by Mary Bowers
“Terri hired a dunderhead?”
“Well, I guess she’s okay. Her name is Darcy. She has a bowl of candy on her desk and she always wants me to take some, but they aren’t chocolate. Just mints and stuff. I like Terri better. She’s nice. She’s nice to everybody, but Daddy says she has to be, because she’s in real estate.”
“And real estate people have to be nice?”
She shrugged. “I guess so. Anyway, everybody likes her, and she’s really pretty, and I’m going to be a big shot like her when I grow up. A professional. I’m going to run things, but people are going to like me because I’ll be a good boss, and I’ll give them all raises. Daddy says nobody gets any raises anymore. That means you give them more money.”
I nodded wisely.
“And I’m going to dress just like her, and wear really expensive clothes. And high heels. She doesn’t wear high heels. She wears sandals. But I’m going to wear high heels.”
“Not for long,” I muttered, remembering those sprints for the Union Station when I was late for my train in the dead of winter. She didn’t hear me, and was so deep in the story of her spectacular future that she didn’t care.
“I think Jason likes her,” she said, finally coming to a stop, because the concept was so tragic.
“Does she like him?”
She pondered. “I don’t know. She’s nice to him, but she’s nice to everybody. I think she likes one of the old guys.”
“Which one?”
She shrugged. “One of the tennis guys. Daddy says she acts that way with all the men, but I don’t know. You know?” For an 8-year old, her tone was surprisingly suggestive. “And all these old guys around here are rich.”
“They are?”
“Oh, yeah. They have Medicare. When we go to the doctor, Mommy has to pay.”
Knowing from personal experience that Medicare helps, but it doesn’t make you rich, I kept my mouth shut. Let her find out for herself in about sixty years, if we aren’t doing some other kind of “care” by then.
“So you think Terri and Jason like one another?”
She thought about it. “I used to think so, but she was keeping away from him at the party and, like, staring at him.”
Because a kid had him trapped in a corner, I thought. Perhaps Jason wasn’t the one she was staring at? I kept a diplomatic silence and looked inquiring.
“He looked sad. He kept looking at her and looking sad.”
“He’ll get over it,” I said, waiting for Mokey to leave his p-mail on a passing tree.
“He will?”
“These workplace things are always a bad idea. He’ll figure that out. Tell me about his new truck.”
“It’s red. And really big. Bigger than the other one.”
“So that’ll get him through. Nothing makes a man happy like a big red truck.”
“Look, there’s Terri! HI TERRI!” She waved madly toward the main drive. We were standing in front of her parents’ townhouse by then, and I had to look past three or four others to see the blond woman strolling through sunshine.
She turned and gave a cheery wave, then went on to wherever she was going.
“Isn’t she pretty? That’s her new dress. It’s got big flowers like those all over it.” She pointed at a hibiscus bush. “She got it in Savannah last week, on vacation. I’m glad we didn’t come last week. We would of missed her, and then Daddy would of had to go to the office and tell the dunderhead we had frogs. Oh!” She looked up at me excitedly. “We had frogs!”
“Kate!” her mother said, looking stern.
I handed the leash over to Mommy and introduced myself. After a few pleasant words to me, she turned back to her daughter. “You shouldn’t talk about people that way.”
“Well, Daddy called her a dunderhead.”
Ah, those parenting moments when the kid’s got a point. Stuck for only a few seconds, Crystal found the right words to explain that grown-ups should not always be quoted verbatim, and certainly not to “other people,” (strangers, like me), and never mind why. Then she tried to shoo Kate inside while she held onto Mokey’s leash.
“Me and Taylor are going to the duck pond,” the child said, pointing down to the end of the townhouse row, opposite the real estate office. “She’s never seen it!”
“Lunch is almost ready. You can go to the duck pond later.”
There was a brief discussion, but Mommy won.
“Oh, okay,” Kate said. “’Bye Taylor.”
“’Bye.”
She dragged her feet away from us, crushed by defeat.
“Thanks for bringing them home,” Crystal said once her daughter was inside. “Kate loves to walk him, but he’s getting too strong for her.”
“No problem. I’m always running after animals.” I explained myself to her.
“So you’re Coco and Patty’s famous friend. They were talking about you at the party before you got there.”
“I figured they were. Kate picked up my high school nickname.”
“I didn’t think the kids were even listening.”
“Oh, kids are always listening.”
“They certainly are,” she said ruefully, “but not when you want them to. Anyway, I think it was sweet of your friends, coming all this way to surprise you after all these years.”
“Oh, yes. And they’ve been surprising me ever since. It was awful, what happened at the party. I’m so glad you and the kids were gone by then.”
She nodded with a worried face and changed the subject. We had a brief, pleasant chat, and then she went inside to give the kids lunch. Jerry, she said, was having a golf lesson.
Lovely lady. Nice family.
I walked back to my friends’ condo slowly, looking for Terri, but wherever she’d been going, she was out of sight by then. I heard women’s voices as I got back to the condo – more than two women, from the sound of it – but when I got inside, it wasn’t Terri they were talking to. It was a lady with a face lift under cranberry red hair.
