Fast Women (15 page)

"How do you know Suze's maiden name?" Nell said. "So Gabe calls you 'kid' now, does he?" Riley raised his eyebrows at her. "What did you do, drug his beer?"

"We talked," Nell said, putting her chin in the air. "He saw the wisdom of my ways."

"He made you promise to change your ways or he'd sack you," Riley said.

Nell dropped her chin. "That, too. So how do you know-"

"Well, I, for one, am glad you're staying," Riley said and Nell smiled at him, feeling better than she had in months. On the rug at their feet, suffering deeply from a lack of attention, SugarPie moaned and fluttered her eyelashes at him over her long brown nose.

"Are you sure she's not abused?" Nell said. "She acts so weird."

"Biscuit," Riley said to the dog, and the eyelash flutter went into overdrive. He gave her a biscuit and she rolled over again to hold it between her paws as she crunched it into oblivion. "I'm sure." He picked up the biscuit box and said, "Come on, Marlene. Back into hiding in case somebody comes looking for you, although only God knows why anybody would."

"Marlene?" Nell said.

"I'm not calling anything SugarPie," Riley said. "That's obscene."

The dog gazed at them unblinking for a moment and then rolled to her feet, checked the carpet to make sure there were no missed crumbs, and trotted off into Riley's office, slowing only to flutter her eyelashes at him as she went by.

"I don't believe it," Nell said.

"I have this effect on a lot of women," Riley said.

"Wait a minute," Nell said. "How do you know-"

But Riley had already closed his door.

"Well, that's interesting," Nell said to nobody in particular and went back to work.

Nell walked to the grocery the next day because it was Saturday, and she didn't want to talk to Suze. If she stayed in the apartment, Suze would come over, and she wasn't allowed to tell her anything, wasn't allowed to say, "How am I going to ask Margie about her mom?" couldn't even say, "Should I ask Margie about her mom?"

She looked at the problem from all possible sides as she cruised the aisles at Big Bear, picking up yellow peppers and fresh spinach and Yukon Gold potatoes and tomatoes so ripe they glowed. The colors were amazing and she added more, vegetable pasta and papery garlic and red and white and yellow onions. Suddenly everything looked good, and she was starving.

It was only when she got to the checkout that she remembered she was walking. All that color turned out to be heavy, and two blocks from the store, she had to put the bags down just to get her fingers out of the plastic loops. While she worked her fingers, she looked around. Like most of the German Village streets, it was crowded with trees and brick houses with wrought-iron fences, but this one in particular looked familiar. When she got to the corner she realized why: It was the cross street for the lane Lynnie lived on. She checked to see if Lynnie was there and saw the door to her brick duplex standing open and a strange woman on the narrow porch.

Nell hefted her bags up again and went to see what was going on.

Lynnie's apartment looked empty. Some of the furniture was still there, but it was on its way out to a van that said CPTYWIDE RENTAL on it. Nell moved aside as a guy carried out a chair, and then she went up the steps to the woman on the porch, feeling oddly bereft, as if a friend had moved without telling her.

"Hi," she said and gestured to the open door.

"Two bedrooms, eight hundred a month," the woman said, and Nell realized she was the woman from the other side of the duplex. "You want to look at it?"

"Yes," Nell said, planning on finding out more about Lynnie's whereabouts, and followed her into the apartment, putting her bags on the floor to rest her fingers again.

The landlady, Doris, lived in the other half of the duplex and didn't know anything about Lynnie except that she'd left a note on her screen door the night before saying she was leaving and that Doris could keep the rest of the month's rent. Doris was not happy that Lynnie had skipped out on her lease, even unhappier when the rental company had come and disrupted her chance to sleep late on Saturday morning, but, as she put it, she was not a gloomy person. "I'm one of those half-full-glass people," she said, looking like her best friend had just died. "I just can't help looking on the sunny side of things."

