Bonnie of Evidence Read Free Page A

I hung my head. “I’m in denial, aren’t I? Those women hate each other already and the tour has just begun.”
    “I don’t wanna be no alarmist, Emily, but we got bigger problems than them four women.”
    “We do?”
    “You bet. Team Five come up with a snappy slogan for themselves. The rest of us don’t got one.”
    I stared at her, non-plussed. “That’s a problem?”
    “You bet it is. They’re makin’ the rest of us look bad, so we’re gonna have to think of one, too.”
    “Is that going to be difficult?”
    “Emily, dear, we got one Catholic, two Lutherans, one birther, and a vegetarian on our team. How are we s’posed to compromise? That don’t give us no common ground to work with.”
    Ew . She had a point. I just hoped their diversity didn’t set them up to get sucked into knockdown-dragouts over issues of a more ideological nature—like, if Catholic priests should be allowed to marry, or, which Gilligan’s Island character was hotter, Ginger or Mary Ann? That could get really ugly.
    I gave her a hug. “Chin up. You’ll think of something.”
    “I just did. I’m gonna let Tilly figure it out.”
    Nana had three chins, blue hair, and stood four-foot-ten in her bare feet. She’d won millions in the Minnesota lottery a few years back, but the experience had changed neither her outlook nor her practical spending habits. She was the treasurer of the Legion of Mary at church, a card-carrying computer geek, and an enthusiastic subscriber to every TV channel offered by her cable provider. She had only an eighth-grade education, but given her addiction to the Discovery and Smithsonian networks, she was the smartest person I knew.
    “ Uh-oh, ” Nana fretted in a sudden panic. “I don’t mean to ditch you, dear, but I’m outta here.” Like a video playing at warp speed, she raced behind me in her size five sneakers and ducked into a shop displaying a selection of tartans and kilts on headless mannequins.
    I stared after her. What in the world? And then it hit me.
    I turned slowly.
    She was barreling toward me with her laptop slung over her shoulder in its trusty carrying case and her fannypack riding her opposite hip like an oversized jellyroll. Her little moon face was flushed from exertion, and her salt and pepper hair was disastrously windblown, but her girlish excitement made it quite apparent that she wouldn’t have missed this for the world. The tour guests knew her as “the timekeeper.”
    Nana knew her as Margaret.
    I knew her as Mom.

two
    “I haven’t had this much fun since I alphabetized the IRS forms in the new public library.”
    Mom was addicted to alphabetical order like a shopaholic is addicted to outlet malls. Nana blames the disorder on a dormant gene that apparently sprang to life when Mom started volunteering at the library after she retired. Her Facebook page lists her favorite pastime as, “Alphabetizing grocery cans in the kitchen pantry.” In fact, she gets so giddy during Fareway’s annual canned food sale that Dad has to accompany her down the soup aisle to protect her from herself. The one time she sneaked out without him, she bought so many pallets of condensed soup that she had to store them in the machine shed and break out the forklift to stack them in order—an event the family refers to as, “The Highlight of Her Life.”
    “One down, eleven to go, and if I do say so myself, the first leg went off without a hitch”—she patted her laptop case as if it were a cherished pet—“if you don’t count Team Five’s objections.”
    “What were they objecting to?”
    “Having too little time. Having no luck finding the cache. Having someone on their team named Bernice Zwerg. But I think my pep talk helped.” She flashed a self-satisfied smile. “I mentioned that Bernice was probably too modest to say, but she was the reigning champ of the two-yard dash at the Senior Center and probably had the fastest feet on the tour, so that gave them a huge advantage