out of her room like a cuckoo."

"Couldn't you wait till she was asleep?"

"Do you know what light sleepers 80-year olds are?"

During the time the mother-in-law had lived there, I'd visited once. And not only was the M-I-L there, all her belongings were, too.

I'd had to navigate a maze of cartons, which, I will admit, were very neatly stacked, and looked as if they'd been dusted regularly. But still. If I'd known about the stairway carpet, I'd have cut the visit even shorter than I did. Ugh.

Reggie looked at her watch, which she annoyed me by wearing on her right wrist. It wasn't as if she were right-handed. Reggie was full of affectations, like chewing toothpicks or eating potato chip sandwiches. Around us, people were still finding seats.

"Is that the only notebook you brought?" I asked "It IS nice, but you won't be able to write much in it. Did you bring a pen?"

"Of course," she said. Digging in her oversized knapsack, she pulled out a fistful of pens, a couple of pencils, half a roll of sucking candy and a discount store receipt.

"Want one?" She offered me a candy then looked around for a place to dispose of the receipt. Failing to find one, she shoved it back into the knapsack.

"No. Thanks," I said.

"There's a funny story about this notebook."

"Oh?"

She handed it to me. It was quite small, about three inches by five, and black, with the word "Moleskine" embossed on the back cover. A slender black ribbon emerged from the binding, and a black elastic band was attached to the back cover, to be stretched around the front to keep the book shut. It had a wonderful feeling in one's hand, and although it was, as I'd observed, too small to write much in, it could be very useful if all one wanted to do was jot down notes. Maybe that was all the old woman had used it for, I thought, but then I thought of the pizza boxes, the carpet, and the living room filled with cartons, and I handed it back.

Reggie began, "You know how you should never read anyone else's diary because you're sure to read something bad about yourself?

"Don't tell me you read her diary?"

"Only a page or two. I didn't mean to read it at all."

"All right. But why did you even have it to begin with?" The library clock above us 'tocked' loudly. One twenty-five.

"She had heart failure, and right before she died, she kept telling us to make sure to look between all the pages of her books after she died. 'Make sure you look in all the notebooks.' So when she died, that's what we did."

"And?"

"It was the day after the funeral. Ron and I each took a stack, and when I opened this one, I saw it."

I raised an eyebrow in lieu of asking the obvious question.

"Well, it was a real hodgepodge. She used to write down notes from doctor's appointments, bus timetables, shopping lists, and sometimes things that had happened during the day. I guess you could call those things her "gripe lists" Anyway, on one of the last pages she used, she wrote, "Ron too busy with 'Miss Piggy' to bring me shopping."

Now it was I who erupted in laughter. Several of the amateurs looked around at us. Reggie's face became even pinker.

"She called you Miss Piggy?"

"Only in writing. Not to my face. So, I guess without knowing it, she got her own back for the carpet and the pizza boxes."

"I'd say she did. May I?" I held out my hand for the book again. I wanted to see for myself the words in ink on paper. Reggie handed it to me, but said, "Oh, I sliced out those pages with a razor blade. This was the last notebook she had, so I only had to cut a few. And we never did find any money. Or anything."

A potbellied man in the next row turned around. "I apologize for eavesdropping, but I couldn't help it. I've always favored those Moleskine notebooks myself." I hadn't noticed him before he spoke, and now that he had, I wished he'd turn back around and mind his own business. I didn't come to these events to make friends.

"When you were looking for money, did you look in the little envelope on the very last page, glued inside the back cover? That's a Moleskine 'signature,' I guess you'd say."

Reggie shook her head. "I didn't even know about it," she said.

"Go ahead, look for it, open it."

This was intolerable. I could see the facilitator approaching along the corridor to begin the workshop and save us. Reggie, of course, was smiling away at the old coot and peeling apart the very last page and the back cover, using her stubby fingernails. "Oh my gosh," she said, or something equally anodyne. "I never knew this was there!"

"Open it," said the old man. He nodded encouragement and winked at me. "You never know. Maybe the old biddie really did stash away a buck or two."

"Do you really think so?" Reggie asked him. Of course I didn't think so, but I nodded.

Then Reggie said, "Oh my God. There is something here!"

Old Potbelly nodded encouragement. "Told ya." And out of the secret envelope, under Reggie's forefinger, slid two ten-thousand-dollar bills, crisp as the day they'd been minted. And only creased where they'd been folded to fit.

"They're counterfeits," I started to say, but the old man shook his head.

"Your mother-in-law sounds like a smart cookie," he said, "even if she did have an acid pen. They haven't printed these since the forties, but they're still circulating. That is, the ones old ladies haven't tucked away in notebooks." He winked.

I heard Reggie breathing.

"Um," she said, swallowing hard. "I have to call Ron."

She looked at me, and for a moment I saw her mother-in-law's x-ray stare. "You don't mind if I don't stay for the workshop, do you?" She asked.

All around us, the other attendees seemed to be aware of something momentous happening. At the front of the room, the facilitator was obliviously setting up her materials.

"Don't be an idiot." I said, "I'm not leaving you after this! We'll go to Frank's office, he handles sums like this every day."

"NO," said Reggie. "I'll call Ron. And I'll tell him to bring his gun. But you stay for the workshop."

I was stunned. I knew that money changes people, but I'd never heard of it happening instantly. Reggie suddenly ordering me around? She squeezed her way crabwise along our row of seats, and pressed down on my shoulder, as if making sure I stayed put. The last I saw of her, she was pulling out her little flip phone and striding toward the lobby, as the meeting room door slammed behind her.

"Well, I never," I turned back to say to the potbellied stranger, But he had vanished. Completely.

###

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About the Creator

Helen Havlin O'Reilly

Born in Glasgow, raised in NYC, living in Las Vegas. Going from bad to worse. Author (Bolting the Furies, The Soul Workout,), wife, mother, stepmother, aunt. "The woods are lovely, dark and deep/ and I have miles to go before I sleep."

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