3 A Brewski for the Old Man (3 page)

When we got back to the Tradewinds, Marley was waiting for us with a suitcase in her hand. Her face said, “Do not ask questions and don’t mess with me.” I didn’t. Having been friends with Marley Hemming since Kittridge Elementary School, I knew when to remain silent for the sake of my own wellbeing. Besides, I knew what was wrong.

But I couldn’t keep from poking at the bear in the cage for long. “How’s David?” I asked as the elevator slid open in front of us.

She growled like a mad dog and jerked her suitcase inside. “Marley is engaged to David Halliday,” I told Lacey. “He’s way too good for her, a Baptist minister even. Saint David I like to call him. I don’t know what Marley calls him…probably sir.” I slid my plastic key into the slot. “Marley’s reformed now. She’s gone from a party girl to a minister’s future wife. That’s a long trip, like from here to the moon, and it isn’t going so well. Trying to be a saint like David is weighing heavy on her and pissing off just about everybody else who comes in contact with Marley.”

Lacey looked from Marley to me, eyes wide and waiting for the explosion.

Marley glared at me, her jaw jutting out and the corners of her mouth turned down. Her fiery red curls and sapling thin body throbbed with energy and life and it was touch and go if she was going to turn nine again and swing for me with her suitcase. Even the freckles on her face looked like they were ready to hop off and do battle.

She turned back to stare at the door.

“Even getting things done yesterday isn’t fast enough for Marley so sitting still with ankles crossed and a cup of tea in her hand is a form of torture she’d only submit to for the love of a good man. I’ve done my best to drag her back to her evil ways, smoking and drinking, but she’s tougher than I’d ever have thought. Temptation isn’t going to take her down without a fight. Maybe you can help me with this, Lacey. Try to get her cussing or spitting or something.”

“You two are friends, aren’t you?” Lacey said. Something in her voice, a longing, and a yearning so great it was painful to hear made both Marley and I turn to her. “Don’t you have friends, Lacey?” Marley asked. Lacey shook her head and looked down at the floor.

Marley looked at me over Lacey’s bent head and mouthed, “Asshole.”

The elevator opened in front of the doors to Clay’s apartment.

“Last stop, ladies.” I led the way.

As we crossed the circular foyer of the apartment with the pale marble floors, I said, “All girls together, it’s been a long long time since I had a slumber party.”

“If we can stand it, so can you,” Marley said, marching off with the suitcase rattling behind her.

“Are you running away from the ladies of the choir, hiding out from the bible class or some other little factions at the First Baptist Church of Fellowship?” I asked her back. She ignored me, charging for the guest room like a determined matron at a Macy’s sale.

My friend was really unhappy. I was going to enjoy this new situation. I was usually the one in shit up to my eyeballs and Marley was the friend giving the good advice and telling me what I should have done. How lovely to be the one making superior pronouncements. Of course, this was only going to work until she asked how Clay and I were getting along. Then…well, then I’d be forced to lie, one of the few things on earth I truly excel at.

Behind me Lace moved cautiously through the door. “Are you sure it’s all right?” she whispered, suddenly shy.

“Honey, if the place survived me, you won’t be a shock.” I took the handle of her trundle suitcase. “Just don’t annoy Mrs. Whiting, the housekeeper. She’s really in charge here and she’s going to complain like hell if we move the slightest little thing. Every day when I come home she’s hidden every tube of lipstick away, insists that the apartment look exactly like it did when that glossy magazine photographed it. This is a shrine and she is its keeper. We are the mere mortals she is forced to tolerate.”

Marley had already parked her ass in a chair in the guestroom, denim-clad legs splayed and arms thrown out over the sides of a chair covered in moiré silk. She looked really unhappy. How delightful. “Do you intend to share?” I asked. “No,” was her gracious reply.

“Charming.” I trundled the suitcase past the door. “Looks like it’s the den for you, Lace.”

She followed silently behind me, still shocked and overwhelmed by the eighteen-foot ceilings, marble and mahogany that stunned any newcomer to Clay’s world. The overpowering wealth of the place had terrified me when I first met Clay, but now I hardly saw it. It’s true that you can get used to just about anything, but I’ve decided, given a choice, I’d rather get accustomed to excess rather than the stripped-down poverty I’d spent my life in.

The apartment was done in what the
Florida Interiors
magazine called the Plantation style. Sounded silly to me. I didn’t think the stone urns full of orchids out in the conservatory qualified as a plantation.

I switched on the light to brighten the den, a room decorated in willow green, straw and cream colors. A pretty room, it was less formal than the rooms in the rest of the penthouse, which made it my favorite room in the three-thousand-square-foot apartment. “The couch pulls out into a queen-sized bed, the bathroom is over there, the TV is in this armoire, okay?”

Lacey nodded and said, “It’s lovely,” but then she probably would be willing to sleep out on the beach to be safe from the hands of R.J. Leenders.

Never one to sulk for long, Marley came out of her bed-room as we made up the sofa bed.

“Okay, you two finish this,” I said. “I’m off to call Clay. I need a little sweet talk.” The one thing I wouldn’t be talking about to Clay was Ray John. He was a secret I hadn’t shared with Clay yet.

