“I’d love that!” I said.
“I told Eve to lock all the drugs away, but it’s not like she listens to me,” Carl said.
“Ow!” Adam said. “Muscle spasms are the worst.”
I thought, Whoa, baby! Vicodin? Muscle spasms? Swallow two with a glass of chardonnay and call me in the morning? Eve definitely has a problem. Carl has to realize this. Doesn’t he?
“Do your boys smoke weed?” Eve asked. “It seems like every single boy in Daphne’s class smokes weed.”
Cookie gasped and said, “Where are the parents these days?”
I turned bright red, thinking that the question was too personal to be addressed in front of Adam’s father.
“Listen, in our world? Our boys never had the time to get involved with all that stuff. I kept them busy,” Adam said.
“You sure did do that!” I said. “If they weren’t chasing a ball or something else, they were catching fish or birds or helping Adam.”
“Idle hands are the Devil’s workshop,” Clarabeth said. “That’s what my mother always said, and she was right. She also said, tell me who your company is and I’ll tell you who you are because birds of a feather flock together. Oh! She had so many sayings like that and they were all true! Kids today should have more supervision, if you ask me . . .”
“I agree!” Cookie said.
Ted reached over and gently patted the back of Clarabeth’s hand to make her stop talking. She does enjoy the soapbox, I thought.
“Come on, old girl,” he said, smiling at her. “Let’s let the young people have their night.”
“Who’s an old girl?” Clarabeth said indignantly. “Not I!”
“I may as well call it a night too,” Cookie said and got up. “Thank you for dinner, Eliza. Your lasagna is almost as good as Stouffer’s.”
For a moment, I thought she was kidding.
“Thank you,” I said, because what could I say?
“Don’t pay her no never mind,” Clarabeth said. “Your lasagna is incredible! Paula Deen would kill for your recipe!”
I hugged Ted and Clarabeth and blew an air kiss to Cookie. Adam walked them all to the door.
“See y’all tomorrow,” I said.
In due time, Carl and Eve reached maximum capacity in the department of stamina and announced they were ready to sleep.
“I’m sorry, but I can hardly hold my eyes open,” Eve said and yawned.
“Long day,” Carl said.
“Don’t worry. We have two whole weeks to solve the problems of the world,” I said.
We went through the motions of shutting the house down for the night. The boys drifted in and said good night, disappearing into their rooms. I set up the coffeepot for the morning and Adam turned off all the lights. It was eleven o’clock. That’s when the screaming started.
“Help! Call 911!”
It was a man’s voice. There was a man outside our condo, close by, huffing and puffing.
“Help! 911!”
“It sounds like Ted!” I said, panicked.
“I’ll go see what’s going on,” Adam said, opening the sliding glass doors.
I watched as Adam raced across the terrace through the pool area and I saw Ted coming off the beach with Cookie in his arms. Ted’s clothes were soaking wet. Cookie was naked and her leg was bleeding like mad.
“Get Carl! Shark bite!”
“Give her to me,” Adam said.
Ted was nearly out of breath and passed Cookie’s tiny body over to Adam’s outstretched arms. Adam, decades younger and more fit, ran with Cookie straight to Carl and Eve’s. I followed Adam, grateful that Cookie was unconscious. It didn’t seem like her injuries were life threatening and I knew it was better that she was not entirely aware that her clothes were nowhere to be found.
And Adam would tell me later that he had the fleeting thought that this was the woman who’d ruined years of his life and he should’ve thrown her back to the sharks. But, on the other hand, he would rather that she owed him one. When I asked why he said, “I’ll tell you the story someday.”
At that point, I was on Carl and Eve’s terrace. I ran to call 911. In minutes, Cookie was stretched out on Carl and Eve’s couch, a makeshift tourniquet of clean dish towels around her wound and a comforter covering her up.
“What the hell happened?” Carl asked.
Carl and Eve were in their pajamas and had been half asleep.
“What’s going on?” Daphne said.
“Go back to bed,” Eve said.
“Oh, my God! Cookie! Is she okay?”
“She’s going to be fine,” Eve said. “It looks like a shark took a little nip of her thigh.”
“Oh, Mom! Oh, no!”
“Calm down, sweetie,” Carl said. “She’s fine.”
“I just went out to the beach to get some air. Clarabeth had the thermostat up to eighty degrees and she was snoring like a bear. Don’t say I said that.”
Carl said, “Ted? Would you like a glass of water?”
Ted said, “Yes, I would. Thanks. I guess she decided to go skinny-dipping.”
The doorbell rang. Eve opened it and there stood two EMS workers with a stretcher.
“Hurry! My mother was bitten by a shark!”
“I never even heard her leave the house,” Carl said, filling a glass from the spigot and handing it to Ted.
“Thanks. I could see it was Cookie. She wasn’t that far out in the ocean. Anyway, I saw her get pulled underwater and I knew she was in trouble.”
“Wait two minutes. Let me get my clothes on,” Carl said, then turned to the EMS workers. “Take her vitals. I’m coming with y’all. I’m a doctor and this is my mother-in-law.”
Cookie was moaning as she was being loaded into the ambulance. Carl hopped in the back with her.
“I’m coming too!” Eve said. “I’ll be right behind you in the car.”
“Holy crap,” I said.
“Wait until I tell Clarabeth this one,” Ted said.
“We’re going to be chewing on this one for years, no pun intended,” Adam said.
“Worst joke ever,” I said.
chapter 9
eliza’s catching up
wild dunes, 2009
It was a mere ninety-four degrees in the shade, but there was not a breath of air to be found. Eve and I were stretched out under the fronds of towering palmettos on recliners by the pool at Wild Dunes drinking iced water and rehashing the year. Our husbands were engaged in an afternoon battle to the death on the tennis courts.
“I still cannot believe it was Cookie who took the Vicodin,” I said.
“And I can’t believe it’s taken me two years to tell you. I was so horrified. She had enough in her system to kill a person three times her size. Evidently she had built up quite a tolerance,” Eve said. “We had a terrible fight over it.”
“Who? You and Cookie?” I sat up, took a Ziploc of apple slices from the cooler, and offered it to Eve. “Here. Have a slice.”
“Thanks!” Eve helped herself to two. “Of course, I had it out with her.”