Skinny Dipping

by Connie Brockway

  “Those who want to sell the land can’t make those who don’t want to do so, can they? For example, if I didn’t want to sell the land, I would have first shot at buying out those who do want to sell it, by paying them whatever their share of the fair market value would be as determined by the assessor?”

  “Well, there are always variables, but in general, yes.”

  As she’d thought. “Thanks, Bud.”

  “No problem. If I can answer any more questions, let me know. Tell Tom I said hi and that I expect him to give me a chance to beat him at racquetball soon.”

  “I sure will, Bud. Thanks again.” She clicked off and slumped back in her chair. She had no idea what the Chez Ducky property would be valued at—had Debbie said something about three million?—but she knew it would be much more than she could come up with on her own.

  Her gaze drifted to her bulletin board, where she’d tacked up the latest digital photo from Prescott. She did not think about Joe Tierney.

  She was very proud of this. She’d been angry at Joe Tierney. Angry and hurt and, worse, frightened by the hollow feeling she’d discovered sometime in the days after he’d left. She wasn’t angry anymore. Or hurt. Why, she had even laughed about Joe’s paternal posturing while Jennifer Beesing was teaching her how to make pecan patties last weekend.

  True, she might have spared a few dark thoughts for him when Prescott had sent a note soon after Solange’s anniversary party. He’d said his father had mentioned in a phone call that he’d run into Mimi Olson in the city and wondered if Prescott knew her phone number or where she worked so he could get in touch with her again. Bullshit. Joe had been trying to scope out whether or not Prescott was calling her eight hundred number and to find out whether she’d been telling the truth or lying about her relationship with his son. What a good daddy.

  But he was being a good daddy. He was doing what he could to see that his son wasn’t—what had been his charming term for what she did?—exploited. Mimi hadn’t replied to Prescott’s e-mail and Prescott had not mentioned Joe since. Good. Because without someone bringing up Joe, there really was no reason to think about him.

  Which she wasn’t.

  She fixed her attention firmly on the picture Prescott had sent. It showed three blurry canine images caught mid-dash on the beach at Chez Ducky. Prescott must have been standing on the frozen lake when he took the picture. It wasn’t the dogs that held Mimi’s eye; it was Chez Ducky. The beach was empty, the swimming raft tipped against the side of Cottage Six, the old flagpole simply a rusting pole surrounded by a crumbling concrete skirt.

  She’d always thought of Chez Ducky as hibernating in the winter, patiently waiting for the Olsons to return. But in this picture Chez Ducky didn’t appear to be sleeping; it seemed to be dying. Unless someone intervened.

  Mimi steepled her fingers and tapped her chin with the tips of her index fingers, wondering why someone wasn’t intervening. Someone like Birgie or Johanna. Someone commanding and wise should don the mantle of familial authority and go fight for Chez Ducky. Which meant not Birgie or Johanna. Certainly not Mimi.

  There was another possibility. It was a long shot, but if Mimi could convince Solange that Chez Ducky presented a unique and possibly lucrative investment opportunity, her mother might lend her the money to buy out the others. Long shot? It would have to be a hole in one. But it was fast getting to the point where any shot was worth taking.

  Mimi stood up and peered over the top of the cubicle. Brooke, the big blond soccer mom–cum–medium who occupied the cubicle next to Mimi’s, was sitting on the edge of her desk, chatting with Ozzie. She saw Mimi and picked up two bottles of nail polish from the lineup on top of her file cabinet. “Carnation or Miami Sunrise? Ozzie says Carnation.”

  “Never doubt Ozzie’s taste,” Mimi advised. Ozzie gave Brooke a superior smile. “I need to be gone a couple hours after lunch. Can I go? I’ll take the phones Friday night.”

  “Lately, you always take the phones Friday nights. And most Saturdays,” Ozzie said. “You need to get a life, Mimi. Seriously.”

  “I have a life.”

  “Ah-huh.” Ozzie and Brooke compressed their lips in unison and exchanged telling looks. “How long have you been working here? Three years? Four?”

  “Five.”

