Ocean's 89

Virginia rubbed her gnarled fingers across the headstone that read:

Bill William Williams IV

1939-2002

A father, husband, brother, son, and friend, beloved by all.

A tear slid down her face. It traveled the time-weathered path of her deeply wrinkled cheeks from years of living, laughing, and loving as the inscribed sign above her entryway door courtesy of her daughter’s tasteful decorative pallet indicated. She didn’t know who TJ Maxx was, but she assumed he was a popular modern-day artist akin to the Jackson Pollock or Salvadore Dali of her time. She supposed she could use the World Wide Web her son hooked up to her portable lap-top computer to look up more of his work, but what more is there really to say? What more could a person strive for in their minuscule existence outside of what had become her mantra in her later years: Live, Laugh, Love.

“Well, Bill, dear,” Virginia started, “the jig is just about up.” Her knees cracked as she forced her 89-year-old body down onto the lush green grass up-kept not by Mother Nature who was singeing the unwatered lawn of her retirement home, but by the hired, persistent groundskeepers of Bayfield Cemetery. Just another indicator of the unnatural modern processes of death. Virginia wondered if the grass would’ve fared just fine if the littered bodies of these dead were allowed to decay in their tombs rather than be pumped full of formaldehyde and locked in an underground cement box just to shrivel into a small mummified husk of their former selves.

She shook her head and corrected her thinking, turning it away from the morbidities as that was not a very Live, Laugh, Love way of thinking. She turned her thoughts instead back to Bill and her forthcoming fate.

She checked her wrist watch again. There was a photo of all ten of her grandkids piled into the background. Her eldest son connected her little square watch to her cellular phone so she could see pictures of her grandkids whenever she needed to check the time. It was a quarter past nine in the morning and the cemetery was still sleeping. A light, summer fog caressed the dew-slick ground as the beaming sun arced in the clear sky. She glanced around to find herself utterly alone amongst the deceased.

“You’re probably wondering what I am doing here,” Virginia continued. The dew pressed through her stockings and cooled her warming legs. The slick, manmade marble was contrary under her fingers. “The police will be here any minute I suppose. Either that or the final leg of the plan worked.”

She glanced around again. Looked down at her grandkids. Then again when she forgot to check the time at first glance. The photos were distracting.

“Ten, even twenty years ago, Bill dear, if you’d ask me what I’d be doing in my retirement, I never would’ve guessed to be where I am now, kneeling at your grave.” She fiddled with her velcro watch strap that itched the underside of her wrist and glanced again around at the empty headstones.

“But you know how it is, once you hit a certain age it’s one diagnosis after another. A small lump here, a just-in-case removal there. A tiny hit of chemo and you’ll be good as new. Good as new, sure. More like good as indebted.

“I’d been drowning in those stupid bills. Do those doctors really think they are giving us a second chance? You got off easy Bill, the beloved. Dead in 2002. What a year to go. Got all the hullabaloo of the passing millenia out of the way and bit the dust. Been downhill ever since, I can tell you that.

“For example--oh you’ll like this one, Bill--at this most recent nursing home, they wanted us to wear pronoun pins. Us. The old folks. We weren’t even supposed to remember our own names let alone what the devil a pronoun is. You certainly never heard of a thing like that dying like you did twenty some years ago. Or maybe you did, who knows really.” She waved a hand as if to brush away the subject altogether.

Virginia has hit up enough homes in recent years that she can Live, Laugh, and Love her way through any modern transition or evolution they throw at her. If one person wants to be a multiple, they can go right ahead. It wasn't any skin off her back. If anything, it aided in her efforts: play nice and fly right under the radar.

“But when you’re a go-with-the-flow gal like me--that’s my pronoun if you must know: a woman--then no one looks twice at you. You know how those dementia wards are these days. Old men assaulting the old ladies and the old ladies snapping their dentures at the old men. One mistakes the other for a dead wife or husband or lover and the next thing you know there is a whole tussle happening in the rec. room.

