Hold on Tight

by Deborah Smith

  She felt sick when she saw how harshly her insinuation affected him. For a moment he seemed incapable of speaking. Then he ground words out through clenched teeth. “Some people know how to stab right to the heart.”

  “Rucker,” she cried, unable to bear the pain she’d caused him. “Rucker—”

  But he had already turned and was walking out the bedroom door. Dinah followed him silently, knowing that this was the end of the beginning, their beginning. They hadn’t even had a chance to make things work. He went down the hall to the living room, removed his jacket from a sleek brass coat stand by the front door, then walked over to a chaise lounge covered in white damask. The possum was curled there, asleep. He scooped it up gently and placed it in the crook of one arm. Then he went to the front door and pulled it open.

  He turned, assessed her with cold eyes, and said simply, “I reckon you know how to find me in Birmingham, if it matters.”

  She nodded. “It matters,” she answered brokenly.

  His jaw worked for a second, but he either couldn’t or didn’t want to say anything else. He went through the door, slammed it behind him, and walked across the porch without looking back.

  Dinah felt as if she were strangling on sorrow. Turning, she fled to the sunny sanctuary of her kitchen, sat down at the table, and put her face in her hands, where she kept it as she listened to the Cadillac leave. Then the morning was silent, achingly silent except for the small sounds Nureyev made as he ruffled his feathers. He cackled something incoherently. He tried again, with better results. Dinah raised her head and stared at him.

  “Dee!” he squawked. “Hot … damn!”

  For a second, she was so startled that she wanted to laugh. Rucker had left his outrageous imprint on her life in every way that he could, even to coaching her intellectual crow in good-old-boy lingo. Now he’s gone, Dinah told herself. And it’s for the best. Tears slipped quietly down her face.

  Six

  “Boss, if you want pictures of beautiful, leggy women, why don’t you go back to your office and look through your collection of Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues?” Millie’s annoyed voice echoed through the newspaper’s research room as she plunked down a new box of microfilm from the file drawers.

  Rucker huffed a vague sound of dismissal at her and kept studying the murky screen before him. “I’m lookin’ for articles, not pictures, articles about one leggy woman in particular. Get me the … hmmm … yeah, check our Sunday magazines from about seven years ago. Must have had some sort of fluffy profile on the current Miss Georgia.” Her short, athletic body full of purpose, Millie glided away.

  “Here’s one!” she exclaimed a few minutes later. “Beethoven, Beauty, and Brains; Georgia’s Triple-Threat Beauty Queen Has What It Takes To Be Top Contender For Miss America.” Rucker leaped up and took the microfilm card she held out, then quickly placed it in the viewer. Millie bent over his shoulder as he scanned through the pages of the old magazine section. “Shoo!” she commented sardonically. “Broiler hens, twenty-nine cents a pound. And to think I was in the Navy then, and missed that buy.”

  “Hush up, you tart-tongued little amazon,” Rucker ordered. She laughed. He found the page he wanted and studied it fervently. It contained a photograph of a younger, slightly thinner Dinah, with short, carefully styled hair. She was in full Miss Georgia regalia: tiara, roses, sash, antebellum gown, bright smile, and gleaming eyes. He forgot that Millie was beside him and gently placed the tip of one forefinger to the photograph as if he were touching Dinah’s face. I love you, he admitted silently. I’m going crazy to see you again.

  From the corner of his eye, he caught Millie shifting in embarrassment and he realized that his expression revealed everything. Rucker jerked his hand away from the photograph. “Ever seen a woman with that many pearly teeth before in your life?” he drawled nonchalantly. “Not too bad lookin’ for one of those debutante types, is she? She looks even better now. Got a little more meat on her.”

  His ruse didn’t work. Millie patted his shoulder sympathetically. “She’s beautiful, Rucker,” she said gently. “You have good taste.” She paused. “I hope that some day a man looks at me the way you just looked at her.”

  “Somebody will, gorgeous.” He paused. “Thanks, Millie, for carin’.” Rucker sighed. When tough little Millie started treating him with kindness, he knew that his misery had become embarrassingly obvious. He grumbled abruptly, “Why don’t you go find a mailroom boy to kung fu, Miss Hunstomper?”

