by Maria Geraci
“I thought you liked talking about toilet training.”
Shea gave a dispassionate laugh. “Things are just a little strained right now. Moose and I are each other’s first and only, and after a while, it gets sort of old. You know?”
No, she didn’t know.
First it was Pilar and Nick and the vasectomy thing, and now Moose and Shea were having bedroom problems? Could it have anything to do with Shea’s car always being at Dolphin Isles? Shea was hiding something. Kitty was sure of it.
Could Shea be having an affair?
With Walt Walters?
No way. It was too ridiculous to even think.
“So, what should I do about the senior center?” Kitty asked.
“I think Pilar’s right. There’s not much you can do. Cheer up! It’s not the end of the world. And it’s not like you did it on purpose.” Shea paused. “Did you?”
“Of course not! What kind of question is that?”
“If I were you, I’d be more freaked about your mother.”
“I guess I’ll figure out something on my own,” Kitty said, pushing her latte to the side. Things were bad if one of Frida’s lattes couldn’t tempt her.
Damn it. She hadn’t called this meeting to be brushed off. Usually whenever she was in trouble, Pilar would come up with some brilliant scheme to fix it and Shea would know exactly what to say to make her feel better. But all they could talk about was themselves.
In the twenty-five years they’d been friends, Kitty couldn’t remember one instance that Shea and Pilar hadn’t come through for her.
Except today. When she needed them the most.
Apparently, the greatest crisis in her life was nothing more than a blip on the radar in theirs.
35
It had been two days since the worthless powwow with Shea and Pilar, and Kitty hadn’t been able to come up with anything to fix the senior center situation. There was no use putting it off any longer. She needed to talk to Viola before she heard news of Kitty’s involvement from someone else.
The back door to Viola’s house was unlocked. The smell of fresh coffee lingered in the air. “Come in!” she cried cheerfully, waving Kitty into the room. “I have some exciting news! We’ve gotten over six hundred signatures on the petition!”
Kitty didn’t have to ask what petition Viola was referring to. Her stomach began to ache.
“You don’t look so good,” Viola said, studying her face. “Did you eat breakfast?”
“Not yet.”
“Help yourself to some muffins. I made six dozen to bring to the Gray Flamingos emergency meeting Friday night.” She looked up thoughtfully. “We’re expecting a record crowd. Do you think I should have made more?”
Emergency meeting? “I have something I need to talk to you about.”
Viola smiled. “I think I know what it is.”
“You do?” Viola didn’t seem upset. Maybe Shea and Pilar were right. Maybe things weren’t so gloomy after all.
“Gus told me. He’s not naïve, and neither am I. There’s not a lot of red pickup trucks with Hillsborough County tags around here. I’d have to be blind not to have seen his truck parked in front of your house the other night.”
Kitty felt a little dizzy. “I didn’t come here to talk about Steve.”
Viola poured her a cup of coffee and handed it to her. Kitty noticed she knew exactly how much cream and sweetener to put in. “Thanks.”
“I didn’t get married until I was almost thirty-four,” said Viola. “Did you know that?”
Kitty shook her head. Bob Pantini had died of cancer when Kitty was still in high school. She didn’t remember him all that well, except that he was a nice man, tall, and now that she thought about it, good-looking.
“I’d lived in Whispering Bay all my life, except when I went to school in Tallahassee to get my teaching degree. Most of my friends found husbands by the time they’d graduated college, but not me. I was picky,” she said with a laugh. “Like Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. ‘I am determined that nothing but the deepest love will ever induce me into matrimony,’” Viola quoted.
Kitty smiled. She knew the line by heart too.
“Did you know that I almost made the 1956 Olympic swim team?”
“No! Why haven’t I heard that before?”
“I said ‘almost.’ Almost doesn’t make you famous. I was nineteen, and the best in the state in the one-hundred-meter freestyle. But someone beat me out the day of the qualifiers and that was that. So I finished college, came back home, and started teaching at the high school. Back then, if you were twenty-two and unmarried with no prospects, people worried about you. By twenty-five, I was an old maid, and by thirty-three, I was practically shriveled up.
“And then, something happened that changed my life. Old Man Donnelly, that’s what we teachers called the principal, retired. And come that September, who moves to town, but the most handsome man I’d ever laid eyes on. Bob Pantini. Straight from Brooklyn, New York.” Viola chuckled. “He was tall, with a head full of dark hair and the most gorgeous green eyes you’d ever seen. He was thirty-eight and divorced and every available woman in town was after him from day one.”
“But you’re the one he liked,” Kitty said.
Viola laughed again. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. Most of our conversations lasted less than a minute. ‘How are you today, Mr. Pantini?’ ‘Just fine, Miss Hayes, and you?’ And that was it. Every once in a while, I’d catch him looking at me out of the corner of his eye during a staff meeting, and he always seemed to pop up in the teacher’s lounge during my planning period. Once, we talked for an hour straight. He was the most fascinating man I’d ever met. He knew all about opera and literature. So different from the local men, most of whom worked at the old paper mill and were only interested in fishing and getting drunk on Saturday night. I told him how I had dreamed of being an Olympic swimmer, and I’ll tell you, he acted pretty impressed. But he never asked me out. I figured he either wasn’t interested in me that way, or he didn’t want to date a teacher from his school.”
