And One Last Thing... (6 page)

“Canine custody agreement?”

“Both parties want sole custody of Bobo the Pomeranian. Lacey, I can’t say that your literary aspirations are going to help us in court because some judges around here are pretty old school. But I have to tell you, I thought it took a huge pair of Spaldings. A lot of the people who come through that door are just so caught up in being a victim that they can’t see straight. It’s part of the job, but it’s pretty damned annoying. It’s refreshing to meet someone who’s not helpless. You are not what I expected.”

“You’re not what I expected either, Ms. Shackleton.” I rose and shook her hand.

“i you need anything, you call me.”

“By that, do you mean, ‘It’s eleven p.m. and I just need to talk’ or ‘It’s three am. and I need bail money’?” I asked.

Samantha grinned. “Urn, neither of those.”

“Fair enough.” I nodded.

“You’re going to be one of those ‘interesting’ clients, aren’t you?”

I arched a brow at her. “You’re just now figuring that out?”

8 • Doubly Screwed by the Fourth Estate

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It was starting to feel crowded at the old home place.

Daddy returned from his reunion a few days after Mama and he was less thrilled to have one of the baby birds back in his empty nest. Other than repeated inquiries as to whether I would need extra boxes when I moved out, he refused to discuss anything with me. If I came into a room, he left it. If I happened to catch him long enough to ask him a question, he answered it in as few syllables as possible. I’m pretty sure the only reason he ate at the same table as me was that Mama refused to serve his meals anywhere else. Daddy was smart enough to know he couldn’t survive on his own cooking.

Daddy was never what you’d call a hands-on father, but he’d never been so distant. When he was disappointed in us, his usual MO was to tell Mama and have her relay the message. Even when Emmett finally, quietly, came out to my parents, Daddy told Mama to tell my brother to be careful. And that was about it.

Daddy seemed to be employing more of a scorched earth policy these days. I think he believed if he made the situation uncomfortable enough, I would give up this whole silly divorce and go back to my own house. He was particularly irritated by the way Mama had managed to insulate me from the phone calls, the insistent visitors, Wynnie’s repeated efforts to talk some sense into me.

“You’ve got to quit coddling the girl,” I heard him grumble through their bedroom door on one of my nightly wanderings around the house. “She needs to face her own music. Personally, I don’t blame Wynnie and Jim for being pissed. Or Mike. Do you know what kind of jokes they’re making about Mike and Beebee down at the golf course? And Lacey? I just don’t understand what was going through her head when she did this. We didn’t raise her to -”

“To what?” Mama demanded. “To stand up for herself?”

“To make a damn fool out of herself,” Daddy countered. “How would you feel if somebody wrote this sort of thing about one of our kids, Deb?”

“Keep your voice down,” Mama hissed. “And our kids wouldn’t be sleazy enough to cheat.”

“Well, if Emmett does cheat, he’d better not tell Lacey about it; God knows what she’d do.”

“Walt, are you upset because you’re embarrassed or because you want her out of the house?”

“Well, she’s never going to leave if you keep stuffing her with pancakes and grilled cheese sandwiches!” he cried.

“Oh, she’s not even eating them,” Mama said. “She doesn’t eat anything. She doesn’t sleep. She just wanders around the house all night, which is why you should keep your voice down!”

I backed away from the door. I didn’t want to hear any more. I was going to have to leave the house, soon. Besides the loser factor, I couldn’t stay at my parents’ house, causing tension and problems for the two of them. There were enough failed marriages in our family.

As I watched my parents’ marriage from a newly enlightened adult perspective, I noticed little things about them I hadn’t before. Little things, like when my dad got my morn a glass of water, he ran the tap for a while, to make sure he was getting her the coldest, least faucet-tasting water possible. Mike used to just stick a glass under the tap.