  She patted his shoulder again and left the research room. Rucker read the article hurriedly, frowning. Damn! Basics, that’s all this was. “I believe in the American political system,” Dinah told the reporter. “I’d like to use my abilities in a leadership role to solve the crises of poverty, war, and hatred in the world.” His brows arched at that quote.

  There was no poverty in Mount Pleasant, very little hatred, and the only war had been a nasty skirmish one year between the Baptist Women’s League and the Methodist Women’s League over which group was going to host the Shriners’ Appreciation Luncheon. He looked at Dinah’s old photograph in sad bewilderment. What had become of the idealistic young woman who appeared so ready to tackle the world’s problems?

  He read on. She said that her father, Bill Sheridan, was her guiding force and biggest supporter. President of First Georgia Trust, one of the state’s largest banks. She’d said he was the most honorable man she knew. Rucker hurt for her, knowing that her father had died in the plane crash only a few months after this article was published. He glanced at the credits. Story by Todd Norins. Special to the Herald Examiner. Todd Norins. That was a familiar name.

  He called Millie on a phone in the research room. “Know who Todd Norins is?” he asked.

  “Rucker! Who doesn’t?”

  “I doesn’t,” he protested.

  “He’s the top investigative reporter on USA Personal. It’s like 60 Minutes, only without class. A big hit. Sleazy, muckraking, network TV show. Ugh.” She paused, then added in a guilty voice, “I watch it every week.”

  “I’m comin’ back to my office. Get me a phone number for Mr. Muck.”

  A few minutes later, seated amid his comfortable clutter, his boots propped on top of a scarred, much-abused computer terminal, Rucker listened to the telephone ring at a New York connection. He cajoled a receptionist until he convinced her that yes, he was the same Rucker McClure who’d written her favorite book, Down Home Swamp Stories. She put him through to one secretary, who put him through to the USA Personal secretary, who hemmed and hawed but finally said she’d see if Mr. Norins was available.

  “Norins here,” a booming voice said eventually. “What can I do for the redneck king of corny schmaltz?”

  Rucker absorbed the greeting thoughtfully. It was one thing for one southerner to call another a redneck, but something else for an outside to use the term. “Howdy, Norins. Heard that you’re the terror of boob tube journalism. Sort of top boob.”

  Rucker listened to a snorting laugh on the New York side of the line. Hell, the guy sounds like Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, he thought.

  “Good shot. What can I do for you, McClure?”

  “Been researching a gal you once interviewed. Recall a Dinah Sheridan, Miss Georgia from about six years ago? Walked out on the Miss America pageant after her father bought the farm in a Cessna crash?”

  “Certainly. I was covering the pageant for Amazing World back then, before I hit the big time.”

  “Oh. The big time bein’ television, instead of print journalism?”

  “Well, you know what I mean. I hated to leave my job at Amazing World, but I had the kind of talent that the TV news execs were willing to pay big bucks for.”

  “Must have been hell, givin’ up Amazing World,” Rucker answered slyly. “Helluva lot of prestige. I read it every week.” He added silently, In the grocery store check-out line. Then I put it right back on the rack next to the antacid mints and cheap candy. How appropriate.<
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  “Yes, thank you. Well, at any rate, McClure, what’s the scoop on Dinah Sheridan? Wonderful girl. We were great pals.” Rucker thought there was something calculated about Norin’s sincerity, but he reminded himself that all TV people sounded that way. “What’s become of her?” Norins persisted.

  Rucker shrugged. He couldn’t see any reason not to chat openly with the guy. “Well, she’s mayor of Mount Pleasant, Alabama. Great little one-drink, Bible Belt place right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Teaches history at the local high school, coaches the drill team, organizes a funky little festival called ‘Possum Days’…”

  “Mount Pleasant, Alabama. Bible Belt,” Norins intoned slowly, as if he were making notes. “Teacher. Mayor. Coach. Sounds like Miss American Pie. Very respectable. Got it.”

  “I went up there to absorb some backwoods color, and I got curious about her. That incident with the Miss America pageant. You were real close to that. Did you know something that never hit the papers? About why she walked out, I mean?”

