LUCY TUGGED SELF-CONSCIOUSLY at her pale green cardigan as she walked into the Dirty Deer that weekend, Marianne McCready Dawson trailing behind her. Frankie waved at them from a booth in the corner, beckoning them closer. Lucy was seized with an illogical desire to run like hell and leave a Lucy-shaped hole in the smoke-stained wood paneling. She hadn’t spent a lot of time in the Dirty Deer before she’d left town, since she hadn’t been old enough to legally enter the bar. Any partying she’d done in high school was out on Make-Out Island with her classmates, and that was on the rare occasions when she’d slipped her father’s careful watch.
For the first time in years, Lucy was sure she was inappropriately dressed for an occasion, even if it was just drinks at the local dive with Duffy’s relatives. While they’d never enjoyed the same closeness Lucy shared with Duffy, Marianne and Lucy had been good friends in high school. So when Marianne had called to invite her for a girls’ night out, because her husband, Carl, “owed her one,” Lucy had accepted based on nostalgia alone.
Lucy didn’t exactly have “girls’ night” clothes in her pared-down wardrobe. After Wayne died, she’d donated her cute little suits and designer dresses to a women’s shelter. All she had left were jeans, sensible cardigans, and the odd church dress, which didn’t really fit in with the bar’s “eclectic neon beer sign” decor.
Then again, Frankie was wearing a dress printed with cats firing laser guns at each other, with thick-soled sneakers and a cardigan in an eye-melting shade of electric purple. While she looked like the love child of Wednesday Addams and Rainbow Dash, Frankie McCready had always been precociously smart and determined to the point of being terrifying. Lucy was not at all surprised to hear that Frankie had taken on the mantle of family undertaker. She was the only one tough enough for the job.
“I still don’t know how I feel about this,” Lucy muttered to Marianne, who was making a “two” with her fingers at Sierra, the Deer’s longtime waitress, and then pointing at Frankie’s empty glass. “Are you sure Carl is up to watching Sam, along with your boys? I mean, Nate mentioned something about a gummy worm stash and Sam can get downright unmanageable if he gets too much corn syrup in him—”
“It’ll be fine,” Marianne promised. “Every year or so, Carl makes noises about maybe wanting another baby, because he thinks I look really hot pregnant and he has this fantasy about raising our own baseball team. And nights like this are a good reminder for him of why parents should not let their children outnumber them.”
“He thinks you look hot pregnant?”
“My pregnancy boobs were a wonder of nature,” Marianne said, shrugging.
Lucy frowned. Wayne hadn’t thought much of her pregnancy, other than that it was a major inconvenience for him to have to take paternity leave. He’d been gung ho about it when he found out they were expecting a boy, but he’d still been vaguely annoyed by her snoring, the nausea, her unwillingness to accompany him to golf tournaments and charity galas when she was so big she hadn’t seen her feet in months.
Then again, Marianne had married Carl Dawson, a dangerous-looking mechanic from one of the more tragic redneck families in town, who possessed a secret, gooey marshmallow center that made him one of the sweetest men on the planet. They’d been desperately in love in high school, and got married soon after Marianne graduated college. But somehow, they seemed even more in love than they’d been all those years ago. Carl looked at Marianne as if she were personally responsible for the creation of beer, pandas, and Netflix. And Marianne, for all her boob-related anti-baby bluster, had absolute faith in Carl, his affections, and his ability to parent their sons. And Lucy tried not to let the jealousy turn her stomach. Body-cramping envy was probably something that nice people didn’t feel toward their friends.
“We’re going to have fun,” Frankie promised as they slid into a booth. “A couple of drinks, some food, we’ll catch up.
“And Margot would have loved to come out, but she’s got this thing about not showing up at a bar when she’s pregnant.” Frankie sighed.
“Damned unreasonable of her,” Lucy said with a shake of her head. “So, how’s that been, having your long-lost cousin show up after all these years? Your family’s always seemed so tight-knit. I would be intimidated as hell trying to walk into that. Duffy mentioned that there have been a lot of changes.”
“So, you’ve been talking to my brother,” Marianne said, waggling her eyebrows.
“Yes, because your brother is my friend. And friends talk.”
