A Gentle Rain (28 page)

Doh. "Pleasingly normal," I said. "Just right." I was only zaftig if judged by the standards of an anorexic reporter.

Lily smiled. "You're just right. I knew it."

Miriam laid the paper down. "So much for gettin' investors."

"Yankee bitch," Lula intoned, flinging a red-nailed forefinger at the paper. "We shoulda drowned her."

Dale shook her head. "Bitch is a bad word. Jesus doesn't like it."

Lula sighed. "I know, Miss Dale, but Jesus ai1'tworried about paying the utilities for the next mermaid show."

The mood in the kitchen turned darker. Cheech and Bigfoot sidled closer to their forlorn lady, Lula. Possum crept under the table and sat, hugging his knees. Mac, Lily, Joey, and even Mr. Darcy and Rhubarb looked at Ben and me worriedly. Miriam and Lula just moped.

The kitchen phone rang. "I'll get it," I said quickly. I plucked a receiver off a faded yellow push-button console attached to the planks wall by the cabinets. "Hello?" I listened. "Just a moment, please. She's right here." I handed the receiver to Miriam. "It's for you. A gentleman from California. Los Angeles, I believe he said."

Miriam covered the phone with her palm. "I don't know nobody from California."

"Just see who it is!" Lula hissed.

"Hello? Miriam here." I watched her listen. I watched her heavily mascaraed eyes stop frowning and go wide among their tanned crevices, like flowering marbles. "Uh huh," she said. Then, "All right." And finally, "Ohmygawd, I gotta talk to the other gals. You email me all this information and I'll get back to you later, all right? And ... and you ... you tell Mr. Spielberg I sure do like his movies. Well, except for a few of `em. That one about the robot boy, that was just weird ... never mind. Thank you. Bye."

She laid the receiver down and stared at it. Ben frowned. "You okay?"

Joey held out his oxygen cannula. "You need some air?"

"Sister?" Lula said loudly. "You're not havin' a stroke, are you?"

Miriam took a deep breath. "Mr. Stephen World Famous Movie Director Spielberg read the story about us in the New York paper and wants to buy the rights to make a movie about Kissme Woomee. For a hundred-thousand dollars."

"Thank you, Jesus," Dale shouted.

Lula chortled. "We can build a concession stand and pave the parking lot and put up an underwater fence to keep out alligators."

Ben and I sat there, looking at each other. He shook his head in wonder. "Who woulda thought?"

"Amazing," I said. I watched a tiny, blue lizard slither furtively along the kitchen window sill. He snatched a gnat off a ripening tomato then disappeared through a crevice between the sill and the window sash.

Stealth, in service to idealistic dreams, has a beauty of its own.

"Very inventive," I said to Sedge that night. "Do we know Mr. Spielberg personally?"

"No, but we know people who know people who know him. And we've invested in several projects of his over the years."

"I see. How appropriate, since what I went through with the alligator might have been a scene from jaws."

"My dear, you are getting in over your head. Literally."

"No. But if I do get in over my head-" I gazed through the soft darkness at daisies shimmering on the wallpaper like happy faces, "-there are people here who will always rescue me."

Part Three

"But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way."

-Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey

Chapter 15

Ben

"You awake? Ben? Wake up, hoss."

Miriam poked me in the shoulder with a fingernail. Hot summer dawn light slipped inside my eyelids like gold mist. I squinted. On his doggie pillow atop the plank floor, Rhubarb stretched and yawned. Two feet higher off the floor, Joey wheezed in his new queen-sized adjustable bed, which had a motorized head and foot rest plus massage action. He wore his favorite Star Wars nightshirt and hugged a pillow with a Spiderman Three pillowcase. His oxygen concentrator hissed and bubbled in the room's corner. A platter full of medicine bottles waited on a bedside table.

"Sssh. Joey had a restless night. Didn't get to sleep good 'til nearly four." I shifted painfully. When had my thirty-eight-year-old back started to ache from nights in a recliner?

"Ben, wake up!" Miriam was so close to my right ear I could feel the heat off her red lipstick. "I want to talk to you about Karen. Wake up. She'll be in the kitchen in a few minutes. We ain't got much time."

"Awright, awright." I sat up, curling the recliner upright. "Talk."

"She's good luck, Ben. Teegee knows this psychic over in Daytona Beach. They call her the NASCAR psychic because she's predicted the winner of the Daytona 500 for ten years straight. So me and Lula and Teegee went to see this psychic the other day. And she says your whole aura has changed from dark to light since Karen came. She says Karen's got a lot of murky energy about her but even so it's clear she's a pure-T human rabbit foot of good luck for you. Hell, if we could get Karen into a stock car I bet she'd win a race or two. You awake?"

"Yeah, yeah." I rubbed my eyes.

"Ben, admit it. Karen's not a Saturday night girlfriend. She's a keeper. She's got what it takes to be your best friend and partner in this dog-eatdog-eared ranch business. Since she came here we've had a run of good luck the likes of which nobody can doubt. Do something. Win her with your ways. Wiggle your waggle. You got to keep that gal here. She's good for what ails us. And you."

Miriam was mighty talkative for a middle-aged mermaid who worked the day shift starting at six a.m. "You think I don't want her to stay? The kitchen's never been cleaner. The snakes and lizards all smell like organic lemon soap, and I'm comin' to like seven-grain biscuits with free-range turkey sausage."

"You lying sack of shit. You know it's not about what she does in the kitchen."

Yeah, truth was, Karen coulda smeared dirt on the table and fed me lawn clippings and I'd still love her. The kiss after the mermaid show had been on my mind a lot. On my mind and wrapped in the sweaty palm of my hand, if you know what I'm sayin'. "I know," I admitted to Miriam.

