Chapter Four
Lacette didn’t like having friends and members of her family visiting her at the place she worked, but she knew it was futile to tell Kellie not to come to the Belle Époque hotel to “check you out,” was the way Kellie put it. Normally, she disliked being the object of Kellie’s concern, considering that her sister had a hidden motive for most everything she did. Before she died, she meant to ask both of her parents how they accounted for the differences between their twin daughters in morality and most any measure of human decency. She didn’t consider herself disloyal or even unduly critical of her sister. Kellie was Kellie, and she loved her, faults and all. It was because she understood her sister that she didn’t want her coming to the place where she worked. And she specifically didn’t want her to meet Douglas Rawlins. Not that he was special to her; he wasn’t, but once Kellie made him the object of her attention—like a cutting horse separating a calf from the herd, Kellie would kill any chance that a relationship would develop between Douglas and her. Maybe it wouldn’t anyway, but she hated the thought of losing another man to Kellie, and especially since Kellie would dump him as soon as she proved she could get him.
With sales dragging as they usually did in midweek, she had time to telephone Bradley. “I’d like space in that building across from the hotel here,” she told him. “It’s almost perfect for what I need, the location is great, and I can afford it.”
“I’ll see if I can get you a lease for a little less than he’s charging. You ought to pay the same per square foot of floor space as other tenants with the same accommodation. Sure you want it, now?”
“Yes,” she said, her gaze on the door of the florist shop and the sign that indicated it was closed. “Thanks, Lawrence,” she added, feeling expansive because Douglas had left for the day and wouldn’t encounter Kellie, and forgetting that she didn’t call the man by his first name.
“What are you talking to Lawrence Bradley about?” Lacette whirled around to face her sister, who stood, arms akimbo, so irate that her chest heaved and her nostrils flared. “You lied to me. You said there wasn’t anything between you and Bradley.”
I ought to let her think whatever she wants to. “Would you please lower your voice, Kellie. Can’t you see that this hotel is quiet and elegant? If you want to act out, go somewhere else, not where I work.”
Kellie stepped closer. “You’re just covering up, but you’re not fooling me,” she hissed. “Why can’t you get your own man and stay away from mine?”
“Yours? Did you say yours? I imagine Lawrence Bradley’s wife would have a few things to say to you, Kellie. Bradley is taking care of some important business for me. He’s my lawyer.”
“You’re lying.”
It wasn’t often that she got the upper hand with Kellie, and having it brought a sense of serenity that wrapped around her the way fog closes over mountain lakes early in the morning. She folded her arms and rocked back on her heels; there was power in being right when one’s adversary was dead wrong, and she could almost feel her chest expanding.
“Lying about what? The man’s wife or his being my lawyer? Which one?”
“The whole thing’s immaterial to me. I dropped him.”
“If you dropped Bradley, why should you care who he hangs out with? Anyhow, he’s not making time with me.” She held up a sheaf of papers. “Look, Kellie, I have to tally the day’s take and place these orders. That’s a lot of work, and I have to pack up in an hour.”
Always quick to change the subject when a conversation wasn’t going her way, Kellie’s face bloomed into a wide smile. “Oh, that’s great. I wanted to borrow your car to run down to Ceresville. I’ll be back before you finish that. I just want to drop something off.”
Lacette spun around, thinking she heard someone say “Don’t do it.” It was so real, a human voice, but how could that be when only she and Kellie were in that booth? She shook it off.
“Okay, but be back here in an hour. I promised Aunt Nan I’d drive her out to Frederick Fairgrounds to see the Christmas Fair. It closes at six.”
“Not to worry. There isn’t a thing to do in Ceresville but leave it.”
Lacette handed her car keys to Kellie and then turned her attention to a man who subsequently ordered a bread maker, two cookbooks and a chef’s apron. Her curiosity piqued, she asked if he planned to give cooking lessons.
“Oh, no. Nothing of the sort. I’m going to use these cookbooks to learn to cook, but I know I won’t learn how to make bread, so . . .” he pointed to the machine.
“Why can’t you learn to make bread?” she asked him.
His shrug indicated that he thought the matter of little import. “Both of my parents mess it up every time they try, so I figure it’s not in my DNA. Besides, it’s just bread. I want to learn how to make biscuits and cornbread.” He looked hard at her. “Do you eat in the restaurants in this hotel?”
