Skinny Dipping

by Connie Brockway

  “Don’t be too impressed. The degree was in English. And who told you that?”

  “Your mother. She spoke about you a lot.”

  She did? Of course she did. Hope springs eternal in a Machiavellian heart. Solange had probably seen Mimi leave the anniversary party with Joe and saw in him an opportunity to influence her.

  “Ah, she says that about all her kids,” Mimi said. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  He wasn’t listening. “And rather than get a real job and do something, you prefer to live in a low-rent furnished rental—”

  “It isn’t a furnished rental,” Mimi protested.

  “You mean you paid money for that stuff?”

  Okay, the honesty thing was getting old. “And I do have a real job.”

  Joe scoffed. “Right. Tell me, Mimi. Do you really think you’re talking to ghosts?”

  “Do you?” she countered.

  “I don’t know what to think. I only know that you are odd, eccentric.”

  “I’m eccentric?” she guffawed. “I’m not the one rushing to leave my hospital bed because of all the icky-bad germs, sport.”

  She felt him stiffen. As she’d hoped, that put an end to the uncomfortable direction of the conversation. If she wanted to be harangued about her life, she could call Solange or Mary. She didn’t need a new voice added to the choir. Which reminded her; she hadn’t heard from Baby Precocious in weeks. Next time she was in Fawn Creek she’d have to hit the Brewski Coffee Shoppe and use their free Internet service to check her e-mail.

  “Come on, Joe,” she said, pivoting him on his good leg and easing him down into the wheelchair. “Let’s get you inside the nice hermetically sealed house.”

  She rolled Joe into the house, the dogs ambling in after them. Kicking the Navaho rug out of the way, she rolled him across the wood floors to the center of the living area.

  She could tell Joe’s pain meds were starting to wear off from the way he grimaced every time he shifted. The doctor had been very pointed in saying he should stay ahead of the pain.

  She went into the kitchen and returned with a glass of water, then reached into her jacket pocket where she’d stashed his prescription and took out the bottle.

  “Here,” she said, twisting off the cap. She motioned for him to hold out his hand and then carefully shook two tablets into his palm. It probably said much about his level of discomfort that he didn’t kick about her handling his pills but popped them into his mouth and took a swig of water.

  “Tell me, Joe,” she said, regarding him seriously. “Is it hard being perfect?”

  That threw him. “Perfect? What are you talking about?”

  “Perfect clothes, perfect haircut, perfectly groomed, perfectly clean…”

  “Tell me, Mimi,” he countered. “In the morning do you walk into your closet and say, ‘Anyone who wants to go for a ride, hop on. ’Cause that’s what it looks like.”

  She sat down on the sofa’s arm and leaned forward. “I’m happy how I am.”

  “I’m happy how I am,” he countered.

  Why did she get the sudden inkling that they were both lying? But to whom?

  “Obsessing over perfection is a sure way to drive yourself crazy,” she said. “Just ask my mom.”

  “I don’t obsess,” Joe declared.

  Mimi regarded him silently, flatly disbelieving.

  “I don’t,” he insisted. “A person’s exterior is simply a reflection of how they see themselves and those around them. Making an effort over your personal appearance tells others that you value their good opinion as well as yourself.”

  Mimi looked down at her sweatpants, bagging at the knees, and the oversized flannel shirt hanging open over her faded pink T-shirt. “So, I’m guessing I hate myself and everyone else?”

  He inspected her thoughtfully. “It would appear so.”

  She laughed. She couldn’t help it. Even gorked-out Joe was fun to trade barbs with. In a perverse sort of way. “You’re good, Joe Tierney.”

  “Aren’t I though?” The drug must be taking effect again, because his eyelids were sliding to half-mast. He looked vulnerable sitting there, and Mimi felt a tug inside. He’d hate this, this dependence, yet he was trying to make the best he could of it. He was trying to do the right thing by Prescott. Why? And why did she care? She usually didn’t pry into other people’s lives.

