Evelyn Delivers the Paperboy

By R.W. Gill

Evelyn hates the terrible degradations of her upper-middle-class origins. Seeking the wealth and power that her rich neighbor Winny enjoys, she vows to rise above her sub-owner status and tries to enlist poor Sonny to team up with her on her quest. But Sonny balks.

Eventually, Evelyn marries Winny and achieves her goal, and poor Sonny becomes a lowly newspaper reporter.

Fast forward to a time when, coming to the end of his career, Sonny accidentally shoots Winny in the head. Charged with attempted murder, he’s rescued by rich Evelyn who, in her merrily remorseful deposition (which is the framework for this novel), she entertains the presiding judge – a good friend and loyal underling – with the story of the exonerating factors that lead up to the shooting, thereby ensuring Sonny a light sentence.

Manufactured Blurbs from Fictional Characters I Admire:

It lacks, for better or worse, the temperate oft-vaunted subtlety of my creator’s animosity to the horrors of rank and privilege.
- Emma Woodhouse

Rumpbustious! [sic]
- Falstaff

Thoughtful books bore me. Even The Custom of the Country, which is about me, bores me everywhere the focus is not on me.
- Undine Spragg

Another day, another pig in human shape who delights in horrifying the other animals on Animal Farm with the nasty truth about how nasty we are until she gets what she wants, which is self-justification for her own nastiness.
- Benjamin the Donkey

• Language: English
• Publisher: R.W. Gill
• Release date: Jun 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370801756

Book preview

EVELYN DELIVERS THE PAPERBOY

As slung by

Bob, the Cat-caregiver

Copyright 2017 Robert W. Gill

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to your favorite ebook retailer to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support.

Dedication

To R.W. Double Gill, for his crushing humility, and to E.F Selliger for his charming absence of any.

Epigraph

Anyone can be unsentimental; brutal charm is a gift.

- Evelyn Chimes, speaking of the stories of Dorothy Parker

In deference to my ghost collaborator who sadly (and humorously at times) drank himself into and out of a series of homes for inebriates while I was writing Evelyn Delivers the Paperboy – my second novel – please donate a dollar or whatever you can spare to Alabama Children’s Hospital Foundation, 1600 Seventh Avenue South, Birmingham, AL 35233. He had a niece and I have a daughter who were treated there, so this is not entirely a cynical marketing ploy aimed at getting you to dig deep and come up with the money I’m charging for reading my first novel Evelyn Explains Everything, available on Smashwords for 99 cents and worth every penny. Thank you.

Table of Contents

Prologue

Round 1

Round 2

Round 3

Round 4

Round 5

Round 6

Round 7

Round 8

Round 9

Round 10

Round 11

Round 12

Round 13

Round 14

Round 15

Round 16

Round 17

Round 18

Epilogue

Bob the Cat-caregiver’s Final Notes

Prologue

Every third week in February my boss gives the keynote address to a select group of the world’s richest entrepreneurs who meet for a complimentary dinner in the banquet hall of her plush hotel on the outskirts of Disney World near Orlando.

Bye, sweetie! she kissed the blind cat Little Bitchergirl Five on the lips. Bye, Frednik! she tickled her little brother Freddy behind the ears. Bye, Bibbitty Bobbity! she tousled my hair. Remember, she instructed me, "three-eighths of a Norvasc tablet for Bitcher’s blood pressure, crushed up in the Honshu tuna the kitchen will be sending up shortly. And Clozaril for Freddy as needed.

If Sonny arrives before I’m done delivering this boilerplate, she added, fix him a drink – gin over ice – or is it cheap vodka neat these days? – call down for whatever he’s swearing by this week if we don’t have it on hand, and tell him I’ll be back as soon as I can get away. After his stint in rehab, the poor thing will probably want more than one…

She calls the billionaires at the free lunch she’s hosting her disciples. They number 60. Because, as she archly explains, I’m five times more charismatic than Jesus.

Billed as a networking opportunity for owners, not players or coaches, her hotel is booked solid for six weeks in advance of the gala event with hundreds of small-fry hoping to wangle a moment of face-time with one of the big fish on the day of the dinner when the doors are closed to all but registered guests.

I’m neither a small-fry nor a big fish. I’m Bob the cat-caregiver. I look after Bitchergirl the ill-tempered blue-eyed Himalayan who is blind and has a mean-looking face like that cat Butch in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. She has a disposition to match. I also care for Freddy, who is prone to dissociative episodes in which he imagines he’s a cat.