She shook her head. “They’re too expensive, though I hear the food is good. I eat mostly at home.”
“These restaurants offer you gourmet this and gourmet that, and it’s getting to be that way everywhere you go, but from time to time, I have to have me some soul food. First thing I did when I got back from Afghanistan was head to Mica’s in Baltimore and get me some stewed collards, some good old fried lake trout and cornbread. Man, that’s food.”
She smiled in agreement, hoping he would move along and she could get her work done. She had to abide by the company rule requiring her to do daily accounting. The man finally left, and she set about her work. When she finished and looked at her watch, she saw that it was seven-fifteen. Where on earth was Kellie? Immediately, she remembered the voice admonishing her not to lend Kellie her car, but she had ignored it, something she rarely did. Calls to her parents inquiring whether they had heard from her sister brought negative responses, and a premonition settled over her and hung there like an ominous cloud.
She didn’t think she had ever been so happy to see anyone as she was to see her father when he walked up to her booth. “If she hasn’t come yet, she won’t be here any time soon,” he said. “I’ll drive you home.”
“But, Daddy, maybe she’s in trouble.”
An expression of sadness settled over his face, “I checked with the police. They don’t have anything on her.” He took her arm. “Come on. She’s all right. The Lord wouldn’t take Kellie now, because she’s got too many sins to atone for.”
Marshall’s sense of humor was capable of seeping out during his most serious moments, and it raised her spirits as it always did, but only for a moment, as she vacillated between fear for her sister and anger at her for not keeping her word.
“Where could she be?” Cynthia asked them when they entered the parsonage.
“As reckless as she is sometimes, there’s no telling,” Marshall said, his tone dry with seeming impatience.
Lacette stared at him, appalled that he didn’t sit down in what, a few weeks earlier, had been his own home, until her mother invited him to do so. She didn’t need more evidence that, in his mind, he no longer belonged there.
“She said she’d be back before six,” Lacette told them, her jangled nerves causing her to repeat what she’d told them earlier. Unable to stand the tension, she wrapped her arms across her waist and walked to the hall window to look for signs of her car, or at least its headlights. She walked back into the living room, rubbing her arms, deep in thought, and sat down, but only for a second before going back to the window for another look.
“If she’s all right, she’d call, wouldn’t she?”
Marshall threw up his hands. “Lacette, your sister is not concerned about whether anybody is worried, and you know it.”
“Why are you always down on her?” Cynthia asked her estranged husband.
He leaned forward and pressed his thighs with the palm of his hands. “Because I want her to do what’s right. If she told Lacette she would return that car to the hotel garage before six o’clock, she should have had it back there before six and not a minute later. Her word’s not worth two cents unless she wants something, and you can thank yourself for that; you coddled her and indulged her from the day she was born. If you don’t want me to lay it out for you chapter and verse, don’t lean on me when I tell the truth about her.”
Lacette looked from one to the other, seeing contrition in her mother and either anger or disgust—she couldn’t make out which—in her father’s visage—indeed, his whole demeanor. She waited for her mother’s denial of his accusation, but it was not forthcoming, and she wondered if they’d fought behind the closed doors of their bedroom while their children believed that only loving energy flowed between them. If it had been the perfect marriage that she and Kellie believed it to be, would their mother have reacted to the split as if she had just been released from a maximum security prison, a bird out of a cage?
At midnight, Marshall called the police station, reported Kellie’s absence and gave descriptions of her and the car.
“Just a minute, sir,” an officer said, “I think a highway patrolman phoned in something about that. Seems the lady didn’t know that a car runs on gas.”
“Officer, do you know where she and the car are?”
“Well, sir, no, I don’t. The patrolman located her on Route 70 just this side of New Market. She’d been traveling at a fast clip, and when she slowed down all of a sudden, he thought she might have been sick, but she was out of gas.”
Marshall thanked the officer, hung up and told them what he’d learned. “She probably called AAA. I’m going home. Let me know if you need me, Lacette.”
She walked with him to the front door and kissed him on the cheek. As he reached for the knob, the door opened with some force and sandwiched him between it and the wall. “Oops,” Kellie said. “Sorry. I didn’t expect to bump into anybody; figured everybody would be in bed.”
