Bittersweet Creek (13 page)

Romy

I
knew I had to go into town to see Dr. Malcolm on Thursday, so I finally made that appointment to see Delilah about a haircut and getting what was left of my nails removed. I spent the rest of the week lounging around the house with Daddy for the most part, but I did manage to do some reunion work for Genie and to keep feeding my little calf. I'd decided to name her Star for the black shape on her white head. In a sort of homage to my mother, I'd go down to the little pen each morning singing to her about being a shining star.

She didn't particularly appreciate my singing, but she had taken to the bottle and trotted around the pen all fat and sassy. Tuesday morning I was especially glad for the boots Julian had given me because little Star loved to step on their steel-toed tips. Daddy had no sympathy for me, snorting that any idiot ought to know to feed the calf from the other side of the gate.

Wednesday morning I tried to call Richard, but he didn't answer. I debated for a long time and finally put on the engagement ring he'd given me. That was the day Daddy sent me for an actual litter box, litter, and copious amounts of cat food. Mercutio aka Freddy Mercury was officially a part of the indoor family. I was more than happy to be done cleaning up the makeshift sandbox. At least Mercutio knew to go to the bathroom there instead of other places. Not that it was going to be this particular idiot's problem for any longer than the next few weeks.

“What are you so chipper about?” Daddy asked when Thursday finally rolled around.

“It's a big day. I've got to go to the doctor, I've got lunch with Genie, and I finally got an appointment with Delilah.”

“Delilah, huh?”

“Yes, Delilah.”

“Gonna get her to take off those claws?”

Instinctively, I looked at my hands. I'd broken off a couple and a few more were loose. One nail in particular was still red and ragged. They looked like Frankenstein hands. “Yeah. These have to go.”

“Well, Julian's coming over to change the oil in the new truck, so you'll have to take the old one.”

“Wait. What?” The old truck was old. Very old. It was so old it had power nothing, not even a tape deck, only an AM radio, and no air-conditioning. Last time I'd checked it also had a wasps' nest hanging from the rearview mirror.

“You heard me. I didn't know all your big traveling was going to be today.” Hank picked up the paper and went back to his favorite pastime. Mercutio pounced into his lap with a guttural mew.

“Fine. I've driven it before,” I muttered as I took the keys from the hook. I should just be thankful that Daddy'd agreed to let someone else change the oil in the truck rather than attempting to do it himself. I tromped through the tall Johnson grass to the shed beside the barn to get the old truck. The grass smacked at my legs, making them itch, so I muttered under my breath the whole way. If I'd known I was taking the ancient truck, I wouldn't have bothered dressing up for town.

The old Ford hiccupped from having sat for so long, then rolled over with a steady, satisfying rumble. I put it in park and yanked the seat about a foot forward. Once in that position I could see all around me. Well, there was the matter of the missing passenger-side mirror, but I thought I could manage a trip to town without that.

This was the truck I'd learned to drive in, the one I'd driven to help Daddy haul hay from the time I was thirteen. After the little Civic I'd bought with my first teacher's paycheck and Richard's roadster, I felt like the queen of the world in the old pickup. Sitting up high had its advantages, I decided.

And Julian tried to tell you Chevy was better.
Ha! I hadn't seen his old Chevy anywhere around. In my mind I saw young Julian, arrogantly sure of himself and his truck. One night as we lay on a quilt in the back of his pickup he said, “Heck, the only thing you have to watch out for is the alternator giving out at about seventy-five thousand miles. Other than that she'll run forever with your regular maintenance.”

“Shut up and look at the stars,” I'd said.

But when I looked his way he was staring at me instead.

Pausing at the edge of the driveway, I reached over to roll down the passenger-side window. No air-conditioning, all right. Delilah was going to have a cow of her own once she saw my hair. It was bad enough it had started to frizz, but riding with the windows down would tangle it sure enough. Somehow, though, it was worth the fuss for the feel of that cooler air on my face as the wind whipped tendrils free from my ponytail.

I turned the old AM radio on and paused at a Tejano station before finding some Hank Williams. The old-school country went along perfectly with my mood, and I inhaled deeply, enjoying the smell of the freshly cut hay on the side of the road. There was something to be said for fresh air and no traffic even if that did mean the only radio station you could find was country.

The fields gave way to a few houses and then to town proper. The truck sputtered a little bit at the light I'd run not so long ago, but she decided to continue into town. I crossed Main Street and turned behind the row of stores that faced it. The backs of those buildings looked nowhere near as friendly as the fronts. Rickety porches crumbled from the walls, and cardboard and corrugated tin covered broken windows. There was a metaphor in there somewhere, but I couldn't find it. Picking apart real life wasn't as easy as finding the symbolism in literature.

A glance at my watch told me I was already three minutes late for my appointment as I headed for the nicer of the entrances. Delilah had added a sign since my last visit, a hand-painted one that read
BACK DOOR FRIENDS ARE BEST
. I walked down the long hall thinking of all the times I'd come to this salon with my mother. She'd always been one to color and perm her hair, almost religious about its upkeep. At least when she had hair to keep up, she was.

When I rounded the corner to the salon proper, the room that looked out on Main Street, I half expected to see her sitting in a chair thumbing through a magazine with her hair covered in foil folds. Instead, Delilah looked up from where she was sweeping as if I'd only been away for a few weeks, not a few years. “Afternoon, Little Hank.”

“Afternoon,” I mumbled back. Delilah had gone to school with my father and swore I was his spitting image. She looked the same as I remembered: still heavyset with bleached blond hair that was cut ever shorter, as though she was always too impatient to try something new and couldn't wait for her hair to fully grow out.

