“Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll take care of it. I’ll talk to Mrs. Weaver and smooth it over. Maybe I’d better find Jane first just to get her side of the story, though I’m sure she’ll lie. She’s probably with that Johnny Smith—making crank calls or something.”
My mother giggled. “Jane Dough and John Smith. If ever two were meant for each other …” Her voice trailed off, and then the screen door creaked open and slammed shut.
I was staring down at the dirt. I didn’t want Johnny to see how much Mom’s words hurt. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard her say something about me that made me want to cry, but it was the first time I’d had a witness to my pain. He must have known how I felt because he took my hand and squeezed it.
“They were stupid rules,” Johnny whispered, “and Mrs. Weaver only changed ’em when she saw you were gonna win. She’s just jealous ’cause you’re a whole lot prettier than her ugly Greta—and a whole lot smarter.”
Johnny pulled a pack of gum from his shirt pocket and held out a piece for me. Doublemint.
He shrugged apologetically. “I shoulda known she’d blame you. I’ll tell her I’m the one who stole it. It just made me so mad that she gave some to everyone but you.”
I took a stick and unwrapped it. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell her; she’ll still say it was me.”
“I’m gonna tell her anyway. Then at least she’ll know she’s lying when she says it was you.”
As I chewed my gum, Johnny picked up a sharp rock and drew a circle in the sand.
“Janie,” he said, his solemn brown eyes glinting with defiance and determination, “you will amount to something, I just know it. We both will, no matter what your mom says. We’re gonna do a spit pact, right here in that circle. I’ll spit first, then you. We’re spitting on what everyone else thinks of us, because they don’t know. We’re both gonna be somebody special someday. You wait and see.”
I was still smiling as I rolled over in bed to snuggle up to Johnny. Wow. He felt weird. Like he hadn’t shaved in a decade. A second later it hit me that it wasn’t Johnny I was stroking. I knew this mainly because I was no longer dreaming and I hadn’t seen Johnny in twenty-five years.
I flung myself out of bed so fast I almost left half of me behind. My heart thumped against my ribcage until my night vision kicked in and I saw that I’d been stroking Little Boy. How had he gotten into the house?
Then I thought eeew. Fleas. He was sure to have them, and now my bed would too. I’d have to scrounge up the money for some of that monthly flea preventative because it appeared that Little Boy was going to show up as he pleased. At the moment he was enjoying his slumber so much that he hadn’t even awakened. He was stretched out, head on a pillow, just like a man.
I went around to his side of the bed. His side? How pathetic was that? I had sunk so low that the male in bed next to me was a cat. And I wasn’t even sure I cared.
As I picked up Little Boy and carried him into the living room, where I hoped he would stay the night, I recalled my dream. I hadn’t thought about that spit pact since … well, I wasn’t sure how old I was when I last thought about it, but I had thought about it for several years after we’d made it. Maybe until puberty, even though my family had moved away from that particular house a year after Johnny and I spat in the dirt.
But that spit pact—or rather, Johnny’s unshakeable belief that we were destined to be somebody—had kept me going for years. I knew Johnny had become somebody. He was a world class tennis player. When I was living in Los Angeles, I’d wanted to look him up, to show him I’d become somebody too, a bestselling author. But I didn’t, and now it was too late. I’d be embarrassed for him to see how far I’d sunk. My short time on the bestseller list might have counted for being somebody once, but just look at me now.
Chapter 11
I slugged through the next day at work, tired and cranky. The guilt over my two-brownie breakfast didn’t help my mood. When I got home from work, I went straight to the brownies, moved them to one of the expensive crystal serving plates Granny had given me, and wrapped the plate and brownies in a colored plastic wrap which I secured with ribbons.
My plan was to take the brownies to Granny. I really needed to talk to her about Richard, and she loved desserts. Not that she would eat the rest of the brownies by herself. She would share them because the other thing she loved was making people smile.
God, how I loved my Granny.
Granny knew me better than anyone else, loved me more than anyone else. And she was the only person I could depend on to take my hopes and dreams, my personality and character into consideration before giving me advice. Everyone else in my family was in it for themselves and would stop at nothing to convince me to behave in the manner that would be of greatest benefit to them. Sue and Mark wouldn’t do that, but they wouldn’t be much help with this. Mark would look at things logically, with no regard for my emotions, and Sue was always wearing those rose-colored glasses, at least when it came to men.
I’d always had a special relationship with Granny. She was the type of woman I wanted to be. I couldn’t believe my mother and Granny shared DNA. Granny could hardly believe it either, telling me she’d once suspected her baby had been switched at birth. She’d wondered about it for years, she said, up until just after Mom gave birth to Katherine. Granny went to the hospital to visit them and the minute she saw Mom posing for a picture with Katherine, she realized that Mom was the spitting image of her own mother at that age. Not just in looks, but in personality, actions, and everything else. Granny was dumbstruck that she’d never noticed it before.
She knew what kind of mother I had because she’d had the same kind. There was evidently truth to the idea that traits skip a generation since Granny and I also seemed to be a lot alike. Once, when I was only about four, she’d told me we were two peas in a pod. That probably accounted for her understanding exactly how I felt about every situation, often before I knew it myself.
