Well, glory osky halleluiah, will you look at that? We made it all the way through the alphabet. Today's letter is Z, and the last but not least excerpt is from my latest book, Georgette Alden Starts Over, written under my pen name, Annie Hoff.  In  this scene, Georgette tries to talk Kent out of stealing penguins from the Bronx Zoo. She has some help, sort of, from her son's girlfriend Poppy. 

“We meet outside the penguin enclosure right before the zoo closes. Then we liberate them!”

Georgette thought it best to let the old man talk on about his fantasy. “Who are we? Are there others?”

The old man sat down. “You don’t need to know.” He nodded again to Poppy who was staring at him openmouthed and twinkle-eyed. “It’s better you don’t know, less chance for snafus. The plan is simple—we climb into the enclosure and hand them out and put them into cat carriers. Then we bring them to Central Park and let them fly free.”

Poppy’s twinkle-eyed look had become a stare. “Release them in the park? Poor little blighters will get
run over, won’t they?”

Together, they could guide Kent back toward reason. Georgette was glad she’d thought to bring Poppy
along.

Kent considered. “You might have a point.”

“I mean, you have to bring them home, don’t you? To Antarctica?”

Georgette would need to get her hearing checked. Had the girl just suggested stealing penguins and
sending them to Antarctica? 

Even Kent’s smile faded at the suggestion. “Air travel is expensive.”

“Maybe you should raise some money first, then? Before you release them?” The girl was crazy like a fox.

Georgette’s faith in her returned. She offered up reinforcement. “Raising money is a wonderful idea.”

“But we’re all set to release them tonight.”

“They can wait just a little longer, don’t you think? We have the PA spot filming scheduled for tomorrow morning. Why don’t we work on that and then we can figure out how to raise money for the penguins?” Distraction seemed a good way to go. Kent took the paper with the studio’s address on it.

Poppy furrowed her brow. “Why do you want to free them anyway? The penguins?’

They had finally gotten Kent’s attention away from his lunatic cause and here Poppy was, bringing it front and center again. Kent began pacing. He lectured for quite some time on sentient beings, animal rights, and unlawful imprisonment. And just when Georgette thought the lunacy was winding down, Poppy said, “I’d never considered it quite that way. It’s unfair, isn’t it?”

Georgette saw it would be up to her to contain it. She went over to the old man and patted his arm. “Kent, you must put the breakout on hold. You do not want to endanger the poor creatures. Central Park is full of danger.”

Kent sat down, his agitation drained away and replaced by despair. He put his head in his hands. “How
will we ever get them home?”

Poppy sat down next to him and took his hand. “I’ll help you find a way.”

She would what? Comforting the poor old coot was one thing. Aiding and abetting was quite another.

When yellow fever spreads to the crew of the Sweet Lenora, the results are dire. 

Only good news it was, more than I might have known. A few moments later, Rupert came knocking on the door. He stood at the threshold, anxious. “Sorry to disturb, sir. Maurice has taken ill.”
The stricken look of his countenance gave me to know it was more serious than a simple illness. I waited as I watched Rupert gather his words. Lenora put a hand to my shoulder and squeezed. “I fear we have a greater devil than Abercrombie aboard. Innis is out of his mind with fever.” Rupert looked down at the floor and swallowed. “He has the black vomit. I fear it be yellow jack.”

These words pounded a stake into my heart. I got up and went to the infirmary. Four now lay abed in that small space. One look at Innis left no question of his state and the dark doom that befell all of us. He lay screaming that his limbs had been set afire as the blood ran from his gums. I had seen the same delirium when my mother took ill. Her skin, too, had had the same sallow cast as Innis’. She had died within a week. “Yellow jack.” I closed my eyes against the evil of the words.

“Yellow jack?” Lenora still stood behind me, her face gone pale. I thought to tell her to go; I needed her to be gone from this place of death.
I put my hand to her shoulder and steered her toward the cabin. “Aye, the yellow fever. ’Twas in Rio these past months. Some four hundred souls perished and yet it worsens. ’Tis the scourge of
the southern climes.”

