CRY UNCLE

by Judith Arnold

  “She said that when she was in Seattle, the creep was following her.”

  “It’s understandable she’s nervous. Let’s face it, she witnessed a murder. It could make any lady a little crazy, right? But, no, he wasn’t following her. He’s under watch, twenty-four hours a day. If she thought she saw him following her, it was just her imagination playing tricks on her. She’s perfectly safe. Our officer is making sure of that.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Joe said. Thanking the detective, he ended the call.

  So, she was telling the truth—or, at least, the truth as it appeared from her perspective. The cops in Seattle thought she was paranoid—just as she’d said. And maybe, if the murderer was under full-time surveillance, she was being a little paranoid. Maybe, as Wilcox had said, she was a little crazy.

  Joe could handle a little crazy. Just that morning she’d proven to be as close to the absolute, ultimate, picture-perfect mommy as a thirty-year-old architect who didn’t know anything about children could be. If she happened to be a little crazy on the side, so be it.

  This marriage wasn’t made in heaven; it was made on a handshake. And within a reasonably short time, it would be over. By then, Joe fervently hoped, he would have regained his old taste in women. He would stop fantasizing about a pale, flat-chested, angular-shouldered, possibly demented woman, and he would stop being so damned serious. Once he had permanent custody of Lizard, he could forget Pamela Hayes had ever entered his life.

  He shoved away from his desk, strode across the office, and opened the door. Someone had programmed the juke box to play Stand By Me. Suppressing a groan, Joe squared his shoulders and returned to his post behind the bar.

  Chapter Eleven

  PAMELA SUPPOSED EVERY marriage took time to find its routines and rhythms. That she and Joe managed to settle into their own patterns of functioning after less than two weeks of wedded bliss ought to have satisfied her.

  Except that the patterns Joe had settled into chafed at Pamela’s nerves, leaving her troubled and glum.

  He no longer seemed to be going to great lengths to avoid her. On rare mornings, he would actually venture into the kitchen before ten a.m. and mumble a good-morning to his wife and niece before he buried himself in the pages of the newspaper.

  He would spend the morning with Lizard if Pamela wanted to run errands. She had learned from experience that grocery shopping was sheer torture if Lizard accompanied her. Lizard had a habit of running up and down the aisles, grabbing junk food and tossing it into the shopping cart before Pamela could stop her. When Pamela made her put the junk food back on the shelves, Lizard whined in a pitch that could shatter fine crystal. And when Pamela got home and emptied the bags, she always discovered among her purchases some sugary pink item Lizard had smuggled past her.

  In the afternoons, when Joe left for the Shipwreck, Pamela would engage in various activities with Lizard. Sometimes they would toil in Lizard’s weed-infested herb garden. Sometimes they would go to Birdie’s house to begin their first renovation project: breaking down the windowed interior wall of the kitchen and turning the room beyond it into a spacious dining area. One afternoon they went to see the latest Disney animated feature at the theater in town.

  It rained every day. The air was thick, sticky, soupy with humidity. Every now and then the sun would peek tentatively through the clouds, and Pamela would feel an answering ray of hope inside her. But then another army of clouds would march across the sky, obliterating the sunlight, and her mood would plummet once more.

  The atmosphere inside the house was as overcast as the atmosphere outside. Even though Pamela’s and Joe’s paths intersected several times a day, he never touched her. His smiles were reserved, his eyes lacking the warmth she’d seen in them the last time he’d kissed her—when he’d been putting on an act for Mona Whitley’s benefit. Key West might be in the tropics, but the Brenner household was currently operating under an Arctic freeze.

  Pamela told herself Joe was keeping the emotional thermostat set on zero to avoid complications. She told herself they would both be better off if he never again flirted with her, gazed at her with longing, or indicated in any way that he desired her. She’d been clear about not wanting a passionate relationship with him, and he was accommodating her wishes. She ought to count her blessings.

  What blessings? None—unless boredom was a blessing, and isolation, and resentment.

