Stryker's Wife (Man of the Month)

by Dixie Browning

  Picking her way carefully, Deke joined him. “She’s still afloat,” he observed, sounding as calm as if it had never even crossed his mind that his boat might have sunk or washed out to sea or broken loose and been bashed against the shore.

  Deke was beginning to think that the old saw about still waters described Kurt Stryker to a T.

  Together they stood and gazed out over the placid water at the forty-eight-foot cabin cruiser floating peacefully in the center of her four mooring lines. Had it been only yesterday that they’d scrambled all over her, dismantling, lashing down, securing against the coming storm?

  It just went to show how drastically the world could change in the blink of an eye.

  “I seem to remember her as being taller,” she murmured.

  “Good memory,” Kurt drawled, and she thought, what a dunce I am! Half of her is underwater!

  After that, of course, there was no way she could leave. The bilge pump hadn’t been able to keep up, and so there was pumping and bailing and Lord knows what else to be done, and he was limping again. The activity bus wasn’t expected in until late in the afternoon, so the two of them—Kurt protested, but Deke insisted—rowed out to the R&R for a more complete damage inspection.

  Kurt circled her slowly, checking for damage, his face expressionless. Not knowing what to expect, Deke was only relieved that there were no gaping holes in her sides. Her hull glistened like new snow in the brilliant sunlight, the bits of grass and seaweed plastered to her sides and deck only accenting her gleaming white paint.

  Inside, there was water, but not as much as she had feared. Kurt rolled up the thin layer of damp carpet in the salon and pulled open a hatch to see if the batteries were still up. Deke began untying her shoes, peeling off her socks and rolling up the legs of the brand-new jeans she had bought at the mall near the motel.

  They worked for hours. Late in the afternoon Frog hailed them from shore, and Kurt sent him foraging for food.

  It was Deke who rowed ashore to collect the boy half an hour later. She was proud as punch to discover she could handle a pair of oars—after a fashion—without knocking herself out or falling overboard. With Kurt flat on his back, shirtless, surrounded by engine parts, it only made sense that she be the one to run any errands.

  This is nice, she thought, being a part of a team. Her school had fielded a soccer team that had never once to her knowledge won a game, but Deke had not been allowed to play. She’d had severe asthma as a child, and as a result, she’d been so overprotected it was a wonder she’d been allowed to play solitaire.

  Frog was sullen at first. He asked flat out what she was still doing there, and she told him about the crowded highway—which hadn’t been all that crowded—and about Kurt’s not having a vehicle to drive.

  She asked about the game, and he shrugged and said nothing. And then she asked when school would be reopening, and he shrugged again. “Who cares?”

  Frog did the rowing while Deke held on to the two grease-stained paper sacks and two gigantic paper cups of lukewarm cola. When she mentioned that whatever was in the bags felt cold, he told her they were damned lucky to get anything, because Joe’s freezer had conked out on him and he was going to have to start dumping stuff as soon as he got the rest rooms baled out. “Man, you never seen such a mess! Water come up through the—”

  “I can imagine,” Deke said, and tried not to.

  The meal was atrocious but surprisingly cheerful once Frog got over his sulks. They were all aware of how much worse things could have been. Deke dreaded leaving, but she couldn’t put it off much longer. As it was, she might have forfeited her only remaining part-time job.

  There were five cheeseburgers and two bags of cold, limp fries. Kurt divided the food. Frog glowered, but when Deke said half a burger and no fries, please, he settled down with one bony elbow on the table, devoured his third stale cheeseburger and started talking about cheerleaders and how close the team had come to winning the game and how he’d helped the driver fix a flat tire. “I might be a coach when I get out of school. Either that or a professional football player.”

  “Takes math,” Kurt said, and Frog expressed his opinion of math in one crude word.

  Kurt glared. Frog mumbled an apology, and Deke, feeling unneeded and unwanted, said, “I’d better get on the road.” It was cold now that the sun had set. A damp kind of chill that leached into the bones. She’d left her sweatshirt somewhere—probably in the car—and now, wearing her new jeans and collecting her raincoat, she stood up and tried to think of some excuse to stay just a little longer.

