Olivia (18 page)

She got it almost to her lips before he ripped it away from her. “I don’t have the fucking authority to promote her! I don’t have the authority to do anything around here. Hell, I can’t even pick my nose without asking for permission first.”

“You pick your nose?” Olivia wrinkled her nose. “Gross.”

“Get the hell outta my office!”

“Who’s gonna make me?” Olivia smirked. “You don’t have the au-
thor
-ity.”

Sam slammed his hands down on his desk, standing up as he bellowed, “
Get to work!
”

Izzie grabbed Olivia by the arm and hurried them both out of the office and into the quality room. “Way to go, Liv. Now we’ll never find out what’s going on with those two.”

“Who cares?” Olivia asked. “It’s none of our business anyways.”

“Well, I
know
that, but we still need to figure out what’s going on.”

“No ‘we’ don’t. From now on, keep me out of it, because I really don’t frickin’ care anymore.”

She had more important things to worry about than Sam and Stephie. For one thing, she had started peeking in Clete’s windows again and still hadn’t seen any sign of his daughter. She was beginning to think the girl didn’t exist, which, in turn, made her
seriously
begin to believe Clete was mentally unstable. For another, Mitch was no longer a salesman for New Holland. He claimed to be working for an auctioneer, but he acted really suspicious about it. He worked odd hours, sometimes in the middle of the night, and he would leave town for days at a time claiming it was for work, but Olivia had her doubts. She was certain he was hiding something big—like being a gun runner for the Italian mob. All that aside, the biggest thing on Olivia’s plate at the moment, the thing that kept her up all hours of the night, pacing and pondering, was that she had received a letter in the mail from a strange woman claiming to be her sister, and she had absolutely no clue what to do about it.

The letter had come three days after Olivia and Mitch got back together, but she was so wrapped up in Mitch and the resurgence of her sex life that she hadn’t opened it until a week later. In the letter, the woman, one Mrs. Toni Tennille Dinwiddie of Pollack, Nebraska, had asked to meet up with Olivia at a Barnes and Noble in Omaha so they could have a discussion in person about their shared mother. Olivia hadn’t even read the letter until two days after the scheduled meeting time. The woman had included her phone number and email address in the letter, but Olivia was too chicken to contact her to reschedule.

Olivia didn’t want to consider the possibility that her mother might still be alive somewhere. She preferred to believe the woman had died a horrid, painful death the second she was released from jail, before the sunlight ever hit her shoulders. Mauled by a mountain lion was good, hit by a runaway locomotive was better, but only if it parked on top of her and crushed her until her head popped off.

Olivia debated showing the letter to Eugene, but really, what was he going to say about it? The same thing he said about anything—nothing. Besides, she didn’t want to upset him. The last time she had made mention of anything related to her mother was back when she was fourteen and they were doing family trees in her sociology class. Olivia had no idea who any of her family was besides Eugene, so she’d asked him. Eugene had clammed up and taken Chester for a walk. He had been gone for three days, and Olivia had to turn in a family tree with only one measly, pathetic little branch on it.

After what Izzie had done to George, showing the letter to her was out of the question. And Olivia still wasn’t talking to George so it wasn’t like she could just pop back into his life like, “Hey, I know I’ve been a real bitch and let loose a crazy, psycho stalker to delve into your personal life with a fine tooth comb, but I need you now, so forget about all that other stuff and hold my hand for awhile…”

Mitch wouldn’t have been any help even if he would’ve wanted to help, which she wasn’t stupid enough to believe, so that left only one person. And that was why Olivia was back to peeking in Clete’s windows while she tried to figure out the best way to approach him.

As it turned out in the end, Clete approached her. He had no choice. It was his job. And it was all Reggie’s fault.

Olivia’s six-year anniversary at Garretson fell just two weeks before the one-year anniversary of Olivia backing into Mitch’s truck, making it also the one-year anniversary of the last time Olivia’s Buick had backed into
anything
.

Reggie was so excited he sent her a dozen roses and a little card with a note that said he had lowered her insurance rates. They were the very first flowers anyone had ever sent to Olivia. She didn’t quite know what to do with them, but she couldn’t stop smiling. The very next day, her stupid Buick backed into the portable marquee that sat in front of the liquor store on Greeley.