Marianne rolled her eyes, grumbling as Sierra delivered their drinks with a smile and a “We missed you, Lucy.” Marianne had ordered two Georgia Peaches: a mix of moonshine, peach schnapps, and a few other ingredients sure to cause Lucy some regret in the morning.
Marianne had been trying to match Duffy up with Lucy since they were kids, going so far as to call Lucy the night before Duffy’s courthouse wedding to Lana and beg Lucy to keep this “huge mistake” from happening to her brother. Lucy had respected Duffy’s determination to do right by Lana, even if it made him miserable in the process. And she’d been too frightened of losing Duffy’s friendship to speak out against the woman he was marrying, even if she thought Lana was a devil’s helping of bad news. So she’d left the antinuptial mission to Marianne and Donna, and couldn’t help but feel she’d failed her friend just a little bit.
“You know, I think my life is complicated enough without thinking about any man that way. Besides, I have a man in my life—”
Marianne lifted her hand to stop Lucy midsentence. “Oh, honey, no. Don’t say your son is the man in your life. That makes me sad for you.”
“Fine,” Lucy shot back. “Tell me more about Margot.”
“Well, getting her to accept her place in the family took some work, I’m not going to lie. Margot was a tad prickly, and some of us—not saying who, ahem, Frankie—may have tried a little too hard to fold her right into the family. But eventually it evened out. She relaxed a lot. We all learned about the importance of boundaries. Margot’s one of us now, she just has some very polished airs about her.”
“How’s Stan taking the whole unwed-pregnant-daughter thing?”
“Actually, I think he’s so happy that Margot is letting him be involved in her life and this pregnancy, he doesn’t care if she marries Kyle or not. Kyle’s a little touchy about it, but Margot’s got a pretty wide streak of the McCready stubbornness in her, so I don’t think that’s something he can rush her on.”
“Sounds like a sensible guy,” Lucy noted.
“Oh, he’s incredibly sensible—principal of the elementary school, a pillar of the community, which is why tongues are wagging so hard about him getting caught with his hands in the premarital cookie jar. The entire PTA is scandalized. No one even remembers how badly I screwed up the wrapping paper fund-raiser anymore.”
“Well, it’s good for them, gives them something to talk about besides their own lives,” Lucy said. “I’m sure my name’s been dropped at the Rise and Shine more than once over the last few weeks.”
“Mostly among the older set,” Frankie assured her. “Evie’s all stirred up about you moving back to town and not immediately handing your son over for her to raise, because you’re just so distraught and unable to function.”
Lucy pursed her lips. “I think I’m functional.”
Marianne frowned. “Well, when she tells it, you’re prostrate with grief and barely able to get out of bed. You just don’t have the strength of character that she does to power through your despair like she has.”
“At Wayne’s funeral, she told me I was a cold, greedy woman who never appreciated the roof her son put over my head while he was working himself to death,” Lucy muttered into her drink.
“Well, you know Evie. She likes to play to her audience when she’s spinning a yarn.”
“That is true,” Lucy agreed. “I try to remember what she’s lost and how I would feel if it was Sam, but she only seems able to express her grief through working my last damn nerve.”
“So how are you holding up?” Marianne asked as Sierra delivered a plate full of “possum eggs”—deep-fried, cheese-stuffed potato skins—to the table. When Lucy’s eyebrow arched, she added, “I’ve been coming here more often lately since I started spending more time with Frankie and Margot. I don’t even have to order anymore.”
“Well, I am really tired of people asking how I’m holding up,” Lucy told her, picking at a potato skin. “I’m tired of people walking up to me at the grocery store and giving me the ‘aw, hon’ face.”
“What?”
Lucy tilted her head and quirked her lips into a sympathetic pout. “Aw, hon.”
“I would say I’m sorry, but as your friend, you know my lying face and you would know I didn’t mean it,” Marianne said, pointing at her face. “I’m interested and I’m worried. And I love you, so suck it up and spill.”
“Honestly, I’m probably better than I should be. I mean, rumors aside, I can get out of bed every day, and be a parent and try to get my business going. I’m very lucky that Wayne left us enough money to start over here, even if it’s with less than we had in Dallas.”
“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Marianne said.
“But you two were struggling toward the end, and you feel conflicted and guilty as hell?” Frankie supplied.
