I needed to tell him what was going on, that I needed help. But the words wouldn’t come out. “I had that dream again,” I said instead, groaning.
“Oh no,” he said. “The one where the social workers are there to pick us up?”
“Yeah, and Phillip’s rocking in the corner.”
“Oh no.”
He got quiet, and I felt bad for even bringing it up. I wished I hadn’t said anything, so I changed the subject. “How’s Lanna doing?”
“Oh, she’s real good,” he said. “She just got promoted from assistant manager to manager of Kohl’s, and she’s real excited about it. And the boys had good grades this quarter, and Rusty’s enrolling in community college in the fall.”
It made me happy how proud Charles was of his kids. When they were coming up, I got to play with them a lot because Charles and Lanna were still living down here at the beach. It took away some of that sting of not being able to have any kids of my own.
“I’m real proud of him,” I said. “And, hey, I wanted to tell you I’ll have a new address soon.”
111 My Car in Some Parking Lot.
“Oh no,” he said. “No Harry?”
“No Harry.”
“Well,” he said, “he’s a nice guy but, you know, kind of a train wreck.”
“Yeah. So, when you coming up here for a visit? I miss you.”
“Soon,” he said. “Hey, Di?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve got a better question for you.”
I laughed. “What’s that?”
“When are you going to open up Carolina Di’s Boils?”
I smiled. Opening a tiny restaurant had been my dream since I was a little girl. I knew I wanted to cook Carolina Boils. Some people called them Steamer Pots. As you can imagine, there are any number of slightly disgusting sounding names a big brother can figure out to call a restaurant incorporating either “boil” or “steamer.”
I’d always loved to cook, and taking care of people was what made me happiest. I had visions of this stand on the beach where people would wait in line for baskets of my simple fresh seafood. Phillip would be in a chef’s hat lining the red-and-white-checked cardboard baskets with paper and dishing my boils into them, filling up cups with ice. He wouldn’t like serving the customers, but I could do that part. He would have a job and a paycheck all his own. I thought he’d like that.
Charles believed in me, even when the chips were down. And I knew then that I couldn’t tell him. I just couldn’t. I’d never asked him for anything, and I didn’t want to start now. I’d had to borrow $1,000 from Elizabeth a few years back to keep from starving and being on the street, and I still felt ashamed about it every day. She didn’t give me a hard time about it or anything, but still. Sometimes pride is all a girl’s got left. “Damn, Charles. Why’d you have to move all the way to Asheville? Why not just Raleigh or something?” I asked, changing the subject. It broke my heart how far away that dream of my own place seemed.
He chuckled. “You know as well as I do that if it ain’t the beach or the mountains, it ain’t worth living in.”
I laughed in agreement, though I would’ve been happy to have anywhere to live right now.
I couldn’t face the idea of going to the shelter, so for tonight I settled on setting up camp in the Impala, which had a big enough backseat. I could get some fast food for dinner, take a walk on the beach, and then, when it got good and dark, park at the beach access down the street from Gray’s house where I’d been earlier and take me a little snooze. And I’d do the same thing I’d always done: I’d worry about tomorrow tomorrow.
I wiped away the tears staining my cheeks. No use crying over spilt milk or spoilt men or the rest of this mess. I knew as good as my own backside in the mirror that tomorrow the sun was going to come out just like always. And a new day can change everything.
* * *
I checked my phone again, just to make sure Gray Howard hadn’t called about the job. I didn’t expect her to work miracles or anything, but I figured if anyone could pull strings down at Meds and More, it was someone like her. The silence made me think that maybe she hadn’t gone and talked to Bill after all. I drove slowly down the street, past Mr. Marcus’s house, past the water, down to Gray’s house. I was planning to pull all the way to the end of the street, where there weren’t any houses, and scope out whether I could park and sleep there. Cops didn’t patrol the nice areas a whole lot because nothing much happened in them anyway. But when I turned my head, I did a double take.
