Fools Paradise (21 page)

When he realized that Bobbyjay Morton could make it worse by telling her how cold-bloodedly he had left her in danger, it made him crazy.

He would have to handle this very, very carefully.

At least she hadn't crumpled like last time.
Oh,
Dio mio,
my
angelina,
I put off teaching you how to be tough and now it's too late.
She faced the
strumenti
in the Local alone. With luck, she was blaming her fiancé that she got harassed, just as she blamed her Goomba in the cafeteria.

Marty rubbed so hard that the Turtle Wax dried and brightened under his chamois.

Of course if Bobbyjay managed to keep her happy, Marty Dit stood a good chance of losing his cook and housekeeper.

He didn't believe this fake engagement for a minute. That Bobbyjay Morton had the hots for his niece, that he believed. That she loved that big dumb lummox, no. No, he'd pushed them into this and he would have to be very careful how he pushed them out of it. Gently. Cleverly.

He was good at clever.

He leaned in the Targa's open window and beeped the horn.

Wesley came running out. “Grandpa?”

“Call me Goomba. You're one quarter Italian, for chrissake, kid, talk like it. Come over here.”

“Hey, did you know Tony is doing dishes in there?” Wesley was beside himself with mystified glee. “He tried to dump the job on me 'cause he's a journeyman and I'm not even an apprentice yet. I told him it'd be a grievance to the Board if I laid a hand on 'em. Not being even an apprentice yet,” the kid said, hinting.

“Never mind that. I need to talk to you.”

Wesley felt properly about Daisy. It wouldn't take much convincing to get him organized.

“We have a problem,” Daisy said hollowly when she got into Bobbyjay's Jeep. “And thanks for driving me. I don't feel like driving yet.” She still had bruises all over her yin-yang from falling in her body harness.

“What's the problem?” Bobbyjay said.

“Mom wants you to come to the cottage in Lake Geneva with us next week.”

Bobbyjay put the Jeep in gear and roared away from the curb. “Okay.”

He was way too calm. How annoying. “She expects us to have sex.”

“What!?” Bobbyjay hit the brake, tossing Daisy against her seat belt with a jerk that woke up all her bruises. “She wants what?”

She noticed he was wearing a torn tee shirt that let the muscles peek out.

“Mom wants us,” she enunciated, “to have sex. Right there at the cottage. So she can find out from me afterward if you're any good,” Daisy added maliciously, enjoying the fuschia blush on his face and neck.

“Guk.” His eyeballs swiveled toward her.

“Yup. Oh, and Mom told Goomba she'd skin him alive if he started anything with your family. I felt like a total idiot. She had him around her finger in twelve seconds flat. I guess you were right about how the feud got stopped the first time,” she said, depressed. “I mean, thank goodness she can do that. I just feel like—there was a time when Goomba used to listen to me. Not because he was scared of me but because he loved me.”
Those days are over,
she thought glumly.
A new order.

Then it occurred to her. Did Mom's intervention mean she didn't have to stay engaged to Bobbyjay? She was surprised at how unpleasant she found that thought.

“Wait, go back to the part where we have sex,” Bobbyjay said, and almost ran a stop light.

Daisy hid a smile. “She probably won't ask you. She'll ask me. Although, I don't know. She shocked the pasta out of me last night.”

“But,” he said. Daisy waited, but no more words came out of her cherry-pink chauffeur.

“She did tell me about a million sex tricks to try on you. We'd, uh, been drinking a little. God, I had no idea my Mom was such a slut. Did you know she used to date Badger, after she divorced my Dad? I suppose that's why—” Daisy stopped, realizing that it wouldn't be politic to refer to her childhood crush on Badger and Badger's tiresome insistence on preserving her virtue.

Bobbyjay's color was darkening. He pulled into their usual Burger King and ordered pancakes for her, coffee for himself.

“It won't come to anything. I'll just lie,” she finished, suddenly ashamed of teasing him.

“Couldn't you have lied before?”

“Relax.” She patted him on the knee.

