Life, Love and the Pursuit of Happiness Read online

  “Yippee!”

  “We might even stop in Virginia at Busch Gardens.” Actually, there was a regional convention of Avon collectors being held in Richmond, Virginia, that Sal would love to attend. Maybe she could talk Maggie into making a pact, several hours with a herd of Avon Ladies for several hours at Busch Gardens.

  “Gramma! I don’t want to go to no gardens.”

  “It’s not that kind of gardens. Busch Gardens is a huge amusement park, like Six Flags. Remember when your nursery school took a field trip to Six Flags?”

  Maggie smiled. “Can we go on a roller coaster?”

  Sal groaned. She was getting too old for the raising of a child, and that was saying a lot. Salome Jones never admitted to being too old for anything. “We’ll see,” Sal lied.

  “Promise?”

  “I promise we’ll go to Busch Gardens. That’s all I’m promising. But remember”—she pretended to zip her lips—“our secret. No one should know about our secret trip.”

  Maggie pretended to zip her lips, too. But she couldn’t keep quiet for long. “Mommy will be so surprised to see us.”

  “That’s for sure,” Sal muttered.

  Everybody plays the fool sometime . . .

  After sharing a few beers at The Live Bass, Merrill decided to drive by Delilah’s diner on his way home to the Patterson Home for Overage Dodobirds.

  And, by the way, wouldn’t Delilah’s Diner be a better name than Rock Around the Clock Diner? Not that I’m going to suggest that anytime soon. My interference factor is through the roof already, according to Delilah.

  Passing through the business, then residential sector, he saw evidence of the huge Fourth of July celebration the townfolk had recently engaged in, which had carried over to the Rutledge wedding on Saturday. Flags. Red, white, and blue banners. Sprays of fake stars on the brass, bell-shaped streetlights. Betsy Ross sitting on a rocker in the town square gazebo sewing a flag. Several yard flamingos wearing Uncle Sam hats. Every kind of kitsch imaginable and then some.

  Supposedly, the powers that be, i.e. the town council, had decided that the Grinch contest and its related festivities in December, followed by a massive Independence Day celebration, had brought in so much of the desirable pass-through tourist traffic they wanted that they were saving the decorations for some kind of Labor Day Lollypalooza, or some other bat-ass crazy idea. If anything else came into their radar, like Ethan Rutledge and Wendy Patterson’s wedding, well, hey, they already had the ideas and decorations available. He could only imagine what they’d do when Delilah had her diner grand opening.

  You had to love small towns!

  He revved the engine on the Harley as he neared the diner, just because he could and because, in his newfound immaturity, he wanted Delilah to know he was out there at midnight. He spotted the twenty-foot neon Elvis standing by the front steps, unlit at this point, but, hey, it would be cool when “The King” welcomed folks to the eating establishment. God bless eBay. You really could find anything there. Not that he’d been looking for a neon Elvis. He’d actually been scoping out boat fridges when Elvis popped up.

  That was his story, anyhow, and he was sticking to it.

  But then, as Merrill was about to cruise around the corner, he couldn’t help but notice something else. A huge pile of mattresses and box springs had been stacked next to the Dumpster.

  In an instant, Merrill’s good mood turned bad. In fact, he was suddenly so mad he could spit nails. Well, frustrated would be a better word, he supposed.

  He just knew that Delilah had done all that heavy work herself. In fact, it was a logical conclusion after having talked to the contractor, Mike Somers, at the bar tonight. Mike told him that he and his men had started on the electrical and plumbing work late that afternoon, and the whole time they were there, Delilah had been scrubbing the walls and ceilings with some kind of bleach solution. So much for Merrill’s suggestion of a cleaning service!

  What was it about the woman that made her so stubborn, so insistent on doing things herself? It wasn’t just poverty, he knew that. She could have asked him or any one of a dozen neighbors who would be more than willing to lift a hand. A strong work ethic was one thing, unbendable pride was another. Stupid! On the other hand, maybe it was some secret in her past that made her untrusting of even the smallest gesture of help.