  There was a long, careful pause. “Oh, it was just grief over her old man’s death. You understand how chicks are.”

  “Not lately,” Rucker muttered under his breath.

  “So tell me more about her. Well-built chick, even if she was too brainy and intimidating. Not very feminine in those ways.”

  Rucker frowned at that condescending description of Dinah and silently mouthed several choice obscenities at the phone. He suspected that any woman with an IQ higher than a turnip’s was too brainy and intimidating for Norins. Rucker’s instinctive wariness of the man blossomed into pure dislike, and after making small talk for another minute, he thanked him for his time and said a terse good-bye.

  Afterwards Rucker sat unmoving, staring blankly at the stack of books he kept by his phone. They were for the times when his creative muses felt like taking a break, which had been often in the days since he left Mount Pleasant. Pat Conroy, Joyce Carol Oates, Ernest Hemingway—Rucker looked at the authors’ names without seeing them. Millie finally stuck her head in the door. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He looked up at her, feeling worried for reasons he couldn’t quite fathom. “Did you ever watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show?”

  “Devotedly.”

  “Would you say that Ted Baxter was a good guy or a bad guy?”

  “What?” She arched one blond brow. “Did somebody hit you in the head with a golf ball recently?”

  “Aw, never mind.” He waved her away and propped his chin on one hand. Todd Norins is okay, he assured himself. A jerk, but harmless. Now what? Rucker had been digging for a week, and he still had no clue to Dinah’s mysterious fears. There was only one thing left to do. Take the offensive. Rucker turned to his terminal and clicked the power on.

  Dinah walked out of her classroom at the end of fifth period Constitutional Studies and was met by Myra Faye, whose corpulent face had flushed a hue that matched her frilly rose blouse. Myra Faye held out the afternoon edition of the Birmingham Herald/Examiner, the newspaper that served Mount Pleasant. “Rucker wrote about us again!” she told Dinah excitedly. “It’s been two weeks since he was here, and I figured he decided not to write any more about us. But look!”

  Her heart pounding with dread, Dinah took the folded section of the paper and hurriedly studied the column, which was headlined “Possums and the Good Life.” Other teachers gathered around, peering over her shoulders. Dinah finished reading and mused slowly, “He didn’t mention my name.”

  “Well … I’m sure he meant to,” Myra Faye offered awkwardly.

  Dinah looked up and saw the sympathy on her round face. “Oh, no, Myra Faye,” she explained quickly, “I’m not upset.” Around her, she saw people smiling over what Rucker had written.

  “He made Wally Oscar sound almost normal,” one of the other teachers commented.

  “And the football team hasn’t had such a good write-up since they beat Mount Clarion seventy-two to three, in a hail storm,” someone else said. “And that was eight years ago.”

  Dinah looked back at the article. “It’s wonderful,” she admitted in a small voice. “I’ll have a copy framed and put it up in my office at city hall. ” Oh, Rucker, is this an invitation to forgive and forget? I hope so, she added silently. A half-dozen times she’d started to phone him during the past two weeks but stopped in each instance, knowing that he wanted to hear more than her sorrowful “I miss you. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” He wanted the truth behind her fears, and she still wasn’t ready to reveal it.

  “You gotta call him and say thanks,” Myra Faye urged.

  “I suppose you’re right. It’s the polite thing to do.”

  “If you’re goin’ to Birmingham for that conference next Monday, why don’t you stop by and thank him in person? I’ll send him a cream-cheese pound cake.”

  “I’ll send some muscadine preserves!” noted Alice Dallyroo, head of the home economics department.

  “I’ll have my seniors make a thank-you card,” chimed Glen Norton, the art teacher.

  Dinah looked around her in dismay. She was the only person in Mount Pleasant who was trying to resist Rucker’s appeal, and even she wasn’t doing very well at it, because now that she had an excuse to visit him, she found herself wanting to whoop like a cheerleader.

  The newsroom of The Birmingham Herald/Examiner was huge, and Dinah felt very self-conscious as she trudged across it under the appreciative stares of nearly a dozen male reporters. Her hands felt sweaty on the big cardboard box that held presents for Rucker. Her knees trembled under the slender skirt of her blue-gray suit, and the heels of her gray pumps seemed to thud loudly even on the carpeted floor.