My parents had that something. Something Mike and I didn’t have. I didn’t know what it was and that was what was driving me insane. I’m not going to say Mike was a total monster. I mean, there was the year that he got me an air purifier for my birthday, but only because I’d mentioned that the infomercial was interesting. I shared some blame in that. We had no connection. No dependence on each other, no real intimacy. We started dating in high school because we ran in the same circles and our parents approved. We got married because that was what you were supposed to do when you’d been dating for a while and were graduating college. It seemed like the next step and we couldn’t think of a better one.

There were things I didn’t expect, a rush of longing when I smelled Tide detergent, a scent that would forever remind me of Mike’s shirts. Not having someone to rub my cold feet against under the covers. Someone to eat my pizza crusts, which I always left behind and Mike called the “pizza bones.” But I think these were signs that I needed a roommate, not Mike. Or maybe a neutered cat.

Yes, Daddy drove Mama nuts with his constant need to be around his stupid adolescent college buddies. But reconnecting, nay, dwelling, on his past kept Daddy happy. And that made Mama happy.

She compromised, she didn’t settle.

******

I woke up the next morning to find that my car had been towed. Mike had removed my name from the title more than a year before and I just hadn’t noticed. When I called the county clerk’s office to try to order a copy of the title paperwork, I found that Mike had also managed to cut off my American Express, my Visa, and my MasterCard. I was still on the phone with MasterCard when Mama came into the kitchen wearing a bathrobe, staring in horror at the morning edition of the Singletree Gazette.

She turned the front page toward me so I could read the headline, “Scorned Local Woman Sued for Scathing E-Mail.”

“Oh… no,” I groaned, dropping the phone on its cradle.

Reporter Danny Plum, whose byline hovered over my own personal nightmare, was an industrious little bastard. He’d found the bridal portrait we’d included with our wedding announcement years before in the newspaper archives. It was front and center, just under a smaller subhead reading “Widely Forwarded Anti-Adultery Missive Sparks Divorce, Community Debate.”

Mama’s face was as white as the newsprint. “Baby, I didn’t mean it. I didn’t know he was writing it down. I’m so sorry.”

I took the paper from her shaking hands. “Unable to return to her marital home, Mrs. Terwilliger is reportedly staying with her parents, rarely leaving the house except to consult her attorney, Samantha Shackleton.” I read aloud. “When contacted by the Gazette, Mrs. Terwilliger’s mother, Deb Vernon, insisted that many wronged wives would follow in her daughter’s footsteps, ‘if they thought of it.’

“Everybody thinks Lacey’s gone crazy, but that’s not true.

She knew what she was doing,’ Mrs. Vernon said in a phone interview. ‘She was just pushed too far. And yes, she overreacted a little bit. It happens to the best of us, but I don’t want to comment. Of course, if Mike didn’t want to be publicly embarrassed, he shouldn’t have run around town chasing some hussy like his pants were on fire … but I don’t want to comment. I just wish people would mind their own business. Really, I have nothing to say.”

My mother cringed as I made a sound somewhere between a groan and call of a dying crane.

“I declined comment! Declined!” she cried. “And he’s twisting what I did say all around! I’m going to strangle that little weasel reporter!”

I picked up the ringing phone without thinking about who could be calling. Samantha’s voice, frustrated and weary, came through the receiver. “I know I didn’t specifically tell you not to have your mama defend you to the press, but I thought I made it clear that you needed to keep a low profile.”

“Mama says she declined comment,” I told her, giving Mama an exasperated look.

“Did she say ‘off the record’?” Samantha asked. “Those are the magic words. Unless she said, ‘off the record,’ anything she said, even in passing conversation while she was declining comment, can be quoted. You should know this stuff. I thought you had a background in journalism.”

“Yeah, the ethical kind, where reporters don’t screw people over when they say they’re not interested in being quoted. She didn’t mean it, Sam. Mama couldn’t stop him from writing a story, but she wasn’t trying to make it any worse. Of course, it would have been helpful if she had told me she talked to a reporter in the first place.”

“I didn’t want to upset you,” Mama whispered. “I was trying to screen your calls!”

