Chapter Five
Whoever heard of anybody dreading Christmas? Lacette sat in her booth, shaking her head in wonder, as she folded fliers edge to edge and crease to crease and stacked them in perfect order. Having finished that, she rearranged her display, didn’t like what she saw, blew up half a dozen red and green balloons and added them to the arrangement. Why was she biting her nails? She had never done that. She lifted the telephone receiver, replaced it and lifted it again. After staring at it for a few seconds, she heard the voice of the operator.
“Operator. May I help you?”
Nonplussed, she replaced the receiver, lifted it again and dialed the porter. “Could you send someone to spell me for about fifteen minutes, please? I don’t want to leave my booth unattended.” If she left her post for a few minutes, she risked losing a customer, but she didn’t have a choice.
Within minutes a bell boy arrived, tall, handsome, and, she surmised, a year or so younger than she. He flashed a grin, exposing even white teeth that glistened against his smooth, hair-free brown skin. Her already somber mood darkened, and she swallowed a lump in her throat, for she knew that the good-looking brother’s smile was not for her, but for the tip she would give him. In the women’s room—that female sanctuary in beige and green marble, beige walls, green carpet and gilded chairs—to the left of the elevator, she took deep breaths and splashed cold water on her face, hoping to shock herself out of the unfamiliar lethargy and moodiness that seemed to have settled over her.
She didn’t dare stay away from her booth longer than fifteen minutes if she wanted to remain in the porter’s good graces. Passing the florist shop, she waved at Douglas and recognized one source of her discontent, for she had come to realize that the wreckage of her family accounted for only a part of her unhappiness. By the time she reached her booth, her feet dragged beneath the weight of her loneliness. The porter grinned his thanks for the three-dollar tip and went back to his post, oblivious to the hole widening deep within her. He’s full of smiles and charm, but would he care if he knew how I ache?
Her smiles for her customers had a wooden character, never altering the contours of her face, and the words she spoke lacked conviction. It was the day before Christmas Eve, and what could she look forward to? A dreary Christmas dinner at which her parents would pussyfoot around each other—formal and civilized—while she and Kellie held their breaths hoping that neither parent would make a mistake and disrupt the superficial and fragile peace. Oh, she would receive the de rigueur gown, perfume, and cashmere sweater from the members of her family, but none of that would replace the sense of belonging to a love-giving, nourishing, and protective unit that she knew was forever lost.
“Why would a beautiful woman like you be wearing such a somber expression in the most delightful time of the year?”
Lacette looked up to see a tall, copper-colored African-American man, elegant and—to her mind—very distinguished. “Hmmm. Not bad-looking, either,” she said to herself.
Recovering her professional demeanor, she asked him, “How may I help you?”
“I’m stuck here until January the eighth, and you can help a lot by spending Christmas with me. I don’t mind being alone the other three hundred and sixty four days in the year, but there’s something about being by myself on Christmas Eve that demoralizes me. Please say you’ll spend tomorrow evening with me.”
She stifled a gasp. “I uh . . . I’ll have to think about it.”
He handed her his business card. “I know it’s presumptuous of me to think you might not have a date, but I didn’t see a ring on your finger and thought I’d take a chance and ask you. Will you?”
Her first reaction was to say that she was busy, but she wasn’t. She was lonely and tired of her dull and uneventful life. She answered truthfully. “I’m not busy. What did you have in mind?”
A smile enveloped his face. “Dinner at the best restaurant I can find and dancing until we get tired. Would you like that?”
She would indeed like it and said so. “Where shall we meet?”
Both of his eyebrows shot up, and his eyes widened, but only for a fleeting second. Had she not been regarding him closely, she would have missed his reflex action.
“May I call for you at your home? Say, about seven?”
She wrote the address of the parsonage on a piece of paper and handed it to him. “That’s fine. How will you dress?”
“Ordinarily, I’d wear a tuxedo, but I’m afraid a dark, navy-blue suit will have to do.”
Her smile, manufactured and as brilliant as she could make it, camouflaged all that she felt. Her mind traveled back to the high school prom that she missed because Kellie stole her date—a boy who would have worn a tuxedo to pair with her white silk evening gown, her first grown-up dress. All theses years later, she still waited for a date with a special man to whom she was also special. If she stayed at home alone on Christmas Eve, she wouldn’t feel any worse than she felt right then. Dinner and dancing with a traveling salesman? Or to stay at home and watch Kellie flaunt her popularity. What the hell! It was better than nothing.
“I’ll look forward to it,” she said with as much grace as she could muster.
“So will I, Miss Graham.”
On Christmas Eve, Lacette hurried home from work, showered, gave herself a manicure and relaxed on her bed while her nails dried. “Come in,” she said in response to the knock that told her she would have to deal with Kellie.
