“Suzanne, you say you and Darby are really, really close. And it sounds like you’re pretty wrapped up in her life and her soccer and everything. I’m wondering if maybe you’re too involved.”
“Yeah, maybe you’re one of those helicopter parents I hear about,” Ashleigh said. “Why do they always call them that, I wonder?”
“Because those are the parents who’re always hovering right over their kids’ shoulders, doing their work for them, or interfering with teachers or coaches, or whatever,” Camryn said. “I did a story about it. It’s a real problem.”
“Helicopter parents? That’s ridiculous,” Rochelle scoffed. “You’ve never had kids, Grace or Ashleigh, so you don’t understand. Suzanne is a great mom. Darby’s a senior this year, right, Suzanne? So this is will be her last year at home before going off to college. It’s totally understandable that you want to be part of her life. When Grace was in school, I never missed a class play or one of her tennis matches.”
“Maybe,” Wyatt said, carefully choosing his words, “you got so wrapped up in your daughter’s life, you forgot to pay enough attention to your husband. Maybe Eric felt, I don’t know, neglected?”
“Spoken just like a man!” Rochelle snapped. “Honest to Pete, I am so tired of hearing men make excuses for their own bad behavior. If her husband was feeling neglected, maybe he should have gone to those soccer tournaments with them, instead of sleeping with any woman who caught his eye. Right, Suzanne?”
“Maybe,” Suzanne said quietly. “Maybe if Eric was feeling abandoned, he could have told me that. Or maybe I should have made more of a point of including him. I just don’t know anything.”
“You knew enough to kick his cheating butt to the curb,” Rochelle said. She glanced over her shoulder and saw a tall black man with a gleaming bald head standing pointedly in front of the cash register at the bar. She jumped up. “Oh, Lord. There’s Garland, from the health department. Hold that thought,” she told Suzanne. “I’ll be right back.”
* * *
Five minutes later, Rochelle returned to the table, grim-faced, with Sweetie clutched firmly under her arm.
She glared at Grace. “Of all the dumb luck. Garland drops in for a beer, and this little mutt comes scampering down the back staircase and into the kitchen.” She thrust the dog at Grace. “You know anything about this?”
Grace sighed and held the wriggling dog against her chest. “This is Sweetie. She was left behind at Mandevilla Manor. I know you don’t like dogs, but…”
“But you decided you’d bring her here to the Sandbox. Are you crazy? We can’t have a dog in a restaurant. You want the health department on my ass? I could lose my license, if Garland decided to report this.”
Grace glanced over her shoulder. Garland gave her a stern look and waggled a finger at her. “I’m really sorry. I thought I’d closed my door tight. I don’t know how she got out. I’ll take her back upstairs.”
“And then find her a new home, tomorrow,” Rochelle said firmly.
* * *
Grace carried Sweetie to her bedroom and examined the door where the dog had scratched and clawed to escape.
She carried Sweetie into the bathroom and set her down on the floor. Sweetie gave her a quizzical look. Grace sat on the edge of the bathtub, to lecture the dog at eye level.
“I know you don’t like being penned up, but you just can’t go downstairs, or you’ll get me kicked out of my mom’s house. And then we’ll both be homeless.” She pulled a treat from her pocket and tossed it to Sweetie, who caught it and retreated beneath the pedestal sink to savor it.
“Stay here for now, and we’ll figure something out tomorrow,” she promised, giving her a final, reassuring head scratch.
* * *
When Grace got back to the bar, the group was still having a spirited discussion and Rochelle was back behind the bar. She set a fresh basket of popcorn on the table and tried to avoid her mother’s disapproving stare from across the room.
“What did I miss?” she asked.
“Just a lot more man bashing,” Wyatt said, helping himself to a handful of popcorn. “The usual.”
Camryn rolled her eyes. “It seems like Suzanne’s husband was jealous of all the time she spent with their daughter, so that’s his excuse for having an affair?”
“Affairs. Plural,” Suzanne said quietly. “But I wouldn’t really characterize them as affairs. More like one-night stands, from what I could find out.”
“Oh, no.” Grace blurted. “That’s so awful.”
“Like my asshole husband,” Camryn said disgustedly. “Men really are such shits.”
“Thanks,” Wyatt said. He stood up and pulled some money from his pockets. “On that note, I think I’ll just take my sorry, shitty man self on home and let you girls continue the vagina monologues.” He did a little half bow. “Ladies?”