  “Why’d you come, Joe?” she asked, taking the glass from his hand. “Really.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “You could have hired a private nurse. A busted leg isn’t exactly life-threatening. You didn’t need to come yourself, and I can’t imagine your employers were too keen on it, either. So, why did you come?”

  “I’m his dad,” Joe said, looking at her like he was sure he hadn’t understood the question because the answer was so ridiculously obvious.

  “Not every dad shows up just because their kid is in a bind,” she said. Her pulse had started racing a little. It must have been harder work pushing him up here than she thought.

  “Sure they do,” he said with patent certainty. A shadow further clouded his already glassy eyes. “If they can. Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes you don’t know you’re needed, but if you can and you know, you do.”

  It was a little convoluted, but she got what he meant. And he really did mean it. He wasn’t right, not about every dad, but he was sincere. Well. She just looked at him a minute, growing all buttery feeling inside. “Come on, Dad. Nappy time.”

  As all the bedrooms were on the main floor in a separate wing, Mimi had no trouble wheeling him into one of five guest rooms. She positioned the wheelchair next to the bed, locked the brakes, and bent over him. But when she started to slip an arm around his waist, he recoiled.

  “What?”

  “Nuthin’.” His face became a mask of manly endurance. “I’m ready.”

  She drew back. “Is this still about me washing my hands?”

  “No. Let’s go,” he said.

  She didn’t believe him. She reached out and patted his knee. “Touch.” She patted his other knee. “Touch.”

  He looked up at her, startled. “Stop that.”

  “Touch.” She flicked her finger against the tip of his nose. “Touch.” She touched the top of his head.

  “You’re being childish,” he said.

  “Touch, touch.” Her hands darted out and tapped his cheek and his shoulder. “Touch, touch, touch.” Hand, chest, arm.

  “Are you done yet?” he asked with heavy patience.

  “Maybe.”

  “Fine. I think I can make it into the bed myself.”

  “Now who’s being childish?” she said, lifting a brow at him. “You’re drugged. You’ll probably hurt yourself. But if you want to prove you’re irresponsible—”

  She had measured her words carefully and now got the desired effect.

  “You’re right,” he said stiffly. “Would you please help me lie down?”

  “Do you think you can bear having my unwashed hands on you?”

  “I told you I didn’t care about your unwashed hands. Well, I do, but that’s not why I flinched.”

  “Really?” she said disbelievingly. “Why did you?”

  “Because you banged into my knee when you leaned over me.”

  Mimi’s cheeks grew warm. “Oh.”

  He saw her blush and smiled. “Did you misjudge the situation?” he said. “Don’t worry, there’s a lot of that going around.”

  Did he remember everything she’d said to him? She cleared her throat. “No. Not at all. So, let’s get you onto that bed, shall we?”

  Mimi leaned forward and he wrapped a long arm around her shoulders. With a groan, he pushed up and balanced on his good leg. She used her foot to shove the wheelchair out of the way and aimed him at the bed. Then, very carefully, she began easing him down. Unfortunately he was a large man and she wasn’t unusually strong for her size. He eased three-quarters of the way and toppled the rest. She landed on top
of him. He gasped.

  She pushed herself up with a hand against his chest, looking down at him anxiously. “Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you are,” she insisted. “You landed on your good side.”

  “But you landed on my bad side.”

  “Did I?” She felt terrible. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry.” She tried to wriggle upright but his arm held her in place.

  “You know, I think I’m feeling better,” he said. His body beneath hers felt rock hard and anything but vulnerable.

  “Ah!” She planted her hand and shoved solidly against his chest, freeing herself. He laughed. “Mimi, I have so many drugs in me right now the Goodyear blimp could fall on me and it wouldn’t hurt.”

  Had he just likened her to the Goodyear blimp? “Ah!”

  She scrambled off the bed.

