by Luanne Jones
She came within a breath of saying, Yes and it’s the perfect illustration for my life. But with Will just inches away and wearing that look—she found herself hard-pressed to see her circumstances as anything but on the upswing. “You are one wicked, wicked man, William West.”
“That a complaint?”
She let the squawk of her setting the parking brake be her answer.
He laughed. Then he turned and shouted directions to the group milling around the lot.
Immediately, Cozie and Pernel started unloading the lunch goods while Mouse and a couple of men helped brace up the Porta-Potti.
Will put one foot on her car bumper and began talking to the blue door.
She couldn’t hear the exchange word for word; however, Will’s tone stayed steady and calm while the man’s on the other end of the conversation grew more angry and threatening. Once or twice Will cut loose with a good-ol’-boy belly laugh—the kind any longtime Southerner recognizes as a pure power play and nothing to do with good humor. Still, he didn’t come off mean with it, like some men do. He simply sounded confident and unwilling to back down when he was in the right.
In response, a string of vulgarities poured out from behind the door. Curses so imaginative and complex that Cozie—the ultimate queen of many-paths-all-lead-to-the-same-God—made the sign of the cross over herself, her eyes wide.
Boot to the bumper, Will jounced the car once lightly, then again, harder.
Rita hung on to the steering wheel and shut her eyes. All she needed was to get carsick in a parked vehicle to put that crowning jewel in her near-perfect day.
A stillness fell over the whole scene. An eerie stillness, they’d say in books, the kind that came over battlefields when no men stood left to fight. Will not only stood, he strode toward the driver’s side of her car, his expression dark.
“Scoot over, I’d better do this.”
Will nudged her over to the passenger side so he could take the wheel without so much as a do you mind if or a please.
“Should I get out?” She scrambled for the other door.
“We’re both getting out.” He grabbed her by the wrist and slammed the door shut. “Getting the hell out of here.”
Her heart raced. Well, your heart would race, she told herself. Good gravy, not every day a girl gets herself into a fix like this and has the man of her dreams charging to her rescue.
“Sit tight and don’t say anything that might come back to haunt you.”
“Always good advice.” She gritted her teeth and tried not to dwell on having just thought of Will as the man of her dreams. Instead she focused on how it just figured that her one chance at playing damsel in distress involved outdoor plumbing and strong-arming a stranger with his pants around his ankles.
Will shifted into reverse and eased the car back just a bit, then leaned out the window. “Don’t let him out until you see our taillights round the corner.”
“Taillights around the corner? Where are you planning on taking me?”
“Doesn’t matter, just so he doesn’t come out and realize who had him pinned in.” He gunned the motor, shifted again, and tore out of the lot. “If he knows it was you, he might claim we set him up.”
“Oh, right. Like I could really have planned anything that perfect.” She shook her head. “If they took it to a court of law, all I’d ever have to do is submit my life as exhibit A.”
He came to a stop at the intersection just north of the Palace—where the road to the left led to Miss Peggy’s grand old home and, to the right, headed out of town to the narrow dirt lane that ended in the cemetery. He made a quick glance in either direction. “Exhibit A?”
“Incontrovertible evidence that I no longer have control over anything that goes on with me anymore, at least not since you showed up.”
“Only since I showed up?” He made a right. He didn’t look at her, but he didn’t have to for her to see that smug expression. See it? Hell, she could hear dripping snake oil in his voice.
He scrubbed bent fingers along his jawline. “I confess I did aim to have an impact on you.”
All right, snake oil was too strong a description. Without stealing so much as a glance his way, she sensed a gentling in his demeanor.
“And not just the impact of…making the earth move for both of us the other night.”
Merciful heavens, the man was showing understanding and kindness. Trying to reach her on an intimate level to make sure everything between them was all right. That she was all right. If he hadn’t been driving, she would have strangled him for it.
Her only goal for the day had been to avoid Will. Barring that, she had wished simply not to look a fool in front of him. And if that proved impossible, she did hold out the one last auxiliary, backup, please-Lord-I-never-ask-for-much-but-just-this-once hope that there be not so much as a hint of reference to their lovemaking and subsequent failed good-bye.
“Rita, I—”
“Shut up and drive.”
The woman had a point. And if he had a lick of common sense left, he’d do just that. He’d shut his mouth and drive around town in blessed silence until it felt safe to go back. “Rita, don’t you think we need to talk?”
“No.” She faced straight ahead, one hand braced on the faded green dash. “That’s the very essence of the phrase ‘shut up.’ No talking. Shutting up of the entire frontal face area in order to prevent the escape of words or even accidental vocal intonations.”
“Got it.” He guided the car around a long curve, eyes peeled for a driveway or wide shoulder where he could turn around.
“I should have seen this coming a mile off,” she muttered, her face to the passenger window.
“I guess the shutting-up portion of the ride only applies to the driver’s side of the vehicle then?”
She exhaled loudly.
