by Sandra Brown
“Hm.”
“No, really. I mean it.” She was wearing one of the slip-type nightgowns he liked. Short. Skinny straps. One had slid off her shoulder. He reached over and pushed it down farther, then stroked her breast.
She brushed his hand aside. “It’s too hot tonight.”
“Not in here, honey. I set the AC down to sixty-eight, just where you like it.”
“Feels hotter.”
He lay beside her quiescently and let her peruse her magazine without further interruption. He gazed at her face, her lovely hair, that incredible body, and tried to fend off his fear. Was it warranted? He didn’t want to know, but he had to know because not knowing was driving him crazy.
“Nice funeral today,” he remarked, as casually as possible.
Her expression didn’t change. “I almost fell asleep in the church. Bor-ing.”
“Huff threw quite a wake.”
“It was okay.”
“Where’d you disappear to?”
“Disappear to?” She thumbed to another page. “When?”
“There for a while, in the house, I couldn’t find you.”
She looked over at him. “I went to pee.”
“I checked the powder room.”
“There was a line. I went upstairs. Is that all right with you? Or should I have held it until I got home?”
“Don’t get mad, honey. I just—”
“Oh, forget it.” She tossed the magazine to the floor. “It’s too hot to argue over something as stupid as my going to the bathroom.”
She began to fluff the pillows behind her head. She had bought the embroidered silk pillowcases at a specialty shop in New Orleans. They’d cost a freaking fortune. He had hit the ceiling when he discovered the charge on their credit card statement.
“You spent this on pillowcases?” he’d said incredulously.
She’d told him she would return them, but she had been so unhappy for the next several days, he’d relented and said she could keep the damn things. She had tearfully thanked him and said he was the best husband ever. He had basked in her affection.
“Thank you for going with me today,” he said, laying a hand on the curve of her hip. “It was important that we go.”
“Of course we had to go. You work for them.”
“Safety director is a very important job, you know. I have lots of responsibility, Lila. Without me, the Hoyles—”
“Did you feed the cat?”
“I mixed dry food with canned just like you asked me to. Anyway, my work at the plant is just as vital as what Chris does. Maybe more so.”
She stopped fiddling with the lace-trimmed pillowcases and looked at him. “No one doubts that you’re a top man at that foundry, George. I’m the first to know all the long hours you give that place.” Pouting, she said, “I know, because every hour you’re there, you’re not here with me.”
Smiling, she pulled her nightgown over her head, then teasingly dragged it across his chest. His small penis stretched with excitement. “Got something for Lila tonight, George? Hm?” she purred.
Sliding her hand into the fly of his shorts, she applied herself to pleasing him, and she knew how. When he caressed her in turn, she moaned as though deriving as much pleasure from their foreplay as he.
Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he was just being paranoid and imagining things, picking up clues and catching vibes that weren’t really there. He was short, pudgy, and pink; Chris Hoyle was tall, dark, and handsome. He had a reputation for taking whatever woman he wanted.
George knew several men at the plant whose marriages had either suffered or ended over the wives’ infidelity with Chris. Naturally a man would feel a little insecure whenever his wife was around such a notorious womanizer.
He had worked for the Hoyles over twenty years. He’d given them so much of himself—time, integrity, pride. But the more you gave them, the more they took. They fed on people, on lives, on a man’s soul. George had accepted that a long time ago. He was willing to be a yes-man.
But, by God, the line had to be drawn somewhere. And with George Robson, it was his wife.
• • •
Wearing only his boxer shorts and an old-fashioned, ribbed cotton undershirt, Huff descended the wide staircase. He tried to tread lightly, but several of the stairs squeaked anyway, and sure enough, by the time he reached the ground floor, Selma was already there wrapped in a robe that was too thick and fuzzy for the season.
“Do you need something, Mr. Hoyle?”
“Some privacy in my own goddamn house would be nice. Do you keep your ear to the floor?”
“Well excuse me for being worried about you.”
