CRY UNCLE

by Judith Arnold

  “It was something to do,” she mumbled, then read his perplexed look and repeated her answer, mouthing the syllables clearly through the soft cotton fabric.

  “I was thinking, maybe it was kind of—what’s the word, sublimation?” The bandanna garbled his words, but not enough to make them incomprehensible.

  She was not going to discuss last night’s activity with him. “If I had anything to sublimate, it was fear.”

  “Are you afraid of me?”

  She shot him a quick look. He appeared to be inspecting a vertical stud, but she wasn’t fooled. “I’m afraid of Mick Morrow.”

  “He’s a continent away—and he’s looking for Pamela Hayes. You’re Pam Brenner.”

  “Why should I be afraid of you?” she asked, feeling a little reckless. “Are you planning to kill me, too?”

  He laughed. It didn’t sound like laughter through the bandanna, but she could tell by the humor in his eyes and the motion of his shoulders that he was enjoying a good chuckle. “Hey, sweetheart, dead ladies don’t do a damned thing for me. I want you very much alive.”

  She felt her cheeks grow hot beneath the broad triangle of cloth. A laugh escaped her, partly from embarrassment and partly from relief at being able to talk to Joe again, and relax in his company. Even if he wasn’t the man of her dreams—although last night he’d done an estimable job of redefining certain dreams of hers—she hadn’t liked being frozen out by him.

  “What we’re going to do,” she explained, grimacing when she tasted lint from the bandanna on her teeth, “is break down the door frame and have this simply be open.” She paced to the end of the counter and gestured with her hands to indicate the opening. “We’ll put a half-wall behind the sink to hide the plumbing. It’s going to look wonderful.”

  “I think it will,” he agreed, scanning the area with his gaze. “You’ve got a knack for this sort of thing, don’t you.”

  “It’s what I do best.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” he teased, then grew still. His eyebrows dipped in concentration. “What’s that knocking?”

  “What knocking?”

  He touched his index finger to his bandanna to silence her. She heard it, then—a rhythmic rapping sound.

  “One of the cats, maybe?”

  “Whatever it is, it’s at the front door,” he said, tossing down the hammer he’d been holding and heading down the crooked, narrow corridor to the front of the house.

  Pamela hurried after him, ready for an excuse to take a break. They’d been working for over an hour, and without air conditioning Birdie’s house was taking on the qualities of a sauna.

  By the time she caught up with Joe, he had the front door open. Two people stood on the small porch. The man had on an elegant, unstructured suit of beige linen, the trousers pleated and the sleeves of the jacket rolled up one cuff. In defiance of the summer heat, his charcoal-gray shirt was buttoned up to his Adam’s apple, although he didn’t have on a tie. His dark hair was so impeccably groomed it might have been clipped with a manicure scissors, one strand at a time.

  The woman beside him was equally impressive. She wore a plain black shift that was so simple in its lines, Pamela knew it had to have cost a fortune. Her hair was shorter than the man’s, and it had been moussed into a profoundly chic arrangement around her face. Both she and the man wore horn-rimmed sunglasses with small, round lenses. The woman also wore bright red lipstick.

  They looked to Pamela like refugees from some terribly precious boutique. Having spent the past month in Key West, she’d been lulled into the prevalent belief that shorts and T-shirts were the ultimate in fashion. She hadn’t seen anyone dressed with such slavish deference to haute couture since she’d left Seattle.

  The stylish couple fell back a step at the sight of the two grungy, dust-covered workers. “Joyce, Lawton,” Joe mumbled through his bandanna, then tugged it off his mouth to circle his throat. “So, you finally decided to roll into town.” He doffed his cap and hurled it down the hall behind him.

  “We arrived last night,” the woman said. Pamela wished she could see the woman’s eyes, but the lenses of her sunglasses were too dark. “We’re staying at the Reach Resort. We went to your house. A very peculiar old woman was there.”

  “She had peacock feathers fastened to her sleeves,” said the man.

