Beach Trip (22 page)

“Oh, now, Henry’s a good boy,” Mitchell said, as if to confirm her suspicions that she was being unreasonable.

She gave him an indignant look. “I never said he wasn’t.”

“Now, honey, don’t go getting your shorts in a knot,” Mitchell said, reaching for her. “And speaking of shorts, why don’t you put on that little black lace bikini thing I bought you for Valentine’s Day?”

Now that she was older she could see it. Henry Furman
was
a good boy. He’d turned out fine, despite the fact that he’d never been on a schedule his entire childhood. Despite the fact that Lola had let him go to bed whenever or wherever he wanted to, just dropping wherever he was when
he got tired, on the sofa in the den, at the foot of Lola’s bed, on the floor in the upstairs hallway. Annie had been appalled at Lola’s lack of routine and had on more than one occasion offered to help her make up a schedule.

“A schedule?” Lola had laughed in her silvery little voice. “Oh, Henry wouldn’t like that at all.”

And now Lola had had the last laugh, although she wasn’t laughing, of course; there wasn’t a mean bone in her frail little body, and Annie was left with the feeling that she had cheated her boys out of something important in their childhoods.

Not that they blamed her, of course. They were always calling her and teasing her about one little thing or another. William, the eldest, had gone off to UVA first, and Annie had worried that he wasn’t being fed right in the school cafeteria. When he called she would always ask him, “What’d you have for dinner?”

The first time he said, “filet mignon au poivre” and the second “trout amandine,” but it wasn’t until he said, “oysters Rockefeller” that she began to get suspicious. But by then she’d already bragged to the women in her garden club about the gourmet meals served in the UVA cafeteria. When Carleton went off to Duke two years later, he’d done the same thing.

“What’d you have for dinner?”

“Lobster with truffle butter.”

It had been a big joke among the three of them, William, Carleton, and Mitchell (because he’d been in on it, of course) and now whenever they were home they teased Annie about how her home-cooked meals didn’t come close to the gourmet fare they were accustomed to at college.

She was proud of them, proud of the tall, sturdy young men they had grown up to be. And despite her constant interference in their lives and fretting over them (what was it some pundit had called her generation—helicopter parents?) they still managed to come across as contented and well-adjusted young men.

Still, if Annie had it to do all over again, she’d throw away the schedules and spend each day just enjoying it as it came. She’d ride bikes, and play board games, and build castles in the backyard out of refrigerator boxes and she wouldn’t listen to anyone who tried to tell her how to be a better mom. She wouldn’t listen to pastors or television child psychologists or well-meaning but misinformed neighbors who tried to give her parenting advice.

When William was four years old she’d let a neighbor convince her to paint his thumb with Mavala to break him of his thumb-sucking habit. And when he’d started kindergarten and was still sleeping at night with a blanket she’d let that same neighbor, who had read every child-rearing book ever written and therefore considered herself an expert, advise her to tie the “bankie” to helium balloons and let William release them into the sky in a kind of symbolic goodbye-to-babyhood ritual. With this in mind, Annie had gathered the neighborhood children for a festive affair complete with streamers, party games, and ice-cream cake, and had allowed the stoic but trembling William to “free” his bankie before the assembled guests. Unfortunately, the balloons carrying the blanket became entangled in the top of a tall pecan tree, where they exploded one by one like firecrackers to the accompanying screams of the watching children. The tethered bankie, rather than continuing its symbolic ascent, became snagged in the branches at the top of the tree, where it hung forlornly above the yard for several weeks like a rotting corpse dangling from a gallows. Every time William went outside he would look up into the branches of the tree and scream. Annie finally paid a tree service to come into the yard with a crane to take it down.

Given that experience she should have known better than to listen to this same neighbor, who advised her that, according to a new book written by the eminent child psychologist Dr. Ernest Witherspoon, a toddler could now be potty trained in less than one day. Dr. Witherspoon’s technique involved locking the child and mother in a bathroom together for twelve hours. The trauma of this experience was so great that Annie came into Carleton’s room several weeks later to find him squatting in a corner, furtively reaching into his pants to pinch off pieces of a giant turd that he rolled into pellets the size of BBs and dropped surreptitiously into the heating register.

Both her sons had managed to survive her mothering, although there were times when Annie wondered how. With the clear-sighted advantage of age and experience, she was now able to see how woefully inadequate she had truly been. Although William and Carleton seemed mentally healthy now she was sure the failures of her parenting would come to light years from now during some long, gloomy period of middle-aged psychotherapy.

With any luck at all, it would happen long after she was dead.

el was serious about the Margaronas. It was close to four o’clock by the time they got back from their shopping spree in the village, and she set about making up a pitcher of something she promised “would take the edge off.”

“What edge?” Sara said. “I haven’t felt this relaxed in years.” And it was true. She hadn’t even wanted to come on this trip and now after only two days she was feeling better than she had in a long time. Maybe it was the lack of routine, maybe it was the sun or the food or the friendship, or sitting around in their pajamas until one o’clock talking about everything and nothing at all. Maybe it was the alcohol. Whatever it was, it felt better than a one-hour deep-tissue massage. She had come to the island dreading an altercation and instead she had found fun and companionship. It made her feel guilty about Tom. When she got home she would insist that he take a boys’ trip somewhere with a group of his friends. Not that he had that many friends. Neither one of them had done much socializing since Adam’s diagnosis.

