Ace Jones: Mad Fat Adventures in Therapy

by Stephanie McAfee

  But I can read this particular text, so I prop my feet up on the lounger and give her a call.

  “Ace,” she says, and it sounds like she’s been running, but she’s not a runner. “I’m not gonna be able to go to Florida.”

  “What are you talking about?” I’m confused because spending spring break in Panama City Beach is one of our most sacred and beloved traditions.

  “I can’t go.” She pauses. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” I yell into the phone. “Are you freakin’ kidding me? We’re supposed to leave in the morning, Lilly! Like nine hours from right now! What the hell do you mean you can’t go?”

  Silence. And then it dawns on me.

  For the past five months, Lilly has been seeing someone on the sly whom she will only call the Gentleman, and she’s more tightlipped about him than she was about the time she got a hot dog stuck in her cooter. I think he might be a gross old man with tons of money. I thought about making a list of all the gross old men with money in Bugtussle, Mississippi, and doing some investigating, but I’m not much of a list maker so I probably won’t do that.

  Lilly, however, is a habitual list maker, and I don’t mean the kind of list you take to the grocery store. She can go on a date with some dude and by the time they get to wherever they’re going, she’s got a list a mile long of everything she thinks is wrong with him.

  I know this because she keeps me updated with a continuous stream of text messages. Not because I ask for them. I don’t.

  After the date is over, she documents the potential suitor’s faults on a piece or twelve of loose-leaf paper that she then files in an alphabetized four-inch binder. I mean, God forbid she should forget one small thing about a guy nice enough to take her goofy ass out to dinner and a movie.

  Some poor fellows hang around long enough to have their list read to them, and the truly unfortunate get shown the actual notebook. Imagine a man looking at a hot pink polka-dot binder stuffed with more than ten years’ worth of documentation on Mr. Wrong.

  The Gentleman, however, does not have a list. As far as I can tell, he has only an itinerary. Since the commencement of her supersecret affair, Lilly has been to New York City, Steamboat Springs, and on a cruise to the Cayman Islands. In the past five months. Five months. And she returns from these escapades with truckloads of fancy shopping bags stuffed with extravagant gifts.

  I guess she may have finally found her Mr. Right, although I have serious doubts about how right a man can be who requires such secrecy concerning his identity.

  Further adding to the mystery of this surreptitious affair is that new BMW convertible she started driving about two months ago. I mean, she has some serious cash stacked up from her days as a lingerie model, but I don’t think she’d blow every last dime of it on an automobile. Maybe the Gentleman is a rich man in a midlife crisis. The car is red.

  Whoever he is, I hate his guts because I’m relatively certain he’s the reason my vacation plans are now in ruins.

  “Oh,” I say, “I get it. It’s him. The Gentleman’s got bigger plans for you, Lilly? A little trip down to the Redneck Riviera doesn’t quite measure up to your new travel standards? I can’t buy you six pairs of Manolos and three Gucci purses so I’m out now?”

  “Ace, please don’t do this to me. Just get someone else to go.”

  “Don’t do this to you?” I yell and feel my face getting hot. “How about you don’t do this to me? And who the hell am I gonna get who can pack up and be ready on such short notice? I’m the only person I know who is that spontaneous.”

  “You could ask Chloe,” she peeps.

  “Oh, yeah, that’s a great idea. I mean, Chloe can’t go to the mailbox without being watched, so I’m sure her adoring husband would just love it if she took off on a trip to the beach, where she might actually get to relax and enjoy herself. Why can’t I come up with ideas that brilliant?”

  Chloe is married to Richard Stacks the Fourth, a prominent pillar in the Bugtussle community who puts a ridiculous amount of effort into his let-me-get-that-door-for-you-my-sweet-beloved-wife-because-I’m-a-perfect-husband persona. In private, however, he talks to Chloe like she’s a shit-eating dog. It’s been almost six years since that midnight phone call when Chloe quietly confided the details of her first verbal beat-down. She’d only been married a few months and asked me what I thought she should do. I told her to pack her crap and come to my house. She wouldn’t. I told her to go in the bedroom and superglue his lips together. She wouldn’t do that, either. I was about to ask her why she called me if she wasn’t going to heed my stellar advice, when it dawned on me that what she needed was for me to clarify who the bad guy was and that it wasn’t her. Soon afterward, Richard had an affair with a skanky-ass local woman who, upon discovering that she was not his only mistress, told everyone in town that he was a gruesome nymphomaniac with a weird, tiny penis. His other concubines obviously didn’t mind sharing, and rumors of his sexual deviance became standard fodder for the rumor mill.