“Okay.” He could sit and listen. Maybe then he’d learn something about what went on in that amazing mind of hers. He could live with that.
“I took on this day with one objective—feed the people helping me with the Palace without once having to deal with you directly. And by directly, I mean all alone, one on one, no witnesses or buffers. That’s the thing I set out to avoid.”
“Mmm.” It was the only noise he could make while still complying with her orders to keep his mouth shut.
“Was that asking so much? It’s all I wanted. But now look at us. A pair of renegade toilet tippers, on our own and on the lam.”
“Just trying to…”
“Don’t say it!”
He raised an eyebrow and finished his justification. “…help.”
“I told you not to say it. I’m sick of hearing it, you know. Sick of hearing you tell me how you’re here to help me—again.”
“That’s bad?”
“Every day I climb out of my bed thinking I am one day closer to the end of this chaos. And every night I fall back into that same bed weighed down with the realization that I am mired even deeper in your debt.”
“How can you be in debt to me when I set out to do all this to try to repay you?”
“Repay me?”
“You gave me something very precious.”
“I didn’t want to talk about that either.”
“That?”
“That little piece of heaven the other night.”
“That was precious.” More than he could describe without taking his hands off the wheel and his mind off the real subject. “That will always remain precious to me, Rita. But it was the little piece of your mind that you gave me more than six years ago that I’m talking about.”
Even with her head bowed, he could see her cheeks redden. “I had no call to talk to you that way.”
“Somebody had to.” The whole car jostled as the tires rumbled from the pavement to the dirt road. It wasn’t the movement that made his pulse pick up or the coldness gripping the pit of his stomach. His eyes on the tree-lined lot up ahead, he whispered, “You gave me a great gift then, Rita.”
“
I hardly think—”
“Time with my son.” He pulled up to the ornate iron gate between two rows of windswept pines.
Rita put her hand on the dash. The kind sadness in her eyes cut away all pretense and in the same instant offered healing and hope. “This is where he’s buried, isn’t it?”
He could not answer that question without giving away too much of himself, so he only nodded.
“Do you want to get out?”
“No.”
“Do you want to talk?”
He nodded again.
She took his hand and waited.
He drew on the strength of her compassion and looked down the gravel lane between the rows of marble headstones. “If you hadn’t chewed me out up one side and down the other about my responsibilities to Norrie, the responsibilities of being that baby’s father, I might never have gotten the chance to hold that precious boy in my arms.”
“Oh, Will, of course you would have.”
He shook his head. “You don’t know the situation, Rita. The way things were and the way things turned out, if you hadn’t had the nerve to give me hell, I might never have looked into that child’s eyes and told him that I loved him.”
She gripped his hand tighter.
“He was so tiny.” He fixed his gaze on the small marker in the distance, the one with the carved white lamb on top. “He couldn’t have understood, but it meant the world to me to have even that short time with him.”
“I think he understood.”
“Yeah?” He wanted to believe her. He looked into her eyes, and he did believe.
“Some people say babies are born knowing everything that’s important—like love, trust, and joy. It’s only as we grow older that we forget.”
He put his hand to her cheek. “You’re still giving me comfort, Rita.”
She turned her face into his palm. “Then I guess I can let go of the shame I’ve carried all these years for daring to confront you about the way you were acting.”
“You’ve nothing to feel ashamed of. I was acting a perfect ass. Drinking a little too much, ignoring the person who was counting on me.”
“Norrie?”
He nodded. “I didn’t care that I’d moved her to Memphis from Nashville and she didn’t have any friends—at least not any girlfriends—there to help her and comfort her.”
Rita tipped her head, her eyes already conveying the question he knew she wanted to ask of him.
He did not let her get a word in. “I didn’t care about my work or my responsibilities in those days. Just tried to hide from my problems by reliving my past glories in a place where all everybody ever expected of me was that I be Wild Billy.”
“I’m sure that was a full-time job in itself.” She caressed his arm.
“You have no idea. That expectation pressed down on me like a yoke. I know everyone dreams of being the hero, but in a town this small after a time it becomes a kind of curse. People want to be Wild Billy’s friend, not my friend necessarily, but Wild Billy’s.”
“I can see that.”
“There was always this pressure that came with it, these expectations. And because they weren’t unpleasant expectations, how could I resent them?” He shook his head, his chest tight. “It’s hard to explain.”
She nodded. “I understand.”
“As long as I stayed in Hellon nobody wanted me to grow up, nobody wanted me to get serious about my life. And nobody had the gumption to say ‘boo’ to me when I become a selfish donkey-headed bastard.”
“Except me.”
“Except you.”
“In this town half-fueled by gossip, I have never heard a harsh word over my behavior during that period.”
“You lost your son, Will. It’s not a town without a heart.”
“I wouldn’t have been there for him—or Norrie—when he was born if you hadn’t spoken up.”
“But you did go before it was too late. That matters, Will. You got to see him and hold him.”