Miriam sighed. "So? You ain't shy. Go about winnin' her over."

"She's different."

CCUy?"

"She's got good taste."

"Since when? She put on a spangled mermaid tail, didn't she?"

"I can't dog her. It ain't right. I'm her boss."

"Who says?"

"Isa " Y•

`Ben, you need to let your harem know about her. Just because you ain't been with `em in a while don't mean they're not expectin' you back.."

"There's nothing to tell `em."

She snorted so loudly Joey opened his eyes. I stood. Miriam followed me as I headed for his bedside. I waved her off with a groggy hand. She prodded me one more time with a fingernail so sharp it hurt. "You better wake up and smell the coffee, hon. Or you gonna have a bunch ofwomen ready to skin you alive and make pocketbooks outta your hide. And Karen'll be at the front of the pack." She stomped out.

Joey stirred. "Benji?" he moaned. "My feet feel full."

Instant worry. I turned the sheets back and stared at his swollen feet. The doc had warned me to look for signs.

The beginning of heart failure.

Like always, I stared out over the St. John's River from the doc's skyscraper view, keeping my eyes occupied. A hot wind kicked up a dust devil against the hot blue sky. Clouds the size ofwhole worlds sailed across that sky.

If you go to the beaches south of St. Augustine, where the Spaniards sailed up it their big warships nearly fifty years ahead of the English at Jainesto,ml, and you stand on a little finger of land called Anastasia Island, just stand there on the edge of the edge of the continent on a summer day, and you watch the sky, you'll see white ghost ships the size of mountains sail in from the eastern horizon, that silver-blue line on the rim of the sky. You'll feel like you're watching souls sail past in Heaven.

After Joey died I'd look up at those beach clouds and pretend he was floating by at the wheel of the biggest ship in God's Armada. I'd think. of Karen's harp music keeping him company. Elvis tunes. And I'd try to find some meaning beyond loneliness. That was what I'd see. Loneliness, grief and faith, right and wrong.

And nothing else.

The doc put a hand on my shoulder. "It's a slow process, Ben. He's still got months ahead of him. We can manage his heart condition with another drug or two, which will keep him comfortable. Take him home, enjoy his company, and make some memories."

A nod was all I could manage.

When I wheeled Joey out of the exam room he was all grins. A dose of diuretics had gotten his feet down to normal. "I'm all better, Benji. Right?"

"Right." I chucked him on the shoulder. "Good as new."

"Let's go get some ice cream! Yea! Now Karen gets to have ice cream with us!"

Karen was in the waiting room with Mac and Lily. Joey insisted she come along so he could treat her to ice cream on the way home.

While Mac and Lily made a fuss over Joey for havin' skinnier feet, Karen gave me a slit-eyed once-over. She knew I was hidin' something. I ignored her and she finally gave up. She smiled at Joey and held out his Star Wars comic book.

He didn't let just anybody take care of his comic books.

Kara

Ice cream is one of the simple joys that sets life aside for a few minutes. Surely there must be some tribal deity, somewhere, who holds waffle cones and double-dip cups aloft in her stony, serpentine arms, wooing the prayerful to forget all earthly woes as they chant softly: Chocolate fudge ripple. With nut sprinkles.

I tried to forget the tired and worried look in B en's eyes at the doctor's office as I meditated on my frozen yogurt. It wasn't easy.

"Hmmm, I like peach milkshakes," Lily sighed. She sipped from an oversized straw and held her large cup in both hands. Mac nodded as he carefully carved tiny divots from his scoop of cherry vanilla.

The three ofus perched awkwardly on heart-backed metal chairs on a pink patio outside the Cold N'Creamy. Across the street, large bulldozers and graders rumbled over a stark sea of sand. The summer sun glared down on the eviscerated landscape.

"What d'ya think of the ice cream parlor's new neighbors?" Ben asked when he pulled into the handicapped space in front of the shops.

"Greedy and despicably short-sighted," I said.

He smiled. Sometimes, my save-the-whales philosophy agreed with his.

Ben wheeled Joey to a restroom inside the ice cream parlor. "Joey has to have help when he goes wee wee or takes a poop," Lily whispered to me, blushing.

I thought of Ben, large and strong and deceptively sardonic, patiently tending to his brother's intimacies among the cramped and antiseptic confines of a public restroom. As I watched Lily and Mac eat their ice cream with childlike enjoyment, I wondered if I could ever take care of them so selflessly.

A sleek, silver Lamborghini whipped into the handicapped space beside Ben's truck. A decidedly non-handicapped blonde stepped out, flashing golden legs that began under safari short-shorts belted with an ornately silvered belt and ended at exquisitely tooled, high-heeled cowboy boots. She was small and muscular, with a gymnast's body. Her perky little breasts paraded, sans bra, in a thin-strapped white camisole. The rest of her was all gleaming arm bangles and wrap-around sunglasses. Not to mention the phone remote riding her ear like a pet leech.

Lily gasped. "Mac, it's that mean rich girl. The one from the auction." She bent her head near mine and whispered, "She made fun of us. And she said Ben had a nice ... behind. Only she didn't say behind." Lily and Mac straightened anxiously.

My warning antennae sprouted like fast-growing bamboo. Ifyou listen to bamboo, you can actually hear its woody joints pop as they expand.

I popped.

The blonde slung a tiny, absurdly jeweled purse from one golden shoulder, then strode our way with her shaded attention on the spa and tanning salon next door. Apparently, her self centered brain had forgotten meeting Mac and Lily. They were, after all, inferior beings not worthy of remembrance. As she sashayed past our table I said loudly but politely, "I'm sorry, you must not have noticed the handicapped markers on that parking space. I'm afraid you'll have to move your vehicle."