Love's Little Instruction Book (11 page)

As noon approached — announced by the weekend disc jockey at WMTR — they broke for lunch. Denise brought Dave into the kitchen, seated him at the kitchen table, and set a cold beer on the table in front of him without asking. Dave apparently didn’t mind her presumptiveness, though, because he thanked her and took a long swig, sighing happily at the end of it. She poured herself an iced tea and then asked, “Are deli turkey sandwiches okay with you?”

“That would be great,” he told her. “I’m not what you’d call a fussy eater.”

She glanced at his belly and smiled. She didn’t think he was. Her mother always said that it was a pleasure to cook for a man who appreciated his food. Her ex-husband had been the king of the fussy eaters. “I’ll make one to bring in to my mother, too. She can eat while she’s working if she wants.”

He nodded. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he offered.

“Just sit,” she told him. “It won’t take long.” She asked him what he wanted on his sandwich and went to work, making all three sandwiches at the same time.

He asked her how she liked living with her mother again after being out of the house for so many years, and if she ever wanted to move into her own place again. He wanted to know if she liked working at the radio station, and if she ever thought about going into a field that would incorporate her background in art history, and if she ever missed Europe. He was making conversation, she knew. Filling in the silence while she was occupied and he was idle, but it pleased her that he really did seem interested in her answers. She’d had a remarkable life so far, and she did like living here in Cambridge with her mother. He didn’t question her answers the way some people did. He just took them at face value, nodding or agreeing with her. And that made her very pleased.

When they actually sat down to eat together, she asked him about himself. Where he had gone to college, how he had gotten into the sales department, how long he’d worked as a painter. He told her a funny story about working with a grouchy old homeowner who had been so involved in supervising the paint crew that he’d finally stepped in a pan of paint and had had to hopscotch his way out of the room, drops of paint splattering over his hardwood floor with each hop.

She told him about going to a museum with Presley, who seemed more interested in what was behind the fig leafs than in the art itself. He told her about the time Presley had informed a potential client who wanted to buy time to air political ads that his candidate was “so crooked that if he swallowed a nail, he’d cough up a corkscrew.” She told him about the time that one of the Kennedys had hit on her at a party and had been inordinately pleased when Dave approved of her response that she did not go out with married men, or with men who would go out with a married woman.

He was easy to talk to and fun to listen to. One subject led to another with ease, and she found, to her delight, that he held many of the same opinions and values as she did. There were disagreements, too, of course. He found Presley’s outspoken funkiness intimidating while Denise thought it was kind of fun, but their disagreements were not strong enough to cause any major dissentions, and any rifts they might have had were gone once they ventured on to their next topic.

And she also discovered that he could make her laugh. He argued that the reason there were no good television shows on TV today was that there were no good TV theme songs. “Think about,” he said. “Sing any theme song you can think of, and I’ll bet it’s from a show that’s been off for years.”

She wracked her brain. She really did. She wanted to prove him wrong, but the only song from a current show that she could think of was “The Sesame Street Song,” which he insisted didn’t count because the show had been on since the ’70s. Then he started singing songs for her just to prove his point — a kind of Boob Tube
Name That Tune
. He started easy —
Gilligan’s Island
,
The Brady Bunch
,
The Addams Family
,
Diff’rent Strokes
, then moved onto songs that didn’t mention the name of the show —
Cheers
,
The Partridge Family,
and the closing song from
Frasier
. (She felt that show was recent, but he pointed out that the show had been on — complete with closing theme — for a very long time).

He finally stumped her with the theme from the old cartoon
Milton the Monster
, which she thought sounded familiar but couldn’t quite place. That got him started on the subject of cartoons, and he started to do imitations of cartoon characters for her. Some of his imitations were atrocious, but others were easily recognizable. He did a mean Foghorn Leghorn, presented in the form of a story of a friend who had gotten into a fight at Halloween party while dressed as the six and a half foot tall rooster, decking a six foot tall Sponge Bob onto the seat of his square pants. “Stay down, I say! Stay down!”

