I roll my eyes. “Very funny.”
“It’s true, Mom,” Nico chimes in. “People are always honking at you to go faster.”
Apparently in (on?) Long Island, you’re not allowed to go less than twenty miles above the speed limit.
Except as we’re taking the off-ramp from the expressway, the sound of a police siren comes from behind us. Enzo looks in the rearview mirror and swears in Italian under his breath. “You got to be kidding me,” he mutters.
He pulls over to the side of the road while I resist the urge to say I told him so. The police officer takes his sweet time getting out of the car while Enzo fumbles around, looking for his license.
“Is Dad going to be arrested?” Ada asks in a worried voice.
“No,” I say.
“That would be cool,” Nico says.
“Still no,” I say.
The cop is a guy in his thirties, who seems like he’s not too excited to be doing this in the ninety-degree heat. Enzo rolls down the window and smiles charmingly at him.
“Hello, officer,” he says in an accent so thick, it’s hard to understand him. “Is problem?”
“License and registration,” the officer says in a bored voice.
Enzo hands over the paperwork, waiting to hear what the cop has to say. He inspects Enzo’s license and finally says, “You know how fast you were going, Mr. Accardi?”
“I so sorry,” Enzo says. “But… see gas dial? Is almost empty! I must go fast to find gas station before we run out!”
The officer stares at him for a second, scratching his head. “It doesn’t work like that, you know.”
“No?” Enzo flashes him an astonished look, which actually seems pretty genuine. “I did not know!”
“No. It doesn’t.” He looks down at the license again, then back at my husband and the rest of us in the car. “Okay, I don’t want to spoil your afternoon with your family. Go get some gas for your car. No need to go so fast.”
“Grazie.” Enzo smiles up at the officer. “You have good day, sir.”
It’s only after the police officer has gone back to his car and Enzo has rolled up the window that he winks at me. “Is too easy.”
He never gets tickets. He always manages to talk his way out of it. Orliehis way out of it, as the case may be. It’s astonishing how good he is at saying things that are a hundred percent untrue with a completely straight face.
I’ve always known my husband is an excellent liar. It just never bothered me until I suspected he was hiding something from me.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Jonathan and Suzette beat us to the beach. Even though we were likely driving faster, they didn’t get pulled over by the cops on the way over.
We park in the special fancy lot for the private beach, and when I get out of the car, Jonathan and Suzette are making their way to the entrance, which is guarded by a tough-looking guy in a black wife-beater T-shirt and swim shorts. He’s like the private beach equivalent of a bouncer.
Jonathan is carrying two beach chairs and an umbrella, while Suzette just has a small tote bag slung over her shoulder. Jonathan looks like the typical beachgoer at the beginning of the season—a little too pale, a bit of a gut hanging over his swim trunks, his white feet shoved into a pair of flip-flops, a baseball cap covering his thinning hair. Suzette, on the other hand, looks like she has been going to the beach all winter. She is perfectly tanned, her Cartier sunglasses perched on her nose, and she is wearing a tiny bikini that shows off a spectacularly fit body.
After two children and forty-plus years of gravity taking its toll, my body doesn’t look like that. It can’t. But even when I was twenty-five, I never felt comfortable prancing around the beach in a bikini the size of a handkerchief, so today I am wearing amodest one-piece bathing suit with a cover-up over it. And much like Jonathan, I am painfully pale. I probably won’t take the cover-up off the whole time, since I’m not much of a swimmer.
The beach bouncer is checking out Suzette in her teeny tiny bikini. Actually, a lot of people are checking out Suzette. EvenI’mhaving trouble not staring a bit. When does she have time to get her belly that firm? And I’m guessing she doesn’t have any C-section scars or stretch marks she needs to cover up.
Enzo has his T-shirt and trunks on, and he is wrangling our own beach furniture he pulled from the trunk. To be honest, I wouldn’t have blamed him if he were checking Suzette out in that tiny bikini—he’s only human—but I don’t catch his gaze dipping below the neckline.
“Millie!” Suzette says. “What an… interesting cover-up you have on. I love how you don’t feel like you need to spend a ton of money on a beach outfit. That issoyou.”
That was a backhanded compliment if there ever was one. But I can’t really argue with it. I got the cover-up from the discount rack.
