You Dropped a Blonde on Me (6 page)
The heat, her anxiety, and her helplessness made her rise to the bait her mother dangled in her face each time she was rejected by a potential employer. “I’m not sure how else you’d like me to change what’s happening to us. I’ve applied for more jobs than all of us combined have fingers and toes. I’ve begged. I’ve pleaded. I’ve humiliated myself on more than one occasion—today being the mack daddy of ’em all. So, got any tidbits of inspirational change for me, Mom? I’m all ears.”
Her mother’s crocheting hook clacked on the scarred tabletop when she made “the face” with the wave of an arthritically gnarled finger. “Don’t you get huffy with me, young lady. You remember who slaves over a hot stove to make you creamed tuna on toast. All I’m saying is, instead of leaving your fate in someone else’s hands, make your own.”
Oh. Okay. Yeah. That was the answer. “You wait here while I get my magic wand, oh Guru of Fate.”
Mona snorted. “You’re a real comedienne. Can the funny. I’ll say this one more time. You let that deadbeat intimidate you and take everything without so much as a puff of indignant air. You took care of all his needs for twenty years. You were at his beck and call while he made big deals and you hosted fancy dinner parties. But in the end you get nothing? There has to be some way around it. Stop pulling the covers up over your head and fight back, Maxie. Where’s your gumption? What kind of judge is going to declare that even if you don’t deserve something, my grandson doesn’t either? Bah! That’s garbage, and if you started threatening that walking penis instead of hiding from him, you’d find out he’s not so big and bad after all.”
Maxine clenched her fists, and her jaw, throwing in her thighs for good measure. Admitting her mother was right, that she was indeed afraid of all of Finley’s money and connections, was the hardest thing she had to do every day when she looked at her reflection while she primped for another interview for a job she wouldn’t get. “No, here’s how it’ll go. If I start threatening, he’s going to whip out that damned prenup he had me sign. You remember the one, right, Mom? The one I didn’t even know I was signing that said I leave with what I came into the marriage with? Which was nothing more than some tiaras and a pair of pom-poms. So it does me no good to threaten the walking penis!” Of all the mistakes she’d made in her life, blindly signing something she didn’t even read made her a tard to the nth degree.
“Whose penis walks?” Gail Lumley, one of her mother’s crew of four friends, asked from outside the screen door. Her shortly cropped hair, sharp onyx eyes, and quick step never failed to make Maxine remind herself this mob of women were all in their seventies.
With an upward tilt of her eyes, Maxine rolled her neck on her shoulders, and gave Gail the warmest smile she could summon while pulling out a chair for her to sit in. “No one’s penis walks, Gail. Mom and I were discussing Fin. Again.”
Gail let the door slam shut behind her and nodded affirmation, plunking down with a groan of the old vinyl seat. “Right. The Peckerhead.”
Mona cackled, slapping Gail on her thigh. “That’s the one.”
Her mother’s friends had dubbed Fin “The Peckerhead” one night at bingo, among other things. Since then, thinking up new and innovative nicknames for her wayward husband had become an endless source of amusement, all of them involving his nether parts—especially if they were drinking malt liquor. “Shhhhh, ladies. You’re like second graders who just found a new game,” Maxine scolded with a grin she fought. “Connor’ll hear you.”
Gail leaned into her with a saucy smile. “I’m sure Connor knows Penis-less is a peckerhead.”
Maxine’s mother, head thrown back, began to cackle. “Penis-less. You crack me up, Gail Lumley.”
“Penis-less? Aw, girls, are you trash-talking me behind my back?”
A shiver, long and thready, slithered up her spine.
For the second time today, Maxine found herself silently calling upon the Lord’s help. Again she prayed. If
He
were a good and gracious God,
He’ d
never let that be the silken tones of Campbell Barker coming from behind her, sliding into her ear like melting vanilla ice cream over warm apple pie.
He
were a good and gracious God,
He’ d
never let that be the silken tones of Campbell Barker coming from behind her, sliding into her ear like melting vanilla ice cream over warm apple pie.
Gail snickered. “Nobody’d ever say a thing like that about
you
, Campbell Barker.”
you
, Campbell Barker.”
