by Diane Capri
It was hard to tell whether the serious rift between Kate and Carly resulted from a secret kept too long, or the natural animosity of a teenage girl toward her mother. In either case, Carly was never the same toward any of us. She went away to college at the University of Colorado and rarely came home after that. None of us knew her, really, since we hadn’t talked to her seriously since she was a child. Mark was the closest to her, and she was the most jealous and distant from me. Carly has always seen me as some kind of competition for her place in her family. She knew I wasn’t really a blood relative, and she felt she wasn’t a full blood relative either. The self-imposed competition made her brittle, even a little flaky.
When Carly secretly moved to Tampa, after her mother and I moved here, we didn’t even know it for a long time. I think she did it partly because she was jealous of my relationship with Kate, and partly because she was beginning to grow up. She entered Stetson Law School and became a lawyer like her two brothers and, not coincidentally, me. It’s hard to beat the competition if you’re not in the same game. Carly wanted a real contest.
Once she moved here, she still saw her mother rarely, but in a typical Carly move, signed up for my class. Even now, she’s a bundle of contradictions; independent and rebellious, brilliant but immature. I couldn’t really fathom how it must feel not to know who your father was, to feel that rejection and deception. Carly certainly seemed to be struggling with it still, and I wasn’t sure she’d ever get over it.
Comparing my childhood to Carly’s wasn’t really possible.
Kate says that I was a dreamer as a child. I spent all of my time either reading or daydreaming, making up a world far different from the one I lived in. In school, I was always planning the next event, looking forward to activities next month or next year.
After Mom died when I was 16 and Dad left me with Kate and her family, I became even more out of touch with what was going on around me, but I held onto Kate and her family as if I was drowning in abandonment and only familial affection would save me. For her part, Kate took the role of my mother in the same way she mothered her own children. She went to parent-teacher conferences, threw birthday parties, and had her picture taken at my graduations, just as she did with her other kids. She even played the part of mother-of-the-bride when George and I married. Kate is my mother, for all practical purposes, and has been for longer than I knew my real mom. If it wasn’t that I’d feel so disloyal, I’d call her “mother.” She’s suggested it. It’s a step I’m not ready to take.
So maybe Carly is right to be jealous of me. Maybe I said or did something those last few years when I lived with Kate’s family to justify it. But even if I did, I can’t relate to how she treats her mother. Because if my mother was still alive, no matter what she did, I’d never treat her the way Carly treats Kate.
Mom died of cancer. While she was ill, we spent so much time together and I wanted to savor every moment of it. She wanted me to go to school and the truant officers insisted that I go at least half a day. But the last few months of her life, they let me stay home when I promised to test out of the tenth grade after she died.
That was such a glorious time. She taught me how to make bread, arrange flowers, put on a dinner party. She told me all of the secrets a mother imparts to a daughter about dating and dealing with men. Some of what she said scared me. “Never let a boy put his hand on your knee. If you do, he’ll want to put it under your skirt.” I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant by that, but it was advice I followed until I met George years later.
Mom and I had our own little world then. Dad was traveling, as he always had, even at what was clearly the end of his wife’s life. On some level, I never forgave him for that. But on another level I was glad for the time it gave mother and me to be together. Maybe that was his present to both of us.
It was while Mom was sick that she told me she’d wanted to be a lawyer instead of a nurse. And I promised her that I would do what she had not done. Eventually, Mom died and her husband, the man I’d called my dad since she married him when I was five, never came home. I went to live with Kate and, as I promised, I tested out of the tenth grade. I graduated from high school at seventeen and then went directly to the University of Michigan.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I know now that I was lucky to have loved my mother for 16 years, and to have had her unconditional love while she lived. She sent me off into the world with that, the love, desire and support necessary to make something of my life. Every time I think of her, I think, “I could be better,” not just as a lawyer, or a woman, but as a person. She believed that what’s important is how you live your life, how you treat others. She taught me always to do my best and to help those who need it. It was a hard lesson to learn at sixteen, but I learned it, and it sustains me. It also gets me into trouble. Mighty Mouse does save the day, but it’s not easy.
Carly was still dealing with Kate from anger and abandonment. I doubt Kate had ever sat her down and asked her to consider the alternative--being born to Kate’s family or not at all. But Carly is the closest thing to a sister I’ll ever have. She may be flaky and irresponsible and irritatingly self centered, but there’s no way I could let her get seriously hurt. Kate would never get over it and I’m not sure I would either. I didn’t want to lose anyone else in my life.
About twenty minutes after I left Carly, I was turning onto Plant Key Bridge. I forced my mind back to the present and filled my senses with the approach. Florida is so flat, and Plant Key so far below sea level, that from the bridge, I could only see the top of Minaret. And a spectacular top it is, too.
The house is named after its most prominent architectural feature, a large minaret on the top of the third floor roof. The story goes that Henry Plant had visited Turkey and became enamored of the bulbous onion domes he saw there. He put several on the top of his hotel and one on the top of his home. Ours is shiny steel and the sun glints off of it most of the day, making it shine bright blue with reflected skylight, orange with the sunrise or grey with the clouds. The rest of the house isn’t in any way reflective of Middle Eastern architecture, so the minaret itself is somewhat out of place on top of the southern style home. It’s sort of like Jimmy Durante’s big nose, something you come to appreciate over time.