“Why would they want to write about a divorce case in the first place?” I asked. “Don’t I have the right to privacy?”

“When Mike filed suit, this became a matter of public record. This is not good, Lacey,” Samantha said. “Mike is made to look like the injured party. And he managed to decline comment, through his lawyer, so he seems to have some sense… and tact. Your mama, as well intentioned as she may be, made it look like you don’t have any remorse and that you feel justified in what you did. You’re the harpy first wife. It’s not exactly a sympathetic role. This probably won’t improve our position in court.”

“Well, I’m not really remorseful and I do feel justified in what I did,” I said.

“That’s fine; you just shouldn’t tell anybody that!” Samantha exclaimed. “Look, this could just die down. But considering that the newsletter is supposed to be ‘widely e-mailed’ I doubt it. In case it doesn’t, and by some horrible whim of fate you manage to get the attention of other media outlets, you don’t even speak to decline comment, you just walk away. In fact, you don’t talk to anyone you don’t know, got it?”

“Lacey!” Mama called. “I think you need to come see this.”

I carried the cordless phone into the living room, where Mama stood in the window, watching a news crew setting up on our front lawn.

“What?” Samantha asked.

“Umm, a camera crew from Channel Five.” I told her.

“And Channel Seven!” Mama called.

“And Channel Seven,” I told Samantha.

Samantha groaned as Mama snapped curtains closed. And if I wasn’t mistaken, I could hear her banging her head against her desk. “Do you have somewhere you could go lay low for a while?”

“I’m thinking maybe Timbuktu,” I muttered, padding back into the kitchen.

“Funny,” she snorted. “I want you to leave town for a while and I don’t want you to talk to anybody. Keep your cell phone on. Tell your parents if they get any media calls to refer all questions to me.”

After a few more curt instructions from my lawyer, I hung up and banged my own head against the kitchen counter.

“This is just not good,” I moaned. “I’m going to end up a punch line on Jay Leno, like that Runaway Bride girl with the crazy eyes.”

Mama sighed. “You should have thought of that before airing your laundry.” When I gave her a stern look, she shrank back a little. “Too soon?”

“Samantha says I need to find a place to lay low for a while.”

“Maybe you should head up to the cabin,” she said. “Hide out there for a while. Even if someone told the reporters where you were, I doubt they’d be able to find you.”

I lifted my head, taking a Post-it note with “milk, eggs, bread” written on it with me. I swatted it off of my forehead. Why hadn’t I thought of the cabin?

Mike and I hadn’t been to the cabin or Lake Lockwood in months. Gammy Muldoon left the cabin to me just before we got married, with the understanding that Emmett could use it whenever he wanted to. But Emmett was religious about protecting his skin from damaging UV rays, so he never wanted to use it. Mike and I went up for weekends sometimes, but we’d fallen out of the habit unless it was Memorial or Labor Day.

Despite the fact that his boat-in-progress was housed there, Mike didn’t particularly enjoy our time at the cabin. It wasn’t as nice as our friends’ places and he didn’t feel like we could entertain properly there. He hated the rattling old window-unit air conditioner, the shabby, splintering porch swing, and the sprung chintz couch in the living room. One of the biggest fights we’d ever had was over Mike’s listing the house with a Realtor to gauge the market viability of the property without telling me. He argued that we never used that “run-down old shack” and it would be much smarter to sell it and put the money toward a place in Lighthouse Cove. I called the Realtor, canceled the listing, and went out and bought new outdoor furniture, a hammock, a new couch, and a laundry list of other things to fix the house up. I maxed out my Visa for that month, but at least Mike couldn’t complain about the damn couch anymore.

The good news was that along with its lack of a prestigious address or central air, Mike deeply resented the tax liability the lake house represented. So, when we got married, it stayed in my name.

Mike’s being a tightwad had finally paid off.