“I never tussled with anyone. I go in to get the job done and make as graceful an exit as always. But this time might’ve gone a smidge too far. Dotty was a stuck-up hussy though, you have to admit--or you would if you’d have ever met her.”

Virginia looked around again and back down at her grandkids. Mere minutes had passed. Virginia turned her gaze to the artificially landscaped hill just before the cemetery’s exit knowing that whoever crested that mound first would be her fate: uniformed police or Giovanni. Giovanni was late. She didn’t let it get to her nerves quite yet, Italians were always late. And she didn’t want to discount Giovanni, but he was certainly not the sharpest crayon in the box.

“I only kept him around after he caught me at the last home with Gladys,” Virginia continued talking to Bill. “Bless his dim heart he didn’t even understand what was happening until I spelled it out for him. But he’s not too sore on the eyes and easy to bring along for the ride: unattached and desperate for an easy life he thinks I can give him.”

Gladys had been a perfect target and she was going to be her last, but you know what they say about Icarus and the Sun’s temptation. Youngest granddaughter to one of the nation’s first ever millionaires, Gladys had pockets galore to pick. That’s all Virginia ever did: pick pockets of those who had forgotten they’d even had pockets to begin with.

“A few nipped necklaces, swiped rings, and a brooch here or there and my bills were dropping digits,” Virginia continued. She hoped talking through it with Bill would pass the time that persisted despite the stagnant air of the cemetery. “I know what you’re thinking, but I’ve never been a gambling woman--or a woman of any vice--but there was something addicting about those numbers getting smaller and smaller to come out on the other side growing.

“Mother Theresa could get addicted to that sort of feeling, I’d bet a dime on it!” She chuckled at her own ironic statement.

“Gladys might’ve been on her last days there at the previous home, and I’d done my research. Scoped out the scenario. Read through the Facebooks. She was a lonely old bat that had been dropped off and kicked to the curb without visitors since 2016.

“Her set of authentic pearls and matching earrings are what paid off my last bill. $0.00.”

She paused, massaging the arthritis in her hands and repositioning her body on the ground to ease her taxed joints. She looked at the hill and then at her grandkids.

“That’s where I was going to stop,” Virginia admitted. “In my naivety, I figured that’s all I needed, all I wanted. I was 88-years-old without more than a few hundred bucks to my name and some government pittance filtering right through the old folks’ home. I had nothing. Was given nothing. I was a working member of society. 30 years a bookkeeper. A mother and grandmother. Even did a stint on city counsel. Went through years of ailments and bills only to wind up where and with what? A husband long dead. Kids who barely call. Grandkids who don’t give a hoot. An extra few hundred grand in debt and a supposed ten more years of a life I couldn’t and didn’t want to afford.”

She drew in a great breath. Live, Laugh, Love, Virginia, Live, Laugh, Love. Her spiraling rant had winded her. It was a rant she’d let fester on the fringes of her mind for several years now. Her TJ Maxx mantra was the only thing that kept the cynicism at bay. That and her growing bank account.

“So, why stop there?” Virginia asked Bill. He was such a good listener. “I put in the effort of being a good citizen all those years. Of keeping my head down and pulling up my bootstraps. I did the chemo like my kids cried about and now they don’t even visit. Darn doctors stuck with me with a life sentence of poverty and isolation.

“Not much else to it I suppose, Bill,” Virginia sighed. “Beloved man, I’m sure you’re smart enough to connect the dots from there.

“Bounced around from home to home pawning what I could swipe and I will tell you what, those old folks have quite the stash of valuables they’re just sitting on. Probably wrote them in a Will for some kid or grandkid to throw in a drawer after they die.”

She looked again at the hill and at her grandkids. She hadn’t even met two of them. Didn’t quite care to either if she were being honest. She’d written her family off not long after they’d written off her. All the kids were the same. They would say an awkward hello and then sit with their electronic devices all hunched over in a corner. They brought her no joy.

