“That’s okay, dear.” Her voice was a soft whisper that hurt more than a curse.
I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t okay for people to dump on her, me included. But I already had enough problems I couldn’t solve without trying to correct Ruth Ann’s character flaws. She’d spent her life being a doormat, stepped on and beat on—she wasn’t going to change now. Besides, the woman truly believed that there was goodness in everyone and it only took enough love from her to bring it out. It was only Andy that Ruth Ann was unwilling to cut some slack.
“Look, Mom, I’m in a checkout line. I have to go. I just wanted you to know that there’s a memorial service for Jimmy on Thursday morning.”
“I’ll pick you up.” Her tone of voice said there was no dissuading her without turning really nasty. I stilled the sharp words that sat on my tongue waiting to jump out and bite her.
I told her the details and added, “I don’t know if I’m going.”
“You have to go. You’re still his wife.”
“The clerk has almost finished running through my groceries. I’ll call you and let you know what I’m going to do. Bye.” I hit the End button. With footwork like mine I should have tried out for football, not cheerleading.
Someone had taken my parking place in front of unit twenty-one so I parked across the lot and stared at the door, trying to decide what was waiting for me. There was no way of knowing, but a crab of anxiety was clawing at my insides. Andy’s bizarre behavior was threatening at the best of times and today wasn’t anywhere near that. Normal had disappeared with the Suncoaster, leaving me swimming in peril, real or imagined, jumpy and ready to overreact.
And now, as I opened the crew door to get out the bags of food, my anxiety was triggered by a shadow approaching from my right. Something about the determined stride or some gut instinct told me that dark form was coming for me. I jumped behind the door, holding on to the handle and using it as a barrier between me and danger. A scream trembled in my throat. “Sherri?”
“Clay!” I sagged back against the truck, weak with relief. What had I expected? “What are you doing here?”
Clay’s hair looked like he’d combed it with his fingers, his clothes were wrinkled and there was dark stain of whiskers on his face. “Jesus, Sherri, Peter told me where you spent the night. I’ve been out of my mind with worry.”
“Always the worrier.” I tried a smile. “I’m all right.” I closed the door so I could come around it. His hand went out to touch me before he thought better of it and withdrew it. I reached into the cab, got the food and closed the door with my hip.
“This isn’t your problem,” Clay said.
“Look, the only thing between me and the electric chair is that tape. That makes Andy my problem. He’s the only one who can save my ass and right now there’s no making sense of half what he says. I need to hold on to him until I can get him medicated and sane.”
Over Clay’s shoulder, I saw Andy. Naked to the waist, barefooted and with his hair standing out in a matted fan around his head, Andy charged towards us. He was making a keening noise high in his throat, his face a contorted mask of rage.
Chapter 36
Clay whirled and dropped into a crouch. “Devil,” Andy screamed. “Satan.”
I dropped the plastic grocery bags and jumped between them yelling, “It’s okay, Andy. It’s okay.”
“He’s one of them, one of them,” he screamed. “Evil, evil. He’ll suck you in. Can’t you see?”
“No, no,” I said. “I know him. He just needs to know how long we’re keeping the room. It’s just about the room, Andy.” I had my hands flat against his bare chest now, pushing him away.
“Go back inside.” I pushed on him. “Go inside. Everything’s fine.”
He looked beyond me to Clay. “They always say something to deke you out. Can’t trust him,” Andy muttered but the violence was seeping away.
“Look, take our supper.” I picked up the bags, one of them weeping soda. “See what you can retrieve out of this.”
Reluctantly he took the bags out of my hands, but he didn’t back away “Go on,” I told him, pushing hard at his chest with my palms.
“Everything is fine and I’m hungry. Make yourself useful,” I ordered like a bossy older sister.
Andy stepped back, watching Clay for any move, any twitch that might seem a threat. He walked backwards, watching us, all the way to the door of the unit where he stood staring at us with a dark malevolent look. Abruptly he went inside. The door closed behind Andy but the curtains opened.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Clay whispered. “You can’t go in there. You can’t help this guy.”
