Foxy Roxy

by Nancy Martin

  Trey patted Samson. “Is your dad going to make us an offer for our shares? So he can run the company free and clear? Do you think that’s what we’re here for? I could go for that. Little extra cash in my pocket. We’re not really here to talk about a funeral for Julius, are we?”

  “I don’t know.” Arden watched the dog make a loop around the room, sniffing everything. Her heart was beating very fast, making her head light.

  “Is Quentin going to try selling the property down on the river?” Uncle Trey asked. “That was Julius’s but maybe its in play? We’d get a nice chunk of change for that now. What’d he tell you, Ardy?”

  “Nothing at all.” She took a deep breath to steady her heart. “I saw you on the Discovery Channel.”

  He perked up and smiled. “You did?”

  “Something about a ship that sank during a hurricane. With gold coins and slaves.”

  He grunted, losing the smile. “That one, we never found. At least that’s what the guys on the boats told me. Which happens a lot. Sometimes I think they put out marker buoys and plan to go back when my money runs out.”

  “Why don’t you go on the boats with them?”

  He made a face. “I get seasick. Besides, they like my money better than they like me.”

  Arden couldn’t stop herself from putting her hand out and patting his face. “Poor Uncle Trey.”

  He patted her back, then said kindly, “Ardy, you’re blitzed. You gotta give up that stuff before you turn into your mother.”

  “What stuff?”

  “You know what I mean.” He got to his feet and went over to the desk. “I saw the caterer in the kitchen. Looks like a great dinner—if you’re looking to boost your cholesetrol. Anybody else arrive yet?”

  Arden frowned, trying to remember what Daddy had said about dinner. The whole family, she recalled, was getting together. Everybody under one roof. To talk about the funeral, Daddy had said, but they’d probably discuss company business, too. That’s why everyone would show up, of course. It all sounded insensitive, actually.

  Everybody would be looking at her, Arden thought. Wanting to know things. Like how much they could sell paintings for.

  She said, “Does Samson need to go for a walk?”

  Uncle Trey was busy snooping on the desk and probably didn’t absorb the question, but he said, “Sure, maybe.”

  “Did you bring his leash?”

  11

  Roxy sent Rooney into Loretta’s fenced backyard, where he could bark his head off at the Radziewiczes’ Chihuahua. Then she let herself into the house. Right behind her, Nooch sniffed the air for cookies.

  “Go watch some TV,” Roxy said. “I have to talk to Sage.”

  Nooch slouched onto the flowered sofa in the flowered living room and turned on the television. The television was probably the only thing in the room that didn’t have flowers on it. Even the rug swirled dizzyingly with roses. Nooch looked like a brontosaurus that had wandered into that Sissinghurst garden in England.

  “Don’t yell at Sage,” he said.

  “Why would I yell at her?”

  “Just don’t.”

  With the remote, he clicked around until he found cartoons. Then he put his boots on the coffee table and settled back to watch.

  “I wasn’t going to,” Roxy said.

  On Loretta’s dining room table sat an open shipping box with a Gucci handbag inside. With the onset of menopause, Loretta wasn’t sleeping well at night and tended to do a lot of shopping on QVC. Looked like she was revving up her credit card again. The breast reduction must be on hold.

  Roxy tripped over a pair of enormous sneakers at the bottom of the stairs, dropped the car keys on the newel, and called upstairs to her daughter. “Sage? Sage, you here?”

  Instead of Sage, a rangy boy appeared at the top of the stairs, hitching his loose jeans and pasting some charm onto his face. “Hey, Mrs.—Miss A. You’re looking really hot today.”

  The kid thumped down the stairs in his sock feet. He had a buzz cut that made his head look pasty white. His T-shirt said Rookie in big black letters.

  Roxy squinted. “I know you.”

  “Yeah, I’m Zack. Zack Cleary. I started hanging with Sage last spring when the girls won the basketball championship.” He plunked himself on the bottom step and reached for his sneakers. “Sage is upstairs, ralphing in the bathroom. She must have had some bad cafeteria food last week.”

