Lee slammed on his brakes at almost the exact moment that Azure did. He managed to control his vehicle, but hers skidded on a mess of cucumber pulp and traversed all three lanes before blowing a tire and slamming down the bank toward a drainage ditch.
Lee, unable to slow his car in time to pull over at the site, shot an incredulous and horrified look back over his shoulder. He couldn’t tell if Azure was okay. All he saw before he turned the steering wheel sharply toward the exit lane was a corner of the white car, which appeared, from what he could tell, to have avoided sliding into the ditch.
He drove as fast as was prudent across the overpass at the end of the exit and back onto the highway, and even though he passed the place where Azure had gone off the road after only a minute or so, a guardrail in the median prevented him from crossing over. That meant that he had to go all the way to the next exit and double back to where Azure was now, thankfully, pacing in the weeds at the edge of the ditch and haranguing someone on her cell phone. Her hair had fallen mostly out of its plait, and the wind was whipping strands of it across her face. Her shirt had come untucked. But she seemed unharmed.
She clicked the phone off and whirled around when he drove up beside her, and he was pleased that she looked relieved to see him. He jumped out of the Mustang.
“Are you all right?” he asked immediately, striding through the dusty weeds and oozy bits of cucumber until he stopped in front of her.
“I—I’m a little shaken up, but otherwise I’m fine,” she said, staring at him as if he were the Skunk Ape, a relative of Bigfoot who was reputed to hang out in the nearby Everglades.
“I saw you go off the road. I was afraid you’d ended up in there.” He jerked his head sideways in the direction of the ditch.
Azure fought to control her trembling. “It’s a wonder I didn’t,” she said. She’d had to struggle to retain control of the unfamiliar car, and her vision had been obscured on the highway by all the cucumbers falling off that truck, and when her tire had blown, it had been with a loud bang! that scared her half to death.
“We’d better try to get you out of here,” Lee said, assessing the damage to the car. Except for the blown tire, it appeared to be all right.
“Keys?”
She handed them to him and, while she bound her hair up into a ponytail, he used the remote opener to pop the trunk. When he pried open the compartment where the spare tire was supposed to be, it was empty.
Azure felt a rush of consternation when she realized that there was no spare. “Oh, great,” she said. “And I just talked to the people at the car place. They can’t bring me another car, they can only arrange for a tow truck.” Not only that, but something floating in the canal looked a lot more like an alligator than a log, the surrounding saw grass seemed like an ideal habitat for water moccasins, and the cars whizzing past on the expressway were cutting too close for comfort.
“I’ll take you back to the Blue Moon,” Lee said soothingly. “As long as you don’t mind going with me on my errand.”
She didn’t hesitate. She went over to the Mustang, opened the door, and climbed inside before she realized that she was sitting on the door handle.
She eased herself up and extracted it from underneath her, treating Lee to a suspicious look. “What this means is that I can get into your car, but I can’t get out, right?”
“Right,” Lee said, flashing her a lightning grin, and in that moment she decided that maybe this wasn’t so bad. Sitting in her disabled rental car waiting for the car people to rescue her from an alligator that might amble out of the canal at any minute would have been much, much worse.
LEE DROVE THE MUSTANG OFF the busy, bright street into the parking lot of a low-hunkering strip mall anchored by a convenience store plastered with signs touting the Florida lottery.
“Are we going to buy lottery tickets or what?” Azure asked.
“Or what.” He continued driving around to the back of the building.
“What’s happening?”
“I need to see a guy,” Lee said, but he saw right away that the painter’s truck wasn’t parked there, so maybe the crew had gone to lunch. It didn’t really matter, since Lee could check on the crew’s progress anyway. This prototype version of the first Grassy Creek store had been configured according to his specifications, and he didn’t want to show the place to Fleck until all equipment was in place.
“This won’t take long,” he told Azure, who was looking curious. “You’re welcome to come in if you like.”
“I might as well. It’s too hot to sit in the car,” she said. He liked the way her ponytail accentuated her piquant features and bounced when she moved.
Lee had a key to the building, and he let them into the store, which was blessedly air-conditioned. The back part was neat, with paint cans and various equipment sitting around in boxes, but he wasn’t pleased with the way the front part of the store looked. Scaffolding had been placed along one wall, and the painters had finished painting the top of the wall mauve but had not started on the bottom. Someone had evidently intended to paint the opposite wall, which was going to be in a darker green to fit in with the wheat grass theme, but whoever it was had opened the paint can and then gone off and left the brush sitting in the can.
Azure, hands on her hips, was looking around with a good deal of speculation. “This is where you work?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“And you only work when you feel like it?”
He kept forgetting his beach-bum fiction, which was getting to be a burden. “Yeah, I guess you could say that,” he heard himself saying. He bent to remove the paintbrush from the can so he could close it up. The paint was already beginning to form a skin across the top, and there was no point in letting it go to waste. He might have plenty of money, but he hadn’t accumulated it by being reckless with either dollars or resources.
She raised skeptical brows. “You were supposed to report to work today, weren’t you?” she asked in a slightly accusing tone.