“Did you, now?” Marshall said, his anger almost palpable. “Apologize to your mother and your sister for worrying them half to death. Where is the car?”
“Uh . . . the car . . . I left it on Route 70. Lacette, why didn’t you put some gas in the car? If it hadn’t been for that nice highway patrolman, I’d still be sitting there. He waited until I caught a ride back to town. A real nice man, and white, too. Never know who you’ll run into.”
Marshall stared down at her, blocking her way. “If you were not a female, I think I would smack you.”
She recoiled, backing away from him. “What did you want me to do? Stay out there all night on that highway? Besides, Daddy, I was hungry, and the couple who gave me a lift took me straight to Mealey’s.”
“Why didn’t you at least telephone your mother so that she wouldn’t worry about you? We all know you don’t care how you make your sister feel.”
“Daddy! How can you say that?”
“Easily.” He looked at his wife. “She’s all yours, Cynthia.” He walked back to the door and stopped. “Lacette, I don’t think we should leave the car out on that highway all night. By tomorrow morning, it won’t have a single tire. I’ll take you by a filling station where we can get a couple of gallons of gas, and you can bring the car on home. Where are the car keys, Kellie?” She fumbled in her pocketbook until Lacette’s heart thudded from fear that Kellie might have left the keys in the car. Kellie found the keys and handed them to her father.
“Let’s go, Lacette.”
Kellie threw up her hands as if she were helpless. “Sorry, Lace, but you ought to keep your tank full.”
Lacette didn’t answer her; she couldn’t, for nothing that came to mind was suitable for her parents’ ears. They found the car intact, although its shiny white coat had been defaced with mud from the tires of passing cars. He put the gas into the tank and trailed her home, and she wasn’t surprised to receive his early morning call the next day.
“Can you spare twenty minutes for coffee before you start work this morning?” he asked her.
“Yes, if I hurry. Where do you want me to meet you?”
“We can have it in the hotel, and you won’t have to go out of your way.”
She hurried to complete her set up before her father arrived and finished as he walked into the booth. “This is very elegant,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Great. The company wanted to extend my stay here, but I’m planning to open my own business the first of March, and I need at least two months to work at that. Bradley has taken care of the necessary papers, and next week I’ll sign the lease for space in the Catoctin Building across the street. If you’ll meet me after work one evening, we can go over and look at it.”
In the coffee shop, he ordered black coffee and a brioche for himself, coffee and buckwheat pancakes for her. When the coffee arrived, he took a few sips, savored it and placed the cup in its saucer.
“Lacette, this is not going to be easy for me to say or for you to hear. The Bible says if your right eye offends you, pluck it out, and if your right arm offends you, cut it off. I’m not asking you to go that far with your sister, but I’m warning you that it is time you held her accountable for her acts. You give, and she takes. She treads on you, and if you’re not careful, you’ll develop this kind of relationship with men.
“Kellie is my child and I love her, but she’s like parched earth soaking up rain water after a long drought, taking all the moisture for itself and leaving nothing for plants. She is not going to change.”
“I know, Daddy, and I’m beginning to accept that I love my sister more than she loves me.”
“That’s a terrible thing for you to say; I hate to hear it. I don’t know if it’s true, or if she thinks love accommodates the things she does. I’ve talked with her about this, but I’m fairly certain that I didn’t make a dent.” He rubbed his chin as he did when he was worried. “It’s a pity. She’s going to pay, and heavily too.”
“You still mad about the car?” Kellie asked Lacette the following Saturday morning.
“A week is a long time to stay angry, don’t you think? And it’s a long time to wait for an apology. Is that what you’re doing, Kellie? Apologizing?”
“Aw, Lace, come on. It’s not like you to act like this. You know I didn’t do it intentionally. Are you working today?”
It was no use. Kellie never admitted culpability, no matter what she’d done. “Yes. Why?”
She knew what was coming, but she wanted the joy of saying no at last to one of her sister’s self-centered requests.
Kellie fidgeted with her fingers, twirling the diamond ring that she inherited from her grandmother and flicking her nails. “Uh . . . I was wondering if I could go to work with you this morning and take the car to run some errands. I’ll bring the keys back to you long before noon.” She crossed her heart. “I promise, Lace, honest.”
