Whatever that meant.
‘Come on, angel.’
I followed, but I was still afraid – that she would yell at me and maybe hit me and call me a tramp. But when she saw me entering the house she just smiled and wiped her hands on her dress the way she did when they were wet or she had sticky jam on her fingers. She seemed unsteady, as though she was on the verge of tipping over.
‘Hi, Jilly,’ she said.
That made me want to duck. I looked for Millroy but did not see him.
‘I like your friend a whole lot,’ Gaga said.
‘Anyway, where is he?’ I began to panic.
But Gaga was smiling. ‘Carrying out his inspection. He’s servicing the house, and that.’
Was she drunk? She wore a silly grin and her head was cocked to one side, her eyes were half closed and looked cruel and slitty. The woman terrified me. I thought her grin was a trick. At any moment she was going to attack me – grab my head and begin bashing me. She could be violent and, in spite of her large size, energetic – huffing and puffing and harmful. But today she looked big and soft, with crazy crinkled hair and those squinting nutso eyes. Was this what Millroy meant by her Babe Ruth face, plump cheeks with fur on them, like a baby monster?
‘The man said he can repair all my appliances.’ Gaga was trembling quietly, as though her motor was idling. ‘He says he has to carry out a property inspection first.’
I kept her out of reach. I said, ‘He can fix anything.’
Gaga tottered at me again.
‘He’s wicked strong, too,’ I said, to make her hesitate.
Just then Millroy appeared, so confident you would have thought he was in his own doorway.
‘It would be a very great privilege to see your restroom.’
Only I knew what this really meant, and why. And then Millroy sort of held his nose as he waded in.
He was not gone long. His expression was pained and disgusted, his mouth turned down, an obvious tingling in his fingers.
‘Quite a lot of work to be done in there,’ he said. ‘Full of distractions. Drips and stains. Hopper’s the wrong height. The seat is a beast. Frankly, I’d gut the whole business. And the other one?’
Gaga stared at him, her goony face wavering.
‘You mean you have only the one restroom, ma’am?’
Millroy’s eyes were fixed on hers.
‘A restroom ought to be clean and comfortable enough to read the scriptures in,’ Millroy said. ‘Something I often do.’
Now I realized that Gaga seemed a little sad, as it sank in – you could see it in her eyes – that Millroy was flunking her.
‘I’d love to see what you’ve done with your kitchen,’ he said.
I could not imagine what Gaga would say to this. Would she hit him? No – she smiled instead, she shuffled her dirty slippers and showed him the way.
To me, she said, ‘As you know, I have great respect for the medical profession.’
A lie, but she seemed to believe it. And it was then that I noticed she was breathing normally – not wheezing. She was relaxed, she was tired perhaps. It was her after-dinner mood, when she was full of food, having finished a huge meal of take-away fried clams and onion rings from Winky’s Clam Shack or a Centerville pizza, when she heaved herself into a chair to watch the news, when she might even burp and say, ‘That’s funny, Jilly. I’m not hungry anymore.’ I could see she was not going to hit me. She turned her moo-cow eyes from me to