Shoot, Don't Shoot (22 page)

“The trip was fine, and I missed you, too,” Jenny said breathlessly. “But is the pool still open? Is it too late to go swimming?”

So much for missing me, Joanna thought wryly. She glanced at her watch. “The pool doesn’t close for almost two hours yet, but don’t you want something to eat first?”

“We ate in the car,” Jenny answered. “Anyway, I’d rather swim.”

“Go help Grandpa with your luggage first,” Joanna urged. “Then we’ll talk about it. You need to check with the desk and order your videos.”

Jenny’s eyes widened. “Videos? Really?”

Joanna nodded. “They have some kind of special deal. Children under sixteen get to order videos from a place just up the street. Two for each day we’re here. They even deliver.”

Jenny grinned. “This
is
a nice place, isn’t it’?” She turned and raced back out to the car.

Eva Lou had entered the lobby as well, walking up behind Jenny. She smiled fondly after her granddaughter, then turned to Joanna and gave her daughter-in-law a firm hug. “I can’t believe all the flowers out there,” the older woman said, glancing back at the entrance. “How can that be when it’s almost the end of November?”

Looking after Jenny, Joanna wasn’t especially interested in flowers. “What I can’t believe is the permanent,” she grumbled. “How could my mother do such a thing?”

“Don’t be upset,” Eva Lou counseled. “Eleanor was just trying to help.”

“Help!” Joanna countered. “Don’t make excuses for her. She had no right to pull this kind of stunt the minute my back was turned.”

“It’s only hair,” Eva Lou said. “It’ll grow out. It was all an honest mistake. I think Helen and your mother got so busy talking that Helen forgot to set the timer for the solution. I know she felt terrible about it afterwards. She sent home three bottles of conditioner. Jenny’s gone through the better half of one of those, although I’ll admit it doesn’t seem to be doing much good.”

“Not much,” Joanna agreed. “But you’re right. The only thing that’s going to fix that mess is time.”

By then Jim Bob had unloaded an amazing stack of suitcases onto a luggage cart. He and Jenny came into the lobby with the bellman trailing in his wake, aiming for the registration desk. Joanna caught up with him before he got there. She planted a quick kiss on her father-in-law’s cheek.

“Registration’s already been taken care of,” she said, handing two keys over to the bellman. “Mr. And Mrs. Brady are in eight-twenty-seven. The little girl and I are in eight-ten. They’re not adjoining rooms, but at least they’re on the same floor.”

Jim Bob gave her a searching look. “You didn’t pay for the room already, did you? It looks to me like this place is probably pretty pricy.”

“Are you kidding?” Joanna returned with a laugh. “I’m getting six weeks of free babysitting out of this deal. If you stack that up against a three-night stay at the Hohokam, I’m still way ahead of the game.”

“I’m not a baby,” Jenny said firmly, frowning. “I’m nine and a half.”

“You’re right, Jenny. Excuse me,” Joanna agreed, then turned back to Jim Bob Brady. “Six weeks of
child
care
then, but it’s still a bargain. Is anybody hungry?”

“I packed some sandwiches to eat on the way,” Eva Lou said. “We’re certainly not starving.”

Joanna nodded. “All right, then,” she said. “We’ll let Jenny swim for a while. We’ll go out later for dessert.”

“As in Baskin-Robbins?” Jenny asked eagerly.

“Probably.” At that Jenny clapped her hands in delight.

As the Bradys followed the bellman toward the elevator, Joanna turned to Jenny. “Did Grandma tell you that Ceci Grijalva is coming to town to see us on Friday?”

It was Jenny’s turn to nod. “That’s why we brought along an extra suit.” Jenny’s blue eyes filled with concern. “Did you tell her what I said?”

“Yes, but I thought she’d get more out of it if she heard it from you in person. We pick her up at ten o’clock on Friday morning.”

They stopped by the concierge desk long enough to make arrangements for Jenny’s videos. Joanna also increased the Thanksgiving dinner reservation from four to six.

“Who’s coming to dinner?” Jenny asked as they, too, headed for the elevator.

“Leann Jessup,” Joanna answered. “She’s a new friend, someone I met here at school. And Adam York, the DEA guy from Tucson. You remember him, don’t you?”

Jenny nodded. “He’s the guy who thought you were a drug dealer.”

“Well, he’s a friend now, and so is Leann.”

