Ladies' Night, Andrews, Kay [best time to read books .txt] 📗

“Weren’t there monkeys, too?” the ninety-year-old inquired.

“You’ve got a good memory,” Wyatt said. “The monkeys were here when I was a little kid. But when this neighborhood started going residential, with all the subdivisions closing in, we were getting a lot of complaints, especially since the little boogers were too clever and kept getting out of their pens and frightening the neighbors. Eventually, all of them were adopted out.”

Cookie found a parrot pellet in Wyatt’s pocket and began chewing contentedly.

“That was certainly interesting,” the old man said, pumping Wyatt’s hand again. “This is a grand place you’ve got here. We’re a little surprised to have it all to ourselves today.”

Wyatt was not surprised. But he made a valiant effort to keep up a good front.

“You just happened to catch us on our slow day,” he lied. “But you come back later in the week, and the crowds will be here, I guarantee.”

That was a lie, too. They hadn’t had what you could call a real “crowd” at Jungle Jerry’s in months and years. Okay, decades, if you wanted to be brutally honest. In this post-Disney era, families got their kicks in air-conditioned comfort, with audio-animatronics and movie-quality special effects. Animal rights advocates didn’t approve of exotic birds performing quaint tricks like riding a tiny bicycle on a high wire, and kids were bored silly just looking at a bunch of plants and trees.

Jungle Jerry’s had shrunken significantly over the years. Right now, they were at around a hundred acres, since Jungle Jerry’s son-in-law, Wyatt’s father, Nelson, had been forced to sell off a chunk of land to pay inheritance taxes after Jerry’s death.

Wyatt had never intended to work in the family business. He’d been a horticulture major in college and had gone to graduate school at Clemson for a degree in landscape architecture, which was where he’d met Callie Parker, a twenty-two-year-old graphic arts major from Orangeburg, South Carolina. He and Callie had been in a fever to get married, such a fever that he’d canned the idea of getting his master’s and dropped out of grad school to get a job working for a mail-order nursery in Greenville.

He’d worked there for four years when his mother called to beg him to come home to run Jungle Jerry’s. Nelson had suffered his first heart attack, and Peggy, his mother, had just been diagnosed with breast cancer, although she didn’t tell him that until after he and Callie moved back to Bradenton.

Peggy lived just long enough to hold Bo, christened Nelson William Keeler II, before succumbing to the cancer.

The first few years at the park, Wyatt had worked furiously to try to turn the tide at Jungle Jerry’s. He’d advertised, joined civic associations, networked like crazy. He’d phased out the old kiddie rides, which were rusting safety hazards anyway, and had begun emphasizing ecology and the botanical aspect of the park. And at first, things seemed to be working. Attendance crept up. Callie came to work at the park, designing posters and ads. Bo took his first steps chasing after Beezus, a gold-capped conure. They weren’t getting rich, but they were young and happy. And dumb, Wyatt reflected now. At least, he was.

They’d bought their first house in one of the newer subdivisions nearby and enrolled Bo in the neighborhood school, one of the best in the school district. Wyatt was working crazy long hours at Jungle Jerry’s, and Callie was doing some sporadic freelance work. Most of the other families on their block were like them, young marrieds with one or two kids. They cooked out together, took the kids en masse to Holmes Beach—all the things you did when you were young with not much money.

The one bachelor on the block, Luke Grigsby, was a salesman with a chemical company. Luke was the neighborhood fun guy. He wore cool clothes and drove a sharp white Trans-Am. His home was the biggest, newest house on the block, and since he had a pool, he entertained frequently.

Every year Luke threw a big, crazy Halloween party. Everybody competed to come up with the most outrageous costume. Wyatt wasn’t a big one for parties, but Callie loved dressing up. That year, she decided they should go as Aladdin and Jasmine, the characters from the Disney movie.

Wyatt reluctantly allowed himself to be talked into wearing a turban, idiotic-looking billowy pants, and, worst of all, a short embroidered vest over his bare chest. For her own costume, Callie outdid herself. She took one of her old bikinis and covered the top and bottoms with hot-glued gold sequins, then attached some kind of filmy fabric to the bottoms to make harem pants. She bought a felt fez, cut a hole in the top, and pulled her blond ponytail through, then made herself a veil with more of the filmy fabric.

Callie refused to let Wyatt see her in her costume until the night of the party. When she stepped out of the bedroom, he couldn’t believe this was his wife.

She’d swept glittering blue eye shadow on her eyelids and outlined them in black liner. Her breasts jutted out of the skimpy sequined bikini top, and her harem pants skimmed right above her pubic bone. She wore half a dozen jangly gold bracelets on each arm, huge earrings, and little gold sandals. As a final touch, she’d somehow attached a huge plastic rhinestone in her belly button.

Callie’s eyes danced from above the veil obscuring the lower half of her face. She did a little pirouette followed by a suggestive hip grind that sent her bracelets jingling.

“What do you think?”

“Where’s the rest of it?” Wyatt asked.

She pouted. “What’s that supposed to mean? You don’t like it?”

He looked over his shoulder, toward the kitchen, where the teenage babysitter was trying to con Bo into eating his dinner. “I like it just fine if we’re staying home tonight—just the two of us,” he said in a low voice, running a finger down her bare arm. “But don’t you