“Hi, Lace. I’m strapped for something to wear. Mind if I borrow your red sequined dress with the slit up the right leg?” Kellie sat on the edge of the bed, ran her hand over the yellow-satin spread and smiled her most charming smile.
She had never worn that dress, and Kellie knew it, because Kellie misplaced their tickets to the Kennedy Center concert to which she had planned to wear it, and the whole family had stayed home.
“Sorry, Kellie, but I’m wearing it.”
Kellie jumped up from the bed and stared at Lacette. “You’re wearing it? When?”
“Tonight.” Oh, how sweet it was! This Christmas Eve, she was not Cinderella or a wallflower pretending that she enjoyed staying at home.
“You’re lying. You just don’t want me to wear it.”
“I don’t have to lie, Kellie. I can just say no. As it is, I’m wearing it. Sorry.”
Kellie’s face lost its hard, accusing look and bloomed into a smile. “That’s great, Lace. Who is it? Well, you don’t have to tell me,” she said when Lacette remained mute. “Why don’t we exchange? You wear my white dress, and I’ll wear your red one.”
Feeling triumphant and not a little wicked, Lacette said, “Not tonight, Kellie. I don’t feel virginal, and white is so . . . you know what I mean. I don’t want him to think I’m waving a chastity wand at him.”
Kellie’s frown deepened. “You’re just pulling my leg. You’re not going out of this house tonight.”
Lacette lifted her right shoulder in a slight shrug. “Hang around and see. Sorry about the dress, but you know red is my best color.”
Kellie’s face sagged, and she slapped her hands on her hips. “Well . . . I never . . .” Not even the prospect of an evening with a total stranger could dampen Lacette’s pleasure at having confounded her sister. The door closed behind Kellie, and Lacette sat up, her bravura gone. She walked over to the window and looked out at the star-covered sky. An idyllic night. Maybe he wouldn’t come. What if he wasn’t even registered in the hotel? She hadn’t thought to check. Perhaps she should call her father and tell him she was going out with a man who said his name was Jefferson Smith. Oh, Lord, she couldn’t do that; she was thirty-three years old.
“Grin and bear it, girl,” she told herself as she rubbed lotion on her feet and legs. Slowly and methodically, she completed her toilet and slipped into the long red sheath. Fendi perfume at her pulse points gave her added confidence. Gazing at herself in the full-length mirror, she could see that Jefferson Smith might think her a siren, but she didn’t feel like one, and rather than boost her confidence, the realization gave her the willies. Her stomach seemed to twist itself into a tight coil. What if Jefferson what’s-his-name thought she was coming on to him?
The doorbell chimed precisely at seven o’clock, and the sound of Kellie’s feet racing down the stairs brought to Lacette’s mind the speeding resonance of someone fleeing an out-of-control fire.
“I’m here to see Miss Graham,” the deep masculine voice said.
“I’m Miss Graham. Sure you have the right house?” Lacette paused at the top of the stairs to see how far Kellie would go and how audaciously she would behave.
“I gather you’re Miss Lacette Graham’s sister, since I see a resemblance.”
Lacette strolled down the stairs, relishing the moment. “This is my sister, Kellie. We’re twins. As you must have noticed, Kellie is full of pranks.” Her glance at her sister dispensed fiery daggers. “Kellie, this is Jefferson Smith.”
She handed Jefferson her coat. “You look ravishing,” he said, softly and with a tone of urgency, as if they were alone. “I’m a proud man.” He inhaled deeply. “Wonderful.”
“You deserve a good night kiss for knocking Kellie off balance,” she said to herself, pleased that he had found a black chesterfield and a tuxedo, obviously rented. As they walked to his car, he confirmed what she had guessed.
“I believe in doing things right, so I rented a tux.”
“Oooh,” she said, awed, when she saw the horse-driven hansom.
“You’ll be warm,” he said, tucking a blanket around her.
“You certainly went to great effort, Jefferson. This is idyllic.” She breathed in the smell of horse mixed with his woodsy cologne, leaned back and pinched her hand. No, she wasn’t dreaming.
His slight smile suggested to her that he’d done it before, but she didn’t mind; the one thing lacking so far was that Kellie couldn’t see them get into that hansom. She glanced at the hanging lanterns and let her hand graze the hansom’s electric-blue, plush interior, thinking that she would imprint the evening in her memory, for at last she had her “prom.”
“When I saw you gliding down those stairs, I knew it was worth the effort.”
Beguiling though he was, with his good looks, finesse, and penchant for saying just the right thing, she suspected that she could nevertheless resist him if she wanted to. She managed not to gasp when the hansom stopped at the famous Monocacy Inn, an elegant restaurant located in a pre-Civil War Federal house just outside of Frederick. An enormous and richly decorated Christmas tree stood near the stone fireplace in the dining room, and holiday wreaths decorated every candle-lit window. That, and the welcoming odor of green pine logs giving off showers of sparks as they burned lent the place an elegant, home-like atmosphere.