Chapter 12
My first impression of Candy Cutter was that her conversation was a lot like Kate’s: cheerful, artless and all over the place.
Patty and Coco watched me with laughing eyes as I was swamped in a tidal wave of unconnected thoughts. I began to realize that even her voice reminded me of Kate’s: very girlish, and on a woman her age, ridiculous.
Her hair was certainly red. I’ve had cranberry sauce that was more subdued. Her eyes were dark brown and her complexion was sort of olive, which couldn’t compete with the dye job right above it. So ill-advised. Her hairdresser, if she had any pride in her work, must have carefully tried to hide the fact that Candy Cutter was her customer.
I found myself nodding, maintaining an uncomfortable eye contact with her, and trying to figure out how to jump aboard this runaway train, because the woman didn’t even seem to need to pause for breath.
Finally, I just interrupted her. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.
That stopped her. She didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. Finally she said, “Oh, Fred.”
“I know you two were close.”
“Who told you that?”
“Well,” I said, blinking, “somebody said you were drinking from his glass.”
“Oh, that!” she said with a rippling laugh. “I was just flirting. Fred was already taken.”
“He was?” I was still locked into her eyes (I don’t know how she did it, but you couldn’t look away), and from the sofa, where they were sitting side-by-side, I noticed a startled flutter from my friends.
“Always has been. Of course, you don’t know that. Have a seat.”
I complied.
“Who was he taken by?” I asked.
“Edith. He only married somebody else on the rebound, after Edith married Harold. Didn’t you know that? I thought you knew him.”
“I went out with him twice.”
“So you caught on right away. He just wasn’t interested. His first wife died young,
and he never bothered to remarry. He dated a lot, but he never got over Edith. I think he was getting tired of following her around, though.”
I knew very well what was coming next, and mostly to avoid hearing any more of her drivel, I said, “He was falling for you.”
She preened. “Nothing serious, really. At least not on my part.”
“No, of course not. Can I get you something to drink?”
Coco spoke up. “I already offered. What about it, Candy, are you ready now? How about one of these?”
The way Coco sloshed the glass I began to think Coco was getting sloshed, too, and just wanted an excuse to get up and get another one for herself.
“Perhaps I will. Just a small one. Not too much vodka.”
“Oh, there’s no vodka in it,” Coco said, “but we can fix that.”
Great. Now we were never going to get rid of her.
* * * * *
By the time she left, I had a headache. And in the midst of a torrent of meaningless blather, she only said one interesting thing, and it wasn’t even to us.
After about half an hour of swilling lightly diluted vodka, her cell phone rang. She answered, and told whoever it was to cancel her appointment.
I raised my eyebrows interrogatively.
“My stylist,” she said, putting the phone away. “I was toying with the idea of going blond, but I’ve changed my mind. I’ll stick with my natural color.”
Give us credit. Nobody laughed.
* * * * *
When we finally got rid of her, we were all too hungry to cook. Day one of serious-dieting was hanging in the balance, depending on where we went and how we ordered.
“There’s a great health-food restaurant called The Manatee,” I suggested. “It’s not too far away.”
“Health food?” Coco said. “Surely you jest.”
“Seafood would be legal,” Patty said. “How about shrimp?”
“I only like it fried,” I told her. “Definitely illegal. We could get grilled grouper just about anywhere, right here on the island.”
Coco stood up and managed to get steady on her heels. “I want to go downtown. I didn’t dress up like this to go to some seafood shack behind a gas station.”
I hadn’t been about to suggest any such thing. The Anastasia Island seafood restaurants are top-notch, but I wasn’t going to argue with a tipsy fashionista about it. I gave it some thought. I’m much more familiar with Flagler Beach and Tropical Breeze, but everybody in the area has been to downtown St. Augustine, including me.
“And no vegetarian restaurants,” Coco said. “We may be on a diet, but we’re not gerbils and we don’t eat lawn clippings. I know the kind of stuff you vegetarians eat.”
“I’m a pescetarian. I will eat fish. You’ve already seen me do it. Remember last night?”
“Whatever.”
“Let’s just go downtown and find a place,” Patty said. “I’m too hungry to argue.”
I stood before them, a very pessimistic pescetarian. After all, I had appointed myself their diet cop, and I could see a binge coming on. There were any number of gelato shops in downtown St. Augustine, and at least three independent chocolatiers that I could think of. No, four. One of them had both gelato and chocolate. A veritable minefield.
“Well, all right,” I told them, “but remember the diet.”
“We’ll walk it off,” Coco said lightly, tacking toward the kitchen to drop off her glass.
Patty came closer as she passed me by, leaned in and whispered, “Starving.”
* * * * *
St. George Street is the main business district of St. Augustine, and has been since the sixteenth century. It’s a narrow, pedestrians-only, brick-paved street with small, Spanish-style buildings on either side. Balconies you can almost reach up and touch jut out from upper floors, festooned with flowers and glazed in sunshine. The occasional plaque lets you know the historical significance of a structure, and of course, just past the street and beyond the old redoubt is the Castillo San Marcos. The old Spanish fort.
“Later,” Coco said as I began to point out landmarks.