She stopped to look at me, her eyes grown wide. “Surely there is something we can do.”

“Nay, love. Naught but pray. I fear ’tis too late for poor Innis.” I wished now I had opiates aboard. That vile black substance could be put to good use in easing pain in such a hopeless case as the crewman’s.

Tears ran down Lenora’s cheeks. She had more kindness for the men than they deserved. “We must be strong, mon amie.” I said, brushing the tear from her cheek.

“Aye, so we must.” She dabbed her tears with a handkerchief and went to sit by Maurice, who moaned lightly in his sleep. She took the boy’s hand. “Find me a cloth and some cool water. We must
bring his fever down.”

“You cannot stay here.” My voice came out as a demand. I wanted to stow her safe away in our cabin. It would not comfort me to leave her here among the sick. I was still learning her then, and had not yet come to understand the fullness of my wife’s compassion. Nor the strength of her will. She took a bucket of cold water from Rupert and dunked a cloth into it. “The crew is sick. You have but a handful to get us to port. You have no second mate to attend to the sick.” She wrung the cloth and placed it on Maurice’s brow. “You need all hands.” With this she held out her lovely, snow white fingers to me. “Including these two.”

I took her dear hands into my own. “I cannot leave you among disease and ruffians. Please, Lenora.”

She put those sweet fingers to my mouth. “Maurice is sick. You care for the boy and so do I. I do not mind being needed. All the men here are sick and in need of care.”

“My sweet girl, I wish the world were as kind as you make it out to be.” My heart swelled at her conviction. I wanted to lay her in the berth and love her with all the tenderness she deserved. I did not
want to leave her here. Yet, what choice had I?

“The world is as kind as you make it to be, Anton.”

In Afterglow, India is set on divorcing her philandering husband. Her mother-in-law believes they can still work things out and so sets them up. For failure, of course. 

Tom looked up from the menu and smiled brightly at his mother. Then he caught sight of me and the smile became a grimace. He put down the menu, clearly as anxious to escape as I was.

“Please, India.” Marissa indicated an empty seat. I considered wading back to the door. I really, really wanted to wade back to the door, run the five blocks back to the car, get in, break the sound barrier driving back to Tamsett, and lock myself in the house with Ben and Jerry. But the look on Tom’s face stopped me. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of easy escape. I sat. Then I noticed that there were but two chairs at the table.

“Marissa,” I said or, more to the point, growled. I rose slightly. Marissa’s hand on my shoulder pushed me back into the seat.

“Now,” she said. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes. You two need to talk. You’ve been married for over thirty years, for goodness sake. You can fix this.” And off she went, parting the water back to the door and leaving me stranded on Tom Island.

I stood and stared after my audacious soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law and considered my options. I stood there for so long that when I heard the sound of Tom’s chair scraping over the floor, it felt like a
jolt of electricity. “I’ll go,” he said, quietly to my back. “You sit. She’ll be back soon.”

“Oh, no, you don’t. You are not leaving me here to explain to your mother why we can’t make it all better.”

Tom sighed and sat back down. “You are bound and determined to make this difficult, aren’t you?”

“Difficult?” I rounded on him now. “You're sleeping with our son’s ex-girlfriend, and you think I’m being difficult?”

“India, please. Sit down.”

“Goodbye, Tom.” I waded back to the door, looking half as elegant as my mother-in-law had been. I wished I’d said more. I wished I’d made a scene. But it wasn’t like me to make a scene. I wasn’t a boat rocker. I marched back to my car. My cell rang halfway back to Tamsett. “India, why are you being so stubborn?” asked Marissa.

“Ask your son,” I said. And, for the first time in my life, I hung up on Marissa Othmar. It occurred to me that I should have  done it a long time ago.

