Went to the doctor with hubby today, to have what the nurse referred to as a “not bad, just a cute little baby melanoma” removed.  The staff were great, I had a book with me to read, and it all went by pretty quickly and uneventfully.  They got it all in the first go, five stitches or so, and that’s taken care of.

Afterward, we go across to P.F. Chang for lunch, because we had a gift certificate, and that’s when things started to get surreal.  We’re walking up to the entrance, flanked on either side with gigantic concrete horses, when hubby’s phone rings.  I amble over to peruse the posted outdoor menu, while he takes a call that is clearly not his Mom, but someone familiar, and such an odd time of the day for him to get a call.  He gets off, and informs me it was his niece, a truck-driver, who lives in Wyoming, but is apparently in Colorado, and says she just missed a call on the cell phone from grandma (hubby’s mom), but when she tried to call her back, grandma didn’t answer.  She was worried something was wrong, so she called her uncle.  I’d heard him explain that since Pop’s stroke, she often goes out on Wednesdays since the aid is there to tend to him, and she’s not that adept at the use of her cell phone, so he recommends that she wait an hour or so, and try again.

We commence entering the restaurant through those snazzy revolving doors, and are seated, our order quickly taken, as it’s only 11:30 and there are only a couple of other patrons in the joint.

I’m finishing my small salad fifteen minutes later, when my own cell rings, and see that it is my mother-in-law.  When I answer, she first asks if Garrett is out  of surgery yet, which is sort of funny since it was just a little in-office with local anesthesia thing, but it’s not that unusual for there to be miscommunications in the case of my hubby and M.I.L., so I just put her mind at ease, and then she quickly goes on to say that “something is going on”.  She doesn’t say anything else though, so, not knowing if she is having a minor lapse of attention, or being held up at gunpoint, I prompt her, here, to elaborate.

“Well, I tried to call Nikki, and she’s not answering, but I got this phone call from her, earlier, and she sounded funny, like almost with a strange accent.  She said her and her friend had gotten free tickets to go to Santiago, Chile, and they were waiting for their flight to come back but they had to take a cab, and when they came up to the gate at the border, the cab driver got into an argument with the police man, and they made them all get out of the car.  My mother-in-law is way worse than I am about that stream-of-consciousness way of telling something, because her stream tends to jump the banks here and there.  Meanwhile, our main course has arrived, my husband is digging in, and I’ve managed to convey to him that it is his mother that I am speaking with, but between my being hard of hearing, and having to concentrate on the rushing torrent to gather the crazy gist of the call, I wasn’t quite able to convey much to him.  He is watching my expression go from perplexity, to suspicion, to doubt, then to one of incredulity, meanwhile I manage to fingerspell his niece’s name, (a complete waste of effort since he doesn’t know the signing alphabet) give a shrug and make the universal “crazy” sign with my left hand spinning around my ear, all the while throwing in an occasional “clarifying” question to my mother-in-law as the story grows more bizarre by the moment:

“Wait, so you’re telling me that Nikki called you, and she is in Chile and she is in some kind of trouble?  (What, Lassie girl?  Timmy’s in trouble?  He fell in the old well? Well, take me to him, go on girl.)

And off she went at a gallop to with much urgency, further inform me that “Nikki” had said that when they got out of the car, the police had searched it and found drugs in the trunk, and so they were all in jail, but her fingerprints were not on the drugs, so they were going to let Nikki go, but they needed money.  She said that then, a man with a heavy accent came on the phone and talked to her (my M.I.L.) and said “look, I don’t know how it works in your country, but I need fifteen hundred dollars and then I’ll let your granddaughter be on her way.

Ok. Clearly we have a scam going on here, even if it took a little time for me to decipher the facts from the midst of the fevered pitch of a riled up grandma. She didn’t pause for me to say so, however, and went on to convey that (to her credit)  when she got “Nikki” (with her newly acquired foreign accent-which “Nikki” explained was the result of a head cold)  back on the phone, she did have the presence of mind to shrewdly ask: “Nikki, do you remember last time you were here, I said something funny, and we laughed and laughed about that?  To which she stated, Nikki just said “oh, Grandma, I don’t know, I’m so stressed out, I can’t remember that right now”.  Not one to be taken in, ahem, my M.I.L. then asked “ok, well, your dog that just died, what was his name?” Again, “Nikki”, claimed she couldn’t remember that right now either, and “why are you bringing that up, just get me out of here and we can talk about all of that later”.

(Why the “accent” wasn’t clue enough, your guess is as good as mine, but I commended my M.I.L. for  thinking on her feet and coming up with the “questions only the real Nikki would know the answers to”.)

My M.I.L. apparently had also asked this “Nikki” if she had tried to call her mother, and she had said “now why would I do that, you know I haven’t spoken to her in a year”.

Just then, my husband’s phone rings.  I have a sneaking suspicion it might be Nikki again, but had only just had the opportunity to finally inform my M.I.L. that Garrett had just spoken to Nikki not twenty minutes prior, when, being unable to get through to grandma, she had called to check with her uncle (my husband, in case I’ve lost you), to see if everything was o.k.   So here we were, in VA, there was Nikki, who lives in Montana, but is a truck-driver and was at the moment, very much “stateside” on a highway in Colorado, and our poor waiter would very much like to know if we needed more tea or were ready for the check, (I’d not even touched my entrée) and probably wondering why a couple would come in for lunch together and both be carrying on separate conversations on their respective cell phones, but then, he was about nineteen, so he probably thinks that is actually normal…anyway…

by then Nikki has let Garrett know that her mother (his sister), IN ARIZONA, also called her to ask what the heck was going on. (Apparently, when unable to get Nikki on the phone, M.I.L. called her  step-daughter, a.k.a. Nikki’s Mom/hubby’s sister, who also didn’t answer right away, and thus, upon listening to whatever message my M.I.L. may have left, and herself unable to get my M.I.L. to answer, my S.I.L. next dialed Nikki and (deep breath) well, you get the idea.

So as my M.I.L. is still a little freaked out, I did let her know Nikki was on the other phone with her uncle as we spoke, and is alive and well and not rotting in a foreign jail, and her response was a genuinely relieved, “Oh, Thank GOD! Thank YOU JESUS!”.

Before ending the call, however, she remarked “I just can’t figure out how someone in Chile knows so much about Nikki”.

“Um.  Yeah,  that’s ….I can see how that would bother you”, I say, before ending the call.

Well, as we say in the south, “Bless her heart!”

This is actually a known scam tactic, such that it has been labeled the “Grandma it’s me” scam.  And Nikki, (the real Nikki) when she was on the phone with my hubby, even said she’d heard of it.

It was rather humorous when we both had ended these calls and sitting across from one another comparing notes.  No harm actually done, we could laugh, and I knew right then I’d have to share it with you guys when I got home.

Well, no telling what bizarre dreams I might have tonight, between my husband’s newly “Greek” nose (ok, maybe Jimmy Durante, puffy big bandage and all), and images of revolving doors, concrete horses, frantic grannies and our truck-driver niece in a seedy Chilean jail.