Lucy’s jaw dropped. “How in the hell did you know we were struggling?”
“She’s just freaky that way,” Marianne intoned, taking a large bite of potato skin.
Frankie smiled, though it was a little sad around the edges. “You work on enough bodies, you notice things.” She chin-pointed toward Lucy’s hands. “Like you haven’t worn your wedding ring in a long damn time. You don’t even have that pale worn circle thing on your finger and most people have that for at least a few months after they take a longtime ring off. So you either stopped wearing your ring before Wayne died, or you did it the moment he was buried, which isn’t something most people do when they’re grieving for their spouse in what should have been their years of peak marital happiness.”
Lucy sighed. “I don’t remember you being this scary as a kid.”
“She’s developed a lot of terrifying life skills,” Marianne said.
Lucy lowered her voice so no one at the nearby tables could hear her, because this was Lake Sackett and someone nearby was always listening. “Yeah, we were struggling. I don’t want to go into why while we’re out here in this very public place where anybody can hear. But we were. And now he’s gone and I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop,” Lucy said, jerking her shoulders. “From the moment the doctors told me that Wayne was gone, I’ve been waiting for this wave of crippling grief to bring me down. But every morning, I get up and do what needs to be done and . . . I’m happy? I can raise my son and live in a place where I don’t feel so lonely and disconnected. I can see people that I’ve missed for years.” She paused as Marianne raised her glass. “And I feel guilty for being happy, because what sort of sick person would be content and thriving in her new life without her recently deceased husband?”
“Someone who was unhappy with her recently deceased husband?” Frankie suggested.
“Still feels wrong, and doesn’t exactly paint me as the most sympathetic person in the world. I wish I felt more for Wayne. I wish his death hurt more. But right now, all I’m feeling is . . . hope.” Lucy blew out a long breath. “This is not the fun girls’-night-out chat I was promised.”
Marianne snorted. “Well, nothing ever seems to go quite like I plan lately. But if I can give you one piece of advice? Worry about being happy and making a life for your son now. Worry about what other people think later.”
“Also seems sensible,” Lucy conceded, taking a long drink from her glass. “But I don’t think that ‘being happy’ is going to include anyone besides my son for a long while, so please don’t put all this pressure on me about Duffy or any other eligible Lake Sackett resident with all of his teeth.”
“Why wouldn’t your happy life include someone else?” Frankie asked. “Toothless or otherwise?”
“It’s only been a few months since Wayne,” she exclaimed, suddenly lowering her voice. “It just looks tacky . . . and suspicious if I’m taking up with someone new after my husband dies in a mysterious auto-related injury at our home. Besides, I don’t know if I want to start anything like that again. I can’t drag Sam into some situation that might not work out. I can’t have men coming in and out of his life, confusing him, disappointing him.”
“Why do you assume that any relationship you get into would go badly?”
“Because clearly, I suck at picking men. Granted, I only picked the one, but I chose him for all of the wrong reasons—his looks and his potential and the person I thought he was going to be, instead of the person he showed me he was, every day. And I just kept doubling down. Oh, you have some doubts in high school? Follow him to the college he wants to attend, just because it happens to have a decent marketing program. You love him, and think he’d probably be a good husband and father, but you’re not sure? Accept his proposal and figure it all out later. Then have a baby with him! Build a life hundreds of miles from everything you know! Put your name on a bunch of loans! And when he cheats, don’t leave, that’s for quitters! It was like every time I felt any little twinge of uncertainty, my response was to dig in deeper, to prove how ‘committed’ I was. I mean, I honestly thought that I was going to have happy ever after with my high school sweetheart. What kind of idiot thinks that?”
“I thought that,” Marianne said raising her hand. “Technically, I have that. Without the cheating, though. I’m so sorry about that part.”
“Sorry, I forgot about Carl,” Lucy said.
“He is the exception to all rules,” Frankie assured her. “And a lot of people marry their high school sweethearts. Because they love them, because those people helped them learn what love was in the first place. It’s not stupid to believe in that kind of love lasting forever. Sometimes those people grow together, they change, but the heart of them stays the same and they’re happy. And other people, they change and they grow but in different directions. They want different things. They figure out that what they thought would make them happy in life doesn’t appeal all that much. It’s nobody’s fault, it just happens.”