Camryn reached out and caught him by the elbow as he started to walk out. “Don’t be such a wuss, Wyatt. You know I wasn’t talking about you.”
“Don’t go!” Ashleigh pleaded. “We really don’t hate all men. Well, I don’t. I don’t know about the others.” She turned to Suzanne. “You tell him.”
“Please stay,” Suzanne echoed. “We want to hear a man’s point of view. Right, Grace?”
She could feel Wyatt watching her, one eyebrow cocked expectantly.
“Right,” she said finally, looking anywhere but directly at him.
Camryn tugged impatiently at his arm. “Come on, dude. Sit back down. Don’t make us beg.”
“It’s getting late,” Wyatt said, his resolve ebbing a little.
“It’s not even nine o’clock yet,” Ashleigh pointed out. “And didn’t you tell us your little boy stays with your wife on weeknights?”
“We alternate days. I pick him up after school tomorrow,” Wyatt admitted.
Camryn was steering him back toward the table. “What about you?” she asked, after he’d sat down again. “You’ve got a kid. Did you ever resent your wife spending more time with your son than with you?”
Wyatt took a sip of his beer. “Maybe when Bo was just a baby, yeah, I probably felt a little left out, especially when Callie was nursing him. Things got better after the pediatrician convinced her she could pump breast milk and let me take the early-morning feedings so she could get some sleep.”
“You did that?” Grace turned to him in surprise.
“Sure,” Wyatt said, shrugging. “It was kind of cool. I’d take Bo out to the living room, give him his bottle, and we’d watch cartoons until we both fell back asleep. I swear, he loved
Phineas and Ferb
when he was only six weeks old. He’d laugh his little ass off.”
Camryn shook her head. “Dexter Nobles used to sleep right through those midnight feedings. And I don’t remember him changing all that many diapers either.”
“Eric changed a lot of diapers, and sometimes he’d sit up and read aloud to me while I nursed Darby,” Suzanne said wistfully. “I kind of miss those days.”
“He read to you? That’s so sweet,” Ashleigh said. “What did he read?”
“
Harry Potter,
actually,” Suzanne said. “A college classmate who was living in the U.K. sent us the first book as a baby gift for Darby. Another nice memory I’d completely forgotten about.”
“How about you all? Suzanne asked, polling the others. “Did anybody else come up with any deeply repressed happy moments?”
Ashleigh wrinkled her nose. “I didn’t really get that question when Paula asked it. See, I was happy right up until Boyce started up with that Suchita chick.”
“Any one, particular memory?” Suzanne queried.
“Oh yeah,” Ashleigh said, dreamy-eyed. “One of the drug companies had a ‘seminar’ for plastic surgeons in the Napa Valley back in the fall. They put us up in this fabulous old inn in the wine country. Boyce and I drove over to Calistoga and did a couples-only mud bath and massage…” She giggled. “We got pretty naughty. I ended up with mud in the most
interesting
places…”
“Spare us any more smutty details,” Camryn said drily. “We get the picture.”
“Your turn,” Ashleigh said, pointing right back at her. “And don’t try telling us you were never happy. You were married longer than any of us, right? There must be some reason you stayed with your husband all those years.”
Camryn sighed. “The last really happy time? I’d have to say it was that first Christmas Jana was old enough to understand about Santa Claus. Dexter bought her this ridiculously expensive Victorian dollhouse with about a million itty-bitty pieces to it. That night, after we put her to bed, we put on my Johnny Mathis CD, and he popped a bottle of champagne he’d been saving for a special occasion. We stayed up drinking and laughing and dancing to Johnny Mathis. “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” came on, and the next thing you know, we’d forgotten all about that dollhouse…” She blushed. “I sound like Ashleigh now, spilling about our sex life. Of course, that was fifteen years ago.”
“You’ve really been that unhappy all this time?” Grace asked.
Camryn rested her elbows on the table and propped her chin on her hands while she thought about it.
“I guess I was going with the flow. At one point, when Jana was about eight, I realized things weren’t great. But then Dexter made partner at his law firm, and I finally got hired on at News Four. We bought the new house with the pool and we put Jana in private school at Saint Stephen’s, which was not cheap. And I thought, why rock the boat? Things will get better. But they never did. I should’ve ended it a long time ago. Before things turned ugly like this.”