  Chloe refuses to acknowledge his infidelity, shrouds herself in ignorance, and stands by in silence as he flaunts his gentlemanly manners in public. She won’t entertain even the slightest suggestion of divorce and ignores me when I say he should be killed. I’ve offered to do just that on several occasions and come up with some good places to hide the body, but she is determined to make her marriage work because she thinks he can change. I think the only thing that can change a man like that is a bullet to the skull. Just like that Dixie Chicks song about Earl.

  Silence on the line.

  “Well,” I say.

  “Well,” she says, “I think you should go on down to Florida and try to patch things up with Mason. You could stop by Perdido Key on your way to Panama City and y’all could have lunch or something, and maybe work things out. When I was at the bar the other day, Ethan Allen told me he isn’t seeing anybody and, honestly, Ace, I think he’s just waiting on you to come back.”

  “Is that what you think?” I ask, heavy on the sarcasm. “How could you even bring that up right now? What the hell is wrong with you?” I pause. “But, hey. I do appreciate you sitting up at the bar and hashing out my personal business with Ethan Allen.”

  “Ace, I’m sorry but you’re the only person who doesn’t see what a big mistake you made when you packed up and left Mason in one your famous fits of rage! No one else will say anything to you because they know you’ll go ape-shit crazy—”

  “Just stop right there,” I interrupt. My face is on fire. “You have got to be out of your damn mind. I mean, first you text me and tell me to call you, which is stupid as shit by the way; then you tell me you’re ditching our trip, a trip we take every year and you know how much it means to me; then you suggest I take along our poor little friend who can’t go to the grocery store without being interrogated; and after all of that, you have the balls to start babbling about how I need to patch things up with Mason. Seriously, Lilly?” I take a deep breath. “Is that what you really think, or is this you worming your way out of our trip because your Gentleman came calling?”

  She doesn’t say anything.

  “You have to admit it’s a pretty convenient thing to bring up now.”

  Silence still.

  “You’re gonna ditch me the night before we leave?” I ask, making a legitimate effort to be calm. “Really?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s not what you think. I have to be somewhere.”

  “You have to be somewhere?” The sarcasm oozes like lava. “Where exactly do you have to be, Lilly?”

  “Paris.” She sounds like a baby frog trying to find its first croak.

  “Really, I thought you quit modeling because you found the lifestyle too exhausting and unfulfilling, and that’s why you came home and started teaching school. Am I right about that?”

  “You know I’m not modeling.”

  “Just trying to be a better French teacher?”

  “Ace, please—”

  “Spring break in Pari
s,” I say with the sarcasm full throttle. “Well, don’t that just take the cake? I’m so happy for you and your Gentleman friend. Or should I say your Gentleman financier.” I put a little French twist on the last syllable. For effect.

  “You are so cruel,” she whispers.

  “Oh, yeah, I’m definitely the bitch in this relationship.” I pause. “Tell me who it is, Lilly. Who is this Gentleman whose plans for you are so much more important than the plans you made with me?”

  “You know I can’t tell you who he is.”

  “Why not? I really wanna know.”

  “Ace, stop, please. I can’t.”

  “Right. Of course you can’t. I mean, why would you? It’s not like you can trust me. It’s not like we’re best friends, good ol’ BFFs forever, right, Lilly?”

  “Ace,” she says, and I can tell she’s about to start her stupid squalling like she always does when she needs people to come around to her way of thinking.

  “Okay, well. Hey! Thanks for waiting until Friday afternoon to let me know. Have a great trip and I’ll talk to you later—” I pause. “Or maybe not.”

  She starts mumbling a string of apologies and I push the red button on my phone with enough pressure to drive a nail through wood. Sorry means as much to me as that dog turd Buster Loo just dropped in that dwarf yaupon holly.