“Giovanni was struck dumb lucky. He worked on our floor and found a handful of Gladys’s belongings in my underwear drawer. God only knows what he was doing in there. Probably some type of pervert. I could’ve played it off, pulled the confused old lady card, but I figured I’d need a handsome, young caregiver after my bank account hit high enough to retire to a condo in the Keys. I’m talking Key West, Florida, Bill William. Giovanni can get my groceries and tend to the lawn, if you catch my drift.” She winked at the grave. She shifted again, turning to lean her back against Bill’s headstone and stretch her feet out in front of her. The sun will have her stockings dry in no time. The granite was cool through her blouse. A few minutes here before her feet fell asleep and her tailbone grew sore and she’d have to shift again.

“Oh, I know he’ll be expecting some big pay out when I finally bite the dust, but that’s on him to figure out. It’s not my problem if he wants to waste a few years of his youth on a Sugar Mama who in all actuality needs to borrow a cup from the neighbor. By the time I’m six feet under, the last of the sugar will be licked clean and Giovanni will need to find a new mother.”

He should’ve been here by now, Virginia thought. The pawn shop was just around the corner. He should’ve been there and back in no time. She gave him the detailed instructions she would have for that of a five-year-old.

She hadn’t had a good feeling this morning. Dotty was particularly lucid and chatting her up more than usual: how’re the grandkids, what do you suspect they’re playing for movie night, and I sure hope they have whipped cream with the Jell-O at BINGO on Sunday. Granted her days were mixed up and they hadn’t served Jell-O at BINGO since Sandra and Dennis smuggled some to their room for post-BINGO extracurriculars. But still, she knew who she was and where she was and worse still, she knew who Virginia was.

“We should have aborted,” Virginia said aloud, renewing her monologue. “I should have taken it as a sign from God telling me I’d gone too far, flown too close to the sun.” But as soon as the words hit the dead air, a figure caught in her peripheral.

She braced herself. If Giovanni was caught, he would fold like a broken lawn chair and the cops would be on her tail any minute. But if he managed the pawn and found his way here, they’d be hitting the skies for Florida in just a few short hours.

“Turtle Dove!” Giovanni’s thickly accented voice called out as his head bobbed over the hill, coming closer toward her. By God, the dunce had done it. And like the true, beautiful idiot he was, he was waving the stack of bills high above his head in triumph.

Virginia snatched the bills as soon as he was within reach and stuffed them into her bra. She peeled herself from the ground with Giovanni’s help and cursed the deep ache that settled in her joints. Giovanni would have to rub her back later.

“My love,” Giovanni said. Virginia swallowed a scoff. “It is done, we are free! Operation Ocean's 89 is complete!”

Giovanni had named their scheme when she’d be discovered: Operation Ocean's 89. She didn’t understand the reference, but he assured her it was witty. She did not believe him.

“Good. Our flight for Florida leaves in two hours. You’re gonna get these old bones there in one piece and then we retire.”

“Magnificent, my little sparrow, however there is one last thing I must know before we start the rest of our lives together,” Giovanni began.

Virginia stopped her eyes from rolling with a slow, deliberate blink. Rest of my life more like, she thought.

“Who is this Bill William Williams on whose graveside you sit?” Giovanni’s hands were clasped to his chest as though he were about to ‘where for art thou’ his Juliette. “Why did you choose this spot for our rendezvous?”

Virginia allowed her eyes the satisfaction of hitting the back of her head this time before answering honestly, “Some chump with a stupid enough name that even a dummy like you couldn’t forget.” Satisfaction bloomed in her chest at the flinch of emotional hurt that flashed across Giovanni’s face, but he persisted nonetheless.

“Then why, pray tell, the tears?” He wiped lovingly at her cheek at the stray tear she had forgotten about.

Virginia barked out a laugh, “the darn pollen is messing with my allergies. Are you taking me to Florida or what?”

Giovanni laughed before replying, “Let’s Live, Laugh, Love my baby!”