“Graaaaccce?” Ashleigh tilted her nearly empty glass. “Is your mom coming back? ’Cause I could use another of her ’ritas.”
“I’ll get it,” Grace stood.
“And then it’s your turn to share,” Camryn said, making quote marks with the fingertips of both hands. “So don’t think we’re going to forget.”
Rochelle deliberately turned her back to Grace when she walked behind the bar. “I’m fixing Ashleigh another fake margarita,” she told her mother. “Could you add it to our tab?”
“Is the dog locked up?” she asked pointedly.
“She’s in the bathroom, taking a nap,” Grace assured her. “It won’t happen again.”
* * *
“We’re waiting,” Wyatt said pointedly, when Grace returned to the table with Ashleigh’s drink.
She stuck her tongue out at him. “I notice you haven’t read from your journal tonight.”
“But I shared. And it was honest and it was meaningful,” he taunted. “Right, ladies?”
“Come on, Grace. Your turn.” Ashleigh noisily sipped her fakearita.
“Okay, okay,” Grace grumbled. She pulled her notebook from her bag and skimmed what she’d written.
“I’d never lived in a real house, until Ben and I bought our first little place in Bradenton. It was the worst house on the street. Concrete-block and less than a thousand square feet. Two tiny bedrooms, one miserable bath that didn’t even have a shower, a galley kitchen so narrow that when you opened the oven door it almost touched the cabinet on the opposite wall. The countertops were plywood covered with plastic tile.”
“Sounds dreamy,” Camryn said.
“I knew we could make it dreamy. But we had zero money to work with.”
Ashleigh waved her hand in the air. “Excuse me, Grace, but when does the happy-memory part come in? Because, so far, this is all sounding pretty grim to me.”
“That was just the setup. The prologue,” Grace said. She flipped through the pages of her notebook and began reading.
“I was working for a big developer in Sarasota, designing their model-home interiors. This was before the economy tanked, when condos were selling as fast as they could put them up. Ben was an account executive with an advertising and marketing company. We’d work all day, then go straight to the house, change clothes, and work ’til one or two in the morning, go back to the condo we were renting, fall into bed, then get up and do the same thing the next day. For six months, we worked every weekend. Some nights we were too tired to even drive home, so we’d just crash on a mattress on the living room floor. Neither Ben nor I had any real do-it-yourself skills. So we taught ourselves. It was all a huge adventure, and we were in it together. We just figured if we messed up, we’d rip it out and start over. We were absolutely fearless. One night, I wanted to put up this ten-inch cove-ceiling molding in the living room. We had exactly enough to do that one room, and I knew it would be fabulous. Ben bet me I couldn’t do it. And of course, I totally messed it up and ended up in tears. He took pity on me, took over, and somehow made it work. But it took hours. It was close to midnight by the time we ate our dinner of Chinese takeout and cheap jug wine, sitting on overturned plastic joint-compound buckets. We got silly drunk and ended up naked, hosing each other off in the backyard. And Ben won the bet, so you can probably figure out what happened next. I can’t remember a happier time in our life together.”
Grace closed the notebook. She heard a soft exhalation of breath from somewhere behind and turned just in time to see Rochelle, scurrying back toward the kitchen.
* * *
“Good night,” Grace said, walking out into the Sandbox parking lot with the others. They’d discussed what to do about Paula but hadn’t come to any kind of consensus. “Let’s see what happens next Wednesday,” Suzanne had suggested, and short of any other brilliant ideas, they’d agreed to do just that.
She’d turned to go back inside. “Hey, Grace?” She turned and saw Wyatt, standing in the shadow of a clump of palm trees.
“Hi,” she said.
“Can I talk to you?”
“Okay.” She leaned up against the bumper of his truck and squinted to see his face in the flickering green and red light cast by the bar’s neon sign.
“Wow. That rash or whatever it is on your face really looks painful,” she said.
“The stuff on my face isn’t the worst of it,” Wyatt said, grimacing and jerking his chin downward, toward his belt line.
“Oh.” She caught his meaning and grimaced, too. “Sorry.”
“I’ll be okay. As soon as I get home, I’ll, uh, apply the cortisone cream. And take some Benadryl and drift off to la-la land.”
“I hope you feel better,” she said, sounding cold and insincere, even to herself.
“I hope you mean that,” Wyatt said. “I know I screwed up at Coquina Beach.”