  She recalled how, during her single days, she had imagined that the ideal marriage would be not all that different from her present situation: a partnership in which her husband made no demands on her, didn’t expect her to discuss sports knowledgeably, and let her hold the remote control when the television was on. She’d dreamed of a husband who respected her independence and didn’t try to change her. She supposed Joe fit the bill.

  But marriage wasn’t supposed to leave one feeling so alone, was it?

  Thank God for Lizard. The little girl kept Pamela company—and kept her sane. To her amazement, she was growing rather fond of the brat, even though every activity they did together seemed to end up in a mess: puttering in the garden, hacking through the wall in Birdie’s kitchen, baking brownies, cleaning Lizard’s bedroom and laundering the mildewed clothing and stuffed animals they excavated from the darkest recesses of Lizard’s closet.

  After more than a week of rain that transformed the yard into a swamp and Pamela’s usually limp hair into a frizz to rival the Bride of Frankenstein’s, Joe lifted his nose out of the newspaper one morning to announce that the weather page was forecasting clearing skies and high temperatures.

  “Let’s go to the beach,” said Lizard. She was eating Cocoa Puffs with her hands, but at Pamela’s disapproving look she emptied her fist into the curve of her spoon and smiled sweetly. “I’ll eat nicely if you take me to the beach,” she wheedled.

  Pamela almost blurted out that Lizard could stuff Cocoa Puffs up her nose for all she cared—if the weather was pleasant, they would definitely go to the beach. Day after day of rain had left her emotionally waterlogged. She was as eager as Lizard to get out of the house and into the sunshine.

  She wondered what a Brenner family outing would be like: husband, wife and child, picnicking in the shade of a palm tree, digging in the sand, romping in the surf. Briny breezes, laughter, the crash and fizz of the waves striking the shore. The fragrances of salt and seaweed, coconut oil and aloe from the sun-screen lotions of beachcombers around them. Buckets and shovels, sand castles with elaborate turrets and moats, Joe in a swim suit. Joe’s bare chest. His bare feet. His broad shoulders. His strong, sleek back. His muscular thighs and calves. His lean abdomen. His windswept, sun-streaked hair, and his eyes as blue as the sky when no rain clouds darkened it.

  “Pam will have to take you, Toots.” Joe addressed Lizard directly, not sparing Pamela a glance. “My distributor’s coming to the Shipwreck this morning. I’ve got to be there to go over my orders with him.”

  “Of course I’ll take you,” Pamela said, clearing the unexpected hoarseness from her throat. She didn’t want to picture Joe undressed. Surely it was just as well that he couldn’t come with them. If she saw him in a swimsuit, she would probably wind up hating him for having a magnificent body—whereas, if he saw her in a swimsuit, all pale and skinny and gawky, he would probably be cured of any wayward interest in her.

  The hell with him. She and Lizard were going to have a grand time at the beach, just the two of them, no guys allowed. Jonas Brenner could spend the rest of his life holed up at the Shipwreck with his distributor, for all Pamela cared.

  Once Lizard was done playing with her Cocoa Puffs, Pamela began organizing for their outing. She packed sandwiches, carrot sticks and boxes of apple-cranberry juice, which Lizard conceded was pink enough to be worthwhile. She located two huge beach towels in the upstairs linen closet and stuffed them into a canvas tote, along with an old blanket, a paperback novel from the den, and the lunch she’d prepared. She slathered Lizard with a thick layer of su
n-screen, even though Lizard swore she didn’t need it. “I’m already tan,” she complained.

  “That’s not a tan. That’s dirt,” Pamela argued, rubbing the lotion into the squirming girl’s arms and legs. “Where I come from, you never go to the beach unless you’re wearing sun block.” Where she came from, it rained ninety-eight percent of the time, but Lizard didn’t have to know that.

  “It smells yucky,” Lizard declared. “Like macaroons. Birdie once gave me macaroons and I threw up all over the place.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Pamela muttered, wiping her greasy palms on a paper towel. “I want you to wear a sun hat, too. And no feathers.”

  “I always wear feathers at the beach.”

  “Do you want to go to the beach, or do you want to give me a hard time?”

  Lizard weighed her choices and backed down. “Okay, no feathers. But if I find feathers there, I’m gonna keep them.”

