Skinny Dipping (4 page)

Joe wondered whether Prescott would be there, too. From what Mimi described, this picnic had to be very close to his house.

“Sure?”

“Absolutely. Believe me, I won’t lack for attention.”

No, he shouldn’t think so, he mused as he drove the short distance. As the mud and weeds began to flake off, a nice set of features was emerging. Not classically beautiful, not cute, but oddly attractive.

He followed the Y she described to a narrow, rutted drive lined on both sides with cars and pickups and a few SUVs. Groups of people and flocks of children were passing back and forth through a row of little, dilapidated cabins.

“Told you everyone would be here,” Mimi said. “Pull off here. See the cottage at the far end? The one with the striped beach towel hanging outside the front window? If you could pull your car up really, really close to the door, I can dash in before anyone sees me.”

“You got it,” Joe said, bumping over tree roots and hummocks until the back door of the car was parallel to the screened door on the cabin Mimi had pointed out. He put his arm over the back of the seat and turned to look at her. “There you go.”

“Thanks, Joe,” she said. He wondered what her hair would look like without the shrubbery. “You saved the day. I owe you.”

“My pleasure, Mimi.” Surprisingly, he wasn’t overstating the matter. Sure, he could have done without the dirt, but he had been richly diverted for a short while.

She pushed the car door open and swung her legs out, putting her injured foot gingerly on the ground. She winced.

“Do you need some help getting in?” Joe asked.

“No. I’ll be fine as soon as I get a pair of tweezers in my hand.” She smiled. “I appreciate the offer this time, though.”

She prepared to bolt, but then stopped. She turned her head to look at him.

“Are you hungry?” she asked.

“Ah…I…Sure.”

“If you’ll wait here while I get this two-by-four out of my foot and clean up a little, I can promise you the best homemade picnic fare you’re ever likely to have. How about letting me repay you a little for your kindness?”

Joe looked down at his shirt. “I’m not company ready. I’m a mess.”

“No one will notice,” Mimi promised. “Not here. Besides, most of the dark splotches were just water and it’s almost dried now.”

Joe considered, which in itself was surprising. Joe was not the sort of man who appeared in public in a dirty shirt. But the shirt wasn’t really
that
dirty, and as Mimi had pointed out, as it dried the stains
were
less noticeable, and he
was
hungry. He’d just be very careful of which home-prepared foods he chose.

Besides, it wasn’t as if Prescott were waiting for him with bated breath. Most likely he’d forgotten Joe was coming. Prescott might not even be there himself. Once Joe had visited Prescott at MIT, where Prescott taught, only to be greeted by a note on his apartment door that said Prescott had gone to New York for the weekend. Prescott had neglected to leave a key.

“What do you say?” Mimi asked.

“Is there somewhere I can wash my hands?”

“You bet.”

After digging a half-inch-long thorn from her heel, washing her hair, and scrubbing herself clean, Mimi looked for something to wear. Unfortunately, she hadn’t driven into Fawn Creek to do laundry in more than a week. She tried on the sweatshirt and pants she’d worn while scraping the grills that morning, but even by her admittedly relaxed standards the greasy streaks were off-putting. The rest of her clothes were in no better shape. It had been that kind of week.

Finally, in desperation, she’d searched the crawl space above the cottage and hit pay dirt: a long-forgotten beach bag filled with teenagers’ beach wear. The girl who’d worn the clothes might well be a grandmother by now, but Mimi didn’t care. They didn’t smell, they weren’t dirty, ergo they were fit for a picnic. She held up a violently blue terry cloth beach robe with orange starfish embroidered along the yoke and slipped it over her head, then hobbled out in search of her rescuer. She found him standing a short distance from the picnic tables, eyeing the feast spread out on them.

She eyed Joe.

He was absolutely gorgeous in a Fortune 500 sort of way, handsome, sophisticated, and
really
well-groomed. His dark hair gleamed; his blue eyes gleamed; his square jaw, shaved as smooth as a river stone, gleamed; even his blue dress shirt gleamed with the soft sheen of really expensive Egyptian cotton—where it wasn’t splotched with faintly damp green marks.

In the Land of Ten Thousand Cabela’s catalogues, by dress alone he stood out like a rainbow trout amongst bullheads. His shirt cuffs were rolled up over nice masculine forearms in what she suspected was his nod to “casual,” his camel-colored slacks had a crease in them, and his loafers—doubtless made by some Italian in a little workshop in Florence—looked as soft as butter. She guessed him to be in his early forties, a solid, broad-shouldered man who not only made Armani look good, but even stripped of his couture, she suspected, wouldn’t be anyone you’d be in a hurry to throw a stadium blanket over, either.