In the P-Town Queen, Nikki, who is an oceanographer, is asked to help remove the body of dead whale that's beached on the shore of Cape Cod Bay. She's ready for the job, but town officials have their own idea how to handle the situation. 

There was nary a parking spot to be had at First Encounter. This was noteworthy because the parking lot is exceptionally large and a weekday morning in May is hardly prime time for beach goers. Add to this that the tide was out, which on the tidal flat meant you’d have to walk a mile to get to swimmable water.

“You think this is on account of the whales?” Parker asked, pulling the truck onto the sandy shoulder alongside the marsh.

“Duh,” I said. Of course it was the whales. Although the whales had been reduced to whale and dead whale at that. I couldn’t much see the point of bringing the kids out to gander at a dead whale.

“So we’re going to chainsaw a whale in front of all these witnesses?” Parker asked.

I gave him the evil eye. “The chainsaw is a last resort,” I said. Which was true, although being as most of the other avenues had been tried, I didn’t see we had much choice but to butcher the whale and cart it away. In front of all these witnesses. Even so, I left the chainsaw in the truck bed. For now,
anyway.

Parker and I made our way past the milling crowd, or gawking crowd to be more accurate, to the beach. The whale lay just inside the tide line. The boundaries around the carcass had been staked out and were festooned by crime tape as though the whale had been murdered by thugs and CSI would be sent in to investigate. As it was, I wouldn’t have been surprised if a forensics unit had shown up. The place was crawling with every sort of official in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Parked on the beach were two State Police cars, several local police sedans, a host of fire trucks, and a van that said SWAT Team.

I saw Max Groper among the official crowd at the crime scene. “Can you believe this nonsense?” he said, flailing his arms like a sea gull trying to take flight in a stiff wind. “You’d think these bone heads would know better. You’d think they’d never seen a beached whale before. But no. Hell no. Don’t take any advice from someone who might actually know something. Oh no, let the cops handle it.”

“Quite the response team,” I said. “Did you dial 911?”

Max rolled his eyes. “Some woman called to complain about the smell. Made her beach walk less than pleasant, she said. I explained to them that it was a new moon and the tide just isn’t coming up very far. A week would do the trick. We could tow it out to sea once the tide situation changes. Next week. But God forbid it sit there a week. Then I suggested that you and I cut the thing up and cart it away. But heavens, then we’d have whale parts on the beach and we can’t have that, can we?” As Max finished his tirade, I glanced at the whale carcass. It was a massive thing, stuck on a sandbar not a hundred yards from the main beach. The birds had begun doing cleanup, though it was an awful lot of carrion for a bird feast. And, with the wind coming off the bay, the smell was, to say the least, unpleasant. Several onlookers had pulled their jackets over their mouths and noses. Parker looked like he wanted to do the same.

“Should I get the chainsaw?” I asked.

Max looked at me as if he thought I hadn’t heard a word he’d said. But they needed to dispose of the body and they wanted to do it today, so I didn’t see we had much choice.

“You aren’t going to be allowed to butcher the whale in front of the crowd.”

“So send the crowd away,” I said.

“Oh, no. Oh, no. These geniuses have got a better idea. They’re putting dynamite under the carcass as we speak.”

“What?” Now it was me who questioned my ability to hear.

Max nodded like a bobble head. “That’s right. Dynamite. Just try to talk them out of it. We have half a dozen ocean people here, but oh no, they’ve got it figured out.”

“Kind of gives a whole new meaning to ‘there she blows,’ huh?” Parker said. To which Max gave him an icy stare.

“Not funny,” Max said.

“Actually, it kind of was,” I said, to which Max turned the icy stare on me. 

In the novella the Whisper of Time, Gwen buys a farmhouse sight unseen in the hills of Vermont. She may have bought more than just a house. Here's how the story begins.