She laughed until she almost cried, especially when he got up from his chair and strutted over the imaginary invertebrate in fine bantam fashion. She hadn’t watched cartoons in years, but he had. He said it was because he babysat his little niece and nephew, although she kind of thought he’d been paying too much attention to have been a mere bystander.

Looking down at the table, Denise suddenly realized that both of their plates had been empty for a while. She really didn’t want to go back to stripping the paint off the porch. She sighed. “There’s no way we’re going to finish the porch today, is there?”

He sat back down and looked across the table at her. “Honestly? No. We might get most of the stripping done, but we won’t get to the painting. Not today.”

She nudged her plate aside and leaned forward across the table. “I really don’t want to go back to working on it today. It’s hot, I’m tired, and it’s nasty work.”

He looked dismayed, but he nodded. “It’s up to you.”

She sat back. “I really owe you for this, Dave. You were a great help.”

“When do you want to work on it again?”

“Honestly? Never.” She grinned. “I have to go down to Newport with my sister tomorrow. Then I’ve got to be at work in the evenings when it’s cool. I probably won’t get to it again until next Saturday.” She shook her head. “My mother will be thrilled.”

“Tell her that she can’t complain about cheap labor,” he advised her.

She gave him an arch look. “You haven’t met my mother yet, have you?” she asked him.

“Do you want me to come back and help again?” he asked.

“I couldn’t impose on you like that.”

He shrugged. “I didn’t have any plans for next Saturday anyway.”

“But there are things you’d rather be doing.”

“Maybe. But I don’t mind. And I do work faster than you. Plus it will get done twice as fast — if not faster — if I help.”

A faint smile crossed her lips. “You make it hard to stick to my guns.”

“Do you not want me to come?” he asked seriously.

She shook her head. “No,” she said quietly. “Please come.”

• • •

Denise was already on the porch the following Saturday when Dave arrived, spreading out the tarp under the railing to catch falling paint chips. “It looks like better weather this weekend,” he told her as he jogged up the stairs. “Sunny and dry, but not quite so humid.”

“Yeah, but will you feel that way in a few hours?” she asked.

He grinned as he came to a stop in front of her. “Did you get more sandpaper?” he asked, bending to help her straighten the tarp so that one edge was draped just over the edge of the porch floor.

“Three packs. Think that’ll be enough?”

“If it’s not, I know where you can get more,” he told her gamely. “You’ll probably finish scraping all the parts you can do before I get through with the spindles. Do you mind sanding?”

“If you can take it, I can take it,” she told him jauntily.

“Ah, yes, but I don’t have pretty long fingernails. You do this right and I can pretty much guarantee that you’re gonna break or chip damn near every one of them.”

She glanced down at her nails — straight, flawless, and filed to perfection — and sighed. “Well, I can always grow new ones, right?”

He smiled. “So they tell me. I don’t think I could ever get mine to grow that long myself.”

She straightened up and looked at him. “Come on in and have a drink. Humid or no, it’s still going to be important to stay hydrated.”

“Yes, Mom,” he said as he followed her into the house.

Denise’s mother was standing in the kitchen, opening a can of cat food for a large black and white cat that was doing the Dance of Hunger around her ankles. She glanced up when they came in. “Is this Dave?” she asked.

“The one and only,” Denise informed her as she moved past her mother and straight to the refrigerator.

“It’s nice to meet you, Dave,” she said, putting the cat food down and wiping her hands on her thighs before extending one of them to him. “I’m Judy Johnson, Denise’s mother.”

“I’d have thought that was obvious,” Denise mumbled.

“She really wasn’t raised in a barn,” Judy said, speaking directly to Dave. “She just forgets her manners sometimes.”

“Manners don’t count for nearly as much as kindness,” Denise retorted.

“Yes, but without manners, we know which
kind
you are,” shot back her mother.

Dave shook Judy’s hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Johnson.”

“Call me Judy.”