“That was a profound and well-thought-out statement, Frances Ann,” Marianne said, raising her glass to clink against Frankie’s.
“Um, thank you, and also, suck it for sounding so surprised,” Frankie told her. “Anyway, you recognized the problem, which is the first step. I’m guessing you were in therapy when he died?”
“How can you tell that by looking at my hands?” Lucy asked.
“Eh, there’s no trick to it. You’re not the type of person who sits around dithering, wondering what the hell they’re going to do, once they realize there’s a problem,” Frankie said, smirking.
Lucy rolled her eyes. She’d forgotten how challenging it could be to socialize with multiple McCreadys. “We were in therapy for the last six months before he died. I swore Wayne to secrecy over it. I did not want Evie knowing we were ‘discussing our problems with some stranger instead of the mama who loves him.’ ”
Marianne shuddered. “It’s times like this I am grateful Carl’s mom ran away with that meat truck driver before my boys were born.”
“Count your blessings,” Lucy told her. “I would wake up in the morning and it was like this nagging ache in my chest, like I’d forgotten something, and then I would realize, ‘Oh, yeah, your life is a lie. You don’t love your husband anymore because he cheats on you regularly. You abandoned your parents. You don’t have any real friends. You’re far away from everything you know and you don’t have any clue what to change or how to make it better.’ And Wayne just couldn’t figure out why I wouldn’t get over ‘my issues’ and be happy. I thought about leaving, but the truth was, I knew I wouldn’t be able to afford the lawyers Wayne could, and there was a good chance I’d lose my son. I didn’t want Evie or the nannies Wayne hired to raise Sam, so I stayed. And there was a part of me that just didn’t want to admit how big of a mistake I’d made.”
“The impulse to avoid the ‘I told you so’ is strong,” Frankie said. “Why do you think Duffy stayed married to Lana for so long?”
“Speak of the devil,” Frankie grumbled.
“Aw, come on.” Marianne sighed. Lucy followed her line of sight to a thin woman in ripped jeans and a low-cut black tank top. Her dark-blond hair was teased high and her green eyes were heavily lined. Lucy could spot the bright red lipstick bleeding into lines around her mouth from fifteen feet away. Lana was already laughing as she entered the room, like she was the life of the party, bringing the good times with her.
“My former sister-in-law, ladies and gentlemen.” Marianne sighed as the woman strutted toward the bar and hollered for someone to “Get me a damn drink!”
Lucy squinted across the room at the sort of woman who would have been turned away from her club in Texas based on her shoe choice alone. “That’s Lana?”
Marianne nodded. Lucy’s chin retreated back into her neck. “But she looks . . .”
“Rode enthusiastically and put up wet?” Marianne griped. “Yeah, well, hard drinking, hard living, and avoiding sunscreen will do that to you.”
Lucy watched as Duffy’s former wife stumbled around the bar from table to table, laughing and screeching and snuggling up to any man whose date didn’t move fast enough to stop her. Lucy’s mouth dropped open. Lana had been a dedicated flirt in high school, but she’d settled down after she’d taken up with Duffy. Lucy hadn’t been thrilled that her best friend had started dating her middle school tormentor, but considering the crap Wayne had put Duffy through, she figured she didn’t have a lot of room to talk.
Lucy couldn’t believe she’d spent so many years being intimidated by this woman. Teenage Lana hadn’t just been mean and sneaky, she’d been unpredictable. She’d poked and prodded in an increasingly aggravating crescendo of bullying until her targets finally snapped back, but you never knew if she’d punch you in the mouth for “disrespecting” her or go running to the nearest teacher with tears in her eyes. Lucy liked to keep that sort of volatility at a distance, so she’d avoided Lana as much as possible, especially since Lucy seemed to enrage Lana just by existing. There were times that Lucy suspected that Lana went after Duffy like a McCready-seeking missile because, well, Duffy was Lucy’s. But then she considered how self-centered and weird that sounded and she dropped the idea for her own good.
