One Last Thing

by Rebecca St. James

  “Aw, man, don’t do that,” he said. “I can’t handle it when you do that. You need a Kleenex? How ’bout some toilet paper? I got toilet paper.”

  I cried free, soft tears until he brought me an entire roll of Cottonelle, and then I laughed.

  “Make up your mind what you’re gonna do,” Kellen said. “If you’re just gonna laugh, give me that. I can’t be wasting my TP. That stuff’s expensive.”

  I kept laughing, even as I let my head fall back and said to the ceiling, “God, please let this be the last of the secrets I have to uncover. I can’t take any more discoveries like this.”

  Kellen was quiet. I blew my nose and handed the roll back to him.

  “I love you,” I said.

  “I love you too.”

  I looked up only quickly enough to see a trace of pain go through his eyes.

  Yeah. It was time for all of us to let it go.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I finally crawled into bed at four thirty a.m., but as down-to-the-marrow exhausted as I was, I couldn’t sleep. I wrestled for two hours with varying opponents.

  Seth, the one who tried to drag Wendy down into his mire.

  Wendy, the one who gave him the chance to.

  And Fritzie, who might be at the root of it. Fritzie who I loved and trusted and whose growing flaws I even forgave. Before I knew what they really were.

  I beat myself up as hard and as brutally as I did them, until by six thirty I felt too battered to get out of bed.

  But I did and I went to church anyway, and I said the confession loud enough to startle Mary Louise Anderson Bales, and I let the communion wine burn in my throat so I could hold on to the forgiveness. I had to . . . since I kept having to forgive over and over and over.

  It was Wednesday and I knew Ned wouldn’t have much time after the service, so I talked as we walked through the morning shadows of the cloister.

  “I guess I had to find all this out,” I said when I’d filled him in.

  “That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt.” Ned stopped at the door to the house. “Unfortunately, you can’t skip the hurt. Fortunately, God’s there.”

  He pushed the door open and let me pass him. The smell of the polished wood and the beeswax candles and the anguish and joy that had dwelt in those rooms for over 150 years came around me in a way it hadn’t before, like arms that had been waiting for me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “God is.”

  “Okay. All better.”

  I looked back at Ned. His eyes were teasing.

  “I wish,” I said.

  “Do you?”

  He nodded me into “our” room, where I only perched on the edge of the sofa.

  “I know you have to leave soon,” I said. “We could talk about this tomorrow.”

  “Or we can talk about it right now.” Ned settled into his corner of the couch and strung his arm along the back of it. “Things have reached a point of no return. I’m thinking you need to be prepared for what you’re walking into today.”

  “I just have no idea what I’m supposed to do with all this now.”

  Ned’s eyes grew firm. “You could start by removing the phrase ‘supposed to’ from your vocabulary.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That and ‘you have a right to.’ ”

  “That’s Kellen’s phrase.”

  “And ‘nobody would blame you if—’ ”

  I actually laughed. “That’s everybody’s phrase.”

  “You’re finding out what’s true. I’m saying it again: that will show you what to do.” Ned ran his finger along the copy of The Message on the shelf just behind us. “It’s true that God’s here so you’ll get through the pain. But the operative word is through.”

  “I just want to know what through looks like.”

  “What does true look like?”

  I scooted forward until I was almost off the couch. “You sure you don’t have to go? I don’t want to keep you—”

  “Tara.” Ned leaned toward me. “Nothing is more important than this right now.”

  “And that scares me. What if I get this wrong?”

  “Then you’ll do it until you get it right. Now, ask yourself, what does true for Tara look like, let’s say, as you face Wendy again?”

  “Okay.”

  “What does it look like with Seth, now that you know all this?”

  “Okay.”

  “Not what no one would blame you for doing. Not what you have a right to do. Not what you’re supposed to do. But what’s true.”

  “I can’t hold on to it anymore,” I said. “That’s what’s true.”

  “Good.”