  “Right. And in all that time you’ve never had a serious boyfriend.”

  “So what?”

  “You need a life.”

  “Life happens without boyfriends, Oz.”

  “Not so you’d notice,” muttered Brooke, a three-time divorcée.

  Mimi was not going to argue about this with Oz and Brooke, whom no one thought of as successful relationship experts. Except they did have them. Well, she did, too. Just not in the same way.

  “Do you have the sort of great girlfriends you go on vacations with?” Oz asked, and then answered the question himself. “No.”

  “You don’t even have a pet,” Brooke said accusingly. “I don’t think you even have a plant.”

  “Aha!” Mimi trilled, triumphant, and wheeled around to point at the century plant clinging tenaciously to life in its pot at the window. “I do so. And what is it with people thinking I need to have things to take care of in order to be happy? Methinks that Brooke and Oz,” and Vida, she silently added, “doth protest too much.”

  They both gave her pitying looks.

  She thought of voicing another protest but decided to forget it. “Can you guys handle it here for a while?”

  “Sure. It’s dead anyway.” Brooke laughed uproariously at her own wit. Ozzie raised his eyes heavenward. A light on Mimi’s phone console came on. She tilted her head to read the LCD panel.

  “Hold on. Gotta take this.” She adjusted her headset and punched the line-in button. “Hi, Jessica. This is Miss Em.”

  Brooke appeared at the entrance to her cubicle, grinning with malicious delight. Behind her hovered Ozzie, bouncing up and down on his toes to see around his much taller and wider employee.

  “I have to know if Mom approves,” Jessica said without preamble.

  “Of the boyfriend moving in?” Mimi waved Brooke and Ozzie away, and with one last roll of her eyes, Brooke went back to her cubicle and Ozzie returned to his office.

  “Yes. Ask her.”

  “What if she says no?”

  Jessica met this posit with silence.

  “Have you talked to your counselor about this?”

  “Duh. Yes,” Jessica said and then added primly, “I don’t feel comfortable discussing my therapy sessions with you.”

  Good. “Okay. Let me see if I can make contact.” Mimi sat down in her chair and closed her eyes and concentrated. For once, Jessica didn’t interrupt her. After a couple minutes she opened her eyes. “Your mom’s not answering.”

  “You mean she’s gone?”

  “How can she be ‘gone,’ Jess? She’s already ‘gone,’” Mimi said reasonably. “I mean she’s not making contact. I don’t sense her.”

  “Well, where is she?”

  “I don’t know. They don’t wear GPSs. It’s heaven, not house arrest.”

  “But why isn’t she answering?” Jessica asked, sounding pissy and, beneath it, worried.

  “Let me try again,” Mimi muttered.

  It was Jessica’s worry that had gill-hooked Mimi into taking the young woman on as a semipermanent client. Despite what she said, Jessica sincerely loved her mother. A lot of her anger seemed to be the result not so much of Jessica’s mother’s controlling her, but of the fact that she wasn’t anymore. Jessica missed her mother and she was angry her mother wasn’t interfering in her life anymore. She was like a fishing bobber suddenly cut loose from the line, unconnected and set adrift.

  “Why isn’t she answering?” Jessica demanded again.

  “I don’t know. Maybe she’s thinking. Maybe she’s busy. Maybe she just doesn’t have anything to say.” Like my Dad. The thought slipped in and out so quickly, she barely recognized it, certainly didn’t pay a
ny attention to it, because she had no idea whether or not her father was Beyond the Veil.

  “Not my mom,” Jessica scoffed.

  “Death is a transforming experience, Jess.”

  “But…what about Neil? Should I let him move in?”

  Oh, noooo. This was one trap she was not going to fall into. When someone’s dead relative or friend or ancestor gave them advice, it was one thing, but she wasn’t playing at being anyone’s mother. Her one shot at messing with little people’s heads was gone.

  The thought brought an unfamiliar throb with it. She’d passed that opportunity up. How many others had she missed? Opportunities? When had mother duty become an opportunity?

  March, closing in on a year ago.

