Read Rundown for Free Online Page B

nothing she can do,” I said. It was fine with me if I put off seeing Cass until the wedding.
    I knew that Cass and Danny, her fiancé, were sharing our cabin, romping all over the master bedroom. Danny was supposed to be in San Diego, playing golf with his dad, a retired VIP with the state department. Cass was supposed to be working on her tan with a couple of girlfriends. My parents would not have died if they knew the truth, but this pretense spared everyone having to think about Danny and Cass giving the heirloom bird’s-eye maple bed a workout.
    â€œWe have to change the flowers,” he said. “I woke up last night with the realization that yellow roses are all wrong.”
    â€œRoses,” I said, one of Mom’s techniques, repeating a key word and letting the client vent. There was something Cass had told me about Dad, but I didn’t know how to begin to ask.
    â€œDr. Theobald has beautiful white hair. We need blue-white hybrid roses to match his coloring.” Dr. Theobald—pronounced Tibuld —is a Unitarian minister, about ninety years old, who met my father at one of the Season of Hope fund-raisers. My father is about as religious as a doorstop, but when he learned that the old gentleman was dean of the Unitarian seminary in Berkeley, my parents had begun inviting the him to the occasional party. The clergyman turned out to be a real gem, with a voice like a wildlife movie narrator. If he said, “This chardonnay is delicious,” it was like the earth itself had opened up and complimented the hostess.
    â€œThat’s dozens of long-stemmed roses,” I said, “for those wicker thingies—”
    â€œSo why not get on the phone to the florist and tell him I want the Jessica Friedlander Brodie hybrid or the April Thursday long-stems. And there’s a couple other of ideas on my tape recorder. I have to be in L.A. all day, wringing someone’s neck.”
    â€œWhose?”
    â€œThey’re planning to give the set for my show the ‘trattoria look.’ Chianti in straw, and hanging Italian sausages, and maybe some fake plastic grapes.” It was only a series of pilots, sample shows. Cass and I half hoped no network would actually buy the series. Dad was getting up too many nights, eating sourdough and Stilton, almond butter and water crackers, lasagna, leg of lamb—whatever he could get his hands on.
    â€œWhose neck?”
    â€œWhat happens when I do sushi?” he said, ignoring my question. “Or when I talk about the First Thanksgiving, with Little Sicily all over the place? I don’t want you to go running until the sun comes up.”
    â€œI is up.”
    â€œRun on the machine, that’s what it’s for. How are you feeling?”
    I said I felt good.
    â€œLook at that printout I got off the Web,” he said. “That stuff’s supposed to be better than Mace.”
    A page on the rosewood coffee table depicted a spray can with arms and legs. It was standing triumphant, biceps bulging, over a prone male body. Karate in a Can .
    â€œYou wear it clipped to your shirt. Someone messes with you, you knock him flat.”
    â€œMaybe you should just buy me a shotgun,” I said.
    Dad gave me the look he uses on headwaiters who say the table isn’t quite ready.
    Dad had to take a twelve-gauge out of the hands of a liquor-wired neighbor a couple of years before, a pensioned freeway construction exec with bladder cancer. The chief of police wrote him a letter saying Dad was the “kind of citizen Oakland needs.” For months afterward the pop of a motor scooter made Dad go white.
    I had forgotten, or maybe remembered without knowing it. Dad had even taken the novel Shogun to Goodwill because it reminded him of the Remington pump-action our fellow citizen had leveled at Dad’s face.
    â€œCome with me,” he said. “Fly down to L.A. for the day. You can meet my