Her bodyguard Booger makes up the fourth member of Evelyn’s entourage. It’s his job to be taken for granite. He was doing that now, giving me his stoniest stare as Evelyn made a pleased inspection of herself in the mirror. When she finished, they entered her private elevator together, Booger first, a hand in his jacket pocket, presumably clutching a pistol. With his free hand he pushed the middle button marked Lobby. Roof and Garage were the other two buttons on the panel.

Even before the doors finished closing, Freddy had started grooming himself. His sister, hoping to put him at ease, stuck out her tongue, crossed her eyes, waggled her head and waved goodbye with both hands.

Ten minutes later, the elevator pinged and out shuffled her old friend Sonny. Pudgy, unassuming Sonny. Even before he was convicted of attempting to murder Evelyn’s husband, Sonny looked like he was always apologizing. Also not a dinner guest, he’d just completed six weeks of court-ordered rehab – a deplorably light punishment some considered it, for such a serious crime.

Accompanying the unlikely felon was Dr. Tex, the famous television shrink at whose state-of-the-art addiction-treatment facility Sonny had been sentenced to take the cure.

As instructed, I fixed the boozehound a drink, and one for myself, and, ignoring the flouncing and gasping of Dr. Tex, we sat and imbibed and talked of this and that.

Sonny remembered me slightly – or pretended to. ‘When you first arrived that night,’ I reminded him, ‘I’m the one who showed you the newest addition to Evelyn’s rescued feline population: a little black kitten she named Bruce Wayne. Well, he does have a bat face, you said, and Evelyn drew herself up and came to the defense of her unprepossessing waif. And you have a fat face! she bristled. Bat Baby and Fat Face, she quipped. Chimesville’s newest crime-fighting duo!’

Sonny smiled at the memory. Either that or at the refresher I put in his hand.

By the third round, as we relaxed into our conversation, heedless of the increasingly shrill castigation coming from Dr. Tex, I noticed that the questions I asked and the responses they elicited from Sonny all revolved around Evelyn’s deposition. On the night of the shooting, at the moment the shot rang out, I was busy with cat duties. But a few days later, after things had calmed down a bit, Evelyn called on me to do double-duty as her videographer and record her chatty statement to Judge Sy.

Having seen the deposition, Sonny was happy to comment on it.

What follows is a verbatim transcript of what Evelyn said, together with Sonny’s comments appended at the end of each Round under the heading of Sonny’s Comments.

Only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. And to preserve my above-ground status.

Round 1

That’s my cue? We’re rolling? Not very bobbish of you, Bob-o. I’d like the full Hollywood treatment: a countdown followed by the clap of a scene-board snapping shut like the jaws of a crocodile. Where’s that old Bob-bob-bobbin’-a-long spirit? At least holler Lights! Camera! Action!

…Sigh [spoken], I guess that will have to do.

Hiya, Sy! Have you met my pussycat Cleo? Short for Cleopatra. Note the heavy eye-liner. It’s like the applicator got away from her. She makes the same bold statement on the other side. Procryptic is what they call these markings. She’s one tough little tigress. A minute ago, she had that roll of paper towels in a death grip and was tearing its throat out.

…And off she scampers. Camera-shy. It’s just as well. Center stage and the show all to myself – just how I like it!

Mercy, how ‘bout this weather, sweetie? Mid-80s in January! Yesterday a girl might catch her death of cold. Today, melanoma!

Well, enough with the preliminary pleasantries, hon. To business. They tell me Winny’s Aunt Mel is pressuring you to throw the book at poor Sonny so I thought I’d fill you in on what I know, which happens to be quite a lot since we’ve been friends since we were yea high. In fact Sonny was my boyfriend before Winny was my boyfriend – by one full day to be exact. Which is not to suggest they were bitter rivals for my affections; I had far too many simultaneous boyfriends for that. Still, we’re all rivals, as Darwin was good enough to never let us forget, and once you’ve heard the full litany of unholy hell I put poor Sonny through, you’ll know the right thing to do, dear, when handing down his sentence. Try to look on these remembrances as a plea for clemency on the grounds of what a little dickens I used to be.

Ah, here’s Lawanda with that pitcher of bloody marys I’ll be needing to fortify me through the coming ordeal.

Thank you, angel. And you included a celery stick to swizzle with. How sweet. Fetch, Cleo! I’ll just use my finger, doll. …Ummm, that hit the spot.

