LITMIR.BIZ

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was around twenty-five years ago. A long time. Still, Uncle Murray had left us too young. They say a modern person at sixty-something is equivalent healthwise to the previous generation’s fifty-somethings.

      Or something.

      I guess Murray’s leaky aortic valve hadn’t gotten word of current life-expectancy trends.

      In the photo, we were posing by his enormous kitchen range. Murray had pulled over a chair and lifted me onto it, and I’d knelt so I could reach the pots and pans on his stovetop as I helped him cook. Smiling as we clinked spatulas for the camera, we wore aprons he’d bought us with the slogan “Schmutz Happens” in front.

      Cute.

      I leaned back in my chair, and it squealed like a strangled monkey before clunking against a wobbly stack of cartons behind me. The boxes were heavy and full, and I hadn’t yet peeled back their flaps to pore through their contents. I mentioned that the office was a wreck, right? The USS Murray. Although I’d cleared a lot of junk off the desktop, a memo spindle in one corner stood crammed with telephone messages in Thomasina’s handwriting. Most were from Artemis Duff, my uncle’s friend, longtime drummer—and accountant.

      One of Murray’s original band members, Artie was one of those rare musicians who’d been grounded enough as a young man to get a college degree and a day job. He’d been dashing in and out of the restaurant for weeks, blizzards of loose paper spilling from the overstuffed ledgers he took from the office. Since we were overdue for a conversation about the tangled state of my uncle’s finances, I figured I’d wait before tossing the memos, just in case the two men hadn’t been caught up—a distinct possibility given Murray’s chronic disorderliness. There were record books, overstuffed manila folders, and loose mounds of paperwork just about everywhere around me. A little digging had revealed some metal file cabinets, a credenza, and a couple of extra chairs beneath the jumbled mess, and I had a hunch that running a giant vacuum cleaner over the room might bare a few more pieces of furniture. Hopefully, there’d be nothing too gross decomposing among them.

      Aside to public health inspectors: I jest.

      The clutter wasn’t my doing. It had been part and parcel of my inheritance, coming along with the restaurant downstairs. In all truth, I’d probably had enough time to straighten up the office. It had been over three months since my move to Nashville. But a whole list of to-dos took precedence…or was it a list of excuses?

      Whatever term fit, I knew I’d get around to the unenviable task before long. I’m very structured when it comes to work, having spent almost a decade sorting out corporate books at a boutique forensic accounting firm on Wall Street. My career at Thacker Consulting was basically about clearing trails through tangled arithmetical woods, and I’d become very systematic in my professional habits. Out of necessity rather than disposition, I concede.

      Housekeeping was another story, though I try to avoid slobbette status. Losing one of my cats under a pile of dirty wash would be tragic and inhumane.

      A slow, thoughtful breath slipped out over the unlit cigarette in my lips. Then I tilted forward to study another picture of Murray, one I’d brought from New York and stood on the opposite end of the desk from the memo spindle. This time my chair’s rickety springs made just the ittsiest bittsiest of squeaks, that’s how careful I was not to further destabilize the Leaning Tower of Cartons.

      The photo was professionally taken—I always thought of it as his “guitar headshot.” Murray gripping the neck of a Les Paul with both hands, his shirt black with white piping and pearl snaps. Broad-nosed, full-lipped and dark complected, his male-pattern baldness hidden by a flashy white felt cowboy hat with a silver buckle and whiskey-colored edging around the brim, he could have been described as a Semitic Garth Brooks. But though he’d gone for the macho-introspective look for the shoot, there was a wicked humor in his eyes that I’d never seen from Garth.

      At the bottom, in bold metallic Sharpie ink, he’d written:

      Keep Ridin’ Gwennie!

      My Heart To Yours

      Uncle M

      My eyes lingered on the inscription. After a while, they started to sting.

      “Keep ridin’,” I read aloud, plucking the cigarette out of my mouth to hold it between my fingers.

      I was trying. I really was. My ex-husband had scammed his investors out of their life savings even while cheating on me with a flock of silicone-accessorized pole dancers. When he got caught redhanded at both, we’d all wound up sharing the losses.

      I’d been left heartbroken as well as broke. Or nearly broke. Incapable of stooping too low, Phil had secretly blown most of my personal assets along with his clients’, and I’d sunk nearly every cent I had left into the condo and reopening the deli.

      “I have to keep riding, Uncle Murray,” I said quietly. “You know I hate feeling sorry for myself. You know. But maybe I do a little right now. Because another fall like the last one and not all the deli’s horses or—”

      I snipped off the end of the sentence, unwilling to finish it. Everyone in my family had called Murray a hopeless dreamer, but I’d always seen him as a bright, free spirit without a grain of pessimism in his bones. Someone not all the world’s weight could crush.

      It might have disappointed him to hear me say that any fall would stop me from pulling my broken pieces together and climbing back up on my horse. No matter how badly I was hurting.

      I exhaled again and checked my wristwatch. Half past midnight already. The kitties would be starved for their eight-hundred-thirty-ninth absolute last meal of the day. My, how time flew when somebody croaked in your restaurant and you had trouble choosing your comfort candy.

      Setting down my cigarette, I dragged a palm across my eyes and appraised the Goo Goo and Nestlé bars. Then I reached for the latter, and made a crinkly racket tearing open its wrapper. I owed Cazzie an objective review, and thought it would’ve been unfair to form an opinion of something new and untried in my current frame of mind.

      Not that I was too, too upset or anything.

      But the wetness on my hand from wiping my eyes gave the chocolate a weirdly salty taste as I scoffed it down.

      Chapter Three

      The morning after the karaoke calamity, I was having my regular Saturday breakfast with Cazzie Watts in the abundant sunshine bathing her kitchen table. The window was wide open, its yellow lace curtains parted to admit the scent of garden lilies.

      “Caz, I’m a gefilte fish out of water,” I said.

      “That doesn’t sound good,” Cazzie said. “But you know what’s worse?”

      “What?”

      “Being a gefilte fish in water,” Cazzie said. “Well, if by water you mean a lake or the ocean.”

      I looked across the table at her. For the uninitiated, gefilte fish is a type of food, not a fish per se, though the recipe does contain fish as its main ingredient. You mix ground whitefish, matzo meal, eggs, carrots, and onions together in balls or patties and poach them in seasoned broth.

      Soooo…gefilte fish can’t swim in water. Or even float. Since they’re cooked patties, get it?

      Caz’s little witticism wasn’t bad. Never mind that the qualifying clause had cost her some pithiness points, it ordinarily might have gotten a half smile out of me. I couldn’t manage one, however, having started the day feeling pretty cooked myself. I’d applied super-concealer to the dark, puffy bags under my eyes, and lifter cream to their droopy lids, but had no illusions about the combo making me look half as fresh as the breeze riffling the curtains. In fact, my cosmetic objective was very modest…say, to avoid being mistaken for a female Morlock.

      “I mean it,” I said after a moment. “It’s like I’m totally out of my element.”

      “It wouldn’t be the first

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