9 • First Impressions or Pride and Panties

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The cabin was only about an hour from Singletree, but it might as well have been an ocean away. It wasn’t much to look at, one story of aging gray cedar set two miles back from the nearest access road. The water of Lake Lockwood was always freezing and smelled faintly of fish, but some of my best childhood memories were rooted in that cabin.

My maternal grandma, Gammy Muldoon, made no apologies for designating me her favorite grandchild. She wasn’t cruel or hurtful about it. She gave thoughtful Christmas and birthday presents to Emmett. She took him out for special outings and called him her “little monkey.” But I was Gammy’s special girl… because I stood still long enough to listen to her stories.

Gammy was a pistol. She cheated viciously at rummy and drank a steady stream of daiquiris after 4:00 p.m. Many people say she’s where I get my special unladylike mastery of “bluer” language, which my Grandma Vernon never managed to cure. Gammy and Grandpa built the family cabin almost fifty years earlier, back when even the richest of the rich didn’t have air-conditioning. Going to the lake was the only escape from the sticky, humid heat. The whole house was decorated in early American Coca-Cola. Old signs, posters, glasses, plaques, everywhere you looked there were rosy-cheeked young citizens trying to sell you the most delicious caffeinated beverage known to man. It was either kitschy or within kissing distance of serial killer territory.

The closest thing to a town near Lake Lockwood was Buford, a tiny tourist trap that depended on summer traffic to keep

stores open during the year. As I drove my mom’s car through town, I had to dodge RVs and boat trailers as tourists with very little experience driving either negotiated the streets. We had a local woman, Mrs. Witter, who kept the place up for us. She came in once a month to check for storm or pest damage, gave it a good annual spring cleaning, and closed the place for the winter. It was obvious she’d given the place a thorough once over after I’d called her that afternoon. The floor was freshly scrubbed and the living room still smelled like lemon Pledge and Windex. As usual, she’d left a plate of her famous snickerdoodles for me on the table.

I carried in my suitcase, my laptop and a couple of bags of on the lam” groceries. Dropping it all on the kitchen counter, I stared at my new home. I’d never realized how small the cabin was. Or that it had a weird old refrigerator sort of smell. Or that the floor slanted slightly when you walked back toward the bedroom.

“Stop it,” I told myself sternly. “Stop it, right now. Stop finding fault and freaking out. It’s going to be -… Oh, for crap’s sake, I’ve been living alone for five minutes and I’m already talking to myself.”

Right now the only thing the cabin had going for it was that the phone wasn’t ringing off the hook. The reporters that had been calling, visiting, and just plain camping outside my parents’ house had proved themselves to be resourceful little buggers. My first order of business was to unplug the phone. I did, however, leave the cord in the outlet because I was going to need it for slower–than-Christmas dial-up internet access.

For an hour or so I managed to occupy myself with mundane little moving-in tasks, but you can only rearrange your toiletries so many times. I tucked my suitcase under the bed, threw the boxes in the burn barrel, and fixed a turkey sandwich, which I couldn’t eat. I just stared at the plate until the edges of the meat got sort of dry and crusty. I threw it out, dropped onto the couch, and rubbed at my chest, where my stomach acid rose with threatening velocity.

I had no idea what to do. Even when I “stayed at home” before, I had a daily to-do list. I had lists of lists. Grocery shopping. Committee meetings. Hair appointments. Yoga classes. Picking up dry cleaning. Planning dinners for friends. Waiting at home for the carpet shampooers, the exterminator. Writing endless thank-you notes to people I barely knew, waxing poetic about their participation in the Junior League Fall Festival or their donation to the Ladies Auxiliary Golf Tournament. My hand could practically write, “Thank you so much for your generous contribution” on autopilot.

What would I do all day? What would keep my racing mind occupied?

I didn’t even have cable. My only TV options were videotapes that had been at the cabin since my grandmother owned the place. She refused to watch movies made after 1950, so her collection was comprised of black-and-white movies featuring actresses she called “broads” in the fondest manner. When I was little, I would come up for special weekends and she would French braid my hair and lecture me about how Joan Crawford was considered a free-spirited flapper before she harnessed the power of her eyebrows. When I theorized that dear old Joan and Bette’s shoulder pads were like substitute testicles, she nearly wept with pride.

