“Maybe you should get the baby off the tit,” Sharla said. People without kids are always giving you advice, I notice.
She had six shot glasses lined up on the counter, filled with bright stuff.
“Jell-O shooters,” she said. “Don’t you have some of that formula stuff to give her just this once? You’d be more fun at a party if you were drinking, too.”
I put my coat over a chair. I couldn’t escape now that Grady had gone off with Ron. “How about a beer? I could finish Grady’s beer.”
Sharla clapped her hands and cheered.
She handed me a fresh beer from the fridge and knocked back a green Jell-O shot to celebrate. Then she had a red shot and shook her head fast, so her cheeks jiggled. It was funny.
“Plus, what you were you thinking?” she asked me. “Daisy and Dixie? Ha!”
“Well, she’s not going to call me Dixie, she’ll call me Mom or something.”
“Did you get called Dixie Cup at school?”
I couldn’t help laughing. “Yes! And D Cup. That wasn’t as bad as them singing I wish I was in Dixie...”
“Isn’t there a Daisy song, too?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I checked it, though, I don’t think there’s anything bad in it.”
“You’d be surprised,” Sharla said. “A girl in my class, Theresa Doherty, her parents wouldn’t have thought there was anything wrong with that. But she got called Turdo all through school.”
Sharla was making me laugh on purpose. Weird. I wondered what she wanted. Maybe just company.
“And her poor brother Dilbert...”
She must be drunk already, I thought. At her wedding she was Ice Princess Barbie, frozen in a full ball dress. She hadn’t cracked a joke or a smile all that night. Living out in the wilderness must be good for her.
The radio crackled. We could hear the guys out there somewhere.
“Control?” Ron was laughing into the radio. “This is Alpha 22. It’s not horses on the road, it’s buffalo. They’re just north of town. Three of them.”
Control’s answer was lost in static.
“Yeah,” Ron said. “The rancher is on scene. The buffalo are moving south toward town. Could I get you to contact Fish and Wildlife Services, see who they’ve got around? We could use some extra hands.”
“10-4, Alpha 22,” Control came through.
In the background you could hear Grady shouting, “Watch out! Watch that one go!”
Great. They’d be out all night, I thought. Dancing with buffalo.
The radio crackled off. Sharla picked up four more shooters, two in each hand. “They’ll be farting around out there for hours, waiting for the fish cops to show,” she said. “I’m going in the hot tub. Come on. Bring your beer.”
I picked up Daisy’s car seat and followed.
The hot tub had steamed up the closed-in sunroom at the back of the house. All I could see outside the sliding glass doors was more snow. The water smelled clean. Ron was a neat freak. If Grady and me had a hot tub, it would stink. Both of us waiting for the other one to clean it.
I set the car seat close to the tub and turned down Daisy’s blanket. Under her tight-closed eyes, her round cheeks were as smooth as pudding.
“Cute,” Sharla said. “Where’d she get the red hair from?”
“That happens,” I said. “When one parent is blonde and the other has darker hair.”
Sharla laughed. “Okay, okay! I’m not saying you cheated on Grady! You’d be a fool to do that.”
I stood by the edge of the tub. The bright blue water was still, but clouds of steam swirled on the surface. There were lights under the water. No way I was getting in there.
Sharla flicked switches to turn up the heat in the room. “We should eat the caramel apple pie. It won’t keep. Nobody else is coming to the party, looks like.”
“I guess I am a little hungry,” I said. Now that she’d mentioned pie, I was starving.
As if I hadn’t answered, she started stripping her purple dress off. She dropped it on the cedar floor, then her sparkly necklace. I was glad to see that she had a black spandex thing on, like a bathing suit.
There was a big TV in there, too, mounted high up on the wall. Biggest Loser was on. The contestants were talking about their love lives. “I was so shy, my wife had to propose,” said a huge guy, his limp hair parted in the middle. “Or I’d still be single.”
“Single. Lucky him,” Sharla said, and hit the clicker to turn the TV off. She made a moaning noise as she slipped into the hot water.
The beer was good. Cool, in this steaming hot room. I sat on the edge of the hot tub.
“For Pete’s sake, get in,” Sharla said. She knocked back another shooter. “Aren’t you cold out there?”
“I don’t have a bathing suit.”
Sharla shrugged, her shoulders lifting out of the water to make ripples. “Take off your socks and sit on the edge, it’ll warm you up.”
I was still cold from the drive. I pulled off my socks and rolled up my sweat pants.
The edge was sharp. It dug into my butt no matter how I sat. But the water was hot, hot, hot. I bent to let my hands dangle in the heat. It felt good.
“Oh, come on, take your sweat pants off at least. The water’s so good...”
I couldn’t.
“Too chicken?”
“Too fat to get in a hot tub,” I said. “Still haven’t lost the baby weight.”
“You look okay. You’re not that much bigger than you were at my wedding.”
I must have looked mad, or sad, or something. There was a pause. I thought she was going to apologize. But no.
“Are you and Ron going to have kids?” I asked.
She drank another vodka shot, her last one. Four empty glasses in a row on the edge of the tub.
“I’ve had three miscarriages so far,” Sharla said.
I didn’t dare look at her.
“They just keep dying on me,” she said.
I had no idea what to say.
After a minute I stood up and pulled off my sweat pants. I got down into the water with her.
“Sorry,” I finally said. “I’m really sorry.”
“Yeah. The first was the day before my wedding. That was fun. Another last summer. Lost the third one just before Christmas.”
She leaned over the edge and stared at Daisy’s upturned sleeping face.
“She is pretty cute,” Sharla said.
Then she jumped out of the tub, grabbed a towel, and ran across the tiles, leaving damp footprints. “Shit! I forgot the wings!”