Life Guards in the Hamptons Read Free Page A

itched.
    “Yeah, chiggers are a bitch, but they don’t carry diseases like ticks.”
    “So what can I do about them? I’m going crazy.”
    “Grandma—”
    “No.”
    “A doctor? They have prescription meds that kill the bugs.”
    I had a dentist and a gynecologist and a walk-in clinic that took my insurance for flu shots. I never saw the same doctor twice. No way was I showing my pox-covered ass to a stranger. “What else?”
    “I heard you could try putting clear nail polish on the bites. Suffocate the bastards.”
    I only had red polish, but so what? So now I looked like a leper.
    And I still itched, except where I’d drawn blood. I guess the blood flushed the venom out. I scratched harder.
    I blamed my mother, of course. I wouldn’t have gone to Paumanok Harbor in the first place if not for her and her dogs and her well-rehearsed guilt sermon. I wouldn’t have encountered M’ma, or the troll, or Grant whom I almost married. I wouldn’t have gotten involved with the paranormal or the parasites.
    I called her cell. Heaven knew where she was.
    “I’ll be home soon,” she said. “We’ve shut down another dog fighting operation, and have one more breeder to investigate.”
    “I need help now, Mom! I’ll be a bloody mess by the time you get here, with permanent scars.”
    She sniffed in disapproval. “You always enjoyed melodrama, Willy. The bites’ll go away in a day or two. Maybe a week. Or two.”
    She must have heard me gasp. “You could always try flea powder. That kills almost anything. Of course I never use those horrible chemicals on any of my dogs when I can avoid it.”
    “But it’s okay for your only daughter?”
    Snort. “There you go, finding fault and acting like an abused child. You’re thirty-five, Willy, so stop whining.”
    “I’m not whining.” Or sniffing in deviated septum scorn. I wasn’t surprised either. My mother always put her animals ahead of her family, which made sense for one of the world’s best dog whisperers.
    She never claimed to be the world’s best parent. “Just like your father, taking yourself so seriously and never listening to what I say. You asked me, I told you.”
    She was right. So I called Dad in Florida.
    “That’s what I always hated about the summer place,” he said when I explained my problem. “Poison this, stinging that. Undertow here, sharks there. And your mother—”
    “Dad! I called about chiggers, not about your divorce.” Which occurred almost two decades ago. Neither one ever got over it. Mom had gone to Florida, where I am certain they have fire ants and snakes and alligators, to help Dad after his bypass surgery in the spring. He survived the surgery better than he survived the visit. Mom discovered the plight of racing greyhounds and hadn’t come home to Paumanok Harbor since.
    My father didn’t have any advice about the bites. “The old bat will have the solution,” he said, referring to my grandmother. “But don’t let her read your tea leaves. She makes up that fortune-telling crap anyway.”
    Considering that my father was a precog himself, I never knew who or what to believe. “Any danger in sight?”
    “I don’t think anyone’s ever died from chiggers. Blood poisoning, maybe. But now that I think of it, I did have a glimpse of something foreboding last night.”
    “What, one of your lady friends trying to pin you down to a long-term commitment?” My father’d had a long string of widows and divorcees since he moved to Florida after the divorce. Maybe before, according to my mother.
    “Stu.”
    “What, she’s a lousy cook?”
    “Not cooked stew, I sense, but S-t-u.”
    “Oh, she has a jealous husband. Find another ch—” My mother called Dad’s women chippies. “Charmer. You don’t want to break up a marriage.”
    Oops. That’s what caused the divorce, I guess. “I mean there’s a lot of women in Florida.”
    “We’re talking about you, not me, baby girl. You knowI only get bad feelings if