My Hero

by Mary McBride

  Holly picked up the knife from the place setting in front of her, pondered its blade a moment and her own reflection there, then put the utensil down with a sigh.

  “What's the matter, Miss Manhattan? Thinking about using that knife to slit your wrists now that you're back in Texas?”

  Her gaze lifted, meeting his. It was the first time they'd actually made and maintained eye contact this morning. Oh, God. Oh, damn. How could she have forgotten the pure, unadulterated blue of his eyes?

  “No,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I was thinking about plunging it into your lying, cheating heart.”

  His gaze didn't waver and those blue eyes didn't even blink when he answered, “I never lied to you, Holly.”

  “Well, maybe not in so many words, Cal.” She forced a note of breezy who-gives-a-shit into her voice. “I'm a big girl, after all. Nobody put a gun to my head. I mean, I knew the risk I was taking by getting involved with a married man.”

  “What risk? What the hell are you talking about?”

  Holly cocked her head toward the window, outside of which Diana was striding back and forth, her cell phone at her ear. “You and your wife. You're back together. Kudos, Cal. Congrats. Bon Appétit. May you live happily ever after and all that crap.”

  “Diana told you that.” It wasn't a question, but rather a blunt accusation.

  “Right after I got back to New York last month.” She smiled with a kind of sweet venom. “Imagine my surprise.”

  He swore and picked up his own knife, curling his fingers around it until his knuckles were white. “Why the hell didn't you just ask me?”

  “You never called me back!”

  “I never called you back, god dammit, because you were so fucking busy with whoever it was who was with you that night.”

  She remembered brusquely telling him she had something on the stove, slyly implying that she wasn't alone. “My feelings were hurt,” she said.

  “Jesus, baby, so were mine!”

  Holly just stared at him then, at the tension in his jaw, the hard, determined set of his mouth, and most of all the sheen of moisture in his eyes. She'd been lied to a lot in her thirty-one years. But if ever there was a look of truth, an expression of bone-deep honesty, this was it. Oh, God. It was, wasn't it?

  “So you're not back together?” she asked, hating the little quaver in her voice.

  He shook his head.

  “Then why did she…?”

  “Are you kidding me?” He gestured with the knife in the direction of the window. “Look at her. She's a goddamn drama queen. She wants in on this TV thing, that's all. It doesn't have anything to do with me.”

  “But you are still married to her.” She cocked her head. “Why did you marry her, Cal?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “That's not an acceptable answer,” she said bluntly.

  “Okay.” He sighed, closed his eyes a second and then said, “I married her because I was thirty-eight years old and didn't have a family to call my own. Because I was sick and tired of sleeping in hotels. Sleeping around, if you really want the brutal, unvarnished facts.”

  “Well, you can use a little varnish,” Holly cut in, figuring ignorance was bliss where Cal's sexual past was concerned.

  “I don't know, Holly. Hell, I was just ready to settle down. The time seemed right. Diana was there. She said yes. It just seemed to happen somehow. It's a lousy reason, but I don't know how else to explain it to you or even to myself. Just believe me when I tell you it's over. The divorce papers went back to her attorney last month, all signed, sealed, and delivered. I mailed them the morning after we made love the first time, as a matter of fact.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “You didn't love her?”

  “I didn't even know what love was.” He reached across the table to grasp her hand. “Holly, not until I…”

  A pungent blast of Fendi signaled Diana's return, and Holly pulled her hand away.

  “Well, my dears, all hell is breaking loose in Washington. Let me tell you,” Diana moaned, sliding into the booth next to Cal. “Senator Ferriss' daughter was arrested last night after a car chase through Georgetown at ninety miles an hour. Can you believe that? In Georgetown. It's lucky she didn't take out a pedestrian or two. She's out on bail, but Jack Ferriss' people, idiots, all of them, don't have a clue about spinning this thing. I've got to get back there. Right now.”

  “Oh, that's too bad,” Holly said.

  Cal didn't say a word. Actually, he looked as if he were holding his breath. Either that or he was trying hard not to yell whoopee.

