That year my Aunt Ellen gave us a large ornate cuckoo clock for Christmas. We'd never even hinted at wanting such a baroque monstrosity, but UPS brought it on the 13th of December, and I spent a feverish evening putting it together and hanging it on the living room wall -- the cast iron pine cones kept falling off their chains and gouging blonde dents in the oak flooring.
In the event, Aunt Ellen died right after the New Year.
"She's not around anymore, so why don't you take that thing down already?" asked my wife one morning as we were peeling grapefruit for breakfast.
"Yeah, okay" I replied, dodging a squirt of grapefruit juice. "When I get home tonight I'll take it down."
But that night we were both tired and cranky, and went out to eat at Embers, where they have the best onion rings in the universe, and forgot about the cuckoo clock. We had turned off the cuckoo sound the very day I hung it up, and let the cast iron pine cones run down, so it was pretty easy to forget -- if you just didn't look at that particular wall.
Then Susan got pregnant, and ran away with our yoga instructor -- who she told me, in a note, was the father of the child. I never saw her again.
I canceled my membership in that particular yoga studio and took a new job far away in Perth Amboy as team leader of an Animal Rescue unit for the city.
I brought nothing but my clothes with me from the old house. Everything else, including the cuckoo clock, got donated to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee.
My new job kept me busy, and, what with chasing dogs and stray pot bellied pigs around on foot, kept me physically fit -- each night I came home exhausted and embraced sleep like it was my new lover. I aspired to wholesomeness, and felt it was just around the corner.
Then I ate some bad clams at an Italian restaurant and got food poisoning. There were complications, so I stayed in the hospital for five days. During which my Uncle Wally, Aunt Ellen's husband, came to visit me. He asked how I had liked the cuckoo clock. I lied and told him it was a cherished item that I could never part with.
"Good" he said smugly. "Your Aunt Ellen was crazy, y'know. She made me put a certified check for twenty-thousand dollars in one of the hollow pine cone thingies, which I bet you haven't found yet, have you?"
"No" I said weakly.
"Well, when you get out make sure you retrieve the check and cash it -- they're good for about four years after they're issued and then the bank won't honor them anymore."
"Okay, thanks" was all I could manage in reply.
A little later that day my mother came to see me. She had flown in from Milwaukee and was staying at the Regency Hilton, where, she told me breathlessly, there had been a murder in the alleyway right under her tenth story window the night before. Then she asked if Uncle Wally had been in to see me. I told her he had.
"Has he been going on about that stupid certified check he supposedly left you in the cuckoo clock?" she asked me.
"What do you mean supposedly?" I asked.
"Oh, well, he's gone soft in the head since his wife died and thinks he's left thousands of dollars to people hidden in their sugar bowls and clocks and so forth" she told me. "He hasn't got two nickels to rub together, so just ignore all his malarkey."
"Yes, I'll do that" I told her.
Just as she was leaving my sister Dorothy came in, but since she was feuding with mom over some trifling matter, they barely nodded at each other. Dorothy wouldn't open her mouth until mom had left. She even got up to check down the hallway to make sure she was really gone, and not hanging around outside snooping on us.
"Why don't you make up with mom?" I asked her. "You two are tearing the whole family apart with this pointless feud."
"She started it" said Dorothy. "Anytime she wants to apologize I'm ready to forgive and forget."
I sighed deeply and asked Dorothy to help prop me up and rearrange my pillows.
"I suppose she told you she was staying at the Hilton Regency, didn't she?" asked Dorothy.
"Well, yeah -- so what?" I said.
"Well, she's not! She's actually in a homeless shelter down on Main and LeClair. She's been there for a month" Dorothy said with malignant satisfaction.
"That's terrible!" I said. "Why didn't anyone tell me?"
"She wanted to keep it a secret" said Dorothy. "She's on the run from her old job at the jewelry store. Over the years she's stolen a million dollars worth of rings and bracelets and hid them all over the place. She even told me she put a small black velvet bag of uncut diamonds inside your old cuckoo clock. Did you ever look inside for 'em?"
"I haven't, no" I said.
"Well, if I were you that's the first thing I'd do when I got out of here" she told me firmly.
I confessed to her I no longer had the cuckoo clock. I had donated it to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee.
Dorothy laughed mirthlessly at my revelation.
"Boy, are you screwed!" she told me. "Uncle Wally told me he put a check in that cuckoo clock for twenty thousand -- and you know he's rich, cuz he won the Lottery."
"Please go now" I told Dorothy quietly. "I'm getting very tired. Thanks for the visit."
She left and it got dark outside and the fluorescent lights hummed above me. On a wild hunch I had the nurse look up the phone number of the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee on her smartphone, and then called them on my phone.
"Hello" I said when someone finally answered. "I was just wondering if your club house still has that wonderful old cuckoo clock hanging up in the lounge?"
The woman on the other end said it was still there, but had stopped working so they were going to take it down and let a local vocational shop class look at it.
"But it's not a cuckoo clock, y'know" she told me. "It's a cute little Japanese number shaped like a cat that's waving one of its paws while its eyes move back and forth."
"There's no cuckoo clock there, then?" I asked.
"Used to be -- but it got hit by a basketball and they threw it out. That was months ago" she told me. "Hon, I've got a square dancing class I've got to supervise -- is there anything else I can do for you?"
"No. Thanks for your help" I said. She hung up. The fluorescent lights hissed and blinked -- one of the tubes was going bad. I hoped the maintenance people would get to it soon.