“So how did you end up together?”
“On the last day of the term he called me to his office to go over my evaluation. He sat behind his big desk, looking all yummy in his white collared shirt and navy blue tie. I still remember the smell of his Old Spice aftershave. He was very professional through the whole thing. Told me what an asset I was to the school and how the girls all loved taking my classes. And I sat there, barely listening to a word he said, just itching to reach out and run the palm of my hand over that stubbled chin of his.
“Then he handed me the evaluation to sign and our hands brushed, you know, just a little.” Viola’s eyes got a far-off dreamy look in them. “It was like a surge of electricity shot between us.”
Kitty felt her breath hitch.
Viola took a sip of her coffee and smiled mysteriously. “I was a little startled at first, embarrassed, really. I waited till my cheeks had cooled off to look at him, and when I did, he was blushing.” She laughed again. “Here was this big, handsome man from New York City and he was blushing.”
“Did he ask you out?”
“No,” Viola replied, calmly. “I asked him out.”
“You didn’t!” Kitty cried, slapping the pine table with the palm of her hand.
“I realized then and there that I was too old to just sit back and do nothing. If I wanted that man, then I was going to have to make the first move myself.”
Kitty nodded, fascinated. Why had she never heard this story before? “Was he shocked? That you asked him out?”
“It was the early seventies, not the turn of the century,” Viola said. “Not an everyday occurrence, but certainly not completely unheard of.”
Kitty smiled. “Go on.”
“At first, I could tell he was taken aback. And I was mortified, sitting there across from him at that desk, waiting for his answer. Then he picked up a sheet of paper and handed it to me. It was a jo
b offer from one of the high schools in Panama City. They’d heard what a good job he’d done here in Whispering Bay and they wanted to hire him. He asked me if I thought he should take it. That’s when I knew the reason he hadn’t asked me out before was because he was my boss. Bob was very professional, you know.”
“So, you told him to take the job?”
“Of course not! You should never make it that easy,” Viola said. “I told him maybe we should have a date first. See how things went.”
“And they went great,” Kitty supplied.
“You could say that.” Viola’s blue eyes twinkled. “He took me out to dinner, and afterward, we walked on the beach for hours. He told me all about his ex-wife and how after their divorce he had wanted to move somewhere new to start fresh. So he came to our little beachside town hoping to do just that. And I told him all about me and my family and how I loved teaching PE. And when he went to drive me home, I said ‘No, take me back to your place.’ ”
“Really?” Kitty squeaked.
“It was bold of me, but we weren’t kids and I knew five minutes into that date that I was going to marry that man. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, we were on his bed doing it.”
Kitty’s mouth dropped open.
“You should have seen the expression on his face when he realized I was still a virgin. I might have been a little fast with him, but you have to remember, I was raised Baptist in a small town in north Florida. You just didn’t give it up until your wedding night, or at least until you had a ring on your finger and could figure out a way to not get caught. The pill was around then, but an unmarried woman in Whispering Bay didn’t dare ask for a prescription for it, especially not when you taught public high school. And neither of us had been clearheaded enough beforehand to think about a condom. Safe sex back then meant using a padded headboard.”
Kitty laughed. “Then what happened?”
“He asked me to marry him and I said yes. Of course, I had to come up with this elaborate made-up story to tell everyone when they asked how he had proposed. I couldn’t very well say, ‘Oh, Bob and I had sex on our first date, and then he asked me to marry him.’ My daddy would have loved that one.” A sentimental look came over her when she added, “Your grandmother was the only one who knew the real story of how Bob proposed. She thought it was a big hoot, you know.”
“My grandmother knew that story?”
Viola shook her head. “Why is it that every generation thinks they’re the ones who invented sex?”
Kitty shrugged, a little embarrassed. It was weird hearing all this from Viola. And to think that her grandmother had known the story too.
Viola took a long sip of her coffee and placed it carefully on the table. “We got married two weeks later. Since I was already pushing thirty-four, we decided to go for a baby right away.
“After trying for about a year, and believe me, we tried,” she added with a wink, “we got worried. I went to the doctor and got a clean bill of health. He told us we were just stressed, to give it a little more time. Before we knew it, another year went by, and I began to suspect something was wrong. Bob had been married for four years that other time, and his first wife never got pregnant either. Back then, fertility problems weren’t so commonly discussed. So we looked into adoption.” Viola glanced out the kitchen window. It was the first time Kitty had ever seen such a wistful expression on her face.
“By that time I was thirty-six and Bob was forty. The first two agencies we looked into said we were too old to start a family. Can you imagine them telling a couple that today?” She shook her head. “We were stupid. Plain ass stupid. We gave up without a fight. And that,” she said, giving Kitty a hard stare, “is the only regret I’ve ever had in my entire life. I’ve never regretted not making the Olympic team or waiting till I was almost thirty-four to have my first real orgasm, or even staying in Whispering Bay all my life. But I’ve always regretted not having a child.
