The Baby Blue Rip-Off Read Free Page B

house, one tangible memory of a more prosperous time.
    “Our boy George, our only child George,” she said, “runs the Allstate insurance office here in town. And George has tried to get me to let go of this old house, but I won’t do it.”
    “I don’t blame you.”
    “Oh, he’s been good about it, considering. Comes over and does the lawn for me, and once a week his wife helps me clean the old place. That son of mine is why you’re here tonight, young man, because he’s the one who got me into this Hot Supper business. Said he was afraid I wasn’t eating proper. And youknow something? He was right. Kind of lonely cooking for one in that big drafty kitchen.”
    The thoughtful son was something of a running refrain along the old Hot Supper trail. Only in the case of the Cooper sisters, it was a thoughtful nephew.
    The Cooper sisters were twins; whether they were identical twins or not, I couldn’t tell you. They were similarly built, being graceful, willowy old gals who must’ve been lookers in their day. I tend to think they
were
identical twins, though, as they both looked much the same. But then so do most eighty-year-old women.
    They lived on the bottom floor of a two-story house; the upper floor they rented out to some college students, who played very loud rock music up there. Neither sister seemed to mind. Or hear, for that matter. The house was a pleasant old yellow clapboard, hardly a match for Mrs. Fox’s mansion on West Hill; just a sturdy, well-kept house in a neighborhood of similar houses. The neighborhood shared the valley between East and West Hills with the downtown area, a belt of churches and schools separating the business and residential districts.
    The Cooper sisters had been living together for a long time—all their lives, I supposed—and probably in this same house; only in fairly recent years had they decided, for practical reasons (both monetary and physical), to rent out the upper floor, and to move all their furniture onto the lower floor. For that reason their living quarters tended to be cluttered; there were chairs enough to seat a meeting of the DAR, old photos of relatives and old paintings by relatives, tall cabinets brimming with china and bric-a-brac, and all the doilies and knickknacks in the world.
    These sisters fit my stereotypical idea of old folks like round pegs in round holes; if I’d thought the intelligent and gracious Mrs. Fox was evidence of the fallacy of my downbeat thinking about the elderly, here was ample rebuttal.
    Or so you might think.
    Because the Cooper sisters proved me wrong. Just seeing the Cooper sisters showed me the error of my ways. Stay with me and you’ll see what I mean.
    Miss Gladys Cooper opened the door, with sister Miss Viola Cooper right behind.
    “Why, Mr. Mallory,” Miss Gladys Cooper said, “we haven’t seen you for years, tell me...”
    “... what have you been doing since last we saw you?” Miss Viola Cooper said, picking up her sister’s train.
    I might as well come out and tell you that the Cooper sisters had been living together so long that they had become a single person, in a manner of speaking. Now I mean just that—in their manner of speaking, they were a single person. They thought so much alike, and each knew her sister’s mind so well, that either could complete a sentence for the other, with neither noticing.
    “Hello, Miss Cooper,” I said. “Hello, Miss Cooper.”
    “Well, good evening, Mr. Mallory, and to what...”
    “... do we owe this unexpected, and rather overdue, visit?”
    “I’m the Hot Supper delivery boy. See?” And I displayed the lidded plates in my hands.
    “What happened to the Petersens?” Miss Gladys Cooper said. “They were such a nice young couple. But of course that doesn’t mean...”
    “... we aren’t delighted to see you again, after so long a time. Come in, come in.”
    I came in.
    Miss Viola Cooper took the dinners into the adjacent dining room (most of the brimming