Okay, so today God wasn’t feeling particularly good or gracious.
Clearly, she’d used her quota of pardons.
CHAPTER THREE
Note from Maxine Cambridge to all ex-trophy wives on the art of sucking it up, Princess: No job is too menial when you’re broke. When someone offers you money for services rendered and you’re broke—despite the fact that the service you’ll provide sucks testicles that are big and hairy—don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Princess. Set aside your inflated opinion of what’s beneath you, and run like hell for that light at the end of the tunnel. Colored paper awaits you. The green kind. You know, the kind you haven’t seen since you were relieved of your wifely duties? Even if it smells like dog poop and mothballs. Money’s money. Suck it up. This is your new life. Welcome.
A sun-browned hand came to rest on her shoulder, warm and delicious. The comfort it brought made her close her eyes for a moment and inhale before even realizing she had. “Max Henderson twice in one day. It’s like Christmas without the annoying blinking lights,” Campbell joked, making Maxine’s mother giggle and Gail cluck her tongue with a wink.
God really did have a hard-on for her today. Maxine straightened in her chair, her spine stiff, her lips compressed. “Yeah, imagine your crazy luck. So what are you doing in my mother’s house?”
He held up a wrench that gleamed silver in the bright afternoon sun spilling from the window above her mother’s kitchen sink. “Fixing her leaky faucet, and FYI, I didn’t make the connection. I didn’t know Mona was your mother.”
Campbell Barker plumbed leaky faucets? Not the whiz she’d known in high school. But who was she to pound the gavel of judgment? That meant at least one of them had an honest to God, paying job. She swung around on the rollers of her mother’s dining room chair to face him. “You’re a plumber? I thought you’d gone off to college to get a business degree—or something.”
He nodded with a grin that left deep grooves on either side of his lean cheeks. “Yep, but I decided a business degree was boring and way beneath me. So I bought a plunger and some PVC pipe. Look at me now, huh?”
“Campbell is Garner’s son. He works helping his dad now, Maxie. He’s a good boy,” her mother said with a doting smile in Campbell’s direction.
“He’s a good-lookin’ boy, too,” Gail added with a devilish glint in her eyes. Because stating the obvious was so essential. “Don’t you think so, Maxine?”
She cringed.
“Yeah, don’t you think so, Max?” Campbell encouraged with a chuckle and a nudge.
Yeah. She thought so. After eight months of not finding anyone or anything remotely interesting while she rode the train to poverty, today she suddenly thought Campbell Barker was good-looking. Funny that.
Thankfully, her mother’s phone rang, saving her from having to answer Campbell’s smug question. Maxine lunged for it, following the ear-splitting jingle her mother’d set on the highest volume, digging beneath a pile of
Good Housekeeping
magazines to get to it. Looking at the caller ID, she didn’t recognize the number.
Good Housekeeping
magazines to get to it. Looking at the caller ID, she didn’t recognize the number.
She’d hoped it was Lenore. The one and only friend Maxine had left on planet Earth, seeing as the still employed trophy wives didn’t much commune with the commoner she’d recently become. Len didn’t give a shit that she wasn’t rich anymore. She didn’t give a flying fuck that the women they’d once socialized with stuck their surgically tweaked pert noses up at her. She didn’t even care that practically all of her close-knit family wasn’t speaking to her because she’d defended Maxine.
Instead of her little sister.
Lacey.
Pressing the “talk” button, she ignored the pang of regret that it wasn’t Lenore calling to let her live vicariously through her, and answered the phone. “Hello?”
“Maxine Cambridge?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Joe Hodge. I got one of your fliers today over at the rec center. You still walkin’ dogs?”
She’d walk saber-toothed tigers if cash were the reward. Her heart began to race. It was Connor’s idea to place fliers all around the village, advertising dog walking. When they’d done it, the original intent was for him to offer his services, noting how many of the elderly had pets but in some cases were semi-homebound by the occasional aches and pains, leaving them unable to take their dogs on long walks or bathe them. Desperate times and the fact that she was supposed to support her kid, not the other way around, made her decide she’d give it a shot.