  Happily Ever Madder

  I didn’t think I’d be this nervous. I mean, I knew from the very beginning that this night was going to be stressful, but I didn’t expect it to feel like an all-out near-death experience.

  I turn away from the toilet and pick up the bottle. I don’t even like champagne. I like beer. And right now I need a beer worse than I ever have, but champagne is all I’ve got to get me through this, so I turn the bottle toward the ceiling and hammer down.

  I remind myself that this is what I’ve always wanted. It’s everything I’ve always wanted, so I don’t understand why it doesn’t feel anything like I always thought it would. Maybe because I never thought this moment would actually arrive. But it’s here. Right now. I’m about to walk out in front of a crowd of people and bare my soul for their casual perusal.

  Someone knocks and tries to open the door.

  “Ace! What are you doing? Come on! Everyone is waiting!” A pause. “Have you got the runs? Please tell me you don’t have the runs!”

  “I don’t have the damn runs, Lilly!” I shout at my best friend of going on twenty years. “Jeez, just give me a minute.”

  “You don’t have a minute! You were supposed to be out there ten minutes ago, so come on!”

  “What am I supposed to say to all those people?”

  “I don’t know.” She pauses, then adds, “I hate to be the one to point this out, but maybe you should’ve thought about that already?”

  “I did.”

  “Great—now get out here and say something before these people start leaving!”

  I reach over and unlock the door. Lilly comes in and starts fussing with my hair.

  “Here,” she says, handing me a tube of lip gloss. She looks at the champagne bottle in my hand. “Are you drunk?”

  “Unfortunately, I am not.”

  She takes the bottle out of my hand and sticks it under the sink.

  “This is your big night, Ace Jones,” she says, smiling. “Get out there and give ’em the old razzle-dazzle.”

  “More like frazzle-dazzle, Lilly. I’m scared shitless. What if everyone hates everything they see? What if they think it’s all complete and total garbage?”

  “Ace, if they think that, then they’re idiots, and no one cares what idiots think,” she says, taking my hand. “C’mon, now. You’ve waited your whole life for this.”

  I follow her out of the bathroom, through my brand-new office, where move-in junk is still scattered everywhere, and out into the wide-open space of the gallery, my gallery, where clusters of people are drinking champagne and looking at paintings. My paintings.

  “And here she is, folks,” a slick-haired fellow says into a cordless microphone. “The star of tonight’s show, Miss Graciela Jones!”

  Everyone claps and I smile and wave. I take the microphone from his overtanned hand, gather all my courage, and pray I don’t hurl.

  “Hello, everyone,” I say and realize I’ve got the microphone too close to my mouth. “Thank you all so much for coming out tonight. Welcome to Mermaids of Pelican Cove.”

  I scan the sea of unfamiliar faces, then home in on my pals, who are congregated in the far left corner of the gallery. I see Lilly walk over and take a seat on the sofa in between her luscious lover-boy, Dax Dorsett, and our mutual BFF, Chloe Stacks. Sitting directly across from Chloe is her new boyfriend, J. J. Jackson, and perched two cushions down is Ethan Allen Harwood, who is chatting it up with his best friend and my fiancé, Mason McKenzie. Mason is sitting on a rectangular ottoman, and I’d give anything to be sitting over there next to him instead of standing up here about to lose my mind. He looks at me and smiles. I feel a little better, but not much.

  I look back at the crowd, take a deep breath, and attempt to give the speech I spent the past three weeks composing. Instead of delivering the articulate presentation I had planned, however, I sputter random words and phrases in a most disorderly fashion, then get really hot and start feeling like I might pass out. I decide to start thanking people.

  “I’d like to thank my fiancé, Mason McKenzie, and all of my old friends who came down to Pelican Cove, Florida, from my hometown of Bugtussle, Mississippi. Thanks, y’all.” I look at them and nod. “And I’d like to thank all the new friends that I make to meet tonight. I’m sorry, I mean, hope to make—I mean, meet tonight.” I look at Lilly, and she looks nervous but flashes me a big smile, so I continue. “Thank you, Mason, for making all of my dreams come true, and thank you, Lilly, for being my BFF since we stopped hating each other the year after sixth grade. And thank you, Chloe, who’s been my other BFF since we met at Mississippi State and me and Lilly moved in with her even though we thought she was a little bit weird.” Then I get too close to the microphone again and mumble, “At first.” I look at Chloe, and her big brown eyes are round like saucers.

