“Dick called?” Bob looked up from his plate.
“We should invite her for tea one day,” Veronica said, ignoring Bob. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”
“Goddammit, Veronica,” Bob said, “I need to know these things. Knowledge is power.…”
“No,” Ginny said, her cheeks reddening. “You’re not listening, Mommy. There’s one thing you do not know.”
For a moment, Veronica’s little girl—blond banana curls and saddle shoes—sat before her. Frustrated she wasn’t being heard. Veronica had never been brave enough (or cruel enough) to tell her daughter that in this world, in man’s world of war, in the din of jet engines revving and factory gears turning, a woman would never be heard.
“They’re black!” Tony burst out. As if all the resentment Veronica knew he felt for her and Bob had released. “Well.” He laughed huskily. “Her husband is. Black as tar. A real moolie.”
“Dad!” Maddie rose from her chair.
“Sit down,” Tony commanded.
“You should’ve seen them, Mommy,” Ginny said, her eyes sparkling. “Strolling down the fairway. Acting like they owned the island.”
“You weren’t even there, Mom,” Maddie said, rolling her eyes the way teenagers did these days.
“Well.” Ginny stared at her daughter. “Peggy Brell said they…”
“Peggy Brell is a know-it-all gossip,” Maddie said.
Veronica liked the moxie in the girl.
Bob sucked on his spoon of sherbet and said matter-of-factly, looking at Maddie, “She’s a stubborn thing. If she doesn’t change, no man will want her.”
Maddie blinked. As if, Veronica thought, the girl was trying to wake from a bad dream. Poor thing. Veronica knew it wouldn’t be the last time a man’s careless comments knocked the wind from her granddaughter’s sails.
“Bob, apologize.”
Maddie huffed, her arms crossed over her newly grown chest. “I don’t want any apology from him.”
Tony’s deep voice thundered over the table. “One more word out of you, Maddalena…”
The effect he had on Maddie, Dom, even Ginny—their heads bowed in fear. How had she allowed her daughter to marry a tyrant like her father? Veronica knew if she peeled back the sleeve of Ginny’s flowery sundress, she’d see the same violet bruises that had bloomed there year after year.
“A colored man?” Bob looked up.
This could be good, Veronica thought. Not that they could directly use the Marshall girl’s black husband as the reason she was ineligible to sit on the board. Heavens no. The Grudder men had always held their racist cards close to their medal-cluttered chests. But they were no liberals, Veronica was sure of that. When one lived and worked in a bubble like Grudder, within the bigger bubble of the military, and on an island with one exit, you could hold on to your prejudices, no matter how outdated and nasty they may be. This news was a weapon. Plus, there was the Marshall woman’s save-the-Earth activism. A fat folder dug up by the private investigator Veronica had hired revealed Ms. Marshall had spent a night in jail after a particularly wild protest—a tree sit-in at a national park with some radical group called Earth First! who actually used an exclamation point like they were schoolchildren.
“Bob.”
“What?”
“We don’t call them that anymore.”
“Who? What did I say?” His bulbous nose reddened.
“‘Colored,’” she said. “It’s ‘African American,’ dear.”
“African American, my ass. You know how much I did for those people?”
“Yes,” she said. “I believe you’ve told us a million times.”
Dominic giggled.
Or this news could be bad, Veronica thought, very bad. The board may want to avoid blocking a woman with a black husband. Black children. How would it look, Mrs. Pencott? She could already hear that public relations pansy Carl Buckley (he’d have a field day). In this age of political correctness, we should consider the message.
“And the children?” she asked.
Maddie answered. “A boy.” She paused. “My age. And a supercute little girl.”
“What?” Bob asked. “There are children? They mulatto?”
“Biracial,” Maddie said.
“What?” Bob shouted.
“You’re not supposed to use that word. It’s,” Maddie enunciated, “bi-RAY-shul.”
“Mul-AH-tow, to-MAY-tow, to-MAH-tow. I don’t give a damn.”
“That’s enough, Bob,” Veronica snapped.
Ginny dropped her fork so it pinged the china. The room was silent but for the fan whirring on the kitchen counter. Veronica drank in their shock and it revived her. Like a magic potion healing her cancer-stained organs. No one had ever dared to interrupt the Colonel.
“We’re finished listening to you go on ad nauseam on the topic.”
He ignored her, stared across the table at Ginny.
“You gaining weight again, Virginia?” His voice went cold as he shifted into the Colonel, the man who had drilled his only daughter, his only surviving child, on historical dates at the breakfast table each morning—the sinking of the Lusitania, the rise of the Third Reich, the Gettysburg Address.
Tony’s chair scraped the floor. The kitchen door slammed behind him.
“Daddy.” As soon as Veronica heard her daughter’s meek voice she knew things would only get worse. “I’m at a relatively healthy weight. There was this doctor on Oprah the other day and he said…”
“Don’t give me that nonsense,” Bob said. Veronica watched his eyes, milky with cataracts, march up and down their daughter’s torso. “You’ve put on so much weight you look like a—”
“That is quite enough, Bob,” Veronica hissed through her teeth.
“It’s for her own good, Veronica,” he said.
“I went to those doctors you sent me to, Daddy. Dr. Atkins almost killed me with those pills.”
Oh, heavens, Veronica thought, not Dr. Atkins again.
Bob licked the back of his spoon. “We burned money so you could go see that quack and do his miracle diet.”
“It was speed, Bob,” Tony said from the kitchen doorway, a full glass of wine in one hand. “Yeah, she wasn’t eating no more. But she was passing out every day.”
“Are you happy now, Bob?” Veronica sighed. “Look what you’ve done. You and your big mouth.”
“Mommy!”
She relished her daughter’s astonishment. Ginny had never heard her stand up to Bob. Or if she had, her daughter had watched the punishment that followed, a hard slap across the seat of Veronica’s pants, or a pinch and twist under her arm. Reminders that only Veronica would see in the bathroom mirror when she undressed to shower.
“You’re just like the rest of this island,” Bob said, talking more to himself and his spoon of sherbet. “Leeches getting fat off the blood of…” He lost his focus, stuttered.
“Bob,” she said softly. She’d give him one last chance.
“Vandals disgracing the island—my island—with lies! Now that we’ve fought their wars, they’ve gone and got soft and spoiled.”
He was standing, his knuckles pressed into the table so it wobbled.
“They say it’s the end of the Cold War.” He shook his head. “They say some liberal hack from Arkansas is going to take over this country. A liar, a man who can’t keep his johnson in his pants!”