Fletch, Too

Barbara shoved Fletch away from the bathroom mirror. “Is this what life with you is going to be like?”

Fletch was brushing his teeth. “What do you mean?”

She put toothpaste on her own brush. “Always running away? Always being somewhere else?”

She already had changed into her swimsuit.

“Carr invited both of us,” Fletch said. “You said you didn’t want to come. You said you were sick of airplanes, want to spend the day resting by the pool.”

“Lovely,” Barbara said. “You fly me to East Africa, worry my mother frantic, then fly off into the bush, leaving me in some tropical hotel…”

“I agreed to go. I thought you would want to go, too.”

“I said I wanted to stay here. I thought you’d say you wanted to stay here, too.”

“Will you let me rinse my mouth? Please?”

Barbara stepped aside, but not much. “We got married. Big event in life. We flew halfway around the world, totally unprepared. Big event. To meet your father, for the first time, which should be a big event, except he decides he’s got something better to do than meet us. Yesterday, you saw someone get stabbed to death in a bathroom. Big bloody event! And today you want to go flying off into the African bush to someplace we’ve never heard of, with someone we don’t even know!”

“You losing your sense of humor?”

“When is enough enough for you? Can’t you sit still a damned minute?”

“Okay,” Fletch said. “I’ll go downstairs and tell Carr I’m not going. We’ll sit by the pool.”

She had put the cap back on the toothpaste and placed the tube neatly on the counter.

Barbara turned and faced Fletch. “No. You go.” Suddenly her tight fist, much smaller and harder than Fletch had realized, smashed into Fletch’s stomach, low, just inside his right hipbone. “Take that with you.”

Fletch lowered his head. He looked up at her. “No one’s ever hit me there before.”

“First time for everything.”

Fletch walked into the hallway outside the bathroom. “I can’t stay now.”

“That’s a nice excuse.”

“Take it as you like it. See you at dinner.”