  “There was a little girl with her. She had feathers braided into her hair. They were stomping barefoot in a mud puddle at the back of your house, carrying bunches of dandelions and chanting strange things. They said we’d find you here.” The woman regarded Joe critically, her bright red lips pressed together in disapproval.

  “Yeah, well...” Joe dusted his hands on the seat of his jeans and extended his right hand to the man, who shook it without much enthusiasm. “That little barefoot girl is Lizard. I guess you didn’t recognize her.”

  The woman turned and glared at the man. “I told you that was her.”

  “She didn’t look anything like the photo we got last Christmas.” The man glowered at Joe. “Whose picture did you send us at Christmas?”

  “That was Lizard, without the feathers.”

  “Elizabeth,” the woman corrected him.

  “She prefers to be called Lizard.” Joe eased Pamela’s bandanna down over her chin, then slid his arm around her waist. “Pam, these are the Prescotts, Lizard’s aunt and uncle from California. Joyce, Lawton, I’d like you to meet my wife, Pam.”

  A long, stunned silence ensued. “Your wife?” the woman named Joyce scoffed.

  “Yeah. My wife. Lizard’s aunt by marriage.”

  Joyce glared at Lawton again. “Why weren’t we informed of this?”

  Lawton, in turn, glowered at Joe. “Why weren’t we informed of this?”

  “I didn’t know you cared. Anyway, I figured if I’d sent you an invitation to the wedding, you might have felt you had to buy us a gift. I thought I’d do you a favor and spare you the expense.”

  Pamela caught the glint of amusement in his eyes. These were the people who wanted to take Lizard away from him; he ought to have been baring his teeth and growling. Yet his arm was draped casually around her shoulders, and his smile produced a dimple.

  In spite of the ghastly first impression she must be making, with plaster caked under her nails and perspiration trickling down her neck, she wasn’t going to let the Prescotts daunt her. After all, she was a professional, a smart, talented woman with a couple of university degrees. Until recently, she’d earned a large income, and she owned an expensive condo. A supercilious couple costumed by Armani couldn’t faze her.

  “How do you do,” she said cordially, extending her hand. “Joe’s told me so much about you.”

  “He hasn’t told us anything about you,” Joyce retorted.

  Joe opened his mouth to respond, but Pam answered for herself. “There really isn’t much to tell. We met, we fell in love, and we got married.”

  “The impact this could have on Elizabeth—”

  “Has been quite positive,” Pamela said with breezy certainty. “She’s been happier than ever.”

  “She has feathers in her hair,” Lawton muttered.

  “And I have plaster dust in mine,” Pamela informed him, pulling off her cap and riffling her fingers through her sweat-damp hair. “That’s why God gave us shampoo.”

  “As you can see,” Joe broke in, “we’re in the middle of some work here, doing repairs on the peculiar old lady’s house, because she’s a good friend of ours. So, Lawton, Joyce—” he nodded to each in turn “—it’s great seeing you, and why don’t you have your lawyer call my lawyer.”

  The four of them squared off for another awkward minute, and then the Prescotts beat a retreat. Only when they’d reached the Infiniti parked at the curb did Pamela feel Joe’s hand furl into a fist at the small of her back.

  “Charming folks,” she said.

  “They’ve got money,” Joe muttered, as if that would be the deciding factor in who won custody of Lizard.
<
br />   “They didn’t even recognize Liz.”

  “All they’ve seen of her for the past three years is snapshots. And they’re right—I cleaned her up some for the Christmas photo.”

  “Joe, look at them! Can you imagine them letting Lizard plant herbs in their back yard?”

  He sent her a quick, ironic look and then spun around and entered the house. “I’d better call Mary DiNardi and let her know the boom’s about to fall,” he said.

  Pamela lingered in the doorway for a moment. She could guess what that look of his said: that when she’d first walked into the Shipwreck one month ago, she’d been no more prepared to raise a child than the Prescotts were today.

