the Dancing Shrimp is this good.”
He sat across from her, the bright floral cushion of the rattan chair rippling under a backside that was still taut and shapely. She figured she was going to love Ken anyway when everything started to sag, but for now, she wasn’t sorry deterioration hadn’t gotten a head start.
“Those feet of yours have seen some hard times,” he said.
“It’s those pointy-toed shoes. Can’t figure out why the new owners are so determined to make everything twice as hard on us. Tight dresses, tight shoes, all so we can plop French fries and shrimp on wooden picnic tables out on the deck. Who do they think comes to the Dancing Shrimp, anyway? Today I had to lug high chairs to almost every single table. You think those little kids care if my shoes have any kind of toes?”
“They giving you any other trouble?”
“Oh, they don’t understand a thing. They keep fancying up the menu. Everything’s either en brochette or étouffée or en croute. People ask me what that means, and half the time I just have to make it up. And if they order something new, when it comes out of the kitchen, it’s just plain old shish kebabs or fish stew or some kind of silly-looking sandwich.”
“You know you don’t need to work anymore. We made good money when we sold the house in Miami, and we’re not spending much renting this one. You could quit. Stay home and rest those feet.”
She was touched. She and Ken had experienced their share of problems. For a while it had looked as if they weren’t going to survive them together, but somehow they had. And Ken, who had retreated into himself for so long she’d been afraid he would never find his way out again, was beginning to sound like the man she had married.
“I do appreciate that,” she said. “I really do, Kenny. But you want the truth? I don’t know what I’d do with all that time. Working kind of puts my day in order, you know? And even if we don’t need the money that bad, it’s nice to make some and know I’m contributing. You work awful hard yourself.”
“About work…” He took a bite of his pie. Fresh strawberry was one of her real masterpieces—she added toasted pecans to a shortbread crust—and she watched the pleasure spread over his face.
“Damn, this is good.” He looked up and grinned. “You’d be worth keeping just for your pies, Wanda.”
“Course, you got lots of other reasons, don’t you?”
“That’s like asking a man to count all the stars in the sky.”
She smiled despite herself. “I’m not going to snatch the plate away from you, you say the wrong thing. You don’t have to go on and on.”
“Found out today they’re sending me up to Georgia to do some training with Homeland Security. I’m going to be gone a lot in the next couple of months, on and off. You’ll be okay out here by yourself?”
Truth was that at one time, she wouldn’t have been. She would have been fearsome, lonely and probably gotten herself into some kind of trouble. But not anymore. The women who lived in the other cottages were as different from her as they could possibly be, but somehow, they’d all learned to get along.
“I’ll be fine,” she told him. “I get too lonely, I’ll go visit Junior and the grandkids.”
“I’ll come back between sessions. I won’t be gone too many days at a time. But the training’s good, and it looks like they want to promote me after it’s done. So I had to say yes.”
“You want to be promoted? You still okay with not being on the streets?”
“I like having a say in things. And let’s face it, I’m getting up there. Can’t be running through alleys and crashing through buildings too much longer. I don’t like paperwork, but I do like seeing things come together.”
“Whatever you do, Palmetto Grove’s lucky to have you.”
“I guess they think so, too.” He finished his pie, got up to take her plate and kissed her on top of her lacquered copper curls. “Gotta go in for a while tonight. Just to finish off some stuff, but I’ll be back in time to watch a movie. I can stop and pick up a DVD.”
“I want to see that Chihuahua movie, you know, the talking kind of Chihuahuas. Chase does, too.”
Chase, their rescued greyhound, came wandering in at the sound of his name. He proceeded to Wanda’s