“Do you like it here?” he asked her.
“Oh, yes. Very much,” she said, and she did, but she wondered how he, a stranger to the area, found it, when she had lived more than a decade in Frederick without having seen its interior.
“It’s Christmas, so let’s have champagne,” he said when the waiter brought their dessert, a crème brulée with flamed cherries.
After having drunk two glasses of Chateau Neuf du Pape with her dinner, Lacette hesitated to drink champagne, but the evening had been perfect, so she accepted one glass of the Veuve Cliquot and declined to drink more.
Jefferson expressed regret that the restaurant didn’t have a band that evening as he had hoped. “Robs me of a chance to get you into my arms,” he added, his smile rueful. “Another time.”
Later in the foyer of the parsonage, he held her hand. “I want to see you tomorrow night. May I?”
“I’d love to, but I’m having dinner with my family, and we eat late. We’re dining at my aunt’s home, or I would invite you to join us.”
“I wouldn’t consider barging in.” His gaze grew more intense and more intimate. More possessive. If she were not already at home, she might be have been impelled to run. With his eyes, he disrobed her so completely that she covered her bosom with her left hand and arm. If he noticed her discomfort, he didn’t make it obvious.
“I want to kiss you,” he whispered.
Not much to ask for on Christmas Eve, she thought, and lifted her arms to his shoulders. But he demanded more than the pressure of her mouth against his. Stunned by his boldness, she parted her lips without thinking or intending to and took him in.
He didn’t abuse the privilege. “I want to see you the night after Christmas and the next night and the next, and the next.”
“We’ll see,” she hedged, although she knew she wanted to spend time with him, not because her heart or her libido demanded it, but because her ego needed the attention of a handsome and obviously successful man. “Yes,” she repeated. “We’ll see.”
“Who is that guy?” Kellie asked Lacette the next morning. “Where on earth did you meet him? That brother is a number ten and change. Whew!” She pretended to mop her brow.
“Maybe I should ask you why you tried to give him the impression that I impersonated you, that you are the only “Miss Graham’ who lives in this house?”
“Oh, for goodness sake, Lace. You get uptight about the damnedest things.” Typical Kellie, Lacette thought. If you got too close to the truth, she either became angry or got out of the way.
Around noon on Christmas day, less jubilant than a person looking forward to a family Christmas dinner should have been, Lacette hurried across the street to her aunt Nan’s house.
“You didn’t have to come so early, child, but I’m glad for the company. My, but you look so nice, just blooming.”
Lacette opened her arms and enveloped her aunt in a warm greeting, grateful for the woman’s presence in her life. “I brought something to wear while we’re cooking.”
Nan had already stuffed the turkey and rubbed it with oil and spices. “It tastes best when you cook it real slow,” she said, and put the bird into the oven. “Not much—if anything—for you to do.”
“What you so quiet about?” Nan asked Lacette. “You haven’t said twenty words since you been here. We aren’t preparing for a funeral, girl. We cooking Christmas dinner. You stop worrying ’bout Marshall and Cynthia. It’s not like they gone. You still have both your parents, but you have to stop thinking of them as a couple. Marshall told me that that marriage is history, and I believe him.”
“I know. Daddy’s intractable when he makes up his mind about something. I sure wish I knew what it was.” She finished setting the table, made a centerpiece of red poinsettias, holly, and candles and stood back to admire it.
“Now, that’s a work of art,” Nan said. “You better dress. It’s a quarter to six. I’m gonna run upstairs and put on something right now.”
Marshall arrived first, and Lacette relaxed; she had expected him to call saying that he had decided not to come. She went with him to the living room where an old black urn full of mulled cider exuded a mouthwatering aroma.
“Want some cider, Daddy? Aunt Nan put it here to give us something to talk about. It’s not fermented, and it’s delicious.” At least, she hoped it was. She hadn’t tasted it. As she poured the cider for her father, the doorbell rang, and seconds later Nan walked into the room with Kellie and Cynthia.
Kellie greeted her father, whirled around and advanced on Lacette. “When you left the house, you could at least have said where you were going. You got a phone call, but I can’t remember his name.”
“Try Smith,” Lacette said, her tone dry and matter-of-fact.
Nan walked over to Kellie and locked her hands to her hips. “This is Christmas, and everybody is going to be nice so I can enjoy my dinner. You hear?” Kellie opened her mouth as if to speak, but bit back the words.
“Thank God, she’s planning to show some sense,” Lacette said to herself, for she knew that if the evening soured with unpleasantness Kellie would have instigated it.
They took their seats at the dinner table, and it did not escape Lacette that her aunt had to urge her father to sit at the head of the table. “Do it because you’re the only preacher here, then,” she heard Nan whisper.
He sat down, bowed his head and said, “Dear Lord, we thank you for the blessing of this food and for the hands that prepared it. Amen.”
