Ladies' Night

by Andrews, Mary Kay

  Dark outside, but sweltering inside. She set Sweetie down on the floor, then ran from room to room opening all the windows she’d closed the previous day. She sniffed the air. The house reeked of Pine-Sol, in a good way, but there were still strong undernotes of mildew and pet smells, not to mention more dead bugs.

  It took two more trips to retrieve the rest of the day’s supplies, which included a pair of old box fans she’d found in the shed back at the bar. She set one fan in the window of the living room and another in the back bedroom where Sweetie had been imprisoned and switched them both to the HIGH setting.

  The little dog apparently hadn’t been totally traumatized by her time living in the house. She trotted from room to room, her nails clicking on the wooden floors, and had a high old time in the kitchen, barking and growling at a cockroach in the death throes.

  Her plan for the day had been to carefully assess the house and work out a list of priorities and a timetable. But her mood, following the previous evening’s disastrous encounter with Wyatt, and the revolting sex dream that had followed, left her in no mood for assessments.

  “Right,” she said briskly. She wheeled in the huge plastic trash can she’d borrowed from the shed, lined it with a black contractor’s bag, snapped on her rubber gloves, and began emptying the kitchen cabinets of their contents.

  She’d considered trying to salvage the pots and pans and dishes left behind, but one glance at their cracked and battered status convinced her to discard them, too. When the house was done, she’d bully Arthur into letting her buy new cookware.

  With the cabinets empty, Grace took another look. In a perfect world, she’d rip out all the upper and lower cupboards and fit the kitchen with inexpensive Ikea cabinets, ones with Shaker-style door panels, with matching drawers. She’d outfitted their little rental house in Bradenton with the exact same ones, spending less than seven thousand dollars for everything, including hardware and countertops. She didn’t have that kind of budget here.

  Instead, she got out her cordless electric screwdriver and removed all the upper-cabinet doors, setting them aside, just in case she found another use for them down the line. The kitchen immediately looked better.

  The gray aluminum-edged Formica countertops were funky but age-appropriate for the house, and the deep porcelain-over-cast-iron sink was filthy, but she knew a good cleaning with Bar Keepers Friend would make it shine again.

  Grace gazed out the kitchen window and saw the first orange streaks of daylight at the edge of the overgrown yard.

  On an impulse, she clipped a leash to Sweetie’s collar and walked out the kitchen door, drawn to the glorious glow. They walked the block to a sandy lot that overlooked the bay, and the two of them stood there, basking in a Technicolor Florida sunrise. Whoever ended up renting the little house on Mandevilla would have the privilege of watching that same sunrise whenever they liked. Maybe she would have to make it a habit to get over here every morning in time to do the same thing. It wasn’t a bad way to start the day.

  She turned to go back to the house, resolving to start ripping up that revolting vinyl kitchen floor. It would feel good to jab something inanimate with a knife, a pry-bar, a chisel, or anything sharp she could put her hands on.

  * * *

  For months now, Wyatt had been meaning to take down the sprawling thirty-foot-tall Brazilian pepper tree that had taken over the area near his grandmother’s old orchid slat-house. As he set out on his golf cart with his weapons of battle—chain saw, ax, and ladder—he grimly decided that today, Wednesday, was as good a day as any.

  The Florida Department of Agriculture had placed the Brazilian pepper, a nonnative invasive “shrub,” on its hit list of noxious plants. It was definitely a pushy interloper—with its massive crown of branches, it shaded out anything else in its path, and it grew so rapidly he hadn’t noticed it had sprung up and taken over the old orchid-house area.

  Though it was a typical summer day, with temperatures promising to rise to the nineties, he knew enough about the Brazilian pepper’s near-poisonous sap to take precautions, outfitting himself in long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, work gloves, and blue bandanna on his head. He set up the ladder next to the trunk, fastened a rope to the chain-saw handle, and began climbing into the canopy. When he’d gone as high as he could, he steadied himself against the main trunk, hauled the chain saw up from below, and fired it up.

  The roar and the whine of the saw as it chewed its way through the brittle wood made a huge din, and the gas fumes filled his nostrils.

  For two hours, Wyatt hacked away at the tree, dropping the limbs to the ground, steadily moving downward as he decimated the upper canopy.