  “So I let go and see where that takes me.”

  For the first time since I’d known Ned, he smiled with more than just his eyes.

  “The Lord be with you, my friend,” he said.

  “And also with you,” I said.

  “Let’s pray.”

  Clouds had gathered to brood as I crossed Madison Square, but what I was going to do was absolutely clear to me. Not all of it, not everything. Just the next thing.

  I went first to my house and packed some clothes and toiletries in a beach bag before I headed back to Montgomery Street. Neither it nor Lexi’s apartment building felt as threatening in the daylight, although I looked over my shoulder more than once going up the stairs and down that hall that reminded me of the Haunted Woods in every fairy-tale movie I’d ever seen.

  Evidently Wendy was looking over her shoulder, too, because I practically had to hold credentials up to the peephole before she would open the door.

  “I’m glad you’re still here,” I said, as she bolted and chained everything behind me.

  “I was scared to leave.” Wendy’s shrug was shy. “It was nice of Lexi to let me stay here when she doesn’t even know me.”

  I didn’t correct her. I was leaving that one up to Lexi.

  “You want coffee? She made some before she went to class.”

  “No,” I said, “because as soon as you take a shower and put some of these clothes on, we’re going to the Piebald. They make great coffee there.”

  She wasn’t amused. In fact, her eyes immediately widened with nothing short of alarm.

  “I can’t go back there,” she said.

  “What else are you going to do?”

  “Ike is pi—furious with me, I know he is.”

  I took Wendy’s hand and wrapped her fingers around the strap of the bag. “Mostly he’s worried about you. Yeah, he’ll read you the riot act—whatever that actually is—but once he finds out you’re okay, he’ll take you back.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he’s a decent guy. There are decent guys. We have to remember that.”

  Wendy blinked furiously, although as swollen as her eyes were I couldn’t see how she could have any tears left. Or maybe I could.

  “Why is it,” she said, “that I say things to you I swore I would never say to anybody?”

  “You’re going to tell me where to go?”

  “No. I do that all the time.” I watched her swallow. “I’m going to ask you to stand there with me when I talk to him.”

  “Of course. I’ll even hold your hand.”

  A trace of the sardonic wit I liked passed across her face. “No,” she said. “You will not.”

  Yeah, well, she was the one who grabbed for my hand the minute we walked into the Piebald and Ike saw us. She didn’t let go until we left his office, after she apologized for not calling him and asked him to let her stay on, and after I persuaded him not only to keep her on but to give her more hours and a chance at a manager’s position so she could quit her other job. I skipped the part where she sort of already had.

  Then I had to pry her fingers from mine because Ike asked me to stay behind while she went to the bathroom to finish sobbing.

  “I can’t tell you what happened,” I said when she was gone.

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  Ike pick
ed up his pipe, looked at it, and put it back down. It didn’t dawn on me until he did it again that he was nervous.

  “I’m doing all of this for Wendy on your word,” he said.

  “She won’t let you down. I was the reason she took off in the first place, but that’s all worked out now.”

  “You’re a good person.”

  I shrugged. “I do okay.”

  “Have dinner with me tonight?”

  Only because he did that adjust-the-fedora-with-one-finger thing did I not say, I’m sorry, but did you just ask me out?

  “Dinner,” I said.

  “You know, the meal after lunch.”

  “The one before breakfast.”

  “That’s the one.”

  His eyebrows lifted and stayed there. My turn. Geez, a date? Now? When my entire life had been shaken like a snow globe and none of the flakes had settled yet?

  But Ike wasn’t a flake. He was the most solid thing I could think of in that moment.

  “It’s just dinner, Tara,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  His face eased into a smile. I hadn’t brought a look like that to anybody’s face in so long I wanted to cry. Again.

  “Sweet,” he said. “After we close. Maybe I’ll do it a little early.”

  “I’ll want to get cleaned up,” I said.