By the way, Sy-borg, you’ll have to pardon the formality of this taped deppo. My idea was to accost you in the pool house next Saturday and make a much more personal appeal, but Sonny’s lawyers insisted I do it this way, in the event a plea-bargain can’t be reached and the case goes to trial, the trouble and expense of which I’m sure we’d all like to avoid.

Testing: one, two…Ahem. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury, learned counsel for the prosecution; dream-team for the defense; The Right Honorable Simony I. Grant:

The accused and I met in the fifth grade. We were all in fifth grade together, come to think of it. Me, Sonny, Winny; my brother Freddy too. I’d been held back a year for disciplinary reasons, so I was a year older than the boys.

I used to call Sonny Paperboy. Among other nicknames, but mostly Paperboy. Average Boy would have served just as well. Because he was far and away the least exceptional of my boyfriends. Neither terribly bright nor terribly stupid; neither gloriously handsome nor grimacingly ugly; neither powerfully robust nor pitifully puny; neither…well, you get the picture. Sonny was just average.

Read no denigration into that assessment. I’m just telling you that the man you currently have under lock and key for shooting my husband in the head would have led a normal, unthinking, middle-class existence, suffering all the usual horrors and humiliations that middle-class people everywhere suffer, and seeking solace from the misery of his subservience in all the usual ways that middle-class people typically do – to include sports, religion, music, art, literature, tranquilizers, in-between-meal snacks, and lots and lots of television – were it not for my meddling.

To put it another way, whenever I find myself thinking of nothing special for any length of time, the image that takes shape in my mind – a little fuzzy at first, but slowly coming into focus the longer I sit and vegetate – is the sweet wholesome freckled face of my old pal Sonny, a face that might have served as the prototype for those young boys Norman Rockwell forged a successful career out of painting.

Technically speaking, you might argue that being exactly average put the Paperboy in a unique category. I mean if he’d been slightly better-looking or slightly worse-looking, or slightly brighter or stupider, or slightly more or less talented in some way, he’d have grown up with grudges to settle or ambitions to fulfill; some combination of angst and resentment which might have led to a more troubled relationship with society. But Sonny was born with none of that to contend with. Instead, he had me, poor thing.

October 1959 marks the proximate date of his lost innocence. His rude eviction from Eden, as it were. That’s when my family moved to Winter Park and Sonny and I became friends and neighbors.

The morning after our arrival, he threw us a paper, the big Sunday edition.

‘Hey, Paperboy!’ I hollered out my window. ‘Quit littering our drive!’

‘It’s a sample,’ he explained.

‘Sign us up!’ I commanded.

‘I need a parent’s signature,’ he said, trying to keep his voice down because of the hour.

‘So ring the doorbell, dumbbell! They’re up!’ I lied.

Rubbing sleep from his eyes, mad Dad answered the door in his pjs and grumpily told the Paperboy to come back later.

He did and was walking back to his bicycle after signing up his new customer when I yanked him into the garage to transact some business of my own.

First, I ascertained his paper income, which varied depending on the time of year and who took advantage of the special subscription rates, who was on vacation, who went north in the summer months, etc. etc.

Uh-huh, Uh-huh, Uh-huh, I said, getting it all down.

Finally, with all the pertinent financial information in hand, I proceeded to make the following proposition: ‘Paperboy,’ I said, ‘twenty percent of your monthly earnings averages four dollars and sixty cents. In exchange for which you get one minute of looking at me buck naked, full frontal, backside or profile, your choice…’

Sonny turned beet red, tee-heed, and dug the toe of his sneaker into the concrete.

‘For an extra five percent, or an additional buck-fifteen,’ I added, performing all these calculations swiftly and unerringly in my head, ‘I’ll make it a less static viewing experience by throwing in ten jumping jacks.’

The Paperboy continued to hang fire. I could tell he was interested – what ten-year-old boy wouldn’t be interested in seeing a pretty eleven-year-old girl naked? – but his eyes had a furtive look, like he was worried he was being set up and my dad might come bounding out from behind a big Mayflower Mover’s box to scream at him if he took me up on my offer.

‘Make up your mind!’ I said, crossing my arms and taping my foot like a scold. ‘I don’t have all day!’

When he remained tongue-tied, I finally took pity on him and gave him the breech view. It’s what most of my boyfriends chose in those days. Understandably, as full-frontal revealed little in the way of curves at that age.

Lush as these puppies are today, sweetie, there was a time they were only bud-sized and waiting on them to blossom took a toll on my nerves, believe me.

