Weezie was shaking and milky-pale by the time she got to James’s car. Jethro stuck his head out the window and barked enthusiastically at the sight of her, but Weezie gave him only a halfhearted nod.
It worried James, seeing Weezie’s moods shift like this. Moments earlier, she’d gleefully pounced at the opportunity to give Caroline a small measure of misery. Now she looked positively ill. Goddamn Talmadge Evans III.
“There was certainly a lot of old stuff in that house,” he said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “Good loot—right?” To him the place looked like a hideous moldering pile of garbage, but then, as Weezie often reminded him, he didn’t know shit from shinola when it came to that kind of thing.
“It’s fabulous,” Weezie said, picking at a bit of lace on the hem of the odd, drooping dress she was wearing. “Just in those three rooms I saw, there was enough for ten estate sales.”
James started the car and busied himself with sliding a disk into the CD player. He turned around and asked, politely, for Jethro to please take his tongue out of James’s ear.
The CD was the latest Clancy Brothers release. James sighed. It was a gift from one of his Florida parishioners.
Mrs. Finley had bought him a box of CDs for his new car; the Clancy Brothers, the Irish Rovers, like that. James had been enthusiastic about the gift at first; but now he thought he’d go mad if he ever again heard a bagpipe or a Celtic harp. It was terribly clangy, Irish music. He wished he had some Trisha Yearwood or Garth Brooks. Simple stuff about pickup trucks and lying and cheating and drinking.
Instead, he had the Yancy Brothers yammering away about some dreamy-eyed girl with a ribbon in her hair.
“I hate it here,” Weezie said suddenly.
They were bumping along down the oyster-shell driveway, past some tabby ruins covered with the foamy green of resurrection ferns.
“Since when?” James said, shocked.
“I do,” Weezie insisted. “Savannah sucks. It’s always hot. The gnats drive me insane. The marsh stinks like dead fish. The people are so self-satisfied, it makes me want to puke. People in this town like to think they’re so sophisticated. That Paris of the South stuff. What a load of crap! Nobody around here knows a damn thing about anything that really matters, like art or literature or music.”
She ripped at the hem of the dress, and a strip of lace and a long patch of fabric came away in her hand. She threw the clump of fabric on the floor. “These assholes keep screwing it up. They tear down anything that’s good or beautiful.”
“They pave paradise and put in a parking lot,” James said.
“What?” Weezie looked at him oddly.
“Joni Mitchell,” James said, pleased at being able to surprise her. He’d always loved radical folksingers, especially the ones with ratty blue jeans and greasy hair who seethed with the injustice of life. Maybe it was the Jesuit in him.
He glanced over at Weezie. “Gerry Blankenship was half in the bag today. He reeked of gin. Drunk talk. Anyway, they won’t have to tear down Beaulieu, you know. It’ll fall down all by itself, any day now.”
“Maybe.” Weezie kept seeing Caroline as she stood in front of the windows in the parlor at Beaulieu, looking out to the marsh and the river beyond. Like she owned the place. One more home to wreck.
“I could make a lot of money off that estate sale,” Weezie told James. “Get the good stuff and get out while the getting’s good.”
“Get out? What’s that supposed to mean?” James asked, pulling the Mercedes alongside Weezie’s rusted turquoise truck.
“Fuck ’em all,” Weezie said. “Ticktock, James. What’s that Bible verse, about a time to every purpose? Maybe all the stuff that’s happening to me means it’s time to get out. Go to a real town. Atlanta. Maybe San Francisco. I’ve never been out west. Hell, New York. Why not? I could open my own shop. Be a real dealer. No more dabbling. I just need to make one good killing at that sale, and then it’ll be my time.”
“Ecclesiastes,” James said. “Originally, of course. Although the Byrds did a nice version too.”