“Good morning, Deke.”
“It’s Dean, ma’am.”
“I don’t think so.” She thrust her purse toward Blue. “Carry this, girl. It’s heavy. And watch my nails. You’d better not have been wasting my gas while I was inside.”
Dean hooked his thumb in his jeans pocket. “I feel a whole lot better now that I see how well the two of you are getting along.”
Blue grabbed Nita by the elbow and steered her into the street. “Your car’s parked over here.”
“I have eyes.”
“I’ll swing by the house and pick up the bike on my way back to the farm,” Dean called out. “You all have a nice day now.”
Blue pretended not to hear.
“Take me home,” Nita said as she resettled in the passenger seat.
“What about the bank?”
“I’m tired. I’ll write you a check.”
Only three days, Blue told herself as she sneaked a look back toward the truck.
Dean stood with a foot propped on the fire hydrant and one of the local beauties hanging off his arm.
When they got back to the house, Nita insisted Blue take Tango for a walk so they could get acquainted. Since Tango was lame and a thousand years old, Blue let him snooze under a hydrangea while she sat on the curb out of sight of the house and tried not to think about the future.
Nita maneuvered her into making lunch, but first Blue had to clean up the kitchen. As she dried off the last of the pans, a silver Ram truck pulled up in the alley behind the house. She watched Dean get out and retrieve the bike she’d left by the back door. He threw it in the rear of the truck, then turned to the window where she was standing and tipped his cowboy hat.
First Jack heard the music, and then he saw April. It was dark, just past ten o’clock, and she sat on the cottage’s sagging front porch underneath a crooked metal light fixture, painting her toenails. The years evaporated. In her clingy black top and pink shorts, she looked so much like the twenty-year-old he remembered that he forgot to watch where he was going and tripped on a tree root inside the broken-down picket fence.
April looked up. And immediately looked back down again. He’d been rotten to her last night, and she hadn’t forgotten.
All day he’d witnessed her relentless efficiency as she’d directed the house painters who’d finally straggled in, argued with a plumber, supervised the unloading of a truckload of furniture, and pointedly avoided him. Only the men’s gazes following her were familiar.
He stopped at the foot of the wooden steps and tilted his head toward the raucous music. She’d perched on an old Adirondack chair with her foot propped on the seat. “What are you listening to?” he said.
“Skullhead Julie.” She kept her attention firmly fixed on her toes.
“Who’s that?”
“An alternative group out of L.A.” Her long, jagged hair fell over her face as she reached back to lower the volume. Most women her age had cut their hair, but she’d never followed trends. When everyone else had worn the Farrah flip, April had adopted a brutal geometric cut that had showcased those amazing blue eyes and made her the center of attention.
“You were always the first to spot new talent,” he said.
“I don’t really keep up anymore.”
“I doubt that.”
She blew on her toes, another excuse to freeze him out. “If you came to get Riley, you’re about an hour too late. She got tired and fell asleep in the second bedroom.”
He’d barely seen Riley today. All morning, she’d followed April around, and in the afternoon, she’d gone off with Dean on a purple bike he’d pulled from the bed of his new truck. When they’d gotten back, she’d been red-faced and sweaty, but she’d also been happy. He should have been the one to buy her a bike, but he hadn’t thought of it.
April shoved the brush into the bottle. “I’m surprised it took you so long to get over here. I could have been spiking her milk with uppers or filling her head with stories of your seedy past.”
“Now you’re being petulant.” He propped his foot on the bottom step. “I was a real prick last night. I came over to apologize.”
“Go ahead.”
“I thought that’s what I just did.”
“Think again.”
He deserved everything she was throwing out and more, but he couldn’t hold back a smile as he stepped up to the edge of the porch. “You want me to grovel?”
“For starters.”
“I would, but I don’t know how. Too many years of having everybody kiss my ass.”
“Try.”