Annie, always ready to be a spoilsport, said, “I didn’t think we were drinking tonight.” They were standing at the breakfast bar watching Mel mix the drinks. Behind her, at the sink, April deveined shrimp.

“No one’s forcing you to drink, señorita,” Mel said, pouring a Margarona and handing it to Lola. She poured Sara one. “I can put salt on the rim if you like.”

Sara hesitated and then took it. “This isn’t going to take the enamel off my teeth, is it?”

“I make no guarantees one way or the other. I take no legal responsibility for what may occur,” Mel said, lifting her glass. “Cheers.”

They tapped their glasses and drank slowly.

“Yow-sa,” Lola said, her eyes shining merrily.

Sara looked pleasantly surprised. “Not bad,” she said. “You hardly taste the tequila.”

“I told you,” Mel said.

“Okay, okay, pour me one,” Annie said glumly. It was no use being a teetotaler when everyone else seemed willing to drink themselves into a stupor. If she stayed sober she’d just have to be the responsible one later on and she was tired of that role.

Mel poured another glass and they drank steadily for a while, watching April work. By the time Mel got up to pour a second round, Annie and Sara were slouched against the breakfast bar and Lola was sitting upright with two bright spots of color on her cheeks. Mel held the pitcher up. “More toxins, Bimbette?” she said to Sara.

“Sure, Homeslice, fill it up.”

Annie asked, “What’s a Bimbette?” and held her glass up for a refill.

“It’s a slutty girl.”

“Oh, thank you very much,” Sara said.

“One who isn’t too smart. You know, an airhead, a ditz, a space cadet.” She smirked at Sara and made a vague gesture with her glass.

“The English always say ‘silly cow,’” Sara said, ignoring her. She loved English literature and English movies. Beneath her East Tennessee exterior beat the heart of a true Anglophile.

“Or silly wanker,” Mel said.

“That bartender at the Black Friar Pub in London used to say that,” Lola said. “Silly wanker.”

“Yes,” Annie said. “But what does it mean?”

“I think it’s a masturbatory term,” Mel said.

“Oh, well, then, you should know,” Sara said.

April finished deveining the shrimp and started mincing the garlic. Mel held the pitcher up and said, “Hey, do you want a Margarona?”

April, who’d watched her mix the drinks earlier, said, “No thanks. I need to stay sober to cook.”

“How unfortunate for you but probably best for us,” Mel said, happily pouring herself another drink. She paused and said to April, “How about your better half?”

The girl glanced at her over one shoulder. “Who?” she asked.

“The Captain.”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “I guess,” she said.

“He’s probably back from the marina by now,” Mel said. “I’ll go ask him.”

“I’ll go with you,” Sara said in a loud singsong voice. She and Mel exchanged glances across the bar. Mel poured another Margarona and Sara followed her out the kitchen door onto the porch. As they walked along the boardwalk to the crofter, Mel said, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you didn’t trust me alone with Captain Mike.”

“I’m just looking out for April.”

“April doesn’t need looking out for. She’s a big girl.”

“She doesn’t know you. She doesn’t know how tricky and cunning you can be.”

“People who live in glass houses,” Mel said, “shouldn’t throw stones.”

Captain Mike was in the garage under the crofter listening to the Foo Fighters. He had on a pair of cut-off shorts and flip-flops, and he was leaning over Briggs’s fancy golf cart with his back to them. The seat was pulled up and he was scouring the connections for the six batteries with a wire brush.

“We brought you a present,” Mel said, standing in the doorway. She felt a momentary sense of light-headedness, which quickly dissipated. The Margaronas were kicking in.

He stood up and turned around, still holding the wire brush in one hand and a grease-stained rag in the other. His eyes appeared green in some lights and blue in others, but she saw now that they were really gray. Gray as a rifle barrel. Gray as the sea under a storm-lit sky. Another Margarona and she’d be spouting poetry.

“What’d you bring me?” he said.

“Something guaranteed to make you a happy man.”

He grinned and said, “That sounds promising.”

Mel grinned back.
Damn.
She was beginning to weave on her feet. There was something about his eyes, something mesmerizing that she couldn’t shake, something you didn’t pick up on at first but that kind of grew on you over time. If you saw a photograph of him you wouldn’t think of him as anything special but standing near him was something else entirely.

“It is something special,” she said and took a step toward him but it went wrong. She managed to put too much weight on her right foot and lost her balance, slopping his drink over the rim of the glass before she could recover.

He dropped the brush and put his hand out to steady her. “You girls haven’t been drinking, have you?” he said, wiping his fingers on the rag.

“It’s not too bad,” Sara said. “If you slip it slowly.”

“Slip it slowly?”
Mel said.

“Shut up, Mel. You try saying it.”

“Sip it slowly, sip it slowly, slip it sowly.”

“See?”

“I appreciate the offer,” Captain Mike said pointing to a bottle of Sam Adams sitting on the floorboards of the golf cart, “but I’m a beer man myself.” He stuck the rag in his back pocket. “Besides, someone needs to stay sober to drive you girls around later on.”

“We’re not going anywhere tonight,” Mel said, and then she thought,
Shut up, stupid. If he wants to drive you around don’t argue.
“Well, not for dinner anyway,” she added vaguely. “Maybe later.”