As I left the bridge, I drove down Plant Key’s version of the Avenue of Palms. Ours are not so old or so tall as the ones at the entrance to Palm Beach, but they stretch for about a half a mile and give one the impression of grandeur an entrance onto Plant Key should have. To show the proper respect to the original, our avenue is unnamed. It opens out to the front lot entrance to Minaret, which is red brick, paved and circular.
Plant copied the entrance from the Breakers Hotel, built about the same time by Plant’s great friend Henry Flagler. If you’ve been to the Breakers, the Ritz in Naples, or seen pictures, you’ve seen our front entrance, except ours is red brick and not yellow. We have a round fountain in front of the porte cochere, and a drive that runs through. In those days, Florida storms were as fierce as they are now, and the ladies and gentlemen needed a shelter from which to leave their carriages. Now, it makes a great valet parking entrance to Minaret, particularly if you’re arriving in the summer between four and seven o’clock in the afternoon when we get our afternoon storms.
Puttered across the bridge, onto the island, and toward the house. I asked the valet to put the top up on the car and went inside, intending to change into running shorts and a T-shirt and take the dogs out.
But when I walked into the lobby, I saw Kate sitting in the dining room with Victoria Warwick and Cilla Worthington.
Tried to sneak around to the winding staircase that goes from the main entrance to the house up to the second floor, but Kate saw me and waved me over. Shook my head furiously, signaling her that I didn’t want to come in, but Victoria spied me, too.
Trapped.
Failed to appear gracious as I walked into the dining room and approached their table.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Tampa, Florida
Friday 4:45 p.m.
January 8, 1999
“Wilhelmina, please join us,” Victoria said, her speech slurred just enough to let me know how many Bloody Marys she’d already consumed in addition to the one on the table in front of her. Kate and Cilla both insisted that I sit down and I couldn’t graciously refuse.
Kate and Cilla looked like what they were: middle-aged matrons at lunch. But again today, Victoria had on a bright pink dress suitable for a much younger woman, tight in the bodice with another low-cut neckline. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Sunlight illuminates everything: she was no longer tewnty-five years old, or even fifty-five. But she was blessed with a long neck and her bosom did look fantastic. She laughed loudly, put her hands on the sides of her breasts to push them up almost out of the top of her dress. She said, “It’s impolite to stare, my dear, but aren’t they fantastic?”
Embarrassed to be caught looking, I blushed but had to agree.
“I had them done in New York about six months ago. I’ll tell you it wasn’t easy to find a doctor who would do them, even though I offered to pay twice the normal cost. I tried to get Mike Morgan to do them for old time’s sake, but he wouldn’t return my calls. Men are such assholes, especially the ones you’ve slept with. They think it gives them the right to be an asshole for some reason.”
Cilla’s nostrils flared, whether at the crude language or the mention of Victoria’s well-known philandering, I couldn’t tell. “It’s bad enough that you’ve slept with every man in town, Victoria. Is it necessary to broadcast it, too? It’s not like you’re the only woman in Tampa to have had an affair with Mike Morgan. Take a number.” She was impatient, and snappier than usual. And she sounded too bitter.
More to distract them from Morgan than anything, I said, “I’ve never known any doctor to refuse to do elective surgery. There’s so much profit in plastic surgery. If you agreed to pay twice the cost, why would they possibly refuse?”
Victoria was remarkably coherent, and much more voluble than she likely would have been if she hadn’t been drunk. “Well, there’s been an FDA moratorium on breast implant surgery for several years. The only way to get silicone breast implants now is to become a part of a controlled study. And, of course, for the controlled studies they want younger, more vigorous women or cancer reconstruction patients. You wouldn’t believe all the releases I had to sign and the strings I made the senator pull to get them to do it. But they did, obviously.” She giggled, looking down her chest. No kidding.
“But aren’t you afraid of the health risks? Tory, really, this is a fairly stupid thing you’ve done to your body.” Cilla was out of patience. She may be a grand dame, but she doesn’t suffer fools.
Victoria looked at all of us with open hostility. “I think it’s fairly obvious that my body is no temple. It takes years for the ill health effects from implants to develop, according to the doomsday theories. I’m sure I won’t live that long, if my darling husband’s wishes have anything to do with it. A widower is so much more electable than a man with an adulterous wife, you know. Everyone wants to know why she cheats.”
None of us had a response to that. Kate changed the subject to some recent charitable activities they were involved in and that gave me my excuse to leave. As I walked out of the dining room, they were still discussing the budget for the next homeless shelter benefit, and I was trying to figure out why discussing Tory Warwick’s affair with Dr. Morgan would make Cilla so angry and Kate so quiet.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Tampa, Florida
Friday 5:15 p.m.
January 8, 1999
Upstairs, both Harry and Bess were guarding the door waiting for anyone who happened to come in so that they could immediately lick intruders to death. Both bounded toward me whining to jump on my suit for ear scratching. I waved them down and changed into running clothes. Then gave in, got down on the floor and rolled around with both of them for a while. Together, they out-weigh me by thirty pounds.
