“Thanks a lot!”
“You’re quite welcome, my dear.”
“We can leave anytime you’re ready,” Mary said, visibly calming herself.
“Are there just the two of you?” he asked.
“The mayor had other plans,” she said tartly, “and the brass band has disbanded.”
“There’s really no need for sarcasm,” he said quietly. “Actually, I prefer it this way.” He banged his empty glass down and stood up. “Let s be off, then.” He was almost at the door before we could get to our feet.
“The next time I get my hands on that sister of mine...” Mary muttered.
“I’d better stay over, don’t you think?”
“To keep me from killing him, if nothing else.”
Aboard the Baylady, Morgan Stonebarger settled himself in one of the fishing chairs immediately. Mary helped me cast off. He said, “Are you a charter fisherman, Wescott?”
“That’s right.”
“Before I go back I’ll take a day with you.”
“Sixty a day.”
He gave me a cold smile. “My dear fellow, if I were concerned about the rate, I would have asked about it.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Stonebarger, sir.”
“Both of you seem to have a talent for sarcasm,” he said, and swiveled the chair and sat looking out over the transom, presenting us with a huge expanse of excellently tailored back.
Mary came and stood close beside me at the wheel. “Stay alert,”’ she murmured. “The hack of your neck is so-o-o red, sweetie.”
“If I had five or six men here to hold him, I’d walk right up to him and I’d—”
“Uh-huh. This is as weird as Liz has ever got, bless her.”
“Cheer up, woman,” I said.
We were out of the inlet, rounding the entrance marker. I shoved the throttles up and my Baylady came sweetly alert, quartering across the choppy water of Charlotte Harbor. Mary swayed against me accidentally with the change in motion, and I took my right hand off the wheel and with an elaborate casualness put my arm around her waist. I thought for a little while she might endure an intimacy so harmless, but I soon felt the tensions and restraint build up. She moved away and I put both hands hack on the wheel.
There was a shared scene in our past and it always came between us. It happened two years ago. She was nearing the end of a two-month stay at her island, and between charters I’d used up all her time that she’d let me have. One day we took a sailboat out into the Gulf and beached it at high noon on La Costa Island. We swam, ate our sandwiches, sprawled on the sand. We kissed with increasing enthusiasm until she broke it up very abruptly, her eyes wide and startled.
“Why?” I demanded. That is ever the forlorn question of the spurned male. “Why, honey?”
“Because you are a sweet guy, Barney, a very simpático and amusing guy, and as I have just learned, a very exciting guy.”
“You’re reading the wrong lines. Those are mine.”
“And because I am not a random girl with random habits. I am a for-keeps girl, and it just isn’t in the cards.”
“Shuffle and deal again. Maybe it is.”
“No, Barney. I work at something I’m good at. I like to be good at things. I wouldn’t be good at all at being a wife. Everything I heat sticks to the pan. Children terrify me. And anyhow. I’d either have to drag you North or he a dead weight on you down here. So we stop right now, before we’ve done any kind of damage to anybody.”
“But—”
“We’ll be friends, the way we have been.”
“That isn’t exactly what I had in mind, miss.”
“That nice breeze is getting a little sickly, Captain. Let’s get hack while we can.”
Once the two of you have played that familiar scene, it leaves you in a kind of emotional limbo. You can’t get back to where you were and there’s no place else to go. In the two years since it happened I’ve found no one I could classify as a reasonably adequate facsimile, nobody with eyes so blue.
Some fifteen minutes later Mary’s little island began to emerge from the larger islands beyond it. As I slowed for her private channel marker Stonebarger came forward to stand behind me.
“This is it?” he asked with a flavor of incredulity.
“Your home away from home, Morgan,” she said.
“I was expecting something much larger.”
“We’ll get the dredges and drag lines working first thing in the morning,” Mary told him.
He looked at her with a ponderous vacuity. “Ho, ho,” he said. “More sarcasm. Slow it down, Wescott. I want to get a longer look at it from this angle. First impressions are important. Where’s the tide right now?”
“An hour off full, on the ebb,” I told him.
“Then those flats over there could he filled cheaply, I suppose.”
Mary stared at the flats and then turned and stared at him. “Nifty place for howling alleys,” she said.
“Ho, ho,” he replied with a certain dutifulness. “Is there high ground over there?”
“Indian mounds,” she said.
“Can I get back in there easily?”
“Not easily, but if you want to, you can make it. The bugs are fierce, though.”
“Um,” he said absently, staring with great intensity. “Okay, Wescott. You may take her in now.”
I hacked the Baylady into the covered slip where the ancient Beastie was usually moored. Stonebarger bounded up onto the dock. While Mary and I were making the lines fast, the scout mosquitoes whistled a billion of their compadres out of the swamps. We made a run for the house, prancing and slapping ourselves.
When we were inside. Stonebarger asked, “Will I be staying here?”
“No,” said Mary. “I will he staying here. And Barney will he staying here, on that couch. And you will he staying over in the cabin. It’s all ready for you. But I’d better come over with you and show you how to work the hot-water thing and the lamps.”
“If there’s anything beyond my ability, I’ll ask for help, Dawes.”
She stared at him. “Dawes?”
“Excuse me. I forgot your local custom, Mary. Is that more suitable, my dear?”
“Just who do you think—”
But he ignored her because he had spotted her work area in a large alcove off the living room. Still carrying his suitcase and topcoat, he walked by her and went to the big tilted drafting table. We both followed him. He looked at the nearly completed drawing pinned to the hoard. He turned and smiled at Mary Dawes. I had the curious feeling he was actually looking at her for the first time.
“A hobby, Mary?” he asked. “Or isn’t it yours?”
Her throat worked visibly as she swallowed. “It’s mine. A poor thing, but mine own. I prefer it to knitting.”
He looked at it again and put his coat and suitcase down. “Container for what?”
“A new hand lotion. Expensive.”
“The draftsmanship is fairly good,” he said, “but the conception is tasteless. It’s a fraudulent version of decent classic proportions. We call it Supermarket Moderne.”
“What?” she said. She looked stunned. “Who are you to— Listen, the market research behind that design is—”
“It will sell,” he said. “Of course it will sell. There is almost no limit to the ability of the American public to absorb contrived bad taste. But the true area of integrity in design is to create something that is clean and beautiful and also salable.” He looked around at her working sketches of other projects, taped to the alcove walls. “But you do not have that kind of talent, my dear. And don’t be upset. Few do.”