There in Gray’s driveway was a man lying on the ground, on his stomach, a huge box beside him. There’s something that happens to a body when it seems like somebody else is in trouble. And that’s what happened to me. I threw the car in park, jumped out, and ran to him. “Should I call nine-one-one?” I screamed.
He scrambled to his feet. He was a nice-looking boy, probably around his early twenties, in jeans and a sports coat, with this big, goofy smile.
“Oh, sorry,” he said in an accent that meant he wasn’t from around here. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He held up his arm. “One of my cuff links fell under the car and I was just looking for it.”
I put my hand up to my heart trying to slow its beating.
“I’m Trey,” he said, reaching out his hand to shake mine. “Gray’s assistant.”
I nodded. “I’m Diana.” I smirked. “The woman she got fired.”
I didn’t expect him to know what I was talking about, so I was taken aback when he said, “Ohhhh. She felt awful about that. I was on the phone with her when she was going to the store to try to get your job back.”
So, she had gone down to the drugstore. And she hadn’t called me. That couldn’t mean good news.
He picked up the box with some effort and, handing me a key, said, “Hey, do you think you could open the back door for me?”
There was something unsettling about that. “Oh, um… I don’t think it would be right.”
He smiled, his eyes gleaming. “What wouldn’t be right is for me to drop an entire case of decadent rosé.”
I looked around to see if anyone was watching, then followed him to the back door, put the key in, and turned the knob. I didn’t walk inside, but I could see towels strewn about on the pair of matching sofas on either end of the fireplace. There were cups on the side table, dishes on the coffee table.
“Good Lord,” I said.
Trey nodded. “Oh, I know. Gray is brilliant, but she’s a total slob.”
I’ve always been real picky about having everything in its place and all that, and it killed me to see this house I used to clean in such a state of disarray. I couldn’t stop myself from walking into the kitchen, where it just kept getting worse. There were dishes all stacked up in the sink, mail scattered around, some kind of fake milk still on the counter from the morning—surely spoilt now.
She was a grown woman, but she wasn’t living like it. I didn’t owe her anything. Hell, she owed me. But I can’t stand a mess. Just like my sister, Elizabeth, when I see it, I clean it. I planned just to get a handle on the dishes in the sink, but I couldn’t leave the counters like that. And then those damp towels on those white linen sofas… And Trey was coming in and out, in and out, carrying groceries and papers and saying things like, “Gray never has any food in the house,” and, “I’ll pay you a hundred bucks to clean this place so I don’t have to.”
And I needed the money, and it was kind of like when I saw Trey lying in the driveway. My body just took over, and here we were. Before I knew it, I was vacuuming and humming, totally lost in my own world. Well, lost until I looked up and saw Gray standing there with her jaw hanging open like a fish on a hook.
My face got hot. I turned the vacuum off and could hear the Van Morrison Trey had playing. He walked in, saying, “Diana, I’m trying to do the guac like you told me, but—” And then he saw Gray and stopped in his tracks too, and we were all standing there, staring like trapped animals. Almost like me, Harry,
and Big Red a few hours earlier.
“I’m having a hard time deciding where to start,” Gray said. She turned to Trey. “But I guess, first, how the hell are you here so quickly?”
He smiled disarmingly at her. “I was in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot across the street when you were dictating that e-mail.”
Gray sighed and rolled her eyes. “Good Lord.”
Now she turned to me. “I have no words.”
All I had done was clean the woman’s house. But, then again, I was a near-total stranger who’d showed up unannounced on her front steps that morning and appeared uninvited a few hours later in her living room.
I looked at Trey. “I’ll take my hundred bucks and then I’m out of here.” Then I did what I do best when I’m on the defensive: I turned it around on her. I gave Gray a good once-over and prepared to deliver a zinger. “No wonder your husband left you. Making a mess, no groceries in the house.” Note to self: When you have money again, get Nicorette.
