Sweetheart Deal

by Claire Matturro

  While Henry patted my arm to the point of irritation, I made a hasty mental list of instructions for Bonita on top of canceling appointments and such things. My key instruction, though, was to be sure to prepare a rough draft of a motion to withdraw as counsel for Idiot Client, and get a couple of ace law clerks started on the supporting memorandum of law on the off-chance the man would oppose my motion.

  “I can drive you to the airport if you want to catch a plane,” ever-helpful Henry chirped.

  My hands started sweating at the mere mention of airport, with its treacherous terminals, running sidewalks, luggage conveyer belts, security checkpoints, and hordes of people from places with different and horrid diseases to which I had no immunity.

  “Airport,” Bonita whispered, and shook her head at Henry, who looked immediately abashed.

  “No, driving, driving is…better,” I said. “It’s only a five-hour drive.”

  “Sorry, I forgot about your…airport phob—er, er—”

  “Lilly, do not worry. Henry will help me, and we will hold down the fort,” Bonita said, interrupting quickly enough to show not only her tact and mastery of American idiom, but knowing precisely how to make Henry look up and beam again.

  After leaving Henry and Bonita to make goo-goo eyes at each other, I sped home as fast as my faithful little Honda Civic could hurl itself across the numerous speed bumps erected by overly protective local powers-that-be that thought knocking out the undercarriage of automobiles would somehow preserve the quaint neighborhood quality of the homes in the Southgate Community.

  And found Armando, the squat and obviously unhappy son of Bonita, camped outside my front door, waiting. Wrapped around his thick, brown neck was Johnny Winter, the ferret that once saved my life but who still spat at me every time I got near him.

  Unlike the rest of Bonita’s five children, Armando had always acted like he didn’t much care for me. But then, he acted like he didn’t much care for anyone. I would have blamed it on his adolescence—he was sixteen now—if I hadn’t known him as a child, when he had that same belligerence, his own extreme leave-me-alone thing going.

  So, yeah, I was surprised to see him waiting for me. Surprised and disturbed, since I didn’t have time for him.

  But I didn’t have the heart to say so.

  “So, hey, Armando. What’s up?” I said, putting on my chipper voice as a hopeful antidote to his grim face.

  “Can I stay here? For a while?” he asked.

  Oh-oh. Not good. Not good in general, and especially not good timing.

  I glanced at my watch. “Your mom know you’re skipping school?”

  “She doesn’t care. She’s so…wrapped up in Carmen and Henry.”

  Ah, jealousy. Carmen, being Bonita’s only girl and the youngest, naturally got a lot of extra attention, plus she was sweet as a clean puppy and four times cuter. And Henry was gaining rapidly in his three-year quest to become part of Bonita’s family.

  “You know your mother cares about you, and she won’t like you skipping school,” I said, in a textbook example of lame responses. But hey, I haven’t had much experience in raising children, okay? And so, spank me, but what I was thinking about was how to get rid of him. “Armando, why don’t I drop you off at your home in a few minutes. I’ve got to pack, pack really quickly. My mother is in the hospital, and I’ve got to go to Georgia.”

  “Cool. I can come with you,” he said, and jumped up, an eager smile on his face. But then Bonita’s good raising made him duck his head, no doubt a bit aghast at his own bad manners. When he finally looked me in the eyes, he said, “I’m sorry, Tia Lilly, about your mom, I mean. Is it real bad?”

  “I don’t know yet. That’s why I have to hurry. And I don’t think this is the trip to take you with me. My youngest nephew is your age, and I’d be glad to take you to Georgia another time, and y’all could meet each other, but, Armando, there’s just too much going on right now. Do you see that?”

  He stared over my shoulder, gazing into the distance and utterly refusing to meet my eyes.

  “Armando, is everything all right?”

  At that moment, the formerly sleeping ferret, Johnny Winter, the albino polecat cousin draped about Armando, woke up, oonked at me as a warm-up to spitting, and then spat until I backed up.

  “Can I house-sit for you, while you’re gone?” Armando asked. And gently brushed Johnny out of his face.

  “It’s all right with me, if your mom agrees. Tell you what, you call her while I pack, and put her on the phone with me. If she says you can stay here, you can stay.”