Kellie only called her “Lace” when she’d done something that she should be ashamed of but wasn’t. “You’re not serious. After leaving my brand new car on Route 70 at night for anybody who wanted to haul it off, you expect me to ever let you drive my car again? Sorry. No dice.”
“Aw, come on, Lace. I couldn’t put the damned thing on my shoulders and hike home with it. Be reasonable.”
“That’s right, you couldn’t, but you could have called me. Or Mama. Or Daddy. You didn’t care. You’ve broken every doll I ever owned and ripped half of my dresses. Don’t ask me to lend you anything else.”
Kellie cupped her jaw and cheeks with her hand. “I’m not hearing this. You’re acting like you’re not my sister.” Then Lacette watched in amazement as Kellie’s bottom lip curled and her eyes blazed in fury. “Now I see where you’re coming from. You managed to get Lawrence Bradley between your legs, and you think you’re Miss Shit. If you had asked me, I could have told you he wasn’t worth the time.”
“Oh. Oh. Look what you just told. Lawrence Bradley doesn’t know whether I’m male or female, but he knows about you.”
“You’re just jealous.” She flounced around as if to rush down the stairs and nearly knocked their mother to the floor. “Oh. I’m sorry, Mama.”
“What was that all about?” Cynthia asked Lacette.
Lacette lifted her right shoulder in a quick shrug. “I wouldn’t let her borrow my car.”
Cynthia recoiled as if she’d been personally denied the vehicle. “For goodness sake, why not? You can’t use it, because you’ll be busy at the hotel all day.”
“Mama, you may have forgotten how she treated my car last week when I let her use it. I haven’t, and she will not drive it again. Period.”
“Oh, dear. I don’t like to see rifts between my girls.” She fished in her pocketbook for a mirror, found one and refreshed her lipstick. “Did I hear her say you slept with Lawrence Bradley? I’m surprised and disappointed, Lacette.”
“No, Mama, you did not hear her say that. Lawrence Bradley is my business lawyer, and there is not, nor has there ever been, anything personal between us, no matter what Kellie likes to believe.”
“I’m glad. I wouldn’t expect you to do something silly like that. I’m going down to the Department of Health to take a physical. It’s mandatory for all teachers, and you know I start teaching in January.”
“And I think it’s great. Are you nervous?”
“A little. I’ll be teaching introductory science courses, and that’s an easy way to get back into teaching science. I’m studying the texts now, and it surprises me that I’m not bored. Well, I’d better run. Let Kellie have the car, honey.”
She didn’t answer. Ringing in her ears was the sound of her mother’s voice over the years saying, Let her have it, Lacette. She ate a banana, washed it down with a mug of coffee, got into her car, rolled down the window and headed for the hotel. A fresh and bracing breeze seemed to flow right through her, invigorating her, cleaning out her insides, blowing away the cobwebs of her past, of her disquieted and unfulfilled life.
Lacette strode purposefully into the hotel, set up her booth, called her father and told him of her encounter that morning with Kellie. “You did the right thing, and don’t look back at it, fretting about it. Kellie will make a dunce out of someone else, most likely a man,” he said. “Always remember: if you don’t make dust, you’ll eat dust. You’ve trailed behind your sister long enough.”
“Mama thought I should have loaned her the car.”
“I don’t doubt that. If Cynthia wants Kellie to drive a car, she can lend her that Mercedes she speeds around town in. Stand your ground.”
She thanked him and hung up, but she hadn’t needed the lecture; she’d been on the bottom long enough. There would be some changes made, and it would be she who made them.
With Christmas only a few days away, and after trying without success to envisage a Christmas dinner in the parsonage with her sister and both of their parents, Lacette walked across the street to her Aunt Nan’s house. She dropped herself into a kitchen chair, crossed her knees and leaned back.
“What is it, child?”
She rubbed her forehead. It hadn’t seemed that bad when she left home a few minutes earlier, but the more she thought about it, the heavier the yoke bore down on her.
“Aunt Nan, this time last year, I had a family, and I thought we lived happily together. Yes, Daddy was bossy; yes, Mama acted as if she were a seventeenth century wife who had no wants apart from those of her husband; and yes, I let Kellie walk on me. But if I cried in the dark, Daddy rushed into the room and comforted me; if I stubbed my toe, Mama made it better; if I got into a fight at school, Kellie fought my adversary even though she was often mean to me.
