After we left dry dock and got back to the marina, I helped Annie in the garden again, planting and weeding, watering and harvesting.
One morning, as I came bounding up the ramp to the garden, I caught her leaning against the fence, squinting at Wade’s houseboat with a hand cupped above her eyes. Annie and Wade hated each other. No one would tell me why.
“Whatcha doin’, Annie?” I asked. My grammar and pronunciation changed when I worked in the garden, then changed back again when I went home.
“I’m waiting to see if I can catch that sonofabitch when he takes a shower!”
I didn’t understand.
“Oh, he’s been complaining to Gunner about the water I’m using. Says everyone else is paying for it. He says when I’m watering he don’t get enough water pressure to run his shower. So I’m waiting for him to get in the shower so I can turn the hose on, just to piss that asshole off.”
I looked at Wade’s houseboat, at the tinted-glass window I knew belonged to his bedroom. I knew this because he had taken me up there one afternoon to see his pet iguana, Gomez. As we walked up the spiral staircase—Wade’s pale, hairy legs a few steps in front of me—the hair on the back of my neck went up and my heart beat a little harder. Marilyn had always told me never to go with a man into his bedroom. I calculated how fast I could get back down the stairs. But still I followed because I didn’t want to be rude.
He really did just want to show me his iguana.
“Ain’t he handsome?” he’d asked, stroking the striped tail. Gomez did have a certain charm, at least compared to the psychotic, blue fish Wade kept in his kitchen. Oscar, who had a mouth full of tiny, white teeth, liked to charge the glass whenever you walked by. If Wade lifted the lid off the tank, the fish would launch himself out of the water onto the kitchen floor and thrash around angrily until Wade threw him back in the tank. One of Wade’s favorite things to do was lift the lid off the tank.
“Annie, I can’t see how you can see in there. He’s got the windows tinted.”
“Nah, I can see. Yep…yep. There!” and off she trotted, all arthritic knees and jiggly arms, to the faucet. She put the hose on full bore. “There! Sonofabitch. How’d you like that?”
A few minutes later, the window to Wade’s bedroom slid open: “You bitch! You bitch! The hot water burned me!”
Annie bent over, cackling like a witch. How did she know? I wondered.
While Annie’s hatred of Wade had increased since she built her garden, mine had decreased. I’d grown fond of Wade for the way he always waved at me when I walked by his houseboat, for Gomez and Oscar, and perhaps especially for his new car: a used hearse painted turquoise with rainbow racing stripes, and oversized fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror. But most of all, I liked Wade because he’d let me in on a secret.
The secret he didn’t tell anyone but me was that he was once a professional chef. One afternoon as I walked by his boat, he called me inside. It was late in the day, and I was worried he’d be drunk already, but he was perfectly sober. He took me by the elbow and led me to his galley. And there in straight rows were dozens and dozens of perfectly made cannolis.
“Where’d you get those?” I asked.
“I made them.”
“No way.”
“Yes way,” he said.
“You can’t cook,” I said.
“The fuck I can’t—I’m a pastry chef.”
“For reals?”
“Yeah, for reals. I couldn’t buy these things. They’d be like three bucks a pop. That’s like two hundred dollars.”
I surveyed the lines of pastries. “Why’d you make so many?”
“Why waste time on small batches?” he said, pensively scratching his belly.
He made me eat one, and it was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted. Everyone at Donahue’s raved about what a good cook Annie was, but her potato bread was as heavy as a brick, and her fudge was sandy with sugar crystals. And here was Wade, whom nobody really liked, making fancy pastries.
“How come I didn’t know you could do this?” I asked Wade.
“I never told anyone.”
“Why not?”
“What’d be the point?” he said and packed some up for me to take home.
My grandfather was not impressed. He called Wade a “lazy shit” for drawing disability when he was perfectly healthy and even had a trade. But what my grandfather didn’t know, and what none of us knew until later, was that Wade had another secret: he had Lou Gehrig’s disease. After I left for college, Wade sobered up. He started volunteering at a marine mammal rescue center; he reconciled with his ex-wife and kids. And not so long after that, he died.