Nell had nodded, not really listening once she'd gotten the full story on Lynnie because the apartment had begun to appeal to her. It was a standard duplex, living room and kitchen downstairs and two bedrooms up. But the living room was big enough to take her grandmother's dining room set, and the kitchen had glass doors on the cupboards, and the bedrooms were real bedrooms with doors, and the bathroom had black and white tiles from the forties. She looked out the back door and saw a postage stamp of a yard with a fence around it. Marlene would love it.

She looked at the bags of food on the living room floor, more food than she'd consumed in the entire previous month, and she wanted to wash the vegetables in the old porcelain kitchen sink and put her plates in the glass-front cabinets, cut tomatoes on the drainboard and eat potatoes and vinegar on the tiny porch while she watched the Village go by. She wanted to see things and taste things and feel things, and she wanted to do it here.

"I have a dog," she said.

"Nine hundred," Doris said. "Assuming you make the credit check."

"Eight hundred and I write you a check for the first three months now." Nell said. "You won't have to advertise the apartment. You won't even have to clean it."

"I don't know." Doris said. "A dog."

"She's a dachshund, her name is Marlene, and she sleeps a lot."

Half an hour later, she opened the door to her old apartment and found Marlene sitting by the door, looking as though she'd been marooned for days. "We have a new place," she told the dog. "Fenced-in backyard. Rooms to run through. You're going to love it."

"I still don't understand why you want this place," Suze said, standing in the middle of Nell's boxes the next day.

"Because I picked it out, not you and Jack." Nell looked around the place as if it were a palace. "Because I'm finally doing things on my own."

"Okay," Suze said, feeling underappreciated.

"Hey, I still love the daybed you found for me, and Marlene is absolutely crazy for your chenille throw," Nell said. "I can't get it away from her."

Suze looked at Marlene, languishing on the daybed on four hundred dollars' worth of indigo chenille. "That's good to know."

"Can we please unpack your china now?" Margie said.

Jase backed in the front door carrying one end of Nell's dining room table, and when the other end appeared, after much arguing and tilting and groaning, it was held up by the girl he'd brought with him in the rental truck. He'd been yelling at her all afternoon to be careful unloading boxes or she'd hurt herself, to wait for him, to just wait a minute with anything that was heavy, while she laughed at him and hefted things without breaking a sweat, and Suze had thought, Was I ever that young?

And then she remembered: She'd been exactly that young when she'd gotten married.

My God, she thought, watching them now, arguing about where to drop the table. They're like puppies. And that was me.

"You okay, Aunt Suze?" Jase said.

Suze nodded. "Couldn't be better."

"Just the clothes left," the blonde said.

"Yeah, right, Lu," Jase said. "Like my mother doesn't have a ton of those." He pushed her gently out the door, laughing down at her, and she made a face at him and pushed back.

Margie gazed around the apartment. "Are you still going to sleep on the daybed now that you have a real bedroom?"

"Nope," Nell said. "I'm going to get a real bed."

The daybed is a real bed, Suze thought, but she said, "If you want, you can have the bed in our second guest room. We never have second guests anyway."

"Wonderful," Nell said and went to tell Jase he had another job.

"I put some of my clothes in the truck for you, too," Suze said when she got back, but Nell didn't hear; she was on her way to the kitchen to open the ancient glass-front cabinets and touch the panes as if they were something wonderful. Suze went out to the truck to help with the last of the boxes. She put one foot on the step at the back and then looked up.

Jase was kissing Lu in the back of the truck, his hands tight on her rear end. It wasn't a kid's kiss, and it took Suze's breath away. Jase shouldn't be old enough to kiss anybody like that, but he was. He was three years older than she'd been when she'd gotten married.

"What happened to my clothes?" Nell called from the porch, and Suze called back loudly, "I'll get them," and banged on the side of the truck and then kept her eyes averted until she'd climbed inside.