  Twenty feet aboveground, with a buzzing chain saw in hand, he was focused only on the tree, the chain saw, and avoiding falling out of the tree.

  By noon, his clothes were sweat-soaked, his face was itchy from the pepper-tree fumes, and the tree itself was looking like a grotesque, defoliated skeleton. He considered going back to the house to shower, change clothes, and grab lunch but went back to work instead. The pepper tree, like Callie and Luke and their lawyer and Judge Stackpole, was his nemesis. And this one he intended to cut right down to the ground.

  * * *

  “Jesus, son!” Nelson recoiled at the sight of Wyatt when he came tramping into the house. “What the hell did you do to yourself?”

  “To me? Nothing. It took me all day, but I cut down the pepper tree, sprayed the stump with the legal equivalent of napalm, then raked up every limb, leaf, and seedpod I could find and hauled it all off to the dump.”

  Wyatt collapsed onto one of the wooden kitchen chairs. “I’m whipped. What’s for dinner?”

  “Beanie-weenies, Tater Tots, cornbread, coleslaw. Doesn’t your face hurt?”

  Wyatt stripped off his gloves and put a finger to his cheek, which, come to think of it, did feel kind of hot and swollen to the touch. The backs of his hands were covered in a nasty red rash, too.

  “Guess I better hit the shower,” he said. “I might be having a slight reaction to the pepper-tree sap.”

  “If that’s slight, I don’t want to know severe,” Nelson said.

  The face of a monster stared back at Wyatt in the bathroom mirror. His entire face was mottled red and swollen, his nose a puffy red blob, his eyes rimmed in pink. Dime-sized welts ran down his neck and to the V of where his shirt collar had been open.

  When he took off his shirt he saw that his chest was also streaked with angry crimson slashes. He unzipped his pants and stepped out of them, as well as his boxers, and looked down.

  Holy shit! His crotch was covered in blisters. Everything was red and inflamed—and not in a good way. He turned on the shower full force and jumped in, letting the cool water sluice over his head and chest. He grabbed a bar of soap, lathered up, but the first touch of the soap to his chest felt like a splash of acid.

  Wyatt dropped the soap and looked down again. Not good. How the hell had this happened? He’d been so careful, with the long pants and shirt, high socks, work boots, gloves. And then he remembered and would have smacked himself in the face if that face hadn’t felt like an open wound just then.

  He’d had to pee. And who could unzip and do all the rest wearing work gloves? He must have gotten some of the sap on his hands, and then, well, his boys. Which were now itching like a son of a bitch.

  He tried to think back to a college class he’d taken on noxious plants. They’d studied poison ivy, oak, sumac, and a few others, and, of course, over the years, working in landscaping and now running Jungle Jerry’s, he’d run into all of the above. But he couldn’t remember anything about the hazards of Brazilian pepper.

  After gingerly toweling off the inflamed skin, he found a bottle of Calamine lotion in the medicine cabinet and slathered it all over himself. Within a few seconds, the thick pink goo had dried and started to cake and crack. And he itched, God how he itched.

  Wrapped in nothing more than a towel, he carefully stepped over t
he clothes he’d just discarded. In his bedroom he donned the loosest pair of cotton shorts he could find and an old, threadbare cotton T-shirt.

  Wyatt sat down at the kitchen table as his father was taking a pan of cornbread from the oven. “Does it feel as bad as it looks?” Nelson inquired, after he’d served his son a plate heaped high with food.

  “Worse,” Wyatt said, pointing toward his crotch. “It’s … everywhere.”

  “Ow,” Nelson grimaced and poured him a glass of iced tea. “I think we’ve got some Benadryl around here somewhere. That might help some.”

  “Maybe after dinner,” Wyatt said. “I’ll fall asleep with my head in the plate if I take it now, and I’ve got some stuff I need to do tonight.”

  They cleaned up the kitchen, and Nelson retired to his recliner to watch his nightly roundup; Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and the Rays game.

  Wyatt sank onto the old sofa and tried not to think of his inflamed privates while he leafed through the paper, but he was so acutely uncomfortable he gave in shortly after eight and went looking for the bottle of Benadryl.