​It figured that I would get lost. Kyle was always telling me I had a terrible sense of direction. “Turn left,” I would say, and he would answer “Which left, Gwynn, yours or mine?” I used to think everything Kyle said was charming.
I’d since found out that Kyle, like GPS, had a limited range. Out here, in the middle of Vermont farm country, my GPS had stopped functioning. A signal kept insisting the phone was searching for a satellite, but it was becoming pretty clear that the satellite was nowhere to be found. It was hiding, perhaps, from the snippy woman’s voice that commanded me to turn left when I wanted to turn right.
Luckily, the real estate agent had given me directions. I’d scribbled them down on the back of an envelope and was now trying to decode them. The agent’s name was Vera Applegate, which I thought sounded like Vermont. I could almost hear Kyle, “What, exactly, does Vermont sound like?” And I might try and explain that it sounded like rolling green hills and stone fences and cows lying under huge old maple trees. None of it would have made sense to Kyle.
“Take route 153 from West Rupert town center and turn left on Witches Hollow Road,” I read aloud. My bulldog Tyrone cocked his head from where he sat in the passenger seat of the VW bug. “I know, right? Which was town center, the shopping plaza or that quaint green with the historical marker and the gazebo? And how far from town center?” Tyrone lost interest in my pondering and went back to doing what he does best, sticking his head out the window and letting the wind blow his jowls back. Miss Kitty, my tabby, was pacing the back seat with a bad case of nerves. I’d let her out of her carrier back in Saratoga, because she was yowling up enough to raise the dead. She stopped complaining aloud, though the prowl wasn’t much better. I kept waiting for her to land on top of my head so that she could navigate.
The road wound this way and that through the hills. I slowed to a crawl, nearly coming to a stop at each intersection to read the road signs. Some of them looked like they had been posted in the eighteenth century and never updated and some were missing all together. An old truck with a huge toothy grill eased up behind me, the grill nearly kissing my VW’s back bumper. I hated tailgaters, so in defiance I slowed even more. The truck beeped, making Miss Kitty jump and then the driver throttled up the engine and roared past me. I caught a glimpse of a good-looking sandy-haired man with a Jack Russell terrier on his lap. In that instant, I got the notion that the dog was driving the car.
“Don’t get any bright ideas,” I said to Tyrone. I went back to searching for Witches Hollow Road. A wonderful name, isn’t it? I could picture a trio of old crones stirring a steaming black cauldron, throwing in mysterious ingredients like eye of newt and chanting spells.
That the farm was on Witches Hollow Road was only one in a long list of features which made me take the leap and buy the place. I could hear Kyle saying it was an impulsive thing to do. At least it wasn’t compulsive, I argued back to his voice in my head.

In Afterglow, India's best friend Eva seems determined to set her up with every available man in the town of Tamsett.  She may have out done herself when a celebration dinner turns into a double date with Eva's current man, Dave and Dave's Uncle Henry. 

Arlan’s Martini Bar was the new hot spot in eastern Massachusetts. The Boston Globe, in an article in the Sunday Living section, had described it as intimate. Which, looking the place over, Iconstrued as meaning tiny. It had all of ten tables. Apparently, people drove from the far reaches of New England for the privilege of sitting at one of them. As Eva had said, even on an ordinary Wednesday night like this one it was nearly impossible to get a reservation.

She shepherded me over to a table near the window. Two men were already sitting there. I recognized Dave. Across from him sat an elderly gentleman with a hooked nose and no hair to speak of except for the ones growing from his ears. I gave Eva what I hoped was a dirty look. She kept her hand squarely against my back and gave me the tiniest of shoves.

“India, my sweet. You know Dave. And this,” she made a flourish towards the elderly man, “is Henry.”

Henry, it turned out, was Dave’s uncle. He was eighty-two years old, he was a widower, and he lived at a place called River View, which he described as a community for mature adults. I might have known. How could I expect any less from Eva?