  She wished these thoughts would leave her alone. She’d expected to be back to her old fare-thee-well state months ago, not to still be pestered by thoughts of what might have been (or who, she thought with an inner smile at the Baby Not) and questions about her father and where he was (or wasn’t). But she was.

  “You there?” Jess prodded. “What should I do about Neil?”

  Ditch him, Mimi almost said. From the many times he’d been in the background while Jess whispered her questions to her mother to Mimi, she’d gotten the image of a whiny, needy, passive-aggressive loser. Jess definitely did not need that sort of additional baggage weighing her down.

  “Miss Em?”

  Almost said. She didn’t want that sort of responsibility hanging over her head. What if Neil really was the love of Jess’s life? What right did Mimi have to interfere? It was one thing to relay advice from the dead, another to give it yourself.

  “How should I know?” she finally murmured, oddly disappointed in herself.

  “Mom’ll never approve,” Jessica said, suddenly doleful. “She never liked redheaded guys.”

  “There is no hair color in heaven, Jess.”

  Abruptly, Jess laughed. It gave Mimi hope for the girl that occasionally she could provoke an honest guffaw from her. Jess was coming around, no two ways about it. The counseling was working. Mimi wasn’t going to mess with that. At times, Jess was even sort of likable.

  “You do not know that,” Jess said. “You always say you have no idea what heaven is like and that none of the deceased even tries to describe it.”

  “True, but I’m hopeful.”

  There was a second’s pause, and when Jess spoke her voice had taken on a hint of wistfulness. “Yeah. Me, too.”

  Jessica hung up and Mimi jerked the headset off. She rescued her winter coat from the hook on the outside of her cubicle, shoving it on. “I’m going!” she called.

  “Just a second. Hold on there, scout,” Brooke said, appearing in the door of her cubicle, carnation-colored fingernails splayed wide and held in front of her. “You mean you hung around just for the joy of talking to Jessica? Jessica the Snide? Jessica of the Massive Mother Complex?”

  “Yeah,” Mimi said, buttoning her coat. “She calls every Monday at noon.”

  “And you’re feeling some pressing need to make sure you’re here for her?”

  Brooke was staring at her oddly. “Well, would you rather take her calls?”

  “No, no, no,” Brooke shook her head. “I’ll leave that pleasure to you. It’s just, you know, you don’t like getting involved with needy types, and I think we both can agree Jessica falls into that category.”

  “What can I say? I’m a people person. And here you and Oz were worried I didn’t have anything to take care of so I could be as blissed out with obligations as you two. Well, there you go. I have Jess to take care of. Is this a happy face or what?” She framed her grimacing face with the thumbs and fingers of both hands.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Brooke snickered. “Don’t you have somewhere you were going?”

  “Yup,” Mimi agreed, picking up her bag and swinging it over her shoulder. “Ciao.”

  It was only when she was moving down the staircase to the first-floor lobby that she realized that despite her mockery, she had in fact been telling Brooke the truth.

  And it didn’t scare her.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  “You know, my initial impulse is to use your request as leverage.” Solange finished pouring the cream into her coffee mug and regarded Mimi across the solarium’s wrought-iron table. Overhead, a dusting of snow had collected along the roof’s glass panes, but inside palms and orchids scented the air.

  “You go to work for one of Tom’s companies; I buy the other heirs’ shares of this swampland,” Solange elaborated as though worried Mimi might not be familiar with the concept. “That sort of thing.”

  “There is a certain historical precedent,” Mimi acknowledged, picking her way carefully. She wanted Solange’s help badly, more than she could recall wanting anything from her mother in a long time. It made her nervous, as if she were holding the door open and ushering in disappointment. If you didn’t ask things, expect things, then you might be able to keep that door locked.

  Solange picked up the box of vanilla wafers from the table and shook it invitingly.

  Mimi declined. “No, thanks.”

  Her mother dug out a fistful of wafers and pushed the box away. Solange might be all about appearances when appearances counted, but in the privacy of her home, she was not nearly as buttoned-down as her public persona suggested. After all, she had once been married to John “Summer of Love” Olson.