  As Dinah neared the far side of the room, a pretty, petite blonde looked up from a desk in a cluttered cubicle next to a closed door. Dinah felt her pulse accelerate as, she noted the boldly hand-lettered sign—Rucker’s handwriting, Dinah deduced—taped to the cubicle’s outer wall. Beware of Miss Hunstomper, it read. She Bites. I’m in the right place, Dinah acknowledged. Rucker’s office is behind the closed door.

  The blond dynamo, dressed in a flowing green dress, leaped up and came out of the cubicle almost at a run. “I’m Millie,” she beamed. “I was relieved to get your phone call, Mayor Sheridan. The boss has been a mess.”

  Me, too, Dinah told her silently. “Call me Dinah.” She smiled politely at Millie, but her eyes shifted to the closed door. “Did you tell Rucker that I’d be stopping by?”

  “No, he hasn’t come back from lunch yet.” Millie led the way to Rucker’s office, opened the door, and swept one hand out in a grand gesture. “Make yourself at home. I have to run some errands for one of the editors.”

  Dinah stepped inside, looking at the tiny room in amazement. There wasn’t a spare inch of unused space. “Are there walls under all these … decorations?”

  Millie made a huffing sound. “I’m afraid to take anything down and look.”

  She left the door open and trotted off on business. Dinah heard a male reporter calling coyly to her and Millie’s growling, “Stow it, sucker.” Miss Hunstomper was strange but likable, similar to everything and everyone else Rucker brought into his life. Like me? Dinah considered wryly.

  She set her box and purse down on a stack of newspapers that occupied the office’s only guest chair. Then she sidled between the desk and a huge hanging plant, intending to study the walls a little closer. But the plant, which had vines as long as ten feet, caught on her arm. She looked at it closely and couldn’t, keep from chuckling.

  “Kudzu! I should have known. He has a weed for an office plant!”

  She turned her curious gaze back to the walls, and her eyes widened in awe. There, scattered among sports calendars, posters, tractor caps, tennis rackets, a broken, bronzed golf club, and a plaque naming Rucker an honorary Boy Scout, were the chronicles of an impressive career. She studied his writing awards, his photographs with celebrities he’d interviewed, his reviews, both good and bad—only a secure,
mellow man displays bad reviews, she thought, with a sense of respect—and the framed covers of his books.

  She saw at least a dozen photographs that could only be Rucker’s family: the tall, plump mother tearfully hugging a full-length fur coat that must have been a gift from him; the dead truck-driver father, raw-boned and stern; a handsome, stalwart sister who shared Rucker’s auburn hair and mischievous eyes. Dinah tapped the sister’s photograph and told her, “You’re a rascal, I’d bet.”

  “She used to knock the stuffin’ out of me.”

  Dinah whirled around, her mouth open in surprise. Rucker stood in the doorway, looking as shocked as she felt. Her heart in her throat, Dinah noted vaguely that his height nearly filled the door frame, that his eyes were just as soulful as she remembered, that he was the kind of rugged looking man who drew a woman’s rapt attention whenever he entered a room. Especially now, in this exceedingly small room, which gave her only a tiny bit of safety space. The sight of him brought back every memory of their tempestuous night together.

  “Hi,” she murmured.

  “Howdy.”

  He wore a nondescript tweed sport coat, a white shirt, no tie, jeans, and his black boots. Virility in a casual but effective package, she thought nervously. He shut the door, closing the two of them off from the rest of the world. His gaze moved slowly over her, then back to her eyes.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked gruffly.

  Excitement and uncertainty hovered in the air between them. Dinah clasped her hands in front of her to hide their shaking. She nodded to the cardboard box, and eventually he removed his gaze from her and glanced at it. “Everyone loved your article. They sent gifts. Everything’s labeled, so you’ll know who to thank,” She cleared her throat. “There’s also … a copy of an official letter from myself to your newspaper’s publisher. I thought I should write him and say how much the article meant to … to everyone in Mount Pleasant.”