  Diana looked at Holly. “I know that puts a terrible crimp in your production schedule, Holly,” she said, “but there's really nothing I can do.”

  “Oh, that's okay.”

  “I'll get back to you from Washington as soon as I possibly can. Naturally, we still have the option of filming there.”

  “We'll work it out,” Holly said sympathetically, without the slightest intention of working anything out where this babe was concerned except celebrating her exit.

  Just then, Coral—who'd been up to her blond beehive in taking orders and refilling coffee cups—sidled up to their booth. “Mornin', folks. What can I bring y'all?”

  Diana glanced up, appeared to look right through the waitress, then frowned and picked up her menu.

  “Coffee, Coral,” said Cal. “You got any of those great Danishes today?”

  “Sure do, Cal.” She looked at Holly. “How 'bout you, hon?”

  “Same for me,” Holly replied.

  “And you, missy?”

  Diana looked back up at Coral. “I'll have eggs Benedict, a croissant, unsalted butter, and a large pineapple juice with shaved ice. And tea, please. Earl Grey, if you have it. With lemon.”

  Coral's pen kind of hovered over her order book for a moment, and then she looked at Cal. “She's kidding, right?”

  “I don't think so,” Cal said.

  “Ooo-kay.” She made a quick notation in her book. “That'll be three coffees and three Danish. Be right back.”

  Two hours later Holly was walking—sauntering, actually—around Ellie's yard, getting a feel for the expensive video cam she signed out of the production department at the VIP Channel. It was light years beyond her own, which she'd picked up cheap from the station where she worked in West Virginia.

  Ellie, who'd been gone since breakfast, clomped down her back stairs. “Hey, what's goin' on? I just went up to check on Diana's room and her stuff's all gone. I didn't miss any early fireworks, did I?”

  Holly laughed, sighting Ellie in her lens. Her hostess' big denim dress just about filled the frame. “No, you didn't miss any fireworks. Diana and her PR firm had a crisis with a Senator's kid in D.C., and being on the evening news in every major market trumped the VIP Channel's comparatively meager viewership.”

  “So, she's gone?”

  “Yep. Cal drove her to Kingsville to catch the bus to Dallas.”

  She laughed again, this time to herself. Even before they'd left the booth at the Longhorn, Diana had started with her arm twisting, wanting somebody to drive her all the way “to someplace civilized. Dallas. Houston. I really don't give a flying fuck.”

  When Cal said he didn't have time to make the trip today, she still wasn't going to take no for an answer and she continued to press until Holly, suddenly inspired, told her, “The Thunderbird's only licensed in this county. He can't drive you any farther than the bus station in Kingsville.”

  Diana looked more appalled than shocked or disappointed. “I've never heard of that.” She turned to Cal. “You can't drive your car out of the county?”

  “That's right,” he said. “It's a special registration because of the steel plate in my head. A damned nuisance, too.”

  “Well, that's absurd.”

  “No,” Holly said with a shrug. “It's just Texas.”

  “You expect me to…to take a…a bus?” The woman could har
dly get the word out.

  “Yep.” Holly and Cal had replied in unison, trading glances, both of them almost cracking up.

  Ellie's laughter boomed across the backyard now. “I'm trying to picture that City Slicker on the bus from Kingsville to Dallas.”

  “Not a pretty picture, is it?”

  “No, indeedy. Well, one good thing about it, though.”

  “What's that?” Holly asked.

  “You can move back into the Rose Room, honey. I'll just go and strip the bed.”

  “I'll help,” Holly said, already envisioning Cal coming up the fire escape when he returned from Kingsville this afternoon.

  Yee-hah.

  Chapter Nineteen

  In this part of south central Texas, the Fourth of July was just about always crystal clear and hellishly hot, and today was no exception. Cal would've loved to have put the top down on the way to Kingsville, but Diana—with her high-maintenance hair and foot-long false eyelashes—wasn't exactly a top-down kind of woman, so he hadn't even suggested it.