And he had thought she was beginning to lighten up. “Not exactly,” he said, hedging.
Her eyes gentled, her face lapsing into the softer expression he had noticed when she had helped the child and the elderly woman at the wedding. “You took me to get the car instead of going to work, Lee. Right?”
“I wouldn’t say that.” He felt unsettled by her probing, and he wished she’d stop asking questions that he didn’t want to answer.
“Well, then,” she said, going over and perching on one of the steps of a nearby ladder. “You go right ahead and start painting. I don’t mind waiting.”
He felt his jaw slacken in surprise but made a quick recovery. “I—”
“If the man you were supposed to talk with is your boss, and if you were going to tell him you weren’t coming in today because of me, that makes me feel very guilty, Lee.” She cocked her head to the side, and the movement made her even more appealing than she already was.
Lee looked down at the paintbrush in his hand and then he looked at the prepped wall. Judging from the time, which was a few minutes after noon, the painters might return in half an hour or so, which meant that the coast was clear for a while. He had enough time to figure his way out of this tangled web of deception that he’d been weaving—maybe.
He walked over to the nearest wall and slapped a green patch of paint on it. He liked the paint shade even better on the wall than in the can, he decided after he stepped back and looked at it.
“Shouldn’t you put on coveralls or something? So paint won’t get all over your clothes?”
Lee looked down and for some reason was surprised to see that he was wearing Fleck’s clothes. He had an idea that Fleck wouldn’t care if they were returned in less than pristine condition.
“I was only going to finish painting this one wall.”
“Still. You don’t want to ruin your clothes.”
In order to keep up the charade, Lee went over to the corner and pulled on a pair o
f paint-spattered white coveralls from a pile that the painters had left.
“That’s better,” Azure said, and she smiled. She didn’t look as prim when she smiled.
“Don’t you want to walk down to the corner? Buy a magazine at the convenience store or something?” He thought she might be getting bored.
“I could get both of us something to drink. What would you like?”
“Whatever they’ve got.” He pulled out his wallet, but she waved him away.
“I’ll pay for it. Be back in a minute.” She slid off the stool and headed out the front door.
He heaved a giant sigh after she was gone. Her absence gave him a chance to concentrate on what he hoped to accomplish with this new Grassy Creek venture.
Ever since he had first tasted wheat grass juice at a juice bar in Mexico, he had wanted to start his own franchise business. It wasn’t that he believed all the claims about wheat grass juice—that it cured serious illnesses, that it helped acne, that it kept hair from graying. He didn’t know if they were true or not.
It was more that he had discerned a market niche for small convenience-type stores where people could buy macrobiotic snacks-to-go. In the past year, he’d studied the market, he’d added eight other vegetable and fruit juice specialties and a bunch of easy-to-prepare snacks to his offerings, and he’d instituted a testing program in traditional health-food outlets.
Now he had arranged for the first store to open in a high-traffic-volume area of Miami, and if it was as much of a success as he expected it to be, he’d begin franchising, first in the U.S. and later, perhaps, worldwide. He’d know more about franchising once he heard from the consultant that Harry Wixler had recommended so highly.
He was taking stock of the placement of electrical outlets when Azure came back with two bottles of lemon iced tea.
She handed him one of the bottles. “I bought us each a lottery ticket. Pick one, you choose,” she said, holding them out to him.
“How much were they?” He’d never bought a lottery ticket in his life.
“A dollar.”
He pulled out his wallet again, but she waved him away. “I’m paying. I appreciate your rescuing me today.”
“But—” He didn’t feel right accepting a drink plus a lottery ticket.
“Here.”
“I don’t mind paying you.”
“Don’t be silly. Anyway, you might win.”
She didn’t seem as if she were going to back down, so he decided that in the unlikely event that he did win, he’d give her all the money. He took one of the tickets, folded it, and tucked it carefully into his wallet.
She resumed her seat on the stool and watched while he twisted the cap off the iced tea.
“When is the lottery drawing?”
“On Saturday. Don’t let me interfere with your work,” she said. He shrugged and finished the iced tea. Then, because there didn’t seem any way out of this for now, he started to paint again.
Azure watched him for a few minutes before speaking. “That looks like fun,” she said.
“I wouldn’t call it that,” Lee replied. He wondered how he was going to get them out of here before the painters returned. Claim that he had a charley horse in his leg? Remember that he was supposed to be somewhere else? Neither of those seemed like viable options.
Azure hitched herself off the ladder. “I could help. I’m a good painter.”
“Oh, I don’t think—” he began, but before he could get the sentence out of his mouth, she had marched over to the corner and was donning a pair of coveralls.
“You don’t think I’m a good painter? Think again. I painted houses during summer vacations when I was in college. I got paid by the job, not by the hour. I suppose you do, too? That’s good, because I can help you get done sooner. Got a spare brush? Oh, I see one.”
“Azure,” he began, thinking he’d better set things straight because this pretense of his had gone too far.
She walked to a radio in the corner and switched it on. “I want to do something,” she said over the music, which was loud and lively. Then she bent and dipped her brush in the paint, slapping it on the wall with a professionalism that put his meager effort to shame.
