Cockeyed by Richard Stevenson Read Free Book Online Page B

got caught,” Art said by way of clarification.
    I asked, “How did your mother live, Hunny? With no income to speak of.”
    “We all helped out. I paid her oil and electric and cable, and Miriam and Lewis dropped off groceries. We all pitched in one time for a new roof. For a number of years Mom worked off and on at McDonald’s. Then her mind started slipping a couple of years ago and she became frail at around the same time. She had to get out of the house, so we sold it and that’s when we got her into Golden Gardens. The house proceeds paid for the nursing home until that money ran out, and then the home said Mom would have to turn over her Social Security every month.
    We told the Brienings, and they got mad and said all the money hadn’t been paid back yet and they might have to go to the police.
    That was last month. So I bought two hundred dollars’ worth of Instant Warren tickets, hoping I would win and could pay off the Brienings, and — praise de Lawd! — I did win.”
    “But now, apparently,” Art said, “the Brienings want half a billion dollars to shut them up, not just what Mother Rita still owes.”
    Lawn said, “This is just totally bizarre. It’s no wonder Nelson is so distraught that he missed a dinner engagement.”
    “The Brienings have been leaving phone messages since I won the lottery,” Hunny said, “but I’ve just been tossing them in the laundry basket with the other requests. I did mean to get to them, but I thought it wasn’t going to hurt if we all did a little partying first and got mellow and the friggin’ Brienings could just wait their turn. But they must have gotten antsy and called Nelson. The poor lad. First he has to put up with his rude, crude, proud-to-be-lewd Uncle Hunny, and now he has to deal with these shakedown artists from Cobleskill. The embarrassments for Nelson just keep a-rollin’ in, poor sweetie-pie.”
    The door to the living room opened again, and this time Nelson himself walked through it. He looked frazzled and bordering on the unkempt.

    CoCkeyed 41
    Nelson said, “Uncle Hunny, I don’t know if you want to go out there. Probably not. But there are some more TV people out front, and they say they want to interview you and it would be best if you agreed to talk to them.”
    Hunny looked uncharacteristically nonplussed. “At two in the morning? Who are they? Channel Ten? Channel Thirteen?
    Channel Six? What is this?”
    Nelson said, “They showed me their ID from Focks News in New York. There are two of them — a woman and a cameraman
    — and they say they’re from The Bill O’Malley Show .”

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    “This is a damned impertinence,” Hunny said. “Tell them I’ll only talk to Anderson Cooper.”
    “Bill O’Malley is doing a report,” Nelson said, “on some organization that wants the lottery commission to take back your winnings because they object to a state agency providing money for immoral purposes. Have you not heard about this? When they told me, my heart just sank.”
    “Oh, some PR woman from the lottery called this afternoon.
    She said not to worry, that as long as I was eighteen years old and didn’t have a relative who worked for the lottery commission, I was the legal winner. Some other reporters called, too, but they went into the laundry basket.”
    “These O’Malley people have just driven up from the city, they said. One of your neighbors is an O’Malley viewer and called them and said you were partying and driving everybody in the neighborhood crazy with the noise. I can only begin to imagine how accurate that description was.”
    “That was earlier. Anyway, what immoral purposes? There’s nothing immoral about playing some peppy dance music and throwing a party in your own home.”
    Lawn said, “I’d be willing to bet that there is a good deal more to it than that.”
    “It’s some religious group,” Nelson said. “The Family Preservation Association of Albany County. I told the Focks News people it