“A wine white spritzer, easy on the wine,” said Chenille.
“A shot of tequila,” Chiffon said.
“A cosmopolitan,” Attalee said with a toss of her long gray ringlets.
“The usual,” Garnell said. “An O’Douls in a frosty mug.”
“Party pooper,” Attalee said.
Garnell shrugged. “What can I say? I’ve never been much of a drinking man.”
Chenille glanced at Garnell, who was bouncing his knee to the beat of the music. The man was constantly surprising her.
After the waitress delivered their drinks, Chiffon got up from her chair and surveyed the action. “I think I’ll put a couple of quarters in the jukebox,” she said, licking her lips. As she shimmied across the room, several heads at the bar swiveled in her direction.
“I don’t think she’ll be buying any of her own drinks tonight,” Chenille mused.
The strains of “Honk if You Honky Tonk” blasted from the jukebox. Attalee snapped her fingers and hungrily scanned the barroom. “I feel like shaking a leg.”
“I’ll take you for a spin,” Garnell said, extending his hand to her.
“Hold on a minute,” Attalee said. “I think I may have snagged me a bull.”
Chenille followed Attalee’s gaze to a man who was propped up on the corner of the bar, sucking on a longneck. He was dressed mostly in black, from his spurred boots to his felt cowboy hat. The fluorescent light behind the rows of mini-bottles lining the bar bounced off his silver Smith & Wesson belt buckle. He ambled toward their table, a chain from his wallet slapping against his relaxed-fit Levi’s. His shirt was unbuttoned to his breastbone, showing off a pelt of wiry white hairs.
“Hot damn!” Attalee whispered as he made his slow approach to the table.
The neon picked up the glint of his trifocals as he stood in front of them. He smiled, revealing a set of teeth so white and uniform they had to be mail-order dentures. Then he extended a gnarled hand across the table to Chenille and said, “Care to cut a rug?”
“Me?” Chenille said, nearly toppling her spritzer with her elbow. Attalee shot her a poisonous look. “I can’t,” Chenille said, scooting her chair closer to Garnell. “My boyfriend wouldn’t approve.”
Garnell draped his arm around her. “That’s right, Dooley. I’m kind of the possessive type.”
Dooley’s glance lighted on Attalee. “How about you, miss?”
Attalee popped up like bread from a toaster. “Don’t mind if I do.”
As the pair strolled to the small sawdust-covered dance floor, Garnell whispered in Chenille’s ear, “So I’m your boyfriend now, am I?”
Chenille shivered at the feel of his warm breath on her neck. He hadn’t moved his arm, and the well-muscled heaviness of it across her back gave her a pleasant and unfamiliar sense of security.
“I’m sorry,” she said shyly. “I’m not used to fending off the advances of men, and I panicked.”
He looked down at her with his crinkly blue eyes. “Pretty thing like you? I bet you have to fight them off with a two-by-four.”
“Not really. This is the first time I’ve ever been in a nightclub.”
“Mmmm, mmmm,” he said. “They just don’t make girls like you anymore.”
A slow song came on the jukebox, Willie Nelson crooning “Always on My Mind,” and couples bobbed like buoys on the dimly lit dance floor.
“That’s my favorite song,” Garnell said. “May I have this dance?”
Chenille started to decline, but instead nodded and ascended from her chair. Garnell grinned and slid her fingers through his belt loop to lead her through the crush of bar patrons.
Once on the dance floor, he put a firm hand on the small of her back as they swayed to the rhythm of the music. He wasn’t the most graceful of dancers. Several times he stepped on her toes, but Chenille felt so light-footed she barely noticed.
Woozy from the wine and the sleepy pace of the song, she longed to rest her head on his shoulder. Just as she was about to surrender, Garnell started singing to the music in a raspy off-key voice. Jolted out of her soporific state, an image of Drake’s classic features flashed in her mind. Her dream mate. The man she’d been waiting for all her life.
She scrutinized Garnell through heavy eyelids. He was congenial, fun, and smart, but all of those qualities couldn’t save him from being as ordinary as a vanilla bean.
“Chenille,” he said in a drowsy voice. “You are some kind of woman.”
Even his compliments were mundane. He was burlap to Drake’s batiste, rhinestone to his rubies, Fritos to his frittata.
“I’m sorry,” Chenille said without thinking. “I don’t think it can work between us.”
Hurt stole over his face like a shadow. With downcast eyes, he opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted by a high-pitched scream behind them.
