My mother and my grandmother looked at each other.
“What?” I asked. “What?”
“He was probably taking care of some personal business,” my mother said. “You don't want to bother yourself with it.”
“What's the big secret?”
Another exchange of looks between my mother and grandmother.
“There's two kinds of secrets,” Grandma said. “One kind is where nobody knows the secret. And the other kind is where everybody knows the secret, but pretends not to know the secret. This is the second kind of secret.”
“So?”
“It's about his honeys,” Grandma said.
“His honeys?”
“Fred always has a honey on the side,” Grandma said. “Should have been a politician.”
“You mean Fred has affairs? He's in his seventies!”
“Midlife crisis,” Grandma said.
“Seventy isn't midlife,” I said. “Forty is midlife.”
Grandma slid her uppers around some. “Guess it depends how long you intend to live.”
I turned to my mother. “You knew about this?”
My mother took a couple deli bags of cold cuts out of the refrigerator and emptied them on a plate. “The man's been a philanderer all his life. I don't know how Mabel's put up with it.”
“Booze,” Grandma said.
I made myself a liverwurst sandwich and took it to the table. “Do you think Uncle Fred might have run off with one of his girlfriends?”
“More likely one of their husbands picked Fred up and drove him to the landfill,” Grandma said. “I can't see cheapskate Fred paying for the cleaning if he was going to run off with one of his floozies.”
“You have any idea who he was seeing?”
“Hard to keep track,” Grandma said. She looked over at my mother. “What do you think, Ellen? You think he's still seeing Loretta Walenowski?”
“I heard that was over,” my mother said.
My cell phone rang in my shoulder bag.
“Hey, Cupcake,” Morelli said. “What's the disaster?”
“How do you know it's a disaster?”
“You left messages on three different phones plus my pager. It's either a disaster or you want me bad, and my luck hasn't been that good today.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Now?”
“It'll only take a minute.”
THE SKILLET IS a sandwich shop next to the hospital and could be better named the Grease Pit. Morelli got there ahead of me. He was standing, soda in hand, looking like the day was already too long.