  He couldn’t ask her. She’d probably blister his skin off with blue words, which she would immediately amend with half-baked clean substitutes, or kick him in his nuts, or tell him to mind his own fucking—uh, bleepin’ business.

  Which would be a silly thing for Merrill to do, anyhow, considering that there wasn’t anything Merrill didn’t know about computers. With a few clicks of the keyboard, he could find out everything there was to know about Delilah Jones of Atlantic City, right down to her medical and dental records. Hell, he could probably even get her kindergarten report card. But he’d chosen not to do a search, so far. Somehow, it felt like the worst kind of privacy invasion, like rooting through her underwear drawer. Yeah, guys and girls on the dating scene did it all the time, a little Google search even before a first date, just in case the person was an ax murderer, or a catfish looking to scam someone. Once F.U. got matched on one of the Internet dating sites with a lingerie model with Barbie-like dimensions, who turned out, with a little computer sleuthing, to be a three-hundred-pound inmate. Which was about right for F.U.

  Nope, Merrill was old school. He still wanted the mystery of finding out about a potential mate through personal interaction. Does that make me a geek? Probably. So sue me!

  And, whoo-boy, did he need some personal interaction in his life! He couldn’t recall the last time he’d gotten laid. Well, yes, he could. That ballerina turned Navy WEALS newbie he’d met at the Wet and Wild last January. The things she could do with a plié! But then she’d dropped out of the program and moved back to D.C. Long-distance relationships were the pits, and one-night stands did not a relationship make.

  Like I have any relationship now!

  Or the prospect of one.

  Well, there was the kiss.

  Promising.

  Shit! I’m going to bust my ass for promises now?

  Aaarrgh!

  Six months of celibacy is beginning to wear on me.

  If sex was all he was interested in, he would have given up on Delilah by now. But what did he want? That was the question. An affair? A committed relationship? Marriage?

  Holy crap! He didn’t even know her. Was she right- or left-handed? Where did she go to school? College? Did she sleep on her back, or her side, or her belly? Was she a morning person, or a night owl? What was her favorite movie, or TV show? Did she like music? What kind? Who was her baby’s father? Was he still in the picture? And why wasn’t her daughter with her now?

  So many questions, and yet none of them mattered. There was just something about her that drew him. He couldn’t explain the attraction. It was overwhelming, like an unending g-force attack on his body, and on his emotions, as well. That was the scary part.

  And, dammit to hell, he felt like such a fool. Chasing after her like one of Elvis’s old hound dogs.

  When he got to the Patterson house, he tried to make as little noise as possible. The seniors were probably all asleep by now, even though they were an active group. Currently in residence, aside from himself on the third floor—Please, God, not for much longer. Little does Delilah know, but I’m going to be occupying one of those motel units—were Mildred Patterson and her boyfriend, Raul Arias, who was Bonita’s father, an academic from Spain who was writing a book on dance through the ages.

  Then there was Harry Carder, who’d moved in after his house had sold quicker than expected following the death of his wife, a beloved Bell Cove dentist. Harry’s stay had been intended to be short-term, but was looking longer term by the day. Like Merrill’s.

  There was also Elmer Judd, a former veterinarian who shared a room with his menagerie of dogs. Elmer’s cooking hobby kept them all
in fine meals, different every night. The little garden he’d started this spring out back now produced a bonanza of heirloom tomatoes, vegetables, and every herb imaginable.

  Mike and Ike Dorset, twin professors emeriti of psychiatry from Auburn, “escaped” recently from Sunset Shores retirement home where they’d been besieged by femme fatales whose freckles had long since turned to liver spots. Not that they didn’t have plenty of their own, despite having full heads of Phil Donohue white hair. The two brothers, who finished each other’s sentences, were always psychoanalyzing everyone, to the point where Elmer had a T-shirt made up that read, “Shrinks Stink.”

  On the female side, there was Claudette Devereaux, a former deb from New Orleans with a mysterious past. And the most recent addition, Joanna Horton, an actress who’d played the family matriarch Gloria Carstairs for thirty years on the soap opera, “As the Stars Shine,” until its demise last year. Gloria was presumably waiting for her Millionaire’s Row bungalow on Nags Head to be renovated, but Merrill suspected that she was just lonely after being dumped by her husband of twenty years for a younger model.