But instead of getting upset, she laughed. “Well, Maria did most of the shopping and cleaning and cooking.”
“So what did you do?”
Gray looked up toward the ceiling. “Well, I grew an affiliate-marketing empire out of a little blog I started in college and made sure I was at every school party and baseball game and bought the house and paid the bills and planned the vacations and the nights out and the playdates.” She smiled pointedly. “That’s what I did.”
“So where’s this Maria?”
“Greg got her in the divorce. He got Maria and Brooke and half of Wagner and the vast majority of my self-worth. I got my world turned upside down and our fine china.”
“Yikes,” Trey said. “Bitter divorcée at the party. We need to back that up, sister.”
I waved my hand. “Oh, honey, it’ll pass. It’s just one of them stages. When my girl Robin got divorced the first time, we thought we were going to have to have an intervention for her. All she could do was bash her husband. I mean, you’d say, ‘Oh, damn. I’m out of bananas.’ And then she’d be like, ‘Cal never remembered to get bananas.’ But she got over it. Well, I mean, they got married again.…” I paused, realizing maybe this story wasn’t as relevant as I had hoped.
She just looked at me like she was still confused, and that’s when I remembered that I had not been invited, and here I was holding her vacuum cleaner.
“I promise I’m not stalking you. I was in the neighborhood, and I thought Trey was hurt in the driveway.…”
Gray looked skeptical. She turned to Trey. “You were hurt in the driveway?”
He held up his arm. “My cuff link was hurt. I was on the ground, so I guess it looked that way.”
“And then he needed help carrying this stuff in, and then there was all this mess and I just…” I continued, feeling the need to defend myself.
Gray looked around, as if she had just noticed her surroundings. “It’s really clean in here,” she said.
“Well, I cleaned it up,” I said. I couldn’t tell if she was happy it was clean or mad it was clean. “I don’t know what came over me—”
Gray nodded knowingly. “Ohhhhh. Now I see. You’ve been Treyed.”
He smiled victoriously, and I was confused. “I’m sorry. I’ve been what?”
“Treyed,” she said. “It’s when you plan on doing one thing and then you’re doing a million others, and you don’t even know how that happened.”
I snapped my fingers. “Yup! That’s it.” I wagged my finger at him. “You’re sneaky.”
Then another girl came walking in the back door. And now she looked confused too.
“Marcy, meet Trey,” Gray said. She paused. “And Diana, I guess. And, Trey, meet Marcy.”
Marcy squealed. “Oh my God! It’s you! It’s the famous Trey. I have heard so much about you, and I am just the most excited person in the world.” She took his hands and started jumping up and down, and there was his goofy grin again.
“I have heard so much about you too,” he said calmly.
This Marcy lady stopped her jumping and looked at Gray, frowning. “He isn’t gay,” she said accusatorily.
“Um, yeah. I know.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell me he wasn’t gay?”
I didn’t know who these rich people were, but they didn’t seem like the sharpest knives in the drawer.
Gray crossed her arms. “I mean, I don’t know, Marce. Did it ever come up?”
Marcy studied Trey. “I just assumed that an assistant who worked at ClickMarket and called you Miss Priss was gay.”
Again, none of my business, but I couldn’t help but jump in. “She has a point. You wear cuff links on weekdays. And say things like ‘decadent rosé.’ ”
Trey shrugged. “Sorry to disappoint.”
Marcy raised her eyebrows at Gray. “This is even better.”
She gasped. “It is not better. It absolutely is not.” She pointed her finger at Marcy. “You stay away from my assistant. He is the single most important person in my life.”
“More important than me?” Marcy protested.
They all laughed, and I was tempted to sneak out the door before Marcy started asking questions about me too. But Trey owed me money, and Gray might have information I needed, so I said, “Um, sorry to disrupt the party, but, Gray, did you have a chance to talk to Mr. Marcus?”
Gray bit her lip. “Let’s just say, it didn’t go well.”
