Page 50 of A Shade of Myself
Sadie squealed and I tensed glancing over, but she broke into laughter, reading something on her phone.
Jude nudged my leg. “She’s fine.” I waited for her to share some more with me because we hadn’t connected in a meaningful way for a while, but the mood was broken.
I licked a trickle of gelato off my cone, then held it up. “Check it out. Looks like a penis head.”
“I wish dick tasted this good,” Jude said.
“And jizzed chocolate chips.”
We broke into snorts of laughter, causing a dour old lady sitting nearby to frown at us.
“Did you really finish the Grind?” Jude said.
“Yes, I did, you doubter, and I’m never doing it again.”
“The rift got handled?”
“You’re safe to continue your masochistic hikes.” I bit into the cone. “Still no leads on what my parents were up to.”
Jude ate her sorbetto, chewing thoughtfully. “Did they find the man from the beach?”
“Not yet.”
She squeezed my hand in sympathy. “What about your uncle Jake?”
“What about him?”
“He must have had thoughts on the matter.”
“If he did,” I said, wiping a drip off my hand, “he didn’t share them with me. I meant to go through all his birthday cards again, but things got crazy. I doubt I’ll find anything new though.”
“He never sent a letter with those cards?”
“No, he was very careful to keep things anonymous. Fifty in cash, no return address, and he didn’t even call me by name. It was always ‘Dear Sam.’” I smiled wistfully.
“Why Sam?”
“Because when I was little, I pronounced my name Mir-I-Am. So Jake called me Sam-I-Am or Sam after the Dr. Seuss character.” I laughed. “Jake loved puns and he’d send messages like ‘You’re getting older, roll with it’ and my birthday cash would be wrapped in toilet paper. Or the one with ‘Have a toad-ally amazing birthday’ had a toad sticker in the card. You get the idea.”
“Groanworthy, but you’re right. They don’t sound like secret messages.”
“They were horrible,” I said fondly, recalling some of the other terrible puns he’d come up with.” I frowned. “On the last card he ever sent, for my fortieth, he wrote ‘Happy 40th. May you have all the keys to your happiness.’ And he included a key. I never thought much about it, but what if the key actually opened something?”
Jude swallowed the last of her cone. “Do you still have it?”
“Yeah. I kept the cards in a memento box.” My next bite sat like a stone in my stomach, so I threw out the rest of the gelato. “Jude, that was the last card. What if he discovered something he shouldn’t have and was killed for it?”
“You said he died of cancer.”
“That’s what his obit in the paper said.” I rubbed a splash of gelato off my hand. “Who knows if it’s true?”
“There’s one way to find out,” she said.
“Have the old people finished their desserts yet?” Sadie said, standing out of swatting reach.
“Eh?” Jude pressed her hand to her ear. “Speak up, youngster.”
“Don’t take us back to the home,” I said in a warbly voice.
