Free Cockeyed by Richard Stevenson

mau-mau them and they’ll just go poof.
    Anyway, I should soon get an inkling as to what I am dealing with. I’m going to drive out to Cobleskill this afternoon.”
    Something somebody was saying on Meet the Press caught Timmy’s attention, and then my cell phone went off.
    “Strachey.”
    “Don, I need your help,” Hunny said, his voice shaky. “Can you drive over to East Greenbush? Art and I came out to Golden Gardens to see Mom. But she’s gone.”
    Gone? “Hunny, do you mean that your mother has passed away?” This could solve certain problems.
    “No, she’s just not here . And nobody knows where Mom went. ”
    I said I’d be there in ten minutes.
    § § § § §
    “They say they’re going to have to notify the police,” Hunny said. “They’re searching the premises one more time, and if Mom doesn’t turn up they are going to have to call the sheriff ’s office.
    I’m thinking maybe they shouldn’t wait. I mean, they found her wheelchair by the front door, for heaven’s sake. It sounds like she somehow just left. Got out the door and wandered away somewhere.”
    “There’s a receptionist,” I pointed out. “Or isn’t she always at her desk?”
    Art said, “We’ve come in here when she’s back out of sight in the office, catching some zees, or trimming her nose hairs, or whatever.”
    “Mom rides around in that chair — she calls it her taxi to nowhere — but she can walk in her slow, rickety way. There was nothing to prevent her from strolling right out the door and —

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    what? Hitching a ride to almost anyplace.”
    “The other doors are alarmed,” Art said, “but not the front.”
    “What was she wearing when she was last seen?”
    “Just her bathrobe and slippers. Mom has been meticulous about her appearance all her life. Or she was until recently. She might not have been aware that she was dressed somewhat inappropriately for appearing in public.”
    I was standing and Hunny and Art were seated on a bench in the corridor outside the administrator’s office. Elderly men and women in various stages of inert disrepair were slumped in wheelchairs up and down the hallway. Some had looked up at me as I walked in, but most took no notice. The place was decorated with pretty-posy wall stencils, under the apparent assumption that none of the inmates would have found Motherwell interesting or gotten a charge out of a Munch or two. The hall we were in did not smell fetid, but the stench of disinfectant was not much of a substitute.
    “I talked to Mom yesterday afternoon,” Hunny said, “and she told me how much she was looking forward to my visit. The staff here had told Mom about me winning the lottery even before I called her on Thursday, so I guess everybody here knew I was coming. And I told Mrs. Kerisiotis, the administrator, that I would donate new flat-screen TVs to all the rooms. That went over big, and I have to say, it went through my mind that Mom might get a little extra tLC as a result.”
    Art said, “Hunny also offered to have the dietician sent on a long trip to Hawaii and replaced by somebody who could cook, but nobody here has said any more about that.”
    “Was yesterday afternoon the last time you spoke to your mother?” I asked.
    “Not long after I got home from your office.”
    “And she sounded normal?”
    “Normal? Well, normal for Mom in the past couple of years is not exactly what Dr. Joyce Brothers would call normal.

    60 Richard Stevenson
    Sometimes she’s her good old self. Other times she forgets things and people. And she gets frustrated and mad. A couple of weeks ago one of the nurses told me that Mom had thrown her Depends at an aide and told people to stop treating her like a baby. I asked her about this, but she said she didn’t remember doing it, and we both had a good laugh over that one.”
    Hunny and Art both stood up as a tiny middle-aged woman wearing a blue business suit, a pink ruffled collar and a huge brooch that looked