If we were alike, I hoped I continued to grow in that direction. I wouldn’t mind being like Granny because she always said what she thought and did as she pleased and made no excuses for either. Thankfully, what she thought and did were usually within the boundaries of the law and constituted no real harm to anyone else. And as far as I knew, Granny had never been unkind.
She was almost eighty now, and I wondered if it was selfish of me to continue to burden her with my problems. I’d already put her into the middle of a family fight that she wanted no part of. I didn’t want to cause her consternation now, but I wasn’t sure my problems worried her. She’d always taken everything in stride, expecting life to be a challenge that should be met with open arms. The only way I’d know if I should start keeping things to myself was to ask. To really be sure of her answer, though, I’d want to see her face, and that meant a trip to Belle Vista.
*****
“Are you sure this will get us there?” I was staring at the beat-up old Chevy truck that Hank had backed out of his garage. My Camaro convertible had inconvenienced me by getting a flat, but my charm being such as it was, Hank had stepped in and not only removed the offending tire, but also offered to drive me to Granny’s.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” he said, hoisting my tire into the back of his truck. “The A-C works great; that’s what matters.”
He’d get no argument from me. It was 97 degrees in the shade with humidity to match. The sun was blistering through a blue sky, undeterred by a few wispy clouds.
We stopped by Firestone to drop off my tire and ten minutes later we were on the freeway. Green scrub grass dotted with pine trees and palmettos sailed by.
Somewhere along the way, I told Hank about Richard. I had that insane urge to tell him the truth, but I mentally stomped on that urge.
“Sounds like everythin’s fallin’ into place,” he said calmly, but he clenched his jaw.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothin’.”
“No, there’s something. What?”
“Do you really think you can marry some guy you don’t know?”
Hmmm. There was nothing Texas-drawly in his voice now.
I shrugged as though I didn’t think it mattered. It didn’t matter because the answer was No, but I wasn’t telling Hank that.
“Lots of people barely know each other when they get married,” I said. “Look at the Regency period in England. Young girls were betrothed to men without knowing the first thing about them.”
“We’re not living in the Regency period.”
And boy, did I know it. But that was where I wanted to be living. In the make-believe Regency period, that is. In the real one I probably would’ve been a scullery maid who dreamed of marrying a duke only to sleep with the duke and then get cast aside like an pair of old boots. In my make-believe Regency world, I would have married the top duke and become known worldwide for my exquisite taste in decorating the estates.
“My mother said she didn’t know my dad at all when they got married.” I failed to add that she also said if she had known him any better, she’d never have married him.
“Were they happy?”
“I don’t think they were unhappy.”
My parents had a strange relationship. I couldn’t remember them ever expressing affection, not to each other or to anyone else, including us kids, though obviously the six of us girls were proof that some type of affection existed between them. Nor did they communicate with each other or us. My mother was always in the house, but she was never there emotionally. I had very little interaction with my mother unless she was in a teasing mood and that interaction wasn’t particularly enjoyable for me.
I had even less contact with my father, but there was a logical reason for that. I had not been born a ball. Had I been a ball … a baseball, football, soccer ball, golf ball, or any other type of ball used in competitive sports, I would have been my father’s constant companion. But alas …
Would their married lives have been different if they’d married other people? Probably not. My father would have been wrapped up in sports, and my mother would have been wrapped up in herself. Still, they had turned out six responsible, hard-working daughters. That could have been sheer luck, or it could have been that we learned to handle our own problems because no one else was going to help us handle them. But if someone asked me what kind of children I wanted to rear, responsible and hard-working wouldn’t come first to mind. Happy and loving would be more like it.
Because of that I couldn’t give my parents a slap on the back. All six of us girls were responsible and hard-working, but I wasn’t sure any of us were happy and loving. I was as happy as anyone else, but I was afraid of love.
“Will it be business or do you plan on raisin’ a family with him?”
In other words, would sex be involved, because really, that’s what Hank was asking.
“I don’t know. It depends on how we feel about each other.”
“That’s baloney. A man can always sleep with an attractive woman. He doesn’t have to feel nothin’. Except the obvious. So that leaves it up to you.”
Hmmm. Apparently Hank thought I was attractive. The feeling was mutual. Too bad he wasn’t applying for the job. If I had to complicate my life, it would be nice to complicate it with Hank.
“Okay, then; it’ll depend on how I feel about him.”
I thought about it, and I concluded it was a good thing I wasn’t really planning to marry Richard because I didn’t feel anything about him. I couldn’t even remember checking out his butt, and I pretty much did that with every guy. This would not bode well in a future husband. I tried to conjure up a picture of Richard and me kissing; I couldn’t even conjure up a picture of Richard. I sighed.
“What?” Hank asked.
“Nothing.”
“There’s somethin’. What is it?”
“I don’t know. I just have to wonder sometimes how I let my life get into this mess.”
“I could hire a crew to clean up your yard. You could pay me back.”
