Cry Uncle (25 page)

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 sun-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.