Not only did he look good, but he oozed confidence, sophistication, and composure. Lots of composure. In other words, the guy was Cary Grant. Cary Grant on the set of
The Beverly Hillbillies.
Which, she supposed, made her Ellie Mae—with a few more years behind her.

She must have looked like a complete madwoman, popping up like the creature from the black lagoon on the other side of the poor man’s car and then running away like an idiot. Luckily, she’d never been burdened with much self-consciousness.

“Hi.”

He looked around and smiled. He had a killer smile. It reached right up into his eyes.

“Hi. You’re clean.”

“Soap’ll do that.”

She’d always had a thing for a really good male voice, and Joe had one of the sexiest she’d heard, the sort of voice that affected your body at the cellular level, like twenty-year-old Scotch: smoky, smooth, and intoxicating.

“Someone left it here,” Mimi said, seeing his gaze slip to the smiling starfish romping across her chest. “Mid-seventies, I’d say.”

He looked down at her feet encased in worn, cheap pink flip-flops. She’d wrapped her foot in gauze and secured it with sticky tape. Both foot and gauze were already a little grimy.

“Is your foot okay?” he asked.

“Fine. I popped that thorn out like a pit from a ripe cherry. You know how those things are: the instant they’re gone, you feel better.”

A look of alarm crossed his face. “You didn’t use your fingers, did you? I mean you
did
sterilize a needle or something?”

She looked at him with amusement. Joe was a germaphobe? Cute. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I fired up the Bic and put flame to metal until it was so hot I dropped the damn tweezers on the floor.”

At his involuntary wince, she laughed. “I’m messing with you,” she admitted, succeeding in making Joe look even more disconcerted. She suspected not many people “messed” with Joe. “How about I take you on a culinary tour of the place?”

She led him between the picnic tables, their faded red-and-white-checkered tablecloths billowing around their legs. At least a hundred people milled around the grounds, strolling along the paths, settled in cheap lawn chairs in front of the cabins, or ensconced within their small screened porches. A group was playing volleyball on the beach, swearing and laughing as those on the sidelines cheered.

Mimi’s favorite cousin, a blond giant named Gerald who’d been tormenting her since childhood, hollered at her to join them, and she hollered back good-naturedly, “Can’t you see I’m limping? There’s a reason I’m limping! I’m injured! Geesh!”

She looked over her shoulder at Joe. “I can’t spike, but I can dig.”

“Me, too.”

She glanced at him sharply, uncertain whether he was now messing with her. He didn’t look like the pickup-game sort. The type who had a personal trainer, yes. Maybe polo. Not beach volleyball.

She brought him to a halt in front of a fragrant, rubicund pile of thinly sliced, garlicky-smelling meat. “I suggest starting with a sandwich.”

Joe regarded her with an oddly uncomfortable expression before carefully surveying the bounty in front of him. Then, just as cautiously, he picked up a plate and speared a slice of spiral-cut ham. Mimi regarded him with pity. With all the spectacular homemade cuisine staring him in the face, he would have to choose that.

“Ah, just so you aren’t disappointed, that ham is”—she glanced swiftly left and right, looking for eavesdroppers, then leaned over the tray of deviled eggs between them and whispered—“water packed.”

“Water packed,” he repeated.

“Yup. Johanna’s been sticking cloves in commercial hams for years and passing them off as her own.”

“Johanna?”

“One of my great-aunts,” she said. “Everyone knows, but no one says anything. No, no,” she said as he withdrew his poised fork. “You can’t put it back! She’s watching. You don’t want to hurt her feelings, do you? Put it on the plate. Good. Now cut off a piece as if you can’t wait. Now smack your lips. Go on, smack them!” she whispered urgently.

He smacked, eyeing Mimi cautiously as she nodded approvingly.

“There. You’ve made her happy. Now let me make you a real sandwich.” She slapped down two slices of rye bread on a Chinette plate and heaped the homemade corned beef on one slice before handing the plate to Joe.

A movement at her feet drew her attention. She looked down in time to see a small, hairy, dirty brown face poke out from under the table. It was the same ugly little dog she and Birgie had spied earlier chasing the splotchball assassin. Joe tore a piece of corned beef from the edge of his sandwich and dropped it. The dog snatched it out of the air and disappeared.

“Your dog?” Joe asked.