“We were there for each other. In some ways, we still are. But, Aunt Nan, who is this woman who has begun to dress as if she’s . . . well . . . on the prowl? And Daddy. It hurts to watch him come to our home and wait for an invitation to sit down. I won’t even describe Kellie. I was happier when I didn’t question her motives and didn’t understand how truly selfish she is. Daddy won’t talk with me at the place where I live. He invites me out to breakfast to tell me what he has in mind.” For a minute, tears rolled slowly down her cheeks, and then gushed until the water pooled in her lap. She sobbed uncontrollably as the pain of her loneliness racked her body.
Nan’s hand, small but strong and steady, stroked her back. “Life happens, honey. Nobody’s living for you; you have to do that for yourself. If your parents had been as happy as you thought they were, the thing that broke them apart never would have happened.”
She sat up straight. “Do you know why they separated? They haven’t told Kellie and me, and I think that’s the least they could do.”
“You don’t have to know everything. Parents shouldn’t rat on each other to their children, because it forces the kids to take sides. Anyway, what’s done is done, and we all have to adjust to it.”
Nan’s words reminded Lacette of her reason for visiting her aunt. “Yes, and with the holidays approaching, we’ll soon be tested, won’t we? Aunt Nan, there’s no way, as things look now, that Kellie and I can have Christmas dinner with both Mama and Daddy. Thanksgiving Day, Kellie and I ate two dinners, one with Mama and one with Daddy. It was terrible. Mama would act okay, but I don’t think Daddy will eat a meal in the parsonage, no matter who cooks it. If . . . uh . . . if I help, will you cook Christmas dinner and let all of us eat over here?”
Nan braced her hands on her narrow hips and looked toward the ceiling. “All right, and you can bet Marshall will ask me who’ll be here.”
“You don’t have to tell him.”
“Of course I will, and if he objects to eating a meal with Cynthia, I’ll remind him of his Christian duty to forgive. Marshall won’t mess with me; he’ll be here, but tell Cynthia to tone down the makeup. I saw her in the library over on Patrick Street day before yesterday, and she’d plastered so much paint on her face that she looked like an artist’s palette. I wanted to ask her if she was on the make, but I figured she couldn’t change that much in a few weeks. Besides, I didn’t have cause to hurt her. Losing your man when you’re pushing sixty must be a blow. I walked out on mine when I was thirty, and that wasn’t easy.”
“Thanks, Aunt Nan.” She got up to leave and remembered that she was supposed to have taken her aunt to see the Christmas Fair on Frederick Fairgrounds the afternoon that Kellie abandoned her car on Route 70. She went over to her aunt, leaned over and put an arm around the petite woman’s shoulder. Her father had explained that his sister was tiny like their mother, and that he had their father’s physique. She was seven the first time she prayed that she wouldn’t be tiny like her aunt, who at a height of five feet had looked more like her seven-year-old niece’s playmate than her aunt.
“I promised to take you to the Christmas Fair. Is today a good time?”
“I know you didn’t come for me because Kellie messed up your plans, and I thank you all the same, but its getting too cold to be out there on the Fairgrounds. You’d enjoy it more anyhow if you went with a nice man. That’s something you ought to think about.”
“Oh, I think about it but, so far, thoughts alone haven’t done the job. Thanks for everything.”
Lacette walked out into the gray December afternoon, tightened her jacket around her and dashed across the street to the parsonage. She was glad that the church was over a block away around the corner on Pile Street, and she didn’t face the sisters and brothers in their coming and going to and from the church office and to the twice daily prayer hours. As she walked up the stairs to her room, she used her cellular phone to call Lawrence Bradley.
“I have good news for you,” he said. “Your papers are all in order, so if you want to renovate the office space, you’re free to do so. I have the keys. As a thank you for using my service, I’m having a brass plate that reads L. Graham Marketing Consultants, Inc. affixed to your office door. How’s that?”
“I’m ecstatic. Thanks so much. Any luck with that house I liked?”
“I’m trying to get the owners to knock off another twenty-five thousand. I should have something on that in a couple of days.”
