The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (6 page)

“Travis wouldn’t be caught dead in here,” Gigi said. “My niece’s birthday,” she said, indicating a picnic table in the snack bar crowded with small kids eating giant saggy slices of pizza. “Buff’s daughter. Angel. She’s four. Let’s sit.” She pulled Vic gently back onto a big carpeted block of wood that served as an observation bench beside the rink. Her brother, Buff, she reminded him, lived in Canterbury Hills. “They have two daughters, Angel and Rusty. You know them? The Coffeys?”

Caroline, Vic’s wife, knew Paula Coffey from school committees and disliked her because she was too peppy. Vic had never met Buff, but according to neighborhood gossip, Buff would preach the socks off anyone he could corner. He was a minister at some wacky fundamentalist church. “I know
of
them,” he told Gigi.

“Rusty’s headed for trouble,” Gigi said. “She used to be such a great kid. And she’s so smart.”

Vic said he was sorry to hear that, and decided not to mention all the neighborhood gossip he’d heard about Rusty. According to the stories, Rusty was more than
headed
for trouble. She’d already been suspended for having pot in her locker and had been caught shoplifting at Hot Topic. She skipped school and periodically ran away from home. Supposedly, she was one of the vandals who occasionally swept through Canterbury Hills at night. So far, they hadn’t done any major
damage, and their pranks were kind of funny if it wasn’t your mailbox sprouting a spray-painted penis and, of course, if it wasn’t your teenager doing it. He didn’t think his teenagers were doing it, but he’d probably be the last to know.

“Hey,” Gigi said. “See that old lady sitting over there with them?” She pointed.

Vic barely looked. “Uh-huh.”

“Just moved in across the street from Buff and them. But it’s y’all she really wants to meet. Seems to know a lot about your father-in-law. Come on over and I’ll introduce you. Her name’s Nancy Archer.”

It was the old lady who was supposedly going to take Suzi to Italy. “Does Suzi know she’s here?”

“They were talking up a blue streak earlier. They’re real buds.”

“Don’t make me go over there,” Vic said. “I don’t want to meet any new people. I know too many people already.”

“Fine, Puddleglum.” Gigi was scanning the skaters. “They should serve martinis to the adults who’re brave enough to come in here, don’t you think?”

“I do think,” Vic said, but, actually, he found the skating rink, once he got acclimated, to be mesmerizing. He got a kick out of watching not only his kids but people of all ages and races and types, from the little dread-locked five-year-old boy to the older white woman in Ice Capades attire, forming the letters
Y, M, C, A
with their arms as they skated past.

Vic never was much of a roller skater, but back in Iowa, he and Caroline, before they had kids, used to go ice-skating on Lake Macbride. He could still picture that silly fur hat and old yellow ski coat Caroline used to wear. Those exhilarating Sunday afternoons, holding hands and moving together over the dazzling white lake, looking forward to a warm fire and split pea soup and an evening reading and talking, were some of the happiest days of his life.

“Hey, Mr. Mature,” Gigi said, squeezing Vic’s elbow. “Good news. I’ve been assigned to your portfolio project.”

The Great Portfolio Project! Vic and his team had spent months designing it, convincing the higher-ups that it would be a better way than the usual standardized tests and timed writing essays to assess high school students’ writing. Eleventh graders in participating high schools would assemble portfolios of the best writing they’d done that year in math, language arts, science, and social studies, and trained FTA scorers would evaluate them. Following the national trend in education, FTA would be encouraging writing not only in language arts, but—and here came the buzzwords—
across the curriculum
. The plan was that after they’d tested the project and gotten it up and running, they’d sell it to various school corporations across the state, who, hopefully, would be delighted to jump on board.

FTA had lined up ten high schools from around the state to participate on a trial basis at no cost to them, with the understanding that, depending on how happy they were with the results, they could later buy into the project at a discount. Vic was more excited about going to work than he had been in years, but he was more stressed-out as well. There were big bucks involved and a strict timetable, and his ass was on the line. Human Resources had hired Gigi and fifty other temps for the trial scoring.

“You’ll be my boss. Can you handle it?” She swung her crossed leg, silver high-heeled sandal dangling from her narrow foot.