  “Okay, Dad,” he said, poking his head out from the hallway. “I’m turning in.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I’m going to bed,” Wyatt repeated.

  “Did you ever talk to your Aunt Betsy?” Nelson asked, his eyes glued to the television.

  “No. Why would I?”

  “She called here looking for you. Guess you must have had your phone turned off.”

  Wyatt came around and stood directly in front of the television, the only way he knew to get his father’s attention this time of night. “Dad? What did Betsy say?”

  “Hey! Come on now, it’s the bottom of the inning, two outs, and we’ve got the bases loaded.”

  “What did Betsy say? Did she have news? Come on, Dad, this could be important.”

  Nelson waved his hand in irritation. “How’m I supposed to know what she wanted? She just said to call her. Not tonight, she had something goin’ on. Now, can I watch my game?”

  Wyatt called her anyway and left a message on his aunt’s phone. The itching was driving him nuts, but he resisted taking the Benadryl. At 9:30 he called and left another message for her, and at ten, in desperation, he texted. WHAT’S UP? DAD SAID YOU CALLED.

  Thirty minutes later, his phone dinged and he lunged for it. Betsy’s message was clear as mud. CAN’T TALK, CALL U IN A.M.

  Finally, sometime after ten, he popped some Benadryl and fell into an uneasy sleep, imagining all the bad news his attorney might be saving up for the next morning.

  28

  Betsy Entwhistle was sitting at a table near the window of Eat Here, her favorite breakfast spot in Holmes Beach, when she spotted her nephew making his way through the parking lot, a baseball cap pulled down low over his face, sunglasses covering his eyes.

  She sighed. She hated the bruising Callie was giving Wyatt. He’d been a good husband and a loving father, and the little idiot thought she could do better with that punk Luke? She’d known Callie was trouble from the start, and she’d told her sister, Wyatt’s mom, that, in confidence. In confidence, Peggy had agreed wholeheartedly. But Wyatt was in love, and they both hoped things would work out.

  “Hey,” Wyatt was almost out of breath. He dropped into the chair opposite hers. “What’s going on? What couldn’t you tell me last night?”

  “Good Lord, what have you done to your face?” Betsy reached over and tipped back the bill of his cap, removed the sunglasses. Wyatt’s handsome face was a crimson, contorted mess. His eyes were nearly swollen shut, his nose and cheeks covered with red blisters that crawled down his neck to his chest. His hands were covered with a similar eruption.

  “I took down a tree at the park yesterday, and I’ve had some kind of reaction to the sap,” Wyatt said. “Just tell me what’s going on, would you? Have you heard from the judge?”

  “Honey, that’s not just a reaction,” Betsy said. “Your eyes are nearly swollen shut. Have you seen a doctor?”

  “I don’t need a doctor,” he insisted. “It’s like poison ivy. I put some Calamine on it and it’s some better.”

  She pressed her lips in disapproval. “I’ll tell you what’s going on, but then I’m taking you to see my dermatologist. Wyatt, that stuff is in your eyes. What if you lose your eyesight?”

  “Okay, whatever,” he said. “Would you please talk to me now?”

  Betsy took a sip of her coffee. “Don’t you want some breakfast? I ordered you some pancakes and bacon.”

  “Betsy!”

  “Okay. Here it is. I got a call from Stackpole’s clerk yesterday. It seems Callie is claiming you’ve been interfering with her time with Bo. He wants to see you in his office this afternoon.”

  “Me?” Wyatt was incredulous. “I haven’t done a damned thing. I don’t even call Bo anymore when he’s with her. Whatever she’s telling the judge, it’s total bullshit, Betsy.”

  “I know it is, but Stackpole doesn’t,” Betsy said.

  “Did the clerk give you any details about this so-called interference?”

  “Something about a birthday party Bo was supposed to go to this past weekend?”

  “Yeah? What about it? Callie deliberately planned a trip to Birmingham with Fatso, supposedly to look at houses. She knew last weekend was his best friend Scout’s birthday party at that new water park, but she planned the trip anyway and insisted Bo had to go. Bo was furious with her.” He laughed. “He confessed to me that he called her a shit.”

  “It’s not funny, Wyatt,” Betsy said.

