With a Southern Touch: AdamA Night in ParadiseGarden Cop

by Jennifer Blake

  “She likes her old bed,” Mary said. Then Aurora could have sworn that she said, “She just needs someone new in it.”

  “What?” Aurora gasped, turning crimson.

  “I said, you like your bed, you just need some good glue for it,” Mary said, frowning at Aurora’s reaction. “Aurora has a big antique sleigh bed,” she explained to Max. “Whatever are you so defensive about, dear?”

  “I heard you wrong. I’m sorry.”

  “What did you think I said?” Mary asked her, perplexed.

  “Nothing. Never mind.”

  She could feel Max staring at her, could sense his laughter. She wanted to douse him in the cocktail sauce.

  She reached for the bucket to pour herself more champagne, drained her glass, then turned her attention to her plate. Mike began to talk about boats, with Max telling him that he had to be careful. No more broken bones once he got out of Paradise.

  Her head was spinning. Mike was still talking. Max’s hand was lying on the tablecloth, near her plate. She found herself staring at it. Glancing down, she saw his feet. Big feet. His foot brushed her, and she was certain she could feel the warmth of his flesh through the leather of his shoe.

  He murmured, “Excuse me,” to her.

  “Aurora needs sex more often,” Mike said casually.

  She dropped her fork.

  “Aurora, what is the matter with you?” Mary demanded. “Mike’s right. You need to get out on the sea more often. It’s a great way to relax.”

  They were all staring at her. Max even seemed to be smirking, as if he could read her mind.

  She prayed for lunch to end.

  Finally, a few hours and several cups of coffee later, it did. And she wound up back where she had been when on the drive over: next to Max. By the time they reached Paradise, she was ready to jump out of her own skin. Tempted to shove two octogenarians out of the way so she could get out of the car first. She could have bulldozed her way through wheelchairs, knocked over the aging, pushed past babies, crawled over nuns.

  Somehow, she waited her turn.

  But once out of the limo, she was ready to run. “It’s late,” she explained to Mike and Mary. “I’ve got to get home, then get to rehearsal.”

  “I’ll just walk Aurora to her car,” Max said.

  “Don’t bother.”

  But he followed her anyway. When she reached her car, she spun on him. “Will you go away? I’ve got work to do.”

  “I’m trying to tell you—”

  “Don’t try to tell me anything. You don’t know anything about my life. You live in a cushy apartment in New York City. You have no responsibilities. Your business, whatever the hell it is, just moves along like clockwork. You have no children. You don’t usually spend your days cranking beds, something you started doing because you couldn’t afford Paradise otherwise.” She flung open the door to her car with such energy that the Saturn protested with a groan. She was into the driver’s seat with the door slammed again before he could get close.

  “Aurora, wait, if you’ll let me expl—”

  “I have to go.” She had turned the key in the ignition. Gunned the engine. She backed out, burning rubber, like a teenager either showing off or just learning to drive.

  Didn’t matter. She was out; she was gone. The wedding would be tomorrow, and then Max, the big-city businessman, would go away, and she would be at peace again, mentally and physically.

  Paradise didn’t have much traffic, but since it was summer, they did have a beach contingent. To make matters worse, she caught what rush hour there was in the town. When she reached the house, Angie was home. She was seated at the dining-room table, doing homework. Angie loved school, but not math, so she had used the summer break to take two math courses when the community college was slow and the student body small.

  She looked up when Aurora came flying into the house.

  “Hi, Mom. Are the young lovers ready for the big day tomorrow?”

  “Oh, yeah, the young lovers are just about perfect. And I’m in an incredible mess. What time is it now? Almost six. Damn. I’m going to throttle them both.” She dropped her purse and headed straight for the computer. “An hour and a half. And then rehearsal. Two days before we perform the stupid thing. And there’s no ending. Watch the printer decide to break. That would be it. What am I talking about? I can’t print an act I don’t have.” She sat down at the keyboard, hit the on key, then set her forehead against the monitor as she waited for the machine to boot up.