High school Lucy probably would have slipped quietly out of the room to avoid Lana’s notice, but this Lucy had been through the social gauntlet of a Junior League Charity Ball floral committee. By comparison, Lana was small potatoes. Sure, she still seemed mean and clearly pretty explosive, but she couldn’t get Lucy’s husband fired or have her son blackballed from a good preschool. The women in her Texas social circles could have done far more damage and she’d survived them. Hell, she’d even made friends with some of them.
The shove-down-the-stairs thing was still a possibility, but Lucy made direct eye contact with Lana and smiled sweetly. Lana sneered and turned her back on Lucy, focusing her attention on getting Sierra to put her drinks on Lemm Trinkitt’s tab.
“How long has she been like this?” Lucy asked, as Lana swiped a trucker’s shot off of his table and downed it without hesitation.
“She’s always been like this,” Marianne told her. “She calmed down for a while, tried to play good little housewife for a year or two. But I guess she just wanted it too badly, if that makes sense? She wanted to be a McCready. She wanted everybody to forget she was ever a Newton. I mean, McCreadys aren’t exactly the Rockefellers, but I guess it’s better than coming from a family that’s only known for shoplifting and cheating the state out of checks. She wanted to be E.J.J.’s cherished baby-girl granddaughter. She wanted Leslie to name a special for her at the Snack Shack.”
“She wanted weekends at some fancy spa in Tennessee with ‘all of the McCready ladies,’ ” Frankie said. “And she used one of the funeral home’s credit cards to book the rooms when we made polite excuses. Can you imagine Aunt Donna . . . in a spa? With other people?”
Lucy winced. “I’m picturing a sort of hybrid between ladies’ mud wrestling and the rebellion in Spartacus if they tried to make Leslie eat three basil leaves and call it a meal.”
“Honestly, I know it sounds like we didn’t try, but we did,” Marianne swore. “She was Duffy’s wife. Even if we had our doubts about the way they started off, she was his choice and we respected that. We wanted them to make it.”
“Well, maybe not Aunt Donna,” Frankie interjected.
“No, my mom made it pretty clear she expected them to fail, but the rest of us, once they were married, we were pulling for them just because we didn’t want to see Duffy hurt,” Marianne said. “But she was just so extra all the time and it got old quick.”
“She’d get mad if Marianne and I spent time together,” Frankie murmured around a bite of cheesy potato. “She said we were intentionally trying to leave her out and hurt her feelings. My therapist would probably say she had rampaging abandonment issues out the wazoo from her father running off when she was a toddler. And her mama had a whole series of boyfriends that ran off as soon as they realized they weren’t ready for an instant family.”
“You’re in therapy? But you seem so comfortable with yourself.” Lucy paused to motion at Frankie’s colorful clothes and hair. “And all this.”
“Anxiety issues stemming from childhood illness,” Frankie said casually. “Not to mention a big helping of stunted emotional growth thanks to my loving and well-meaning drone parents.”
“Drone parents?”
“Helicopter parenting implies they’d let me get several hundred feet away from them,” Frankie said. “Which they will not. Anyway, when Eric came along and there were some . . . outbursts, I realized I needed to talk to a professional and get my shit together so I could react to things like an adult and not a pissed-off teenager.”
“It’s been really good for her,” Marianne said. “She hasn’t staged a fake zombie apocalypse in months now.”
Lucy tilted her head and stared. “Beg pardon?”
“It’s a long story,” Frankie said, waving her off. “And we’re not here to talk about me. We were talking about our ex-cousin-in-law. Lana wanted us to be her instant adoring sitcom family, complete with ‘awws’ from a captive studio audience. And when we did not comply, she went crying to Duffy over it.”
“What was he supposed to do about it?” Lucy asked.
“Hell if I know,” Marianne said. “And Duffy didn’t know, either. He just told her it would take time and that we would get to know her better eventually and everything would fall into place.”
“That’s our Duffy,” Frankie said, sighing. “A beautiful, optimistic soul . . . trapped inside a great big idiot.”
Marianne started to take exception and then shrugged and took another bite of possum egg. Around a mouthful of carbs, she said, “Then Lana tried to play us against each other. She tried to tell Tootie that Uncle Bob and Uncle Stan had plans to put her and E.J.J. in a nursing home.”