  “As long as they aren’t attached to any live animals,” Pamela said before stepping into her bedroom and closing the door.

  She’d brought one swimsuit with her from Seattle. When Kitty had taken her shopping for her “trousseau,” Pamela had considered buying a new swimsuit. But beachwear in Key West, like nearly everything else on the island, breached the boundaries of good taste. Pamela wasn’t a prude; she could handle a bikini. But the bikinis for sale at the boutiques Kitty had taken her to made G-strings and pasties look puritanical in comparison. “That’s just a thong,” Kitty had told her when she gaped at one swimsuit bottom, unable to tell the front from the back.

  “What it is, is repugnant,” Pamela had argued, wrinkling her nose and hanging the garment back on the rack.

  So there she was, a married woman in a modest tankini that was faded from her having worn it while swimming laps in the heavily chlorinated pool at the health club she belonged to back in Seattle. She would no doubt be the dowdiest woman on the beach. Lizard would probably announce, at the top of her lungs, that Pamela was ugly.

  So be it, she thought wryly, slipping a baggy T-shirt on over her suit and settling a broad-brimmed straw hat onto her head. If Mona Whitley had any spies at the beach, they would see Pamela and report that she was the most demure, primly attired woman there.

  Lizard was waiting impatiently on the porch, clutching a bag of plastic beach toys, when Pamela came downstairs. She detoured to the kitchen to get the tote. Joe was gone.

  She suffered a pang of irritation at his having left without saying good-bye to her. She wanted to be the one to leave without saying good-bye to him.

  Something was bugging him, something more than unfulfilled lust. She tried to recall when Joe had transformed from merely conflicted to outright icy. That they’d kissed a few times, that they’d both responded more passionately to those kisses than was wise... So what? They were adults; they could deal with their shared discomfort. But Joe had gone from treating Pamela as if she had leprosy to treating her as if she were irrelevant.

  And she couldn’t begin to guess why.

  “Are you comin’ or what?” Lizard hollered through the screen door.

  Sighing, Pamela hoisted the tote off the counter and carried it out to the porch. She locked up, took Lizard’s hand, and stepped down off the porch with her. “Isn’t this sunshine lovely?” she remarked, savoring not just the clear sky but the absence of the thick humidity that had clung to the island for so many sodden days.

  “You know how to get to the beach?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s a few blocks from here, right?”

  “Yeah. We can walk if you want.”

  “I’d love to walk.”

  Pamela and Lizard strolled side by side down the driveway to the street. Lizard thought for a minute, then turned left. That seemed correct to Pamela, who had driven past the municipal beach a couple of times.

  “I’m gonna build the greatest sand castle in the whole entire universe,” Lizard boasted. “Birdie told me about this place, it’s called Versatile or something?”

  “Versatile?” Pamela repeated.

  “It’s this big palace in France.”

  “Versailles,” Pamela corrected her.

  “Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, that’s what I’m gonna build in the sand. And I’m gonna decorate it with sea shells and dead kelp.”

  “Just like the original Versailles,” Pamela noted, even though she knew Lizard wouldn’t get the joke.

  The further they journeyed from the house, the more Pamela’s spirits lifted. Partly it was the weather, the pleasant shock of walking from sunlight to shade to sunlight again. For so long the sky had been too dark for the trees lining the street to cast shadows. Today, after so many days of rain, the flora smelled fresh and green and alive. Cars cruised past with their convertible tops down and their radios blasting. People coasted by on bicycles. The world was drying out and coming back to life.

  But part of Pamela’s cheerfulness might also have been a result of getting away from Joe, from the strain of living in his house yet being totally shut out by him.

  “Can I ask you a question, Lizard?”

  “You could ask me anything,” Lizard assured her. “I’m very smart.”

  Pamela mulled over whether she ought to drag Lizard into her problems with Joe. But she wasn’t expecting Lizard to solve those problems, or to take sides. All Pamela wanted was to figure out what the problems were.

  “Is something bothering your uncle?” she asked.

  Lizard nodded somberly, her round little face taking on a mature cast. “Yup.”