“Are you fixing the two of them up?” Jen asked.

Joanna was stunned. She wasn’t quite ready for Jenny’s inquiring mind to take on the world of male/female relations.

“What a strange thing to say. No,” Joanna declared firmly. “Nobody’s fixing anybody up.”

“So Mr. York isn’t her boyfriend?”

“No. He doesn’t even know her.”

“Is he your boyfriend, then?”

“Jenny,” an exasperated Joanna said. “As far as I know, Adam York isn’t anybody’s boyfriend. He’s a friend of mine and a colleague. What’s all this stuff about boyfriends?”

“But why does he want to have Thanksgiving dinner with us?” Jenny asked.

Jonnna shrugged. “It’s a holiday. Maybe he doesn’t want to be alone. Besides, I’ll be happy to see him again.”

“Why can’t he have dinner with his own family?” Jenny asked.

“Look,” Joanna said. “Adam York is one of the people who encouraged me to run for office. He’s also the one who suggested I come up here and take this course. He probably just wants to see how doing.”

“Are you going to marry him?” Jenny asked pointedly.

“Marry him!” Joanna exclaimed. “Jenny, for heaven’s sake, what in the world has gotten into you? Of course I’m not going to marry him. Whatever put that weird idea into your head?”

Jenny frowned. “That’s what happened to Sue Espy. Her parents got a divorce when we were in second grade. Her mother asked some guy named Slim Dabovich to come for Thanksgiving dinner last year. Now they’re married. Sue likes him, I guess. She says he isn’t like stepfathers you see on TV. I mean, he isn’t mean or anything.”

Joanna almost laughed aloud. “Just because Sue’s mom married the guy she asked to Thanksgiving dinner doesn’t mean I will. Now, do you want to go swimming or not?”

In advance of the holiday, Dave Thompson had stocked up on booze. Fighting a hangover from the previous night’s excess, he went looking for hair of the dog the moment the last of the students and instructors left campus. By nine-thirty that night, he had been drinking steadily for most of the afternoon and evening. And not just beer. Booze—the real hard stuff—was the only thing that could dull the pain on a night like this. Dave knew that if he drank long enough and hard enough, eventually he would pass out. With any kind of luck, by the time he woke up again, part of Thanksgiving Day would already be over and done with. He would have succeeded in dodging part of the holiday bullet, one more time.

For a real binge like this, he tried to confine his drinking to inside his apartment, but each time he needed a cigarette, he went outside. That was pretty funny, actually—that he still went outside to smoke. Irene had been a very early and exceptionally militant soldier in the war against secondhand cigarette smoke. She had never allowed him to smoke inside either the house or the car. Her prohibitions had stuck and turned into habit. Despite Irene’s betrayal—despite the fact that she had been gone all these years—Dave Thompson continued to smoke outside the house.

It would have surprised Irene Thompson to realize that over time her former husband had found some interesting side benefits to smoking out of doors that had nothing at all to do with lung disease. People didn’t expect someone to be standing outside in a yard or patio at night for long stretches of time. Dave Thompson had seen things from that vantage point, learned things about his neighbors and neighborhood that other people never even suspected. As a matter of fact, it was something he had seen through the kitchen window of their old house, back in Chandler that had signaled the beginning of the end of Dave’s marriage. If it hadn’t been for that one fateful cigarette, he might never have found out what was really going on with Irene. He might have gone right on being a chump for the rest of his life.

Dave didn’t look at his watch, but it must have been close to ten when he staggered outside for that one last cigarette. He knew he was drunk, but it was a fairly happy drunk for a change. He laughed at himself when he bounced off both sides of the doorway trying to get through it. Since he wasn’t driving, though, what the hell?

Dave lurched over to his smoking table—a cheap white resin table and matching chair. His one ashtray—a heavy brass one that had once belonged to his ex-father-in-law—sat there, waiting for him. Pulling the overflowing ashtray closer, he lit up and then leaned back in the groaning chair, gazing up at the sky.

Sitting there, he remembered how, when he was a little kid growing up in Phoenix, it was still possible to see thousands of stars if you went outside in the yard at night. Some of his favorite memories stemmed from that time, standing in the front yard with his folks, staring up in the darkness, trying to catch a glimpse of the newly launched sputnik as it shot across the sky. Now the haze of smog and hundreds of thousands of city lights obscured all but the brightest two or three stars. And if there was space junk up there, as
Discover
magazine said there was, it was invisible to the naked eye from where Dave Thompson was sitting right that moment.