It would make everything more fun to have someone he actually knew and liked working with him. “You can help me train the language arts scorers.” He made this statement without thinking about it first. As soon as he said it, he knew he shouldn’t have. But for the first time in forever, he felt a bit reckless. He was aware that he was willing to risk pissing off his boss because he wanted Gigi’s company, but what was wrong with that? Why was he arguing with himself?

Suzi and Davis, gliding past, waved at Vic. Then Suzi clapped her hand over her mouth, meaning, Uh-oh, I forgot what time it was!

Otis continued round and round with smooth scissor strokes, looking neither left nor right, his shaggy hair flying out behind him. A couple of tweenage girls struggled valiantly to keep up with him. He would never notice them.

“Don’t you have to be, like, a permanent employee to train scorers?” Gigi asked him. “I mean, it’s not that I don’t want to.…”

She was right. Temps weren’t supposed to train people. “I can assign you any job I want to,” Vic said. “That’s why I make the big bucks!” Gigi kept staring at him quizzically, so he kept on, digging himself deeper into the hole. “I know you’d be good at it. You won a teaching award, right? So, congratulations! You’re a trainer! If they sold booze in here, I’d buy you a martini to celebrate.”

“Rain check!” Gigi said, moving aside as Suzi came hurtling toward Vic, falling on top of him and nearly knocking him down.

“My friend’s here!” Suzi said to her father, clambering shakily to her feet. “My friend Mrs. Archer. The one who wants to take me to Italy. Come meet her.”

“Don’t have time right now, kiddo,” he said, waving and smiling at the old lady, who sat by herself at a small table on the edge of the party. She waved back, and for a moment he was afraid she’d get up and come to them, but, thank God, she didn’t.

Suzi went over to Mrs. Archer before they left, her Rollerblades slung over her shoulder, and gave her friend a hug good-bye. Now, as Vic often did, he felt proud to have a daughter like Suzi. She always put herself out for people. Everyone except her own sister.

* * *

Vic thought that the best way to handle the whole Italy thing was just to ignore it, but Caroline thought differently. She wanted to meet Mrs. Archer and size her up, and she wanted Vic to be there with her.

“You’re not thinking of actually letting her go off to Italy with a total stranger,” Vic said.

“What I
think,
” Caroline said, “is that Suzi probably read too much into a casual invitation. Let’s find out for sure instead of
thinking.
”

“Why do you hate me?” Vic asked her.

She sighed, looking even more exasperated. “What kind of nincompoop question is that?”

“We should rent a villa in Tuscany,” he suggested, “Just you and me.” Neither he nor Caroline had ever been to Italy.

“Like I have time,” she said. “Have you seen the pile of laundry in there?”

Nowadays everything Vic said got on Caroline’s nerves, so he tried to stay out of her way. In the evenings he’d been escaping to his little study (closet) in the basement to check out the National Hurricane Center Web site. After supper and before Nancy Archer was due to arrive, he snuck down and sat in his dark study bathed in the blue glow of his Mac laptop.

Praise be! A new hot spot! He clicked on the little orange circle on the map.

Oh, the possibilities! Thanks to the Internet, you could now watch a storm during its inception and incubation through all stages of development,
which in turn allowed you more time to obsess, if you were so inclined. Conditions had to be just right for a hurricane to develop. First of all, he’d discovered, for a trouble spot to form, ocean waters had to be warm, warmer than usual, and along with that you needed a cool upper atmosphere. There also had to be a disturbance near the surface of the water, an inverted trough of low air pressure moving through, such as a West African Disturbance Line—a line of convection that formed over Africa and moved into the Atlantic Ocean. Many factors could dilute storm activity—the infamous El Niño causing vertical wind sheer, a dry dusty Saharan Air Layer cooking the upper atmosphere, an area of high pressure hulking like a big bully, deflecting all storms. The 2005 hurricane season notwithstanding, the more Vic knew about hurricanes, the more it seemed a sort of miracle that one ever formed at all.

