I'm Not Julia Roberts (17 page)

“Yes, he was.”

“Glynn,” he says, getting a little annoyed, “I don’t think he smoked a day in his life.”

“You just don’t remember, that’s all,” Glynn says.

“
You
don’t remember,” Tate says. “You were three years old.”

Glynn opens her book, closing the subject.

“Why did you ask me what I remember if you don’t want to know what I remember?” he says, though she continues to ignore him.

Tate pushes his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose in disgust and pretends to sleep. But he can’t stay irritated for long; the sea air scours away irritation, exasperation, consternation. Anyway, he has something else to think about. Green is no longer wearing green, she wears a new bathing suit, a polka-dotted one. Though it covers more of her body, she seems more naked in it, as its different shape reveals secret stripes of untanned skin.

Tate’s not-father father insists on taking the family out for dinner, despite the fact that his wife has planned to make lobster tails with drawn butter, despite the fact that his wife is furious. “I can’t understand what we’re doing here,” she says, yanking her napkin off her plate in disgust and spreading it over her lap. Tate notices that when Renee frowns, she develops jowls. When he was little, he always wished that people looked more the way they really were inside. Renee’s jowls say a lot. Renee’s jowls say,
I will devour your soul if you let me. I will stuff you with bugs and dirt.

“The kids didn’t want lobster tails,” says Tate’s dad. “Kids don’t eat that sort of thing.”

Renee doesn’t care what kids eat. “What am I going to do with all that lobster?”

His father’s expression is blank when he says, “Maybe you can give it to one of your friends.”

“Which friend?” Renee says. “Who are you talking about?”

“I don’t know any of their names. Isn’t that funny that I don’t know any of their names? You’d think I would by now.”

Renee studies her husband. “You’ve been drinking again.”

“No more than usual.”

It seems the kind of drama that teenagers live for, but Ashleigh isn’t interested. “So, Dad, have you thought about what I said?”

“About what?” says Tate.

“About living with you.”

Glynn dribbles clam chowder down her chin and neck. Ryan’s head snaps up. “Are we moving in with Dad?”

Tate says, “I don’t think that’s the best idea.”

“Why not? We can hang out together. Do things, like we used to.”

What things? All Ashleigh ever talks about is her hair or her nails or her boyfriends, and sometimes, sometimes, he has to remind himself that he’s her father. He doesn’t feel old enough to be Ashleigh’s father—or Ryan’s, for that matter. When did he have these children? How long ago could it have been? His forty-fifth birthday had come as a huge surprise. He does not want any more surprises.

“Well?” Ashleigh says.

“I’ll think about it.”

“I know what that means,” says Ryan. “That means no.” He wraps his hands around his warm Sprite. “Don’t put ice in it,” he told the waitress. Ryan hates ice, hates that the ice could abruptly avalanche as he’s drinking and hit him in the face.

Glynn carefully crumbles crackers into her soup. “How about a compromise?”

“What do you mean?” says Ashleigh.

“Maybe you could spend part of the week at your dad’s and part with your mom,” Glynn says.

Ashleigh considers this. “That could be okay. As long as the weekends are with Dad. Maybe like Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays are Mom’s or something. Or just Mondays and Tuesdays.”

Glynn nods energetically. “Yes, like that. I’m sure if you sat down with your parents and discussed it, you could work it all out.” She glances at Tate. “I don’t know if your father has mentioned it to you, but we’re thinking of taking the whole family to therapy. This is just the kind of thing that you could work through there. I think that it will be good for all of us to hear what you have to say.”

Tate wants to throw something at her.

Tate has now seen both of Green’s nipples and one butt cheek. He can’t imagine where she’ll go from here. Will she strip on the beach? Stride naked into the sea foam like Aphrodite in reverse? Behind dark shades, he watches, every muscle in his body tensing in anticipation.

“Stop staring, Dad.”

“What?” He sees Ryan, Joey behind him, both wearing little boots of wet sand.

“You keep staring at those people,” Ryan says, dumping his boogie board on the blanket. “It makes you look weird.”

“I’m not staring,” Tate says. “And I don’t look weird.”

Ryan grabs a towel and, with it, wraps his head like a turban. “You always look weird.”

Tate considers his son. “This from a boy in a turban.”

