Little Blue Lies (19 page)

“I didn't need to worry about him before,” she says coldly.

“Right,” I say, hurrying to sort out the bill and get away. “Well, okay. I guess
I
don't have to worry about him, then. After talking to him I feel less nervous, even if you never—”

“Did you do something you shouldn't have done, O?”

That feels, as soon as it lands, like the most profound question anyone has ever asked me.

“Nope,” I say.

I have placed the bill on the table, and as we stare intensely at each other over it, it must look to other diners like a battle is about to commence over money.

“Good,” she says.

My heart starts again, which is also good.

•  •  •

“Can we walk a little, up the pier?” I say, maneuvering things like I do it all the time. “Get a little stroll in and a good look at the boat at the same time?”

She shrugs, which I choose to take as enthusiasm.

We are walking alongside the big, gorgeous gleaming watercraft for which we have tickets, which she still does not know. We are holding hands. Junie is leaning on my shoulder heavily, even though she is not a leaner at all.

“I have another confession,” she says softly.

“I love these,” I say.

“I've never been on one of those things either.” She is looking up at the boat with what looks like curiosity.

I don't know what the hotel charges for the total cosmic manipulation they are engineering on my behalf, but it's not enough.

“Would you like to?”

“No,” she says without the malice of the lobster refusal. “I'm really tired.”

“Come on. How tired could you be?”

“Well, I work really hard. And to be brutally frank, you do not.”

And then sometimes the word “brutal” seems woefully insufficient.

“Game, set, and match,” I say, bowing to her.

“See, you even speak tennis.”

She makes me laugh even as she eviscerates me, which is itself impressive. “But you know it would be so—”

“It absolutely would,” she says. “And I wouldn't enjoy one minute, O. I'm exhausted, beat, flat, and distracted. You know what I would really like? What would make this memorable, crazy little vacation end on a perfect note?”

“I'm all ears.” Well, not
all
 . . .

“I'd like to go up to our incredible room, smelling of flowers,
fall down with you in our big crazy bed, and just lie there together, in front of the TV, in front of the gigantic window with the view, and just fall asleep together.”

We stop just short of where the white-uniformed crewman is taking people's tickets and ushering them up the little gangway onto the boat.

Without hesitation or regret I steer to starboard, heading us back to port, to hotel, to all that Junie Blue just laid out.

On the way we skirt right past our table, where an older couple, maybe in their thirties, are sharing a pitcher of red beer. I take the cruise ticket out of my back pocket and slyly slap it onto the table between them.

Just as we are entering the hotel, I turn back to see them standing, draining beers, and scrambling seaward.

The night, I am thrilled to observe, goes the way Junie presented it, to the letter.

Except we do not fall asleep together. I linger for at least three more hours, leaning into her, breathing her, holding her, absorbing her, keeping her.

When I wake up, she
is already gone.

There is a note, on hotel stationery, right next to me in the empty Junie space.

You looked so sweet. So serene.

Had to work very early. Took the train.

Lots to say, O. About all this.

But there are no words.

Love,

J

That is a word. Love. “Love” is definitely a word, and I'm hanging on to it.

I gather up my small bag of belongings. Then I go to the bath and collect all those ingredients that went into creating that once-in-a-lifetime Junie Blue mist in here last night. I have them now, for keeps.

Several of the roses are gone, and I throw several more into my bag before backing out of the room, looking it over
and over, every inch, until the door shuts in front of me.

A short time later my good friends of the hotel have sorted me out, brought me my car, and sent me on my way, when my phone makes the new-message noise. I stop the car, having gotten only ten yards from the hotel front door.

Goddamn you, O, get down to the shop right now.

It is from my one true love. Her notes have a frightening mood swing quality to them today. Ominous, even.

When I enter—with great trepidation—the shop, Junie is behind the counter. One Who Knows/Juan Junose/Harry is standing just this side of the counter, with his horrible little dog panting away at his side.

“What does he mean, my obligation is cleared?” she yells at me. “Huh? What does he mean by that?”

There is very little room for me to maneuver here. So I don't.

“I'd say it means your obligation is cleared, June.”

“Except that I never
had
an obligation to this man.” She walks around the counter and stomps in my direction. “And if I did have an obligation, that obligation would be
mine
to deal with.” When she reaches me, she starts punctuating every word with a sharp poke very high up in the middle of my chest. “I do not need to be taken care of by anybody. Do you understand me, you arrogant posh prick.”

“That hurts, Junie,” I say.

“Ah, women,” Juan says, sounding very much like a man who desires a vicious chest poking.

“Women, is right, ya pig,” she says.

“The last thing you need is to be mixed up in any way with dirty money,” I say to her. “And now you're not. So that's a good thing.”

I believe we have somehow made Juan's day, because he starts for the door with a deeply satisfied smile on his face. It's not enough, apparently, to win in whatever competition the likes of him are in. He has to create chaos in the lives of others to ice that cake properly.

“My money is not dirty,” he says as he reaches me. “I employ the finest of financial consultants to see to that.”

I get a shock right through me. It shoots up from my guts and certainly splashes all over my expression.

“
That's
what I was waiting to see,” he says, pointing at my face before going on his way.

What was that? What did he say? Head games. I have had very little interaction with this man, but I have learned one thing quickly, and that is that his primary business is in head games.

“What was that he said?” I say to Junie after he's gone. “Did you hear that?”

“Get. Out,” she says.

“Junie, listen. We have to talk—”

“We do not have to talk. If you don't get out of this store right now, I'm gonna call the cops, or the other guys, and tell them you're robbing the place. And that won't go well for you.”