Lacette’s eyes flew open, and she stared at her father. No mention of the glory of Christmas and what it meant. And what about the prayer of grace that he always said when they ate? He couldn’t have chosen a more pointed way of reminding them all that their lives had changed. Cynthia and Kellie ate with gusto, but she, Nan, and her father hardly tasted the food.
“I hear you’re gonna be teaching next year,” Nan said to Cynthia.
“Yes, seventh grade, as before.”
When no one commented on that topic, Nan asked Lacette, “How’re things at the hotel? I have to get over there and buy a bread making machine.”
“You can’t make biscuits in them,” Lacette said, “or cornbread, either.”
“I like light bread once in a while,” Nan said, “and I’d just as soon make it fresh myself. A machine will save me time.” Hearing the desperation in her aunt’s voice, a hope that one of the other three would comment, Lacette fought back the tears. Her mother focused on the food, and she could see from her father’s demeanor that he would leave as soon as they finished the meal. Nan stopped trying to make conversation, and for the next twenty minutes, Lacette thought that that dining room was filled with the loudest and most jarring silence she had ever been present at.
When at last dinner was over, Marshall stood, placed a small package beside the plate of each of his daughters and handed one to Nan. “A blessed Christmas, everyone. Good night.”
Marshall left them to exchange gifts among themselves, but the joy of Christmas eluded them, and after Cynthia and Kellie went home, Lacette and Nan cleaned the kitchen in silence, each dealing with her own thoughts.
When Lacette spoke, her own voice startled her. “Dinner by myself would have been preferable to this. If I learned nothing else tonight, I learned not to try to make pearls out of fish scales.”
Nan nodded assent. “It was worth trying. Still, it don’t hurt to remember that you can’t get blood out of a turnip.”
“No, I guess you can’t. But you can bet I’ll think long and hard before I attempt another family dinner.” Later, when she got home, she went directly to her room and closed the door. The last thing she wanted was an encounter with her twin sister.
For the next six evenings, Jefferson Smith courted Lacette in the manner that she’d dreamed of during her adolescent days. He lavished her with attention, sent flowers each morning and telephoned her during the day. It occurred to her more than once that he might have invented the art of seduction, although it seemed natural, as if he automatically treated women in a courtly manner.
“If I don’t see you before I go out,” Lacette said to Kellie in the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, “Happy New Year.”
Kellie had been blow-drying her hair. She spun away from the mirror nearly dropping the dryer. “You’re going out with Jefferson Small tonight? New Year’s Eve?”
“His name is Smith, and I’m going out with him tonight.” What was more, she had bought a green-chiffon, figure-revealing evening gown for the occasion. I don’t know when he will leave or how far he intends to take our relationship. I just know that I’ve been queen for a week, that I no longer have to wonder what it’s like to be the object of a man’s unqualified admiration and pursuit. I’m not going to worry about tomorrow or what his intentions are. He’s what I need right now.
You were quick to find out whether Lawrence Bradley had a wife and family, but you haven’t dared to ask Jefferson whether he’s married, her conscience needled. She pushed the thought aside. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. He’s not wearing a ring, and there isn’t a print of one on his ring finger.
Halfway through the evening, it became clear to Lacette that Jefferson Smith had planned an evening guaranteed to seduce any woman. Their round, linen-covered candle-lit table bore a centerpiece of tea roses and stood near a waterfall and beneath a crystal chandelier.
“You order,” she said to him when the waiter handed her a menu without prices. “Anything except brains, rabbit, and rhubarb.”
She hadn’t heard him laugh often, and never with such gusto. “Believe me, those are three things I would never order, because I can’t stand them, either.”
After a gourmet dinner topped off with champagne, he took her dancing at the hotel’s New Year’s Eve gala, where guests welcomed the New Year in colorful party hats and amidst blaring horns and showers of confetti.
“Happy New Year, sweetheart,” he said. “Kiss me.” He hadn’t previously called her by anything except her name, and she wondered at the change and its significance. She gazed up at him with what she knew was an inquiring expression, but his answer was the pressure of his lips on hers, the flickering of his tongue at the seam of her lips and the pressure of his fingers on her naked back. Gently, he stroked her spine, and then locked his arms around her and shifted from side to side until her nipples erected beneath the sheer fabric of her dress.
With a knowing and satisfied expression on his face, he slipped an arm around her waist and headed out of the ballroom to the elevator. Although heady with wine, champagne, and the dazzle of New Year’s Eve, she hesitated nonetheless and told herself to slow down, that the time wasn’t right. But as if he read her mind, or perhaps because he understood women better than she understood herself, his voice caressed her ears with the words, “Don’t you need me?” Tempting. Tantalizing. His woodsy cologne teased her nostrils, and his voice, dark and urgent, assaulted her senses.
They entered the elevator, he unlocked the top level floor stop with his passkey, and brushed his hand against her already erect nipple. “Come with me.”
