“I just hope he’s a good guy. He seems all wrong for her.”

“Fiji’s healthy and pretty. You can’t expect her to sit home by herself.”

And this time Manfred left, but he was smiling to himself.

19

Olivia took care to be sitting on the same spot on the couch when she saw Manfred returning, though of course she’d been looking around while he was gone. She could tell from the way he walked that she would get her way.

“All right, we’ll ask Joe,” Manfred said as he came in. “Maybe we can eat at Home Cookin tonight and talk about it. That way I won’t miss any more time off work.”

“So ahead of time, I need to ask the oldies if they’re willing.”

“Go right ahead. Since this whole crazy idea is based on them saying yes for some unknown reason.”

“Unknown reason, hell,” Olivia said. “They’ll do it for money, same as anyone else.”

“And think of something to call them besides the oldies,” Manfred called as she let herself out.

Olivia, the bit firmly between her teeth, felt purposeful and much more cheerful. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail as she walked to the hotel. She felt the beginning of a trickle of sweat on her back, knew it would roll with an unpleasant ticklish feeling down the crack between her hips. She found she was looking forward to talking to Tommy again. He was a rascal, through and through.

Olivia liked old people. It surprised her to realize this, and she wondered if it had something to do with her relationship with Lemuel, who was the oldest person she’d ever met . . . though perhaps calling him a person was a bit of a stretch.

But then she remembered her father’s mother. She’d liked Grandmother. There had been a few moments in her childhood that hadn’t actually sucked, and the times she’d gotten to stay with her grandmother had contained all those moments. So she walked into the hotel with pleasant anticipation. Two old women were sitting in the lobby, which contained several comfortable chairs and a table or two. One of the women was knitting, and the other was listening to an iPod. They both looked up with interest as she came to a stop in front of them.

“I’m Olivia Charity,” she said. “I met Tommy the other day. I believe you ladies must be Mamie and Suzie?”

Mamie turned out to be the knitter, and Suzie the listener. Mamie had to use a walker, and Olivia discovered quickly that her conversation tended to wander away from time to time. Mamie’s knit pants hung on her, and her shoes were orthopedic, but she wore makeup, by God, and her hair was white and curly like a lamb’s coat. Suzie was (to Olivia’s surprise) of Asian descent, though her speech was purely American. Her thick gray hair was cut short at her earlobes, and her eyeglasses were decorated with rhinestones. Suzie was wearing a red T-shirt and white crops with red sandals. She looked as if she were about to go on a Golden Age cruise.

“Yeah,” Suzie said, when Olivia introduced herself, “Tommy told us about you. I’ll go get him.” Suzie was able to walk on her own with relative ease.

Left alone with Mamie, Olivia asked her how she liked the hotel.

“It’s safer than the Five Aces,” Mamie said. Her eyes were a faded blue, and her eyelids looked very thin and delicate with their trace of blue eye shadow. “We were going to get murdered in our beds there. Or right out in the street.”

“So you were glad to move?”

“Glad? Well, I don’t think ‘glad’ really covers it . . . I never have liked Texas. I loved Vegas. But I wanted to live, more than I wanted to be in Nevada.” She looked at Olivia with close attention. “I expect you’ll be that way, too.”

“Probably,” Olivia said. But it was a creepy thing to think about, and she was relieved when Tommy and Suzie returned, Tommy moving slowly with his cane and Suzie in possession of a bit of news. “We have asked if we can use what Mrs. Whitefield calls the parlor,” she said. “Mrs. Whitefield said yes.”

Olivia was relieved. The lobby was wide open, and there were several doors behind which could lurk any number of listeners. At the moment, there was no one there besides them and a sleeping man in the chair in the corner of the room, a newspaper half off his lap. He was several decades younger than the people Olivia had come to see. In fact, he seemed to be Olivia’s age.

“That’s Shorty’s grandson,” Tommy said, pointing with his cane. “He came in late, couple of days ago. He jumped out of his car and ran into the hotel like he was on fire.”

“Shush,” said Mamie. “You’ll wake him up. I think Shorty’s having his visit with the nurse.”

“Then this guy ought to be in his own room!” Tommy said. He seemed to be in a grumpy mood. Olivia wondered if Suzie had woken him from his own nap.

The parlor turned out to be a small room leading off the south side of the lobby. Olivia glanced back, and she saw that the younger man’s eyes were wide open and fixed on her. He hadn’t been asleep at all. He hadn’t wanted to talk to the old ladies, so he’d been feigning. He looked faintly amused, and as his eyes met hers, he winked. She almost smiled. His eyes are gorgeous, she thought. Brown and large and emphasized with perfectly arched dark eyebrows, he looked like someone out of an old Spanish painting. And as she thought this, he batted those long eyelashes at her. She smiled and shook her head and followed her old people.

Then she thought, It’s just like he knew what I was thinking. And she frowned. Exactly like he knew.