Ordinarily, that would have been no big deal—a minor scratch, at most. Olivia would have simply paid for the marquee and never mentioned the ordeal to Reggie, but the stupid marquee had wheels. And the wheels hadn’t been locked. And the Buick had pushed the marquee down a little incline. The marquee had picked up a remarkable amount of speed as it launched out of the parking lot—onto the four-lane highway.

In the end, fourteen cars were piled on top of each other in a mangled, smoky mess. Luckily, no one was injured, but Olivia knew for certain she would never be getting flowers from Reggie again.

Olivia sat on the curb and drank a Dr. Pepper (minus vodka, just in case they decided to give her a breathalyzer) while she watched one tow truck after another haul off a crumpled pile of metal that used to be a soccer mom’s taxi or a bald man’s mid-life crisis or a teenaged boy’s chick magnet. Olivia couldn’t really tell which was what. Once they had been mashed up and smooched together, they all kinda looked alike.

A big, fat cop had been assigned to protect Olivia from the angry mob of former car owners who were chomping at the bit to get a piece of her. He stood by her side with his arms crossed over his chest and glared at anyone who dared look her way. If Clete hadn’t been the responding officer, Olivia wouldn’t have gotten the protection. Any other cop would’ve let the mob eat her for breakfast. Her stupid Buick made a huge mess, totaled twelve of the fourteen cars in the pile-up, and tangled up traffic for five miles in both directions, and the only damage she had to show for it was a tiny scratch in the paint of her bumper that probably hadn’t even been caused by this accident. Fuck Reggie anyway. He’d jinxed her.

Three hours later, with the sun setting in the backdrop, Clete came up to her with his face beet red and sweat pouring from his sideburns, stood over her with his hands on his hips and asked, “Well?”

Olivia looked up at him and tried to figure out exactly how to explain to him that,
technically
, the accident wasn’t her fault. If the marquee hadn’t been on wheels, or if the wheels had been locked like they should have been, she would have just smashed it and her own car up instead of sending it careening onto the highway and smashing every other car in Juliette—but it sounded kind of lame. Instead, she said, “You wanna get some tacos or something? I’m hungry.”

Clete’s jaw dropped open and he looked at her like she had two heads for a very,
very
, long time before he wearily closed his eyes and sighed. “Why the hell not.”

After she stuffed her face with Tomas Juan’s nachos and tacos and a burrito and those crispy cinnamon things, and finished slurping down her third margarita, she pulled the letter out of her purse, slid it across the table to him and asked him what she should do about it.

He read it, and then re-read it a few times. When he finished, instead of offering advice, he asked, “What do you want to do about it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you know you had a sister?”

“No. And if she weren’t named after a stupid singer that topped the charts in the eighties, I would’ve thought it was a scam.” She sucked hard on her straw to get the last of the tequila out of the bottom of her glass.

Clete cringed from the noise and took the glass away from her. “What singer is she named after?”

“She’s Toni Tennille.” Olivia rolled her eyes. “From the Captain and Tennille. Duh.”

“Well,
duh
, we don’t all follow 80’s pop culture, Olivia.”

“Whatever.”

“You know, you’re worse than my daughter sometimes with this whole attitude thing you have,” he said. “And she’s seven.”

“Whatever,” Olivia repeated. “I don’t think you have a daughter anyways. She’s never home.” Her hands flew up to her mouth a second too late to stop the confession. It had slipped out on accident, greased by stress and one too many margaritas.

Without missing a beat, or pausing to look at her with bewildered indignation over learning she had been spying on him, Clete said, “Allie’s at her mother’s house for the summer.”

“Oh.”

“But you’ll be happy to know she’s coming home this weekend, so the next time you peek in my windows you’ll be able to watch her sleep, too,” he said, not even bothering to hide his amusement. “And you owe me two hundred bucks for that Japanese maple you destroyed.”

“Why don’t you sleep in your bed?” Olivia asked. No point in denying she was spying on him. If it bothered him he would have arrested her. He was the po-po, after all.