  I shift my gaze back to the crowd and see that more than a few people look like their underwear just started squeezing them in all the wrong places. My brain feels like it’s swelling up inside my skull and I wish I hadn’t drunk all that champagne. I mop the sweat off my forehead and try to remember what I’d planned to say. I don’t think I meant to thank my friends individually, but since I mentioned a few, I decide to mention the others because I don’t want anyone to think that I don’t appreciate their driving six hours down here to watch me make a fool of myself in front of all these people I don’t know.

  “Thanks to Sherriff J. J. Jackson and Deputy Dax Dorsett, who came down with their lady friends, Chloe and Lilly, to see, uh, me and all this.” I wave my arm around in a big circle and try to smile. “I don’t know who is keeping criminals off the street in Bugtussle tonight, but since I moved out of town, I guess the crime rate has gone down considerably.” I snigger and look at Lilly, who is slicing her hand across her throat. I hear a rumble in the crowd and panic. “And, finally, thanks to Ethan Allen Harwood, my best guy friend in the whole wide world and Mason’s best friend in the whole wide world.” I look at Ethan Allen, who is frozen like a statue. “We love you like a brother, Ethan Allen, so I guess it’s a good thing that me and you never hooked up, because that would’ve been almost like incest.”

  The crowd is quiet now and staring at me like I have an alien probe sticking out of my ass. Despite my best effort not to, I start laughing hysterically. I look at Mason, who gives me a sweet “you’re so pitiful” smile. He starts clapping, and others do the same. I tug at the hem of my not-so-little black dress because all of that slimming fabric has started to creep. I look around and try to remember what I just said to all these people, but I can’t. “Thank you all for coming out,” I say a bit too loud. “Please excuse my n
ervousness. Lucky for me, you didn’t come to hear me speak, thank goodness—you came to see my work, so if we could please just move along to that part, well, that would be great.”

  I look at the tuxedo-clad slickster, who smiles at me with genuine sympathy. I verbalize my gratitude one more time and then give the microphone back to him. He gives a short and far more graceful spiel, and everyone claps and starts looking comfortable again. I stand there beside him and smile, wondering if the spotlight glaring into my face could scorch my eyeballs and cause me to go blind. I take a little bow, then walk slowly away from the brutal shaft of light, trying to project a sense of confidence that I most certainly do not feel.

  Shit. No wonder van Gogh cut off his own ear.

  I make a beeline for my pals.

  Down and Out in Bugtussle

  From a distance, it looks better than it actually is: the starched white tablecloth, a carafe of red wine, the glass goblet candleholder glowing amber against a terra-cotta wall. The ambiance is enchanting, the pesto is amazing, and sitting on the other side of that luscious chunk of rosemary bread is a fairly decent-looking fellow with neatly trimmed hair, light brown eyes, and a perfectly manicured goatee. He smiles. I smile. Dinner arrives. And then he launches into yet another idiotic spiel. “Have you ever envisioned the materialization of your most fantastical dreams?” he asks, smoothing the napkin on his lap with both hands. I have no desire to discuss my dreams—or my lack thereof—with a perfect stranger, but I welcome the odd turn of conversation, seeing as how he spent the past twenty minutes blathering about his mother. His eyes are locked on mine as he swirls linguine onto his fork.

  “I’m sorry—have I what?” I say, looking down as I cut into my lasagna. I would attempt to change the subject, but I’ve gathered that whatever Mr. I Love Mommy wants to talk about, by golly, he’s gonna talk about.

  “Have you ever thought about how magnificent your life would be if your wildest dreams somehow came true?” He’s peering at me like a Peeping Tom, no doubt trying to catch a glimpse of my bare-naked soul.

  “Of course,” I say. “Hasn’t everyone?” I take a bite of lasagna while he continues to work those noodles and stare at me.