  As we went inside together, I realized this boy—this young man—had never in the many years I had known him ever called me Tia Lilly before, though his siblings had done so for years.

  I wasn’t sure there was going to be anything in the whole damn town of Bugfest that I could eat. While I wasn’t changing time zones, I was traveling to the land of pig-out-and-slaw-down, where barbecued pork reigned supreme, edging out fried chicken only by a slice of Texas toast, and I was a vegetarian, whole foods, organic only, tofu eater, convinced the secret to a healthy, happy life lay in fueling it properly. That is, I didn’t eat barbecue or fried chicken.

  So, yeah, food was going to be an issue. But after settling with Bonita that Armando could house-sit, and giving them both my brother Dan’s address and phone number, I crashed through the Granary on my way out of Sarasota and grabbed the obvious: organic apples, bottled water, yogurt, kefir, organic fair-trade coffee, and all the boxes of Save the Forest Organic Trail Mix Bars that the store had in stock.

  I was already on I–75, near the Gainesville exit, when I realized I should probably mention to Philip Cohen, my persistent lover/boyfriend/beau/alleged-fiancé-to-be, that I was going to be out of town for a few days, in case he should miss me. Philip is the best relationship I’ve ever had, though he keeps trying to ruin it by insisting we get married. Even with that major flaw, he’s a keeper, so I pulled out my cell phone and got him on the line.

  “Something’s come up,” I said, skipping the usual intro. I was driving too fast to absorb the tiny flicker on a tinier screen, which would tell me whether my cell was charging me roaming fees or not, and I wasn’t chitchatting at an unknown cost per chit.

  “Busy,” Philip said, instead of hello. “Trial. Next week.”

  Yeah, I knew that, but figured he’d want to know I was out of town, even preoccupied as he was preparing to defend a man indicted for commercial espionage. His client, who was Cary Grant debonair, had been breaking into businesses, homes, briefcases, and computers to steal corporate secrets, patents, client lists, proprietary info, the real accounting records, and just about anything else anyone would pay him to steal. Philip insisted this man could do things with computers the FBI only wished they could. This client had been making a lucrative living stealing information, and probably would have continued to do so, but his wife discovered him with his girlfriend and tipped off his next target.

  This Cary Grant–cool guy, who posted his own bail in an amount well beyond most people’s projected lifetime earnings, always flirted outrageously with me when our paths crossed. Yeah, he was tempting. But he had a wife, a girlfriend, and an impressive list of criminal indictments that made the usually unflappable Philip blanch, and the IRS was sniffing around. Plus, if I dated his client, Philip would probably break up with me.

  Anyway, as Philip had been hyperventilating about for weeks, this case was going to take lots of trial prep time, so I hit the punch line in a hurry. “I’m going to Bugfest to visit my brother a few days. Everything is cool. Call you when I’m back.”

  Philip muttered something that loosely translated into “Okay,” and I hung up. If I hadn’t been a trial attorney myself, I’d have been grievously offended by his lack of concern or curiosity. But I knew the days before any trial were precious, and preparation trumped everything short of nuclear terrorist attacks, and I put up my cell and hummed on down the highway.

  My f
ive-hour drive took me from the autumn in southwest Florida, where fall isn’t much different than summer, to Georgia, where I could feel a coolness in the breeze that wafted into the open window of my car. The fields along the sides of the road were filled with purple wildflowers and goldenrod so tall and thick you would have thought it was planted and cultivated, like cotton. And already, in the bay and sweetgums, yellow, gold, and red touched the leaves.

  Given my mission, I had driven like a bat out of hell on my way to Georgia. One can do that on I–75 north, and not stand out at all. But on the last lap of the trip, on Meridian Road, the famed canopy thoroughfare out of Tallahassee that crossed the Georgia state line right in the middle of a plantation that reeked of old money and landed gentry, anything faster than forty was difficult.