  Breezing along with the needle dancing around the speed limit, he found himself wondering again why he'd ever married Diana Koslov. Granted, he had felt a profound urge to settle down last year, an urge that had been building with every succeeding birthday in his thirties. But why Diana? Other than the fact that he was her lover at the time, Cal couldn't come up with a single reason.

  If he made a list of the qualities he prized in a wife, Diana's sexual enthusiasm might have made it in the top dozen or so, but that was about it. She didn't have a sense of humor to speak of. That was important to him. A sense of humor like Holly's. Diana's intelligence wasn't stellar. Her curiosity was limited to the people and events in her own small coterie of socialites, politicians, and hangers-on, the people who paid her handsomely to get their names in or out of the paper, depending on the story.

  It suddenly occurred to Cal that a better question than why he'd married her was why the hell she'd ever married him. After all, he was just as wrong for her as she was for him. He figured this was a good time to ask as they were only a few miles from Kingsville now, and after he put her on a bus he'd probably never see her again—he hoped—no matter how long he lived. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, waiting until she broke the connection on the phone that had been attached to her ear for most of the trip.

  “I've got a question for you, Diana. No big deal. Just something I've been wondering.”

  “What's that?” she asked, then added, “Oh, would you roll your window up a bit more, Cal? This wind is absolutely ruining my hair.”

  While he cranked up the window all the way and turned the AC down a notch, he cast about for a way to phrase his question so it wasn't insulting to her. Why he cared about that, he wasn't sure. In all honesty, though, Diana probably wouldn't recognize an insult if it bit her on her bony ass. “When I asked you to marry me last year, Diana, why the hell did you ever say yes?”

  “What?” She sounded surprised, even slightly amused, and far from insulted.

  “I said when I asked you to marry me last year…”

  “I heard what you said, Cal.” She laughed as she pulled down the sun visor, adjusted its mirror, and fiddled with an eyelash. “Darling, don't you remember? You didn't ask me. I asked you”

  He shook his head in disbelief, keeping his eyes on the two-lane road, doing his best not to blink in complete befuddlement or to look half as lame brained as he felt. She'd proposed to him? “No,” he said. “I don't remember that.”

  “Well, I do. I asked you. It was a year ago today, come to think of it. The Fourth of July. Funny, isn't it?”

  Oh, yeah. A real riot, he thought. “You proposed to me? Why?”

  “Why? I told you, Silly. As a matter of fact, I confessed to you right before you left for Baltimore last September. We had that terrible argument and…” She snapped up the mirrored visor and stared at him. “God, Cal, you really don't remember, do you? The little wager I had with Penny Price? Well, not so little actually. She's still bitching on a daily basis about having to pay up the inches she owes me in her column.”

  Jesus H. Christ. He did remember now. It was as if Diana's words had jarred something loose in his brain, probably something lodged right beneath the metal plate. Penny Price and Diana were pals in a back-biting, cat-fighting sort of way. Penny wrote a gossip column—Penelope Tells All—in one of Washington's glossy chi-chi magazines, a column in which Diana, Queen of Public Relations, coveted coverage for her clientele.

  Suddenly he remembered something else Penny had once written in her column about him as the most eligible as well as most elusive bachelor in the White House. He'd taken more than a little ribbing about that in the West Wing. Now a tiny light bulb went on somewhere in the dim recesses of his skull.

  “You had it all planned?” he asked, already knowing the answer. “Right from the start? Beginning with that red eye flight from LA.?”

  Diana didn't even have to answer. Her feline smile, somewhere between a cougar and an alley cat, was far more eloquent than any words she might have spoken.

  “You married me on a fucking bet,” he muttered, slapping the steering wheel with the flat of his hand.

  “Well, we had some great moments, darling. Oh, come on, Cal. You've got to admit that. And if you're worried that someone might find out, don't. Trust me, no one knows a thing but Penny and me. I'm certainly not telling, and I've got enough dirt on Penny to guarantee that she won't ever say or print a word of it. Not to worry, love. And I meant what I said, you know. You really do look sexier than ever.”