Vic would never have admitted it to anyone, but part of him was hoping for a hurricane to hit Tallahassee. Growing up in the Midwest, he’d always run outside, instead of into the basement, when the tornado sirens started wailing, but he never actually got to see a funnel cloud. Now he wanted more than just to see a storm coming. He wanted to be
in
a storm. Period.

Almost every summer, tropical storms flooded Tallahassee, but a tropical storm, nasty as it might be, wouldn’t do. It had to be a big mother. Cat. 3 or better. Chances this year were good. According to the weather experts, the 2006 hurricane season was supposed to be as bad or
worse
than the previous season, which was the most active hurricane season in recorded history, the season of Dennis, Emily, Rita, Wilma, and Katrina. He’d watched news coverage of those hurricanes and found himself, in a sick sort of way, envious of the survivors he heard telling their stories. They’d lived through a natural disaster of legendary proportions, they told awe-inspiring stories, and their lives would never be the same. Of course there were tragic losses, and he felt bad about
the losses, when he thought about them, which he didn’t spend much time doing. Instead, he kept imagining what it would be like to be right in the middle of all that fury, and hoped he’d get the chance.

Tallahassee was twenty-five miles inland, but that didn’t make it safe from hurricanes. People still talked about Hurricane Kate, which wreaked havoc in 1985—ten years before Vic and his family moved from Iowa to Tallahassee. People said there were trees down everywhere, especially the big pines, power and water out for six weeks. There hadn’t been any direct hurricane hits since then, but Vic was hoping for the worst, which, he supposed, made him a selfish and callous person, but as long as he never actually voiced this desire, who would know? It’s not like he could
cause
a hurricane to come there. Get bigger, he told the little orange circle that wasn’t quite a storm. It didn’t budge.

* * *

Mrs. Archer showed up right at seven thirty p.m., and Vic was annoyed to be summoned out of his hidey-hole, but he tried to cover up his annoyance by offering the old lady some chocolate cake, and of course Caroline and Suzi wanted some, too, so he divvied up the remains and gave himself the smallest piece. Carrying their slices of cake on Caroline’s precious Jadeite dessert plates, they paraded into the living room—Vic, Suzi, and Caroline and Nance, as she insisted on being called. The rest of the family was nowhere to be seen. Otis was out in his shed, Ava was in her bedroom, supposedly doing homework, and Wilson was downstairs “resting.” None of them wanted to be subjected to an awkward evening with Nance, the fool who was dangling a trip to Italy in front of Suzi.

Vic’s living room felt more cramped and shabby each time he entered it. One side had big windows looking out at the front yard, and the other walls were covered with bookcases and flea market oil paintings
and old family photos—of
Caroline’s
family—in antique frames. Every flat surface was littered with fifties knickknacks—souvenir ashtrays, chalk bookends with animals heads on them.

Once upon a time Vic had welcomed all the stuff Caroline brought home from her excursions, but that was back when the kids were little and it felt like they had room to spare. Now they were living with three hulking teenagers and a dog and Caroline’s ever-present father—who’d always been kind to Vic, even though he’d been an English major, and had paid for private elementary school for all three of his grandkids, so how could Vic complain about his being there? It was just that this house was starting to feel just as chaotic and unwelcoming as the house he grew up in. If a hurricane did come through Tallahassee and their house was flooded, all Caroline’s crap would be ruined and they’d get to start over again.

As soon as Nance spotted the old photographs, grouped together on one wall and lined up on top of a short bookcase, she shuffled over to see them, oohing and aahing. Suzi told her who was who. Nance seemed most interested in photos of Wilson and his wives. Suzi pointed out Wilson’s later wives, Lila and then Verna Tommy, both of them plump and blond and sweet faced, unlike Caroline’s own mother, his first wife, Mary, who was dark and serious looking. Nance picked up and closely examined the oval sepia-toned portrait of Wilson and Mary on their wedding day, both of them gazing down at her bouquet of daylilies like it was the most compelling thing in the world. “What a lovely couple!” Nance said. “Oh, I just love old photographs.” She turned to Caroline, who was slouched at the other end of the couch from Vic, waiting to be able to politely eat her cake, as he was. “Your mother made a beautiful bride,” Nance said to Caroline.