“How about I begin by admitting you were right,” he said. “I have no idea what I’m doing with her. That makes me feel stupid and guilty, and since I don’t know how to deal with either one, I took it out on you.”
“Promising. Now say the rest.”
“Give me a hint.”
“You’re scared out of your mind, and you need my help this week.”
“Yeah, that, too.” Despite her pugnacity, he knew he’d hurt her. Lately he seemed to be hurting a lot of people. He gazed out toward the woods where the fireflies were beginning to show off. Peeling paint scraped his elbow as he leaned against one of the porch’s candlestick posts. “I’d give anything for a cigarette right now.”
She dropped one foot and pulled the other up. “I don’t miss cigarettes so much. Or drugs, for that matter. For me, it’s alcohol. Scary to think about living the rest of your life without a glass of wine or a margarita.”
“Maybe you could handle it now.”
“I’m an addict,” she said with an honesty that unsettled him. “I can’t ever drink again.”
From inside the cottage, her cell rang. Quickly capping the bottle, she jumped up to answer it. As the screen door banged behind her, he shoved his hands in his pockets. Today he’d found a set of blueprints, for the screen porch. His dad had been a carpenter, and Jack had grown up with blueprints and tools lying around, but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d held a hammer in his hands.
He gazed through the screen into the empty living room and heard the muted sound of April’s voice. The hell with it. He went inside. She stood with her back to him and her forehead resting on the arm she’d propped against one of the kitchen cabinets. “You know how much I care,” she said so softly that he could barely make out the words. “Call me in the morning, all right?”
Too many decades had passed for him to feel these old stabs of jealousy, so he focused on the brochure lying on the counter. As he picked it up, she closed her phone and gestured with it toward the brochure. “That’s a group I volunteer with.”
“Heart Gallery? I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s made up of professional photographers who volunteer their time to take these amazing portraits of adoptable kids in the foster care system. We display them in local galleries. They’re more personal than the mug shots social services takes, and a lot of kids have found families through the exhibits.”
“How long have you been doing this?”
“About five years.” She padded back toward the porch. “I started out styling the sittings for a photographer I know—putting the kids in clothes that reflected their personalities, coming up with props, helping them feel comfortable. Now I’m doing some of the portraits myself. Or at least I was until I came out here. You’d be shocked how much I love it.”
He pocketed the brochure and followed her out to the porch. He wanted to ask about the guy on the phone but didn’t. “I’m surprised you never got married.”
She picked up the nail polish bottle and resumed her perch on the Adirondack chair. “By the time I was sane enough for marriage, I’d lost interest.”
“I can’t imagine you without a man.”
“Stop fishing.”
“Not exactly fishing. Just trying to figure out who you are now.”
“You want to define me with a head count,” she said bluntly.
“I guess.”
“
You want to know if I’m still the bad girl solely responsible for the fall of countless good men too weak to keep their pants zipped.”
“Put like that…”
She blew on her big toe. “Who’s that brunette I spotted last week traveling with your entourage? Your valet?”
“A very efficient assistant I’ve never seen naked. So are you serious about anybody right now?”
“Very serious. About myself.”
“That’s good.”
She wiped off a polish smudge. “Tell me about you and Marli. You were married for what? Five minutes?”
“A year and a half. Ancient history. I was forty-two and thought it was time to settle down. She was young, beautiful, and sweet—at least I thought so at the time. I loved her voice. I still do. The demons didn’t come out until after we were married and discovered we hated everything about each other. I’m here to tell you that woman did not like sarcasm. But it wasn’t all bad. I got Riley.”
Following Marli, he’d had two long-term relationships that had been well covered by the press. Although he’d cared a lot about both women, something fundamental had been missing, and with one failed marriage behind him, he hadn’t been eager to enter another.
April finished her toes, capped the polish bottle, and unfolded those endlessly long legs. “Don’t send Riley away, Jack. Not to summer camp, not to Marli’s sister, and especially not to boarding school in the fall. Keep her with you.”