  Mildred and Raul hosted dance parties for older folks here at the house several days each week, and not just for those in residence. Tuesday Tango. Wednesday Waltz. Flamenco Friday, Saturday Salsa. Intermixed with those alliterative titles for day of the week parties were some others: the Bounce, the Jive, the Electric Boogaloo, the Swing, and the ever-popular regional favorite, the Carolina Shag. Last week he’d even witnessed, and would forever have the image imprinted on his eyeballs, Raul teaching the crowd how to twerk.

  The thing was, they were good. All of them. Really good! Even Harry in his wheelchair, which he was sometimes able to replace with a walker.

  And they had fun.

  Good to know that, at an advanced age, men and women could still get it on.

  Especially since he was thirty years younger and not getting anything on, dancing or otherwise.

  There was a light in the kitchen, he saw. Maybe someone forgot to turn it off. Usually a night-light in the hall was all that was left on.

  He walked down the hallway to find a pj’s-clad Harry sitting in his wheelchair at the kitchen table, playing solitaire. A bottle of wine and a half-full glass sat within reach.

  “Hey, Harry? You’re up late.”

  “Couldn’t sleep. Usually, a little wine does the trick.”

  Not inclined to break his pattern of the evening, Merrill grabbed a can of beer from the fridge and sat down wearily across from the old man.

  Harry said right off, “You had a visitor today.”

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Some guy named Benjamin Good.”

  Oh, shit! “My brother? Here?”

  “Yep.” Harry grinned. “Staying at some mansion in Hatteras with your parents.”

  “How do you know they’re staying in a mansion?”

  “Because he told me so. And made a point of mentioning that the mansion belongs to some big shot on the Princeton board of trustees.”

  It was probably Jerome Dellasario from Johnson & Johnson, whose ego matched theirs. Who happened to be Ben’s father-in-law.

  “No offense, but your brother has the biggest pole up his ass I’ve ever seen. Almost as bad as my son Sterling, who thinks he shits gold.”

  Merrill arched his brows.

  “Your brother looked at this house like it was a slum. In fact, his exact words were, ‘For a guy who’s supposed to be worth a million dollars due to some embarrassing invention on the Internet, my brother sure is slumming.’ He was referring to you, of course.”

  “Of course.” Merrill laughed. “Typical! I haven’t seen Ben for five years.” Last he’d heard, Ben and Vanessa were biophysicists doing research at Johns Hopkins. He had no idea if they were still there or what they were doing. “Kinda hoped good ol’ Ben woulda loosened up by now. He inherited that elitist attitude from my parents, by the way. They think anyone with less than a master’s degree is illiterate and anyone not pursuing ‘high’ endeavors is a loser.”

  “Uh-oh! Sounds like you’ve had some bad experiences in that regard.”

  “You could say that. They couldn’t imagine why a person with a Mensa intellect and a 5.0 GPA from Princeton, where they teach, would go into the military.”

  “Pacifists?”

  “Not so much that as a waste of intelligence.”

  Harry shook his head. “Serving your country is a waste? Pff! All those soldiers out there getting themselves killed for their freedom and safety must be imbeciles. Losers with no other options.” Harry had served in Army intelligence at the tail end of the Vietnam War.

  “Right. If they only knew the squids, jarheads, and grunts I’ve met! Between you and me, in SEALs, at least, there are some very intelligent, highly educated men, who also happen to be brave and loyal and patriotic. I’d take one of them any day over some professor who’s never done anything outside a classroom.” He paused. “Sorry for the rant. You hit a sore spot.”

  Harry took a sip of his wine and grinned. “It didn’t help matters that Elmer asked your brother’s wife if she’d like to dance. Today was Mambo Monday, remember?”

  “Oh, Lord! Vanessa is here, too?”