“Where’s your favorite restaurant?” Patty said as we passed through the old city gates at the north end of St. George Street and paused to face the tourist hordes.
It wasn’t shoulder-to-shoulder, as I’d feared, but many of the spaces between the families of four and the old couples holding hands were filled in by school groups in matching tee shirts. We began to work our way down the street, hearing the music of several different languages as we passed through the crowd.
It was past noon, but the sun seemed to still be directly overhead. Like a tunnel without a roof, the street was lined with hard surfaces and the sun seemed to fill it up like a glass and submerge us in light and heat. I’d forgotten to bring a hat. Every Floridian with any sense has a shade hat in the backseat of the car, but we hadn’t come in my car. The northerners hadn’t thought of such a thing, and at least one of them would have pressure-cooked her own brain before she’d have messed up her hair.
When a middle-aged couple with a pair of Chihuahuas in a dog stroller distracted me, I rammed into a man who immediately apologized in charming, accented English. It had been my fault, but he was past me before I could say so. After that I decided we were going to ground someplace fast, getting out of the sun and the mob, and putting a stopper in the whining.
“The Columbia,” I said.
“What’s that?” Coco asked.
“A Cuban restaurant. It’s famous, and more to the point, it’s close.”
“Whatever,” Patty said. “Just go.”
Those of you who have eaten at The Columbia would argue with my decision. Not because you don’t like it; you do. Nobody doesn’t. But the first thing they do is set a basket of fresh, soft, hot bread in front of you, with lovely scoops of soft butter to slather on it, and no matter what resolutions you have made, your eyes glaze over and you eat.
We were seated in the main dining room, with the boy-and-the-dolphin fountain splashing merrily next to us, and Patty and Coco looked all around, quietly smiling. They approved. Above us was the railing lining the upstairs gallery, and around us the room was decorated with glazed tiles and vintage pictures of the restaurant’s founding family, dancing, smiling, welcoming.
A willowy young thing came up to our table and introduced himself as Joey, and the diet went out the window.
In our defense, the strawberry dessert we had probably saved us from the higher concentrations of calories lying in wait for us out on St. George Street, and technically, strawberries are healthy. The cake and meringue and hard sauce were merely incidental. And, of course, the moment Joey flicked his lighter and set the thing en flambé was a memorable, vacation moment, of which Patty got cell phone pictures that she immediately posted on Facebook. So in the sense that it was a must-do vacation experience, it was worth it. Required, if you want to look at it that way.
So, check that off the list. Now we would walk it off, as promised.
We rolled out of The Columbia and looked left and right, and Coco saw a dress shop.
* * * * *
Standing around outside a dressing room door waiting for somebody to come out and model clothing for you counts as an activity, right? After all, standing burns more calories than sitting. Next we were going to walk, which burns more calories than standing. (Ask me about the science behind body mechanics vis-à-vis weight loss. I’ve got all the facts. Putting the facts into practice? That’s a little more iffy.)
Bumping through the crowds on St. George Street would slow our pace, though, and once outside the dress shop we all realized at the same time that Coco’s shopping bags, even distributed among the three of us, were going to be a nuisance. Also, with the number of people milling around we were sure to bash some poor kid in the head and get yelled at by dad-the-tourist, so we agreed to go back to the island and walk on the beach instead.
* * * * *
Coco had had a mojito a
t The Columbia, on top of all that healthy “fruit juice,” so when the bags had been dumped on her bed in the master bedroom, (it had a bigger closet; Patty hadn’t even made her flip for it), Coco tried to flop onto the couch, believing that between the two of us, Patty and I wouldn’t be able to haul her off again. She underestimated us.
We didn’t actually stagger off to the beach with Coco hanging between us like a drunk supported by lamp posts, but it was a near thing. When she realized we were actually going to try to make her burn some of those calories off, she got cranky.
I tuned her out. Patty and I had a nice chat over the top of her head as if she weren’t there at all. She was just a dark-headed creature with flamboyant draperies, making strange growling noises. Since Patty and I are both way taller than Coco, it was easy, and since Coco was too out-of-it to do anything but drone, we heard one another just fine.
After a while, Coco piped down altogether. I diagnosed an early-onset hangover, but she got no sympathy from me. I wasn’t about to cave to her whimpering, as Patty would have. I became skeptical about her ability to walk along the ocean’s edge without falling in, though. Patty and I were going to have to do that without her. Still, she needed to be taught a lesson. Next time she blew bubbles about “walking it off” before wolfing down a full meal including dessert, she was going to think twice about being able to fool me.
I could see that the years of traveling with a sweetie pie like Patty had spoiled Coco. She was used to always getting her way. While I still wasn’t interested in taking annual trips with them, I realized it would do Coco a lot of good if I did. She needed toughening-up. A little character-building. Most of all, somebody needed to say no to her every now and then. I could do that with my eyes closed. In fact, I’d enjoy it.
We almost had the corpse all the way down the walkover to the beach, where we were going to throw it down on a blanket and put an umbrella over it, when Patty recognized somebody she knew and waved.
It was Michael’s friend from the party, the one with the China-blue eyes. I was glad. I’d taken an instant liking to her, and of all the people at the party, she was the one I wanted to get to know better.