The Baby Blue Rip-Off Read Free

the service had had to drop out for the summer months, I was relieved and glad to do it.
    I was one of several dozen people in Port City who had taken on this particular good deed. Doing it once a week was no big strain, especially since it was summer and I wasn’t busy with a damn thing anyway, except taking a course in literature at the college two mornings a week and writing my latest mystery novel, which mostly ran to afternoons. I could spare the time.
    There was only one irritating aspect to my getting involved with the hospital’s Hot Supper Service (as it was ingeniously titled), and that was that by the time I had done my duty for the first time, Sally and I had broken up.
    As I promised earlier, Sally isn’t going to be in this story much longer, and I wouldn’t even mention her if she hadn’t been the prime mover for getting me into one of my larger messes, playing a peripheral Stan Laurel to my center-stage Oliver Hardy. And I think it’s interesting, if irrelevant, to note how a person out on the sidelines of a certain chain of events can make so great a dent in those events without even trying.
    As far as our breakup scene goes, I’m not going into detail about it. I didn’t find her with another man; she didn’t find me with another woman. (I didn’t even find her with another woman, which would at least have been a change of pace.)
    She just got tired of me.
    And chose to tell me, of course, while we were in bed—and not sleeping, either; she had a bad habit of using that most inappropriate of occasions to bring up topics for discussion.
    Well, I was tired, too, and told her so; told her we’d just been using each other, and a good time was had by all, but good-bye. And I moved back into my house trailer on East Hill.
    But should you ever happen to pick up this book, Sally, keep reading; even though you aren’t in it anymore, stick around.
    See all the trouble you caused me.

3
    The bad thing, I thought, about my getting involved in the Hot Supper Service was the flock of old people I’d be serving. Four of them; four old ladies. God forbid I’d be asked in to chat with one of the tottering old relics. Who in hell wanted to watch the decaying creatures gumming their food, saliva and masticated glop dribbling all over their hairy-warted chins? Yuck. I accepted the Hot Supper Service as a good thing, theoretically, being a humanitarian at heart; but, like so many humanitarians, I harbored a secret dislike for humanity. Old people, particularly.
    For example: I’d see some old guy driving in a car in front of me, going thirty in a sixty-five zone, and I’d say, “Why don’t they get those senile old bastards off the road?”
    For example: I’d be in a hurry to get some money out of my bank account, and some old bag’d be ahead of me at the window, cashing her social security check and having the teller divide up the money and place it into envelopes marked “rent,” “groceries,” and so on, and I’d think, “Just pass away in your sleep, why don’t you, and save yourself the trouble.”
    But I was signed on for the duration. So there I was in my blue Dodge van, setting out to feed the elderly multitudes, with four self-lidded Styrofoam plates of hot food sitting on the floor in back. I hadn’t got around yet to carpeting and fixing the thing up, so my Styrofoam passengers got a rough ride.
    The hour or so a week I had to spend delivering the meals took me all over Port City. As a rule, Hot Supper volunteers had a single neighborhood to service, but no such luck for me. Apparently I’d been saddled with a grab-bag list of leftovers from the other routes, giving me the Port City grand tour, starting with Mrs. Fox on West Hill.
    West Hill is steep, rising out of the downtown business district, looking out over the bend of the Mississippi along which Port City nestles like a rhinestone in the navel of the land. The hill’s view has been spoiled somewhat by the factories that crowd the