  If she’d been hoping for a polite protest, her hopes were quickly dashed.

  Frog said, “You coming down again next weekend?” as if daring her to say she was.

  It was hardly an invitation. She glanced at Kurt, but all he said was, “I’ll row you ashore.”

  “When will you be able to go back and tie up at the pier?” she asked, her voice brittle with suppressed tears.

  “A few days, if we’re lucky. Depends. Lot of work to be done first. Some of the pilings need pumping down again.”

  He couldn’t have sounded more impersonal if he’d been reporting on the weather. Blindly, she collected her purse and the plastic sack containing the clothes she’d worn yesterday. Rejecting Kurt’s offer of help, she swung her legs over the coaming and dropped into the dinghy.

  The thing rocked wildly for several seconds. Fortunately, she managed to sit down before she fell overboard. That would have left a lovely last impression!

  While Kurt silently rowed the few dozen yards to the wharf, she studied the darkening landscape with every evidence of interest. She’d expected him to shove off the minute he’d set her ashore, but he didn’t.

  He walked her to her car, and she stood there awkwardly, trying to think of some polite and impersonal way to say goodbye to the man she had slept with, laughed with, shared silly little nuggets of information with—the man she very possibly had fallen in love with.

  And would probably never see again.

  “I guess this is goodbye, then,” she said cheerfully. Dear God, how could he let her leave this way? “It’s been a real, um—adventure.”

  He stared at her as if he were trying to memorize every detail of her appearance. Which, after all she had been through since she’d first arrived at Swan Inlet on Friday afternoon, she would just as soon he’d forget.

  Her smile began to quiver and she turned away quickly, fumbling with the car door handle.

  “Deke,” he said quietly.

  Tears broke through her lashes to leak down her cheeks. Oh, damn, hell and blast! “Look, tell Frog I said goodbye, will you? And good luck with his…whatever. Math.”

  “Deke, listen, I know you have to get on the road—you should have gone sooner. There’s no place to stay, and I can’t promise you—”

  She glared at him over her shoulder. “Did I ask you for a single promise?”

  “No, you didn’t, but I’m not talking about that. I mean, about what you think I’m talking about. Yeah, well…maybe I am, but that’s not what I’m talking about now.”

  He broke off, swore and muttered something about losing it, but by then Deke had had all she could take. She struggled with the door latch, which was tricky and had to be jerked and twisted at the same time. “Good luck, Kurt. Lots of charters and—and smooth sailing, and all that.”

  “Deke, wait. Dammit, now you’re upset, aren’t you? I never meant to make you cry.”

  Keys in hand, she yanked at the door latch. It gave way, and she flung a look over her shoulder that was supposed to be coolly haughty but probably missed it by a country mile. “You? Make me cry? Mercy, but you boat captains do have a superiority complex, don’t you?”

  He swore again then, using words that would have made her great-aunts rise up from their graves. And then he snatched her back against his chest, turned her in his arms and proceeded to kiss the living daylights out of her.

  One of her feet was
standing in a puddle of water. She never even noticed. The plastic bag containing her change of clothing fell to the ground. She never noticed that, either.

  All she noticed was the blinding wonder of being held hard in his arms, of feeling his mouth on hers—of soaking in the heat and the scent and the taste of him, and wanting more.

  And knowing it wasn’t going to happen.

  Eight

  They had it out as soon as Kurt got back to the boat. Frog was rummaging in a locker, looking for his week-old cinnamon buns, when Kurt lit into him. “Would you like to tell me what that was all about?”

  “Hey, get off my case, man. You wanna bring your bimbos aboard, it ain’t no skin off my—”

  Kurt held onto his temper—just barely. He’d seldom been driven to violence, and never with a child, but he was feeling raw and frustrated on several counts, and Frog was openly spoiling for a fight. Skinny, rebellious, with a chip the size of a redwood on his bony shoulder, the boy was ready to take on all comers.