She told herself to get off at the second floor, leave him and get a taxi home, but there he stood, sexiness personified and mesmerizing in his maleness. The elevator stopped, and she saw that they were on the top floor. He braced himself against the edges of the open door to prevent its closing and smiled at her.
“All I want to do is to please you,” he said.
She needed what he offered, needed to come alive, to bloom in a man’s arms, and dispel the loneliness that had depressed her since a week earlier. The pain of it flashed before her mind’s eye, waving before her the tragic figure who had hoped in vain for a glance of appreciation from a bell boy. I deserve warmth and affection, she thought, pushed reason aside and stepped out of the elevator.
He came to her with skill and patience, loving every inch of her body, heating her until she thought she would go insane waiting for the moment when he would thrust into her. Once he entered her body, he shocked her with his wildness.
“Am I hurting you?” he asked when she stopped moving.
“Oh, no. It . . . I can’t keep up with you.”
“I’m starved for you. I’ve been half crazy waiting.” He rolled over on his back. “Maybe we can slow it down this way.”
“I don’t want to slow it down. I want to burst wide open.”
He flipped her over on her back, put an arm beneath her hip, the other one under her shoulder, sucked her left nipple into his mouth and drove her to climax. Seconds later, he shouted his own release.
She lay beneath him panting for air and exhausted, but not sated. The thought that he had not uttered one word of endearment or affection, roared in her head. He’d given her physical relief, but that was all. Wondering if there could be anything else for them, a binding relationship, she stroked his hair.
“I’d ask how you feel,” he said, “if I hadn’t felt you wringing me practically out of socket.”
“You may still ask,” she said. “How do you feel?”
“Wonderful. You’re some woman. Can you spend the night with me?”
She sat up, remembered her nudity and threw the sheet across her chest. “Jefferson, I can’t go into my house Saturday morning, the morning after New Year’s Eve, wearing an evening dress. This is a small town, and the chief pastime here is gossip.”
He eased an arm across her and deftly let the sheet slide downward, uncovering her breasts. “What do you care about the gossips?”
His words had the impact of an alarm clock at five in the morning, and she eased out of bed dragging the sheet with her. “What time . . . ?” She stared at the two photographs on the table beside his bed, one of an attractive woman and the other of two boys about three or four years old.
“Who are they?” she asked, although she knew without his telling her.
He braced himself on one elbow and faced her. “They’re my family.”
She sat on the edge of the bed, clutching the sheet around her. “I should have known that a man like you would be married, and I should have asked you, but I suppose I didn’t want to know.”
“If you had known . . . ?”
“I wouldn’t have gone out with you the first time. Where are they?”
“They’re in Germany. My wife is German. I married her while I was a soldier stationed in Wiesbaden with the U.S. Army. My mother-in-law is very sick, and my wife took the children and went to be with her.”
“How long has she been in Germany?”
“A little over two months.”
“I see. Would you mind turning your back while I dress? Where’s the bathroom?”
“Over there.” He pointed to a door near the closet. “Look, sweetheart, this is New Year’s Eve. What’s done is done. Let’s make the best of it.”
“That’s precisely what I had in mind. Talking about going from wine to vinegar . . .” She left the thought hanging, for she knew that nothing she added would tell him more succinctly how she felt.
“Does this mean I can’t see you again?” he asked later, standing in the foyer of the parsonage.
She looked him in the eye. “That’s what it means. I don’t hold this against you, Jefferson. It’s my fault that I didn’t ask if you were married. But you see, I was lonely, and I needed a good ego boost, but finding out that you were married right after you set me on fire was like a kick in the teeth. I don’t ever want to lay eyes on you again.”
He stood there long enough to know that she meant it, turned and left. She climbed the stairs slowly, reliving the evening, churning in her mind what she regarded as her folly. She hadn’t let herself think beyond the fact that such a seemingly eligible man had chosen her from among the pack of single women milling around the hotel. “And face it,” she said to herself, “you enjoyed being with a man you knew Kellie would want. You gloried in making her jealous, in turning the screw as she had so often turned it on you.”
I got what I asked for. Mind-blowing sex such as she hadn’t previously experienced, but it left her empty; he was skilled beyond anything she had imagined, but he made no attempt to let her feel adored. She pulled off the dress and threw it across a chair, certain that she would never wear it again. The man had at least one virtue, though: he hadn’t lied to her, not even when he was buried deep inside her body. And when the subject of his marriage arose, he did not offer excuses for himself or spin illusions for her.
“I ought to be grateful that he didn’t pretend to care,” she said aloud, shaking her head as if astonished. “A wizard in the bed is a dangerous man.” She showered, slipped on a short gown and lay down.
