We All Killed Grandma Read Free

everyone told me—Robin Britten, Mrs. Roderick Britten.
    I gave her the clipping.
    “Are the facts in it straight, Rod? Or do they have anything wrong?”
    “Pretty straight,” I said. “Probably farthest off the beam in their estimate of Grandma Tuttle’s fortune. Arch has been looking into that angle of it with a man named Hennig, a banker, who is executor of the estate, and says that after taxes and expenses and stuff there’ll be probably less than forty thousand left.”
    “You and Arch share it equally?”
    I nodded. “No other bequests, not even a cent to the housekeeper who worked for her for ten years. I’m trying to talk Arch into us giving her a thousand out of it anyway.”
    “And if Arch doesn’t kick in, you’ll probably do it out of your share.”
    “Why not?” I said. “What’s a thousand out of nearly twenty? And she’s got it coming, working there that long. Or is it a change of character for me to feel like that? Was I a tightwad before?”
    She looked away from my eyes on that. She said, “Damn you, Rod.” But not vindictively. “All right, you came here and I let you in; I suppose I might as well make a noise like a hostess. Will you have a drink?”
    I nodded and started to say that, if she had it, whisky and water was what I liked. But I remembered in time not to say it.
    She’d know that. She knew what things I liked and didn’t like better than I knew.
    She walked toward one of the doors and it opened and gave me a quick flash of kitchen white before it swung shut after her.
    She’d be busy for a few minutes and that gave me a chance to look around. I stood up and walked to the other door. It opened quietly and it led to the bedroom. I didn’t go in; I just stood in the doorway. There was a big double bed in the far corner and it was strange to look at that bed and realize that I didn’t recognize it. Like the living room the bedroom was well, but not expensively furnished. There was a door opening from it that no doubt led to the bathroom. I wondered if we’d had a tub or shower or both but it didn’t seem worth investigating.
    I closed the door quietly. I was studying one of the prints, the Van Gogh, when Robin came back carrying two drinks. The one she handed me was whisky and water. I thanked her and sat down again and she sat down again, too. With a drink in her hand she looked more relaxed, less as though she expected me to stay only a moment.
    She said, “What do you want to know, Rod?”
    “About us,” I said. “About what happened to our marriage.”
    “Why? It’s over now. It was over before you got amnesia. And in case you’ve forgotten—I mean, you
wanted
to forget it. So now that you have, why not let well enough alone?”
    “I’ll remember sometime.”
    “All right, you’ll remember sometime. And the farther in the future, the less it will matter.”
    I took a sip of my drink while I hunted for words. I said, “I’ve got to know who and what I was. It’s a lost feeling not to remember. The two years I was married to you must have been an important part of my life. Ditto, the reason or reasons why you divorced me. Especially because it was so recent. Was it a month ago? I think that’s what Arch told me.”
    “We separated a month ago. The actual divorce was Tuesday, only three days ago.”
    I sat up straight. “You mean it was
since
—” And then I didn’t see how that mattered, so I thought a moment. I said, “Listen, Robin, how’s about briefing me from the start? Where did I meet you? How long did we know one another before we were married? That sort of thing. It’ll help orient me.”
    “I was working for the Carver Advertising Agency when you started there as a copy writer three years ago. I was Mr. Carver’s private secretary. You asked me for a date the first week you worked there. We actually had our first date a month later. We went to see—”
    “Wait,” I said. “Why the month interval? Was I a slow worker? Or were you