and effortlessly, Woody reached for a stanchion and boosted himself onto the bow. He borrowed the boat hook from the flummoxed female and fished the line out of Biscayne Bay on the first try.
“Can you take it from here, Mrs. Elliot?”
“I, I think so,” came the unconvincing response.
With the boat still shifting in its slip, Woody decided it best to stick around to make sure Mrs. Elliot tied off the cleat without incident. He recalled the time Mr. White’s “secretary” had not been so careful and ended up being rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital.
The severed tip of one of her perfectly manicured digits packed in ice.
It was a messy situation.
And an even messier divorce.
Woody pocketed the ten-dollar tip Mrs. Elliot insisted he accept and then ran off to help Mrs. Burke transport her groceries to the vintage trawler she shared with her husband. She being Irish and he Jewish, their boat was aptly named: Mixed Nuts. But after fifty years of marriage, the “Bicker-steins”—as the couple was secretly known amongst staff members—had managed to switch ethnicities.
“Thank you so much, dear,” said Mrs. Burke. “My arthritis is really slowing me down today.”
“Sorry to hear that,” said Woody.
“I must look like a hundred and ten. An alter kaker.”
Woody assumed this was a less than complimentary description and insisted she looked like a teenager.
“What a sweetheart this boy is! Still nobody special yet, huh?”
“Nope, afraid not, Mrs. Burke.”
“I can’t believe you don’t have a special gal. Such a face this boy has. You look just like John F. Kennedy, Jr. Anyone ever tell you that?”
Woody smiled. “Just you, Mrs. Burke.”
“You know, my mahjong partner, Ida, she’s got a gorgeous grandchild and—”
“Anne,” interrupted her spouse, who suddenly appeared in the cockpit, glass of whiskey in his hand. “Will you leave the poor kid alone? Every week you ask him the same question, and every week he gives you the same answer.”
“Such an expert on the opposite sex, that one is. Mr. Lance Romance. Besides, who wanted your opinion, Harry?”
“And who gave you permission to play Yente the matchmaker?”
Woody cleared his throat and began to pass Mrs. Burke’s shopping bags to her husband.
“What the hell did you do, Anne? Buy out Publix?”
“All to support that fat gut of yours, Harry!”
“Guess you haven’t noticed your fat ass in the mirror lately, huh, honey?”
“Excuse me,” said Woody as he handed off the last parcel. “But is there anything else I can do for you folks?”
With a skirmish brewing, a speedy departure from the battlefield was mandated.
“No, thanks, son,” said Mr. Burke. “But if you see Ariel, could you tell him my damn head is on the fritz again.”
“You can say that again,” snickered Mrs. Burke, pointing to her bald husband.
On that sour note, Woody bade the lovebirds adieu and had just turned to leave when the Hammond twins—Christopher and Jasper—charged up the dock toward him. Accompanied by their recently separated mother, a very attractive forty-some-thing blonde with legs as long as the Amazon and a reputation equally as treacherous.
“Hey, dude,” said Christopher, giving Woody a high five.
“Hey, dude,” echoed Jasper, his mirror image, save for brown rather than green eyes.
The twins, Jasper and Christopher, were in Woody’s youth sailing group and yearned to become Olympic racers. After they captured gold for their country, they planned to attend Yale like their father, play major league baseball, become firemen, open up a chain of video game stores and then travel to Mars.
“So, don’t keep me in suspense,” said Woody. “How’d you guys rank today?”
“We totally kicked butt!” said Jasper.
“Exceeded all expectations,” added his brother, the more cerebral of the two.
“Awesome,” said Woody. “This was your most challenging regatta yet.”
“But their success is all thanks to you,” said the twins’ mother, smiling. “The best and, I might also mention, the most adorable sailing coach anyone could hope for.”
Woody chose to ignore the latter comment and addressed the former.
“Your boys made it easy for me, Mrs. Hammond. They’re terrific students. Eager and super enthusiastic.”
“Too bad they don’t have the same attitude toward their homework.”
“Aw, Ma,” sighed Jasper. “Can you chill?”
“Yeah,” piped in his brother.
“By the way,” said Mrs. Hammond. “The boys want you to come to their birthday party next Saturday night at our house. I promise it will be fun for kids as well as us grown-ups.”
Given Mrs. Hammond’s bad rap sheet, Woody thought it wise to decline this invitation. Especially since the club had unspoken rules (often broken, of course) about staff canoodling with club members. Not to mention those members whose husbands—ex or otherwise—happened to sit on the governing board of directors.
“We’d really love to have you, Woody,” said Mrs. Hammond, licking her chops.
“Thanks, ma’am, but I’ve already got plans.”
“A hot date or something?” asked Jasper.
“See you two monkeys next week,” said Woody, choosing to ignore the question.
He took leave of the twins and their mama, and headed for the dock house, a small, gray shingled shack at the very end of the main pier. It was there that Woody found his boss hunched over his cluttered desk, slurping coffee and chewing on an unlit cigar which his doctor had forbidden him to smoke.
“Fucking paperwork,” grumbled Skip.
“You know. It’d be much easier if you’d let me teach you how to use the computer.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late to teach this old salty dog new tricks. Which reminds me, that new member, Ted Page…”
“You mean Fred Sage,” said Woody. “His Bertram 450 gets delivered this afternoon.”
“Yeah. And from what I’ve been told, damn fool don’t know his ass from his bowline when it comes to boats. Never even owned a canoe before.”
“Terrific, I can hardly wait to meet him.”
“Well, here’s your chance, son. Seems the boat is already in the channel and Mr. Terrific has just pulled into the parking lot. As for me, my hemorrhoids and I got an appointment with the proctologist.”
Fred Sage may have flunked out of community college, but he was far from dumb. A New Jersey transplant, he immediately honed in on a by-product of South Florida’s booming real estate market and started a company that delivered home insurance for the average buyer. Hassle-free. Cheap. With fast, reliable payouts. Or so his ads claimed.
Now, in the good old days, a guy like Fred Sage would never have been able to secure membership at the Trade Winds, a club established in the fifties by a group of stodgy old yachtsmen and favored by many wanna-be social climbers in the greater Miami boating community. But times they were a changing. Old money was dying off and, as former club commodore Gregory Cox so delicately put it, “The current economic climate sadly