“I can’t do that. I have a tour coming up. What am I supposed to do? Lock her in a hotel room?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“You have too much faith in me.” He stared out at the sad excuse for a fence. “Did Riley tell you about last night? With Dean.”
Her head shot up like a mother lion sniffing the air for danger to her cub. “What?”
He sat on the top step and told her exactly what had happened. “I’m not trying to make excuses,” he said as he finished, “but Riley was screaming, and he was chasing her.”
She came out of her chair. “He’d never do anything to hurt her. I can’t believe you tackled him. You’re lucky he didn’t break your stupid neck.”
She was right. Although he stayed in shape so he could keep delivering the high-octane concerts that were his trademark, he was hardly a match for a thirty-one-year-old pro athlete. “That’s not all of it.” He rose from the step. “Afterward, Dean and I had a talk, or at least I talked. I hung out all my sins. Complete honesty. Needless to say, he was thrilled.”
“Leave him alone, Jack,” she said wearily. “He’s taken enough shit from both of us.”
“Yeah.” He glanced toward the door. “I’d rather not wake Riley. Is it okay if she sleeps here tonight?”
“Sure.” She turned away to go back inside, and he almost made it down the steps. Almost, but not quite. “Aren’t you the least bit curious?” he said, gazing back at her. “Don’t you want to know what it would be like for us now?”
Her hand stilled on the screen door handle. For a moment she didn’t say anything, but when she finally spoke, her voice was a ribbon of steel. “Not even a little bit.”
Riley couldn’t hear what April and her dad had been saying, but their voices had woken her up. She felt cozy lying in bed inside the cottage, knowing they were talking to each other. They’d made Dean together, so they must have loved each other sometime.
She scratched an itch on her calf with her big toe. She’d had so much fun today she’d forgotten to be sad. April had given her cool jobs to do, like looking for flowers to make a bouquet and getting drinks for the painters. This afternoon she’d gone on a bike ride with Dean. Pedaling on the gravel had been hard, but he hadn’t called her pokey or anything, and he’d said she had to throw the ball around with him tomorrow so he could get in some practice. Just thinking about it made her nervous, but excited, too. She missed Blue, but when she’d asked Dean about her, he’d started talking about something else. Riley hoped him and Blue weren’t breaking up. Her mom had always been breaking up.
She heard April moving around, so she pulled the sheet up to her chin and lay very still just in case April decided to check on her. Riley had already noticed that she did that kind of stuff.
As the next few days passed, Blue told herself it was a good thing Dean was staying away because she needed all her wits to deal with Nita. Still, she missed him badly. She wanted to believe he missed her just as much, but why should he? He’d gotten what he wanted.
A good old-fashioned case of loneliness settled over her. Nita decided she wanted to be in the portrait with Tango, but she also wanted Blue to paint her as she’d been, not as she was. This involved digging through a stack of scrapbooks and photo albums, with Nita’s crimson-tipped fingernail stabbing at one page after another, pointing out the flaws of everyone she’d been photographed with—a fellow dance instructor, a slutty roommate, a long series of men who’d done her wrong.
“Do you like anybody?” Blue said in frustration on Saturday morning as they sat on the white velour living room couch surrounded by discarded photo albums.
Nita flicked the page with her gnarled finger. “I liked them all at the time. I was naive about human nature.”
Despite Blue’s frustration at not being able to get started on the painting, she found a certain fascination in seeing Nita’s life unfold from her teenage years growing up in Brooklyn during the war, to the oft-mentioned fifties and early sixties when she’d taught ballroom dancing. She’d had a short-lived marriage to an actor she labeled “a drinker,” sold cosmetics, worked as a model at trade shows, and been a hatcheck girl at various high-end New York restaurants.