  At an ancient white church in the wildwoods, I turned off Meridian onto Hadley-Ferry Road, and slowed down even further when I hit the city limits. Having nearly completed my drive north from Sarasota into the deep south of southwest Georgia, I was hoping to un-spasm my neck by the sheer force of my own willpower as I coasted past the courthouse square and stared up at the Mule Day banners hanging pillar-to-post on every block, as bright and happy as the Christmas decorations that would hang there in another month.

  Mule Day?

  Yeah, this Saturday would be the first Saturday in November, which meant the annual Mule Day Festival.

  A part of me suddenly wanted to go to Mule Day. After all, my mad hatter brother Delvon and I had had some good times at the Mule Days of our weird little childhoods. But a bigger part of me hoped that before Saturday I would be done doing whatever it was Dan wanted me to do, and I’d be home in Sarasota.

  About the time I stopped oohing at the thought of Mule Day, I saw the old Zebulon, the town’s movie house, an old-fashioned Art Deco palace with elaborately decorated walls and the balconies where the local teenagers had learned to make out. As I drove by, I was glad to see obvious signs of renovations, including a beaut of a bright, new marquee.

  This weird urge to see a movie at the Zeb caught me off guard, and briefly I wondered if I’d have time to catch a Saturday-night show.

  But mostly I was too hungry to plan much beyond eating a healthy, organic snack to fortify myself for whatever was coming my way. Having skipped lunch in my haste, I worried with the wrapper of a trail mix bar, driving one-handedly. As I jammed the trail mix bar in my mouth, a mosquito flew in from the netherworlds to torment me.

  Four blocks past the intersection that marked the end of downtown, and nearly at my mother’s house, a quick and bright blue something big ran out slap-dab in front of my ancient Honda.

  Busy as I was with the trail mix bar and with slapping at the mosquito, I lost a second or two in dodge-time.

  Slamming on my brakes, I felt the car skidding west into the oncoming lane, which, unfortunately, was already occupied by a late-model Ford pickup. I spun the steering wheel madly, but my front bumper caught the truck’s bumper and we careened off in a sort of low-end auto dance toward a shallow ditch, but not before an old Thunderbird, whose driver had dodged toward instead of away from the melee, clipped the rear of the truck.

  The three of us spun through the ditch and into a front yard, my Honda narrowly missing an ornate blue birdbath. When we had all come to rest, the man in the truck scrambled out, ran to my door, and yanked it open. “You all right, ma’am? You aren’t hurt or nothing, are you?”

  The mosquito sharing the front seat with me took the lull in my frantic hand-waving as a prime opportunity and bit me in the middle of my forehead. Oh, great, a car wreck and a red welt. This was going well, I thought, then wondered exactly what I had expected. After all, there’d been plenty of reasons why I had left this town right after high school graduation night.

  “I’m all right. How about you?” I asked the pickup man.

  “Oh, takes more’n a little fender bender to do me in,” he said. “I’m a veteran of the Great War.”

  I climbed out of my car and together we walked back to the Thunderbird, where another older man pushed himself out of the driver’s side and got to his feet. He looked me up and down, then grinned. “Why, I’ll be doggoned if it isn’t Lawyer Cleary’s gal. That photo in the paper your brother Dan had ’em run when you won that lawyer partnership thing hardly did you justice,” he said. The old man stuck out his hand, and I took it.

  After shaking hands, the three of us circled the vehicles, none of which appeared much improved by the experience but certainly not disabled.

  “Reckon we don’t need a wrecker,” the Thunderbird man said. “My car’ll drive. I can sure knock that bumper back right on your car, ma’am, that way we don’t need to swap insurance.”

  I figured that meant I was the only one in the group who actually had auto insurance. As this little wreck was technically my fault, I nodded, thinking the less my company knew about it the less high my rates would go.

  “Good, good,” Thunderbird Man said, and kicked on my bumper until it was more or less in the traditional place for a bumper.

  “I can get my son-in-law to fix mine,” Great War Veteran said. “He ought to be good for something.”

  The large, blue creature that had caused all the commotion let out a loud, unworldly scream, pulled up a bug in the dry grass of the ditch, and flew in a perfect blue arc toward the front porch of the house in whose yard we were all more or less parked. A woman came out on the porch.

  The Thunderbird man shouted at the woman: “I told you, you ought to keep that bird penned up. That peacock nearly caused us to wreck out here.”