He choked on his beer. “What?”

“You have a bed, but you never sleep in it. How come?”

“I… don’t know,” he said as if he truly did not realize he didn’t sleep in his bed.

“Oh.”

He looked at her for a long time without saying anything, and Olivia started to feel uncomfortable. He wasn’t being creepy about it, but it felt like he was trying to read her mind, like she was a test subject or something. He must have given up because finally he just asked her.

“Tell me about yourself.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“Sure there is. Everyone has a story. What’s Olivia’s?”

“Ha! You don’t want to know my story. Tell me about Juicy Fruit instead. Why do you insist on calling a horse a dog and what’s with the pack of gum on his collar?”

“He
is
a dog.” Clete laughed. “He’s a mutt made up of very big dogs—part Great Dane, part Mastiff, and a lot of Akita—and he’s a sweetheart.”

“Humph.” Olivia grunted. She knew better. “And the pack of gum?”

“Allie’s little joke.”

“Oh.”

“Do you have a dog?”

“No.”

“Cat?”

“As if.”

“A goldfish?”

“No.”

“Hamster? Turtle? Iguana?”

“No, no, no.” Olivia sighed. “I don’t have any pets unless you count a fly that’s been stuck between my screen and kitchen window for like six months now.”

“I didn’t think flies lived that long.”

“Neither did I,” Olivia said with a roll of her eyes. “Well, this has been fun. See you around, Clete.”

As she moved to leave, Clete placed his hand on top of hers. “You haven’t told me your story yet.”

“I don’t have one,” she said dismissively, but she stopped trying to leave. There was something oddly comforting about his hand on hers that made her take pause and just feel.

His voice was soft when he said, “Yes, you do. Please, share it with me.”

Olivia closed her eyes in a long blink and let out a sigh of surrender. “Fine…”

He squeezed her hand in encouragement. It was crazy, but she felt like crying.

“I was born in jail to a woman I never saw again and raised by my father who smokes too much and can fix a stove but never learned to use it. I barely passed high school. Never went to college. I have probably the shittiest job in the world, my best friend is a nymphomaniac, and men lie to me and tell me they’re gay to keep me away from them because I creep them out… Happy now?”

“Did you ever go back and look at all of the evidence?” he asked, leaving Olivia completely dumbfounded.

“Wha ‘chu talkin’ bout, Cletus?” Olivia asked in her best Arnold Drummond voice.

Clete laughed. “The evidence on your friend. The one who said he was gay. Did you ever go back and look at all of the information before you drew your final conclusion?”

“I heard enough to know he lied to me.” Olivia pulled her hand away from him, more in anger at George than at Clete, but Clete was starting to annoy her and she didn’t want him touching her anymore.

Clete looked her dead in the eye and asked her, “Did you hear it from him?”

Olivia’s anger flared up and she unleashed it on him. “You want to know what I heard from
him?
I heard, ‘Liv, I’m gay.’ Those three little words that I never wanted to hear but I had already assumed. And I believed him. And I kept loving him anyway. And then he went and started screwing a big, fat, fucking cow with itty-bitty titties and a
tee-hee-hee
laugh that makes me cringe every time I hear it which is every
fucking
day because I work with her! So you tell me, Clete, how much more proof do I need to know that he lied to me?”

“Did you hear it from him?” Clete asked again, slowly, quietly, pointedly.

Olivia let out a long, low grunt of frustration and grabbed her purse. “Fuck you, Clete.”

Clete sighed and lifted his beer to his lips. “Real mature, Olivia.”

Olivia stormed off, but she had to go back to the table because he still had her letter. She snatched it up and said, “Bite me.”

Clete grabbed her arm and stole the letter out of her hand.

“Give it back!”

She made a grab for the paper but he was faster. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed the number under the signature. He tossed the letter back on the table for Olivia, but she was too busy trying to claw his face and steal his phone before the call connected to worry about the letter anymore.

She was unsuccessful.

“Is this Toni Dinwiddie?” Clete asked in a calm, professional voice as Olivia shoved her knee into his kidney and the heel of her palm into his face. She pinned him against the wall and tried to wrestle the phone away from him with her free hand.