She was opening her mouth to answer when Gino wheeled and said to her, "You stay out heah wit' Ahty."
He slammed back toward the doorway. Joey and Debbi flew off in different directions, like bowling pins. Joey backed inside; Vincente excused himself and walked slowly toward the house.
In the sudden and disarming absence of the father and his sons, the world grew oddly peaceful. Debbi dropped into the Godfather's chair, she and Arty sat a moment in a silence that was both awkward and delicious, a respite from the noise and tumult that pulsed off Gino like hot blood around a boil. A breeze riffled through the hedges, carried smells of coconut husks and seaweed, moved the shrubs in which the floodlights were embedded so that shadows danced around the pool.
Finally Debbi put on a slightly bent half smile and said, "So I guess that just leaves us unimportant people."
"Looks that way," said Arty Magnus. He would have said more if he could think of more to say, but he couldn't just then, and Debbi took his terseness to mean that maybe she had offended him.
"I guess I shouldn't put you in that category," she said.
"It's an OK category to me."
"But you're a friend of Mr. Delgatto's."
"This makes me important?"
Debbie gave her head a tilt, pursed her lips, and lifted a plucked red eyebrow.
Arty went on. "You're a friend of two Mr. Delgattos."
That wasn't something the girlfriend especially wanted to be reminded of. She pulled her green eyes away a moment, then changed the subject. "You still working for the paper?"
Arty saw her looking at the stained blue notebook on the metal table. No one could handpick the moment when a book became a public thing, and it made him nervous that she noticed it. "Not tonight," he said. Then he changed the subject. "But what about you, Debbi. Up in New York, whadda you do?"
Surprised to be asked, she raised a hand to her chest. Her long pink fingernails looked both elegant and goofy against her freckled throat. "Me? You're gonna laugh."
"Try me," Arty said.
She paused. Palm fronds rattled, ripples ran across the pool, caught the light like fish scales. "I groom dogs," she said.
Arty didn't laugh and Debbi was nonplussed.
She studied him a moment, then felt a perverse urge to goad him into laughing, poke his ribs, tickle his feet, anything to call forth the expected mockery. "I shampoo their fur. Trim their bangs. Poodles, sometimes I put nail polish on their paws."
Still Arty didn't laugh, so Debbi Martini laughed for him. "Such a dumb job," she said.
Arty considered. "You like dogs?"
"I love dogs."
"Well, you're ahead of me. I don't love newspapers. "
Debbi didn't buy the comparison. "Yeah," she said, "but to work for a newspaper, ya gotta be really smart."
"Wanna bet?" said Arty, and now he laughed.
She watched him laugh, it relaxed her like a bath. His eyes crinkled up, his lean shoulders jostled, it made him less forbidding, less severe, less something than she had imagined him to be. In her relief she leaned a little closer to him and amazed herself by saying, "I wanted to be a vet."
He said nothing, just came to the end of his chuckling and looked at her.
"I wasn't bright enough," she said.
"Who told you that?" he asked.
She made a small harrumphing noise and a dismissive gesture with her painted hands. "Everybody. My father, the nuns. My report cards mostly."
"Ah," said Arty. Report cards were hard to argue with.
But now Debbi got feisty, decided to argue with herself. " 'Course, I coulda done better if I went to school more often."
"So why didn't you?"
She shifted in her chair; the metal frame rang slightly with her squirming. "Trouble at home," she said. "Boring stuff."
She waved it away, then felt herself retreating, shrinking back. She stared off toward the pool and the low stars that dangled just above the aralia hedge. "I wonder what they're talking about in there," she said.
Arty Magnus shrugged. "Must be something very important."
He said it deadpan, it wasn't meant to be a test and yet it sort of was; she would either get it or she wouldn't, would choose to be a party to his secret wry subversion or would play it safe and let it pass.
She hesitated just an instant, then she crossed her arms against her midriff, gave her chin a gutsy and rambunctious tilt, and met his eyes. Something like a smile happened. Palm fronds scratched and rattled like maracas, light and shadow poured in waves from the illumined shrubs, and from the house came sharp contentious voices that were drowned in the outdoor mildness like scorpions in the swimming pool.