Florida Straits by SKLA Page B

notes all sounded more or less the same to
him. Still, the episode put him in a buoyant mood. It reminded him
somehow of his wife. "Joey," he said, gesturing around him as they
approached the cottage, "ain't this paradise?"
    Sandra had come to meet them. "In paradise,"
she said, "the plates match."
    She held out her hand to shake. But Bert had
the dog in his right hand, and so took her fingers in his left,
raised them to his lips, and kissed her on the knuckles. "You're as
lovely as Joey says you are."
    "Joey who? If Joey paid me a compliment, I
think I'd plotz." She wagged her finger at Bert, admiring his
perfectly draped shirt of midnight-blue voile. "But you're as sly
as Joey says you are, and that's the truth."
    "So Bert," said Joey, "glassa wine? We'll
sit out by the pool awhile."
    He brought a tray and put it on a small
wooden table just outside the sliding door of their cottage. The
wine seemed to draw into itself the last rays of dim light, and
glowed a shimmering garnet.
    "Salud," said Bert the Shirt, and
Joey could not help noticing that the word made Sandra wince. The
Italian sound, the Italian wine in stubby glasses, a certain
old-fashioned and very appealing swagger in the way Bert lifted his
drink to toast—these things, to Sandra, were a threat,
unintentional but real. They were the old ways, the family ways;
their warmth and comfort bound a person to the neighborhood as much
as did the promise of easy earnings, maybe more so, and made it
hard to change. At any moment a gesture or a word could pull a
person back to the small, sad, cozy place he'd come from.
    "And how do you like it down
here?"
    Sandra barely heard the question. "Me? Oh, I
like it fine. The weather's great, the girls at the bank are
nice."
    She stopped talking, but Bert just looked at
her. It was a simple trick he'd developed decades before to get
people to go a little farther.
    "But ya know," Sandra obliged, "for me, it's
not that big a change. A bank's a bank. Money's money. I mean, if
you think about it, money's the least interesting thing there is.
There's no variety about it, you know what I mean? Seen one dollar,
you've seen 'em all."
    "Yeah," said Bert, "but until you've seen a
helluva lot of 'em, it doesn't really seem that way."
    "I guess," she said. "But people. That's
what's interesting. Now, with Joey's job . .."
    Joey looked down at the wooden table and
gave his head a modest shake. This job. It was confusing, this job.
He couldn't decide whether to be proud of it or embarrassed. It was
like the time he painted some autumn trees and won an art contest
in grade school. He was happy to win, happy to see his mother flush
with satisfaction, but at the same time felt that making pictures
was for girls. Of course, with the job, it had a lot to do with who
was asking. With Sandra, yeah, he was proud, he could tell it made
her happy. Around Bert, well, it wasn't like Bert was putting it
down, it was just that, let's face it, Bert had a different sense
of what a man should be. Joey wondered if he'd ever have a more
firmly held opinion of his own. He had to believe that life would
be easier if he did.
    "Anybody hungry?" he said. "If I can figure
out how to work the stupid grill, we can eat sometime tonight."
    The hiss and pop of propane being lit
reminded Joey how quiet the compound had become. The women from the
antique store had abandoned the hot tub and gone inside; Luke and
Lucy had disappeared into the thickening dark; Steve, under his
towel, seemed down for the count. Joey looked at the blue flame of
the grill, felt, rather to his own surprise, the prideful
contentment of being the host, then went inside to get the steaks.
Walking past the wooden table, he saw that Bert the Shirt was now
holding Don Giovanni on his lap. All that was visible of the tiny
dog was the thin silver spikes of its whiskers and a morbid gleam
from its oversized eyes.
    "You really love that little dog, don't
you?" Sandra was saying.
    "The dog? I hate the dog. The