“Thank God, I’m in my own bed,” she said and turned out the light on her night table. She didn’t make New Year’s resolutions because, like most people she knew, she forgot them before the year was a month old. But after tossing, sleepless, for over an hour she sat up and repeated as if it were a mantra the words, “Never again, as long as I live, am I going to be a sucker for anybody, not my mother, my father, my sister, or any man. Especially not a man.” She slid beneath the covers and went to sleep.
At that moment, Kellie was scheming to get the coveted brooch. “Gramma knew I wanted that brooch,” she told her New Year’s Eve date, “and I’m sure she meant for me to have it.” She shifted in her chair. Mealey’s wasn’t the place in which she would have preferred to welcome the New Year, but she had a date with a respectable, decent-looking man, and, such men were hard to come by.
“If you get the brooch, won’t that mean you have to give Lacette that diamond on your finger?” Matt Simmons, who owned a chain of garages in and around Frederick, asked Kellie.
Kellie spread the long tapered fingers of her right hand and looked at the ring. “I don’t see why I should. Who knows how much money was in that bank account Gramma gave Lacette?”
Matt rubbed his chin and spoke in a way that suggested he spelled every word before uttering it. “Doesn’t seem right to me, Kellie. How you gonna manage it?”
“Leave it to me.” She raised her glass of wine, nodded to him and took a few sips. “You ought to know by now that I’m clever.”
His left shoulder flexed in a quick shrug. “Yeah, so was Il Duce, but thanks to the anger of his Italian constituency, he died hanging upside down. If I were you, I’d think again before doing something like that.”
“Oh, don’t be a drag, Matt. I’m only after what’s rightfully mine.”
He lifted his glass, clicked hers and swallowed the remainder of his wine. “Up to you, babe. It’s no skin off my teeth. Let’s call it a night.”
Anger began its slow sizzle, and she took in a deep breath, intent upon stifling her ire, for she needed Matt when a more desirable date wasn’t available. Still, she didn’t remember a time when a man called an evening with her to a halt; it was she who announced the end of a date. Maybe Matt had a woman and she didn’t know about it.
She pasted a smile on her face and said. “Yes, let’s. Nights like this can be tiring.” Earlier in the evening, she had hoped he would suggest they stop by his apartment, but she no longer felt up to tussling with him while he readied himself for a sexual romp. Once he got started, he was a gem, but getting him to that point could be trying. And if he wasn’t already stirred, it would be that much worse.
“It’s been a lovely evening,” she said, standing at the door of the parsonage.
“Yes, it’s been interesting. Earlier, I’d thought we might finish the evening at my place, but . . . well . . . I don’t want us to get in any deeper. What you’re doing to your sister is a little too much for my stomach. So . . . well . . . I’ll be seeing you.”
When he turned to go, she grabbed his coat sleeve. “You’re giving me the brush off? Who do you think you are? I don’t need you. All you’ve ever been to me is a convenience.”
To her surprise he let out a harsh laugh. “No kidding. And exactly what do you think you’ve been to me? If I cared two cents for you, we wouldn’t have such clumsy, disgusting sex. See you around.”
She wanted to slam the door behind him, but she couldn’t risk awakening her mother, and she didn’t want Lacette to know how her evening turned out. “Oh, hell!” she said after thinking about it, “he was just saving face, and he has a right to that. Hal sure isn’t in love with me, but he’s ready the minute he sees me.”
“What did you do last night, Mama?” Kellie asked Cynthia as she carried a plate of scrambled eggs to the table. Her mother didn’t like eating in the kitchen, but she acquiesced when Kellie made it clear that she wasn’t going to clean the dining room after they ate.
I went to the Weinberg Center with a friend to see a modern dance company. After that, we went to Isabella’s for a while. The place was crowded.”
“Really? Who’s the friend?”
“A friend. Would you believe we ran into old deacon Moody? I guess the woman with him was his wife, but if she was she’s gained a hundred pounds since they used to go to your father’s church in Baltimore.”
Kellie nearly choked on the bacon she’d just put in her mouth. God forbid that man should have moved to Frederick. “Did he recognize you?”
“Uh . . . no, but you wouldn’t expect him to. I looked a lot different in those days.”
“True,” She could no longer focus on the conversation with her mother. After the fiasco with Matt the previous evening, she didn’t need to be reminded of her foolish adolescent behavior with old man Moody. She made a pretense of eating, and cleaned the kitchen. She wished she could call Hal.
“Maybe I’m a slut, and maybe I’ve always been,” she said to herself as she tripped up the stairs remembering the way in which Melvin Moody introduced her to her body’s potential, how she, a fourteen-year-old virgin, had enjoyed teasing and playing with him. Well, what the heck. I’ll only be young once. She dressed in woolen pants, a sweater, and her storm coat and headed for her grandmother’s house. Anxiety streaked through her when she saw Hal’s truck, but it subsided at once, for a different man worked on a downstairs window.
She walked over to the window and waited until he acknowledged her presence. “I’m Kellie Graham, and this house belongs to my father. Would you please throw me the front door key?”