  “Mom—”

  “That…jerk. I lost a bunch of stuff yesterday when he came in. ‘Anything can be found in a computer!’ Like hell. But hey, how was class? How are you? No hangover? You haven’t talked to that jerk, have you?”

  “Chill, Mom. Class was fine, I got some tutoring after, I’m fine, no hangover, and quit trying to knock yourself out on the monitor.”

  “This computer is too old. Too slow.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Mom. The play is done.”

  Head still against the monitor, Aurora frowned. Slowly she straightened and swiveled around in the chair. “What do you mean—the play is done?”

  “Max was here.”

  Had they just changed the subject? Or was Angie losing it, too?

  “Here? Max was here?” she said slowly.

  “Yes, here.”

  “When?”

  “This morning, after you left.”

  “And you let him in?”

  “Of course I let him in. His grandfather is marrying Gran. And he’s a great guy. If you don’t think so, it’s because you haven’t gotten to know him yet.”

  “He’s not a great guy. He’s a pompous ass who meant to ruin everything for your grandmother.”

  “No, he just didn’t want his grandfather being taken by some gold digger.”

  “A gold digger? Me?”

  “Well, you were pretending to be Mike’s fiancée, after the big bucks.”

  “All right, so Max was here. How does that make the play done?”

  “Max finished it.”

  “Finished it. My play. My house, my computer. You let… Max into my computer?”

  “He wanted to read the play.”

  “So you let him?”

  “Mom, it’s a play. You’re going to put it on for a couple hundred people. What did it matter if he read it? He was all excited about your work last night.”

  “That’s not the point. That’s an incredible invasion of privacy. I don’t believe this. You let him into my house.”

  “My house, too. You’ve always said I’m welcome to bring my friends in.”

  “He’s not your friend.”

  “He is my friend.”

  “He waltzed into my house. And he—he went into my computer and finished the play?” Aurora said incredulously. “The nerve. I’m erasing it immediately.”

  “Mom, just read it first.”

  “No. It was my play.”

  “And you were stuck.”

  “I would have gotten unstuck. I will get unstuck. What did he think he was doing?” Aurora whirled the chair around and brought up the file with amazing speed. Apparently even the computer sensed her mood. She began to read, her finger hovering over the delete key.

  “It’s a great ending,” Angie said, standing by her shoulder.

  “It’s all right.”

  “It’s great,” Angie repeated.

  “It was my play.”

  “And you’re ticked because someone else came up with a great ending for it.”

  “Of course I’m ticked.”

  “When were you going to finish it? In between the wedding and the show? When could we have rehearsed it?”

  “We could have been spontaneous. We’re known for great improv.”

  “Or we could have sucked.”

  Aurora crashed her head down right on the keys. She groaned. “We are going to suck. Dammit! Dammit all to hell. God, I hate that man. It’s a good ending.” Aurora sat back. “I hate him
. I really hate him,” she said softly.

  “Why?” Angie said with surprise. “I thought you’d like him better. Mom, you write great stuff. But with Gran, working at Paradise, the time you spend at the theater…you had no time, Mom. No time at all.”

  “There should have been time. I was at the home with the priest, the rabbi, caterers and decorators, when I should have been here, working. Was Max there helping with the details? No, he was here. In my computer. Bonding with my daughter. Who won’t listen to a word I say, but when he speaks… You haven’t called the jerk, have you?”

  “Which jerk, Mom? Max? Josh. Never mind. You mean Josh. Max is an asshole, Josh is the jerk.”

  “Angie, you really shouldn’t use that word.”

  “You use it.”

  “I should stop.”

  “So you hate him, because…”

  “I don’t even know him, and he has more influence with you than I do. And he sat down and finished my play. And did a good job of it, damn him.”

  Angie hugged her shoulders. “He doesn’t have more influence. He’s just…he’s a guy. So he knows how guys think. And he admitted that he’d been an asshole.”

