DOUBLE MINT Read Online Free PDF

undercover. To let an employee in the front door (a misty beveled glass tarnished
     copper number wide enough to drive a car through) would be to blow my cover. So I
     had to call Sears, like everyone else.
    “You say you live where, lady?”
    “At the Bellissimo. The twenty-ninth floor.”
    “You’re pulling my leg.”
    “I am not.”
    “Okay, here it is, and the computer says we sent someone to fix it two weeks ago.”
    “It’s broken again.”
    “There’s actually fourteen pages of repairs here, lady.”
    A sad fact I was well aware of.
    “Maybe it’s time for you to think about a new refrigerator.”
    Wouldn’t that be nice? We couldn’t get the old refrigerator out to put a new one in .
    A month into our marriage and new living quarters, after six visits with six different
     Sears repairmen and no luck, I dragged Bradley into it. I hid in the voodoo pantry,
     so deep, dark, and cavernous, I’m positive this is where Magnolia kept the dead bodies,
     while he met with the Sears appliance service manager and a man from the Bellissimo
     engineering department named Ding Ding. (I wish I were kidding.) (Surely to one of
     the Jesuses it was just a nickname.)
    “Mr. Cole, I don’t know how they ever got this refrigerator in here, but I can assure
     you, we can’t get it out without a crane and tearing down a wall or two. If this refrigerator
     comes out whole, it’ll have to go down the side of the building. The freight elevators
     can’t even hold the weight .”
    “Then you’re going to have to repair it.”
    “I’m telling you, Mr. Cole, we’re at our wits’ end with this monster.” I heard him
     tap on the blood red doors. (The refrigerator has four doors. Four. All red.) “For
     one, it’s a dinosaur. I was in first grade when this thing was built. It’s a Jenn-Air
     custom, we can’t find anyone who knows a thing about it, and there’s not parts for
     it or a manual on it, and we’ve done just about everything we can possibly do.”
    “And you can’t get it out?”
    “You see that?” Ding Ding pointed to the top of the refrigerator, where it disappeared
     into the ceiling. “The problem is none of the wiring or plumbing is behind the refrigerator.
     Or even below it. It’s all up top. The only way to get it out is to come down through
     the ceiling.”
    “Go right ahead.”
    “Well, we can’t. We’re right below Mrs. Sanders’s closet. I’ve already tried that
     route. I filled out the paperwork and my boss shot back that he didn’t care what kind
     of repairs were needed below the Sanders’s residence, the wife would never go for it, and we needed to figure something else out.”
    Bianca Sanders couldn’t care less if we had a refrigerator or not. I could have told
     Ding Ding that.
    “Now, if you could move this saint somebody,” Ding Ding said.
    Yes. In my kitchen, across from a massive gold-inlaid island was a five-foot-tall
     garden angel on a two-foot cement cube base, with a wing span of four feet, made of
     moldy cast resin, and, bonus, it was a fountain. It cried black tears that pooled
     into its own hands. When we’d been married two weeks, I spent my first night alone
     here. On my way to refill my glass of wine, I bumped into the angel. Barely bumped,
     like grazing the sofa or catching the corner of the bed. Boom. I went down—spread
     eagle on the floor, passed out, and somehow on the way down, I cracked my head open.
     That angel knocked me flat on the ground. Probably with its moldy breath. I came to
     later with a bloody line across my forehead and blood in the middle of both of my
     palms.
    Like Jesus.
    “’Cause there’s plumbing behind this statue, see?” Ding Ding told him. “And we can
     get a new refrigerator here.”
    There were four thousand places to put a new refrigerator in the Fat Tuesday Fort.
     Every time we were fed up and ready to order one and plug it up in our bedroom, or
     beside the television, or in one of the many powder rooms,