“How's your arm?” she asked as she guided me to the front portion of the salon and had me sit and soak my fingers in a bowl of acetone. I was careful to hold my injured finger out. I didn't have much of any kind of nail left on that one.

I looked over at the layered gauze that held the bandage in place. “Better.”

The only folks in the salon were a lady I didn't recognize and an elderly lady I only half recognized. Delilah motioned for the older lady to take a seat in her chair and headed back in that direction.

“Quite a rock you got on your finger there,” she said as she took out a fresh cape and draped it over her next customer. Only Delilah could manage a conversation starter as a simultaneous scolding that I hadn't led with the best piece of gossip.

“Yes, I got engaged to Richard Paris. I met him at Vandy.” My words didn't come out as brightly as I had hoped.
At least I hope I'm still engaged to Richard.

Delilah nodded as she pulled up long strands of the stranger's hair and snipped them in an even line. Pull and snip. Pull and snip. “How's ol' Hank feel about that?”

“He's getting used to the idea.”

“Gonna live in Nashville after you get married?”

I hesitated. Delilah, meanwhile, had stopped her snipping. Her beady eyes bored through me. Why the heck would she care where I lived? “I don't know yet. Probably.”

She nodded and released a breath as if relieved there was some doubt in where I'd be living. Weird. I opened my mouth to ask her a nicer version of “What's it to you?” but I couldn't find the courage, watching her rhythmically snip the hair of the lady while my nails soaked. After what felt like an eternity but couldn't have been more than thirty minutes, the front door opened with a tinkle of bells. My eyes automatically traveled in that direction.

Not Shelley Jean. The nail tech could not possibly be my cousin Shelley Jean.

“Sorry I'm late,” she said brightly as she placed her jacket on the chair behind the little white table she'd be using to work on nails.

Delilah grunted. “You and your two-hour lunches! I told Rosemary here we'd squeeze her in.”

Shelley Jean looked through me a good thirty seconds before she recognized me. “Romy! So good to see you. How's Uncle Hank?”

“Same as always. How's Aunt Bonita?”

“Still on my case wanting me to be more like you.” Her smile said she was joking. Her eyes did not.

She patted a seat on the other side of her table. “Come on over and let's see what we can do for you.”

I'd rather take up snake handling, but I had to do something about my broken nails, so I left the acetone behind and went to sit across from Shelley Jean in front of the picture window that looked out on Main Street. She picked up my nails and clucked, “Good heavens, what did those acrylics ever do to you? What have you been doing with these nails?”

Driving trucks, picking beans, fighting off dogs, carrying calves—you name it.
“A little farmwork.”

Shelley Jean wrinkled her nose as though she'd been the one to fall in a pile of cow manure earlier yesterday. “And you want to replace these?”

“No, I think I'd better get rid of them.”

“Next time you ought to try this new gel polish they've been coming out with.”

“Maybe I will.”
But I probably won't because getting dirt out from under long nails is a pain.

She tested a nail to determine they were ready and got to work. “So. I hear you went to The Fountain and sang your little song with Julian.”

I gritted my teeth. Shelley Jean had been in my business since kindergarten when she tattled to the teacher I was wearing the wrong day of the week on the back of my underwear. “Just a little karaoke.”

She chuckled. “I know that's right. I had a little run-in with Julian a few years back myself.”

I stiffened in spite of myself. The thought of Shelley Jean so much as holding hands with Julian made me want to rip out her throat. Thanks to her never-ending whispers during high school World Geography, I knew exactly where she'd been—and that was just in high school. Julian might not be my favorite person in the world, but I didn't want him to catch any communicable diseases.

Of course, it shouldn't have come as any surprise to me because Shelley Jean had dated every starter on the football team but two: the kicker and Julian. Apparently, as a cheerleader, her philosophy had been that each player needed some one-on-one encouragement.

“I guess you're totally over Julian now that you're marrying a Paris, huh? And once upon a time I thought you and Julian were going to last forever.”

I gritted my teeth. “Nothing lasts forever,” I said before I could stop the words.

Shelley Jean, almost a bleached blonde mini-me of Delilah, looked up at me with pursed lips and an arched eyebrow that was about twenty shades darker than the rest of her hair. “Well, let me tell you one thing: You dodged a bullet with Julian.”

She had finished with one hand and was starting on the other. If I could just keep my mouth closed, maybe she would finish getting the rest of my nails off and I could leave before I gave in to the urge to punch her pug nose.

My left hand curled into a fist in my lap, feeling oddly naked without the nails I'd been sporting for so long. Shelley Jean made it all the way to my middle finger on my right hand, but she couldn't hold it in anymore. She leaned across the nail table conspiratorially and whispered, “He's just awful in bed. We didn't even make it to the bed. He's impotent or something.”

“He's
what?!
” My face flamed as soon as I said it. If there was one thing in this world I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, it was that Julian McElroy was the farthest thing from impotent. Unless. . .

“Shelley Jean, you quit your gossiping and worry about what you're doing,” Delilah snapped. As her charge left the seat, she snapped out the cape as a double warning, and the sound made us both jump.

Shelley Jean cast a sideways glance at Delilah, then leaned forward again. “See, I knew you were one of those ‘good girls' who waited until marriage.”

“Good thing I did a little legwork for you a few years back. Met Julian over at The Fountain and thought he could use some cheering up. . . .”

“Only when we got back to my place, he got all freaky and made me turn out the lights. I heard him taking off his shirt, but then he just turned and walked away.”

This is a nightmare. Make it stop, make it stop.
I wanted to pull my hand away, but she had a vise grip on it.

Shelley Jean clucked as she took off my pinky nail. “Such a shame, too. That man is
built,
I'm telling you. I could feel the muscles underneath his shirt—”