Rent A Husband (21 page)

He hesitates a moment at the closed door, clears his throat, runs a hand through his hair, and then, at last, raises his hand to knock.

When his knuckles strike the door is creaks open.

“Brontë?” he says.

There is no reply and he slowly pushes the door until he is presented with a view of the entire room.

The bed has been stripped, the bedding neatly folded on the mattress.

The one closet stands open, empty but for a few hangers.

Even though he understands that Brontë has gone, Billy still says her name again as he steps into the room.

And, of course, there is nobody there to answer.

Deflated, he lets the mangled arrangement of flowers fall to the floor.

How could she have left without even telling him?

Poor Billy sighs and is about to withdraw from the room when he spies something poking out from behind the dresser.

He kneels and snags the edge of a small book—a Moleskin journal—and as he stands he (naturally) bumps his head on the dresser and the book tumbles to the stripped mattress, falling open on a page of cramped, spidery, handwriting.

Billy Bigelow is the last man to invade anybody’s privacy and he’s about to close the book and take it down to the store for safekeeping in case Brontë contacts him and asks him to forward it to her, when he sees his own name, written too many times for him to ignore.

And when he lifts the journal and reads the page he understands everything.

Understands that Darcy was right about Brontë Baines’s feelings for him.

Understands that when the poor girl saw that dance in the headlights of Darcy’s car she’d—quite understandably—assumed that Billy Bigelow and Darcy Pringle were romantically involved.

Billy’s heart contracts in anguish.

How crushing it must have been for her.

He snaps the journal closed and stows it safely in the closet before hurrying from the room.

He has to find Brontë Baines.

He has to stop the only woman who has ever loved him from disappearing from his life.

64

Still dazed from that kiss—a kiss that unleashed a torrent of emotions—Darcy sits on the warm sand, gazing out at the deep azure of the ocean.

When she looks up at her ex-husband his face is inscrutable in the gathering gloom.

“What just happened, Porter?”

“We kissed.”

“I know that, but why? Why did you kiss me?”

“Because I wanted to.”

She taps the sand beside her.

“Sit, Port, let’s talk.”

He hesitates, then hitches up his suit pants and crouches.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

He shrugs. “You know . . .”

“Now don’t get
all alpha male
and incommunicative on me, Port. Not after what just happened.”

He sighs and shrugs his shoulders.

“Okay, there are some issues that I’m having to deal with.”

“Issues?”

“Yes.” He looks off over the ocean. “I accessed your MasterCard account on-line.”

“Okay . . .”

“And I saw that you’d spent a night at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”

“So?”

“Were you with Forrest Forbes?”

“I don’t see that’s any of your business.”

“Oh, I think it is when I’m the joker picking up the tab.”

“I’m confused, Porter. Is this all about money?”

“No, not entirely.”

“Okay, then spell it out for me.”

“Look, I’ve had some reversals lately. In my business.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it’s a tricky climate. A couple of deals have gone south and put a crimp in my cash flow.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Darcy says, but she’s feeling something unusual coursing through her veins.

Rage.

“Yeah, it’s been tough for me and Paige,” Porter says, “what with the baby coming.”

“I can imagine.”

Darcy clenches her fists to keep a lid on that rage.

“So, when I saw the card account, I realized we needed to make some adjustments.”

“By
we
I’m assuming you mean me and you?”

“Correct.”

“And what adjustments do you have in mind?”

“Well, I may have been a little overgenerous in our divorce settlement.”

“Really? My attorney told me
I’d
been too lenient.”

“Well, let’s not get into a fencing match here, Darce.”

“No, let’s not.”

“What I’m thinking is we scale back on the monthly alimony, just to ease me through this tough time.”

“I see.”

“And maybe we sell the house.”

“There’s no
we
when it comes to the house, Porter. You signed it over to me.”

“I did. As I said, perhaps I was overgenerous.”

“And
if
I were to sell the house, what are you proposing?”