  Roxy kicked the sneakers out of his range. “What are you doing here, Zack Cleary? I thought you were going to college somewhere.”

  “Sage didn’t tell you?”

  Sage hadn’t bothered to mention she had a boyfriend at all, let alone this one. “No, she didn’t. What did you do? Join the army?”

  When the kid had first appeared, he’d looked like a character in a vampire movie—all skinny good looks and long hair. He still had the good looks, Roxy noted, but with muscles now and no hair.

  He rubbed his hand on top of his bristly head and grinned. “Does it make me look tough? Because I started at the police academy a couple of months ago. We’re on break for a week before we start training at the gun range.”

  “Is that shirt some kind of official uniform?”

  “Hell—heck no. It was my dad’s. I stole it out of his closet. I’m not a real rookie until I get hired on the force.”

  Zack, Roxy remembered suddenly, was the idiot son of the city’s new chief of police.

  Roxy thought about what it meant that her daughter was dating the one kid with the most direct line of communication to the police department. She steadied herself on the newel. The chief of police’s kid coming around on the exact week Carmine asked her to join his crew—that’s all she needed. “You think you can be a cop, huh? I guess there’s hope for the criminal element after all.”

  He laughed and reached for his shoes again. “Yeah, I’m heading into the family business. It was either police work or Laundromats. Hey, was that you last week at that club near Station Square? With the band? Singing?”

  “That was past your bedtime.”

  Zack grinned. “I didn’t know you could belt it out like that. Plus you looked—you know—sexy up there.”

  “Sweating, mostly.”

  “Sexy, though. Hey, I’m starving to death. I don’t suppose you’d make me a sandwich, y’know, for the road?”

  Roxy controlled the urge to snatch off one of his gigantic sneakers and beat him over the head with it. The last thing she wanted was Sage’s friends recognizing her at club gigs. “There’s half a Bruno’s pizza on the front seat of the red car out front. It’s a little squished, but help yourself.”

  “No kidding? Thanks.” Zack finished with his shoes and lounged to his feet. “I’m outta here. Behave yourself, okay?”

  Roxy debated kicking him through the front door. But the thought of Zack chowing down on the pizza Rooney had slobbered over was good enough.

  When he was gone, she took the steps upward, two at a time.

  Her daughter’s bedroom was frighteningly tidy. Unlike every other teenager on the planet, Sage kept her clothes and many books in perfect order. Even the poster of Colin Firth in a velvet suit was attached to the wall in a frame, not with masking tape. Such tidiness wasn’t something Sage learned from her mother.

  While her girlfriends loved boy bands and gift cards to Ambercrombie & Fitch, Sage read the Onion every day and watched Jon Stewart. Roxy was increasingly at a loss about her increasingly adult daughter. It was only calculus that Sage couldn’t conquer alone.

  “Sage? Where are you?”

  A voice croaked from the bathroom. Roxy went down the narrow hall and pushed open the door at the end. Sage lay on her back on the poufy pink bathtub rug, staring at the ceiling with a blank face. Her long legs—when had they gotten so long?—were draped over the edge of the bathtub.

  “Hey.” Roxy rested her shoulder against the doorjamb. “What was Zack Cleary doing here?”

  “He just left.”

&n
bsp; “I know that. He said you ate some bad cafeteria food or something?”

  Sage groaned. She still liked wearing her dark curly hair in pigtails that stuck out on the sides of her head, but today they didn’t look so perky. Her lanky body was encased in a Steelers football jersey, with a pair of nylon basketball shorts on her legs and tall athletic socks on her feet. Her fair skin looked as white as marble.

  Sage turned her face away. “Leave me alone.”

  “You want some ginger ale?”

  “Mom.” Sage sounded as exhausted as if she’d just staggered out of the Amazon jungle.

  “Okay, I just—it was a surprise to find the Cleary kid hanging around.”

  Sage flung one arm across her face. “He dropped off some stuff, that’s all.”

  “What stuff?”

  “A basketball. I left it at the court over the weekend.”

  “You saw him over the weekend? I thought you were working on a biology project with Kiryn.”