  “Angie!”

  “It’s what you called him.”

  “Idiot fits just as well.”

  “He can’t be an idiot—look how he finished the play.”

  “So he’s an idiot who can write,” Aurora said. “I hate him. I hate him. I hate him.”

  “Methinks thou doth protest too much,” Angie said with a laugh.

  Aurora gave her daughter the most evil stare she could manage, rose and decided that a shower was in order.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To take a long shower.”

  “Cool. I’ll just print this out for you and make the copies,” Angie said.

  Aurora stopped in her tracks and turned back. Somehow, in two days’ time, Max Wulfson had cost her her mind.

  “Thank you,” she said, and marched off, desperate for solitude and the healing effect of cool rushing water.

  Six

  She was wonderful. Aurora was simply wonderful.

  Max should have been working himself, but curiosity had been killing him, so he’d come here instead.

  He had slipped into the theater at about nine, using the back door and taking a seat in the rear. It was a small place, seating two hundred, tops, and arranged in a manner that wasn’t quite theater in the round, but close to it. The rehearsal was well under way when he entered. The goblin and the witch were on stage when he came in, played by Aurora and a man.

  Max realized with definite surprise that he knew the actor. He had disappeared from the Broadway scene maybe five or six years earlier. Jonathan Smith. He had performed in some of the best shows—musicals, dramas, and comedies—of the past few decades.

  The story was a fractured fairy tale. The princess of the kingdom was sworn to marry a prince, whom the princess didn’t like at all. She was in love with the young minstrel who played at the castle. She had gone to the witch for help, little knowing that the witch was in league with an ogre with a huge crush on the princess, and was plotting to sabotage the wedding, only to steal the princess for himself. There were several very funny short songs, along with a few messages—beauty was in the eye of the beholder, and money and position were not as important as love and emotion and doing the right thing in life. But the show wasn’t preachy, just amusing and cute. The ogre, though a monster, became sympathetic, as it became clear in a musical number that he wanted to steal the princess because he had been ugly all his life, never loved for what he was.

  His ending was a bit pat, Max thought, but for this show, it fit. As the wedding approached, the ogre and the witch got into a conversation about beauty, grace and coordination. Aurora was an incredible physical comedienne tripping into the ogre’s arms as they tried to hide, spilling the wrong ingredients, into her potions and crawling into the cauldron to retrieve them. And when the wedding day came and the witch swooped down to steal the bride, Angie was just as adorably inept. When it came time for the witch to hand the princess over to the ogre, the action stopped. The witch knew how much the princess loved the young minstrel. And then the witch and the ogre stared at one another, realizing that what they had wanted all along was just to find love, and that they had found it with each other.

  “Tomorrow night, eight o’clock,” Aurora called, after congratulating her cast and crew on a good rehearsal. A young man wearing a T-shirt from the University of Central Florida had come down from the light booth, and the stage manager and a few others had joined them. There was talk and laughter as the cast and crew gathered for a few minutes, then began to filter out. When even Angie was gone, he started to rise and join Aurora and Jonathan onstage, but he stopped in the shadows when he heard Jonathan ask, “So you didn’t write the ending, huh? A ‘friend’ named Max did.”

  “Yes,” she said briefly.

  “Max who?”

  “Mike’s grandson. Max Wulfson.”

  “Ah.”

  “What does ‘ah’ mean?” Aurora asked irritably.

  “It means you had a nice lunch and you’re friends with Max.”

  Aurora grunted. “We are not friends.”

  “Oooh, don’t we sound witchy tonight.”

  “Jonathan, lay off.”

  “Did you have sex?”

  “No!”

  “Pity.”

  “Would you quit? He thought I was a gold digger out to fleece his grandfather. No way would I have sex with him.”

  “But he finished your play.”

  “He finished my play, he straightened out my daughter and he even had the old folks salivating over him.”

  “Gosh. He should be shot.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “All that, and no sex?”