In the early seventies, she’d met and married Marshall Garrison. Her wedding photograph showed a voluptuous platinum blonde with a beehive, heavy eye makeup, and pale frosted lips gazing adoringly at a distinguished-looking older man in a white suit. Her hips were slim, her legs long, her skin firm and unwrinkled, exactly the kind of woman who turned male heads.
“He thought I was thirty-two,” Nita said. “He was fifty himself, and I worked myself into a fit worrying what he’d do when he found out that I was really forty. But he was crazy about me, and he didn’t care.”
“You look so happy here. What happened?”
“I came to Garrison.”
Turning the album pages, Blue watched as Nita’s anxious-to-please smiles gradually turned to bitterness. “When was this taken?”
“Our Christmas party the second year we were married. When I’d lost the illusion that I could make everybody like me.”
The resentful expressions of the female guests showed exactly how they felt about the brash Brooklyn interloper in her big earrings and too short skirt who’d stolen the town’s most important citizen. On another page, Blue studied a photo of Nita standing off by herself at someone’s backyard party, a tense smile plastered on her face. Blue flipped to a picture of Marshall. “Your husband was very handsome.”
“He knew it, too.”
“You didn’t even like him?”
“I thought he had a backbone when I married him.”
“You probably sucked it out of him while you were drinking his blood.”
Nita’s bottom lip curled, and she took a pull on her teeth, her favorite way of expressing disapproval. Blue had heard that unpleasant sucking sound more times than she could count.
“Get me my magnifier,” Nita demanded. “I want to see if Bertie Johnson’s mole shows up in this picture. The homeliest woman I’ve ever met, but she had the gall to criticize my clothes. She told everybody I was ostentatious. I fixed her.”
“Knife or gun?”
Suck. Suck. “When her husband lost his job, I hired her to clean my house. Mrs. High and Mighty didn’t like that at all, especially since I always made her do the toilets twice.”
Blue had no trouble imagining Nita lording it over the unfortunate Bertie Johnson. Nita had been doing exactly that to Blue for the past four days. She demanded homemade c
ookies, ordered Blue to clean up after Tango, and had even put her in charge of hiring a new cleaning lady—a daunting task, since nobody wanted to work for her. Blue snapped the album closed. “I’ve seen more than enough to start working. My sketches are finished, and if you’ll just leave me alone for a while this afternoon, I can get something done.”
Not only had Nita declared she wanted to be in the painting, but she’d also decided she wanted it done on a much grander scale, so she could hang it in the foyer. Blue had special-ordered the canvas and increased the price accordingly. She’d have more than enough money to get started in a new city…if she could only get out of Garrison, something Nita was doing her best to prevent.
“How are you going to paint anything decent when you’re mooning over that football player all the time?”
“I am not.” Blue hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of him since she’d met him Tuesday on the street, and when she’d driven back to the farm to get her things, he’d been gone.
Nita reached for her cane. “Face it, Miss Big Talk. Your so-called engagement is over. A man like that wants a lot more in a woman than you’ve got.”
“As you keep reminding me.”
Nita regarded her smugly. “All you have to do is look in the mirror.”
“Are you ever going to die?”
Nita’s bottom lip curled, and she took a noisy tug on her front teeth. “He’s broken your heart, and you won’t admit it.”
“He hasn’t broken my heart. For your information, I use men. I don’t let them use me.”
“Oh, yeah, you’re a real Mata Harry, all right.”
Blue grabbed two of the albums. “I’m going up to my room so I can get to work. Don’t interrupt me.”
“You’re not going anywhere until you make my lunch. I want a grilled cheese sandwich. Use Velveeta, not that crap you bought.”
“It’s called cheddar.”
“I don’t like it.”
Blue sighed and headed for the kitchen. Just as she opened the refrigerator, she heard a knock at the back door. Her heart tripped. She hurried over and saw it was April and Riley. As glad as she was to see them, she couldn’t help but be just a little disappointed. “Come in. I’ve missed you.”
Natural Born Charmer Page 24