At that point, she’d have slept with the devil for cash. So two days ago, she’d made up some fliers on her mother’s antiquated computer and hung them up all over Leisure Village. And now look—she had a taker. Which meant the forces of the universe hadn’t totally abandoned her—they were just slacking off for happy hour appletinis.
“You still there?”
Maxine cleared her throat, taking the phone down the small stretch of hallway to the guest bathroom. Stepping over the debris of scattered tools, she planted herself on the closed toilet seat. “I am. So, uh, Mr. Hodge, right? You need your dog walked.”
“Well, I’m not callin’ for a date, that’s for sure. We haven’t even met.”
Maxine giggled. She’d discovered that when you reached a certain golden age, you didn’t much care about protocol, or in the case of her mother’s other cohort in chaos, Mary Delouise, modesty and manners. Something she had to admire. Their time here on Earth was limited. Why waste it on bullshit and sucking someone’s ass? “What kind of a dog do you have, Mr. Hodge?”
“You got rules about what kind a dog you’ll walk?”
“No, no, of course not. I just want to be sure I have all the details.”
“He’s a mutt. A big ole mutt, and he shits like a horse. Big stinkin’ piles of shit I can’t pick up no more ’cause of the fact that I have arthritis in my knees. Hurts to bend down, you know. Doc says I gotta take baths to relieve the pain. I say, who the hell’s gonna pull me outta the tub after I get in there?”
Who indeed? A finger went directly between her eyes to massage the bridge of her nose. Sometimes, when she wasn’t hiding in her mother’s house and she actually chatted with the occasional village resident, she found it was hard to keep them on task. Much like herself when she rambled in nervous bouts. Jesus, she’d be a handful at seventy. “I understand completely. So how often do you need someone to walk your mutt?”
“As often as he has to shit. And his name’s Jake, not Mutt.”
The heat of the bathroom was becoming sauna-ish. She struggled to pull off her suit jacket, draping it over the yellow vanity. “Why don’t we set up a time so I can meet Jake and we’ll discuss it then?”
“You busy now?”
Busy? Hah. Cold hard cash had just called her via AT&T. Though it was probably only Happy Meal money, it was money, and even a meeting and the promise of some hot lovin’ with John Cusack wouldn’t keep her from it. “What’s your address? I’ll be right there.” Forgetting the door was open, forgetting there was a man present, Max unzipped the back of her skirt and shimmied it off as she memorized Joe Hodge’s address, clicking the “off” button on the phone.
“We haven’t even had that cup of coffee and already you’re getting naked. Who’d have figured Chuck Norris actually knew what he was talking about when he infomercialed me into buying that Total Gym. He had that look in his eye like he knew if I worked out enough, hot women would just throw their clothes at me.”
Maxine let her head hang low.
To look at the skirt she’d been wearing, now almost at her ankles. Nice. God was clearly back to shunning her again.
Instead of hiding, she turned to face him full on. What difference did it make if Campbell Barker saw her in her panties and silk shirt? Nowadays, this could be considered haute couture—sort of. “Did that twinkle in his eye tell you they’d be old chicks with lumpy asses and thickening waists? If I were you, I’d ask for my money back. You were raped.” She reached for the only towel in the bathroom—a hand towel, holding it up in front of her while she slid her skirt back upward with her free hand.
Campbell stepped into the bathroom, laying his lean fingers on her waist to help her zip up her skirt. His deep chestnut brown hair, thick and tucked behind his ears, was shiny and silken under the light in her mother’s bathroom. “Who says you’re old? Have you looked in the mirror, Max Henderson? You look just as good as you did in high school.”
Her eyes met his in the big mirror over the sink, her heart skittered with his broad hands at her waist. Not for over twenty years had she thought another man would ever touch her, and now here she was, in her mother’s bathroom, being touched in a way so personal she was uncomfortable and excited and . . . uncomfortably excited. Simultaneously. She couldn’t meet her own eyes, let alone his, in the mirror. Though she had just enough time to note that she was no longer a Vanilla Pudding blonde. The stripe of medium brown hair along her scalp, her natural color, said so. The corners of her fading green eyes with the beginnings of crow’s-feet said it, too, and the small but rapidly growing lines around her mouth—lines that sure as shit weren’t from busting a gut laughing.
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