“C’mon, Elaine. I mean, I got to run the boat, you know that. I mean, I can’t run the boat and watch the kids at the same time. We should all go out together,” he says. Why does she always have to make these things complicated? Why can’t she just say, “Fine, let’s go,” or “No, thanks, I’m too tired,” or something? It should be that simple. Instead, she’s coming on all sarcastic, suggesting absurd, impossible alternatives, and Bob is feeling guilty.
He stands and walks to the screened door and looks out at the yard, sand with bits and patches of witchgrass scattered through it. Across the road, Allie is still seated on her stoop, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. She’s got her wig on again, and it makes her look younger, just as she said. Bob thinks, I should have gone ahead and fucked her. Then he thinks, It’s a good thing I didn’t. I could’ve, but I didn’t, and he walks to the refrigerator for a beer.
“I’m just trying to come up with something to make you and the kids happy,” he says. “That’s all I’m doing. It’s not like I’m trying to think of ways to make you more miserable than you already are. So for Christ’s sake, please stop acting like I’m some kind of bastard, will you?”
She scrubs furiously at the blackened pan, her face twisted and red and sweating from the effort. “God damn. You really ruined this pan.”
“The hell with it. Throw it out.” He pops the top of the can of Schlitz and takes a long gulp.
“Sure, I’ll throw it out. Just like everything else when it breaks or won’t work anymore. Only we can’t afford to replace anything now when we throw them out, so after a while there won’t be anything to throw out,” she says. Frantically, she scrubs at the pan in the sink. “Just toss it out with the garbage! Easy! Except that next time I want a saucepan to cook supper in or maybe just to heat up the baby’s bottle, I won’t have any!”
Bob moves away from her, backs to the door, pushes it open with one hand and steps outside. “I’ll be back in a while,” he says softly.
“Fine.”
“Anything you want in Islamorada?”
“Nope. Nothing.”
“Thought I’d buy me a dip net for shrimp. The shrimp’re running out by the bridge. All you got to do is stand there and scoop ’em up. Maybe I’ll get nets for all of us, you know? So we can go out there on the bridge below Moray Key after dark tonight.”
“Fine.”
“You kids want to come up to Islamorada with me?” he calls.
They don’t answer. Ruthie leans forward and turns up the volume on the television.
“Hey, I’ll buy you a new pan,” Bob says to Elaine. “Ave’s got a charge at the tackle shop up there, and they got pots and pans and stuff like that.”
She stops scrubbing for a second and stares at him outside in the yard a few feet beyond the door. He’s still a large man to her, muscular and brown and kindly-looking, a bearish man. His face is open and sad and confused. “Bob,” she says in a low, even voice. “You still have to pay for it. You can charge your shrimp nets and your pots and pans or anything you want, but you still have to pay for it.”
“Yeah, I know, I know. Things’ll pick up soon,” he says. “I promise.” He turns abruptly, walks to his car and gets in, finishes off the beer and tosses the empty can onto the floor. Starting the engine, he looks over at Allie Hubbell and raises his hand in a short wave.
Allie grabs her can of beer, takes a sip, replaces it at her side. She doesn’t wave back.
Bob drops the car into gear and moves slowly away from the trailer, turns around in Horace’s driveway, causing the German shepherd to come barking out from under the trailer, and leaves.
The dream bothers Bob. It feels like a rash across his belly beneath his shirt, so that he rubs against it when he least expects to, in the car idling at a stop sign as he emerges from the road and prepares to turn north on Route 1, at the roadside grocery store where he stops to pick up another can of Schlitz, out on the highway again, when he looks to his right and sees rain clouds roiling up in the southeast.