“It is a weekend, after all,” Denise added. “Dave, we’ve got milk, iced tea, bottled water, cranberry juice, orange juice, diet soda, and — ugh! Mom! Is that vegetable juice?”

“That’s what it says on the side of the pitcher, doesn’t it?”

“You can have anything you want, Dave, but trust me. Stay away from the vegetable juice.”

“My other daughter gave me an electric juicer for Christmas,” Judy confided to Dave. “I’ve made drinks that I didn’t know existed.”

“If God had meant for us to drink carrots, he’s have made them with straws on top instead of greens,” Denise said.

“Orange juice will be fine,” Dave informed her. “Have you finished what you were writing, Judy?”

“What, you mean what I was working on last week? I finished it and set it aside. I can’t be objective about my own writing immediately after I finish it, so I tuck it away for a week or two, then take it out to edit. In the meantime, I’ve started working on something else. You’ve heard of opposites attracting?”

“Yes.”

“Well, don’t you believe it. Opposites irritate, that’s what they do.”

“It’s called
chemistry
, Mom.”

“Yeah, well, things blow up if you get too much ‘chemistry.’”

“That’s called combustion, Mom,” Denise said. “You know, going up in flames? Really hot sex?”

“Sex is just sex unless the people care about each other,” she retorted. Then looking at Dave, she said, “The way these two are going, he’d be better off taking things in hand, if you know what I mean.”

“Mo-om!” Denise whined in protest.

“Oh, it’s nothing Dave hasn’t heard of. Right, Dave?”

Dave stood there sputtering, unable to begin to think of a way to respond.

“Mother! Leave the man alone! He’s nice enough to come here on his day off to paint your porch, and all you can talk about is masturbation. Really! Show some respect!”

Judy seemed to realize that Dave was turning a delicate shade of pink and caught herself before she made another too fast quip. “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you, Dave. I forget myself sometimes. Usually it’s just Denise that I try to embarrass.”

Denise handed him a glass of orange juice. “You got that right,” she muttered as she returned the carton to the fridge and withdrew a bottled water for herself.

“Smart mouth aside, I am glad that you’re helping Denise with the porch. It’s needed doing for a long time, but it wasn’t a job I looked forward to tackling. Thank you.”

Suddenly Denise’s mother didn’t seem quite so outrageous, and Dave nodded. “It’s my pleasure,” he told her.

On that conciliatory note, Denise guided Dave out of the kitchen and out to the porch, leaving her mother to deal with the still-dancing cat.

“You’ll have to overlook my mother,” Denise told him as they began to gently rock in the porch swing. “I’d say that she was raised by wolves, except that my grandmother was a lovely woman.”

Dave smiled. “I was more surprised than offended. Although now I’m wondering just what it is that she writes.”

Denise crossed her legs. “It’s surprisingly civilized, really. Sex only for the sake of the story. The more outrageous stuff she gets out of her system by bouncing it off of us. This new book isn’t going well yet. She’s trying to reconcile two opposites who may just turn out to be too opposite to believably get together.”

“What happens then?”

“She junks what she’s got and starts something else.”

Dave pondered what it must take to abandon a work in progress when she had already clearly put much thought and time into it. He wished that some of Shelby’s bottom shelf authors had had that much resolve.

“It was kind of a relief that she was sequestered last weekend when you were here,” Denise observed.

“She’s all right,” Dave assured her. “It must be nice to be able to make money doing something you enjoy. Me, I always know when five o’clock rolls around.”

“But you still stay at work later than that most nights,” she said.

Busted
, he thought. “I still have work that needs to be done,” he told her, not willing to admit that the reason for his late nights had nothing to do with work. “I stay until the jobs get done. But I still
know
when it’s five o’clock.”

She smiled. “I don’t mind working the
P.M.
shift, but there are times when I see everybody else going home and I really wish I could be going with them.”

“But it must be nice to have your days mostly free.”

“Yeah, but it’s a drag not to have evenings off like everyone else.”

“What would you like to do in the evenings?” he asked, recognizing this as a golden opportunity to find out what Denise liked.