“Not from me. Ashleigh.” He points to the lifeguard stand, where Ashleigh chats with two boys who look as if they’ve been sculpted entirely out of toffee. “She told me to tell you that the girl is too young.” Ryan puts his hands on his hips. “Are you going to marry her?”

“No, Ryan. Ashleigh’s got the wrong idea. I’m not marrying anyone.”

“My dad’s getting married,” says Joey. “Mom doesn’t like it.”

“Do you blame her?” Tate says.

“Huh?”

“I mean, are you sad that your dad is getting married?”

“No,” says Joey. “Mom got married, so it’s only fair that Dad gets to. That’s what I keep saying, ‘It’s only fair, Mom.’ It just makes her madder.”

“Yes,” says Tate, glancing at the girl in green. “Women are like that.”

Ashleigh is talking. Something about a lifeguard, and dinner, and a party afterward.

“So?” she says. “Can I go?”

“Right now?”

“No, next year,” she says. “Yes, now! Dominic is off duty at five and wants to take me to this restaurant he knows.”

Tate eyes the lifeguard. Instinctively, he sucks in his stomach, then, feeling foolish, releases it. “Which restaurant?”

“How do I know? And who cares?”

Tate waves his hand. “Fine, fine,” he says. “Just tell Dominic the lifeguard that he needs to have you back at the beach house by eleven. Do you know the address?”

Ashleigh recites the address and the house phone number. “Okay?” she says.

“Okay. Just keep your cell phone on.”

She yanks some shorts out of a canvas bag and steps into them, one foot, the other foot. “You’re not going to, like, call me in the middle of my party, are you?”

“I will if you’re late.”

Ashleigh rolls her eyes, her gaze settling on the girl in the lime bikini. “You should probably go back to the beach house now. Renee will probably make you some snail-slime salad or whatever.”

Tate plays it casual, doesn’t look at the girl on her rainbow towel. “I’ll go in a bit. I like the beach in the late afternoon,” he says.

Ashleigh’s lip curls. “Yeah,” she says. “I bet.”

He sends the boys back to the water for one last swim and settles back into the sand chair. Except for Green and for Tate, the beach is empty. It’s safe for whatever might happen to happen. The girl in the green bikini is smiling, smiling, smiling, and untying her bikini top, and he will get another glimpse of something secret and delicious from a girl who isn’t alarmed, who isn’t looking to go anywhere. Except there’s something blocking his view, some boy in his way, some blond boy in blue swim trunks, who is not just blocking his way but is walking toward the girl in the lime bikini, dropping to his knees on the rainbow-striped towel, and grabbing the girl around the waist. They fall to the towel, giggling. The boy pulls an orange blanket over them, the lime bikini top tossed out onto the sand, where it curls like seaweed. There is frantic, frenzied motion under the blanket. The moans carry in the wind.

This is a family beach,
Tate thinks.
A family
beach
!

His cell phone saves him. He fishes it out of the canvas bag. “Hello?”

“Hey, you,” Roxie says. “How’s the beach?”

“Fine,” says Tate.
We’re all fine.
Lime green bikini bottoms fly out from under the blanket.

“You sound a little funny. Are you coming down with a cold?”

“No, no,” he says. More firmly, “No.”

“That’s good. Are you guys having fun?”

The orange blanket moves rhythmically. “Yeah,” Tate says. “We’re having a great time.” He realizes that he is no longer a man, he is a dog. A voyeur dog, the dog next door. He adds, “Wish you were here.”

“Really?” says Roxie. “Too bad you didn’t ask me to come.”

“I should have,” he says.

She’s silent for a moment. “Yeah, you should have. But you didn’t.”

“Next time I will.”

“What are you saying?” she says.

He turns away from the undulating blanket, from the ocean. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He’s not saying anything. What is there to say? He doesn’t want to marry Roxie. He doesn’t want her to meet his extended family, the high-maintenance, emotionally crippled parade. He likes things the way they are, Roxie in one corner of his life and everyone else in the other. Doesn’t he? Isn’t that what he likes?

“Tate?” She sighs then. “Tate, look. Don’t worry.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t worry about me getting too serious.”

“I wasn’t—”

“Yeah, you were. I’m not stupid, Tate.”

“I never said you were,” he says stupidly.

“If it makes you feel any better,” she says, “I have a date tomorrow night.”

“You what?”

“I have another date. I figured you wouldn’t mind. I figured you’d be relieved.” Her laughter sounds fuzzy in the cell phone. “You
are
relieved.”