My grandmother would have been ashamed by what I’d become. If she were alive, she would have watched me cry for about two minutes, slapped some sense into me, and told me to show some backbone. I was a Muldoon, damn it. And Muldoons didn’t just roll over when someone kicked them. We stood our ground. We fought back. And we stole your good liquor on the way out the door.

Well, that was probably just Gammy.

Sighing, I picked up Gammy’s favorite, The Women. Somehow, it felt appropriate - a movie about infidelity, divorce, and vindication where not a single male character was shown. Perfectly in keeping with my new “no penis policy.” I pulled the worn purple quilt from the bed, snuggled up on the sofa, and let myself get swept away to a world where everybody is beautifully lit and has blistering retorts at the ready.

******

My movie marathon didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. I forgot at the end of The Women, Mary throws away her pride and goes back to her husband. It didn’t exactly put me in a drowsy place. I ended up watching a few movies where Rex Harrison pretended to sing and John Barrymore pretended to be sober. I wrapped up with Rebecca, a movie about a first wife who was such a vicious bitch that her mere memory eventually drove everyone around her kind of nuts.

I found that message a little more cheerful, but I was still awake at 5:00 a.m. and not sleepy in the slightest.

I hadn’t been awake to see the sunrise in years, so I decided to go out to the front porch and enjoy it. I settled into an old cane rocker with some juice and propped my feet on the porch railing. I loved the quiet time at the lake in the mornings, before the birds started chirping or the boaters and the jet Skiers started their wake wars. The water reflected a bright coppery light that made you feel cleaner and somehow healthier and more virtuous just for being outside in it. Even the gentle lapping of the water seemed muted and kinder.

I might have worried about the fact that I was wearing just an old Wildcats T-shirt, panties, and a surprisingly chipper expression. But the only cabin within sight was the old McGee place, about fifty yards down the shore.

The McGees had been friends of my family for generations. They were sweet people who co-hosted decades of Fourth of July barbecues with my grandparents. But the tradition had died with Gammy Muldoon. My parents preferred entertaining at their house and I hadn’t quite graduated to hosting family holidays yet. I was still doing “hostess training wheel” events like baby showers and bridal teas. Besides, Harold McGee was getting older and no one had opened up the house for years. I thought so right up until the front door opened and my new neighbor stepped out onto his porch.

“Gah!” I yelped, tumbling off of the chair in a panty-baring heap. If there was one thing Mama drilled into my head, it’s that you never have a second chance to make a first impression. And I had just made a first impression on my new neighbor with my ass in the air. Lovely.

Maybe I could commando-crawl into the house without him realizing I was even there. I peeked over the porch railing to see him staring at me, openly smirking. “Morning.”

Maybe not.

“Morning.” I said, standing and trying to pull my shirt down as far as possible. I stood behind the rocker, hoping it at least would cover my bare legs.

My new neighbor, hoo boy. I will admit that the only reason I own the X-Men trilogy on DVD is that I have an unnatural fixation with Hugh Jackman. And here I was living next door to Wolverine personified. Old battered jeans, black T-shirt, bare feet, a lot of dark wayward hair and sideburns that desperately needed a trim. Sharp hazel eyes and sharper cheekbones, and a wide, generous mouth set in a grim line. He raised his coffee cup in mock salute and padded back into his house.

“I usually wear pants!” I called.

******

Later that afternoon I sat at the scarred maple breakfast table, my hands on my chin, staring at a Saran-wrapped Bundt cake. It was my special Ugly Cake recipe. Chocolate cake swirled with a cream cheese and dark chocolate filling. Once baked, it was about as attractive as homemade sin. But it was a really good ice-breaker, even if it was “Sorry you started off your day being confronted by my airborne ass” ice.

And yes, I do consider cake mix and cream cheese to be essentials when I stock up on survival groceries.