The tobacco juice that he spit out missed her by a dozen inches. “And they call me Jocko. Sorry. I didn’t realize it was so windy today. I’ve been warned about you, lady. You gets nothing here. If you want the key, ask your daddy for it. I ain’t losing my job over you.” She wanted to ask him if Hal had been fired, but thought better of it.
“I really need to get into the house,” she said, pouting.
“I don’t care where you got to go, you ain’t getting into this house on my watch. I’ll report you to your father.”
She laughed and made it as joyous as she could. “Come on. I’m the apple of my father’s eye. What good would that do you?”
She unbuttoned her coat and put her hands in the pockets of her jeans, pushing the coat back and risking the cold air in order to give the man a look at her high, rounded breast.
“Might as well button up your coat, cause I don’t mix work with what you offering.” He put the spatula aside and stared at her. “Does your daddy know how you act?”
“What’s it worth to you?” she asked him.
He spat more tobacco juice. “Not a damned thing.”
She plodded back to the parsonage. First last night and then today, men who are not on my social level turned me down. Well, I don’t care about either of them; I want that brooch, and I intend to get it.
Monday afternoon after work, she walked around her grandmother’s house looking for an opportunity to get inside and found one. With the door to the back porch unlocked, she went in, and from the porch broke a pane in the kitchen window, unlocked the window and climbed inside. She rummaged through the room in which her grandmother slept, the guest room, and the den.
“It’s here somewhere,” she said aloud, tossing out the content of drawers, throwing things from closets onto chairs and the floor.
When she heard what sounded like a door opening, she raced down the stairs and out the kitchen window, leaving behind the wreckage of her misdemeanor. Dashing around the house to the street as fast as she could, she collided with Hal.
“What were you doing around there?”
“None of your business.”
“But it is my business.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her along with him as he headed to the back of the house. “I wouldn’t trust you any farther than I can throw you. You’ve been up to something. What’s this?” he asked when he saw the screen door of the back porch open.
“Turn me loose. I’ll have you put into the jail for manhandling me. Let go.”
“Well, I’ll be damned if you didn’t break that window.”
“I didn’t, and you turn me loose, you hear?”
“You’re not sticking me with this, babe. Breaking and entering is a felony.”
“Nobody will believe you. And you let go of my arm.”
“The police will believe me when they find your fingerprints on that windowpane.”
She hadn’t thought about fingerprints or any other incriminating evidence she might have left. Counting on Hal’s weakness for her, she switched tactics. “I came here looking for you, but I didn’t see you or your truck, so I walked around the house hoping to find you back there. Come on, let’s go inside. I haven’t . . . uh . . . we haven’t been together since before Christmas, and for me, that’s a long time.”
His laugh, loud and boisterous, stunned her. Appearing to gaze down his nose at her, he removed his baseball cap and ran his fingers over his tight curls. “You really are a piece of work, babe, and just as transparent as clear glass. You think you can get anything you want just by spreading your legs, but you’re not sticking this on me. Your father was here this morning, and he knows that window wasn’t broken. He checked out the house, too, and he’s aware that I’m the only person due to work here today, so I’m shoring up my behind, babe. You’re good in the bed but not so good that I’d willingly take the rap for you.”
He opened the passenger door of his van, lifted her and sat her in the front seat. Before she could solve the problem of the lock, he got in the driver’s seat, locked both doors and started the motor. “Your daddy can get you out of this, babe, but right now, I’m covering my ass.”
A decent man, one of her own class, wouldn’t leave a woman to take the rap. Well, she’d show him. Determined not to go to the police precinct, she reached for the steering wheel, but he grabbed her arm. “I’d rather not hurt you, but I’m not going to let you cause a wreck and get me killed either.”
She sat back in the seat and folded her arms. This was a scenario that she hadn’t counted on. Only the Lord knew how her father would react when he discovered what she’d done. She sucked her teeth in disgust at her own clumsiness. She’d spent over an hour in that house, and she should have left as soon as she went through her gramma’s bedroom. But she’d thought it safe to be there late on a Monday afternoon.
She reached over, rubbed his thigh and spoke in a soft, pouting voice. “Where’re you taking me?”
“I haven’t decided whether to take you to the police or to your daddy; but you need more’n a slap on your wrist for what you did. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “The police station is closer. And get your hand off my thigh,” he added the latter almost as if in afterthought.
“I thought I meant something to you,” she said, remembering to keep her voice soft. “If you take me to the police, that will finish you with me.”
He whistled a few bars of “Mack the Knife,” turned into Patrick Street and headed for the police station. “What did you think you meant to me? There are a lot of stupid men in this world, babe, but I doubt many of them will stick their head in the fire just to get a chance to bang a woman. Too many willing women for that. Anyhow, I can get you anytime we’re alone, and you know it.”