He sputtered, “How can I relax? Your grandfather's going to expect me to take your cherry under his roof while he's there, and then your Mom will give director's notes afterward! He'll kill me!”

“Nonsense. He won't be there. Besides, Mom's put her foot down. You should have seen him, he looked utterly crushed.”

“Are you telling me he thinks you're not a virgin?” Bobbyjay bellowed, and the guy in BMW in the next lane turned his head.

“Keep it down, will ya? And what makes you so sure I'm a virgin?”

“C'mon, Daze.” He looked down at her with a patronizing expression and she wanted to jab a plastic fork in his thigh. “He knows.”

“How do you know? Badger Kenack lived with us for two years.”

“When you were a kid,” Bobbyjay said dismissively. “Plus, he's still alive. Marty Dit would of killed him.”

“There are other males in the world besides Badger.”

“Not for you,” he said, and Daisy suffered another shock at Bobbyjay's always-amazing shrewdness.

He's in love with me and he knows I've cared about Badger all my life. He knows I'm a virgin. He gets me work and he gives and takes punches for me and he sticks up for me to Pete Packard.

And he didn't,
she realized,
he didn't hesitate for a moment about coming to Lake Geneva.

She eyed him. Complicated guy, Bobbyjay.

Bobbyjay had no idea what to expect of a summer place owned by Marty Ditorelli. The “cottage” turned out to have eight bedrooms, a three-car garage with a jet-ski and a dinghy in the third bay, a TV the size of a small Porsche, and a dock directly on the lake infested by a year's supply of mosquitos.

To Bobbyjay's dismay, Mom Ditorelli (“please call me Fran”) took him upstairs to a guest room and prodded the king-size bed.

“You're so tall,” she kept saying. “I hope this will be comfortable.” For a woman dying to break her daughter's cherry on a stagehand, she had a pretty worried look.

“Mom Dit—uh, Fran,” Bobbyjay said, interrupting her, “are you sure you want this? I mean, me and Daisy sharing a room? Like, it would be okay with me if you wanted us to, uh,” he swallowed, “wait for the wedding. Night.” He cleared his throat, thinking of Daisy's low riders and crop top. “Wedding night.”

“Why do you ask?” Fran said. “Is Daisy a screamer? I always screamed for oral sex. Back in the day,” she added sadly.

“A-hum!” He choked.

“Never mind. TMI, isn't that what you kids say? I won't tell you about her father, that really would be too much information, but I will say that nothing worries me so much as the thought she might be taken in by some smooth talker who's too selfish to make her happy.” Fran lowered her voice. “That's a big reason why I'm so glad it's you she's chosen. I know you, Bobbyjay. You were a good kid and you'll be a good husband.”

He couldn't argue with that. He just had no clue whether he would get to be Daisy's good husband.

“I'll, uh, try to take good care of her.” The thought of being a good husband to Daisy had crossed his mind a few times lately. It made his lungs inflate like hot air balloons and the top of his head flap in the breeze. How to pull it off, he had not the remotest guess.

What worried him was her working in the Local. He pictured what could happen to her on some job when he wasn't available to bat cleanup, and the hair rose on the back of his neck. He still woke up at night watching her slip through the truss spot cage and fall to a yanking stop at the end of her safety, her face screwed into a mask of pain.
How can I take care of her,
he thought,
if this is what she wants to do with her life?

“I don't want to make you self-conscious,” Mom Ditorelli said now, “but I'll be checking with her later. To make sure she's really happy.”

“Um, Fran, I'm, uh, okay with talking about this with you,” he lied. “I mean you're cool, you're a cool Mom. But maybe we shouldn't talk about it in front of Marty Dit? You know, her grandfather,” he said, making one-handed see-saw gestures, “probably dandled her on his knee and gave her baths and all that, maybe he's not really ready to, uh, think that far ahead into her future.”

Fran looked at him with approval. “That's very sensitive of you, Bobbyjay. What a thoughtful suggestion.”

