Fairy Tale Blues (12 page)

Daisy and I stood quietly in her kitchen a moment; then she asked, “What did Jess do?”

I recalled how my words had brought Jess to the edge of the sofa we shared, his elbows on his knees, hands hanging loose between them. He looked at Lola as if she were the judge in a custody trial about to separate us and was powerless to stop her. He said, “I love AnnieLaurie.” His voice was husky and pleading. I remembered how we reached for each other's hands, the two of us against Lola and her bad news.

I told Daisy, “Jess told Lola he loved me and that he would do whatever he had to do to make our marriage succeed. Lola said that would take considerable work on his part, but she was willing to help him, if he chose to do it.”

Jess indicated his willingness, I remembered now, but never proclaimed it. And never acted on it. Never followed through on further appointments with her or any therapist.

“Lola confessed that she watched us every week as we held each other in the parking lot after leaving her office—she apologized for this, but it all happened right outside her window. She said our deep love for each other was very clear to her and moved her beyond words. She even thanked us for letting her witness this, saying that it allowed her to go on with her work, strengthened and renewed.”

I put my juicy hands down in the midst of the ants, and said, “Isn't that something?”

Daisy said, “She sounds pretty special.”

“Before we left that day, she looked straight at me and said, ‘Take care of yourself, Annie. That's the best thing you can do.' ”

“Wow,” Daisy said, “she was sure sending you a message.”

I realized I'd unwittingly committed mass murder of the ants and moved to the faucet to rinse my hands of tiny ant corpses.

“I ignored that message though. Until now, anyway. That's what I'm trying to do down here.”

I rooted around a drawer for a better knife for slicing the pineapple into pieces.

I stopped shuffling through the drawer and looked up. “I love him.”

“The stinker.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I gave up my search for a better knife and resumed slicing the slippery pineapple quarters.

I hadn't seen Bijou for a while now, and her nap should be over. I called Nell and Libby. “Did you take the puppy outside?”

Nell said, “We couldn't find a puppy.”

Libby said, “We thought you just wanted to tell secrets to Mommy.”

“No, really, I have a puppy.” I nodded to Daisy. “Really.”

“I haven't seen any puppies,” Daisy said. Did I detect a hint of disbelief?

“Oh, my gosh.” I rinsed and dried my hands. “She's got to be around here somewhere.” I began to lift clothing strewn around the family room. “Careful where you walk, Daisy; don't step on any piles.”

“What color is this puppy?”

I abruptly stopped my search. “Daisy, I know I'm a mess, but, honest, I have a puppy.” I scooped a load of damp beach towels off one end of the leather sofa and looked beneath it. I said, “She's got to be hungry. She hasn't eaten since early this afternoon.”

The twins wiggled their tiny bodies behind the sofa. Nell found a baloney sandwich.

Leaning against the kitchen counter with her arms folded, Daisy said, “Well, don't worry. If there's a puppy in here, it won't starve to death.”

“
If
?” I said. “
If
? I own a puppy; her name is Bijou. Now help me look for her.”

“If Marcus calls and finds out we have an animal loose in the house and that nobody's seen it for an hour, he's going to start in about my housekeeping again. It'd be a lot easier on me if this puppy was a figment of your imagination.”

“Bijou!” I called.

A moment later she trotted down the stairs with one of the twins' dollies in her mouth, wagged her tail at all the smiling faces staring at her. She accepted Nell's and Libby's squeals of pleasure and their four chubby hands reaching for her.

“Aw,” Daisy and I said in unison.

Jess

 

 

S
he answered on the second ring. I didn't even say hello.

“No dating,” I said.

“No dating?” she repeated, sounding puzzled.

“No dating.”

I hung up.

I drummed my fingers on my desktop in the back office of TFS. I did not feel reassured. Furthermore, I doubted Annie had considered dating. Maybe I'd given her ideas. And beyond that, I suspected I had, as usual with Annie, said more about my own thoughts than anything else. And worse, that was just what Annie would pick up. My neck heated.