“That we split the profits, fifty-fifty.”

Perhaps even a man as self-obsessed as Porter Pringle hasn’t entirely lost the ability to read non-verbal signals, because he stands and takes half a step back from Darcy as he says, “I don’t think that’s unreasonable.”

Breathe girl, breathe.

Darcy breathes and when she speaks her voice is ominously calm.

“So you softened me up with the whole
I miss you
thing? And figured if you put your tongue in my mouth I’d just turn to mush and be the good girl I always was and say,
oh of course, Porter, anything for you and your little baby mama
?”

“Now hold on, Darcy, Paige isn’t my baby mama. We’re married.”

The rage is finally uncorked and—amplified by the glasses of wine—it drives Darcy to her feet.

“You selfish, manipulative bastard!”

Porter shakes his head.

“Darcy, come on, don’t be unreasonable.”

“This,” she says slapping him through the face, “is me being unreasonable.”

Porter lifts a hand to his cheek, staring at her in shock.

“And this is me being downright contrary!”

Before Darcy knows what she’s doing she has swung back her leg and planted her foot fairly and squarely in Porter’s groin.

He sucks air and folds slowly to the sand.

When he tries to speak, only a soft mewl escapes his lips.

“You stay away from me, Porter. You stay
very
far away from me.”

Darcy hurries off into the dusk, rage still boiling so hot in her blood that she doesn’t see Carlotta McCourt standing like a scarecrow on a sand dune, her mouth fallen open in astonishment.

65

Brontë Baines has a talent for misery.

Just as other people can sing or dance or play the flugelhorn, she has a unique ability to extract the maximum unpleasantness from any given situation.

She comes to this conclusion as she sits at the dingy bus station, her battered suitcase at her feet.

It is not enough that she has endured the anguish of having to flee both her job and the man she loves, she’s had to sit for hours in a cramped waiting room, the air a ripe cocktail of the junk food favored by her fellow travelers, their body odor and the fecal stench that wafts from the filthy restrooms.

All that has saved her from succumbing to the vapors is a lilac-scented handkerchief held to her nose and the certainty that a bus will be arriving soon to deliver her from all this misery.

But an announcement has just warbled through the public address system, a genderless voice informing the group of travelers that the coach to Los Angeles has broken down in Goleta—wherever that may be—and there will be no bus service to the city tonight.

The voice invites the passengers to collect their refunds at the ticket office.

Brontë drags herself to her feet and, humping her suitcase, stands in line until she reaches the window where a thin man with a goiter and a parrot’s beak for a nose returns her money.

“I absolutely must get away this evening,” she says. “What am I to do?”

“Try the train station,” he says, counting out the bills and coins. “You may be in luck.”

So Brontë joins the other passengers as they trudge to the train station, which is mercifully adjacent to the bus depot—a small building that looks like Pancho Villa may have used it as a hideout during the Mexican Revolution.

The relief that she feels after being told that, indeed, there is a southbound train in a few minutes is muted when, her ticket gripped tightly in her hand, she sits on a bench on the platform only to be accosted by a raving lunatic.

A tall man with the kind of Byronic looks that under other circumstances may have brought Mr. Rochester to mind, taps her on the arm.

Brontë flinches. “Yes?” she says.

“You don’t happen to have anything to drink, do you?”

“There’s water at the drinking fountain.”

“No, I’m talking about booze. I’m told there’s none to be had until the train arrives. Scotch, brandy, hell I’d even drink potato wine right now.”

“I’m afraid I don’t drink,” she says, deeply offended.

“Pity. You look like a girl who knows her way around a bottle of hooch.”

She can only shake her head.

He leans in closer and says, “Maybe something chemical then: a Xanax or an Ambien?”

She stands. “What on earth do you take me for?”

Without waiting for a reply she grabs her suitcase and stalks off.