Unable to think of anything she wanted to do at home, she got in her car and headed for the hotel. At least she could work. She’d barely pulled away from the parsonage when snowflakes drifted down to her windshield. No breeze moved the now snow-littered tree limbs; pedestrians were nowhere to be seen; now and then, a vehicle moved past, slowly and irresolutely as if the drivers found a dusting of snow unmanageable.
In the silence of her thoughts, she drove past the exit to the Belle Époque Hotel and soon found herself at the edge of Catoctin Mountain Park. Following a whim, she parked between two oak trees, got out, tested her weight on the snow-covered sod. The crunching of her Reeboks on the leaves—now obscured by the falling snow—was the only sound she heard as she walked among the leafless trees and barren bushes, breathing deeply of the clean, fresh air, thinking of the chasm she was about to cross and glad for it. She hated to leave the idyllic place, but the snow thickened, and she knew the folly of getting stranded in an out-of-the-way place even in good weather.
Her heartbeat accelerated when she saw the florist shop open on Sunday afternoon. As she worked, she didn’t look in its direction; if he was there and he wanted to speak with her, he could see the light in her booth as well as she could the one in the florist shop.
“Hi,” he said, obviously having come from the opposite direction. “I came in this afternoon because I had exhausted myself building shelving for my workroom at home. What brought you in here? You don‘t usually come in on Sunday.”
She placed the stack of brochures in a neat pile at the edge of the table and smiled, detaining him while she gathered her thoughts.
“I needed some kind of change. I could’ve been bored, but I suspect I was just restless. So many things are happening in my life just now that . . . I don’t seem able to focus on any one of them.” She told him about her new office, her marketing consultancy and her hope that her lawyer would get the house she wanted.
“Wonderful. Congratulations. Well, I’d better get busy on these Christmas wreaths. I have to make half a dozen every couple of days. It’s surprising how many people who can afford the high rates this hotel charges will steal a wreath that’s only worth about thirty dollars. See you later.”
She slapped her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. If the man was going to treat her as if she were his baby sister, she wished he would learn to control his eyes and the expression on his face. Always leading her to believe he was interested in more than casual conversation. She kicked the box of Christmas bells that she would hang around the upper edge of her booth and sucked her teeth.
“He’s not the problem; I am.”
She took half a dozen orders for bread makers and three for a blender, closed up and went home. Maybe she and Kellie could see a movie together. They hadn’t done that in a long time.
Kellie was at that moment on her way to meet Hal Fayson, the handyman hired to work on the house her father inherited from her grandmother. She figured that, on a chilly December evening, few people were likely to see her go into the house. Her knees shook, and she moved unsteadily when she didn’t see his truck, forgetting that he shouldn’t be at work on a Sunday. But as she reached for the doorbell, the door opened and he pulled her into the dimly lit foyer.
“I thought you’d never get here. I got it good and warm for you, cause it’s snowing and ain’t nobody walking around looking up at the snow dropping in their eyes. You didn’t see no smoke from the chimney, did ya?”
She shook her head, sat down on a bench in the foyer and kicked off her boots. “Like you said, the weather isn’t conducive to staring up at chimneys.” She eyed his clothing. He wasn’t wearing his sweat-soaked work clothes, but what he had on wasn’t much better.
“I got us a carton of cold beer,” he said as proudly as if he’d announced that he had a bottle of Moët and Chandon champagne waiting in a wine cooler. When she didn’t react, he sneered, “Don’t tell me Miss High and Mighty looks down her nose at beer. Look, babe, I’m a working man, and I drink beer. If you don’t want any, six bottles ain’t nothing for me to drink.”
“I guess it’s an acquired taste,” she said and immediately wanted to kick herself, certain that she’d made him angry.
“Yeah.” He opened a bottle of beer and took a long slug of it. “I’m an acquired taste, too, but you don’t seem to be having a problem with me. I suppose whatever it is you’re looking for is worth whatever you have to put up with in order to get it.”
If he’d shave, spend some time in a dentist’s office, learn how to dress and how to speak properly, she wouldn’t give him any trouble; he was the only man she’d had who knew what he was doing in bed, and she’d had a few.
“You’re being unfair,” she said. “I didn’t tell you I wouldn’t do it unless you let me in here; I said I would if you were nice about it.”