  “I don’t see how you could get any cleaner. Although, do me a favor.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Both you and Wendy go home and get some sleep before your shift. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were both out on a bender last night.”

  Something like that, I wanted to say. Something like that.

  I took Wendy home with me so we could follow Ike’s orders. I fell into an immediate coma, but I wasn’t sure about her. She covered it well, but from the way she gazed up at the nine-foot ceilings and ran her hands over the furniture and seemed to count the lights in the chandeliers, I guessed she was a little overwhelmed by our house. Maybe our life. At one point, just before I drifted off, I heard her whisper, “So this is what it looks like to have.”

  Three and a half hours’ sleep wasn’t enough but we were both significantly more focused when we got back to the Piebald—Wendy more than me. While she went at her shift like she was upper management already, I could hardly make a cup of hot chocolate without having to read the same directions I knew by heart the day before. With Wendy back on track, and hopefully headed off the other one, my mind went straight to Seth. And Fritzie.

  Do what’s true, Ned had said to me. But he also said I had to go through the pain, and I realized I was now starting with another whole layer of it. Fritzie had set a rankling chain in motion—and not just any chain. A chain in a horror movie of the Vincent Price era. One thing I did know. I was tired of having it wrapped around my ankle.

  Toward the end of our shift, Lexi came by to take Wendy home with her. Somewhere between the time I left them the night before and the time I’d returned for Wendy that morning, Lexi had gleaned the information that Wendy shared a place with three other dancers, but when she told her manager she was quitting—moments before I accosted her at the back door of the club—he’d threatened to hunt her down because she owed him. So no, she wasn’t going back to the dancer house.

  Ike let her go early, and he told me to go ahead and hang with my “ladies” while he finished up, and then we could leave for dinner.

  I fully intended to talk to the Watch about my date with Ike and process just exactly why I’d accepted, which I hadn’t had time to figure out. But as I headed toward them, the weight of the day sank down on me again. Without Wendy for the first time in twelve hours, I had no one else’s stuff to carry but mine.

  So I did what was true. Without mentioning Wendy’s name I spilled everything about how I found out about the abuse and Fritzie, all to the beat of Betsy’s warm hand squeezes and Gray’s nodding ponytail and Ms. Helen’s tapping spoon on the rim of my latte mug.

  “I’m trying to let go of the anger so I don’t get bitter,” I said as I wound down. “Y’know, so I can see what to do next. But this . . . this cuts so deep.”

  Gray rubbed her hand up and down her arm, a rare conflicted look on her face. “Define ‘let go of the anger,’ ” she said.

  “That’s just it. I wish I could define it.”

  Betsy raised a creamy palm. “Can I try?”

  “Go for it,” we said in unison.

  I looked at Gray. “That was scary.”

  “You don’t want to keep hating this Fritzie person, is that right?” Betsy said.

  “Right.”

  Gray grunted. “You’re a better woman than I am.”

  “But you can’t just swat the anger away like you would a horsefly.”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t.”

  “But you have to find something to do with it.”

  “Something that isn’t going to hurt any more people.” I felt my throat tighten. “I’m so sick of pain.”

  “Honey, I know you are.” Ms. Helen tapped my mug again. “You have to keep up your physical strength, though. You need to drink that. Have you eaten anything?”

  “I’m actually going out to dinner,” I said, and then for no apparent reason my face flushed like I was thirteen and had to pass my crush on my way into the bathroom.

  “Ah,” Gray said, eyes narrowing deliciously. “Do we have a date?”

  “Now don’t badger her,” Betsy said, and then she leaned into the table. “Who with?”

  “Honey, that is so easy,” Ms. Helen said. “Y’all must be blind. You haven’t seen ol’ Ike looking over here and looking at the clock and looking over here?”

  Gray broke into a grin. “You’re going out with Ike?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But it’s dinner, not—”

  My phone rang and I snatched it up like it was a life preserver. God bless Lexi.

  “What’s up, Lex?” I said, as I escaped from the table and moved several feet away.

