Cry Uncle by Judith Arnold Read Free Book Online Page B

plastic. Her feet were bare and
dirty, and her equally dirty hands clutched a toy archer’s bow.
    She scowled at Pamela. “You’re dead,” she
announced.
    Pamela met the girl’s stare. “Do I look dead
to you?”
    The girl considered the questionfor a minute,
then shrugged. “You’re ugly,” she said.
    Pamela knew better than to ask the child if
she looked ugly. Her smile, however, felt as plastic as the hula
skirt looked, and she abandoned all pretense of friendliness.
“Where’s your uncle?”
    “ He’s not here. He went to
Birdie’s.”
    “ He invited me for
lunch.”
    “ Yeah, well, he’s at
Birdie’s. You wanna play?”
    No, Pamela did not want to play. Not with a
heavily armed savage who called her ugly. “Who is Birdie?”
    The girl smirked at Pamela’s apparent
ignorance. “You know. Birdie. Come on, let’s play. I’ll be the Boo
Doo Chief. You can be the biker.” With that, the girl spun around
and plunged into the shrubbery.
    Pamela took a deep breath and let it out. She
didn’t want to be the biker. What she wanted was for Jonas Brenner
to appear and explain what in God’s name was going on.
    Her prayers were answered promptly. “Pamela!”
his voice sailed toward her from the street.
    She turned to see him jogging up the
driveway, a bouquet of pale squares drooping from his hand. As he
drew nearer, she saw they were loose tea bags.
    She shifted her gaze from the tea bags to the
man holding them. His grooming had improved considerably overnight.
Although his hair was still too long, his chin was clean-shaven and
his apparel—a sky-blue cotton shirt tucked neatly into a belted
pair of khakis—was untorn. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of
mirror-lensed sunglasses, and his earring was dangly and gold this
time, either a heart or a skull, or maybe—she hoped—a peace sign.
She couldn’t make out the shape.
    “ Sorry,” he said, then
smiled. Without the stubble to hide it, his dimple was more
pronounced. “I realized you might be a tea drinker and I didn’t
have any tea bags, so I had to borrow some. Actually, I wanted to
borrow the whole box, but Birdie can be funny about stuff.” He had
reached Pamela’s side, and she fell into step next to him as they
ambled up the front walk to the porch. “You should have rung the
bell. Lizard would have let you in.”
    “ Lizard is outside playing,”
Pamela told him. “She invited me to join her.” She told me I was ugly . Honestly,
Pamela reproached herself, she shouldn’t let a child’s opinion mean
so much to her. But it did. “Who’s Birdie?”
    “ She’s Lizard’s main
baby-sitter. She lives across the street. You’ll meet her
eventually,” said Joe, holding the screen door open for Pamela and
following her into an entry hall. The walls were a muted beige, the
oak floor covered with a thick, faded runner rug. The shadows kept
the interior air surprisingly cool.
    “ Lizard, Birdie, Kitty... Is
there anyone named Toad I ought to know about?”
    Joe threw back his head and laughed. It was
such a deep, warm laugh Pamela almost begged him to remove his
sunglasses. She wanted to see what happened to his eyes when he
dissolved in robust laughter—whether they squinted into two
crescent slits or sparkled, or... No, she didn’t want to know
anything about his eyes at all.
    “ I reckon I’m as close as
anyone gets to being a toad around here,” he said. “We should all
count our blessings we’re about to add a swan to the
menagerie.”
    It took Pamela a full minute
to realize he meant that she would be the swan. She felt her cheeks grow warm.
She hadn’t prepared herself for flattery—especially not after
Lizard’s succinct assessment of her appearance. And Joe’s
compliment wasn’t like the usual line a man would use to beguile a
woman. He had already established that he wanted to marry her, and
that once he did they would sleep in separate beds. Maybe he was
trying to soften her up so she would overlook his