It is only when Brontë enters the ladies’ room and confronts a figure in the mirror with hair so untamed it appears as if birds have roosted in it, a face drawn and hollow and eyes wild and staring that she understands why the man singled her out as either a dipsomaniac or a drug fiend.

And, standing at the sink, she starts to cry and doesn’t believe she will ever, ever stop.

66

Back on the train a scant hour and a half after he arrived, Forrest heads straight for the dining car and slumps into a seat by the window, staring out at the platform, watching the weird girl he accidentally offended earlier—if she isn’t a juice head or a pill freak then he’s a monkey’s uncle—wander like a sleepwalker through a knot of youthful passengers waiting for the night train heading north to San Francisco. 

They are some kind of child musical ensemble, carrying their instruments.

Forrest identifies violin, cello and horn cases, and sees the unmistakable outline of a harp beneath a dust cover.

A woman with mauve hair fusses over kids, ticking names off a clip-board.

When a waiter appears at his elbow, Forrest says, “Bring me five double Maker’s Marks on the rocks.”

The man stares at him, blinking.

“You heard me,” Forrest says, holding up a hand with all fingers spread. “Five doubles.”

When the weird girl enters the dining car and walks toward him Forrest nods in greeting and says, “Look, I apologize about earlier. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

She rears back as if he is about to attack her and sees, “Stop following, me! Leave me alone or I’ll call the police!”

Forrest shrinks in his seat, his hands raised in surrender and the girl scuttles by.

The waiter arrives with his drinks and Forrest grabs a glass from the tray and has downed it by the time the other four touch the table.

Reaching for the next glass, Forrest says, “I think we’d better have another five.”

The jolt of neat alcohol has brought tears to Forrest’s eyes.

It must be the booze.

What else could make a sophisticated man of the world like Forrest Bennett Ford III cry?

Then, as a whistle blows and the train slowly starts to move, a sight so rich in comic potential yanks Forrest Forbes from his melancholia, and he stares out of the window, open-mouthed.

A man comes pelting down the platform, seemingly in pursuit of the train.

A man who seems blind to the youthful musicians and their instruments who block his path like skittles.

Oblivious to them until . . .

67

It’s been all about near-misses for Poor Billy Bigelow.

He arrived at the bus station to discover that the service has been cancelled and the passengers sent next door to catch a train down to Los Angeles.

The uniformed man in the ticket booth reluctantly allowed that a girl answering Brontë’s description had been amongst the disgruntled travelers he’d refunded.

“You missed her by a minute,” the ticket seller said, slamming closed the window in Billy’s face.

So Poor Billy took off for the train station, scanning the information board as he ran.

A train waited at the platform.

A train that would leave for Los Angeles in seconds.

Then Billy saw her.

Saw Brontë Baines walking slowly across the platform, dragging her suitcase behind her.

“
Brontë
!” he yelled, but his voice was lost in the piercing shriek of the whistle.

And now, from all the way up the platform, he watches as Brontë steps up into the train and disappears.

Another near-miss.

Billy sets off in a sprint, running faster then he has since he was last in a race in the fourth grade—an event so embarrassing that its memory sears him even now, and he forces it from his mind as he rockets down the platform.

“
Brontë
!”

The train is clanking and creaking and slowly starting to move.

Billy, his eyes fixed on the compartment that’s swallowed up the love of his life, picks up speed, oblivious to the thirty members of the California Children’s Orchestra standing with their musical instruments.

And this time he doesn’t miss.

Later, after the train is long gone and Billy has been released from police custody—the authorities finally convinced that he had not launched a solo attack on the youthful musicians—he is able to piece together what happened.

He barreled in the second violinist first, a slight girl with braces.

And she tumbled into the stocky cellist, whose bulky instrument collected the harpist in the jaw and she went down, taking with her the kettle drummer and his apparatus, and then down went all the others like a row of dominoes, leaving Billy lying under a pile of small screaming bodies and large instrument cases, kicking and yelling “
Brontë
!
Brontë
!” as the train clattered away into the night.