  “She went to work.”

  I could have asked Who? Wendy? and said, No, she’s on her way back from work. But I knew from the tremor and pitch of Lexi’s voice exactly what she meant.

  “At the club,” she said. “She got a call and she took the phone in the bathroom. I heard her whispering in there and then she came out crying and said her manager talked her into dancing one more night—he said she owed him that and then he’d let her go.” I could hear the tears in Lexi’s voice. “She looked so scared, Tara. He’s not gonna let her go.”

  “Okay,” I said, “don’t panic. I’ll be right there and we’ll figure out what to do.”

  As we hung up, someone said, “Tara?”

  I jumped, dropping the phone on the table I was standing next to.

  “You okay?” Ike said.

  Even as I nodded I was headed for the door. “I’ll call you,” I said over my shoulder. “I have to take care of something. It won’t take long.”

  I hoped.

  I hoped that all the way up Bull Street as the safe arms of the historic district folded behind me and I half-ran back to Montgomery. I heard footsteps gaining on me and I quickened my own steps, until Gray called out to me, “Tara! Wait up!”

  I faced her and kept walking, backwards. “I have to go help a friend,” I said.

  “Stop. You’re going to—Tara, stop!”

  I did, just as a black pickup rushed past me on Congress, so close I could feel its draft.

  Gray reached me before I could start moving again.

  “You aren’t going to help Wendy by getting yourself run over by a truck. I’m surprised you’ve lived this long.”

  I glossed over the fact that she knew exactly who I was going after and said instead, “I really need to go.”

  “Fine,” she said, “I’m going with you.”

  She fell into step beside me. I didn’t try to argue and instead brought her up to speed on the remaining walk-run to Montgomery Street. There was no point in not tellin
g her, and by the time we got to Lexi’s building I was glad she was with me. Gray may have been brought up Savannah with as much class as my mama, but she had the aura of a woman who’s been places a lot closer to hell and come back stronger for it.

  Lexi looked beyond surprised when I showed up with Gray, but she didn’t ask questions. She didn’t have a chance.

  “We need a plan, ladies,” Gray said. “Do you mind if I—”

  “Please,” I said. “Coming down here was as far as my plan went.”

  Lexi just nodded.

  “Okay, Lexi,” Gray said, “you stay here and be ready to open this door when we come back with Wendy. Don’t open it to anybody else.”

  “Ya think?” Lexi said.

  “Tara, how much money do you have in the bank?”

  I told her.

  “That’s not enough.” She looked me over. “Do you even have your purse with you?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t either of you ever try to become undercover agents. We’ll stop at the ATM—I saw one outside the club—and I’ll get some cash out.” She glanced at her watch. “I’ll tell you the rest on the way.”

  “Be careful, y’all, please?” Lexi said.

  “Put the teakettle on,” Gray told her, and she and I stepped out into the hall.

  By the time we got to the ATM, I knew what our plan was, and I was convinced beyond all doubt that I wasn’t going to be able to pull it off.

  “Pretend you’re in a movie,” Gray said. “Besides, you’ve got the easy part.”

  For somebody who had the hard part, Gray looked like she was actually enjoying herself as we sauntered—she had to show me how to saunter—into the club and she plunked about half of the cash into the outstretched hand of the guy inside the door.

  “Cover charge,” she muttered to me. “Here—you take the rest. And stop looking like you just walked into a haunted house.”

  Hadn’t I?

  The placed smelled worse than it did from the sidewalk. The air was clogged with the fumes of stale liquor and male sweat and suffocating perfume, and I could barely breathe. Even my gape at the almost-naked woman straddling a carousel horse two feet from me was choked off by the smog of ugliness. Seth had hung out here? Really?

  Gray gave me the familiar elbow nudge. “Go behind that curtain,” she said, pointing with her chin. “The dressing room is probably back there. I’ll distract Mr. Man. Is that him?”