He stared at her. “Yeah. Right. The sun didn’t set; it’s taking a nap till tomorrow morning. Don’t double talk me, babe. I can make you do anything I want you to do. Whatever it is you want in this place ain’t the only reason you’re here. Pull off your sweater.”
“Before I do that,” she said, allowing a smile to float over her face and quickly disappear, “I want to look around.”
“Sure. Go ahead. But if I drink all this beer before you get back, you wouldn’t be able to get a rise out of me if you used a helium tank. It’s up to you, babe.”
She tossed her head and started up the stairs. “See if I care.”
His hands at her waist turned her around, not roughly as she would have imagined, though with authority, as if he had the right to do it. “Oh, you’ll care, all right.” His big calloused hands slipped around her body and clamped on her breasts. “Oh, yeah, baby. You got as many weak spots as a frayed rope ladder. Turn around.”
At that moment, she despised herself. The word no battling for release from her throat, her upbringing and her personal bigotry about men who were not educated and who labored for their livelihood should have been sufficient armor against him. But his fingers toyed with her nipples, sending tremors throughout her body, and she could barely breathe.
“Take off your sweater,” he whispered. “Do it now.”
He waited until her hands grasped the edge of the sweater before yanking it over her head, unhooking her bra and turning her to face him. She knew his game because she had played it many times. Force your intended lover to yield because he wants to, and don’t let him feel as if you seduced him. But having conducted a few sexual symphonies herself didn’t save her, didn’t prevent her from becoming Hal Fayson’s victim. She knew he had her in his clutches, because she didn’t want to be saved.
“Don’t mess around pretending to fight it, babe. I’ve got the music that makes you dance, and you damned well know it.”
She cupped her breasts and offered them to him. An hour and a half later, he slapped her on her nude buttocks and woke her up.
“Come on, babe. I’ve got to be getting home. The snow is probably six feet deep by now.”
She bolted upright. “You’re not leaving here before I—”
“I’m leaving in twenty minutes, and you’re going with me. It’s not my fault that you can’t think past your vagina. Come on. Snap to it.”
“I could hate you.”
The sound seemed to erupt from the pit of his gut, more like an angry snarl than the laugh she knew he intended it to be. “Now, ain’t that gonna make me cry! Get up woman. I gotta get out of here.”
She recoiled as if he’d struck her. “Listen, you! I’ll be here tomorrow after work, and if you don’t live up to your bargain, damn you, you’ll be sorry. Real sorry.”
“What bargain? You got most of what you wanted, and I got what I wanted. You’re a sore loser.”
“I’ll fix you, mister. What do you do around here, anyway? What’s my father paying you for? Everything I’ve seen is just as it was when my grandmother died.”
“You listen to me,” he growled, jerking on his pants. “Nobody faults me about my work. I’ve gutted that kitchen so Reverend Graham can have a new kitchen built in. I put a new floor and new steps on the back porch and screened in the porch, and nobody helped me. So don’t go causing problems.”
She grabbed at her advantage. “Stick to your bargain, and you won’t have to worry.”
“You ain’t exactly clean in this yourself, babe.” He buttoned his storm jacket and donned his baseball cap. “And another thing. You can’t come here tomorrow, because a man will be here replacing the windows. I was supposed to do that, but Reverend Graham changed his mind and told me to do this other work. After all, I’m a regular construction worker.”
She didn’t want to hear that. Neither he nor anyone else was going to prevent her from finding that brooch. If it wasn’t in that house, it would have been with the ring. “How will I know when it’s safe to come back?”
“Give me your phone number, and I’ll call you.”
“Why can’t I call you?”
“Cause you’ll be plaguing the hell out of me. What’s your number?”
Grudgingly, she gave it to him, grinding her teeth as she did so and imagining how he’d look dangling from that oak tree in front of the house. “Your day will come,” she spat out.
“You don’t worry me none, babe. I know what floats your boat.”
“Drop me off at the corner,” she said as they approached the parsonage in his pickup truck, which he had parked around the corner from her grandmother’s house.
“You bet. God forbid you should be seen getting out of a pickup truck. See you later.” She got out, and as she trudged through the snow it occurred to her that she’d had sex with the man on two occasions but had never kissed him. She hadn’t even contemplated it. If anyone had suggested to her three months earlier that she would do some of the things she’d done recently, she’d have flown at them, irate and defensive.