  Ignoring him, the woman studied me. I studied her back, something familiar in her face. About the same time I recognized my middle-school English teacher and my mother’s only known friend, Eleanor Spivey, she must have recognized me.

  “Well, Lilly Belle Rose. It’s about time you came back,” Eleanor said, “now that your mother needs you, accused as she is of killing that bill collector.”

  “That was your momma?” Veteran Man asked. “How come you go and let her live like that?” He took a step away from me, creating extra air space around me, which was immediately filled with a swarm of gnats.

  “Well, as long as you all are here, you might as well come in. I have some fresh iced tea and ice-box cookies. You too, Lilly Belle Rose, come on in.”

  “I go by just Lilly now. You can drop the Belle and the Rose. And thank you, Miss Spivey, but I’m not thirsty and I need to get on over to Dan’s.”

  My former English teacher opened the door, the two men walked toward her, and the peacock ran past them into the house. “Not you, Free Bird, no sir, I do not hold with animals in the house.” The peacock came trotting back out, while I thought, Free Bird? Funny, Eleanor didn’t look much like the Lynyrd Skynyrd type, and for a moment I flashed on the summer Brother Delvon and I had listened to a purloined cassette with Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” over and over. It wasn’t our generation’s song, but we took it to heart anyway.

  “Lilly, call me Eleanor. Dan won’t be home until after five-thirty, and you can sit a spell, and I put fresh mint in the tea.” Eleanor smiled at me as if she were glad to see me.

  My grandmother used to grow mint and crush the leaves in our tea. I was suddenly thirsty, and I smiled back. “Is the tea organic, by chance?” I asked.

  “It’s Luzianne. Same as your grandmomma made. You have consumed your own weight ten times over in Luzianne iced tea.” There was a snip in her voice when she added, “Do not get above your raising on me now.”

  Great. Already my former English teacher was fussing at me. I slapped at another mosquito, but not before it bit me. Free Bird flew up to the railing on the porch, uttered a couple of pluck-pluck noises, and stared at me, a long bug dangling out of his beak.

  After twenty years, I was home again.

  chapter 2

  Ah, the sweet, green grass of home, I thought, and looked down the street to assure myself there was no prison wall at the end of it.


  Still itchy, I walked up onto the front porch of my brother’s house, which is a tad too close to our mother’s house for my personal taste, and I kicked at some sawdust gathered in piles under the eaves.

  A towheaded teenager with freckles and blue eyes opened the door and said, “Aunt Lilly?”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of his tentativeness. I wasn’t sure if I could hug him, or if, at sixteen, my nephew had reached an age where that wouldn’t be tolerated. I wasn’t sure what I was doing, standing in front of my brother Dan’s house.

  Kicking the sawdust out of my way and making a little shower of pale dust, I stepped toward my nephew.

  “Damn carpenter bees, they been eating on the porch since spring, like to give Daddy a fit,” he said.

  “Bobby?”

  “Yes’um, it’s me.”

  “Are you allowed to cuss?”

  “I didn’t cuss, I just said damn. Damn’s okay. You got to watch the f-word, and you can’t be taking the Lord’s name in vain.”

  Okay, that laid some ground rules I might need to remember if I was going to stay more than the night.

  While Bobby was staring at the sawdust, I snuck up and gave him a quick hug, which he accepted without too much wiggling, and Dan came up behind him and bear-hugged me like we’d been best friends forever. We hadn’t. Dan, with his red face and his red hair and the quiet Methodist ways he’d adopted from Patti Lea, his wife, never quite approved of me, though he was far too polite to say so. But polite or not, Dan never hid his disapproval of our older brother, Delvon, who had been simultaneously a lay Pentecostal preacher and a local independent businessman in the field of recreational drug procurement before the Georgia Bureau of Investigations put him out of business—at least around Bugfest, that is. Despite the fact Delvon was currently being rehabilitated by the love of a good woman, the mere mention of his name could make Dan spit iced tea, he’d get so mad. But there he was, my brother, dear, sweet Dan, hugging me and saying how good I looked and wasn’t it nice I had finally come home to visit.