me much sooner if she
had, she could have purchased a police radio, which I was pretty sure she hadn’t
done, or she could have been alerted by an ex-friend of a sergeant. I didn’t
know how, but some day I was going to get even with Lou.
+++
I was concerned about
Lou. I wanted him to get help, so the next morning I placed a call to the
police psychiatrist. I let him know about Lou’s new fetish. He let me know what
the Wii Fit had done for him. I hung up and remembered that some people think
psychiatrists are the looniest of all people. I had only two other recourses,
Thelma Lou, Lou’s girlfriend, and Internal Affairs. I decided to wait before
contacting either. I was beginning to think like the one man whose body hadn’t
been taken over by the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The
Wii fanatics were everywhere. Soon, there would be only skinny people. I
reminded myself not to buy stock in any fast food restaurant, and to eat an
extra helping of dessert, unless the Blue Moon Diner quit serving dessert.
After all, Rosie had been affected, too. What if the cook is next?
Chapter Seven
Lou and I made it
through March and the first half of April without too much trouble. Well, no
trouble except I had to listen to Lou expostulate about the Wii everyday and
received a weekly report on how much weight he had lost. I was concerned about
him. His pants were slipping down, and I noticed how Lou had to move his belt
over a notch. Also, I learned that I’d lost one of my allies. Lou had had
Thelma Lou over twice to Wii. He’d Wii for a half an hour and then she’d Wii
for thirty minutes. Then, they repeated their workouts until both had Wiied for
an hour. I wasn’t convinced. If God had meant for us to Wii, He’d have put
something in the Bible about it. I challenged Lou to show me where in the Bible
we were instructed to Wii, and the best I could get out of him was something
about the body being a temple.
Luckily, the Wii hadn’t
taken over Lou’s entire life, just one hour a day and most of his conversation.
And Rosie had convinced Lou that he didn’t need to give up any of those foods
he liked, just cut back on them. Well, if Lou wanted to starve himself to death
eating only a half of a meal at a time, so be it. Less food on his plate meant
the possibility of more on mine.
Other than Lou’s
workout, our routine each day was the same as it had been. We checked out the
weather before we left the house each day to see if sunshine or rain was
forecast and what the temperature was expected to be. We’d also developed a
few friends at the Scene of the Crime, mostly old women, old men, stay-at-home
wives, and one guy who worked the night shift. A couple of days ago, Lou and
I’d finished reading John Dickson Carr’s The Three Coffins and were
about to start a work by a current mystery author. We were beginning to enjoy
our new life. At least until I received a phone call I never expected.
I was sitting at home,
lying back in my recliner, thinking about buying a computer. I couldn’t get Hershey, Pennsylvania out of my mind, so a few days earlier I asked one of the elderly
women in the reading group if she owned a computer. She responded by saying,
“Doesn’t everyone these days?” Reluctantly, I informed her that at least two
residents of Hilldale didn’t, although who knew what other changes Lou would make
in his life. This resulted in her sharing our faux-pas with the others in the
group, and immediately everyone gathered around Lou and me to encourage us to
take the plunge. For a minute it seemed like Lou and I had stepped into an A.A.
meeting by mistake. The last time I’d experienced such encouragement was when
one of the guys at the department bet on me in a pizza eating contest. When
someone asked why we wanted a computer, I told them I understood there was a
place we could go to look up information about various people and places. My
new friends told me that even a novice