“So what if we were considered a little old to be first-time parents? Bob would have been the best father ever. It would have been nice to have a son or a daughter. They would have been almost your age by now. I might even have been a grandmother. I’d have been a good grandmother.” She sighed heavily. “But I’ve never been one to look back and cry over what could have been. That’s just not me.” She glanced at the clock and then at Kitty’s uneaten muffin. “Eat! You’re probably starving and here I am talking my head off.”
Kitty took a little nibble of the muffin. “Viola, why did you tell me all this?”
“Sometimes we have to go out of our comfort zone to make things happen. I just thought you might need to hear that.”
It didn’t take a genius to figure out what Viola was getting at. But she had it all wrong. She and Steve were nothing like Viola and Bob Pantini.
“Viola, are you dating Gus?”
“I’m not sure if what we’re doing would be called dating, but I guess you could call it that.” Viola blushed.
Dear God. Kitty didn’t want to take this any further. She smiled. She was happy for Viola. She really was.
“So if you didn’t come here to talk about Steve, then it must be your mother. I’ve been so busy with this senior center project I haven’t had time to go over and say hello, but I noticed she’s moved in.”
“She’s left Larry.”
Viola made a face. “What is it this time?”
“Basically, he’s a selfish beast for wanting to spend time with his new granddaughter.”
Viola sighed. “You know, your mother isn’t the enemy, Kitty.”
Viola’s defense surprised her. “I know that.”
“And your grandmother wasn’t a saint. I loved her. She was my best friend, but she made her share of mistakes too.”
Kitty suddenly remembered Earl’s admission about he and her grandmother being sweethearts. She wondered what else she didn’t know about her grandmother.
She eyed the empty muffin tins on the counter. By the time the Flamingos held their emergency meeting on Friday everyone in town would have read the Whispering Bay Gazette. They would know about the condo deal and the destruction of the senior center and Kitty’s role in the whole mess.
Kitty’s stomach felt like it was being scoured in acid. She’d forgotten the sensation, but she’d felt it once before. On the day she and her mother had moved here twenty-five years ago. She’d been scared and lonely and angry then. But her grandmother had made it better. And then Viola had shown her how to bake sugar cookies and had let her play with Sebastian. And then, a few weeks later, she’d met Shea and Pilar. And everything had worked out okay.
But nothing was okay now.
She had a short reprieve. Two more days of blissful freedom. Two days before she became the town goat. She didn’t want to give those two days up. She couldn’t tell Viola about her role in the condo deal. She just couldn’t.
“Can I help you make more muffins?” Kitty asked.
“You think we’re going to need more?”
Kitty nodded. The Flamingos meeting was going to generate a lot more interest than Viola could even begin to imagine.
36
It was strange. Three weeks ago she hadn’t even known Steve Pappas, and three days ago he was the last person she’d have gone to for advice. After she’d left Viola’s house she’d gone into the office and tried to make sales calls, but she’d been too agitated to get much done. Her mother, sensing something was wrong, had even made Kitty’s favorite childhood supper—fried chicken and mashed potatoes—but Kitty had only been able to get down a couple of bites. She’d excused herself from the table, laced on her sneakers, and gone for a run. Five miles later, here she was, standing on Gus’s doorstep.
She rang the bell, catching sight of her reflection in the glass panel strip alongside the wooden door. Her face was flushed and her hair was pulled back in a sweaty ponytail. She wore Steve’s Ron Jon T-shirt and a pair of navy blue nylon shorts, both of which were dripping wet.
Steve answered the door. “You look like hell,” he said, ushering her into the air-conditioned living room.
“Gee, thanks.”
“It’s an expression. Personally, I always think you look fantastic. What I meant to say is that you look like you need a friend.”
“That’s exactly what I need,” Kitty said. She’d never been in this kind of situation before. Shea and Pilar had always been there for her. But for some reason, they just didn’t get it. Or maybe they did and they were just too busy to care. Either way, it was depressing to think of what was going on with the three of them right now.
She took a look around the room. She hadn’t been inside the place since she’d sold it to Gus. He’d ripped out the old gold carpet and replaced it with Mexican tile. Most of the furniture looked brand-new, but Kitty recognized the La-Z-Boy chair Gus had insisted on bringing from the old house. Family pictures covered the walls. Pictures of Joey and Angela and their spouses and children.
“Where’s Gus?” she asked.
“He took Nathan bowling. They just left.”
“We’re alone?”
“Yep.”
Her skin tingled. It was probably the cool air-conditioning drying the sweat off her body. Or maybe it had something to do with knowing that she and Steve were alone. “Do you have a few minutes?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve left three messages on your cell, not to mention the half dozen times I’ve driven by your house.”
She’d known about the messages, of course, but she hadn’t known about the drive-bys. Her heart seemed to skip a beat. “Why didn’t you stop?”
He shrugged. “Your mom’s car was always out front.”
She couldn’t blame him for that. “I’m sorry about pushing you out the door. It’s like I said, I really don’t know how to explain you to her.” Or to anyone else for that matter.
“Come here.” He led her down the hallway into the spare bedroom. On top of the queen-size bed was a large suitcase and several neat piles of clothes.