“And it hurt your mouth to say it, poor boy. But no matter how churlish you feel right now, you do look better.”
“I haven’t slept this late in a long time, Mitch.”
“We had a good rain. Did you hear the rain?”
“Vaguely.”
“When I drove to my place the air was wonderful. All clean and fresh and sweet. Now it’s like hot soup again. Are you in any kind of trouble?”
He looked up from the paper. “Huh?”
“Trouble! Are you in any?”
“I’m with you. My sister wouldn’t approve.”
“Laura is a dull, righteous frump, and she always has been. I remember you were about fourteen. I was eleven. You were teaching me how to throw a curve. I came over on Saturday morning. She chased me out of the yard with a rake. Called me boy-crazy. She was wrong. I was curveball-crazy. I wasn’t boy-crazy until I was twelve.”
“That’s when you started teaching me how to throw curves.”
“Not throw them, darling. Appreciate them. Oh God, remember how we were going to wing up to Georgia and get married? What was I then? Fifteen, I think. Look at us, honey. Could we have done any worse?”
“I forget why we didn’t go to Georgia.”
“Because Willy wouldn’t loan us his car. Anyhow, Jaimie, you were my first. Remember the guilt? God, how wicked we felt! We pledged our sacred honor we’d never slip again. And we didn’t, did we? Not for three whole days. Can you remember what we fought about?”
“No.”
“You went away to school. End of romance. And here we are again. But without the romance. I wonder what kind of life we’d be having if we’d... if Willy had been a little more generous with his car. Have you slept with her, Jaimie?”
“What? Who?”
“With the gal who’s messing you up.”
“No. And it’s none of your business, Mitchie.”
She poured more coffee. “Maybe that’s what you have to do. To break the spell.”
“Get off it!”
She made her eyes wide and round. “Ho, ho, ho, yet. So with my dirty mouth I’m soiling some princess? This is Grace Kelly you’re swooning over?”
“Mitchie, for God’s sake!”
“Are you a grown man? What kind of a kid-stuff torch are you carrying? Listen to the voice of experience, dear. I have been around. Oh, way way around, and back several times and out around again. I’ve still got my disposition, half my looks, and twice my early talent. The bed part is pure mirage, until proven otherwise. Friendship is a bigger part of the rest of it than anyone will admit. One little smidgin is magical romance. Anybody who mistakes the smidgin for the whole deal is retarded.”
He stared at her. “Mitchie, I am fine. I am nifty dandy.”
“Then you got more on your mind than a girl.”
“What I have on my mind is how late I’m going to be getting to the shop.”
“I’d like to see you better adjusted to whatever the hell you’re adjusting to.”
“I don’t cry in the rain, at least.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You know, you’re a bastard sometimes.”
“You learned that a long time ago. You keep forgetting.”
She stood up quickly, grabbed her purse and headed for the door without a word. She stopped suddenly. Her shoulders slumped and she turned slowly and came back to him with a small smile. She put her hand on his shoulder and kissed him on the mouth. “Enough old friends I haven’t got, Jaimie. Last night seemed sweet. Even the tears were sweet. If I had any luck left, I’d give it to you. You know it. I wish one of us was happy. It would seem like a better average.”
He smiled up at her. “You make horrible coffee.”
“It’s the only thing in the world I do badly, dear.”
He sat and heard the rackety motor of the Minx start, and heard it fade as she drove out to the highway. He put the dishes in the sink and went downtown to work.
Twelve
Kat turned the little car into her driveway just after dark on Sunday. Alicia was asleep in the backseat, collapsed uncomfortably across the big wicker picnic basket. Roy slept beside her, curled against the door. For the last half hour Kat had become uncomfortably aware of having burned herself again. It had been a long dazzle of day on the beaches of Sanibel, the sand like snow and diamonds, the Gulf like a stream of hot blue milk. In spite of the wide brim of her coolie hat, the shoulder scarf, the big black glasses, the continual oiling, the time spent in patches of shade, the sun had found her. Her thighs stung, her shoulders smarted, and there were little needles of pain in her back. The all-day sun had merely deepened the brown-bronze of the tough hides of her children.
Never seem to learn, she thought. Now pray that it isn’t the chills-and-fever kind. And that there won’t be too many blisters, and they won’t be too huge and wet.
But nothing could spoil her sense of relief and accomplishment at having gotten through the day. During the day she had tried to make herself lose track of the hours. She had hidden her watch in her beach bag. But she had kept stealing glances at it...
About now he is finishing lunch in Venice, after talking to those men about the design for the new professional building.
Now he is in the car, heading south, heading home, thinking about the contract, planning the preliminary sketches, and at about that same time that drunken woman is storming out of the roadside bar in Punta Gorda, getting into that old pickup truck and heading north, with no license to drive, with the gas pedal flat against the floor, heading in a rage toward Venice where, as it has been reported to her, her common-law husband, missing for over a week, is now in a bowling alley with her sister.
Now both vehicles are entering that big curve north of Murdock.
Now they are a hundred feet apart.
Now the bald tire blows on the pickup truck.
Now Van is dead. Forty minutes from now, I will answer the phone. I will hear it ringing and come in from the yard, running and smiling because I am so sure it is him calling to give me good news.
“Miz Hubble, m’am? This is the State Highway Patrol...”
She drove into the carport. In the sudden silence Roy made a murmuring sighing noise. She put her hand on his shoulder and shook him gently. “Come on, boy. We’re home.”
She got them roused and they each took their share of the things to be carried in. Mosquitoes whined around them in the hot crickety night. When they were inside, with the lights on, the children were astonished to find it was only eight-thirty.
Kat showered away the layers of sun lotion and the crust of sea salt. Then she used an antiseptic spray can, a medication which also contained some pain-deadening agent. She called Alicia in to spray it on her back.
It was so icy it made her yelp, and made Alicia laugh. “Get it on evenly, dear.”
“Your back is pretty, Mommie.”
“Thank you, honey.”
“It’s so smooth, but it’s awful red.”
Roy came into the hallway and yelled, “Colonel Jennings wants you on the phone.”
“Please tell him I’ll call him back in five minutes, dear.”
“I don’t care if they fill up the darn bay,” Alicia said. “We don’t have a boat any more anyhow.”
Kat put her robe on and sat on the edge of the tub and took hold of Alicia’s hands. “That isn’t a very nice thing to say, dear.”
“What’s wrong with it?” the little girl demanded, looking sullen.
“Don’t you like to look out across Grassy Bay?”
“I can’t see it from here, can I?”
“You’re being a little bit fresh. Now, don’t try to pull away from me. I want you to understand something. You can’t think of these things just in terms of yourself, ’Licia. You have to think of them in terms of pleasure for other people. Do you know about those huge redwood trees in California?”