Beach Wedding(3)

I was just going to roll with it, I decided, sipping some more beer to help in the flowing of the power of now.

“Wait. When are the others getting here? This afternoon, right? Your mother, too?” Vivian said a moment later, insisting on ruining my chi.

For his wedding, Tom had invited everyone in my sprawling Irish-American family to stay here together for a Rourke family reunion. And I mean all of us. Three generations were going to be playing millionaire beach house together for the next several out-of-control roller-coaster weeks.

“Yeah, my mom texted when you were in the shower,” I said. “They’re coming around four. Stop worrying. By the way, how’s Miss Snuggle Bunny Princess? Did you check on her? You need to. If she gets out of her room and starts wandering around the halls of Hogwarts here, we may never find her again.”

“Don’t worry. She’s still sleeping. She’s wiped out after that crawl up 95. You have to see her in her bed, like the princess and the pea. It’s so awesome that Tom gave us this jack-and-jill setup.”

“Exactly. It’s all awesome. Now you’re getting it. Stop worrying.”

“I’m worrying!” my wife cried, letting slip a little of the South Philly Italian moxie that occasionally soundtracked our whirlwind romance. “What about you?”

I patted at the bed beside me.

“Come on, would you?” I said. “Stop making sense and come up here, Jill. Jack needs you up here on the hill.”



3

“Look, Daddy! Mermaids!” my daughter, Angelina, shrieked later that afternoon as we were outside at the pool.

And what a pool. Like the over-the-top house, the marble man-made lake was something out of old pre-income-tax Hollywood. There were two diving boards and art deco sea-blue tiles. Even the pool house way down on the other end from where we were sitting was white marble with Doric columns and Greek temple steps. I stared out at it, waiting for Clark Gable to emerge onto the stairs whipping at Katharine Hepburn with a beach towel.

When Clark didn’t show, I repositioned myself down another travertine step in the pool and exchanged a smile with Viv, who was sitting behind me on a chaise reading a paperback. Then I sidled over a little next to my daughter as she stuck her goggled face back into the water to get another look at the mosaic-tiled mermaids that lined the massive walls.

“Mermaids!” she cried again when she came up for air.

“You keep saying that. Wait a second. I know! You must be a mermaid, too!” I yelled.

Angelina stared at me wide-eyed through her goggles, then leaned in close to my ear.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I am.”

“I knew it,” I whispered back. “Are the mermaids on the wall pictures of you?”

Again, she gave me her wide imagination-filled eyes.

“I’ll go see,” she said, sticking her face back under.

“Well?” I said when she came back up.

She shook her head.

“No? Not you? Then who are they?” I said.

“They’re...my little sisters!” she said, splashing at the water.

“Sisters, huh?” I said, frowning over at Viv, who looked up from her book with a grin and a nod of superiority.

“What about brothers?” I said hopefully. “Do mermaids have any handsome and helpful little brothers that they like to swim with?”

“Yuck, Daddy. Don’t you know anything? Boys can’t be mermaids,” she said as Viv chuckled.

“Laugh it up, Viv,” I said. “While you can. I’m betting that we’re going to be evening up the odds around here very soon.”

My wife and I were still exchanging eye rolls when I spotted Tom coming toward us down the courthouse-like steps of the mansion’s side entrance. As he started across the gargantuan green plain of the lawn, I could see he had changed out of his play clothes and was wearing a pin-striped navy suit, his dark hair slicked back now, his easy smile very white against his tan.

Speaking of Clark Gable, I thought.

“Well, I’m off to the city for a little while, so you’ll have the run of the place,” he said as he waved at Angelina from the pool’s ornate wrought-iron gate.

“No, you’re leaving?” I said as I hopped out of the water and came across the glowing limestone.

“That stinks, Tom. Do you have to?” Vivian said as she got into the pool next to Angelina.

“Something came up at the office. Can’t be helped.” He shrugged.

I didn’t even want to know what that meant. I’d been to Tom’s Midtown office once before, and his desktop looked like his own personal Pentagon war room with three blinking screens that he stared at all day. The dizzying array of constantly changing multicolored graphs looked like some kind of impossibly advanced mathematics video game.

I didn’t know how the hell he did it. Whatever it was that he actually did.

“I’ll be back by dinner. At least hopefully,” he said, checking his fancy steel wristwatch that probably cost more than my hatchback.

“Hey, I’ll walk you up,” I said, opening the pool’s heavy gate with a creak.

The Yankee Stadium outfield of just-watered meticulously cut grass that we walked across was pleasantly cool under my bare feet after the sun-warmed pool stone.

There was an elaborate coffered arch built through the bottom of the house’s north wing, and as we arrived on the other side, a shining black Mercedes was coming to a stop in the circular drive.