Summer Breeze (15 page)
P
ete Roberts had broken just about every one of the Ten Commandments several times, plus any number of other offenses. Since drying out, taking some college classes, opening Rods-N-Ends, and starting to attend church, he had managed to rid himself of almost all these vices. But there was one he couldn’t avoid.
Every time he saw Patsy Pringle, Pete could feel himself heading straight for the devil’s workshop. He wanted to hold that woman in his arms. He wanted to kiss those sweet, sweet lips. And he wanted to—
“Pete? Are you coming, or are you just going to stand there looking like a big, hairy goon?” Patsy swung around, her hips aswaying as she sashayed toward the dessert table at the Fourth of July picnic.
Pete stood at the edge of the green, grassy expanse near the lake and stared. Never in his whole life had he seen anything like this Fourth of July celebration. It was better than the Christmas parades his mother had taken him to when he was a kid. It was better than the day his father got out of prison and the whole family went to McDonald’s for lunch. And it was a whole lot better than Pete’s two weddings, both of which had happened more or less by accident—being as it was hard to make a clear decision when you were drunk as a skunk.
On this beautiful summer day, everyone in Deepwater Cove had turned out for the festivities. Pete counted eleven grills loaded with pork steaks, sending up an aroma that would make a horsefly dizzy with joy. All fifteen of the neighborhood’s golf carts were decked out in red, white, and blue bunting. A giant flag had been strung up on one of the mud poles beside the dock. All that, not to mention the row of tables groaning with salads, chips, dips, sodas, and desserts of every flavor and color. It was enough to make a grown man break right down and cry.
“What’re you hanging back for, Pete?” Patsy waited for him to catch up and bumped him with her hip. “Help me carry this watermelon before I fall off my shoes.”
The moment Pete laid eyes on Patsy that afternoon, his already high blood pressure had shot up like a bottle rocket. She had bleached her hair until it was almost white, added some long blonde ringlets that must’ve come out of a package, and pinned sparkling red, white, and blue stars in among the curls. Her red shirt and blue shorts might have been ordinary enough, but her little feet were perched up on a pair of wedgy high-heel sandals pretty enough to make a man’s heart stop.
Before Pete could drop dead on the spot, Patsy shoved a watermelon into his midsection and set off ahead of him. Stumbling after her, Pete balanced the watermelon on the cusp of his somewhat substantial paunch. He wished he didn’t have that beer belly, and he denied it as much as he could. But truth to tell, once a man had got himself one, it was awful hard to get rid of.
“Where do you want the watermelon to go, Patsy?” Pete asked as he stepped up beside the fount of perfume and hair spray that drew him like a bee to honey.
“Where do you think?” She shot those big blue eyes at him and pointed with a long red fingernail. “Over there under the tree with the other watermelons. I swear, Pete Roberts, are you blind?”
No, he sure wasn’t, Pete thought as he made his way to the watermelon cart. He saw those pretty calves and tiny ankles swaying on top of Patsy’s high-heel shoes. He saw those red lips that matched her long fingernails. In fact, usually when Pete saw Patsy, he couldn’t see much else.
He liked to give her a hard time about her hair, but the truth was plain enough. It didn’t matter if she dyed it orange, black, pink, or polka dot, Patsy’s hair simply fascinated him. Around Patsy, Pete felt like he had been shot straight through the heart by Cupid’s arrow—a sensation he’d never had before in his life. And he wasn’t at all sure what to do about it.
“Hey, Pete, how’s business at Rods-N-Ends these days?” Steve Hansen was beckoning him over to where a group of men were seated in lawn chairs minding their grills. They wore ball caps and bib aprons with sayings such as
Grill Sergeant
or
Le Chef de BBQ
on the front. Each man held court with a pair of tongs, a bowl of whatever special secret sauce he had concocted, and a flyswatter.
“Didn’t I tell you things would pick up during the summer?” Steve asked. “That you’d be so busy you wouldn’t know whether you were coming or going?”
“You were right,” Pete replied, settling into a chair with frayed webbing. He wasn’t real confident it would hold his weight, but he decided if he dropped through, he’d deal with it somehow or other.
“I bet the high gas prices don’t hurt,” Steve added. “Keeping gas in our cars is about to kill the real estate business.”