I did my level best to curtail my anger. I smiled, made polite conversation, and toasted Eva’s success.
Henry was, it turns out, not so easily fooled. “You seem a little preoccupied,” he said. We had finished dinner and moved to the famous martini bar for a farewell famous martini. Eva and Dave were snuggled together a few stools down, whispering like a pair of  teenagers.

“Do I?” I said, giving Henry my best charming smile.

Henry put his hand on my thigh, which did nothing to decrease my level of discomfort. “No worries. I’ve got a little present for you.”

I could just imagine. A picture of Henry in boxers jumped into my head. I put my hand on Henry’s, moved it gently away, and said, “Oh?”

Henry reached into his pocket and pulled out a baggy. “Open your purse,” he whispered. He buried the baggy under my wallet and winked at me. “Prime stuff,” he said. “Maybe you’ll share it with me
later.”

Flustered, I pulled my purse into my lap and put my arms around it. What exactly, does one do when an eighty-two year old man hands you a packet of weed? Did Miss Manners have some protocol for this?

Stephanie, the heroine of my sweet romance, Searching for Superman, works at the Rialto--an old regional theater that's being restored. The theater plays an important part in the story. Below is how it is first introduced, early in the book after Stephanie's sister enlists her help in getting a Cinderella character for daughter Sophie's birthday party. 

Stephanie considered what to do on the two block walk back to work. She hadn’t the foggiest idea where she could find Cinderella on short notice. A lot of people, Liz included, figured that because Stephanie worked in a theater she had her finger on the pulse of every entertainment venue in upstate New York. Nothing could have been further from the truth. In the first place, the Rialto hadn’t had its
grand reopening. And in the second, she was not the theater director.

She was Conrad Finch’s assistant and her job consisted of answering phones and e-mail, sorting the bills, and bringing Conrad soy vanilla lattes from Starbucks. Like the one she was trying not to spill as she walked.

That is not to say that she didn’t love the Rialto. It was the oldest theater in the Capitol district, though like the rest of the city of Schenectady, it was struggling to make a comeback. Conrad Finch
was nothing if not passionate about making this happen, and Stephanie was proud he’d chosen her to help him. Conrad had a strong vision of someday, when the theater would attract name acts and Broadway road revivals. They would host a regional theater group and maybe they would even show the Metropolitan Opera live on screen as they had in a similar theater in New England last year.

Stephanie could almost see it. Though today, with the cold March wind sweeping stray paper to the curb in front of the marquee,the place looked downright shabby, like a garish old woman who​ had
insisted on one too many face-lifts.

The Sweet Lenora series has at it's heart the lifelong love of a clipper ship captain and a shipbuilder's daughter. The two of them have a love of the sea and sailing in common--and all of the books contain some aspect of this. In Sweet Auralie, Lenora and Anton, married ten years, have lost a child. Anton believes that Lenora's grief can be soothed by reminding her of her passion for sailing. 

We went to the docks, noisy with sailors coming in and out of the taverns and houses of ill repute. It was an unsavory place at any hour, made more so by the covering of night. “Trust me,” Anton said, as he handed me into our skiff.

“You mean to take me to Willow? What have you in mind, to kidnap me finally after all these years?”

Anton took up the oars. “It has been nearly two years since we sailed. I fear you have forgotten her.”

I knew he felt most alive when we were heeled into the wind. He said nothing as we climbed aboard, the rigging creaking in the wind as the ship swayed. We’d awoken the ghosts that resided here, though perhaps they were not ghosts, rather the memories Anton recounted for me as we stood upon the deck.  “Do you remember the day we first sailed into Shanghai port? You stood at the rail like one enchanted.”

“Aye.” I looked to the night sky blanketing us. “I remember, too, how you taught me to navigate by the stars.”

“You were an able student, Lenora. It is no surprise, you were born to sail. If I can give you anything that might ease your mind, it is but this, to stand upon the deck again and feel the roll of waves under your feet. You and I, we are made for the taste of salt, for the wind.”

I took his words to heart and I put my arms about him and kissed him for having reminded me what I had forgotten.