Relieved? “Uh, I—”

“I finally get it, Tate. I get that this is a casual thing for you. And you know what? I’m okay with that. I’m not ready for anything serious anyway. I already have one failed marriage under my belt, I’m not looking for another one. I’m really not.”

“Oh,” he says. All he can think to say. He risks a glance. The orange blanket is still.
That was quick,
Tate thinks nastily.

“Well, I didn’t expect to be talking about this today, but I’m glad we did,” Roxie says. “Liv is here, so I should go. But I’ll try to call you tomorrow.”

“Right,” says Tate. “Have fun on your date.”

There’s a pause, and then: “Geez, Tate.”

“Geez yourself,” he says. “Bye.”

“Tate . . . I . . . Okay. Bye.”

He flicks the phone shut and tosses it back into the canvas bag. Then he takes off the sunglasses and throws them into the bag. If he’d had anything else to throw, he would have thrown that, too.

When he finally looks up again, the girl is back in her lime green bikini, a huge grin stretched across her face. The blond boy nods, shouts, “Like the show, old man?”

It’s one
A.M.
, and Ashleigh still isn’t answering her phone. Glynn wants to know why Tate would allow Ashleigh to go out with some strange boy in the first place.

“First you tell me she’s too old, and now you’re telling me she’s too young,” Tate says.

“Too old for a baby-sitter, too young to be out with marauding strangers, yes.”

“Marauding? What do you mean,
marauding
?”

“Isn’t that what you’re worried about? Isn’t that why you’re upset she’s not home?”

Tate’s father, still up, still swirling amber liquid in a glass, grins at him. “I seem to remember worrying about the same thing when you’d go out.”

“Not now, Dad,” says Tate.

“What? A man can’t worry about his son?” He booms the word
son.
As a matter of fact, he’s always boomed the word
son,
as if it were never a sure thing.

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

What comes out of Tate’s mouth is not what he’d intended to say. “Do you know . . . do you have any idea if my father, the biological one, was ever a smoker?” He does not look at Glynn when he says this.

“I think he was. Why?”

Tate licks his lips and notices that they are raw and sore, burned in the sun. “No reason. I just don’t remember him smoking, that’s all. I . . .” He trails off. There’s something about this, the not remembering, that is bothering him, but he doesn’t know what. Why doesn’t he know?

“Your mother was sure it would turn you and Glynn into human smokestacks. Bad early influence and all that. Speaking of your mother, how is she?”

“Don’t worry about Mom,” says Tate. “You have other things to worry about.”

“Like what?”

“Your drinking.”

“Not you too!”

“Okay, then. Your wife,” Tate says, punching in Ashleigh’s number again.

“My wife,” says Tate’s father. “Yes. She can be worrisome. Or she was. Now I just don’t care anymore.”

“Dad, I’d love to talk to you about Renee, but I’m trying to find Ashleigh right now.”

Tate’s dad grunts. “She’ll come home when she’s ready.”

“What if something’s wrong? What if that moronic lifeguard kidnapped her or attacked her?” He’s sure to say “moronic” and not “marauding.”

“I’m sure she’s fine. She’s just trying to scare you.”

“Why would she need to scare me? Why does everyone keep saying that?”

“Who’s everyone?”

Glynn’s face is so full of worry, so full of genuine concern and real feeling, that it hurts to look at her. “Forget it,” Tate says. “I’m going out to look for her.”

“It’s not going to help,” his father says in that same booming voice, echoing throughout the house. “The time you should have paid attention is over, don’t you know that?”

But Tate is already out the door, already down the street. Instinct takes him the few blocks down to the beach. As he walks toward the water, grit fills his shoes and abrades his skin. There are couples dotting the sand, murmuring in the dark. He has no idea if she’s here, if he’ll be able to find her. He moves from couple to couple, dot to dot, looking for her sherbety hair. He’s about to start shouting her name when he sees the X marking the spot: Ashleigh, spread-eagled on the wet sand, the tides licking her toes. He runs over to her, an awkward, broken lope.

“Ashleigh,” he says, shaking her shoulder.

“What?” she says groggily. She frowns. “Dad? Where’s Dominic?”

“I don’t know,” Tate says. “What are you doing? Are you drunk?”

She pushes his arm away and sits up. “Get off.”