Pete nodded. “You were smart to buy that hybrid when you did. But I won’t accept any blame for my gas prices. They get passed on down the line from the oil wells in Alaska, Oklahoma, or wherever in the world we’re buying it from these days. Nope, boys, if you want the honest truth, I make a bigger profit selling minnows.”
The other men chuckled.
“At least the minnows are homegrown.” Charlie Moore was an avid fisherman. He dropped by Pete’s minnow tank nearly every day. He was waving a flyswatter around his head as he spoke. “If I had my way, Esther and I would buy everything we need right here in the Ozarks. Or grow it ourselves. There’s nothing like a fresh tomato right off the vine or a taste of my wife’s strawberry jam.”
“Who has time to take care of a garden except retired people?” Brad Hanes, a good-looking young fellow who had worked construction so long that his skin was the color of oak, had joined the older men. Pete didn’t know Brad too well, though the kid always bought gas for his big new truck at Rods-N-Ends. Brad’s favorite thing was to ask when Pete was going to start stocking beer and lottery tickets, and the joke was getting a little old.
“Ashley buys everything at the discount store in Camdenton,” Brad was telling the others. “She tries to make our meals unless she can talk me into eating out. But at the rate she’s learning how to cook, we’ll owe our souls to Bitty Sondheim’s place one of these days. I think Ashley has run up a mile-long tab there.”
“Kim and I ate at the Pop-In the other day.” Now it was Derek Finley’s turn to speak. Pete liked the Water Patrol officer as much as any man he’d ever met. Derek was fair, firm, and friendly. He was tending a grill lined with hot dogs for the children.
“Bitty brought sushi appetizers,” Derek informed the men as he gestured toward the colorfully clad Californian in the distance. “I’m not sure about eating raw fish on a hot summer day, but I like those omelets Bitty cooks at her restaurant. And her fajita wraps fill a guy up pretty well too.”
“Not if he’s been hammering shingles onto a roof all morning,” Brad observed. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told Bitty she’s got to start serving platters with ham, eggs, hash browns, toast, and butter if she expects my crew to eat at the Pop-In. We don’t mind her not having chairs and tables. We’re used to sitting on the back of a pickup with our sandwiches and water coolers. But I can buy four or five of Pete’s hot dogs for what I’d pay for one of Bitty’s veggie wraps. Besides, who wants to eat eggplant and alfalfa sprouts for lunch?”
“Might as well go out to graze,” Charlie agreed. “In my day, we’d step off the back porch and gather a few turnip greens or plantain leaves. Maybe some spinach if we were lucky. Mother would fry up a mess of greens for us, and we’d eat that along with ham hocks or whatever she happened to have on hand. We didn’t pay a nickel for any of it, either. Those were the good old days, and I mean that for a fact.”
As the men went on chatting, Pete began a surreptitious survey of the women. He hadn’t seen Patsy since he left her for the watermelon wagon. She ought to stand out with her blonde ringlets and those red, white, and blue sparkly stars in her hair, but the whole lakeside was a sea of patriotic clothing. If folks didn’t have on a plain red T-shirt, they wore something with the St. Louis Cardinals’ red baseball logo. In the Ozarks, rooting for the Cards was considered as patriotic as saluting the U.S. flag. Even the kids had gotten into the spirit of the celebration, waving sparklers as they chased each other back and forth alongside the swimming area just off the shore.
Pete spotted Derek Finley’s twins, Luke and Lydia. Cute kids. Too bad about the boy having diabetes, though it didn’t appear to be slowing him down any. He was racing after his sister with a red water balloon, and she didn’t stand a chance.
On a bench under a tree, the Hansens’ two knockout daughters sat watching the kids play. Brenda had brought them with her to Pete’s place when she was buying gas the other day. The Hansen girls were blonde, trim, and as sweet as pecan pie. Hard to believe one of them was planning to become a missionary.
What was a missionary, anyhow? Pete wondered as he continued his search for Patsy. Some kind of religious work, Brenda Hansen had told him. Her daughter was going to study at a training center nearby and then head off to live with a remote tribe in the jungle. Pete thought missionarying sounded more like a man’s job than something fit for a pretty young lady. Jennifer Hansen had explained that she wanted to tell the natives about Jesus Christ. She hoped to bring them the message of salvation so they could be born again.
Born again
. That phrase.