“No, I don’t know whose it is,” she said, casually uncovering the top of his sandwich and ladling on a creamy sauce. “Horseradish,” she said in answer to his questioning look. “Homemade. Really good.”

“Ah-huh.” He smiled and took a tentative bite. The uneasy expression disappeared, replaced by one of rapture. “I can’t tell you the last time I had anything homemade,” he said. “This is…It’s…”

“Just eat,” she said.

He ate.

“So, is this a yearly ritual?” he asked curiously after finishing the sandwich.

“God, I hope not,” she answered, laughing.

“Why?”

“Because this is a wake.”

“A wake?” Joe asked, pointedly eyeing the manically grinning orange starfish. “Interesting wake-wear you have on there. Most people just go the easy route and opt for black.”

She laughed. “It’s not supposed to be a solemn occasion. Ardis would have hated that.”

She cleaned up well, Joe thought. Really well. “Who is Ardis?” he asked.

“One of my great-aunts, Ardis Olson.” Some fond memory awoke a fleeting smile. “She would have been eighty-five today.”

“That’s a pretty long life.”

“It would have been a longer life still if she hadn’t tried to squeeze in another nine holes of golf.”

“Stroke?” he asked quietly.

“Nine iron,” she replied. “Her partner nailed her with a Titleist on the fourteenth hole of the Pelican Strand golf course while she was in the rough, searching for her ball.”

“Ouch.”

“Thank God, no,” she said. “The doctor has assured us Ardis literally never knew what hit her.”

“That’s nice,” while appropriate, just didn’t seem tactful, so Joe said, “That must be a comfort.”

“For most of us, yes. But her golf partner, Morris, has sworn never to play again. That’s Morris over there.” She gestured toward an affable-looking bald guy in canary yellow golf pants taking a practice swing with an imaginary golf club. He was surrounded by a critique group of similarly attired men.

“Just between us, I do not hold out much hope of that particular vow being honored for very long,” Mimi said.

“Maybe I should leave,” Joe suggested. “If this is some sort of memorial I’m crashing…”

“Please don’t,” Mimi answered. “Ardis has been blowing in the wind over the Mexican gulf since May. At least her ashes have, as per her request. We decided to have the memorial at Chez Ducky because everyone would be here and we thought it would be nice to have it on her birthday.”

“Chez Ducky? What’s Chez Ducky?”

“This”—she swept her arm out—“is Chez Ducky. Eighty acres of weedy lakeshore, scrub alder, and pine trees.”

“And all of these people are Olsons?” he asked.

“In one way or the other. The Olsons take the ‘end’ out of ‘extended.’ Once you’re part of this family, there’s no going back. Not because of divorce, remarriage, adoption, religious conversion, or sex reassignment,” she said. “If you’ve been declared ‘family,’ the only way out is death.”

He couldn’t imagine a family so large and inclusive and unplanned. He and Karen had had only one child. Even before Karen had died a dozen years ago, they’d never been the classic nuclear family. He’d been working overseas most of the ten years they’d been married, while Karen had stayed in Chicago and raised their son. It wasn’t what Joe had necessarily wanted; it had just worked out that way. Karen took pride and pleasure in being a stay-at-home mom, and Joe had done his part by making it possible for her to be one.

“But even that’s just an assumption. Or wishful thinking,” Mimi went on. “Actually, there’s hoards of Olsons on the Other Side just waiting to give the newly departed a big group hug.”

Joe regarded her narrowly. She returned his gaze with unblinking sincerity. He
didn’t
think she was putting him on, but he wasn’t entirely sure, and that knocked him a little off balance. Joe read most people as easily as Superman reads an eye chart.

She smiled. He relaxed. Of course she was kidding.

She waved her hand around the compound. “And everyone else you see here who isn’t related to the Olsons has long ties to Fowl Lake. Why, the Sbodas over there”—she pointed to a group of redheads with a predilection for plaid—“
may
have been the first family to build on the lake, though we Olsons fervently resist that notion. Besides,” she said smugly, “
we
have our original buildings. Those cottages over there? They’ve been here since before World War One.”

Unable to hide her pride, she continued. “Note the simplicity of the design, the clapboard exterior, the narrow porch, the length of the facade. Inside are twin rooms on either side of a central hall, a feature, you may be interested in knowing, that makes them the dictionary definition of ‘cottage.’ So do not make the outlanders’ mistake of calling them ‘cabins.’”

“Go on,” he said, actually interested.