  But she’d changed. She’d put away her silk blouses and tailored trousers. She’d forgotten about nail polish and nights at the ballet. She hadn’t listened to Mozart in a month; she couldn’t recall the last time she’d eaten steamed asparagus or sipped a properly aged Bordeaux. But she’d learned how to tramp through the mud and herd an unruly child through a store, how to tune out the whining and accept Lizard’s candor without taking offense.

  If she could learn, why couldn’t the Prescotts?

  They didn’t have the same incentive she had, she answered herself. They would be doing it only for themselves, to satisfy their own preferences when it came to the girl’s custody. Pamela wasn’t doing it for herself.

  She was doing it for Joe.

  Not because she’d made a deal with him, she realized. Not because he offered her his name as a shield. Not because he trusted her—she wasn’t entirely sure he did.

  Not even because of last night, which Pamela was still convinced had been a major mistake.

  She was mothering Lizard, scolding her, finger-painting and collecting sea gull feathers on the beach with her and staying up late at night to discuss her well-being with Joe, because somehow, Lizard and her uncle had come to matter more to Pamela than her expensive condominium and Mozart and all the rest of it.

  In the past eight years, she had designed buildings, received plaudits, earned bonuses in her work—but that all came easy to her. She had spent her life training for it, studying, developing her innate talents as a draftsman and an artist. Maybe she had a gene for architecture somewhere inside her, but everything she’d ever accomplished had been well within her abilities, completely under her control.

  Lizard was different. Dealing with her didn’t come naturally to Pamela; she had no gene for it, no training, no talent, little control over what Lizard did and even less control over how Pamela herself felt about it. But she was doing it for no other reason than to make another person happy.

  Two other people: Lizard and Joe. Her temporary family. She was doing it for them.

  And no snooty, swanky interlopers were going to convince her to give in to their wishes without a fight.

  Chapter Fourteen

  THE PRESCOTTS’ ARRIVAL on Key West was like a solar eclipse, blocking out Pamela’s other concerns and throwing the world into shadow. She had no time to worry about her relationship with Joe, her situation back home in Seattle, or even her plans for Birdie’s house. Her thoughts zeroed in on one subject only: the battle for Lizard.

  Joe spent the afternoon at Mary DiNardi’s office on Eaton Street, plotting strategies and working out schedules. Pamela spent the afternoon with Lizard at the beach. She supposed there were things she ought to be doing—cleaning the house, tidying the yard, buying Lizard a wardrobe of respectable feather-free clothing—but somehow, none of those activities seemed as important as making sure Lizard had a happy afternoon.

  Pamela wasn’t used to exerting herself to make a child happy. She tried to remember what her life had been like not so very long ago, when all her energies had been devoted to her career, her adult friends, her memberships in museums and subscriptions to the opera. In those days, she used to grimace when she saw children entering a theater with her or sitting near her on an airplane, because she knew they would be noisy and disruptive. She used to pride herself on the order in her life, the dependability of her surroundings. She used to go for days—for years—without ever considering the significance of pink food.

  But now that placid existence had vanished. Pamela could no longer control the flow of events that coursed around her. She was geared to the needs of others—most particularly, the needs of a demanding, occasionally obnoxious and chronically messy little girl.

  And the strange part was, Pamela was too busy worrying about that little girl’s needs to mind.

  The phone was ringing when they got back from the beach late in the afternoon. During the walk home, Lizard had groused about having to keep her swimsuit on the entire time they were at the beach, but Pamela had stood firm in her view that Lizard had to behave modestly, at least when it came to her body.

  Modesty in all other matters seemed beyond Lizard. “I’m the smartest kid I know,” she boasted when Pamela expressed surprise at her ability to identify the different breeds of palms bordering the beach. “I’m smarter than Megan, even. She’s my best friend, but I’m smarter than her. Ask anybody. Even Birdie, she’ll tell you how smart I am. And she knows Boo Doo so she oughtta know.”

  Pamela heard the shrill, rhythmic peal through an open window and hustled Lizard up the front walk. “Maybe you’re smart, but right now you’re as slow as molasses. That could be your Uncle Joe calling us. Let’s pick up the pace.”

