“Okay, bye,” Courtney said into the phone. “Love you, too. Big smooches, I won’t be late.” She hung up and gave Zoe a quick hug. “Hey, your skin’s all broken out.”
“I know.”
“Arnie’s cooking fish,” Courtney said sotto voce, as she adjusted her pistachio-colored sarong and white halter top. To ensure that they showed off her figure to best advantage, Zoe thought. Tall, wheat-colored hair and thin, that was Courtney.
“I’ll eat salad.”
“Oh, my God.” Janna, arranging the larkspur in a vase, clapped a hand to her mouth. “I forgot all about you, Zoe. Arnie wanted salmon and—”
“Don’t worry about it, Mom.” Janna would self-flagellate for the rest of the evening, and Zoe didn’t want to hear it, especially since nine times out of ten Janna served fish when she invited them to dinner.
“Ever tried Benadryl?” Arnie appeared in the kitchen, carrying a platter of salmon. “That would clear it right up.”
“Yep.” She looked at Arnie, who was wearing white pants, the stretchy waist kind that older men played golf in, and a yellow polo-neck shirt with, naturally, Seacliff Country Club embroidered in discreet small lettering above the breast pocket. “Doesn’t help.”
“I could always keep it under control.” Janna had started assembling a salad, overlapping circles of cucumbers, radishes and tomato on a bed of finely chopped lettuce. “I just didn’t have time to be constantly after you to do it.” She stood back to survey her handiwork. “That’s the best I can do with iceberg. I meant to ask you to bring some of your little lettuces, Zoe.” She turned to look at her daughter, frowned and leaned over to lightly stroke the top of Zoe’s head, much as she might have petted a small dog.
“Woof,” Zoe said
“Did you have it cut again?”
“Just the bangs. Did it myself. Attractive, huh?”
“Honey.” Janna’s expression was strained. “Why do you do this sort of thing? I’d give you the money for a decent haircut.”
Zoe raked her fingers through her hair. She’d paid last month’s overdue feed-store bill with the forty dollars—or however much haircuts cost these days—she’d saved by not going to the beauty shop.
“I like it,” she said.
Janna shook her head. “You have absolutely no vanity.”
“Is that a good thing?”
Arnie was banging around, opening cabinets, setting out glasses. “Pay a million dollars for a place, and the damn doors don’t shut properly. Say Zoe, d’you check out that entrepreneur site I told you about?”
Zoe ate a cherry tomato from the salad. “No.” Through the tomato, it came out dlo. “Hey, did anyone catch Phillip Barry on TV?”
“Zoe’s content to just muddle along,” Janna told Arnie apologetically. “Courtney’s my ambitious one. She takes after me. She knows that success doesn’t come seeking you out, you have to actively pursue it.”
“They might put me on commission,” Courtney explained as she leaned against the counter. “I saw him, Zoe. Phillip Barry. Actually, I often see him around Seacliff.” She looked at Arnie. “We know the Barrys from way back.”
Janna loudly cleared her throat.
Courtney grinned. “Oops.”
“The Barrys were neighbors of ours,” Janna said. “For a while.”
“We used to play with their kids,” Courtney said. “Phillip was…what, three or four years older than me?” She looked at Zoe. “Remember cannibal?”
“Vaguely.” Zoe turned to look out of the window. Brett and his cousins sat on the edge of a frothing hot tub. Brett was saying something and the other two were laughing. Ellen lifted a leg and splashed hard, showering Brett with a spray of water. The scene, obviously full of good-natured fun, seemed light-years away from her childhood memories.
One year, it seemed the Barry kids and Courtney had spent the entire summer playing cannibal in this great big metal bathtub. She could still see Phillip Barry’s hateful smirk. He’d looked straight at her arms with their big red blotches and said, “You’ll poison the pot.”
And then the other kids had all laughed, even Courtney. “Screw you,” Zoe had said. “I wouldn’t go in there for a million dollars. I don’t like Barry cooties in my food.”
Zoe stayed at the window, watching Brett, who had moved to sit next to Ellen. They were all laughing now. She wondered what they were talking about. Had Brett told them about this girlfriend his father had mentioned? Probably. She suddenly felt shut out, and somehow extraneous.
“The other kids wouldn’t let Zoe play cannibal,” Courtney was telling Arnie. “They thought her rash was contagious. Remember that, Zoe? How you got so mad?”
“Not really,” Zoe lied. Even now, she ached for the fierce little kid she’d been then. Locked in the bathroom, crying and scratching her legs and arms until she drew blood. Maybe Phillip Barry was God’s gift to medicine, but she could only think of him as a grown-up version of a horrible, snobby boy with a knack for cruelty.
“Oh, her skin wasn’t that bad,” Janna said. “It just flared up now and then because she forgot to put stuff on it. Remember all those salves I used to buy? If you’d just used them the way you were supposed to, you wouldn’t have had the flare-ups.”
Zoe turned from the window to stare at Janna. The scaly, oozing outbreaks at the backs of her knees had been so bad that it hurt to walk. Every day had been like that. Sitting on her bike, gears disengaged, a hand against the wall to keep her stationary, frantically pedaling around and around to unstick her legs. Had her mother really forgotten all that?
“Well, let’s talk about something else,” Janna said brightly. “Arnie, hon, what do you think Zoe could get for that house of hers if she put it on the market?”
“PAM SAID you should take Saint-John’s-wort,” Brett told Zoe the next morning as she was sweeping up the shards of a coffee cup she’d accidentally knocked off the counter. “She said it helped her when she was getting mad about everything.”
Zoe practiced deep breathing. Okay, breaking the coffee mug hadn’t been an accident. It was more like leftover anger from the night before. And hearing Pam’s name this morning did nothing to improve her mood. Pam, Denny’s twenty-eight-year-old surfer-chick bride. Pam wore neon-colored bikinis and bodysurfed. Last week in a late-night phone call Denny had asked Zoe if she could get by with half of the monthly child-support check because he wanted to surprise Pam with a trip to Hawaii to celebrate their three-month anniversary. Zoe had sweetly suggested that he do something anatomically impossible with his surfboard.
After Brett went off to school, Zoe slipped on her gardening clogs and went outside to augment the soil in the flower beds. Physical work to shake the surly, disgruntled aftertaste that family matters tended to leave in her mouth. An hour or so later, she looked up to see a guy in bib overalls and a straw hat pulling down the steep driveway towing a horse trailer behind a battered white truck. By the time she reached him, he’d unloaded a tan-and-white Shetland pony from the trailer and was leading it toward her.
“Heard from the feed-store guy that you keep a few animals.” He patted the pony’s neck. “This one here’s looking for a home. Used to give kids rides in a petting zoo, but she’s getting along in years. Ready for retirement,” he said with a laugh. “Know exactly how she feels.”
“Hold on.” Zoe ran into the house,