Bobbyjay managed a smile. “Yeah.”

All in all, he was relieved when they went downstairs for hamburgers.

Fran went after the kid Wesley next. “What do you hear from your parents?”

Wesley glowered over the mustard.

Daisy handed Bobbyjay the picalilli jar. “Open this please? Mom, lay off. You ask that every time. You know Wesley's folks don't call.”

“They called on my birthday,” Wesley muttered.

“They're touring in Europe,” Fran told Bobbyjay, who was twisting the top off the picalilli. “His mother's orchestra is very well thought of there.”

“And his dad is their roadie,” Daisy finished. “Just like mine.”

“Only probably without venereal disease,” Fran said, and bit savagely into her hamburger.

Bobbyjay choked on his pickle.

“Mom's still bitter,” Daisy said.

“Here we go, two more rare burgers, two medium, and a pile of sissyburgers,” Marty Dit said. His joviality was scary. He wore a big white puffy chef's hat and an apron that said
Kiss the Cook.
All his teeth showed under his paisano mustache. “Did Daisy set you up in a room?” he said to Bobbyjay.

“Ugh.” The pickle hunkered down in Bobbyjay's throat and wouldn't budge.

“I put the kids in the big front room,” Fran said.

Bobbyjay saw her eyes lock with Marty Dit's. Daisy pounded him on the back.

Marty Dit turned pale. He glared lethally into Fran's eyes and stammered, “It's g-got a nice view.”

“True. Be sure to draw the drapes tonight, Bobbyjay,” Fran said. “And lock your door. Wesley walks in his sleep.”

“I do not!” Wesley said. He scowled at Bobbyjay, and Bobbyjay remembered that the kid was in love with Daisy.

“He doesn't walk in his sleep,” Daisy agreed. “He just said that when Mom caught him pointing his shotgun mic at the neighbors across the lake.”

“Shush?” Bobbyjay said, swallowing pickle.

Marty Dit turned that scary-jovial grin on him. “Boy, I hope you won't hold it against me that I'm running for the Exec Board against Bobby Senior. This time I'm not fooling around. I've rented an office and I'm sending out campaign literature and everything. But of course with you two lovebirds mending the fence between the two families, Bobby Senior will understand there's no hard feelings. Calamari salad?”

Panicking in the face of all this fake good humor, Bobbyjay said, “Uh, I don't eat that fishy stuff.”

“Now that,” Fran said, eyeing his shoulders, “is a real shame.”

Daisy slapped Bobbyjay's arm. “Oh, you do too. What about all those fish you and I made. That day you kissed me in the back yard?”

Wesley choked this time.

“C'mon,” Daisy said with an innocent air. “I personally guarantee anything you eat in this house.”

Marty Dit pointed a three-foot-long barbeque fork at him. He turned an emotional shade of purple. “You'll eat what my granddaughter offers you and like it.”

Her mother watched Bobbyjay interestedly, and Marty Dit turned his attention to his burger, his face dark.

Bobbyjay stared at him like a rabbit meeting its first Mack truck.
I'm a dead man,
he thought. He especially didn't like the sound of Wesley's shotgun microphone. Those things could hear through walls.

“I thought you said your grandfather wouldn't be here,” he hissed to Daisy while they were carrying dishes into the house.

“He must have changed his mind,” Daisy whispered back.

“Jesus. He's going to kill me.”

“No he won't. He knows how important this is to me.”

“What do you mean, this?” Bobbyjay said, feeling pathetic for fishing.

“Us. This engagement. Not killing you.” She sent him a warning glance and he noticed her cousin Wesley coming into the kitchen with the leftovers. “I think we're going to turn in,” she said to Wesley. “Tell Goomba I'll make pancakes in the morning?”

“Uh, don't do that,” Wesley said, looking nervous. “I mean not yet. I think Goomba and Aunt Fran want you to, to bring out some gelato.”

Daisy rolled her eyes. “All right, I'll get it. Now can I have some time with my fiancé? Alone?”