  “Do you have any idea what it could be?”

  “Joyce and Lawton.”

  “Who?”

  “Joyce and Lawton. They’re this other aunt and uncle of mine.”

  “Ah.” It hadn’t occurred to Pamela that Joe’s withdrawal might simply be a result of his stress over the looming custody battle.

  “They’re these people, they were related to my daddy.”

  Pamela nodded. “Joe’s mentioned them to me.”

  “They’re supposed to come and visit me soon. I don’t think Uncle Joe wants them to come.”

  “You may be right, Lizard. I think that’s part of what’s bothering him.”

  “It’s up to us to keep him happy. I figure, I’ll bring him some gull feathers from the beach. There’s always tons of gull feathers lying around. That might make him happy. And maybe we could make some more brownies.”

  “Your Uncle Joe didn’t get to eat too many of that first batch,” Pamela reminded her. “You gobbled up most of them.”

  “And they weren’t even pink. I bet if we made pink brownies... Hey! We could call them pinkies!” Lizard wiggled her pinkies in the air and sing-songed, “Let’s bake pinkies!”

  Pamela rode out Lizard’s silliness with a tolerant smile. After a while the child wound down, and Pamela once again pursued the subject of Joe’s state of mind. “Anything else you think might be bothering your uncle?”

  Lizard meditated for a few minutes. “You know what? He doesn’t get to do anything fun. He has to hang around with his disliberator instead of coming to the beach with us. I think he needs more fun in his life.”

  “I agree.” Not that Pamela was volunteering to be the source of his fun. But there were other kinds of fun than that. Family togetherness, for instance. Trips to the beach. Lizard was right: Joe ought to spend less time sitting in meetings with his distributor.

  “You know what?” Lizard continued. “We ought to let him help us with Birdie’s house. He’s always fixing stuff over there. She had this leaky ceiling once, and he fixed it. And her toilet backed up one time, it was real gross. It flooded all over the bathroom floor and everything! You shoulda seen it. There was soggy toilet paper gushing out of the toilet, and poop, and—”

  “Spare me the details.”

  “Yeah, well, it was really gross.” Lizard let out a delighted laugh. “Anyway, Uncle Joe fixed it. I bet he’d like to help us fix her kitchen.”

 
“Do you think so? Do you think he’d enjoy plastering the new wall with us?”

  “Yeah. He likes getting messy. He has to. He’s my uncle.”

  Pamela smiled. Apparently Lizard didn’t know what was wrong between Joe and Pamela—or even that anything was wrong at all. But her suggestion made a certain sense. Joe had declined their invitation to go to the beach today, but if they kept asking, kept trying to include him in their activities, perhaps in time they could break down the barriers he’d erected between himself and Pamela. She remembered the way he’d been at their wedding, smiling and tender, dancing with her again and again as Ben E. King crooned from the juke box. Stand by me...

  If she was going to be married, that was the man she wanted to be married to. The dimpled, grinning man, the man who would stand by her. Maybe, if she and Lizard could somehow entice him to roll up his sleeves and join them in their daily mess-making, Pamela and Lizard could make him happy.

  ***

  THE BEACH WASN’T too crowded, although Pamela suspected that by afternoon it would be packed. She staked out an area in the shade of a palm tree, spreading the blanket and using her sandals, the towels and the tote to hold the corners down. Lizard grabbed her bucket and shovel and raced down to the water’s edge, eager to build her replica of the “Versatile Palace.”

  Pamela arranged herself comfortably on the blanket and sighed contentedly. The air was laced with the scent of salt and the gleeful squeals of children splashing at the water’s edge. The sun glazed the sand, imbuing it with a gentle shimmer.

  Lying in the shelter of the palm tree, absorbing the therapeutic warmth and the soothing sounds of youthful laughter and the surf, Pamela could almost forget that anything was amiss in her life. An uncommunicative husband? A murder trial? A temporarily sidelined career? Who cared? She had the beach, the sea, a good novel and the company of a little girl who could obviously entertain herself without constant adult supervision. On a morning like this, it was possible to believe everything was going to work out okay.