  Despite appearances, Mimi wasn’t offended. In fact, she was a little flattered by the lascivious glint in Joe’s murky gaze. If she could, er, awaken the interest of a man with that much Demerol in him, she obviously still had it. In spite of the baggy sweatpants and flannel shirt. Or maybe the “it” she had was Jo Malone bath gel. That stuff was like witchcraft. She was going to have to get more.

  She peeked back in the bedroom. Joe was already conked out, stretched out on his back, one arm flung wide, snoring lightly. Good. Now she was free to enjoy an unwitnessed and generally antic reunion with the dogs.

  She didn’t want Joe getting the idea that she actually liked being with the dogs because then he’d think it was no big deal that she’d agreed to take care of them—and him—and that would pretty much destroy all the nice beholdenness going on, although she hadn’t yet figured out exactly why she liked the idea of Joe owing her. There was nothing he had that she wanted and nothing he might do for her that she needed. Unlike Joe, who was a slave to Forbes and GQ and elite airline upgrades but mostly antibacterial soap, she was an island unto herself, completely, serenely independent.

  Ten minutes later she sat contentedly flanked by Blondie and Wiley, their warm doggy heads resting on her lap. She was a rolling stone. No direction. No home.

  She frowned. That wasn’t how the song went. It was “no direction home.” Oh, well. She slapped her thighs, rousing Blondie and Wiley. “Okay, who’s up for pizza?”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Joe heard the front door open and close. A few minutes later, Mimi came into the living area carrying a large padded envelope. She walked toward the couch, reaching out and absently tapping Joe on the head as she passed, murmuring, “Touch.”

  “Would you please stop that?”

  “Nope,” she said. “I should be charging you for this. I’m desensitizing you.”

  “I don’t want to be desensitized.”

  “Sure you do. Look how far you’ve come in just a couple days. You barely flinch anymore.”

  “You’re reading that book by Stephen King, the one with the wacko nurse taking care of the novelist, aren’t you?” he asked morosely.

  “Misery?” she asked, delighted. Mimi spent a lot of the time being delighted. Anything that struck her as quixotic or odd, which in Mimi’s slanted worldview could be almost anything, tickled her sense of humor. “No. Why? Do you think I’m going to come at you with a baseball bat some night?”

  “No. That would be too quick. You want to torture me.”

  Her brows rose.

  “Besides,” he went on, “unlike what’s his face, I’m not killing off your favorite fantasy.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I had this fantasy that you wore starched boxers and ironed your socks.”

  He raised his brows. “How do you know I don’t?”

  “I’m guessing.”

  “Well, if you are really curious, we could always check. Together.”

  Mimi laughed again. She had a great laugh, low and throaty. “And there goes my fantasy. Someone who starches their boxers would never make such an improper suggestion to his day nurse.”

  “So…” he said hopefully. “Do you wanta?”

  His pulse drummed a little heavier in his chest as he saw the inadvertent speculation in her quick glance. Then it was gone.

  “Men, eternally optimistic, aren’t they?” she asked, shaking her head. “Here you are, trussed up tighter than a Thanksgiving turkey and still hoping for the best. And before you make any snide comments, yes, by ‘best’ I am referring to me.”

  “There’s only one way to prove it,” he replied solemnly.

  She didn’t bother answering this time, but sat down on the sofa and began peeling the strapping tape from the package. He wasn’t entirely joking in his half-assed attempts at seduction. The reason he didn’t refine his pitch was that he wasn’t sure how it would be received and he wasn’t yet at the place where he wanted to find out.

  Besides, he didn’t want to screw up with Mimi again. That first day here, Mimi had examined anything he said to her for a hidden subtext. She needn’t have bothered; if he hadn’t already decided that whatever Mimi was, she definitely was not out to drain Prescott of his hard-earned cash, one day in her company would have been all it took to convince him. He didn’t surmise this because he thought her particularly moral or ethical, but because he didn’t think she had the necessary motivation to follow through with a plan that would require as much work and organization as a scam.