  “You’re jealous,” Kurt said slowly as realization dawned. “Oh, hell, son, you don’t—”

  “Man, you’re crazy. And I ain’t your son, and I sure ain’t jealous of no dumb girl.”

  Ignoring the protest, Kurt said, “So that’s it. You thought that just because I—”

  “I didn’t think nothin’!”

  The gauntlet down, they confronted each other other across the space of a tiny, cluttered salon that reeked of diesel oil, salt water, marsh mud and stale fries. Kurt was torn between wanting to comfort and reassure the boy and wanting to shake some sense into his thick skull. He felt like taking a swing at something, but not at Frog. Never at him.

  This wasn’t even about Frog. It was the woman who was at the root of both their problems. The same woman who, only a few hours ago, he’d thought might just be the answer to all their problems.

  Hell, he’d never even got to tell her. Or rather, to ask her. There’d been too much to do, and then the kid had rolled in with a couple of bags of throwaway food and a lousy attitude, and Kurt had started wondering where the dickens he could put her, even if she agreed to marry him. There was barely enough room for two aboard the R&R, and for all he knew, the house he’d been planning to buy had been trashed in the storm.

  “Hey, you wanna roll in the sack, I’m cool,” Frog said with a sophistication that was about as thick as the layer of gold on a two-dollar wedding band. “I’ll get outta your way. Man, I was getting freaked anyhow, doin’ all this math and readin’ and dumb stuff like that.”

  With one forearm, Kurt took a savage swipe at the headache that was beginning to hammer at him. “Aw, jeeze. Look, that has nothing to do with it. Dammit, Frog, I thought you liked her!”

  Frog shrugged nonchalantly, but his eyes told another story. “I was fixin’ to move on, anyways. It’s borin’ here, you know what I mean? Nothin’ but stinkin’ old fish ‘n’ homework. No cable, nothin’ but a bunch o’ dumb girls who don’t do nuthin’ but giggle and poke out their ti—”

  Kurt cleared his throat. Man talk was one thing. Crudeness was another. He’d thought they’d agreed on that point.

  “I mean, hangin’ in one place too long, man, it ain’t healthy.”

  “Deke liked you. At least she did until you started acting like a jerk. She told me what a great kid she thought you were.”

  Frog rolled his eyes and fingered a crumb of salt off an empty French fry sack. Kurt gave up. “Look, before it gets any darker, I’m going to row over and check out the pier. You want to come along?” It was an out, if the kid had sense enough to take it.

  He did. “Yeah, I guess. If they gotta tear all that old stuff out an’ pump them pilings down again, we’re gonna be S.O.L.”

  Kurt grimaced. “Don’t push it, boy.”

  Frog smirked. “What, you don’t know what it means? It means out o’ luck, tha’s all.”

  “Sure it does. Now let’s get going before it gets too dark to see anything.”

  “O. L. Outta luck. Everbody knows that.”

  What Kurt knew was that the boy wouldn’t quit until he’d had his fun. He figured he might as well play it out before he launched into his standard let’sclean-up-our-act routine. “S.O.L.?”

  Even tired, ticked off and frustrated on several levels, it was all he could do to keep from laughing at the look of injured innocence that came over the boy’s face. “Certainly outta luck, tha’s all. Whadja think it meant?”

  “Do they still teach spelling in the ninth grade? Never mind.”

  Frog grinned knowingly. Kurt reached for the baseball cap hanging on the bulkhead, slapped it on the boy’s head, and Frog readjusted it so that the bill shadowed the back of his bony neck. Torn between irritation and affection, Kurt wondered if he had ever been such a trial to his parents.

  Yeah. He had. “C’mon, smart mouth. While we’re at it, we’ll see if we can borrow Joe’s truck and ride out and look at the house.”

  “Sheesh. Like I care about that ol’ heap, or somethin’.”

  “Yeah, like you care or something,” said Kurt, who recognized the sound of whistling in the dark when he heard it. “C’mon, I’d like to check out the Detroits before we turn in, too, and I’ll need a hand.”