  “Jonathan, when was the last time you shared your personal life?”

  “I’m not a fool.”

  “Then, if you don’t mind, get out of mine.”

  “You’re a friend. I can’t butt out.”

  “You have no right to preach to me.”

  “Yes, I do. Because I, unlike other people I know, do indulge. And on occasion I don’t look to the future, or bog down in the day-to-day. Go for it. Give yourself one night.”

  “Great. I’m teaching my daughter to abstain because there are horrible diseases out there, but I should—”

  “I didn’t suggest you discuss it with her.”

  Jonathan moved behind her and began to massage her shoulders.

  “Think of it…a night completely off. Away from everyone over eighty. Alone, on a deserted beach. In the sand. With a breeze blowing. The sound of the surf—”

  “If it was me on that sand, I’d guarantee you there would be chiggers,” Aurora said.

  “Okay, scratch the sand. A beautiful room, the breeze blowing in, a glass of wine, and he—”

  “He? Doesn’t ‘he’ have a name?”

  “Just ‘he’ for right now.”

  “He’d wind up being gay. Charming, friendly, a great guy, good-looking and wonderful, but gay.”

  “Max Wulfson isn’t gay.”

  “He’d become gay. One night with me and I guarantee it.”

  “Why don’t you take the chance?”

  Aurora pulled away. “Maybe he didn’t ask.”

  “Maybe you should ask.”

  “Great. I should just knock on his door and say, ‘Hey, Max, how are you? Thanks for finishing the play. It was a really great ending, and I hate your guts for it. My daughter is acting normal. I hate you for that, too. Mostly I hate you for being a rich asshole. But you are a good-looking rich asshole, and my co-workers seem to think I’m desperate. Want to have sex with me?’”

  “Aurora! How have you survived in the theater all these years?”

  “By working my ass off.”

  “But no romance, no imagination. You knock on his door and waltz into his room. You turn around, strike
a pose and say, ‘Let’s make love.’ Make love, Aurora. Not ‘have sex.’”

  “Jonathan, I really am going to hit you.”

  Max decided at that point that it probably wouldn’t be wise to let them know he had been there, listening. He quietly left the theater.

  Aurora had no intention of following Jonathan’s suggestion, but she did know that she had to make herself go see him. She was going to be polite, mature and decent. And the decent thing to do, of course, was thank him for what he had done. That was it. Knock on his door, but not go in, and just say thank-you.

  It was late, but not that late. The night had gone like clockwork. Though they’d just received the last act and were working with scripts in hand, the cast had done a beautiful job with the reading. The entire show wasn’t much more than an hour, since many of the residents of Paradise were unable to sit for longer, even in their wheelchairs. But it had all gone so smoothly that they had broken a few minutes before ten. And there was no traffic to speak of in Paradise at this time of night.

  She made it to the Paradise Motor Lodge in less than ten minutes. She didn’t stop by the office or call—she would have lost her determination if she had—just walked straight to Max’s door.

  But once there, she hesitated, hand raised. No. She couldn’t do it. She would thank him in the morning and be decent then.

  But before she could turn away, the door opened. She wondered if she was losing her mind, if she had knocked after all.

  Max was in denim cutoffs. That was all. His chest was as bronzed as his hands. Muscled. Not ridiculously infommercial muscled, but tight and sleek. He’d showered; his hair was still damp and almost ebony. She stared at him, her throat suddenly dry, no words coming to her lips.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “Come in.”

  “No, no, thanks. I, uh, I just came by to say thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “You shouldn’t have done it.”

  “It was fun.”

  She didn’t know why she was suddenly angry. “No, I mean you shouldn’t have done it. That was an incredible invasion of privacy.”

  “Sorry.” She could tell from his tone that he didn’t mean the word at all.

  He turned around and walked into the room. She followed him. “What if I suddenly decided I was a business genius and took over your office? You have a lot of nerve. That was a horrible thing to do.”