Mrs. Grumm's kitchen is exactly the same as it was two decades ago: not even the clock-faced cookie jar she keeps next to the stove has changed.
Bruce cradles a fragile tea cup filled, incongruously, with brandy, and stares at the hanging pictures in her foyer. A pair of children span the whole length of one wall, faces losing baby fat over the journey from corner arch to door frame, hair and clothes changing, expressions growing more sullen and then less so. The last two photographs are of young man with acne, a desperate smile, and an eyebrow piercing, and a girl in crisp Marine blues with a dazzling grin and a shaved head.
"Elias and Jeanine," Mrs. Grumm says shortly, and doesn't bother to elaborate. She hands him a phillips-head screwdriver. "Come on, genius, let's see if you know what to do with a busted hinge."
"I hold onto the thick end of the screwdriver, right?" Bruce says, earning a rough bark of a laugh and a second splash of brandy in his tea cup, which he plans to dump behind a bush the moment he gets outside. Even the smell is a little nauseating. "So was there any damage to your Hummer?" he asks, following Mrs. Grumm's slow journey through a light-filled dining room to big French doors looking out over a winter garden. Snow lies lightly on dormant rose bushes and a bunch of other plants he doesn't know the names of. Mrs. Grumm walks out in her house dress. Bruce snatches an afghan off a chair, taking the excuse to set the hideous brandy on an end table. He hands the blanket to her as she turns, braving a glower that would blister paint.
"It's cold," he informs her, and edges around her to see the broken gate.
Her garden hasn't changed much either: this whole estate appears to have been frozen in time somewhere around when Clinton was elected.
"You left rather a lot of your paint job on the underside of my front bumper, but there wasn't a scratch otherwise," Mrs. Grumm says serenely, wrapping the afghan over her shoulders. "That monstrosity was worth every cent."
"Great," Bruce mutters, and the old lady snorts. "So tell me what I'm supposed to be doing to pay for all the paint I left on your grill, Mrs. Grumm. This gate doesn't seem to be in terrible shape, but I admit this is a little outside of my area of expertise."
"Your area being what, exactly?" Mrs. Grumm says, and Bruce forces a wide grin.
"Having fun," he says, tone full of smug duh.
She returns his raised-brow look with equanimity and not a shred of credence. He thinks he might have been eleven the last time she looked at him like that. She'd had black hair back then, with two wide streaks of gray at the temples like the bride of Frankenstein, and favored silk pantsuits in loud shades of purple. He'd picked one of her roses without permission, and wound up washing her car to apologize.
The parallel strikes him, cutting through the clamor of objectives waiting for the sun to set, the white noise of Wayne's shallow charm, and the jangling of nerves still trying to settle.
He eyes her, trying to catch some hint in her expression that she sees it too, even did it on purpose, but Mrs. Grumm only offers him a perfunctory smile and walks through the knee-high white fence that leads to her rose garden. Bruce follows her, screwdriver dangling from his fingers, and utters a startled yelp of laughter when he sees the ten foot wrought iron monster that brackets the other side of the garden, arched door leaning drunkenly. The entrance to hell is probably less imposing.
"This is more like it," he says appreciatively, forgetting to be an idiot for a moment. The door squeals painfully when he tries to lift it back into place. "When did you get this? I don't remember it."
"Oh, years ago when that pack of young hoodlums were bashing in mailboxes and joyriding around at night," Mrs. Grumm says mildly.
Bruce, crouching to inspect a hinge, feels heat crawl up out of his collar onto his cheeks. He'd been one of those young hoodlums, at least for a few months. He hunches his shoulders and makes a noncommittal noise. For fuck's sake: he cannot remember the last time he blushed.
"Good thing young men grow out of such things," his neighbor is saying. "Most of them."
Most things or most young men? he wonders.
"…Yeah, Mrs. Grumm. Good thing. Um, I think I'm going to need some screws, maybe? And at least one new hinge, I think. Maybe two or three. Also, I might need to google this before I do anything."
"Well, stop by the hardware store on your way here tomorrow, then," Mrs. Grumm tells him impatiently. "There's one at the bottom of the hill in the ugly little mall."
He got several d-clips there one day when he was in a hurry to catch a serial killer who liked to climb, so he knows where it is. He didn't realize he was coming back here tomorrow, though, and he straightens, rubbing the back of his neck and trying to look as useless as possible.
It does no good. Mrs. Grumm only pulls the screwdriver out of his hand and leads him inside for another horrifying cup of brandy, one he can't find a polite or sneaky way out of. He can hide his entire body in half a shadow on a busy city street, but he can't dodge an old lady with a limp and an inexplicable penchant for plum-based booze.
Somehow he ends up agreeing to another attempt on the gate, and also a trip to a flower shop for "something to brighten up her kitchen". He leaves not knowing quite how it happened, and takes his crumpled Lamborghini and dignity off to the warehouse to take Klein Inc.'s data encryption apart, because all this bottled frustration ought to be put to some use.