Pete borrowed Charlie’s flyswatter and slapped it down on a particularly pesky fellow that had been bothering him ever since he joined the men near the grills. As he handed the flyswatter back to Charlie, Pete had to admit to himself that he’d been doing some thinking ever since Patsy had told him he needed to be born again. And the fact was, he’d botched up his life so bad the first time around that he didn’t have the heart to start all over. Oh, sure, he was doing his best not to repeat his previous mistakes. But there was simply not much hope for a man with his past.
“Whoa!” The exclamation escaped Pete’s lips the moment he spotted Patsy standing near the salad table. Mercy, that woman looked good in a pair of shorts and high heels.
“Something wrong?” Steve Hansen asked, elbowing Pete. “Or did you just notice Patsy Pringle?”
The other men guffawed as if this were the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
Pete leaned back in the lawn chair and grinned. “As a matter of fact, I believe I do have my eye on the prettiest gal in Deepwater Cove.”
“Now, hold on there,” Steve spoke up. “Patsy’s pretty all right, but I’d have to vote for my beautiful Brenda as the belle of this ball.”
All the men focused on the lovely blonde whose smile shone like the summer sun. Brenda was obviously talking to the other women about her daughters as she gestured toward the two young beauties who favored their mother to a tee.
Pete agreed that Brenda Hansen was very attractive, and he was glad to hear her husband speak up for her. But Patsy Pringle—
“Aw, come on, Steve,” Brad Hanes said. “My Ashley’s the hottest hottie out here. Look at those long legs on my woman.”
The men shifted a little uncomfortably as they all made an effort
not
to look at the young redhead’s legs. Pete began to wish the topic of women had never come up. Brad shouldn’t have drawn the fellows’ attention to his wife’s legs. Not even Pete was that ignorant, and he decided it was time to steer toward a safer topic than a comparison of one woman’s attributes with another’s.
“A pretty lady will get my thumbs-up any time and any place,” he said. “In fact, I think this little corner of the world has got the pick of the crop. Look at those gals. Esther, Brenda, Ashley, and Patsy—fairest flowers of the land.”
“Speaking of pretty women, where’s that mother of yours, Derek?” Charlie Moore asked. “And come to think of it, I don’t see Kim, either.”
Pete glanced over at Derek, who was shifting a little uncomfortably in his lawn chair. “They, uh … they had a little problem in the kitchen. Kim’s bringing one of those seven-layer dips.”
“Got in a fight about which layer went first, huh?” Brad asked with a laugh.
The look on Derek’s face told Pete that was exactly what had happened. Charlie gave an awkward harrumph and pretended to search for his wife. Steve reached across his grill with a pair of tongs to turn over his pork steaks. Who would have thought a bunch of good-for-nothings like these fellows sitting around on the Fourth of July could manage to make each other so uncomfortable?
Pete knew women talked nonstop and everyone felt just peachy when they parted company. Before he had built a soundproof wall between his tackle shop and Patsy’s salon, Pete had heard the women next door jabbering away day after day. In fact, their constant chitchat had been partly what prompted him to start up a chain saw every now and then. Anything to drown out that racket.
But men? Men didn’t really know how to talk to each other. They couldn’t very well admire each other’s hairdos or trade chicken soup recipes. What this bunch needed was a woman to sit among them and stir up some cordial conversation. But as it was, the men fanned themselves with their flyswatters or checked their grills until Pete finally brought up what everyone was thinking.
“How about them Cardinals?”
“I couldn’t believe the pitcher in yesterday’s game,” Brad Hanes muttered.
“Did you fellas see that drive down the right-field line?” Charlie Moore asked.
And that was all it took. They discussed the ins and outs of the game, weighed the players’ talents, mentioned statistics from the past, and generally talked the subject half to death.
That was okay with Pete. He focused on Patsy Pringle, who was balancing on her high-heel wedges as she picked her way across the grass toward some destination Pete couldn’t see. Adjusting her gold ringlets, she began to smile as if she’d just gotten a glimpse of heaven itself. Slightly disturbed at what might have captured Patsy’s attention other than himself, Pete leaned forward. The plastic webbing under his backside crackled a little as he scanned the scene, and finally he noticed goofy ol’ Cody Goss half skipping and jumping toward Patsy.
“Hey, Patsy,” Cody cried, clapping his hands as he greeted her. “You have stars in your hair!”
“It’s the Fourth of July, honey!” she exclaimed.