Wishful Thinking Read online

  “I have an idea.” Cass rolled down her window. “I’m thinking we’ll be able to follow our noses.”

  Phil rolled down her window as well and put her head out, taking a deep breath of the humid Florida air. She withdrew when she caught whiff of something that smelled like burning hair and rotten eggs. “Ugh! Is that Nana’s potion?”

  Rory rolled down her own window and took a sniff. “Yup, that smells like the latest batch all right. She spent all night in the kitchen making it. I tried to get her to stop but you know Nana. She’s so stubborn when she decides she wants something.”

  Josh had rolled down his window as well and he took a deep whiff of the unmistakable miasma floating on the breeze as he parked the car. “Wow.” He got a strange look on his face as he turned toward Phil. “That smells terrible. And yet…” He took another deep breath and frowned. “And yet, I kinda like it. Is that weird?”

  Cass looked grim. “She must have perfected it.”

  “Well she couldn’t get much farther from perfection,” Phil pointed out, thinking of the debacle at the bowling alley. “Come on, we’d better go get her.”

  They left the car and followed their noses to a low gray building that had ramps instead of steps, for easy wheelchair access. But long before they reached the door, they could hear the commotion going on inside.

  “Hurry!” Phil reached for her sisters’ hands, feeling the tingle of power, and dragged them toward the entrance. “Who knows what she’d gotten herself into now!”

  They hit the door running with Phil in the lead. But it opened onto a scene of such confusion that for a moment they all just stood there, stunned. The room had been set up for a bingo game, with rows of long, thin tables covered with paper cards and piles of dried kidney beans to use as markers. At the front of the room a smaller table held a large plastic bingo ball filled with numbered ping pong balls. It was the kind that turns with a crank until one of the ping pong balls pops out the spout. But aside from one elderly woman who was quietly nibbling her pile of dried beans, no one was sitting at the tables. No one was working the bingo ball or calling numbers and no one was marking their cards.

  Instead, everyone was at the front of the room in a teeming mass, not a single one of them under the age of seventy-five. They weren’t standing around talking as the Eagle Scouts had been the night before in Splitsville, either. Instead, arms were waving and people were shouting. As she watched, Phil saw one elderly man brandish his cane at another man who looked even older.

  “She’s mine, I tell you! I saw her first!” he yelled, whopping his neighbor with the wooden cane. “You get away from her, Smithers!”

  “She’s my angel!” the other man yelled in a hoarse, cracked voice. “She doesn’t want anything to do with you, Bernstein!” As Phil watched in horror, he raised his walker and used it like a lion tamer uses a chair, fending off further strikes with the cane and trying to push the other man to the ground. The entire room reeked of the horrible potion and the shouting was so loud Phil was tempted to drop her sisters’ hands and put her fingers in her ears.

  In the middle of the mêlée, Nana was standing her ground with a man who looked to be at least ninety gripping her hand tightly. Today she wore a hot pink pantsuit and a pleased expression on her plump, pretty face. She was actually enjoying herself, Phil thought dismally as the battle royal continued. Nana always had liked causing a scene.

  “Now, now, gentlemen, there’s no need to fight over me.” Nana’s silvery voice rang out over the confusion. “I’m sure we can work this out in a civilized manner. Maybe I can go out for a date with each one of you on a different night.”

  “You’re not dating Harold!” screeched a woman who, if possible, looked even older than the man who was holding Nana’s hand in a death grip. She had fluffy white hair with a pale blue tint and she was wearing an old fashioned pair of horn-rimmed glasses. “He’s my husband, you hussy! And if you think you can bring your painted, perfumed self over here and break up a marriage that has lasted for sixty-five years then you’ve got another think coming!”

  “She’s got my Benjy too!” shouted another little old lady whose salt and pepper hair was twisted into a scanty bun at the back of her neck. She pointed to a man who appeared to be in his eighties standing on Nana’s other side, trying to nibble on her ear with his false teeth. “Fifty-five years together and he never cheated on me once. Now just look at him!”

  “Wow,” Josh muttered and Phil turned to see him staring wide-eyed at the scene in front of them. “Is that, uh, your grandmother in the pink pantsuit?” he asked, giving Phil a sidelong glance.

  Phil felt her cheeks begin to heat. He was totally appalled, just like Christian had been. “I’m afraid so. Nana, um, loves being the center of attention. You just wait here—we’ll go get her.” There was a new outcry and she saw that one of the little old ladies—the one with the horn-rimmed glasses—had tried to slap Nana and missed. Instead, her wrinkled hand connected with her friend’s cheek. The second lady’s false teeth flew out of her mouth at the impact and skittered across the floor reminding Phil of a pair of those wacky wind-up walking teeth you see in joke shops.

  “Help!” yelled the senior citizen who had been de-toothed. “My theeth! Thombody get my theeth!”

  “Oh my God, what a mess,” Cass muttered. “Come on, Phil. We’d better get in there before somebody breaks a hip.”

  They waded into the crowd of Peaceful Beach residents, dodging canes and walkers until they reached their grandmother. Nana was watching breathlessly as the action unfolded around her, no doubt feeling like the star of a movie featuring very old actors.

  “Nana!” Phil shouted. “Nana, come away from here. Somebody’s going to get hurt!”

  “Oh, but it’s so exciting!” Nana smiled, her plump cheeks a girlish pink. “And I hate to disappoint my new beaus.”

  “Nana, these men are spoken for.” Cass nodded at the angry little old ladies who were trying to get through the crowd to rescue their husbands from her grandmother’s evil clutches. “Besides, they’re too old for you.”

  “But you told me to find someone my own age!” their grandmother protested, pointing at Cass. “And besides, they’re very charming.”

  “Charming or not, we have to get you out of here,” Phil said, fending off a cane with her elbow.

  “Yeah, Nana, come on!” Rory insinuated herself between her grandmother and the man who was trying to nibble her ear. Slowly the three sisters formed a half circle around their grandmother, just as they had the night before.

  “Well, if I must…” Nana looked disappointed but at least she seemed willing to come away from the senior citizen riot she’d caused. However, it didn’t look like the seniors were ready to let her go. Phil looked around in dismay at the sea of wrinkled, angry faces.

  “It’s the potion, same as last time,” she shouted to her sisters. “Rory, do you still have that breath spray?”

  “Sorry, Phil. We used it all up last night.”

  “Crap.” Cass looked around, frowning. “Well, what the hell are we going to do? They won’t let us through—the men all want to hump Nana’s leg and the women all want to kick her ass.”

  “Young lady, watch your language.” Nana sounded shocked.

  “We need a distraction,” Phil yelled. “Something to take their minds off Nana. They’re not going to let us go as long as they’re all fixated on her.” Someone stamped down hard on her foot with the rubber tip of a cane and tears of pain sprang to her eyes. What a ridiculous way this would be to die, she thought. Mauled to death by senior citizens.

  Suddenly a deep voice boomed above the roar of the angry elderly crowd. “I—nineteen,” it shouted and several of the seniors turned to see where it was coming from. “B—forty-four,” the voice continued loudly. “Come on, folks—back to your seats. You’re missing the numbers. N—twelve.”

  More and more heads were turning to see where the voice was coming from, Phil’s among them. She was