Bess is black and Harry is yellow. Like their namesakes, they’re fiercely independent, no-nonsense dogs, thoroughly devoted to one another. We got them originally for protection as guard dogs because so many strangers come into what is, after all, our home. Pricilla Worthington told me once, after Harry slobbered all over her Dior dress, “If you had a gun, and knew how to use it like everyone else in Tampa, you wouldn’t need these noxious creatures.” But I’m from Detroit. Nothing as sissy as handguns for protection for us.
Of course, anyone who spends five seconds with Harry and Bess realizes what useless guard dogs they are. They do have big barks and that counts for something, at least to strangers. We still pay the alarm company every month, just in case.
After I put on my running shoes, we went down the back stairs, avoiding everyone else who might be in the restaurant, to the beach. I threw sticks and toys into the water for them to chase for a while before we began our run. After fifteen minutes of having wet sticks returned by two ninety-pound dogs, I was as wet as they were. I threw the last two sticks and took off in the opposite direction, counter clockwise around the island. If I don’t play with them some beforehand, there’s no way I can keep up.
By the time they got the sticks out of the water and came after me it took them, maybe, fifteen seconds to pass me up. It’s a little contest I have with myself. I’ve made it as far as twenty seconds ahead of them, but I have to throw the sticks pretty far out first.
When I’m in good form, I do an entire lap around Plant Key, or maybe two. Other days, I just do half a lap and take a golf cart back. Because I was feeling guilty about leaving the office early and I had plenty of time before sundown; today would be a complete lap day.
A lot of people run just for exercise, hating every minute of it. For me, though, it’s a spiritual experience. I love the sand, the water, the sunshine and the companionship I get from Harry and Bess. After years of running, I’m able to get to the runner’s high in about three minutes and it carries me the remainder of the run. Sometimes, I have to consciously make myself stop. Otherwise, I might be like the tiger chasing Sambo and run around so long and so fast that I melt into butter. During the summer I feel like I’m melting.
Today I considered what I’d learned on my visit to MedPro and at lunch from Carly. Something about her explanation just didn’t fit with the facts. It was nagging me and the more I tried to focus on it, the more elusive it became. I attacked it another way. Why would Dr. Morgan call Carly with his discovery when he could have called Zimmer or Young directly? He knew them better and they had a history together. Why would he pick a young, gullible and inexperienced employee to disclose such allegedly valuable information? It just didn’t make sense, unless he planned to use that inexperience for his own ends. Or, and this was more likely, Carly wasn’t telling me everything. I worked out a plan for finding out the rest.
As I came up the back stairs after my run, our private phone rang and George answered it.
“Its Marilee Aymes, for you,” he said as he handed me the cordless. I wondered how she got the number. Like my office number, it’s unlisted and only given out to the family.
“Dr. Aymes. So nice to hear from you.” Another lie. To the best of my knowledge, information and belief, as we lawyers say, Marilee Aymes had never called me before.
“Wilhelmina,” she said, imperious as usual. “We have a foursome for next Sunday and we’ve lost one of our group. The handicapper said you’re a ten, which would place you at the high end of the group, but he suggested we ask you to fill in. Are you free?”
Kate would say when you want a thing, it happens. I was trying to figure out a way to talk to Marilee Aymes, and she just called. There are no coincidences in life. I accepted.
George and I had a wedding to go to that night.
We went, we ate, we came home.
I always make Friday night an early one. It’s a pleasant end to a long week, and besides, I
play golf every Saturday at 6:00 a.m. with my former partner, Mitchell Crosby, out at Great Oaks.
We’ve tried playing other courses, just to keep our skills up, but there’s something about the familiarity of the holes, the fairways and the greens that challenges us to beat our best games. We play best here, on our home turf, but that’s not the reason we keep coming out to the same 18 holes every weekend.
I’m not an early riser and I can’t make it to the office before 9:00, at the earliest. But on Saturday, I jump up before sunrise, slip on a golf shirt and Bermudas in some wild combination of colors, and sneak out of the house so as not to wake Harry and Bess. For a while there they were on to me, and they’d sleep right next to the bed so I couldn’t get away from them. If they wake up, they have to be fed and run before anything else. They know they’re the center of our universe and the world revolves around them, not George, although he likes to think he’s the Master Cylinder.
So, if I don’t get out without waking them up, we can’t tee off until 7:00, which doesn’t sound like much of a problem unless you’re a golfer in Florida in July. If you are, you know what I mean. If you’re not, you don’t want to hear about it anyway.
On this particular Saturday in January, it was dark at 5:30 when I woke up, and a little too cool. George had opened the windows sometime during the night and the warmth of our Egyptian cotton sheets and down comforter almost sucked me back in for another couple of hours. But I knew Mitch would be on the first tee in thirty minutes. He lost five dollars last week, and whenever he was down in our weekly wagers, he couldn’t rest until he won it back. If I skip a day like that, he declares himself the winner and will not back down. Mitch is more than a little obsessive, overbearing and stubborn. Some would say we’re perfectly matched.