“Well, the Olsons and the Sbodas were the first on the lake, and, as you can see, we are all still well represented. In fact”—she looked around—“excluding you, there isn’t anyone here without a pedigree going back at least three generations. The community around Fowl Lake is notoriously exclusive. We think of ourselves as sort of the Hamptons of the Bogs. Sans the money—Oh!” Mimi abruptly exclaimed, grabbing his elbow.

“You simply cannot miss these cashew bars,” she said, picking up a battered pan of gooey-looking stuff and prying a roughly rectangular-shaped piece out with her fingers. Joe winced.

“Susie must have just set these out,” she mumbled around a mouthful of bar. “They won’t last ten minutes once they’ve been discovered.”

She bumped the pan against his chest. Thus encouraged, he used a plastic fork to pry another square from the opposite corner. One bite told him all he had to know. Some things were worth risking your health for. In quick order, he’d stockpiled several more before moving out of the way of the incoming crowds swarming toward them like yellow jackets at a barbeque, alerted by some sixth sense to the cashew bars’ presence. Together, he and Mimi retreated, carefully shielding their bootie with paper napkins.

She led him to a bench completely encircling the trunk of an old ironwood tree and motioned for him to take a seat. She finished two more cashew bars before she spoke again.

“What’s your story, Joe? How did you come to these strange shores? Who are your people and are they waiting in the woods for your signal to attack? Do we stand in imminent danger of having our picnic raided and our cashew bars plundered?”

“Nope. I’m just visiting.”

“Oh? One of the new places?” Her friendliness faded a bit. “Which one?”

“I’m not exactly sure. It’s somewhere around here. I was on my way when I got the flat. Maybe you know—”

“Nah,” she clipped out before he could finish. “We don’t rub elbows with the McMansioners.”

Ouch.

“How long are you staying?” she asked.

“If I don’t get kicked out, the weekend.”

“Do you get kicked out of a lot of places?” Her face tilted up toward his. It was a piquant face. Definitely used to being au natural. Scrubbed and tanned and a little weathered. Unlike any of the few women he’d dated in the last decade, she didn’t have a bit of style to her.

He shrugged. “It’s the karaoke machine. People go crazy jealous when I break it out.”

She snickered. “Michael Bublé?”

“Paul Anka.”

She laughed, a full-throated and infectious sound, and glanced at him from beneath a fringe of dark lashes. They didn’t need any mascara to exaggerate their length. She was flirting, he realized. And so was he. When had he last casually flirted? But she was so distracting, and the circumstances of their meeting so bizarre, and the whole wake setting so odd, it seemed completely natural.

“Tell me more about your family,” he asked.

“What do you wanta know?” she replied around another mouthful of bar. “They’re just…family.”

She was wrong. There was no such thing as
just
family. “Who is who?” He angled his head toward the crowded picnic area. “How are you related?”

She blew out her cheeks and looked around. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Okay. Ardis, the deceased, was the oldest of six sibs. The next oldest is Birgie, another maiden lady. That’s Birgie over there, the one that looks like a truck driver.”

He followed Mimi’s gaze to where a square figure with short white hair sat splay-legged across the table from a tall, raw-boned woman with a single long gray braid streaming down her back.

“I thought she
was
a truck driver.”

Mimi pursed her lips and ignored this comment. “Believe me, the fact that neither of the girls married and that both spent their childhoods—and I use the term loosely—taking care of four younger brothers has not been lost on anyone. After Birgie came Emil, who is dead but survived by half a dozen grandchildren. The oldest one of his grandchildren is Gerry, the big guy who wanted me to play volleyball. He’s married to—forget it. Let’s stick with the principals.”

“Okay.”

“After Emil were the twins, Charles and Calvin. Calvin, too, is dead, but Charlie is one of the guys trying to improve Morris’s never-again-to-see-a-fairway swing.” She pointed to a tall, skinny old man wearing mirrored aviators, his hands on his hips as he stood silently watching Morris take another imaginary swing. “Charlie is a bachelor.”

Mimi then nodded to the woman with the long gray braid. “Sitting across from Birgie is Calvin’s widow, Johanna. Johanna of the water-packed ham? Charlie and Johanna have lately become an item. They think none of us know.

“After the twins came my grandpa John. He died a while back after marrying twice. The first one produced my father, John, and the second marriage, to Naomi…” She looked around. “She’s the one wearing a bedsheet.” She shrugged. “Anyway, the second marriage to Naomi produced my half-uncle, Bill.”

“Is your father here?” Joe asked, curious.

Her expression didn’t change an iota, but suddenly where there had been a relaxed, easy candor, there was a distance. “Nope. My parents were divorced when I was a baby.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Happens a lot,” she said brusquely.