  Wyatt slapped his hat on the table in disgust. “I didn’t tell him to call her that. In fact, I told him it wasn’t nice to call his mother names, although, privately, I can think of lots worse names to call her. And incidentally, he says Callie called him a shit first, and I happen to believe him. So that’s what this is about? Some name-calling? Seriously?”

  “It’s worse than that,” Betsy said. “When Callie went to pick him up at school on Friday, Bo wasn’t there. She claims she called you, but you never answered her phone call.”

  “Wait? Are you telling me Bo went missing? And this is the first I’m hearing of it?”

  “Calm down,” Betsy said. “I did some checking. Apparently, Bo never had any intention of going on that trip to Birmingham. He told Scout’s mom, Anna, his mom wanted him to spend the night with her and go to the party, and Anna, not knowing any better, took him home from school with her, and on to the party.”

  “That little con artist,” Wyatt said. “I don’t know whether I want to pat him on the back or whack him on his butt. But I still don’t see how Callie can say any of this is my fault. It was her weekend to have Bo. I didn’t call him, didn’t pick him up, didn’t hide him from his mom.”

  Betsy shrugged. “Don’t kill the messenger, okay? Callie’s made a serious charge, and Stackpole, in his totally random way, seems to find her story believable. So we’re going to see the judge this afternoon.” She looked over his shoulder and saw the waiter approaching with a tray of food. “Right after we get you your pancakes. And see my dermatologist.”

  * * *

  “Sir, remove those sunglasses and that hat,” the Honorable Cedric N. Stackpole said, as soon as Wyatt and Betsy were seated in his office.

  Wyatt shrugged, took off the glasses and the baseball hat. Stackpole cringed. “Are you having some medical issues?” he asked brusquely.

  “An allergic reaction to some underbrush he was clearing,” Betsy said. “He’s gotten a cortisone shot and he has some steroid cream. He’ll be fine.”

  Callie was sitting in a chair on the judge’s left side. She was dressed in a short pink skirt and a tight-fitting black tank top that displayed yet another tattoo, and glimpses of her abdomen whenever she moved. She leaned forward and grimaced. “You look like something out of a horror movie.” She glanced over at her lawyer. “I don’t want my son to see him like that. It’s upsetting.”

  “I’m fine,” Wyatt said
, clenching and unclenching his fists. “The swelling has already started to go down. It’s not contagious. Bo has seen me with poison ivy before.”

  “Let’s stick to the subject at hand, shall we?” Stackpole said. He looked down at a file on his desk. “Mrs. Keeler, you’re alleging that Mr. Keeler is interfering with your son’s visits with you? Something about a birthday party?”

  “Bo knew we’d been planning this trip to Birmingham, to look at houses,” Callie said. “Wyatt knew it, too. We’d been planning the trip for weeks, and then suddenly, Bo was having a fit over going, because of some little party a friend was having. When I went to pick him up from school on Friday, he wasn’t there!”

  She leaned across her lawyer and glared at Wyatt. “You put him up to this. And I know it.”

  “Put him up to what?” Wyatt demanded. Betsy gave her client a small headshake, warning him not to be baited.

  “Bo deliberately lied to his friend’s mother, told her I wanted him to spend the night with them that night, so he could go to the party! He even packed a bathing suit and pajamas and hid them in his school backpack,” Callie said. “He never would have done that on his own, not without his father giving him the idea.”

  The judge eased back in his leather desk chair. “Mr. Keeler, did you suggest to your son that he disobey and lie to his mother?”

  “Absolutely not,” Wyatt said. “This is the first I’m hearing about any of this. Bo did tell me his mother had scheduled a trip out of town, and he was upset over having to miss his friend’s party that he’d been looking forward to for weeks. He even admitted he called his mother a bad name. But when I told him that wasn’t acceptable behavior, he told me his mother called him that name first.”

  Stackpole raised an eyebrow. “What kind of bad name?”

  “Bo told me his mother called him a little shit,” Wyatt said calmly.

  “Ridiculous,” Callie snapped.

  Stackpole’s head swung in her direction. “Do you deny calling your son that name?”

  Her face reddened. “Bo’s been hostile to me for the last few months. He acts out, talks back. Whenever he comes back from a visit with his father, he’s belligerent and defiant. And he’s openly disrespectful to my fiancé.”