“Norrie and I had broken up before…” No, he could not tell everything, not even to Rita. “Before she even knew she was pregnant.”
“You and she were together a long time, right?”
He nodded. “Lived together for almost three years. My longest-standing relationship outside family and folks in Hellon. Guess that sounds pretty pathetic to a person like you, doesn’t it?”
“No more pathetic than I figure my choices and relationships seem to you.”
“Not pathetic, just…we’re so different, aren’t we?”
“Like sunshine and rain.”
“Still, I thank you, Rita. It changed my life.”
“Maybe it changed that one eternal moment for you, Will. Not your whole life.”
“You can’t possibly make that judgment.”
“We are known by the fruits we bear. You gather a bushel of pecans and bake a pie, it won’t taste like apple no matter how much you tell people it does.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“If what happened with your son changed your life, Will, then your life would be different.”
“It is different.”
She didn’t say a thing to that.
“What you really think is that if my life had really changed, that we wouldn’t be so different. If I were a changed man, I’d be more like you now, right?”
“You’ve been in town all this time and you still haven’t gone to see your mother. Does that sound like a man changed in his heart toward his family?”
He could tell her about the calls, about the checking with his mother’s doctors and getting reports from Jillie. He could tell her that if his mother had used any other ploy but a phony deathbed summons, he would have given in by now. He could tell her, but having to tell her something so obvious, something that even her ex-husband had known? It galled him more than a plain old-fashioned slap in the face.
He started the car. “We’d better get back to the Palace.”
“Yes, we should. You haven’t even had your lunch.”
He jerked the car into reverse. “It’s you I’m thinking of.”
“Don’t worry about me.” She put on the phoniest smile he’d ever seen. “I can afford to skip a meal now and again.”
“As can I.” He laid his hand on the back of the seat. Twisting around he looked out the back window. “But I was thinking about the talk.”
She wound her fingers together in her lap. “The talk we just had?”
“The talk around town.” The brakes squeaked. He faced forward without even meeting her gaze. “You and I take off in your car and stay away too long. It’s bound to start tongues wagging.”
“I think it’d be hard to top the real big story of the day—me lending a new meaning to the idea of a portable toilet.”
“Either way they’ll talk about you, and I know you hate that.”
“I’ll live.”
He clenched his jaw. “Why do you do it, Rita?”
“Live?” She purposely evaded his meaning. “Because I’m not ready for the alternative.”
The car surged forward. “Yeah, you’re a regular survivor.”
“I pretty much have had to be.”
“But you don’t have to be one here. Rita, you could do so much more than survive, you could flourish if you’d get out of this town and—”
“Now it’s my turn to change the subject.”
“We’re a pair, aren’t we? Both thinking we know what’s best for each other, each too stubborn even to consider we might be right?”
“Right about each other or right about what’s best for ourselves?”
“If I answered that honestly, you’d shove me out of this car and make me walk the rest of the way.” He slowed to ease the car back onto the paved road.
“Let me guess, you think you’re right about what’s best for me and that you know best about what’s right for you.”
“Spoken as a woman who shares the sentiment.”
“Oh, how pleasant thing
s would be if only people behaved the way I want them to.” She laid her head back and gazed at the ceiling.
“Pleasant but not very interesting.”
“Did you just call me dull?”
“I know you’re anything but dull.” He stopped the car a few feet back from the intersection. From there they could see the corner of the Palace’s parking lot through the trees, but no one milling around there could see them. “I just wonder sometimes if you know it.”
“I know that with all our talk of late of life changing, of renovating and following dreams, that when it comes right down to it, neither of us can do that work for each other. I’ll make my choices, and you’ll make yours.”
“We can be inspired to make better choices.”
“Translation: you, the wise William West, can inspire me, the girl with the goddess thighs, to make better choices.”
“You have so much potential, Rita.”
“So do you, Will.” She put her hand to his face.
He wanted to argue that with his business success and a home in the most coveted part of Memphis he had realized his potential years ago. But material gain wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans with this woman if she thought he had missed achieving his fullest human potential. How had she put it?
For his life to have meaning. For someone to miss him when he was away and mourn him when he’d passed on. To be really good at something, to hear praise for his work and know it was earned…. to beloved. Will had no grounds to argue he had lived up to that.
“In a week or so, when you’ve gone and the dust has settled, there’s every chance things will look and feel almost like you never came to Hellon at all. Except, of course, people will be able actually to eat in the Palace without breaking half a dozen health codes and a couple of the Ten Commandments.”
“Is that all, Rita?”
“That’s a lot more than most people have given me in my life, Will. It’s more than I expected or ever deserved, and I’m grateful.” She leaned in to give him a kiss on the cheek.
He turned just enough for their lips to brush at the corners. Just like that his mouth found hers. At first he thought she would protest, or make a pretense of it for appearances’ sake. When she didn’t, he cupped the back of her head in one hand and deepened the kiss.