“I told you a thousand times today that I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine, you just don’t let on.”
“Can we save this conversation for some other time? I’m in my drawers.”
“I have to pick up and wash those drawers. You think seeing you in them is going to put me in a swoon? Besides that, it ain’t a’tall a pretty sight.”
“Go back to bed before I fire you.”
With the hauteur of a prima ballerina, she did a pirouette on her terry-cloth scuffs and retreated into the darkness at the back of the house.
For a while Huff had lain in bed, wakeful and alert. Although, even when he was asleep, his brain didn’t shut down entirely. Like the furnaces in his foundry, his mind burned just as hotly through the night as it did by day. Some of his knottiest problems had unraveled while he was asleep. He would go to bed with a dilemma and wake up the following morning with a solution worked out for him by his active subconscious.
But tonight’s problems were particularly disturbing, and sleep had eluded him completely. Every time he closed his eyes, he would see an image of Danny’s fresh grave. Even dressed up with flowers, a grave was a hole in the ground, and there was nothing dignified about that.
The walls of his bedroom had seemed to be closing in on him, like the walls of earth inside Danny’s grave, like the satin lining of his casket. Huff had never been claustrophobic before, especially not in his own house. Even though the air-conditioning vents were directed toward his bed, the linens were damp with his sweat, so clingy that even though he’d thrashed his legs he couldn’t kick off the sheets.
He had a bad case of heartburn to boot. So rather than lie there and nurse these miseries until dawn, he’d decided to get up and go outside. Perhaps the tranquillity of the countryside at night would calm him enough to bring on sleepiness.
He pulled open the front door. There was no alarm system in his house, and the doors were rarely locked. Who would dream of stealing from Huff Hoyle? The thief would have to be either extraordinarily courageous or downright crazy.
Huff despised Arabs—just as he did Jews, Latinos, blacks, Asians, and any ethnicity other than his own—but he admired the swift justice that was meted out in Islamic nations. If he caught somebody stealing from him, he’d cut off the culprit’s hand and only then turn him over to the sluggish legal system, which these days was less concerned about punishing the wrongdoer than it was about safeguarding his goddamn civil rights.
Just thinking about that sad state of affairs fanned his heartburn. He belched sourly.
Huff eased himself into his favorite rocking chair and lit a cigarette. He puffed in contentment as he gazed at the portion of the horizon that was aglow with the lights of the foundry. The smokestacks had created a thin layer of cloud above the town. He might be momentarily at rest, but his work never was.
In the summertime, the gallery ceiling fans were kept on around the clock, because often, like tonight, they provided the only breeze to be had. Huff leaned back and enjoyed the caress of the soft air against his clammy skin. Closing his eyes, he thought back to the first time he’d ever seen a ceiling fan. He remembered it like it was yesterday.
He’d gone into a drugstore with his daddy, who’d been looking for work. The Drugstore Man wore a bow tie and wide suspenders. Hat in hand, head
lowered, Huff’s daddy meekly offered to push the oiled dust mop around the hardwood floors of the store, or burn trash in the big barrels out back, or do any other menial tasks the proprietor might want to delegate to someone not afraid of hard labor. For instance, he’d noticed a few dirt dauber nests up under the eaves as he was coming in. Wouldn’t Drugstore Man like those knocked down?
While the two men negotiated the terms of his daddy’s temporary employment, young Huff stood staring at the circulating blades of the overhead fan, marveling over the fabulous machine that stirred his hair with cool air and dried the sweat off his sunburned face.
All that day his daddy stocked shelves and swept floors and washed windows. He burned trash in the blazing sun and told Huff to help him be on the lookout for flyaway sparks. Huff became entranced by the licking flames and the heat waves that shimmied up out of the barrels.
His daddy hauled and fetched and carried for Drugstore Man until his back was bent and his face was lined with exhaustion. Huff got to eat that night, though. A pimento cheese sandwich, a leftover from Drugstore Man’s soda fountain. Nothing had ever tasted so good, although he felt guilty for eating it in front of his daddy, who’d said he wasn’t hungry.
