A Pain in the Tuchis: A Mrs. Kaplan Mystery Read Online Free

other residents at meals and in the lounge or the garden. “I’m much too tough an old bird to stay down for long,” Vera said to Mrs. K and me one sunny day in the garden. “I’ll go down kicking and screaming, I can tell you.” I think we all believed her. It certainly looked like whatever had tried to knock her down had failed miserably.
    Almost from the time Vera arrived at the Home, her son, Daniel, a pharmacist, would come to visit her regularly. In fact, he would be there almost every afternoon after leaving the pharmacy and before going home. “If it weren’t for my Danny living in the community and working so close to the Home, I never would have come here,” Vera said shortly after she moved in. Of course she then had to add, “There sure isn’t much else to recommend this place.”
Nu,
that was Vera. Would it kill her to say something nice? Perhaps.
    As he was at the Home nearly every day, we all got to know Daniel quite well, including Mrs. K and myself. He seemed to be a real
mensch,
a good person, very friendly. And he was very attentive to his mother, even before she fell ill. Vera, in turn, never said a bad word about Daniel, at least not that I ever heard. She obviously loved her son very much.
    Mrs. K and I both enjoyed talking with Daniel when we had the chance and found he had both
saichel
and a nice sense of humor. But Mrs. K always took a special interest in him. I believe it was because he reminded her of her own son, named Adam, who had planned to be a lawyer. He joined the Air Force, which after he served would have paid for his law school tuition; but he never got the chance: he was on a reconnaissance mission somewhere overseas when his plane went down, with no survivors. (
Zikronah livrakhah—
may his memory be for a blessing.) Mrs. K seldom speaks of her Adam, whom I did not know, and I do not ask. But I have seen pictures, and Daniel Gold has a close enough resemblance to make me feel certain she sees a lot of her son in him.
    Even before her illness to which I am referring, in fact as long as we knew her, Vera had a whole alphabet soup of pills that she took in the morning and evening. She was one of these people who, when they travel, have to carry an extra suitcase to hold all the medicines. Generally the Home’s nursing staff would help residents with their medications, but Daniel had decided from the time his mother moved into the Home that he would help her with her evening pills.
    “I’m here every afternoon anyway,” he told Mrs. K, “so I might as well be useful. And I’m sure my mother would rather I give her her meds than have a stranger do it.” This was no doubt true. Vera clearly appreciated his looking after her that way, rather than some busy staff person. Daniel became very familiar with what Vera was taking so he could be sure she got the right medicines, in the right order, at the right times. And of course being a pharmacist himself, he would know better than anyone about such things. But despite this, they actually made him and Vera sign a paper saying that the Home would not be responsible if Daniel gave his mother the wrong medicines. “Isn’t it ironic, Ida?” Mrs. K said. “As a local pharmacist, he has probably filled most of those prescriptions himself, maybe even these very ones for his mother. I’m surprised they don’t make us all sign a paper before dinner saying we will not blame them if we swallow our dentures and choke to death.”
    “Not so loud,” I said, “or you will give them ideas.”
    And so Daniel became what you would call a regular fixture at the Home, sometimes even staying for dinner with his mother. It was good to have a younger man around as almost a part-time resident.
    About a month before
Rosh Hashanah,
Vera’s illness—or maybe another illness not related to what she already had, I do not know—became much more serious. Mrs. K and I went to see her in her room, but she was too ill to talk to us. It was probably the