Jase handed Lu a box and said, "Work for your keep," and she said, "Like you wouldn't keep me anyway." She shot Suze a grin as she climbed out of the truck with the box, so sure and happy and young that Suze felt the envy in her bones.

When Jase and Lu drove the empty truck away to get Suze's second guest bed, Suze went inside and found Margie and Nell unpacking Nell's china. Nell handed her a bubble-wrapped piece, and Suze unwrapped it carefully, trying not to be depressed by Jase and Lu. She should be happy for them. She was a horrible person.

The last of the bubble wrap came off, and Suze looked at the teapot in her hands, startled out of her despair. It was round on the edges and flat on both sides, and it had a landscape painted on it, an eerie little scene with a weird bubble-shaped tree and two sad little houses, smoke curling mournfully up from their pointed chimneys. The bottom of the teapot was blue, a little stream between two tall hills, separating the tree from the houses forever.

"I thought your stuff had flowers on it," Suze said. "I've never seen this before."

"It was on the top shelf," Nell said. "I never used it."

"Crocuses," Margie said, frowning into space. "That's what they were." She looked at the three boxes marked "China" and said, "This can't be all of it."

"This is my share," Nell said. "Tim got the rest in the divorce."

"What?" Margie's eyes grew wide. "He took your china?"

"It's just dishes," Suze said.

"It's her china," Margie said, and Suze remembered Margie's ten zillion pieces of Franciscan Desert Rose and said, "Right. Her china."

"And he got more than half," Margie said. "You had shelves of it."

Suze looked down at the teapot in her hand. "What is this stuff, anyway? I only remember the flowers."

"It's all British Art Deco china," Nell said. "Art Deco?" Margie said.

"From the twenties and thirties," Suze said, still fascinated by the teapot. "Very geometric, bright colors, stylized designs." They looked at her as if she'd said something strange, and she said, "Art History 102. I know the introductory stuff about everything."

Nell nodded. "It's from my mom's family in England. That teapot is Clarice Cliff, my second favorite pattern of hers. It's called Secrets."

"I don't understand why Tim got so much more," Margie said.

"The stuff I loved best was the expensive stuff," Nell said. "Like the Secrets tea set. It has thirty-four pieces and appraised at seven thousand dollars."

"Oh, my Lord," Margie said, taking a closer look at the teapot Suze was clutching.

Suze held it out to Nell. "Take this, please."

Nell took it and put it in her china hutch. "So did you get your mom's china, Margie?" she asked, and Suze looked at her sharply. Nell had been the one to tell her fourteen years ago that questions about Margie's mom were off limits.

"No," Margie said. "What's this?" She held up the teapot she'd just unpacked, a round peach-colored pot with white crescents scratched in it.

"Susie Cooper," Nell said. "Not nearly as expensive. That's part of her kestral line. She owned her own pottery works in the late 20s and was still designing in the 80s."

"She lasted." Margie nodded down at the Cooper bowl in her hands.

"Her pieces were the best designed," Nell said. "She even had her own pottery works. But Clarice made beautiful things." Nell unwrapped another bowl. "This is Stroud, my favorite pattern. Just the green band around the outside and the cartouche at the bottom."

The bowl was cream with a wide green band bisected in the lower left-hand corner by a little square with a landscape inside it-a fluffy cloud, an orange-roofed house, a puffy green tree, and two curved hills-a tiny perfect world.

A tiny perfect world. That sounded like Nell, arranging everything in her life and then maintaining it. If Nell could, she'd make sure the clouds in the sky looked exactly like that. Neat and comfy. Suze looked back at the creamer. "And this one is called Secrets."

Nell sat back and nodded again. "That was my mom's favorite." She looked at Margie for a minute and then went on. "I think it's autobiographical. According to gossip, Clarice was having an affair with her boss, the guy who owned the china works."

Margie sat up straighter, with a little gasp. "That's terrible. She must have been an awful woman, stealing somebody else's husband."