Huff wished that Drugstore Man would offer to make him an ice cream cone, like he’d been watching him make for folks all day, piling the scoops so high that Huff didn’t know how they stayed on the cone.
But Drugstore Man didn’t offer to make him one, and as soon as Huff had eaten his sandwich, making it last as long as he could, the man said it was time for him and his daddy to “move along now,” which was something they heard often.
Headlights swept a bright arc across the front lawn. Huff, roused from his reverie, rubbed his hands over his face as though to wash away the memory and the embarrassment it would cause him if anyone knew of it.
Chris’s shiny Porsche Carrera came to a stop, and he climbed out. He jogged up the walkway and was almost to the gallery before he noticed Huff.
“What are you doing out here this time of night?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?”
“Nice outfit,” Chris remarked with amusement as he dropped into the other rocking chair and stretched his arms high above his head. “I’m so tired, I might sleep straight through tomorrow.”
“You’ve got work tomorrow.”
“I’ll call in sick. Who’s gonna fire me?”
Huff harrumphed. “What kept you out so late?”
“George’s mom came down with a stomach virus. She called at a most inopportune time. Poor George had just got it up when he had to go see about Mama, leaving Lila alone and lonely.”
“That girl is trouble.”
“Granted. That’s what makes it stimulating.”
Huff expelled a gust of smoke. “Are you going to waste your best years diddling frustrated housewives? Or are you going to get your wife back into your bed and make her pregnant?”
Chris pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets as though they suddenly pained him. “I’m not going to talk about this tonight.”
“We’ll talk about this when I say we talk about this,” Huff said. “You’ve been dodging the subject of Mary Beth for weeks. I want to know what’s going on.”
“All right.” Chris rested his head on the back of his chair and took a deep breath. “She refuses to sign the divorce document. Beck consulted the best divorce lawyer in New Orleans. This one favors the men, not their money-grabbing, whining exes. He’s as tough as they come.
“He drew up the document, and Beck went over every word of it. In his opinion, it was the best possible deal for me and still very generous to Mary Beth.” He stopped rocking his chair and leaned across the distance separating them, bringing his face close to Huff’s. “She won’t sign.”
“Then there’s hope for a reconciliation.”
Chris gave a short laugh and returned to his original position. “Mary Beth isn’t refusing the divorce because she wants to stay with me. She’s refusing out of spite. She hates me, hates you, hates this town, the foundry. She despises everything about us.”
“Hell, boy, she’s only a woman. A woman. Stop screwing Lila and get yourself down to Mexico. Woo your wife. Do what you have to do—flowers, jewelry, a new automobile, new tits if she wants them.
“Win her back with gifts and romance. Eat some crow if you have to. It won’t kill you. Hose her enough times to get her pregnant, then lock her up until the kid is born. Once we’ve got the kid, we’ll claim her an unfit mother, send her packing without a penny.”
Chris shook his head. “It’s not going to happen, Huff.” He held up his hand to stave off Huff’s arguments. “Even if I was inclined to seduce the bitch into my bed again, which I’m not, and even if I hosed her, as you so romantically put it, a thousand times, it wouldn’t take.”
“Wouldn’t take? What the hell are you talking about?”
“She had her tubes tied.”
Huff felt his blood pressure skyrocket. In a matter of seconds, his heartburn had grown from a low ember to a wildfire that was searing its way through his diaphragm and up into his esophagus.
Chris said, “The last time I made a pitch for reconciliation, she laughed at me. She said she knew I only wanted to patch things up so I could provide you and myself with an heir. Did I think she was stupid?” He looked across at Huff. “She’s a lot of things, but stupid isn’t one of them.
“Then she dashed our hopes for good by informing me that she’d had a tubal ligation. She said birth control pills were making her fat. And that much is true—her butt is getting as broad as a barn. She’s wearing thong bikinis now, so she can’t afford any extra poundage or fluid retention. That’s a quote direct from her. So she had the procedure.
