Dry as Rain (23 page)

I licked my lips. “You know teenagers. They love to melodramatize everything.”

She looked dejected. “Let's not do that anymore. Benji's got enough to worry about.”

“Agreed,” I said. “So, you want us to pick you up for dinner after the batting range?”

She was halfway up the stairs when she turned around. “I already told you I'm having dinner with my sister and Marcello.”

I figured when she said she didn't want us to fight anymore that meant this discussion was over. Staring up at her, I felt an overwhelming desire to hit something. “Fine. Maybe I'll have dinner with some of my female coworkers then.”

“Or maybe you could just do lunch,” she said. “Oh, that's right. You already do.” A strange look crossed her face. “We've argued about this before, haven't we?”

My blood ran cold when I realized what was happening.
Maybe not,
I told myself.
Look at her face. She's unsure.
There was still time to convince her she was just imagining things.

I started to disagree, but stopped myself. Adding one more lie to the pile was something I just couldn't stomach.

She rubbed her forehead as if the newfound memory gave her a headache. “Why would we fight about you having lunch with your coworkers? Was I that jealous?”

“We've fought about a lot of things,” I said. “But we've started over, remember?”

Looking dazed, she slowly nodded. I watched her retreat up the stairs and recalled the last fight we had before she'd found the e-mail. It had been about me having lunch with my female coworkers, one of which was Danielle. I realized two things then: one, that things were not as good between us as they once were, and the same old demons still lurking below would surface; and two, my wife was getting her memory back.

Twenty-Eight

During the long hours Kyra was gone, I sat on the couch, flipping through channels, wondering why there were so many cleaning product infomercials and what my wife might be doing at that moment.

I'd offered numerous times to take Benji out for dinner or to the batting cage, but he maintained he wasn't up for it. I ended up just ordering us a couple of sandwiches from McCallister's down the street, and resigned myself to house arrest.

I raised the corned beef sandwich to my mouth, sniffed the mustard-coated rye bread, then set it down again in its wrapper without taking a bite. I knew I should make myself eat. The only thing I'd taken in all day was a brown-speckled banana, half a pot of coffee, and a roll at the Harbor Inn. Rampant thoughts about Kyra and what she might be doing with Mr. Italiano didn't exactly whet my appetite.

Despite the ridiculousness of it, I couldn't help picturing the two of them going at it like teenagers and eventually moving the party to his hotel room. He was probably loaded and would have one of those penthouse suites that took up an entire floor, a heart-shaped bed, and a giant Jacuzzi that just happened to have a chilled bottle of Dom Perignon and two glasses waiting beside it.

Drawing in a deep breath, I reminded myself of what Marnie had said. Kyra wasn't like that. She hadn't even let
me
get to second base until our wedding night. The front door opened and Benji walked in. Looking at him coming in, I felt disoriented. I hadn't even heard him leave. “Where have you been?”

He gave me the same one-raised eyebrow his mother was famous for and plopped down next to me. “You sure you weren't the one in the accident? I told you I was going next door to see the Harringtons.”

“The Harringtons? Why?”

He smelled like hickory smoke. Bram was always grilling up something.

“Because they asked me to.”

“When did they do that?”

“At boot camp. They wrote to me.”

I was beginning to feel like the whole world was off. “The Harringtons wrote to you?”

He sat beside me, unlaced his boots, kicked them off, and set his socked feet on the coffee table. Kyra would have a fit. Not because his feet were up there, but because the soles of his socks looked like he smeared them around in a pile of dirt. I wondered how long he'd been wearing them.

“You okay or has Mom's date got you all discombobulated?”

My cheeks grew warm. “Get your feet off the table, I've got food up here, and it's not a date.”

“You'd deserve it if it was.” He set his feet down. “Even I know you can't pull that macho stuff on the modern woman.”

“You think your mother is a modern woman?” Was she? I never really thought about it. Just like the rest of women throughout history, she cooked, cleaned, and made no sense, so I doubted it. “Anyway, it's not a date.”

“I know.” He slid his hand up his T-shirt and scratched his chest. “I was just picking.”

“Well, stop.”

We sat there a minute staring at the TV, though if someone had asked me what I was looking at I wouldn't have been able to say. “So, why were the Harringtons writing you?”

“Because they're nice people and they're interested in my life,” he said.

“Yeah, they're nice,” I said halfheartedly.
Phony and annoying, but nice.

Benji eyed my sandwich even though I delivered one just like it to his room an hour before. “What did you get?”

“Same thing as you,” I said.

He nodded to the overweight brunette throwing pizza dough in the air on the TV. “What are we watching?”

The woman caught the crust on her fingertips and said in a thick Louisiana accent that she'd be right back after a word from her sponsors. A fabric softener commercial blinked on.

I shrugged and held out the remote to him.

He didn't notice it, because his eyes were glued to the corned beef.

“Take it,” I said, waving the remote.

“You sure you don't want it?” He picked up the sandwich.