I crossed my arms and raised my eyebrows at her, and she shrugged.
“So do you have any suggestions of what I should do now?” I asked. I put my hand up to my swollen jaw for effect.
“Oh, oh!” Trey chirped. “I know. She should be your housekeeper. Lord knows you need one.”
Marcy looked at me. “She can’t cook either.”
That’s what piqued my interest. Because I could clean, yeah. But I could really cook.
“That is untrue,” Gray interjected. “It’s not that I can’t cook. It’s that I don’t have time. Those are different things.”
This wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. I guess I thought that she’d get me some new job with all her connections. I mean, working the picture counter at Meds and More wasn’t a glamorous job or nothing, but it beat some others out there.
I’d sworn up and down and around that I wasn’t ever going back to being anybody’s maid. I mean, it’s not a pie job, to say the least. Washing up underwear and cleaning up dishes. But ever since I was little, cleaning has been something that calms me down. And Lord knew I could use a little therapy, not to mention a little cash.
Gray hadn’t asked me herself, so I didn’t know if the offer was real. Hell, I didn’t know if I’d even accept.
She just shrugged. “I think it’s a little weird that you showed up here twice today, but I got you fired, and this feels like a way to make it right. You can balance my karma.” She paused. “What do you think?”
I let out a pained sigh even though I was probably more relieved than I had ever been. “I think we’ve both been Treyed.”
Gray smiled and shook my hand. “Welcome to the crew, Diana.”
CHAPTER 4
gray: innate goddesshood
Two days later, as Diana was making me a smoothie that tasted like heaven in a glass, I was returning morning e-mails at the kitchen island. Normally I would have been doing that in my office upstairs. But I didn’t mind being around Diana, and I had to admit that, despite Bill Marcus’s endorsement, I was still a little wary of letting a virtual stranger roam around my house unsupervised.
As I took the first sip of her apple-pie smoothie, though, I realized nothing else mattered as long as she could feed me like this.
Diana’s head was lost in the fridge, and she started pulling things out and setting them on the counter.
“What are you doing?” I finally asked, after sending off an e-mail.
She pulled her head out, wiped her brow, and said, “I’m cleaning out your fridge.”
I didn’t want to tell her, but I couldn’t even guess when that had last been done. She turned back to the fridge and pulled out a hunk of what had perhaps once been cheese that was now black, brown, and green. So, yeah, she knew it had been a while since the fridge had been cleaned.
“What did this used to be?” she asked.
I made a face. “Camembert, maybe?”
She tossed it in the trash and said under her breath, “Looks more like cam-ouflage.”
We both laughed. Then she held up a bottle of ketchup with the lid crusted shut. “This expired in 2016. Were you doing a science project or can I toss it?”
This was the best thing about Diana. I never had to tell her what to do. She showed up at my house at seven, got everything straight, made me a smoothie, made the bed, did the laundry, wiped stuff down that I didn’t know had to be wiped down, went to the store, made food that should have been at the finest bistro in the world appear on my counter, and left it hot for me so I could eat or have guests or whatever. I made her eat too. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. What in the world would I do with all that food with just Trey and me to eat it if she didn’t?
I told Diana she didn’t have to stay all day. I told her she didn’t have to work so many hours. But I guessed she had a lot to catch up on around my house because she had stayed until five both days. We had agreed that one day a week she would come in around ten so she could go see her brother. That made me happy, and a little jealous. Family was so important. I knew that. I wished my sister did.
Diana sprayed the inside of the now empty fridge and said, “Do you know that crisper drawers are for produce, not wine?”
“Ohhhh,” I said as if that were brand-new information. “I thought they were for keeping summer wines crisp.”
She laughed. “Are you and Trey eating here or at your club today?”
I groaned. Diana turned and shut the fridge, leaning against it. “What’s that about? Bad sushi up there or something?” she asked sarcastically.
“It’s silly,” I said, taking a sip of smoothie.
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