Shit. I had just announced to my beloved that
I
was considering dating.

Now she would think less of me than ever, and she wasn't in Florida to think good things about me as it was.

The adolescent boy left without supervision for a couple weeks was eyeing other women—that was what she would think.

I heard Hadley scrape snow off her boots on the grate outside the store's front door, then insert her key into the lock and turn the bolt. Soon the rest of the staff would follow and the workday would begin, ready or not.

I wondered if Lizette was scheduled to come in today.

I wondered what she'd be wearing, how she'd fix her hair. Sometimes she left it down and all those curls would swing in sync with her short skirt. I wasn't the only one watching her, I had noticed. But I didn't think she was encouraging the young guys.

Then the flip side of my phone call occurred to me. Maybe Annie would get jealous. Maybe she would worry. Hurry home and claim me.

Then my mind flipped again, and I realized that if I was experiencing sexual thoughts about another, she might be, too. Now I was back where I started, back when my hand had reached for the phone.

 

I sat at the Snake River Brew Pub that night thinking I'd have paid any price to undo that “no dating” phone call to Annie. She heard those words and knew right off what was going on with me. I doubted it scared her, either. It won't make her rush home to keep me from straying. I knew Annie. She'd figure if I was so damn shallow to start an affair as soon as she left, she wouldn't want me. I don't know—am I that shallow?

I had known the guys sitting at my table here at the pub for years and had begun coming after work to have a beer with them since Annie left. Usually I stayed to order some dinner. Gerry Spence's private detective was here tonight, along with Harrison Ford's ranch manager, the helicopter pilot responsible for most of the mountain rescues and a friend who had the smartest search-and-rescue dog I'd ever seen in action. Buster, a border collie-blue heeler mix with gold eyes lively as small suns, found a man buried in fourteen feet of snow in three minutes flat. Great storytellers, all these guys. And though the talk was good as always tonight, I kept tuning out of the conversation to watch my hands wipe sweat off my beer mug and feel sorry for myself about spending dinnertime here once again, drinking Snake River Pale Ale and having the pasta special.

Maybe Annie didn't give a damn, but Lizette was beginning to notice me watching her. I swore there was an extra swish to her butt moving around the store when she knew I was in sight.

Aside from that, the store was doing okay without Annie. In some ways she was too intense for a resort business. Once a guy came in, just browsing, saying he was killing time. And Annie said, “That's a terrible thing to do to time.” She was always bringing people up short like that. I remember one fellow shot back, “What the hell? Time's going to kill me.”

The racket in this place was getting to me. They designed restaurants these days to increase the noise level, instead of reducing it as they once did. The pub was two stories of metal stairs, supports, rafters and brewing equipment, all of it ringing with voices and the clink of glass and pottery. The din was supposed to jack up the belief you were having fun. Tonight, it wasn't working.

Ford's ranch manager was telling how they sneaked the Dalai Lama and his entourage on the ranch last summer, because he needed a rest. Painted a pretty humorous picture of orange-robed monks and cowboys milling around the corrals together. When the story was over, I said good night to the guys, using the dogs in the car as an excuse—didn't want them to get too cold. In the parking lot I scraped off a couple inches of fresh snow from the windshield to expose their three noses smearing up the other side.

I wished I'd thought before making that stupid phone call—“No dating.” It was the image of all those exposed bodies in Florida. Naked tanned chests, bare muscled legs. Annie, half clothed herself, walking the beach, strolling along the boat pier. Men would look at her. And, unlike me, they would really see her—topaz ear studs and all.

Annie

 

 

J
ess hung up on me, and I looked at my cell phone and said right out loud, “Jess, you dumb nut.”

