Blind Dates Can Be Murder (20 page)

“Oh, yeah, we’ll definitely get to the hair. But first we’ve got to find you something new to wear. Trust me on this, Danny. It’s time to get gorgeous.”

“I thought I already was gorgeous,” he teased.

“Yeah, you’re like a chunk of marble in front of Michaelangelo.”

“Meaning…”

“Meaning, the beauty’s in there somewhere. Now we’ve just got to start hacking away until we get to it.”

10

B
y the time the mall closed, Danny was the proud owner of four new outfits, all handpicked by his sister Diana. According to her, the slacks, shirt, and tie would be perfect for church in the morning, so that when Jo sat in the pew and watched him up front playing drums in the praise band, she couldn’t help but think how handsome he looked. Danny never wore a tie, but when he had seen himself in the mirror of the dressing room, he had to admit the look was pretty sharp.

For after church, when they went on their hike, he would wear the khaki multipocket shorts and the navy polo shirt. The other two outfits were for the days that followed, when they would have their first actual dates.

Whipping out his credit card at checkout time had been rather painful, but Danny was banking on the fact that ten thousand dollars would be coming his way very soon. He hated to count his chickens before they hatched, but this was important enough to take that chance.

“I usually hate shopping, but that wasn’t so bad,” he said as they walked to the car, a bag in each of his hands. “You sure you don’t mind giving me a quick haircut tonight?”

“Oh, trust me, honey,” Diana replied, pressing the remote that would unlock her minivan. “We’re just getting started. Haircut, nails, facial…you must be perfect for her.”

“Come on,” he cried, tossing the bags into the back of the van. “That’s not necessary. Jo will love me just as I am.”

“Of course. But you’ve got to think about the type of person
she
is, Danny. Neat, precise, exact. If you want things to go smoothly right off the bat, it won’t hurt you to clean up your act a little.”

They got into the van. As she started it, Danny wasn’t sure whether to feel hurt or enlightened. He thought suddenly of Brock Dentyne, who had been so suave and debonair at Tenderloin Town despite getting bashed on the head and stashed in a trunk. Brock had barely had a hair out of place—and his slacks had been neatly pressed and creased. Danny had to admit that that was probably a part of what appealed to Jo about the guy.

He sighed loudly.

“You’re sure all this trouble is worth it?”

“Hey,” his sister replied, pulling out onto the main road, “this is Jo Tulip we’re talking about. You know she’s worth it.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

“Besides,” she added, “just be grateful I’m not making you have anything waxed.”

The Lemon Pickers were on a roll. Tonight’s lesson was about self-image and how rejection by a suitor couldn’t be taken personally. It seemed to be striking a chord with almost everyone in the room.

“Get your sense of self-worth from God, from your friends, and from your family,” Denise said to the circle of women. “But don’t get it from the men you date. If they reject you, it doesn’t mean you’re less of a person or that you’re worthy of rejection. It just means it didn’t work out with them. So you move on and try again.”

“But rejection hurts!” Tiffany cried. “I’d rather not go out at all than date someone and get tossed.”

Jo nibbled on a lemon bar and listened to the conversation. Rejection tended to be a hot-button issue for her as well, though she wasn’t really speaking up about it. In her dating history, the men who made the most progress with her were the ones who avidly pursued her. If a man sat back and waited for her to make a move, he was going to be waiting a long time. She simply wasn’t willing to go there. The fear of rejection was too great.

“Look at it like this,” Denise said, her eyes sweeping the room. “Are you going to give some
guy
the power to decide for you whether you are loveable or likeable or desirable? Of course not. You know you’re worthy of finding someone really special. Rejection simply means he wasn’t that someone. You lick your wounds, you laugh about it, and you move on. That’s why having a group like this is important. Get your validation from your friends, from the other people in your life, but not from the men you’re dating or hope to date. They don’t have that right.”

The women debated that concept for a while, and she had to admit that it made it lot of sense. When Bradford had abandoned her at the altar, Jo had spent too much time wondering what was wrong with
her
. It took a while for her to expand her thinking and begin to wonder what was wrong with him. He was the one who walked out!

Jo never received any clear answers on the whole mess. She and Bradford had spoken only once since that awful wedding day, about a week after, when he called to say that he wanted to sit down, face-to-face, and explain what had gone wrong. She had shown up at the appointed place and time for that talk, but he had never come. Once again, he had stood her up. Jo hadn’t accepted a single phone call from him after that, and eventually he had quit calling and quit trying to explain. It was just as well. Jo didn’t think there ever could be an explanation for letting a woman get all the way to “I do” and then blurt out, as Bradford had, “I’m sorry, but I don’t!”