  “I see him around. He’s not a total jerk, Mom.”

  Could have fooled me. Roxy almost said it aloud.

  Without moving her arm, Sage grumbled, “You’re so judgmental.”

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. Zack was just being nice.”

  “Okay, okay.” Roxy knew better than to argue any longer. So she said, “Actually, I was hoping you could find a book for me. About ancient Rome. Or Greece. I forget which. With pictures. You were reading it last spring for a report. You know the one I mean?”

  Sage opened her eyes and looked up, suspicious. “I wrote a paper about Sparta. But there must be, like, a thousand books available about ancient Greece. Have you gone to a library?”

  “I’ve been banned until I pay my late fees. I figured I’d just ask you instead.” Roxy stepped over Sage’s prone body, put down the toilet seat, and sat on it. “I thought you’d like to give your mom a little help.”

  Sage closed her eyes again wearily. “Do I look like I feel like helping?”

  “C’mon, it’ll take your mind off your stomach.” Roxy put her hand down and felt Sage’s forehead for fever. “What do you know about old statues?”

  Sage pushed Roxy’s hand away, but said, “What do you mean by old? Like, old-old?”

  “Really old. Naked guys throwing spears—that kind of thing.”

  “Are you referring to some kind of antiquity? Like the sculptures celebrating the athletes at Olympia? In ancient times, the winners were immortalized by carvings that lined the walkways of the original Olympic village.”

  “Yeah, okay, are there any in museums and stuff?”

  “Of course there are. And more are being discovered every day, so it’s still an emerging field of scholarship. Why are you asking?” Sage propped herself up on one elbow. “What’s going on, Mom?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Watch your mouth or Loretta will wash it out with soap. I wonder how much one of those Olympic statues might be worth now.”

  “A lot.” Sage lay back down, her intellectual curiosity waning.

  “What about the book?”

  “I’ll check the library. Maybe I can find a general history for you.”

  “Great. Thanks. Want me to make you some toast?”

  Sage blew a long-suffering sigh. “God, no.”

  It hadn’t been too many years ago that Roxy had spent hours on the bathroom floor, too, just moaning about being a misunderstood teenager. She’d spent even more hours raising hell, but Sage didn’t find hell-raising all that therapeutic. Sometimes Roxy wondered how she could have produced a kid so different from herself.

  So Roxy thought for a minute before guessing what had Sage moping.

  Roxy said, “Did you get rejected by Yale?”

  “No, I won’t hear from admissions for weeks.”

  “Is that idiot chemistry teacher proving his manhood by giving pop quizzes again?”

  “No.”

  “Then what? Some dickhead hassling you?”

  Sage covered her face with both hands. “Sometimes you totally gross me out, Mom.”

  Deciding to take a general stab at the situation, Roxy said, “Hey, nothing’s worse than high school, kiddo. I know that. But you’re almost finished. Pretty soon you’ll go off to college, and everything will be great. I know we’ve been worried about the tuition, but maybe I’ve got that figured out. You’ve just gotta make it through the stupid stuff of senior year, that’s all. Keep studying and—”

  “Stop,” Sage said through her hands. “Just—stop with the cheesy pep talk, Mom.”

  “I’m serious! You’ve got everything going for you. Look out world, here comes Sage. The greatest kid to ever graduate from this—”

  “Mom.” Sage raised her voice. “I’m not graduating.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t graduate.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “I think I’m pregnant.”

  Roxy sat very still. “You’re…?”

  “Yes,” Sage said. “It was a stupid mistake, a onetime thing, and I was completely dumb about it. Now I’ve missed my period.”

  The whole bathroom spun, and no words made any sense. Roxy grabbed the toilet seat with both hands to keep from falling off. “What?”

  Sage sat up unsteadily. “I missed my period, and I’ve been throwing up for days. I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant. I mean, I did everything wrong. And now I can’t graduate in May because—because I’m going to have a b-b-baby.”

  Roxy tried to focus on Sage’s words, but the colors in the bathroom all whirled together in a sickening jumble. “How can you be pregnant? Do you even know about sex?”