“It’ll be all right. Besides I need him as much as he needs me.”
“You’re nuts. He’s going to kill you!”
“Go,” I ordered. “Before you upset him.”
“Upset him!” he roared. “Upset him! That guy is crazy!”
“Go Clay.” I backed away from him. “Just go. I’ll be fine.”
“Wait,” Clay yelled. I swung around to the motel, expecting Andy to be charging out again.
“Wait,” Clay said again, quietly this time. His hands were raised, placating. “I’ll find a doctor.” He came towards me and for one horrible moment I thought he was going to wrap his arms around me.
“Don’t touch me,” I whispered. “You might scare Andy.” I saw him take a deep breath. I was sure he was going to argue. Instead, Clay reached in his pocket. “Take this,” he said. “Don’t argue. You have my cell phone number. I’ll have it with me all night. Call me if . . . well, I don’t know what. Just call me if there’s anything.”
“Thanks, Clay.” Tears stung my eyes. Shoving the folded bills he’d given me into my jeans, I ran for the motel.
Andy sat on the edge of a chair facing out the window to the parking lot. With his elbows on his knees and his feet bouncing up and down like pistons, he was hitting himself in the jaw with each upward movement. He didn’t seem to notice. The white plastic bags were dumped on the floor at his feet, still oozing liquid.
“Zippy Stop and the Roast were crazy,” I explained, all calm as though nothing unusual had happened. “But I’ve got all your favorites. Barbied gator bait.” I pulled the chicken, in its greasy little cardboard tray out of the plastic bag and set it on the table like an offering. “There’s coleslaw.”
The top had come off the slaw. I just picked the shredded cabbage off the bag, shoving as much as I could back into the clear plastic container and put it out with the chicken. “And here’s the potato salad.” The leaking plastic bottle of soda I left in the bag and took into the John.
“We keep eating like this and we won’t have to worry about how we can manage to live on social security,” I called out to Andy. I closed the bathroom door a little so Andy couldn’t see me and pulled the wad of bills out of my pocket. I counted five hundred dollars before I shoved the bills back in my pocket. “We’ll stroke out first.”
I poured what remained of the soda into the two glasses in the bathroom, threw a bath towel over my shoulder and headed out. Setting the glasses on the table with the food, I tossed the towel on the floor, tapping at it with my toe to sop up the mess. Andy sat just as he had been when I left.
“C’mon, Andy, eat something,” I urged like a mama with a reluctant toddler. His legs kept going and he stared out blankly at the parked cars.
“This junk will surely kill you but you’ll die quicker if you don’t eat anything.”
I set a plastic fork and napkin on the table. “Destroy your arteries,” I invited.
“You don’t bug me about what I like to eat and I won’t bug you about your cigarettes. De al?” he said, still staring outside.
My hands stopped in midair, hovering over the chicken. “That’s what Jimmy always tells me.”
He swung ’round to the table now and held the chicken with one hand while he broke off a drumstick, attacking the chicken, biting into it and pulling the meat away from t
he bone, licking the juice off the palm of his hand and sucking it off his fingers.
“What was your favorite part of Casablanca?” In a flash he said, “The romance.”
“Yeah, me too. I guess we all want a romance like that. Something grand. And I love those hokey lines, ‘We’ll always have Paris’ or ‘This is the start of a beautiful friendship.’ They get to me.”
“Shhh,” a finger to his lips. He leaned over to me, his lips brushing my ear and whispered, “It might be bugged. Don’t talk about it here.”
So much for my sneaking up on his thought processes. Even totally psychotic, I couldn’t fool him into telling me where my Holy Grail was and time was running out.
“I always thought Jimmy would make it in the pros,” I told Andy.
“He could if he practiced every day, quit drinking and partying, if he gave up all the other distractions, he probably could make it.” He nodded his head. “He has the natural talent and the temperament but not the discipline or the willingness to put off short-term pleasure for long-term gain.”