“Anyway, my grandmother passed on early, and after a couple decades, Grandpa married Naomi and promptly got her pregnant with Half-Uncle Bill.”

“Which one is your half-uncle Bill?”

She looked around again. “Not here. But there’s his wife.” She pointed at a well-packaged brunette in a dark, short-sleeved dress.
“Debbie.”
Her upper lip curled as she said the name. “She’d be the one in obligatory black,” she said. “I suppose we should be thankful someone in the family has a sense of decorum.”

“You don’t like Debbie.”

“I don’t like her or dislike her. She alarms me.”

“Why’s that?”

“She always looks like she’s wondering what good use she can put me to and suspicious there might not be one,” Mimi confided.

“And you’re worried she might be right?” Joe asked, quietly sympathetic. He could imagine how unpleasant it would be to have someone question your value. Not that anyone had ever questioned his.

“God, no!” Mimi rocked back. “I’m worried that she’ll never figure out that she
is
right about me and leave me the hell alone! It’s exhausting just knowing she’s out there planning something or arranging something or fixing something. Just look at her.” Mimi jerked her head in the direction of the picnic tables where Debbie bustled about, older people scattering before her approach.

Joe studied Debbie. She didn’t seem so bad to him. A woman who saw confusion and imposed order; what was wrong with that?

“Is Bill also an organizer?”

“Nah,” she said. “Olson men are utterly and blissfully un-desirous of heading anything. Especially anything that has to do with Chez Ducky. I suspect it began when Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Günter wrote in his Chez Ducky journal, ‘I make decisions all the time but here, in this place of retreat and refuge, I refuse to make any.’”

The notion was as foreign to Joe as ritual disfigurement. He couldn’t imagine not
heading
things. Control was too important a thing to cede to the less capable. Not to mention irresponsible.

“Ever since then, the Chez has been strictly a matriarchy,” Mimi continued. “There are six legal heirs to the place, but everyone’s kids and spouses and whoever else wants to gets a say in what happens here. Every year, just before we close up the cottages, we have a family meeting to decide if anything needs to be decided. Ardis used to oversee that, and before her my great-grandmother Lena.”

It sounded to Joe like a criminally inefficient way of dealing with things. “What does this matriarch do?”

“Besides look wise at the end-of-the-year powwow? Just stuff related to Chez Ducky. Poll the family on things like whether we should get a phone line in here or just hope the microwave tower in Bemidji gets a stronger signal. Keep the golf scores for the family tournament. Make sure the inner tubes are patched.” She said this last with a solemnity that suggested it was one of the more important duties.

“You don’t have phone service?”

“Not a land line. We get cell on and off.”

“Who’ll be the matriarch now?”

“Birgie,” Mimi said. “She has large shoes to fill.”

“What if Birgie doesn’t want to fill Ardis’s shoes?” he asked conversationally.

“Oh, she doesn’t,” she said. “But it’s one of the last traditions the Olsons have. The oldest Olson woman has been here ruling the roost at Chez Ducky ever since Olsons bought the land.”

“If Birgie doesn’t want to do it, why not you?” he asked. It seemed a reasonable suggestion. She obviously cared about the place, and she was just as obviously intelligent. “Ever think of initiating a coup d’état?”

She burst into laughter. “
Me?
Ha! Nope. If Birgie doesn’t take the honors, someone else will, and we’ll just carry on like we’ve been carrying forever.”

She glanced toward the burr oaks at the far end of the compound. “Except for the view.”

He shifted. “The McMansions?”

She gave him a sharp glance. “Bingo.”

“I take it you’re not too happy about the, ah, recent lakeshore development.”

“Lakeshore?”
She eyed him narrowly. “Look, I may be fond of this place, but it’s like being fond of a ditzy relative who farts in public. You like ’em in spite of their shortcomings, not because of them. The only reason the Sbodas and Olsons and everyone else here have a place on Fowl Lake is because none of their families, even way back when prime lakeshore was cheap, could afford better.”

“But you’ve stayed for generations.”

“Well, it’s better than nothing,” she said practically. “None of us are wealthy enough to trade up. But now people like your friend have run out of premium lakeshore to exploit and are starting to take over the smaller lakes. Crappy lakes. Like this lake. Only they call ’em ‘wilderness lakes.’” She snorted derisively. “They’re running off the locals. Putting up monstrosities and eating up acreage and raising the property taxes until people who’ve been here for decades can’t afford to stay.”