I set down the remote as I watched my son tear into bread, meat, and Swiss cheese. Five minutes later, the only thing that remained of the sandwich was a smear of yellow mustard on the corner of his mouth. I wondered if he'd put on a bunch of weight like he had when that girl broke his heart. If we didn't get him over this Navy thing soon, he'd look like Larry.

He ran his tongue over his lips as he flipped through the stations. He set the remote down when he got to what looked like a
Deadliest Catch
knockoff. Icy waves were beating a fishing vessel mercilessly.

“Those guys are crazy,” I said.

“I don't know.” He looked at me. “I can see the draw of that lifestyle. You know how much money those guys make?”

“You mean if they live?” I said.

“I could buy my own boat.”

“You mean if you lived,” I repeated.

Right on cue, one of the men caught his foot in a line the others were throwing over the side of the ship. It nearly dragged him into the water. Luckily another crewmember saw it, dove on him in the nick of time, and grabbed on to a thick chain. The other men shot right into action and freed the victim's foot as though they'd performed the move a million times.

Benji and I sat quiet watching while the man rubbed at his leg, choking up as he thanked them for saving his life. I'm sure Benji, like everyone else, saw it as a touching moment; I just saw it as scary. When a commercial came on, he said, “Well, maybe I could do something else to buy a boat.”

I'd have thought seeing what we just had would have deterred him. “What's your sudden interest in boats?”

“I've always liked boats.”

“What kind of boat would you want to buy?” I was thinking if it was a kayak or canoe I might surprise him with it to take his mind off the Navy.

“A troller. You know, one of those big commercial ones.”

I about choked. “You know how much those things cost?”

“Forty-five to sixty-five thousand used from what I could find online. It's cheaper than a college education though, and it would pay for itself in time.”

“You want to be a fisherman, Benji?”

He shrugged. “Maybe.”

His whole life flashed before my eyes. This wasn't at all what I pictured when Kyra insisted we paint his nursery in bright colors and read to him every night to boost his intelligence. “You know how much they make?”

“I don't care.”

“You should,” I said. “About twenty-five grand if they're lucky.”

He gave me the look all teens were good at, that made it clear they thought their parents knew squat. “How do you know that?”

“Because before I took the job here, I thought about it myself.”

He gave me a curious look. “You?”

“I thought about doing just about everything, just to get out of the car business.”

“If you hate it so much why do you do it?”

I raised both hands. “To give you guys this.”

His expression gave me the impression he thought I was a fool. Maybe I was. Moving here, making manager, buying into this neighborhood, none of it had brought us happiness in the end. Just a different set of problems. A bigger set.

Benji stared at the TV, watching the captain yell at one of his men. “Once I knew I was probably getting kicked out, I started thinking about what I wanted to be before I got the Navy itch.”

I couldn't help but smile at the memory that conjured. “You wanted to be Popeye.”

“I still want to be Popeye,” he said. “Lots of people in Braddy's Wharf make a living fishing, you know.”

I took a sip of my sweet tea, which was watered down now from the melting ice. “It's a hard life, Ben.”

He shifted in his seat like I was making him uncomfortable.
Well, tough,
I thought.
Better to be uncomfortable in your warm, paid-for house than laying in the gutter, penniless five years from now.

“What isn't?”

“There are easier ways to make money. A lot more money. That's all.”

He rolled his eyes. “Money isn't everything.”

“You say that because you've never lived without it.”

He let out a breath like I'd sucked the life out of him. Seems I was getting good at doing that to people lately. “I kind of thought you'd give college some more thought. You have a business sense about you like no one I've ever seen. The right school could really help you hone that.”

He buried his face in his hands and ran his fingers through what little hair he had. “I thought we buried the college discussion when I left the first time.”

“Okay, okay, just throwing things out there.”

He turned to look at me. “Well, stop throwing. This is my life, not yours. You're the businessman, not me.”

“Well, if you're going to make your living fishing, you have to be one too.”

“I just want to fish.”

“Well, life doesn't work that way.”

He turned sideways to face me. “How does it work, Dad? Tell me. I get married, sell out for a big house in a snooty neighborhood, fight with my wife while my kid listens through the wall wondering when the divorce is going to happen, then get a little something on the side so I can feel better about selling out my dreams?”

I clenched my jaw and felt short, angry puffs of air shoot from my flared nostrils. I wasn't about to discuss my alleged shortcomings with my kid. “You may be a man, but you're still my son. You'll show me respect as long as you live under my roof.” I realized then that what made me so angry was that he was exactly right.

He snatched up the remote and flipped the channel, replacing the fishing show with a cartoon. He slammed the remote on the table, knocking the battery from it. It rolled off the table onto the rug. “You know what the Navy taught me? You want respect, you earn it.”

Twenty-Nine

Kyra stayed out so late with her sister and their designer-slash-musician friend that I had fallen asleep on the couch by the time they got back. Rather than take a chance on learning that my wife had remembered more of my indiscretions, I pretended not to wake up when I heard them come in. Although a person would need to have no sense of smell whatsoever to sleep through my sister-in-law's obnoxious perfume.