He was still smoking and staring mindlessly up into the milky white sky when a car pulled into the APOA parking lot. Headlights flashed briefly into the private patio that separated Dave’s quarters from the building that housed the dormitory.

Shit, Dave thought. Who’s that? Most likely one of the students. There was no law against being drunk on the patio of your own home, but finding the APOA’s head instructor in that kind of condition wouldn’t be great for trainee morale. He meant to get up and go inside, but as footsteps came toward him across the parking lot, Dave froze in his chair and hoped that not moving would render him invisible.

Within moments, he was sound asleep.

Joanna pried Jenny out of the pool a minute before the ten o’clock closing time. After a quick trip to the nearest 31 Flavors, it was ten-thirty by the time they made it back to their room, where Jenny was delighted to find that the covers on her bed had been turned back. On the pillow was a gold-foil-wrapped mint and a letter addressed to her in her mother’s handwriting. She tore open the envelope. Then, munching on the mint, she sat down cross-legged on the bed to read the letter. She looked at her mother who had settled on her own bed, textbook in hand.

When she finished Joanna’s letter, Jenny sighed, refolded the letter, and returned it to the envelope.

“Mom,” Jenny said. “Did you ever think your classes here would be this hard?” Jenny asked.

Welcoming the interruption, Joanna closed the book and put it down on the bedside table. “Not really.”

“And do they make you do push-ups and run laps, honest?”

Joanna smiled. “Girl Scout’s honor,” she said.

“That’s no fair,” Jenny grumbled. “I always thought that when you got to be a grown-up, people couldn’t make you do stuff you didn’t want to do.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Joanna agreed.

Suddenly Jenny scrambled off the bed and charged over to her suitcase. “I brought something along that I forgot to show you.”

After pawing through her clothing, Jenny came back and sat down on the edge of her mother’s bed. She was carrying two pictures. “Look at this,” she said, handing them over to Joanna. “See what Grandpa found?”

One was the picture of Joanna taken by her father, the one in her Brownie uniform. The second photo, although much newer and in color, was very similar to the first one. It was a picture of Jennifer Ann Brady, dressed in a much newer version of a Brownie uniform, and standing at attention near the right front bumper of her mother’s bronze-colored Eagle. In the black-and-white photo, a nine-year Joanna Lathrop posed in front of Eleanor Lathrop’s white Maverick. In both pictures the foreground was occupied by the same sturdy, twenty-five-year-old Radio Flyer, and in both pictures the wagon was loaded down with cartons of Girl Scout cookies.

As soon as she saw the two pictures side by side, Joanna burst out laughing. “I guess pictures like that are part of a time-honored tradition,” she said, handing them back to Jenny. “Where did you get the second one?”

“Grandpa Brady got it from Grandma Lathrop.”

“That figures,” Joanna said. “She probably has drawers full of them. I’ll bet somebody takes a new picture like that every single Girl Scout cookie season.”

Jenny didn’t seem to be listening. She was holding the two pictures up to the light, examining in them closely. “Grandma Brady thinks I look just like you did when you were a girl,” Jenny said. “What do you think?”

Joanna took the pictures back and studied them for herself. It was easy to forget that she, too, had been a towheaded little kid once upon a time. The red hadn’t started showing up in her hair until fourth or fifth grade—about the same time as that first traumatic haircut. This picture must have dated from third grade or so since Joanna’s hair still hung down over her shoulders in two long braids.

“Grandma Brady’s right,” Joanna said. “You can tell we’re related.”

“Yes, you can,” Jenny agreed.

“Did I ever tell you about the first time Grandma Lathrop took me out for my first haircut?” Joanna asked.

Jenny frowned and shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, get back in your bed,” Joanna ordered. “It’s about time you heard the story of your mother and the pixie.”

“I know all about pixies,” Jenny said confidently. “They’re kind of like fairies, aren’t they? So, is this a true story or pretend?”

“This is another kind of pixie,” Joanna said. “And it’s true, all right. Believe me, it’s not the kind of story I’d make up. And who knows, once you hear it, maybe it’ll make you feel better about what happened to you when Grandma Lathrop took you to see Helen Barco.”