He honked the horn. “You’re not getting out?” she asked him.
To her disgust, he honked it again. “If I do, you’ll make a run for it. We’ll sit here till an officer comes out.”
After a few minutes, an officer sauntered out of the station and walked over to the driver’s side of the van. “What’cha know, Hal? What’s up?” the officer said, and she slumped into the seat figuring that she couldn’t expect preferential treatment from a policeman who greeted Hal as a buddy. She listened while Hal told the policeman what she’d done and of his personal concern.
“You’re in the clear, it looks to me,” the officer said, “but I’d better ring up Reverend Graham and see if he wants to press charges.” The policeman went back into the station, and when he returned in less than five minutes carrying a pair of handcuffs, she groaned in defeat.
He walked to the front passenger’s door, and Hal unlocked it and rolled down the window. “Your daddy said I should handcuff you and lock you up till he gets here. He’s gotta conduct vespers prayers and, after that, evening church service. He said he’s tempted to let you stay in jail overnight. Hop out, unless you want me to take you out.”
When she didn’t move, he said, “Try any tricks with me, lady, and you’ll be just another prisoner. I’ll drag you out.”
She stared down at him, angry and getting angrier. “You wouldn’t dare.”
“Don’t give him a reason to manhandle you, babe,” Hal said. “I am definitely not tussling with no cops.”
She crossed her left leg over her right one, letting her narrow skirt rise up as she did so, and stepped out of the van. A grin spread over the officer’s face, and she thought he might laugh.
“Turn around, and put your hands behind you. Both of ’em.” He locked the handcuffs on her wrists and called out to Hal, “Be seeing you, man.”
“How can you do this to me? I haven’t done anything wrong,” she said to the policeman. “Hal’s gone. Can’t you take these things off me? My father’s just being tough; he doesn’t want his daughter locked up in jail.” She walked closer to him, touching his body with her own. “Please!”
His laugh irritated her. “Look me up you after you get out of this mess you got yourself into, but if you try any of that sex appeal on me while you’re in custody, I’ll report it, and you’ll get some time for sure.”
She stared at him. “What’s this country coming to? Men aren’t men anymore.”
“Ten years from now, I hope to be precinct captain; in the meantime, if my sister breaks the law, I’ll lock her up. Get my drift?”
“Got anything interesting to read?” she asked the officer when he slammed the cell door.
“No, and we don’t have a radio, television, or CD player for your comfort, either.” He walked off, and she sat on the bunk and looked around. She didn’t see anything that she could throw. The veins in her neck felt as if they would burst, and her belly seemed to twist itself into a reptile-like coil. Hours passed and no one offered her food or anything to drink. At a quarter of twelve, the same officer opened the door of her cell.
“You’re free to leave, Miss Graham.”
Her father had never seemed so big, so formidable or so angry as when she walked into the waiting room and saw him standing with legs apart and his knotted fists on his hips. His eyes narrowed to barely slits.
“I should have let you stay here overnight, but your mother cried and begged until I agreed to come down here and get you out. You ransacked that house and left it in total disarray. Did you find the brooch?”
“No, sir.”
“I’m ashamed of you, Kellie. I never imagined that you would stoop to breaking into my house. I want you to repair the damage to the window, sweep up that glass and debris from the kitchen floor, and put everything in that house the way you found it. I want every bit of it done by next Saturday.”
“But I have to work during the week, Daddy.”
“Do it at night.”
Seeing her chance to search the house thoroughly and at her leisure, she added, “And I don’t have a key. If you give me your key, I can get started on the clean-up tomorrow after work.”
Marshall got into the car and switched on the motor. “Kellie, I never before thought you regarded me as a fool. I will be with you every second that you’re straightening up that house. If you don’t have everything done by Saturday, I’ll give the house to Lacette. You have my word on—”
“You can’t do that. She already got more from Gramma than I did.”
“Mama Carrie treated you and Lacette equally, but it’s in your head that you should have that brooch just because you always wanted it. Well, you’re going to start behaving like an adult. If I ever catch you with that brooch, you’ll spend more than one night in jail, and that house will go to Lacette; not when I die, but now.”
He parked in front of the parsonage. “I should have taken you in hand long ago, Kellie, and if it isn’t too late, I’m starting today.”
He leaned over, kissed her cheek and, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, she rubbed the place his lips touched and looked at her hand. “What time tomorrow do I start working at Gramma’s house?”
“I’ll pick you up at work, and from now on, try to remember that it’s not Mama Carrie’s house, but my house. See you at four-thirty tomorrow.”
She walked into the parsonage and let the door slam shut behind her. Her mother could sleep through a hurricane; if she awakened Lacette, she didn’t care, because she needed to lash out at somebody. She got a glass of milk, a fried chicken leg and three biscuits, climbed the stairs to her room and closed the door. Her father considered himself smart, but she meant to outfox him, and he would never know she did it.