  Sage’s face contorted with tears. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “For crying out loud, I’m not blind! And I’m not stupid. You’re like a walking sex bomb. Maybe Loretta doesn’t see it, but God, Mom, I— Look, I just thought I could try it, too, you know?”

  “No,” Roxy said. “You’re too young.”

  “I’m the same age as you when you got pregnant.”

  “That was different. You’re different! You’ve got a real future ahead of you, Sage.”

  Sage burst into sobs. “Now I don’t have any future! Everything’s ruined. Yale, basketball—everything.”

  “Have you taken a test?”

  “How can I walk into a store and buy a p-pregnancy test? Everybody knows me!”

  “Who’s the father?”

  “Zack, of course.”

  “Zack?” Roxy almost shouted. “Of course?”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m dating anybody.”

  “Except him!”

  “We’re not dating.” Sage used the word as if it were something disgusting. “We just— We’re friends, that’s all. I didn’t want to go to college a virgin, for crying out loud. So we were fooling around. It was nothing serious.”

  “It’s plenty serious now. Haven’t you heard of birth control?”

  “Of course I have! I just never thought I’d need it.”

  Another motherly shortcoming to add to her list. Roxy bit back a few more choice words on the subject of sexually transmitted horrors and nearly choked herself with the effort. Better to save that lecture for when the hysterics had passed. Then she thought of Zack’s smug grin. “Does your boyfriend know?”

  “He’s not my—no! I can’t tell him.” Sage groaned again. “Not yet, anyway. Eventually I’ll have to. It’s not like I’ll be able to hide this for long.” She hiccupped. “I’ll be f-f-fat by Christmas. Huge at Easter.”

  Roxy felt her anger crumble. “Easy, now.”

  “It’s so awful!”

  “It’s not awful until it’s official. What you need is a test.”

  “I can’t just walk into a store and buy something like that!”

  “I’ll get you one. There’s no sense panicking until you know for sure.”
/>
  “I’m sure.” Sage gave a miserable sniffle. “You’re going to be a grandmother!”

  The word felt like a shard of hot glass stabbing Roxy through the heart.

  “And me,” Sage said, starting to weep again. “I’ll have a kid to take care of. Oh, how could I be so dumb?” Sage buried her face in her arm and wailed.

  Roxy should have patted her shoulder. Done the consoling mother thing. But all she could think of was how she could possibly murder Zack Cleary and get away with it.

  The next thing she knew, Sage was lunging for the toilet and upchucking. Roxy held her hair and listened to the echo of her daughter’s first throes of pregnancy. It took her back. Not in a good way.

  Her cell phone rang.

  Sage waved her away, then went back to clutching the toilet.

  Roxy grabbed her phone and went out into the hall, hoping against hope she could hear some good news for once.

  Bug Duffy’s voice said, “Roxy? I need to talk to Nooch.”

  “On the phone?”

  “No,” Bug said. “The detectives want to see him. We have a few questions. Can you bring him down here?”

  Oh, hell, Roxy thought. Why couldn’t disasters happen one at a time?

  12

  Henry walked into Fair Weather Village carrying a small potted calla lily and trying not to inhale the smell of old people getting older. A herd of codgers in wheelchairs clustered by the closed door of the dining room watched him pass by. Henry checked his watch. It was ten thirty, and they appeared to have nothing better to do than listen to Muzak and breathe the unappetizing scent of boiled sauerkraut.

  As he hurried past the observant group, somebody muttered, “Nice flowers. Too cheap to get the big pot, huh?”

  Henry hastened his step. Outside Dorothy Hyde’s room, Sharlane, the formidable nurse, sat at a desk, glowering like a gnome guarding a bridge.

  “You can’t go in just now, slick.” Sharlane focused on her paperwork. “She’s on the phone with one of her daughters.”

  “Which one?”

  Without lifting her pen, Sharlane said, “The one who asks for money all the time.”

  That could be any of Dorothy’s offspring, but Henry decided not to continue the subject. He lingered at the desk, though, and summoned some cheer for Sharlane. “How are we feeling today, Miss Oaks?”