As she turned off the sidewalk onto the walkway leading to the parsonage, the front door opened and Cynthia stepped out. She grabbed her chest, reacting to the sudden acceleration of her heartbeat. If Hal had driven her all the way home, her mother would have seen her get out of his truck. She walked to the bottom of the steps, stood there and watched as her mother headed around the house to the garage without looking in her direction. With her own guilt hanging over her, she couldn’t help wondering where Cynthia Marshall—a quiet, subservient housewife only three months earlier—would be going alone at ten o’clock on a Sunday night.
Lacette sat on the living room sofa, looking at the television, nibbling potato chips and drinking hot, spiced cider as she watched a toothless old black man picking and strumming his twelve-string guitar and singing what he called “down home, gut bucket blues.” She had always wanted to play a musical instrument, and the swift and agile movement of his long, bony fingers over the strings and between the frets fascinated her. In his voice, she heard the hurt, pain and humiliation that matched the tired longing, the resignation and despair mirrored in his face. At the end of a song, his intake of breath was deep and labored, like that of a man dropping the weight of the ages from his shoulders.
So immersed was she in what she envisaged as the tribulations of the old man’s life that she didn’t hear Kellie enter the house. “Who’s that?” she yelled, jumping up and looking around for anything that would serve as a weapon. “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” Kellie said. “Where was Mama going this time of night?”
“Did she leave already? She told me maybe half an hour ago that she had to run an errand. What time is it?”
Kellie walked in and sat down. “It’s eleven minutes after ten. What kind of errand was she on if she had to dress up in that mink coat Gramma left her? You know, from the time Daddy walked out of here, Mama’s turned into a human chameleon. It’s like I don’t know her.”
I could say the same about you. “She didn’t tell me any more than that, so I suppose she’ll be back soon.”
“That’s because you never ask questions. I do, so I know what’s going on around me.”
“Did you ask Mama why she and Daddy split up?”
“No. She didn’t spend time crying about it—at least not to my knowledge—so I figured she either wasn’t surprised or was confident that he’d come back.” She threw up her hands. “But what do I know about man-woman relations?”
A potato chip crumb lodged in Lacette’s windpipe, throwing her into a coughing fit. Kellie brought her a glass of water and slapped her on the back. “Thanks,” Lacette said. “When you said you didn’t understand relations between men and women, I nearly choked, cause if you don’t, who does?”
Kellie got up as if to leave the room. “Probably no woman. Every one of the bastards has a different way of mistreating women. Doesn’t matter who they are. The first jerk I ran into was a deacon of the church, and I was fourteen years old.”
That brought Lacette to her feet. “Get outta here. Does Daddy know this?”
“Of course not, but if he’d been paying attention he could have seen it for himself. All I had to do was put my hands on my breasts, and I could see that old guy’s mouth start to water.”
“But you didn’t—”
Kellie rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “What do you take me to be?”
Lacette remained there long after Kellie went up to her room, but neither the old man nor the program that followed recaptured her attention. She was tired of pretending to be content with her life; tired of being alone; tired of living without the loving arms and strong body of a man who cared for her. Didn’t she deserve a man’s affection and warm loving? She knew she didn’t encourage the attention of men, because Kellie set out to get every man who appeared to be attracted to her. And somehow, she had inculcated the notion—stemming from Kellie’s taunts and jibes—that she was unattractive while Kellie was beautiful.
She got up, went to the downstairs powder room and looked into the mirror. She saw the marked resemblance of herself to Kellie, but she also saw differences, and they made her no less attractive than her sister. That was another thing with which she intended to confront her parents. Why had they never disputed Kellie when she claimed to be beautiful while her sister was not?
She went into the kitchen, opened a bottle of white wine, returned to the television and sat down to watch old Ed Sullivan show reruns. Black divas of the 1950s, some of them stunningly beautiful, wouldn’t be recognizable today, she thought. Someday, I’ll be old, my youthful looks wasted, and I won’t have done a thing with my life. She left the wine untouched on the coffee table, turned out all of the lights except two and headed up the stairs to her room. “It’s not going to happen here,” she said aloud, and a strange, giddy feeling settled over her. As in more than one of her premonitions, it was as if she had already begun a journey into a new life.