  Deke sat on the organ stool and stared at her image in one of several mirrors that were a part of the ornate superstructure. Too bad Halloween was over. She could have passed as a ghost.

  What she needed was a brand-new lipstick. Preferably Day-Glow red, if they made it in hypoallergenic. And maybe some blusher. What she didn’t need was eye shadow. The shadows around her eyes were already the color of mildew.

  “Well, Ms. Kiley,” she whispered, “you’ve gone and done it this time. Stepped right smack dab in the middle of a big one.”

  Deke had been home for several hours, and home was even more depressing than she’d remembered. It wasn’t only the dismal green walls that no tenant was allowed to paint over without written permission, plus a sworn promise to repaint them in the same bilious shade before she moved out.

  It wasn’t even the fact that her dolphin story was going nowhere. She was stale. Her ideas were stale. The dolphin idea had been done and done and then done again. What she needed was a whole new approach, only how could she think of little boys and dolphins when she was too busy thinking about big boys and—

  Well. She’d simply have to try harder, that was all. Meanwhile, she needed to get serious about finding a place to live, preferably something on the ground floor. Preferably something with room for more than a coffeepot and a bed.

  Oh, yes, and preferably something she could afford.

  Then all she’d have to worry about was finding a mover who could handle her organ, and coming up with a brilliant premise for a story that wouldn’t bore the socks off your average eight-year-old, in case it ever made it past an editor’s desk.

  “Darn it, Kurt, why did you have to go and ruin my concentration?” she whispered plaintively. “What did I ever do to you?”

  Kurt stepped outside the real estate office and rammed the sheaf of papers into his pocket. Holy Hannah, he’d done it! It had damn near sucked his savings account dry, but he was now the proud owner of the ugliest house on the eastern seaboard. Perched on four and a half acres that was either bureaucratically protected wetland or valuable waterfront, depending on whether you were buying or selling.

  All he needed before they could move in was a new roof, a new heating system, several new windows, new front steps, a new septic tank, new wiring, new plumbing and half a dozen different kinds of inspections.

  Not to mention the basic appliances.

  Not to mention a few coats of paint, both inside and out.

  Not to mention a couple of beds, a table and a few chairs.

  And that was just for starters.

  Kurt told himself he’d got a bargain. “Hell, the old dump is about to be condemned, we both know that. It’d take a fortune to bring it up to standard,” he’d told the agent.


  “The property alone is worth more than the asking price. You know what waterfront property brings these days. They’re not making any more of it.”

  “Waterfront, hell—the place is a marsh. I’ll be lucky if I’m not locked up for trespassing on protected wetlands.”

  “There’s plenty of high ground there.” The agent had put on his glasses, no doubt, Kurt thought, to hide the gleam in his beady little eyes.

  “Sure there is,” he scoffed. “Almost three square yards that’s close to four and a half inches above sea level, and we both know the house is going to cave in any day now.”

  “What, heart pine and juniper with cypress underpinnings? That place has been standing for nearly seventy-five years.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. It’s a dump. I’m crazy for even thinking about buying it, but I need a place to tie up my boat. If I can get permission to dredge a channel…”

  They’d gone a few more rounds, but in the end, Kurt had signed on the dotted line, just as the agent had known he would. He wanted the place so bad he could taste it.

  No, dammit, he needed it. If he was going to ask a woman to marry him, he had to have someplace to bring her.

  “Man, you are crazy, you know that?” Frog was back at the pickup after a run to the nearest fast-food place. They seldom came to town, but now that the truck was fresh out of the shop with a newly rebuilt engine, they’d lit out first thing this morning for the county seat to buy some winter clothes and a new pair of boots for Frog, a six-volt battery and a set of jumper cables to replace those lost in the storm—and a house.

  “Your boots still feel okay?”

  “Yeah, they’re okay. Uh…thanks. For the stuff an’ all.”

  We’re coming along nicely, Kurt thought, suppressing a grin. An unsolicited thanks and not a single four-letter word beginning with F or S. “You’ve earned it.”