He liked it that Azure had a helpful side, but when he glanced at his watch, he realized that the painters—the real ones—would return in a matter of minutes if his calculations were correct. There was only one thing he could do, he figured, and that was to paint as fast as he could, the sooner to get them out of there.
Plus there was something about those coveralls and the way they curved around Azure’s delectable derriere that made working beside her a pleasure.
Or correction: make that behind her.
4
YOU’VE GOT MAIL!
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: tiffany
i’ve been trying to reach you on your cell but you don’t answer. tiffany called me today and told me that she and paco are on the outs!!! :-) :-) :-)
so what are you up to? have you found any frogs to kiss? dorrie
“WHEN I WAS WORKING MY WAY through college,” Azure said as she dipped the brush into the paint again, “I worked odd jobs. Painting, wallpapering, dog walking. Mowing lawns. House-sitting.”
The music blaring from the radio seemed to have loosened them both up. “I’ve never sat on a house,” Lee said conversationally. “Is it more comfortable than sitting on a handle from a car door?”
She caught the sly mote of humor in Lee’s eyes. “Definitely, but let me tell you about baby-sitting. It’s—”
“I’ve actually sat on a baby before. It was in a dark movie theater, and I was munching my popcorn as I moved down the row after the movie had started. I saw an empty seat, and I sat down. It wasn’t until the mother yelped that I realized that the seat wasn’t really empty and that I was about to squash this kid in a baby carrier.” He laughed. “I thought the mother was going to kill me.”
Azure rolled her eyes. “Did you do any harm to the kid?”
“No, the baby was sound asleep and the mother yelled before I sat. I felt so bad about the whole thing that I went and bought the mother and her other kid a couple of cartons of popcorn. The kid wanted to go home with me. He was so cute that I almost let him.”
“You like children?”
“Yeah, a lot. I noticed at the wedding how you took care of that little girl, by the way. I thought it was a nice thing to do.”
“She was crying,” Azure said. “Anyone would have helped.”
He wielded his brush vigorously, moving closer. “No one took notice of her but you.”
“Someone would have seen to her eventually.”
“I thought she might be a member of your family.”
“No, there are no small girls in the family at present, only my sister Isis’s young stepsons. You may have noticed them at the reception—they were the ones who were doing their best to take a dive off the roof. They’re a handful. And then of course, my father had eyes only for his lady friend, who none of us had seen before, and my mother was holding forth telling about her job decorating cakes baked in the shape of sex organs, and—”
“Would you mind repeating that?” Lee said, stopping work entirely and trying without success to wipe the incredulous expression off his face.
“I certainly would mind repeating that! I mean, wouldn’t you? If she were your mother? It’s bad enough that Mom changed her name and left my father for a new life in Sedona, Arizona.”
“Why’d she do that? If you don’t mind my asking?”
She concentrated on her painting. “Why should I? Everyone in our family has been asking ever since it happened. She and Dad were active in the community—Mom chaired a community action committee, and Dad led a Boy Scout troop. All I can say is, I think Mom was bored. We kids had already flown the nest, so her leaving didn’t inconvenience us, but my father was devastated.”
“I can understan
d that,” Lee said slowly.
“Soooo, Dad now teaches ballroom dancing on a cruise ship.”
Lee appeared reflective as he climbed a ladder to cut the paint in at the ceiling. “Have you ever appreciated how interesting your family is?” he asked, looking down at her.
Azure began to lay off the last section of wall she’d finished. “Interesting? I’ve been fighting against their eccentricities all my life. Karma and her fruity-granola New Age lifestyle never made much sense to me, and Mary Beth, my sister who is the assistant rabbi, seems to think about nothing but religion. Isis is probably the most normal, but she lives way out in California, and when she was twenty-two, she married a man who already had a family, so none of us sees her much.”
Lee thought about his own family and wished in that split second that it was more like hers. “You’re lucky,” he said with conviction. “You don’t know how lucky, that’s all.”
“I’m lucky that none of them live in Boston near me,” she retorted, laughing as she said it.
He concentrated on the delicate business of painting the top edge of the wall without getting paint on the ceiling. “You and your sisters should be glad that your parents didn’t try to force you all into a mold. They obviously didn’t want you to be cookie-cutter images of each other. You were each allowed to develop in your own way, to be anything you wanted to be. That’s a kind of gift, Azure.”
She appeared thoughtful. “I suppose that’s true, but I still remember that when I was a teenager, all I wanted to be was like everyone else. I didn’t want to have a sister who in her spare time did nothing but study for her bat mitzvah, and I didn’t want anyone to know that our family was vegetarian, which pretty much cut out having classmates over for dinner. I certainly didn’t want anyone to know that Karma kept a statue of Buddha in the room we shared and—horrors!—insisted on sleeping in the nude.”
“Do you suppose she still does?” Lee asked with frank admiration.
“You’ll have to ask Slade. Who knows?”
“It—um—isn’t a family custom, I take it?”
Life Is A Beach / A Real-thing Fling Page 23