  After that remark, it hadn't really surprised him when Diana had suggested a farewell tryst in the rest room at the bus station. Cal had politely declined. Actually what he'd told her was that by the time his Viagra kicked in, she'd already be halfway to Dallas. Her look of pity and disgust was exactly what he'd expected, and he figured that would preclude any further invitations for Olympic-class sex from his soon-to-be ex.

  After he put her on the bus for Dallas, Cal thought about what she'd said while he was driving back to Honeycomb. He wasn't sure whether he was relieved to know that the marriage hadn't been his idea, or ashamed to discover that he'd been so thoroughly duped, beginning in an airplane lavatory at 35,000 feet above the earth.

  He almost laughed out loud, recalling the look on Diana's face when he'd mentioned the Viagra. He'd have to remember to tell that Viagra thing to Holly. It was almost as good as the Creeks and Greeks and the goats, if he did say so himself. God, how he loved to hear her laugh. Well, on second thought, maybe it wasn't such a good idea. Holly, despite her vibrant sense of humor, probably wouldn't think it was so damned funny, his being hit on by another woman. Particularly Diana.

  Or maybe Holly wouldn't really give a shit. Maybe she was one of those women who just loved the one she was with. Him in Texas. Somebody else when she got back to New York.

  After what he'd just learned about his marriage, who was he to judge a woman's wiles or whims or motives? He'd made a mess of that even before he'd gotten shot.

  The little round clock on the dashboard told him he had eight hours before the Hec Garcia bust went down this evening. One good thing. His problems with the women in his life had certainly made him forget all about the butterflies in his stomach.

  There was no mistaking Cal's tread on the fire escape or the accompanying acceleration of Holly's pulse. She'd spent the past few hours, while waiting for him to return, filming B roll of the annual parade on Main Street, where it had begun to feel less like the Fourth of July than Old Home Week, only far better than her actual old home.

  Nita Mendes called out and waved to her from the back seat of a red Caddy convertible that was draped with blue and white crepe paper. Bobby Brueckner from the bank leaned down from his two-story-high palomino in order to present Holly with a little plastic flag. Coral, stationed in front of the Longhorn, handed her a doughnut with red, white, and blue sprinkles and wouldn't even consider letting H
olly pay.

  “Pardon my asking, hon,” Coral asked with a telling roll of her eyes, “but where's that too-sexy-for-her-clothes ex-wife of Cal's who was with y'all at breakfast?”

  “Gone,” Holly said, licking patriotic sprinkles from her fingers. “Long gone. He drove her to Kingsville to catch a bus.”

  “Good riddance,” Coral said. “Though I'd rather you said he'd put her in a gunny sack and taken her down to the creek and pitched her in.”

  Holly laughed, then asked the waitress to move out into the sunlight so she could get a better picture of her.

  Coral patted her blond beehive and scooted her chair out of the shade. “You gonna put me in your movie, hon?”

  “Sure,” Holly said, even as she realized that she was doing most of this filming for purely personal reasons. It wasn't extra footage for Cal's story. It was for herself. For her own private archives. She wanted to remember everything about this day in Honeycomb. Everything and everyone.

  Especially the one who was coming up her fire escape right now. She opened the door before he had to knock.

  Cal stepped over the threshold, gazed around the rose-papered room, then drew Holly into his arms and whispered, “I hate to admit it, but I'm starting to develop a fondness for this damned wallpaper.”

  Holly laughed, loving the feel of his arms around her, the hard warmth of him against her, the way his lips drifted over her hair. “We're probably the only couple in the world who doesn't have ‘Our Song.’ We have ‘Our Wallpaper’ instead.”

  She began to pull away, but Cal drew her even closer against him.

  “Holly. Listen to me, baby. I'm sorry I hurt your feelings.”

  She shook her head against his chest. “It's my fault,” she said. “I should've known better than to believe anything Diana said. I'm a journalist, for God's sake. I should've checked my facts.”

  “Next time, just ask me, okay? I'll never lie to you.”

  She angled her head up, grinning even as she grimaced in mock horror. “There's going to be a next time?”

  “Not if I can help it.”