“Which Tootie knew was bullshit, because part of the reason the McCready compound exists in the first place is to keep our elders at home being smartass fonts of wisdom for as long as we can,” Frankie said. “Plus, Tootie’s already picked out a nursing home in Florida that has a casino attached and employs attractive male nurses.”
Marianne sipped her drink. “So then Lana tried to convince Aunt Leslie that Frankie had a heroin problem, otherwise she wouldn’t be so skinny and pale.”
“Which my mama knew was bullshit, because I’m high on life,” Frankie added. “And after my chemo experience, I’m pretty selective about which needles I let near me.”
“Then she tried to convince Stan that the family was about to ask him to leave the business because the stigma of his drinking problem had become too much for us,” Marianne deadpanned.
“Which Stan knew was bullshit, because the August before we’d just thrown him a big ol’ party for being fifteen years sober, and E.J.J. and Bob both told him how proud they were to run McCready’s with him,” Frankie said, the humor leaving her voice entirely. “Carl set off his name in fireworks, for Pete’s sake.”
Lucy laughed. “So she went from wannabe sitcom princess to reality show villain? And thought it was going to get her a big happy family?”
“Well, in Lana’s family, people mostly screamed when they had something to say. She didn’t think Duffy’s relatives would discuss all these ‘issues’ with each other almost immediately.”
“That must have been uncomfortable for Lana,” Lucy said, almost feeling sorry for her.
“Oh, it was downright confrontational,” Frankie said. “My mama yelled. And my mama almost never yells, but she did not appreciate somebody coming in and intentionally trying to sow trouble in her family.”
“And once Aunt Leslie stops insisting we play nice, the whole family becomes a big wall of icy politeness,” Marianne said.
Frankie added. “Lana took what you might call a ‘withdrawal of affections’ very personally and declared that our whole family was a bunch of judgmental assholes who never wanted her around in the first place.”
“To be fair, she wasn’t wrong,” Marianne said.
Frankie noted, “Yeah, but you told her flat-out that she wasn’t wrong, at Christmas, which really didn’t help.”
“I regret nothing,” Marianne declared. “And then the cheating started, and the marriage was all downhill from there. She was being party-time Lana pretty much full-time. Slept with most of Duffy’s friends, convinced herself that Paul Dabney was gonna marry her and take her to Southern Oaks to live happily ever after.”
Lucy cringed. “Yeah, Duffy mentioned something about that, but I didn’t want to ask a lot of questions.”
“Paul decided that while it was exciting to bang his friend’s wife, Lana was way less interesting after she filed divorce papers,” Frankie drawled.
“Poor Duffy.”
“Duffy was smart enough not to let her move into the cabin he’d built on McCready lands, but doesn’t seem smart enough to cut her off entirely.”
The peach schnapps and the potato skins seemed to be fighting a war in Lucy’s belly. “Is he still mixed up with her?”
Marianne shook her head. “Not for a long while now. I’m not saying there haven’t been moments where I was afraid he’d end up remarrying her in some terrible counterintuitive bid to lose out on life insurance, but I think he’s smartened up. It must have been the universe telling him that you were on your way back to him.”
“Don’t start that again.” Lucy sighed.
“You have feelings for him. Admit it.”
“I do have feelings for your brother. Friendly feelings of friendship. A friendship I refuse to mess up with some weird postwidowing rebound that will inevitably fail because I may not be ready for any sort of relationship right now. I think I just need time to be a single adult for a while. I have enough to do with Sam and the business. I don’t need to complicate things.”
“Fine,” Marianne conceded. “I’ll drop it.”
“Thank you.”
“Until you’re in a better mood and then I’ll pick it up again.”
Lucy pinched her lips together before turning to Frankie. “I have a better idea. Let’s talk about your boyfriend, the cop who’s built like Magic Mike.”
Frankie blushed as crimson as her hair. “I would, but Marianne says I can’t talk about Eric without making sex faces.”
“It’s true,” Marianne said. “It’s more than a little embarrassing. If she wasn’t dating the local sheriff there would be some danger of an arrest for public indecency.”
“I regret nothing, and other than that, no comment,” Frankie replied. “Let’s talk about the bakery instead. So about this cake Maddie Paxton ordered . . .”
Lucy sucked a bite of possum egg into her windpipe and damn near choked on it. Duffy was right, this was how bakers got reputations.