“There is more,” he said as we broke the kiss. He took me by the hand and led me to our quarter. It had
changed not an iota since I last stepped aboard and the memories became very real indeed. There was the bed upon which Anton and I had slept and loved. I thought for a moment he meant to lead me to
it, to remind of how often we found each other in this place, how often the fire between us had been sparked and fanned into a conflagration. And, oh, how I remembered. The fine hard muscles of his shoulders under my fingers and the ship rocking us, the way he would cry out my name. We had grown distant in this since Robert took ill. The hurt of his death had drained me of my passion, and so
night after night I had lain with Anton by my side, feeling so far away from the love he gave that I might as well have lain upon the moon.

“We have spent many a happy night here, you and I,” he said, still clutching my hand in his.

“We will again.” I closed my eyes and told myself to be fearless, to love my man full and whole, he deserved no less. I kissed him soundly and we stood lost in one another for a moment.

He stroked my face then went to the chest that stood next to the desk. Out of it, he pulled a paper, scrolled and fastened with a ribbon. He removed the ribbon and unrolled the document and motioned for me to join him. “Here is the other part of my reason for wanting to sail to New England and soon.” 

I knew what it was, though I had not seen it since before we had sailed the first time to Shanghai. “The blueprint for Sweet Lenora.” I ran my fingers along the lines I had taken such care to draw so long ago.

It seems to me you can't write a book about sailing the high seas in the 19th century without at least some mention of run. Anton Boudreaux, captain of the Sweet Lenora, did keep a store of it onboard. Which lead to some confusion as to his cook, Rupert's condition, before the truth--and a villain--was revealed. 

Maurice’s face was white in the light of the candle he held, his thin body shivering to the marrow. Seeing him in such a state made me forget my anger. “It’s Cook,” he said. “You must come.”

Lenora made her way to the door and I bid her stay behind, but she was a stubborn lass and would have none of it. Maurice led the way to the galley and there we found Rupert lying face down on
the table. I thought at the first that he had gotten into the store of rum that was under his watch. The man was known to have a taste for it, but he never drank to the point of incapacity and the thought that he had both angered and surprised me. Then he raised his head. Lenora gasped and I feared for a moment she would faint, for the cook’s face was a hideous sight. The skin along one cheek puckered, angry red streaks running rivulets from his eye to his neck like tears.

“Get me a cloth and fresh water,” Lenora said. I might have known it would take more to shake my girl and for this I was sore glad.

Maurice ran to do as she asked. Rupert flinched as I drew near and I knew he was not in control of his senses. “What has happened?” I demanded.

“Accident.” The word hissed from Rupert’s throat.

Maurice returned and Lenora took the wet cloth and held it to the cook’s face. She was tender at the task, but poor Rupert blacked out from the pain of it nonetheless.

“What happened?” I demanded again, this time of the cabin boy.

“’Twas the soup. Cook fell into it. Boiling, it was.”

Lenora wrapped a dry cloth over the wound.

“How, pray tell,” I asked, “does a cook fall face first into a pot of soup?”

“I can’t say, sir.”

I took Maurice by the shoulders and attempted to shake the sense back into him. “You can’t say, or won’t say? I need the truth, boy.”

Lenora stepped forward. “Anton, please.”

“I need the truth,” I repeated. I’ll admit I did not like that she had stepped into the affair.

She turned to the boy. “If you know what happened, Maurice, you must say.”

“I have told you. He fell into the soup.”

I grumbled, ready to throttle him again. Then Lenora said, “You and I both know cooks don’t fall
into the soup unless they are sore drunk. And I don’t believe that to be the case.” Maurice stared at my wife, seeming uncertain that he had heard about drunkenness from the mouth of a lady, and I had to
suppress a grin. Lenora stood her ground. “So Cook was drunk, then?” 

Maurice looked at his shoes. “No, ma’am.”