  “Uh-huh! And the pole up her behind was practically through her snooty nose.” His grin faded as Harry explained, “She looked at Elmer like he was a dog turd under her fancy pancy sandals, and she said something unkind to Mildred when she offered them some lemonade.”

  Now, that burned Merrill’s ass, big-time. It was one thing for Ben and Vanessa to insult him, but they had no business coming here and offending these kind people. If they were here now, he would have a thing or two to say to them. And maybe a fist in Ben’s priggish face was long overdue.

  The sad thing was that Ben hadn’t always been that way. Two years older than Merrill, Ben had been a great older brother. Fun. Protective. Adventurous. Merrill wasn’t sure when he’d noticed the changes come about, maybe in high school when Ben had first fallen for Vanessa Dellasario, who thought she farted roses, even back then when she wore industrial-looking braces and had a lisp. Or maybe it was earlier than that, when their parents had begun pressuring both of them to become intolerant of those “inferior” to them, to associate only with friends with higher aspirations.

  Merrill, a disappointment from an early age, had refused to bend to their mold. Almost everything Merrill liked had been a no-no. Skateboarding, football, video games, rock music, anything that didn’t improve the mind. Ben hadn’t been so determined, or maybe he was just weaker and unable to fight the tide of parental influence.

  Merrill took a long swallow of beer and changed the subject. “So, insomnia? Happen a lot?”

  Harry shrugged. “Ever since Julia died last year. I can keep busy during the day, but during the night I miss her so much I can barely stand it.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Forty-three years tomorrow.”

  “Aaah.”

  “I can’t complain. Lots of people never find ‘the one,’ not even after repeated divorces and remarriages. I got lucky first time around.”

  Harry continued to play his card game while they talked.

  Merrill took another sip of his beer, a smaller one this time, before asking, “How did you know she was ‘the one’?”

  “We were students at Georgetown. It was love at first sight for me. Not so much for Julia.” He chuckled at some memory. “Julia had, in fact, been engaged to another fellow at the time.”

  “So, how’d you convince her that you were the better catch?”

  “I made an absolute fool of myself, that’s how,” he said with another chuckle.

  Merrill perked up at that word. “Really? How?”

  “Maybe today I’d be accused of harassment, but I just wouldn’t give up.”

  “And it worked?”

  “Yep.”

  “Not that I did anything aggressive or slimy. Persistence, that’s the key.”
<
br />   “And the willingness to play the fool?”

  “Small price to pay for ‘the one,’ wouldn’t you say?”

  Merrill suspected that Harry’s words were targeted at him. He knew that was the case when Harry remarked later, “What fool bought that tacky Elvis over at Lilah’s diner?”

  Chapter 8

  Tarantism: the uncontrollable urge to dance (and not a spider in sight) . . .

  Delilah was happy.

  And that surprised her. She hadn’t realized that she’d been unhappy. And maybe she hadn’t been unhappy, precisely. Not since she’d been released from prison five months ago, anyhow. Just joyless, if that made sense.

  The mayor of Bell Cove, Doreen Ferguson, had talked Merrill into having a launch ceremony at noon; so, they were all biding their time with little makeshift jobs until then, anxious to get going. As Delilah stored the last of the supplies she’d purchased in the boat’s kitchen, she wondered what had made a difference in her mood. Was it satisfaction over the work she’d done the past few days, both on her own diner/motel project as well as on the Sweet Bells boat in preparation for the Three Saints treasure hunt? Was it the knowledge that she would soon have her daughter living with her? Was it hope-turned-conviction that her life was finally taking a turn for the good? Was it simple excitement over the launch of the salvaging venture today? Or was it Merrill Good himself who made her happy?

  Whatever!

  She turned up the volume on the radio that sat on the counter, tuned to a South Carolina classic rock station, and found herself dancing in place to that old Bob Seger classic, “Old Time Rock and Roll.”

  “Now that’s what I like to see . . . a dancing cook,” Bonita said, as she came down the hatchway. “But, honey, you need a little more sass in your ass, Spanish style.” She set her designer overnight case on the floor and danced her way toward Delilah in a combination boogie and salsa, with, yes, some ass sass thrown in.