Redbeard by Matthew Wilson from the Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine July August

2024 edition. When COVID hit and Ben lost his job, he moved in with his grandmother and began to grow a beard.

He was 29. The last time he tried a beard, he was 20 and it came out patchy, but he older now and the whiskers grew in nicely this time and some of them were red which surprised him but not his grandmother.

Oh my Jack had quite a bit of red in his beard, she told him.

Ben's late grandfather had always been a gray beard to him.

Any red he may have had in his beard as a young man was lost in the black and white photos from way back in a past,

Ben knew little about. His parents were old beatniks as far as he knew, something before

hippies, sages in the Peace Movement of the 60s.

Grandma lived in a nice craftsman in East Portland.

A house paid off going on two decades.

This was long before the neighborhood gentrified into young couples pulling in tech salaries.

Still, dotted among all these newbies were older people like Ben's grandmother, with fixed incomes, but plenty of equity.

COVID had jammed Ben up in the job department.

He had been serving up organic locally sourced fare at a pricey spot off of Division Street,

a place a Portland Foodie Legend had set up in the style of a Thai street shack.

But once the lockdown forced everyone to stay home, the Foodie Legend shut down his operation, leaving Ben with unemployment checks and time on his hands.

To make his unemployment dollar stretch, he gave up his room in a run-down rental house, which wasn't much of a loss and besides his grandmother could use the help.

Ben would slip on his mask and go pick up her prescriptions at Walgreens. He shopped for groceries

at new seasons in Trader Joe's, bringing home her favorite chocolates and organic produce.

He liked to cook, so he threw together elaborate salads and casseroles his grandma blessed with a

yummy or different signaling to Ben just how well he had hit the mark.

All this care of his grandmother gave him a new sense of purpose, especially with how he could shield her from a virus they were all just getting used to.

...