That wasn’t the mess I was talking about, but I put my mind to his offer. I didn’t want to be rude and ask how he would pay, but I doubted he was driving a beat-up Chevy because he’d put all his money in the bank. People tended to live at their economic level or higher. They never lived lower.
But it wouldn’t matter if he had a ton of money; I didn’t want to be rescued by a man. Well, Richard was a man, and some people might say he was rescuing me, but I was the one making the compromise so it could happen. Or I would be if I weren’t lying about the whole thing.
“You probably think I don’t have any money, but I do,” Hank said, “and I’m happy to loan you whatever you need—interest free. You shouldn’t throw away the rest of your life just because you don’t have enough cash to work things out. Unless that’s the reason you’ve let your life get into this mess.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, self-sabotage. Maybe you wanna be forced into a decision that’ll make you unhappy for the rest of your life. That way, no matter what happens, you can always blame this situation for your unhappiness. And you never have to try to get anywhere else.”
“Oh, puh-leze. What are you? A psychotherapist? What do you do for a living anyway?” I needed to ask just in case he was a psychotherapist because I was thinking he might be onto something. Maybe I was trying to absolve myself of all wrong choices in the future by ruining my life right now. Not by marrying a stranger, but by losing my property because I hadn’t paid attention to the contract I’d signed.
“My last, very successful venture recently ended and I’m takin’ time off to see what I wanna do next,” Hank said in answer to my question. “I can afford to. I have a good portfolio, and I know how to manage it. If you borrow a few thousand dollars, it’s not gonna strap me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“I’m not worried about it, but I’m not borrowing any money.”
“Suit yourself.”
I would suit myself, or at least I’d suit the part of me that cut off my nose to spite my face. You couldn’t be a Dough if you weren’t a bit of a martyr.
The atmosphere was strained, and I was wishing I’d kept my mouth shut. I tried to come up with a different conversation, one that wouldn’t end in a disagreement, but then Hank did that for me.
“I read your books. Book. Dark Scoundrel.”
I was stunned stupid for a moment. Then my thoughts were frantic, colliding with each other all over the place while I tried to remember just exactly what I’d had my heroes and heroines doing during all those torrid love scenes.
“Uh … I’m speechless. It is, after all, a historical romance.”
He laughed. “I know. I can’t believe women read that stuff.”
“Hey!”
“I’m talkin’ about how they live happily ever after and all that drivel.”
“Which is exactly why women read it. I mean, duh, we don’t get it in real life, so we want it in fiction.”
He shot me a puzzled look. “What exactly is it that you don’t get in real life? Perfection? Because if you’re gonna get perfection, you have to also give it.”
“Not perfection. Romance. We don’t get romance in real life.” But was that really what I meant? Maybe I really did mean perfection. After the end of the book, that is. We know the heroine will have to go through hell until the ending, but don’t we really expect everything to be perfect for the rest of her life? Yeah. We do.
“If you’re not getting’ romance, then you’re hangin’ with the wrong men.”
Boy, did I know it. And hanging with Richard wasn’t going to change that sad fact.
*****
There’s my Janie!” Granny leapt out of her chair in a manner that belied her age and held out her arms for a hug. I sat the plate of brownies on the table and hugged her as fiercely as she hugged me, letting little girl memories flood me as I breathed in the Chanel No. 5 perfume she’d worn forever. For a woman only five feet t
all and less than a hundred pounds, she had an amazingly strong grip.
After almost suffocating me with love, she let go and stepped back. She ran a brown-spotted, blue-veined hand over her lustrous silver-gray hair, a habit I remembered from way back, when her hair was a rich russet brown with a mind of its own. When I was a child, the gesture was prompted by something I did or rather, from the knowledge that I’d get a belt whipping as a result of it. She’d done it often when Grandpa was dying in the hospital and six months later when his estate was finally settled and we learned he had a second family that he’d kept in high style for thirty years. These days Granny’s thick hair was twisted into a tight bun, but her smoothing of the now-imaginary errant hairs whenever she was troubled remained.
It hit me that she was probably troubled over my situation. Not about the newspaper articles—she laughed over those—but that I might end up losing my property. She knew the truth about the husband hunting, so she couldn’t be worried that I’d end up with some jerk for life.
I was about to introduce her to Hank when an incredulous smile spread across her face. “John, oh my goodness,” she exclaimed, staring at Hank. “How long has it been?”
Uh-oh. There’d been nothing wrong with Granny’s mind when I’d visited three weeks earlier. I grimaced at Hank, hoping he wouldn’t be embarrassed by Granny’s mistaking him for someone else. But he wasn’t even looking at me. He was smiling at Granny, and it was a great big boyish, bashful kind of smile. He was like a kid who’d been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“Way too long,” he said as he scooped her up in a bear hug. He gave me a little eyebrow shrug over her head while he held her for an eternity. He didn’t seem to mind at all that she thought he was someone else. In fact, he was playing along. Could he be any nicer?
I figured I should set her straight.
“His name is Hank, Granny. He’s moved into the house at the other end of my street. Remember, I told you they were looking for a renter? Well, Hank here is as nice as can be and when I went outside and found my tire flat, he offered to drive me.”
Rules of Lying (Jane Dough Series) Page 10