“Junie, please—”

“I mean it,” she shouts, eyes closed, phone poised.

I go.

“I am
nobody's
bitch,” she yells at my sorry, sorry, stupid back.

It is over now. Yes,
I am a numbskull for taking it this far before being able to make that statement. I have tried my calls and my texts and my stakeouts of dog walking routes. I have traveled near, though not into, her store. I have tried calling Maxie, but I get nowhere there, either. Mom talks to Leona, but nobody talks about Junie, at least not to me. Instructions are obviously in place. And a person has to be a certifiable lunatic to cross Junie Blue.

Yes, hello.

I haven't done much talking at all since Junie took my voice away.

I really thought I was doing something good there. And maybe that's what she means about the gulf between us.

I ache with every breath. Like all my ribs are broken, and stabbing my vital organs in the bargain.

Sunday comes, and I realize I haven't had a single conversation with my father for days. Way more than days. Way beyond days.

I think about the deal I made. I get more queasy every
hour I get closer to starting work. I start Monday.

Sunday sacreds.

The beach is mobbed, and I don't like it. It's an absolutely made-to-order call-it-up-from-room-service sunny summer Sunday. Kids and seagulls are squealing, indistinguishable. Dogs are not supposed to be on the beach. They're all here, all of them. My father and I are walking straight into the sun, along through the shallows, both of us in long pants—I don't know why, with the cuffs rolled insufficiently up.

“You're very quiet,” he says, raising his voice to be heard over the waves and the music and the wildlife.

“I noticed that myself,” I say. A Frisbee hits the water about a foot in front of me and splashes. I stare at it until a girl comes over to claim it.

“Sorry,” she says.

Girls in inappropriate turquoise bikinis who have every business wearing them do not need to apologize, so the gesture is appreciated.

“Not a problem,” I say, and she is gone.

“You know,” Dad says as we resume our very stiff-legged bankers-go-beaching walk, “not that you necessarily need my coaching, but that looked like a missed opportunity to stretch your social muscles a bit.”

“You think?” I say, looking back in the young lady's general direction.

“I do. Just, something you might want to keep in mind, openness to new experiences and opportunities.”

“Ah,” I say, sounding a little like a bitter and pissy and ungrateful teenager, “but that's what tomorrow's all about. We don't want to be overloading my circuits with too much all at once.”

We are walking a greater distance than usual. We are approaching the stretch where the ridiculously beach-blanket-friendly white sand of the public beach starts giving way to the rugged boulder-strewn private one. The population and commotion drop off precipitously here, which is a welcome thing.

“That would be ambivalence about the next, exciting stage of your life I'm hearing?”

At this point farther progress requires some rock climbing, which I have always loved but Dad never showed much interest in. The tide is coming in and is just starting to slosh around in the gullies between the boulders. This is prime crabbing territory. We did a lot of rock-pool adventuring when I was a kid. Probably the single most durable and treasured component to our early-years experience. It was the original Communion of our Sunday sacreds.

“Sorry, Dad. I'm sure it will be great.”

“I, myself, am certain of it,” he says.

He scrabbles kind of awkwardly, up a rock that's about seven feet tall and five feet in circumference. He looks very
much like a crab trying to climb a tree. That rock has got a twin, slightly shorter, six feet away, which I mount. We squat on our little mountains, me sitting like a chimp when gawking back at zoo patrons, him still crablike.

“I could release you from your obligation, if you feel this pessimistic, Son.”

“No, Dad, you can't.”

The waves are slapping at our rocks, the tide seeming to accelerate. He reaches into his breast pocket, because of course we have breast pockets at the beach.

“You did not have to do this,” he says, holding out the check I wrote to Harry.

Is it possible to have a feeling, a reaction to something, and not have any idea what it is, even though it is going on inside your own body?

I do not know if I am surprised by this. I do not know if I am angry, or worried, or intrigued.

“I did what I had to do, Dad. I knew, at the time I did it, that I had to do exactly that. I knew it the way you know when you are hungry and have to eat.”

He nods, and I know this smile-nod. It's his low-grade pride reaction when I say or do something that's not exactly monumental but that signals there is perhaps an active bio-culture of sorts existing inside me. The check continues to flutter like a flag.

“You should put that away before it flies,” I say.

“Okay,” he says. “But just so you know, this does not have to happen.”

“It absolutely does.”

“Well, you have impressed the man, at any rate. He wants no more from you. This finishes it.”

I say nothing.

“You are an honorable man, Son.”

“You work for him,” I state flatly.

“He is a client.”

“What do you do for him?”

“Same as I do for all my clients. I look out for his interests.”

I look down at the slapping, splashing water reaching up for us.

“Do you do things you shouldn't do?”

This is most definitely not what my father expected of his Sunday sacreds. I do not know what he did expect, but I can read that it was nothing like this.

“Oliver, you know what I do, very simply? I do what's necessary. That, young man, is the same thing every single person who makes it in this world ultimately does. I do what needs to be done, to get by, to succeed, to provide for my family, and you have to admit I have done a pretty fair job of that over the years. Right?”

“No argument there.”

“And in my business—probably in most businesses, but certainly in mine—there are decisions that need to be made every single day, hard ones, that not everybody is going to agree with. I do my best, make the tough calls, and at the end of it all I am certain that I am doing more good in this world than bad. And that, combined with success, is a pretty fair marker of a man's ledger in this life.”

I am looking down now more than I am looking up. But I am listening.

“Are you listening?”

“I am.”

“Does this make any sense to you? Do you appreciate where I am coming from?”

“I'm pretty sure I do, Dad.”