Across the table from me at the Osceola Café in Old Town Stuart, where my sister, nieces and I were eating a late breakfast, Daisy halted her motions a moment, then busied herself cutting up an egg-and-bacon croissant into small pieces for her daughters. A bit dazed, I tucked my phone back into my tote. I kept my head down, my hand holding the phone inside the tote on my lap. I shouldn't have allowed phone calls. I had enough garbage to wade through without him adding more crap.

Two words, “No dating,” and he'd hung up.

As was typical of Jess, he attributed his own feelings to me, which left him off the hook for needing to acknowledge or be responsible for them himself. Instead, he picked up the phone and issued his demand,
no dating,
as if I were the one plotting such a thing. But I knew what he was thinking even if he didn't. He was thinking that it'd be a lot easier to fall into a sexual attraction with another woman than to trouble himself solving this thing with me. All I could think was, Oh, Jess, you wouldn't, would you?

My nieces picked up on the charged atmosphere around the table. I felt them staring at me. I looked up.

Libby said, “Mommy has hair on her vagina.”

Nell asked, “Do you, Aunt Annie?”

Yanked from my dark thoughts, I barked out a surprised laugh, set my tote on the floor and said, “Yep.”

Satisfied, the two girls resumed eating. And Daisy said, “Everything okay?”

I told her what Jess had just said on the phone. “The next time I talk to him, he'll minimize his words, experience a loss of memory about the call or say that I had misunderstood. I'll bet money on it.”

The door of the café was open, propped by a potted palm, and sweet breezes from the Indian River one block over skated through, rolling smoothly over our table, lifting napkin corners and tickling my face with my loose hair. I took a big breath and then a bite of my omelet.

Two more bites and a sip of coffee, and my phone's muffled ring came from my tote on the floor. I resisted smirking at Daisy, reached for my tote, checked the ID and said, “Hi, Jess.”

“I don't remember exactly what I said, but I thought you might misunderstand. I was just thinking we hadn't talked about certain things.”

He used all three excuses. Should have made that bet.

“Okay, thanks. Bye-bye.” I sounded friendly and even felt that way, always grateful for any sort of acknowledgment that could be construed as an apology from Jess. Then—as I typically did—I began my descent into forgetting my negative feelings toward him once we patched things up. If it wasn't for talking to Daisy, I knew I would not be capable of recalling what had upset me.

After first checking that the girls were preoccupied with their own conversation, I said to Daisy, “It's as if I lived with a wife beater who, after bloodying my nose, fell to his knees to swear his deep love, and I only remembered the words of love. I am so eager to forgive, to slip back into the good parts of our marriage, that I sometimes cannot actually recall the trouble that led to our makeup kiss.”

Feeling hopeless, I shook my head. “Marital amnesia.”

Daisy said, “Sounds to me as if you both use ‘marital amnesia.' ”

“But he uses it
against
me; I use it
for
him.”

Daisy and I could talk freely to each other without suffering guilt over betraying our husbands, because we loved each other's mates enough to bear the knowledge of their imperfections. Marcus' wonderful curiosity and wide intelligence made him a benevolent listener; he wanted to understand everything and everybody and rarely made judgments, feeling as he did that he always had more to learn. I adored him, and Daisy could count on it, even while she complained, as she did after breakfast while we browsed together in Barnes & Noble.

“Marcus will have a fit if I come home with more books.”

I said, “More books bought with your
own
hard-earned money from working at Teague Family Sports three days a week?”

We had positioned Nell and Libby in the children's book corner, then strolled the nearby shelves while we talked.

“Daisy,” I said, “why can't you buy all the books you want?” The two of them spent money like kids betting toothpicks. “It's
your
money.”

“We pool our money. We've done that since we began living together. You and Jess do, too.”

Abruptly I was struck by the immaturity that sharing money required of marriage partners. Why in the twenty-first century were adult men and women bound to each other by money in ways that curtailed their personal freedom? I thought how Jess tossed his opinions around every time I bought beautiful gift wrapping, saying it was just wadded up and tossed out after one use. And how I rolled my eyes at his ever-expanding collection of Hawaiian shirts.