“Now she can screw her Mexican pool boy nine ways from Sunday, or she can come back here and be my loving, devoted wife, or she can join a convent, but the one thing she is not going to do is conceive a baby.” He sighed. “That’s what I’ve been dreading to tell you, and I can honestly say I’m glad it’s finally off my chest.”
Huff smoked his cigarette down to a nub while he contemplated this unwelcome piece of news. His silly, shallow daughter-in-law—a title too elevated to apply to the conniving shrew—had made herself barren. All right. That left Chris with only one option: to obtain a divorce from her and marry a woman who would bear him children.
Huff relaxed again. At least they wouldn’t have to play any more guessing games about what they should do with Mary Beth. She had eliminated herself from the decision-making process, and Huff could almost thank her for it. Now that the new goal had been set for them, he and Chris could go full throttle toward achieving it.
“Have you told Beck?” he asked.
“Nobody,” Chris replied. “I only told him that I’d given up on the marriage completely and wanted out as soon as possible.”
“And he thinks this lawyer in New Orleans is the best?”
“He’s expensive, but his clients don’t leave the courtroom completely fleeced, carrying their balls in a paper sack.”
Huff laughed and reached across to pat Chris’s knee. “Try and hang on to those. You’re going to need them.”
Chris smiled, but he was still dejected. “I should’ve listened to you and got Mary Beth pregnant as soon as the marriage vows were spoken. Instead, I went along with her and agreed to hold off until she had ‘settled into the family,’ as she put it.”
Chris didn’t know this, but Huff hadn’t left the decision to the newlyweds. He had gone to Doc Caroe and told him to replace Mary Beth’s birth control pills with sugar placebos. The doctor had done it . . . for a hefty fee, of course.
It had turned out to be a bad investment. Months went by, but to his consternation Mary Beth didn’t conceive. Even that soon into the marriage, she and Chris were fighting more often than they were having sex.
“That’s water under the bridge now, Son,” he said. “No sense in wasting energy on regre
t. We need to concentrate on getting you a speedy divorce. If she’s screwing her pool man, we can cite adultery.”
“She would only counter by listing my affairs, most of which were with her good friends. We’ve got to think of something else.”
Huff patted his son’s knee again, then stood up. “This New Orleans lawyer sounds like a good man to have on our side, and even if we can’t rely on him to get the job done, we can rely on Beck. Let’s go to bed.”
“Long day,” Chris observed as they entered the silent house. “It seems like ages since we left to go to the funeral, doesn’t it?”
“Hm.” Huff absently rubbed the bonfire still raging inside his chest.
“What did you think of Sayre? We haven’t had a chance to talk about her.”
“Still prissy.”
“Prissy?” Chris scoffed as they climbed the stairs. “That’s like calling Osama bin Laden a troublemaker.”
“She didn’t leave town like she said she was going to. The manager of The Lodge called me. She booked a room for tonight.”
“Why?”
“Maybe she was as tired as we are, or didn’t want to make the drive to New Orleans in the dark.”
Chris looked at him skeptically. “If she wanted to leave badly enough, she would have crawled out of town. She thinks no more kindly of us and Destiny than Mary Beth does. Possibly even less.”
“Damn women. Who knows why they do anything?” Huff grumbled. “At least Beck was with her part of the evening.”
“Still on assignment for you?”
“Actually no. He saved her from Slap Watkins.”
Chris stopped on the landing. “Come again?”
Huff turned, grinning and shaking his head. “That’s what I said. Beck went to the diner to grab a burger, saw Sayre sitting inside, which was astonishing enough. But there was Slap, big ears and all, trying to pick her up.”
Huff recounted for Chris what Beck had told him. When he finished, Chris was shaking his head with a mix of amusement and bewilderment. “What in the world would Slap Watkins have to say to Sayre?”