  It wasn’t that he thought she was lazy, either. Mimi was categorically not lazy, at least not in the accepted sense of the term. It was simply that conning Prescott would not get her anything she considered worth the effort it would take to acquire. That included money. Joe had never known anyone less interested in material possessions.

  She lived like a stowaway on the Good Ship Earth, someone who’d figured out a way to avoid paying her passage with blood, sweat, and tears like everyone else. Yet, that wasn’t quite true, either, he thought, watching her give up trying to peel the tape off the package and resort to gnawing on the corner (he cringed thinking about where that corner might have been). She clearly cared for things. Things like the dogs and Chez Ducky. She cared for her family. She even cared for him to some degree. She just went to great lengths to keep a distance between her and the things she cared for, a physical as well as emotional distance that kept her from investing too much.

  She was frowning now, looking through a thick stack of variously shaped and weighed papers, someone’s records and files.

  “Mimi?”

  She looked up, her expression uncertain. “It’s from this guy, Otell Weber. He’s a private investigator I hired to try and find out what happened to my father.”

  “Your father? What happened to your father?” Joe vaguely recalled asking Mimi about her father during the picnic. He’d gotten the impression then that he was around somewhere, just not at Chez Ducky at the moment. If Mimi’s father had recently disappeared, she certainly was casual about it. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Thirty years ago.”

  “What?”

  “Thirty years ago. He dropped me off at Chez Ducky for the summer and went off to wander the world.” She tapped her finger on a stack of paper. “Turns out the world may have stopped in Montana.”

  “Back up. Now, details, please.”

  She looked surprised by his interest but obliged. “After my parents divorced when I was a baby, Dad got me for the entire summer, every summer, as part of the settlement. And that meant we spent every summer up here at Chez Ducky. Always. It was just like it is now, kids and adults stacked to the rafters in those cottages. You could go days without actually speaking to an adult. Don’t get me wrong; there were plenty of people to keep an eye on things, they just didn’t interfere with kids being kids. My dad, in particular, had a very relaxed parenting style.”

  “He also must have had some job to be able to take off entire summers like that,” Joe said.

  “Oh, he didn’t really have
a job,” she said casually. “I mean, he worked. But not like…a career. He worked to live, not lived to work.”

  She was making excuses for the old man, Joe realized. And what better way to tell the world that you stand behind your dad than to adopt his lifestyle for yourself? The whole “let it slide till it slides right on by” philosophy was beginning to make a little more sense.

  “Most of the time Dad hung around, but it wasn’t unusual for him to take off for a week or even a month or two here and there. But usually not so long during the summers.”

  What kind of dad just dumps his kid and disappears for weeks on end?

  Me.

  The word popped unbidden into his mind. At once, Joe discounted it. It wasn’t the same thing. Not at all. Mimi’s father didn’t have a career and responsibilities keeping him away from Mimi. John Olson had a choice; Joe didn’t.

  Or maybe the difference was that Joe had an excuse.

  How different were he and Mimi’s father really? Both had left the work of raising their children to women they were convinced were fundamentally more capable, who seemed to enjoy, no need, to raise them. Why had John done so? Had he truly been as footloose as Mimi evidently thought him, as cavalier and heedless, or had he been secretly relieved not to have to step up to the plate? Had he, too, been afraid? Like Joe.

  Joe didn’t flinch away from uncomfortable questions, and he didn’t now. But he didn’t have a definitive answer. Maybe the truth was somewhere in between. Maybe that was the reason behind Prescott’s animosity. Not that he felt Joe had abandoned him, but that he’d sensed Joe’s relief that Karen had given him dispensation from full-time fatherhood. Joe wasn’t even certain how he felt about that. Only that whatever relief he’d initially felt had not lasted.

  When had his relief begun to turn to resentment? When had he realized that it wasn’t only Prescott he was failing but himself? Before Karen’s death? He couldn’t remember. He’d never asked himself the question so directly before. He felt vaguely disloyal, questioning the consequences of Karen’s devotion to their son. At the same time, he wondered whether it might not be disloyalty but simply seeing things with a new objectivity.