  Just to be contrary, Lizard chose that moment to drop the bag containing her beach toys and chase after a butterfly flitting among the rhododendrons. Ignoring her, Pamela raced up the front steps to the porch, unlocked the door, charged into the kitchen and dove for the phone, eager to answer before Joe hung up.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t Joe. “This is Mona Whitley,” the social worker’s voice chirped through the line.

  Dear lord, Pamela thought a few minutes later, after Ms. Whitley had explained to her that, in order for her to observe the Prescotts interacting with Lizard, Pamela would have to host a get-together with Lizard and her long-lost relatives tomorrow morning at nine o’clock.

  Lying through her teeth, Pamela assured Ms. Whitley that this would be no trouble whatsoever. She had to behave courteously, exactly the opposite of how she felt about entertaining a social worker and the bad guys in Joe’s house.

  She glanced at her watch. After five. Lizard was still outside; through the kitchen window Pamela could see her, armed with her plastic bow-and-arrow set, firing arrows blithely at the butterfly. Pamela considered calling Lizard inside for a bath, but wrestling the kid into the bathtub was more than Pamela could handle right now. The realization that Lizard’s life—or, more accurately, Joe’s life—was about to cave in, sapped Pamela of energy.

  She recalled the last time Mona Whitley had paid a call on the Brenners. Pamela had knocked herself out to make the house and Lizard presentable. Joe had knocked himself out to convince Ms. Whitley that he and Pamela were madly in love, even though, at that time, Joe could barely tolerate her.

  Obviously, he could tolerate her now. More than tolerate her, if last night counted for anything. Would he kiss her again in front of Ms. Whitley? Given that they’d been intimate, did he think kissing was too tame? Did he want to kiss her again? Did she want him to? Would kissing him lead to other acts, acts that would throw her emotions into even greater disarray than they were already in?

  Had Pamela ever wasted so much mental effort trying to figure out a man before?

  Since Joe hadn’t called her, she telephoned him at the Shipwreck. After three rings, Brick answered. “Hi, it’s Pam Brenner,” she said. “Is Joe there?”

  Brick grunted something and set the phone on the bar with a loud thud.

  She heard the sounds of early tavern traffic, a low babble of voices and the muffled strain of music from the juke box. She recognized the song at once: Stand By Me. It sent a tremor of longing through her. Life had seemed so complicated the day she had married Joe—but in fact it had been much simpler. Now, li
fe really was complicated, but when Pamela contemplated it everything seemed simple.

  She had to help keep Joe and Lizard together. She had to stand by Joe.

  Really, very simple.

  She heard his voice through the line. “Pam?”

  “I just got a call from Mona Whitley,” she said, then reported on the following day’s agenda.

  Joe cursed. “I’ve been waiting for this to happen for so long,” he confessed. “Now that it’s finally in the works, I can’t stand it.”

  “I know.” She sensed the sadness and frustration in his tone, and felt a powerful desire to reassure him. “Joe, those people—the Prescotts—they aren’t cut out for dealing with Lizard. It doesn’t take much of perception to realize they aren’t child-oriented.”

  “They’re rich,” he said laconically.

  “So what? You’re not exactly poor.”

  “I could shave every day, and I’d still be a bum.”

  “No,” she said, refusing to let him label himself the way she’d once labeled him. “You’re a good father. Or uncle. No, father. That’s what you are to Lizard.”

  “Yeah, sure,” he muttered.

  “What did your lawyer say?”

  He cursed again. “In twenty words or less? She said the law was a funny thing, and she hoped I could hang onto my sense of humor.”

  “We’ll get through this, Jonas,” Pamela promised, wishing she actually had some influence on the outcome. “I’ll do whatever I can to convince the courts that Lizard belongs with you.”

  He said nothing for a minute, and then, “Thank you.” Just two small words, yet they conveyed so much. She heard the catch in his voice, the slight waver, and felt a closeness to him far more profound than the closeness she’d felt during those few intense minutes last night when her body and his were locked together in love.

  This was it, the main event, the reason Joe had taken her in and given her his name. She would do whatever she could, and he would trust her.