But Clay had too much on his mind to be worrying about me. “There are more police, Coast Guard, Customs agents, Florida Marine Patrol, you name it, there are more of them than there are boaters or anti-Cuba marchers. Our boat was searched again today.” “What were they looking for?”

“Beats me, but they found a pile of booze in Kevin’s locker. I didn’t know how much he drinks and no one but me seems concerned about it. It’s all still in there; they weren’t looking for booze but for something else.”

“What?”

“Who the hell knows?

“They must have some reason for searching the boats although I thought they’d be more worried about things coming into the country than going out.”

“I think everyone is overdosing on paranoia, but it looks like they’re going to let us leave tomorrow.” He fell silent before adding in rather a sheepish tone, “To tell the truth, I’ve been trying to talk the guys out of it. Just forget the whole damn thing and go home.”

“Is it that dangerous? If there’s any question in your mind if it’s safe to sail to Havana just forget about it. Fly back and I can pick you up in an hour. Let them go on without you.”

“Well, that’s not really it,” he said. “It’s safe enough.” His tone was tender and reluctant.

“Not safety? You don’t think it’s dangerous?”

“No, it’s not safety that’s the issue.”

“Then what’s worrying you?”

Big sigh. “I’m just missing you,” hesitant and almost pained. “I guess that’s what’s worrying me. Man, when did I turn into such a wimp?”

“Oh, you miss your sugar. You need a little candy, a little sweet, honey?” That’s when the safe-sex part started, although this was just a little too safe for my liking. I could’ve handled something a little more high risk than phone sex.

When I went back to the den forty minutes later I found Marley and Lacey well into the bonding rituals of females on their own.

“I kid you not,” Marley was telling Lacey, who was sitting cross-legged on the bed while Marley lounged across the bottom. “Tell her it’s true,” Marley ordered. “Tell her that everyone in your family is named after states or cities.”

“Well, not everyone. But we have a few.” I flopped down in a butter yellow leather chair and held up my hand and started ticking off the names. “There’s Aunt Carolina, Aunt Virginia, Aunt Georgia and then Aunt Atlanta. I have an uncle named Dakota and one named Nevada.”

Lacey put her hand over her mouth to hide her smile. “My family was so poor Grandma used a beat-up old atlas of the U.S. to name her eight children instead of a baby book. Or maybe she had wanderlust. I’m only sure she had an atlas and they were poor. Thank god she stopped having kids before she got to Poughkeepsie.”

Lacey’s hand couldn’t quite hide her smile. “My dad is named Tulsa.”

“But it worked,” Marley put in. “Your Aunt Virginia was well named, virgin by name and virgin by inclination. That woman is just too ugly and mean to ever find a man.”

“And Aunt Georgia, she was well named,” I pointed out.

“She’s sweet, a real peach.”

“Yeah, fuzzy and round. I think her mustache may be her best feature. Hasn’t that woman ever heard of depilatories? Of course, she’d have to bathe in it.” Marley pointed a finger at me. “See where your genes are leading you?” Lacey snorted with laughter, spraying soda over herself.

I’d known her for six months and never seen her laugh outright. It was a good feeling if only temporary but maybe even this would show her things could get better.

“Listen Saint Marley, don’t go trashing my family. At least none of them spread manure from the church door to the altar.”

“Oh, trust you to bring that up.”

“That’s why she’s hanging out here,” I explained. “The Baptist church elders are out to lynch her.”

Lacey’s smiled faded. She looked at Marley and then me.

“Really?”

Before Marley could answer, I jumped in with the story. “It came with Marley’s handling of the Christmas pageant. Marley took over the pageant, just as she takes over everything she’s associated with, and decided that what they really needed was to have Mary ride into the church on a real donkey. That wasn’t too bad, despite the little deposit the donkey left on the way up the center aisle; it was the loud fart in the middle of the prayers and the hysteria it caused among the junior choir that sent events spiraling downhill.”

Lacey was laughing again and even Marley stopped looking like she had a bellyache. “The sheep and the cow were no better behaved and the smell of barnyard did nothing to improve the behavior of the choir, and what should have been a magical evening turned into Barnum & Bailey when one little angel stepped forward for her solo and joined the rest of the animals, peeing on the altar steps.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” Marley protested. “I can’t be held responsible for that kid’s bladder control.”

“Oh yeah? Didn’t you fill them full of juice and cookies before the parade?”

Marley was never one to give up on a good idea. “The church was packed. They never had so many kids in the choir or so many bums in the pews. Wasn’t that the point, to get people out for the Christmas Eve service and make it a real Christmas experience?”

“Perhaps it was just too real for the elders, all that poop and stuff.”

“What did they get so bent out of shape about?” Marley asked. Her face held a look of utter amazement. “I got it all cleaned up.”

“And I may be wrong, seeing how religion and I are barely on a first-name basis, but a Baptist minister would probably frown on his future wife telling the ladies at bible class last week that it was like trying to herd cats, getting them to do anything.”

Marley stopped smiling and sat up. “Who told you that? Was it David?”

“Lauren Sales. She was the only one who thought it was funny.”

“Well, those women just wanted to drink coffee and gossip. There was work to be done.”

“Maybe you should take a course in people management.”