My jaw must have dropped at this logical, reasoned group of words with no gobbledygook in the middle.
“And for one million dollars, Mr. Crown, was there anything I could have done to influence the outcome?”
“You mean like nag him more?” He looked at me, a sad sweet smile on his face. He raised his right hand and made the sign of the cross in the air. “I absolve you from all guilt and responsibility.” He lowered his arm. “You nagged enough.”
“Thank you, Father Andrew.”
“You’re welcome, my child.” A gain that sweet smile. “No one can control Jimmy or make him do something he doesn’t want to do. Jimmy won’t change until he wants to, which will probably be never.”
“That’s exactly the conclusion I came to.” He started humming softly to himself and bouncing his knees up and down in time to silent music.
“I have to go to work. Will you be all right here?”
He didn’t answer. I let him go away from me.
I pulled out to pass a line of traffic and saw a white SUV with its blinker on one lane over on the right. Flipping my right signal on, I pulled back in, slipping by a black Saturn with inches to spare when the driver slammed on his brakes, and then I exited Tamiami Trail for the freeway, nearly taking out the steel barrier. My heart was pounding and the adrenaline was dumping into my blood like Niagara. I caught up to the SUV.
I’d nearly killed myself for the wrong SUV. I hit the gas and pulled out around it, heading for the first exit. I was days away from joining Andy in Bizarreville.
On any normal day not guilt nor kindness nor love could make me voluntarily seek out one of my family. This had been far from a standard day. Since I was already late for work and it was my day for the weird and unusual, I decided to stop and see Ruth Ann.
“She just went out back,” one of the other waitresses in Dutch’s bar told me.
“Thanks.” I went outside, through the tables fronting the parking lot and around to the back of the restaurant. Ruth Ann was there and so was a man I didn’t recognize.
Chapter 37
With all that has happened to her, my mother should look like a hag, but her skin is still smooth and pale, without lines or brown spots. And there’s a kind of innocence to her face that reflects the inner woman. Too skinny, she’s still full-chested and manages to look voluptuous. And she’s still beautiful.
She was wearing a short denim skirt, studded with silver, and a pink frothy top that looked more suitable for the bedroom than a public place. Silver bracelets jangled up and down her arm and silver earrings caught the light shining down on her from above the door.
“Bitch,” the guy looming over her snarled before he jogged down the three cement steps to the alley. At the bottom of the steps, he turned back to look up at her. “Stupid bitch.”
Unruffled, Ruth Ann jutted a hip and looked down at him from her impossibly high stiletto heels.
Dressed in cowboy boots, a western shirt and a straw Stetson, the guy looked like an aging guitar player from a country and western band. Actually, knowing Ruth Ann’s taste in men, he probably was. “Too bad your brain isn’t as big as your tits,” he yelled. “You’d be a frigging genius.”
“Yeah?” Ruth Ann says. “Well, if your brain was the size of your prick, you’d be a gnat.”
Woo . . . when nice girls turn mean, it’s real nasty. This was a side of her I’d never seen before.
Mr. Country got very still, his eyes focused on her while I held my breath, sure she was going to be needing help here, but hers was the one comment guaranteed to set any man heading for the door double-time. She reached out for her cigarettes on the railing and lighted one as if he were already gone.
The war was over. He turned away and walked with great dignity up the alley, passing me without really seeing me.
Ruth Ann watched him go, one arm crossed over her waist and the other arm hanging straight down with the cigarette dangling from long slim fingers. I stepped out from the shadows.
She straightened. “Baby? Is that you?” She threw away the cigarette. “What y’all doing out here in the dark?” Everything was normal in Ruth Ann Land.
“That detective was here looking for you,” Jeff said, as I tucked my pocketbook under the counter.
“I told him I didn’t think you were coming in, seeing how late it was.”
“Sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t. Missing Styles made Jeff’s frown bearable. Then I pissed Jeff off even more by hanging out with the amigos while he ran up and down the bar trying to keep the customers happy.
“I haven’t got any good news for you, Sherri,” Brian told me. “I faxed a strongly worded letter to Dr. Steadman. I took the liberty of telling him I’m your lawyer. You owe me a retainer of one dollar for that. And as your lawyer, I told him you would hold him personally responsible if anything happened to Andy Crown.”
“Thanks, Brian. I take back all those bad jokes about lawyers.”
“Don’t do that.” He adjusted his glasses and smiled. “What will we have left to talk about?”
When I told them about my night on Elm Street, Clay barked, “Enough.”
We’d never heard him raise his voice before, so he had our full attention. “You’re not going back there,” he said.
The other two turned to look at me, waiting for me to put Clay straight.
But his words gave me an odd little feeling of joy: I was pleased he was worried about me rather than annoyed to be told what to do. “Relax. I’ve already decided I’m not spending another night with Andy.” I could feel the laughter bubbling up inside me but with the other two as an audience I couldn’t tell Clay how I planned to spend the night—visions of sugarplums were dancing in my head, erotic and sensual honeyed treats.
Clay wasn’t done playing alpha male. “Don’t spend another minute with the guy.”
“Come on,” I coaxed, “you’re exaggerating. Andy won’t hurt me.” But was it true? He was no longer the person I’d known and I no longer knew what Andy was capable of.
“Besides,” I told him, “He’s the only one with evidence that there was more going on in Jimmy’s life than our domestic battles.”
I followed Clay into the body of the apartment—three enormous iron chandeliers were suspended from the eighteen-foot arched ceilings that were ribbed with heavy beams like the upside-down hull of a ship.
“Holy shit.”
He was grinning at me and for once the normally guarded face was alive with pleasure.
“Who knew?” I said, spinning around and around. Opulent oriental rugs floated on cream marble floors. One wall, overlooking the gulf, was all glass. “I thought places like this only existed in the movies.”
“Come on. I’ll show you the rest.” He was as pleased as a boy with a new toy and taking my hand, led me through an apartment bigger than most houses. Nothing had been spared, every detail, every luxury added. Trust Clay to do it up right.
“Wow,” I said.
“Is that all I get? You’re never at a loss for words.”
“Until now. It’s fantastic, Clay”
“I had a decorator down from Tampa. I told her what I wanted and opened my wallet and there you have it,” he said with a wave of his arm. His joy was palpable. Mr. Cool was way over the top here as he showed me every nook and cranny of his opulent three-thousand-foot penthouse.
Clay didn’t notice my silence, didn’t notice I was edging for the door as he finished the tour. The beauty and elegance overwhelmed me, making me feel awkward and off balance. “What is it?” he said at last.
My soft shrug didn’t satisfy him.
“Tell me.”
“I so don’t belong in a place like this.”
“Oh you belong all right.”
With light kisses and velvet caresses he beguiled me and seduced me until I felt just fine. It seemed I’d been missing him. Later I could deal with being a donkey at a tea party.
We were already naked when he pulled away from me and asked, “What about Evan?”
“Why? What do you mean? What’s Evan got to do with us?”
His eyebrows were drawn together in worry. He was thinking hard, trying to see where the quicksand was in this conversation. “I thought . . . you know.”
“Evan and I were never together. This is for your ears only. Evan is gay. He and Noble are lovers.”
At first he was silent, his body rigid with astonishment. And then he began to laugh. A rumble that started deep in his chest under my head and rose until it shook the whole bed.
When I opened my eyes he was gone.
“Of course,” I told the ceiling, “today is the weekly meeting with all his salespeople. You didn’t really think he’d miss that, did you?” I headed for the kitchen, and there was Clay, barefoot, in jeans and wearing a T-shirt even. A black shadow showed along his jaw; his raven hair was still tousled from sleep. Being unkempt made him look youthful and endearing . . . and sexy. Even more appealing, he was cooking.
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