I stared at the boy. He blinked up at me and whispered, “’Twas no accident. Mr. Abercrombie dunked Cook’s head into the boiling pot."

I have two books with the word queen in the title. The P-Town Queen is the name of a boat that plays an important role in that story. The Sausage Queen is a person, Mandy Minhouser, the main character and tour guide through the quirky world that is the small town of Kassenburg. Her "title" was given to her by her son, five- year- old Sammy, who drew a rather provocative picture of his mother. A picture that raised eyebrows and a summons for Mandy and husband Randy to the school psychologist's office. 

 The school system works fast in matters of questionable drawings by five-year-olds. It didn’t help I was a known garden hat poser, and Randy’s borrowing of Ricky’s cruiser had become common knowledge. Mrs. Seuss called the following Monday to say the school psychologist, Mr. Helprin, wanted to see me and Randy the following day.

So on Tuesday, Randy and I made a second trip to the principal’s office. “We might get detention this time,” said Randy.

We didn’t. Mrs. Seuss said the barest of hellos and led us down the hall to the psychologist’s office.
Mr. Helprin was a tall skinny man with stick-up hair who bounced on his heels. Sammy was playing with play dough in one corner of the bright little office, which had a kid-size table, a rug area, and a ton of toys. Dolls mostly, but also blocks and crayons and drawing paper.

Sammy looked up from his play dough kneading and held up a long cigar-shaped blue piece. “Look. A sausage.”

Mr. Helprin began bouncing as though on a trampoline. He grabbed Sammy’s picture from his desk and tacked it to an art easel. He should have labeled it exhibit A in the “demented parents raise
demented child” trial.

“Sammy, would you come over here and tell Mother and Father what you told me about your drawing, please?” 

Sam stood by his picture like the proud exhibitor of a major work of art. “Just as you told me,” said Mr. Helprin.

“Once upon a time,” Sammy began. Randy’s stories, it seemed, had taken root. “Big Bill had a really big sausage. And then Big Bill died, and Mommy gave head and was the sausage queen.” 

I started to laugh. I laughed so hard I had to sit down on the rug. Mr. Helprin  bounced harder.

“You may be excused, Sam,” said Mr. Helprin. And Sammy, who’d begun giggling, went off with a finger wave. I couldn’t say see you later. I was laughing so hard I’d begun to cry.

“Sausage is an interesting euphemism,” said Mr. Helprin.

I snorted. “Euphemism,” I said to Randy. “Bill’s Big and Tasty.”

“Oh crap,” said Randy who had joined me on the carpet, “Big Bill’s euphemism.”

“I hardly think this is a laughing matter,” said Mr. Helprin. “He’s talking about head. He’s talking about sausage.” Mr. Helprin drew imaginary quotation marks around “head” and “sausage,” which I found hysterical.

“Stop,” I said. “You’re killing me.”

“Your son is talking about head and about tasty big sausage.”

“You’re not from around here, are you?” said Randy once he’d regained his capacity to speak.

“I hardly see how where I’m from has any bearing.”

I’d managed to compose myself enough to stand up and walk over to exhibit A. “This,” I pointed to the crooked boxes in Sammy’s picture, “is Bill Ludowski’s sausage factory. Bill’s Big and Tasty, available at your local market.” I started laughing again. “God, that innuendo hasn’t been funny in a long time.”

“Sausage factory?” Mr. Helprin stopped bouncing and started looking confused.

“As in Italian hot and sweet. As in kielbasa,” said Randy.

“This,” I pointed to the stick figure, “is me eating a sausage. I am wearing a crown, because somewhere along the line Sammy decided I was the sausage queen.”

“Why?” asked Mr. Helprin.

“Because when Big Bill died, he bequeathed the factory to my grandmother and made me CEO. In other words, the head of sausage.

Mr. Helprin had a sheepish grin on his face. “So that…” he said pointing to the giant penis.

“Sometimes,” said Randy, “a sausage is just a sausage"