I immodestly explained as much to Sonny, squeezing what there was of them.

Thank goodness Fortune blessed me with a world-class fanny to exploit, and, judging from Sonny’s goggling eyes, he was more than happy to watch me exploit it.

He’d see all sides of me soon enough as I turned his paper route into a steady source of revenue. To keep him coming back, I varied the fare, eventually presenting all my boyfriends with a four-page menu, featuring some fancy calligraphy and an Aubrey Beardsley tracing on the cover page, listing the many options:

They could touch my plump bottom, massage my plump bottom, kiss my plump bottom, watch me extrude from my plump bottom, or see me shake and shimmy my plump bottom via one or more of a set of five exercises I called the Canadian Experience, named for the military PT program my loony father employed to torture my brother Freddy in those days.

All poses, both static and animated, were numbered and followed by a posted non-negotiable rate with an asterisk beside each item, indicating at the bottom of the page that prices were subject to change without notice at my discretion.

Lurid photos – my face prudently masked – were also available.

I baffled Sonny – not at that first transaction, but not too long after that – with the information that just before moving to Florida, I’d reached womanhood and had begun boffing the brains out of some of the older boys in the neighborhood who were in danger of going blind due to masturbating a dozen times a day. ‘But, on the assumption you’re not an early developer,’ I said, ‘we’ll get to that later.’

Sonny gave me a blank look.

‘Just remember,’ I added, baffling him still more, ‘that when you reach that stage, rough sex is the only kind of sex that doesn’t completely nauseate me.’

Of course the truth is my focus was not on sex. I mean I could take care of my own needs in that department. And frequently do. And did. And my boyfriends were allowed to watch. For a price. It was on the menu.

Neither was it about the thrill of reducing boys to drooling cretins at the sight of my bare hindquarters. Not that I didn’t enjoy a good laugh as much as the next girl. Even today I find the raptures men go into at the sight of me unclothed so preposterous that I can’t help scoffing. But making boys drool was not my main focus either. The Languorous Odalisque may have been one of my more popular static poses, but I was not some simple bimbo luxuriating in the power of my beauty.

My focus was upward mobility.

Since the time I was eight, I’d been using every means at my disposal to rise above the crushing humiliations of my hated upper-middle-class origins. Since the third grade, I was all about rectifying the terrible oversight God or Fate or Whatever had committed by giving me parents who were not of the rich and powerful class of oligarchs who control society. And once I saw that boys were willing to pay me to shed my clothes – mysterious as the thing was to me in the beginning – I had no qualms about shedding them, after getting my money up front.

However, my sources of income were not limited to the carnal.

For instance, I was not above running off with Sonny’s glasses and making him pay a dollar to get them back. A dollar here a dollar there; it adds up.

A scarier gambit involved a jar crawling with newly hatched black widows. Trust me, you won’t find a more aggressive spider than a black widow. Tarantulas are tenderhearts by comparison. Show me the entomologist who flaunts his lack of squeamishness by letting black widows amble up and down up his bare arms and I’ll show you an entomologist who milks their venom beforehand. I brought the jar to Sonny’s bedroom and threatened to loose the hundreds of little black dots in it if he didn’t pay me three dollars to keep the lid on. He didn’t hesitate to cough up. My other boyfriends too.

A somewhat more elaborate scheme involved stealing a can of green spray paint that Sonny was using to weatherproof some gourds he was making into birdhouses as a Cub Scout project. I made off with the can and used it to spray the words PROUD SLAVE! on my family’s front door. Then I composed a note addressed to the police and showed it to Sonny, naming him as the malefactor, and threatening to turn over of the can of spray paint with his fingerprints on it if he didn’t fork over five dollars or some possession of equivalent value. That’s how I came to acquire his transistor radio.

I preferred cash of course, but in my struggle to rise above the degradations of my sub-owner social status, I was willing to accept readily convertible property as payment. With the result that I was soon inundated under a mountain of material assets.

Fortunately, in keeping with my overall good luck in the world of business, our day-maid’s younger son Poughkeepsie happened to own a pawnshop in Eatonville, and his assistance proved invaluable to my upwardly mobile climb. But for Poo, I’d have had to hold a garage sale every day of the week to keep my inventory of bartered goods from reaching to my bedroom ceiling.

