The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [66]
He ducked out of her room and into his own, changed into shorts and a T-shirt, grabbed a can of sparkling water from the fridge—no beer left! Should’ve gone to happy hour—then went out back to sit on the screened porch, under the ceiling fan, which was uselessly paddling the turgid air. It was the golden time of day, mellow spotlights of sun gleaming between the branches of the live oak trees. Quiet except for the squirrels chittering in the limbs and the whine of a distant leaf blower. It was so hot out there in the summer that he always had this second story porch to himself. His own little tree house. Down below, Otis’s white shed looked like the hut of a fairy-tale creature.
Their backyard was so totally enclosed by trees and shrubbery, they could cavort around naked if they were so inclined. Caroline had done that very thing one morning, peeling off her sweaty clothes after her run. She’d never do anything like that now, not since her body had decided to betray her by aging, but he wished she would. He would take off his own clothes and join her. He pictured the two of them, frolicking in the backyard, a gleeful, world-weary middle-aged Adam and Eve who’d returned for a second honeymoon in a much smaller, homelier Garden of Eden. If he told Caroline about this fantasy, she’d either bring up dirty laundry or laugh her head off.
The longer Vic sat there, sipping the unsatisfying sparkling water, the more he became aware of the work that needed to be done all around him. The porch smelled musty and the screens looked green. He needed to pressure wash again, needed to replace some mushy boards on the deck, and repaint the whole thing. But before he did any of that he would check the NHC Web site.
“Daddy.” Suzi stood in the doorway, flushed and disheveled but determined, leaning on her crutches. “I’m sorry. I want to make cookies.”
“I’m sorry, too,” Vic said, rising out of the wicker chair.
“For what? You didn’t do anything.”
How could he even begin to explain what all he was sorry about? He was sorry she’d hurt her knee, sorry that he depended on her to prop him up, sorry that she’d been stuck in the role of the “only normal kid in the family.” He was sorry that poor Wilson had had to come live with them and that poor Ava and Otis had Asperger’s and sorry that his marriage had gone south and that he missed the days when it was just him and Caroline and sorry because Caroline felt so besieged and that he felt so inadequate that he was counting on a hurricane to blow their problems away. He was sorry that his life was slipping away while he sat on the porch feeling sorry. He was sorry that he was such a sorry son of a bitch.
“Forget it,” he told Suzi. “How about peanut butter with chocolate chips?”
* * *
Gigi and Vic were finishing up the training packets—six example packets and six testing packets. The readers had been hired by Human Resources and would show up at FTA the following day, ready to be trained.
Vic was not only helping Gigi make up her packets but also supervising the other test specialists in math, science, and social studies, and he needed to go over their training packets with them later that day. He and Gigi were taking too long to make hers up, because, basically, she couldn’t keep her mind on the task.
“If I have to read one more review of The Incredibles I’m going to kill myself,” Gigi said. There were entire classes at one high school that had written reviews of The Incredibles. “I’ve never seen that movie and I never will. Just the thought of it makes me sick.”
Vic smiled at her and picked up another essay to read.
Gigi pulled up the hood of her green sweater. “It’s like a refrigerator in here,” she said. “Aren’t you cold?”
Because Vic wasn’t seeing any bigwigs that day, he was wearing shorts and a polo shirt. He was cold, but it did no good to complain, because that’s the way management