Denise waved her hand, trying to get everyone’s attention. The conversation was nearly out of hand, as it had been all night.

“Now I do have one qualifier here,” she said, raising her voice to be heard above the din. “And that is this: If you keep getting rejected and you keep getting turned down over and over again, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to take stock and consider whether you do need to make some changes.”

“Like not being too clingy,” said one woman.

“Or too demanding,” added another.

“Or having a faulty man-picking meter,” said Jo.

“That’s right,” Denise agreed. “But ask your loved ones their opinion on the matter. Follow what God says in Proverb 15:7: ‘The lips of the wise spread knowledge; not so the hearts of fools.’ Don’t listen to the fools, girlfriends. Are we clear on this?”

Jo pictured Bradford again, letting herself feel again the sting of his rejection. Yes, she was clear on this. She didn’t need the love of a man to prove her worth.

Thank You, Jesus
, she prayed silently,
that I’ve learned so much from this Bible study
.

She was ready to find the right Mr. Right.

Lettie couldn’t sleep.

It wasn’t just the rattle of the fan under the window or the scratchy sheets or the hard, crinkly bed in her room at the Palace. It was her brain, which simply wouldn’t wind down and shut off.

She kept thinking of Melissa, going back to a time when they were young, maybe eight and ten at the most. Melissa had been reading
Two on an Island
, an old paperback book from the library, and she was obsessed with the notion of being stranded on a deserted island.

“Wouldn’t that be something, Lettie?” she had rhapsodized. “Wouldn’t we have a heck of a time?”

Lettie had agreed that the idea sounded wonderful: sun, sand, all the coconuts they could want, and no stepfather around to beat them.

Lettie was reading well beyond her grade level at that point, and so she began to check out other island-related books and read them aloud to her little sister:
Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, The Sailor’s Guide to Island Survival
. Down the street from their house was an empty lot, overgrown with weeds and dotted with trash, and at the center of the lot was a cement foundation for a house that was long gone. Soon, that lot became the focus of their afternoons. They would play there often and long, pretending the foundation was an island and everything around them was water.

One night, when they were reading yet another island-survival guide, they happened upon a page of internationally recognized ground-to-air signals. They memorized them all and then spent their afternoons spelling out codes on their cement island, using the trash they collected from among the weeds. Melissa’s favorites were a giant square, which meant “Need map and compass,” and a giant triangle, which indicated “Safe to land here.” Lettie preferred the more obscure giant letter
W
, which indicated “Send engineer.” Often they would set up their signals and then lie there next to them in the warm sun for hours, wishing a rescue plane would fly overhead and recognize what they had done.

Sometimes, when she was particularly bruised and sore, Lettie would slip out of pretend mode and pray, for real, that a helicopter might come. It would see them there and send down a basket.

Together, they would be whisked into the sky, rescued from their little cement island for real.

Now, lying in the darkness and remembering, Lettie blinked, sending two hot tears down the sides of her face and into her ears. No helicopter had ever come for them. At the age of 16, Lettie had run away with Chuck, going from one bad situation to another.

Melissa had fared even worse, if that were possible. Left alone there to bear the brunt of their stepfather’s rage and their mother’s indifference, she had finally run away too, less than a year later. She ended up in New York, under the control of a pimp and forced into prostitution. Chuck didn’t allow Lettie to communicate with her sister, but one time when he had passed out, she managed to get to a pay phone, call her mother, and get a number for Melissa. She was able to reach her, and the two sisters had talked for a full ten minutes, crying together about their fates, promising that somehow, someway, one of them would make it out and rescue the other.

Once Chuck was sent to prison, Lettie knew she was free to do the rescuing. Unfortunately, by then Melissa was nowhere to be found. According to their mother, the police said that her pimp had been killed in a drive-by shooting, which had given Melissa the opportunity to skip town. Lettie went to New York City then and tried to find her, but word on the street was that Melissa had fled the country, and it was doubtful she’d ever return.

That news was nearly Lettie’s undoing. With her husband in prison and her sister far away, Lettie had contemplated suicide. Why go on living when the one person she was living for had disappeared?

Then one day she brought in the mail, and tucked between her electric bill and an auto parts mail-order catalog was the catalyst that changed everything, the one thing that sent her to Mickey to get the job, the one thing that drove her to make money and send it on ahead and lay down her own careful plans for leaving the country.

It was a postcard, a cheap, dime-store postcard featuring a colorful scene of “La Fiesta del Pollo” and postmarked Tegucigalpa, Honduras. The card featured only a post office box address and, under that, two letters, handwritten and very large, that meant nothing to anyone else but everything in the world to Lettie:
LL
, the internationally recognized ground-to-air signal for “All is well.”