Which triggers another memory of my mistreatment of poor Sonny: A few days after Christmas, I remember wheeling the Paperboy’s brand-new 3-speed bicycle into PooPoo’s hock-shop. It marked a watershed moment for me in my partnership with Poo. That’s when he started taking me a little more seriously and cheating me a little less on the jewelry which my boyfriends were stealing from their mothers, which PooPoo insisted was all paste at first. But the audacity required to steal something as big as a bicycle impressed him.

Not to short the importance of relatively minor characters in the story of Sonny and Winny and me, we’ll get back to Poughkeepsie a little later…

Having explained that sex wasn’t my priority, I’m not going to sit here looking the way I do and pretend it wasn’t the big draw for most of my boyfriends. Squat thrusts – item number nine on the menu, if memory serves – were Sonny’s favorite. They got the lower hemispheres jutting and jouncing to the max in those pre-twerking days, and kept him in my thrall for the duration of his prepubescent years. I set the motion-surcharge at a sensible five percent, raising it to only ten after I began filling out in that other remunerative area, the upper half of the old T&A, thus furthering my business opportunities, thanks to Nature’s generous if dilatory bounty. Remind me to show you some of my early home-movies from that era, Sy. In the meantime, here’s a slightly superannuated version:

Ready-o! Exercise!

Down!-Out!-In!-Up! Squat!-Thrust!-Recover!-Two!

Sonny’s Comments

About his stolen bike, Sonny said Evelyn’s mention of it in her deposition was the first he’d heard of her part in its disappearance.

He was hurt but she reminded him his wasn’t the only new bike that Poughkeepsie took delivery of. Every year there was a rash of bicycle thefts in their neighborhood in the post-Christmas season. Most of them more expensive than yours, sweetie, she pointed out, with a lot more gears.

On a more congenial note, Sonny remembered the time Evelyn taught him how to hit a baseball.

One of the under-gardeners on the Chimes estate had been a professional third baseman for the Orioles, and when Winny’s dad asked him to teach his son the finer points of batting, Winny insisted Sonny learn as well. ‘Winsome picked it up like a natural,’ Sonny recalled. ‘But when it came my turn, I couldn’t hit a thing, and after about eight thousand swings and misses, the ex-ballplayer was verging on exasperation – probably a bit beyond it. That’s when Evelyn came to my rescue.

‘JESUS!’ she hollered. ONLY A CONGENTIAL BIRDBRAIN WOULD KEEP PARROTING ‘WATCH THE BALL, WATCH THE BALL, WATCH THE BALL’ AND LEAVE IT AT THAT!"

‘She had no interest in sports beyond the money that could be made sponsoring fake fights (as she called all athletic competitions), but having watched from the comfort of her family’s screened-in pool for the better part of an hour and laughing all the while at my failure, she finally took pity and sashayed over in her skimpy swimsuit and made a deal for two dollars plus a double-payment clause if the outcome proved successful before explaining to me, "Look, Spazz, the reason you watch the stupid ball is so you can see whether the stupid thing goes over or under your stupid bat so you can correct your stupid swing at the next stupid pitch, Stupid!"

‘I followed her advice and was amazed at her powers of analysis when, three swings later, I connected.

‘Unfortunately, I didn’t have the four dollars I was contractually committed to so she took my marble collection, which filled half a shoebox, plus my Hardy Boys mysteries series as a penalty.

‘Which was okay with me since I’d pretty much outgrown the marbles and had the Hardy Boys by heart by then and had moved on to Sherlock Holmes.

‘I later learned she turned right around and sold both the books and the marbles to her brother Freddy – only to get everything back the next time he peeped her bottom.’

On the subject of Evelyn’s world-class fanny, Sonny said, ‘To see it was to believe her boast that by the time she moved the Florida, three years after she started selling peeks at it for a dime and permitting kisses to be planted on it for two bits, she had three grand invested in Treasury notes, plus a thousand in preferred stock in a major European tire manufacturer, on the strength of these spectacular glutes alone, as she put it.

Round 2

A little touched in the wind, but not bad for an old broad, eh, Sy?

Another drink, Bobby Socks. And make it a stiffy.

There was a time I could have kept that up all day. Or at least until Sonny’s money ran out and he was bereft of all liquid assets. Poor lamb never really stood a chance. Few hetero males or Sapphic females did, back in my prime. Alas, the body has lost a little tone since then.