  Right now, swimming in an oversized pale blue sweater and loose-fitting corduroy slacks, most of her lipstick left on her coffee mug, she looked like a slightly frowsy suburban housewife. Her demeanor, however, was one hundred percent regal. Though how a plump woman in a baby blue sweater working her way through a handful of vanilla wafers still managed to exude a royal air was a mystery even to her daughter.

  “Well, I’m not going to,” she said. “Are you surprised?”

  “Not really,” Mimi answered truthfully. She’d never really expected her mom to rescue Chez Ducky.

  “Do you want to know why?”

  “Not really,” Mimi repeated. She already knew why. Solange was fundamentally opposed to all things Olson.

  “I consider your proposal ill considered and poorly thought out,” Solange said anyway. “You arrive with some nebulous plan for me to buy a piece of property without knowing exactly who the heirs who want to get rid of it are, how many there are, and what price they are asking.”

  “I was sounding you out,” Mimi said, trying to control the flutter of eagerness in her voice. “Why should I go through the trouble of pinning things down without first finding out if you’d even consider it? Should I come up with the particulars for you?”

  Solange munched thoughtfully on another wafer. “No,” she finally said. “I don’t think so.”

  The bottom dropped out of Mimi’s stomach. That was it, then. There was nothing more to be done. Nothing more to be said. “Oh.”

  “Let me explain myself,” Solange said.

  “Not necessary.” Mimi started to push back from the table.

  “But I want to,” Solange protested. “In the last twenty years you have never asked me for any money or financial help of any sort. I know why. You don’t want me to have any control over you or feel any sense of obligation, even a financial one. I appreciate that. Very wise of you, truth be told. I would take merciless advantage of it if you let me do things for you.”

  Mimi had to hand it to Solange; she never minced words.

  “So, for you to show up on short notice and ask me for this kind of financial backing can only be an act of desperation. Which is very interesting, especially coming from you. Interesting enough”—Solange paused, not above extending a dramatic moment—“that it gives me hope for you. Desperation is a powerful motivator.”

  Mimi pulled herself together. Chez Ducky was a place, for God’s sake. Third-rate lakeshore on a fourth-rate lake. Sure, it would be nice to have it. But them’s the breaks. If people could disappear from your life, why the hell not places? She
wasn’t going to make a mountain out of the Chez Ducky molehill, and she wasn’t going to let her mother think this was something it wasn’t.

  “For the love of God, Mom. I’m not experiencing an epiphany, a metamorphosis, or a come-to-Jesus moment. I’m just trying to continue enjoying free-rent summers at a lake.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Solange said calmly.

  Damn it.

  “I believe you are acting because you care profoundly about Chez Ducky. I might not understand why, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think it’s great you’re willing to work, actively work, for something you probably won’t get.”

  “Wow,” Mimi snapped, irritably, “I’m feeling better by the minute.”

  Solange smiled. “You try to save it, Mimi. Do whatever you can. Whether or not you succeed will be immaterial. The journey will be the making of you. I can just tell.”

  “Mom. I’m forty-one years old. I am not going on any journey, except home to my apartment, and I’m already as ‘made’ as I’ll ever be.”

  Solange’s eyelids had slid half closed and the sanguine expression she wore looked weirdly familiar. Mimi had it. She looked like Ozzie on the brink of a mystical pronouncement.

  “Some people, Mignonette”—here it came—“some people experience their coming of age later than others.”

  Mimi threw up her hands in exasperation. “This is not my coming of age. I did that at eighteen with Jimmy—”

  “Stop,” Solange said, picking up another cookie. “I’m speaking metaphorically.”

  “Metaphorically or not.”

  “We’ll see.” Solange’s smile was infuriating. “Go forth. Save Chez Ducky. You have my blessing. I’d say I was sorry I can’t help, but we’d both know I’d be lying.”

  Mimi pushed back from the table and came around to her mother’s side. She looked down at Solange’s upturned face. Solange looked back up, munching happily away. “You don’t have the wherewithal to buy a quarter of Chez Ducky, do you?” Mimi asked.

  “No,” Solange said. “At least, not by myself.”