Normally, baked goods wouldn’t pose such a heated internal debate, but I was absolutely mortified by the whole pantybaring welcome. That whole incident had thrown me off-kilter. I came to the lake for solitude. I didn’t particularly want to be on friendly terms with my neighbor. But here I was, having lusty feelings for the Wolverine look alike, which could not be healthy in my present emotional state.

“Oh, screw it,” I muttered, scooping the cake off the table and bounding for the door. “It’s just cake.”

I shoved the screen door open just enough to pop my new neighbor in the nose before I realized he was standing there. “Gaah!” he yelped, clutching his free hand to his face.

“Oh!” I cried. “I’m so sorry!”

“You are reedy bad at meeting people, aren’t you?” he groaned, blood trickling out from under his fingers. In his other hand, he held a key ring.

“Come in,” I said, chucking the Bundt and grabbing a handful of paper towels. I pressed the paper to his nose. “I’m so sorry.”

He tilted his head back. “I broght you some keys that Mrs. Witter left for you,” he said. “I did not expect a door to the face.”

“I’m so sorry. I usually don’t assault my neighbors. And I’m wearing pants. Look, see?” I said, indicating the very covering jeans I was wearing.

“Very nice,” he muttered, blotting at his reddened nostrils. He extended his other hand and shook mine. “Lefty Monroe.”

“Seriously?” I said. “You tell people that?”

He gave a brief flash of gleaming white teeth, then tucked them back away. It was the first time someone had smiled at me and then taken it back. Interesting. Lefty? And to think I was embarrassed that I was going to call him Wolverine.

“Lacey Terwilliger,” I said, extending my hand. I shook my head and corrected myself. “Lacey Vernon.”

“New alias or multiple personality?” he asked, arching a brow, not shaking my hand.

“Newly separated. I’m taking my maiden name back,” I said primly. I didn’t think guys with prison nicknames should throw stones. But I did just hit him in the face, so…

“Sorry,” he muttered, his eyes immediately putting up what I can only describe as “defense shields.” Well, that was just fine. No matter how good he looked in worn Levi’s, I planned to maintain and defend the no penis policy.

“I made you a Bundt cake,” I said, handing him the plate. “But now I think I owe you another one for smacking you in the face.”

“I would feel better if you kept your distance,” he admitted. “God knows what you could accomplish with a cabinet door. Mrs. Witter said she would have left the keys in the house, but that she was afraid to. She told a very long story about you managing to lock yourself out of every room in the cabin in one afternoon.”

“I was eight!” I cried. “This is the problem with continuing your acquaintance with people who have known you since your awkward adolescent phase. I’m expecting mine to be over just any day now. I’m really sorry about this morning. I didn’t know anyone else was up here. The McGees haven’t opened the house in years. I haven’t seen anyone coming and going…”

“I’m renting from the McGees. I work from home,” he said, his tone harsh and clipped. “I stay holed up for days at a time. I keep to myself.”

The message could not have been more clear if he’d put up an electric fence. Stay away. Neighbors will be shot on sight.

“Oh, that’s fine. I plan on being a quiet, keeps-to-herself, we-never-expected-to-find-those-bodies-in-the-deep-freeze type of neighbor, without the actual bodies.” I said. “That probably wasn’t reassuring, was it?”

He shook his head, turned on his heel, and walked out of the house without another word. Generally, people wait until they’ve known me for a while to have that sort of reaction. I stared after him as he made his way to his cabin, as much in bewilderment as to seize the opportunity to catch sight of his denim-clad butt. He seemed to walk with a slight limp in his left leg. And if I wasn’t mistaken, one of his cheeks was, well, fuller, than the other. It was an ass with character.

“Well, at least that wasn’t weird,” I marveled as he slammed the front door to his cabin behind him.

Of course, his being exceedingly grumpy and potentially crazy didn’t change the fact that I sort of wanted to see him naked. Fine. I really wanted to see him naked.