…Speaking of bawdy tone, I wouldn’t dream of trying to influence you with anything in the way of an ad hominem appeal, dear, but going through my closet this morning I couldn’t find a thing to wear so, in light of today’s unseasonably warm weather, I decided not to wear a thing. I didn’t think you’d mind, as often as you drop by unannounced in the summer months when chances are pretty fair that I’ll be here by the pool working on my sans-tan-line. A girl enjoys those little attentions, by the way. Particularly a girl of my years.

So where were we? Pan up, NaBob. Let’s not overdo a good thing.

…Ah, yes, the Unexceptional Son-o. Born of decent everyday middle-class slavefolk who were just as unexceptional as he was. His dad was a chubby loan officer in the second largest of Winny’s dad’s eight banks in the greater Orlando area. He sang baritone in the church choir and was proud of his voice in a golly-gee-gosh-darn sort of way, making those and other humble noises of appreciation whenever anyone complimented his singing. But if his musical talent was above par, his I.Q. was exactly 100, his looks were a 5 at best, and his athleticism was subnormal; so, on the whole, Sonny Senior amounted to exactly the unexceptional block of wood from which you’d expect an unexceptional chip like Sonny Junior to fly.

If anything his mom was even more unexceptional. Average height, average build, average mind and average aspirations. She enjoyed the little things in life, a little gossip, a little nip of sherry, a little prosaic wit, and the little matriarchal shows of affection she exchanged with her average little boy.

For twenty years she labored as a combination nurse and paid companion to Winny’s mother, a chronically ailing handful, older than her husband by eight years. Ministering to her steady complaints of headache and heart palpitations – diagnosed as pity-attracting devices by her doctors – kept Sonny’s mother busy day and night, until the reputed hypochondriac got the last laugh by suddenly dropping dead of heart failure when Winny was just fifteen.

Whereupon the merry widower immediately wed his secretary – a buxom former Cypress Gardens water-skier with whom he was already sleeping – and together they gave Winny a half-sister named after his dad’s own sister just before wife number two died in a car crash for which the intoxicated driver of the other car would have served time in jail for vehicular homicide if her blood-alcohol hadn’t been over the limit as well, leaving Winny with a twice-bereaved dad and an aunt and a half-sister both named Melody.

One final note on the unexceptional Sonny, if I may, before moving on to the exceptionally rich WinWin: The house he grew up in with his unexceptional parents and his two no less unexceptional older sisters, JoJo and ZoZo, stood at the farthest reaches of Winny’s family’s lakeside compound, beside a babbling brook that overflowed its banks and flooded the front yard whenever it rained too many days in a row. Wildlife-sightings were not uncommon in that remote location, and when Sonny was twelve he found an abandoned baby possum in extremis making the most forlorn chirping noises in the woods outside his window. Moved to save it, he put the toothy orphan in a cardboard box with a blanket and fed it milk from an eye-dropper. And when it died a few days later, he cried buckets. Remember that when handing down the Paperboy’s sentence, Sy. The whole thing puts me in mind of what’s-her-face, that duck-doctoring kid in Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.

By contrast, Winny was always fairly aloof to the suffering of animals. My rescued cats are a distraction to him at best and a downright nuisance much of the time. He rarely pets them; knows the names of only one or two; and objects to the odor.

It’s the way he was raised. The only child to a distant father and a querulous mother and their bulging moneybags, he was the least cosseted of three pets. His mother had a smelly toy poodle she adored named Tinkerbelle, with an e at the end, and his father’s best friend was a slobbering chocolate Lab named Georgia.

They all lived together in the biggest of five ivy-covered mansions on Lake Maitland situated between Rollins College to the west and the Winter Park Racquet Club to the east – that’s Racquet with a qu. One of the lesser mansions was leased to the Racquet Club and converted to a clubhouse; two of the others were leased to the college; the president and his family occupied one and the other was home to various visiting professors and writers-in-residence. The fourth mansion was Winny Senior’s office, which his wife kept putting on the market after learning that it was also her husband’s favorite trysting spot. She could sell the property because the whole place was hers to begin with. But her husband had his own money and he kept buying the house back, until my parents bought it and declined his offer. However, they promised him first crack at it if they decided to sell, and casting a moony look at Mother’s face and a moonier look down her cleavage, the old philanderer seemed okay with that.

To complete the housing report, a number of caretakers’ cottages – I called them slave-quarters – dotted the Chimes family demesne. Sonny’s family rented the roomiest one. And the whole estate was accessed down a humming brick-paved road that split two tall white obelisks, making both Sonny and Winny my next-door neighbors, loosely speaking, although I was hardly the girl next door.

Rest easy, Sy, if