A burly man lumbered out from behind the bar and pulled the plug on the jukebox. The crowd pushed toward the noise, and Chenille was caught up in its current.
When the throng reached the source of the disturbance, Chenille stood on tiptoe and peeked over the broad shoulder of one of the onlookers. Through the blue fog of smoke, two women rolled on the floor, locked in a bizarre embrace.
“Catfight!” shouted a bandied-legged cowboy standing next to her. It was difficult to discern much from the writhing tangle of legs and arms, but as she blinked in the faint light, Chenille spotted a mass of blond curls and the toe of an alligator boot.
“Chiffon!” she cried out. “That’s my sister!”
A bushy-haired woman straddled Chiffon’s chest, getting the better of her. The woman shook her so hard that Chiffon’s head lolled from side to side.
“Stop it!” Chenille shrieked. “You’re hurting her!”
No sooner had she shouted than an electric streak of blue burst from the crowd, squealing like a banshee.
It was Attalee in her Lycra pants. She pounced on the back of the woman with all her force, but was instantly flung off like a pile of rags. The bushy-haired woman, her bony denim-covered bottom twitching in the air, renewed her assault on Chiffon with a vicious vigor.
The surrounding mob clapped and shouted, “Fight! Fight!”
Chenille looked behind her and spotted Garnell trying to jostle his way through the crowd. He seemed so far away.
She frantically rifled through her purse, searching for some kind of weapon, but found only Walter’s rubber bone. She snatched it up, shouldered through the crowd, and started hitting the bushy-haired woman on the butt with the bone.
“Get off of Chiffon, now!” she demanded. The girl whipped around and tried to rake her face with a set of long blue fingernails. Now that she was close enough to smell the bourbon on her breath, Chenille recognized the wild-eyed creature: It was Jonelle Jasper.
“Easy, Jonelle, easy,” Chenille said, ducking before Jonelle could shred her cheeks with her talons. Jonelle hissed like a cat and lunged for Chenille at the waist. Chenille’s knees buckled underneath her, and just as she was about to hit the floor, she felt someone grab her underneath her arms. She spun around to see Garnell holding her up.
Meantime, both Attalee and Chiffon had recovered, and they were yanking a screaming Jonelle around the floor by her long dark hair. A bouncer bullied his way through the crowd and shooed the pair away from Jonelle. Adding to the confusion was the insistent pop of flashbulbs and the whirr of cameras.
Chenille staggered toward Chiffon, looking like a wrung-out rag doll. “Come on! Let’s get out of here,” she said.
Attalee was behind her, and the three stumbled to the exit. Garnell followed on their heels as they pushed open the door and fled into the cold night air.
“We gotta get to the car,” Chiffon said, swiping at a smear of blood on her lip. “I saw them, they wer
e—”
Before she could finish her sentence, two photographers burst out of the exit door holding their cameras.
“Aren’t you a picture, Chiffon?” one hollered out. “Is that a collagen injection, or did someone use your lip as a punching bag?”
“Make a run for it,” Garnell said. “I’ll distract these boys.”
Chiffon and Attalee had already sprinted toward the parking lot, but Chenille lingered.
“How will you get home?” she asked Garnell.
“I’ll catch a ride. Go,” he urged. He turned his back and walked away, and Chenille felt an unexpected feeling of loss. Had she made a big mistake?
Twenty-Three
If God wanted me to touch my toes, he would have put them on my knees.
~ Bumper sticker on Attalee Gaines’s Buick Skylark
“How bad is it?” Chiffon asked her sister. It had been several days since the scuffle at the Tuff Luck Tavern, and her bottom lip was still inflated like a toy raft. There was also a quarter-sized bald patch on her scalp where Jonelle had yanked out her hair.
Chenille had just returned from the grocery store with a stack of tabloids under her arm. “Well, it’s—” She winced and deposited the magazines on her sister’s lap. “It’s pretty awful.”
Chiffon sifted through the papers, reading the headlines aloud: “‘Redneck Mama Rocks Roadhouse.’ ‘Drunk and Disgraced: Mom Involved in Melee.’ ‘Chiffon Butrell, Brawling Broad.’”
She shoved them aside. “Are they all like this?”
“Sort of,” Chenille said. “I put the nicest ones on top.”
“Dang,” Chiffon said. She glanced at her watch. “It’s time for Hollywood Hijinks. They’re supposed to be airing another story about me.”
“Do you really think you should watch it?” Chenille said, settling beside her sister on the couch.
“I can’t help myself,” Chiffon said as she aimed the remote at the TV.
Godiva Jones appeared on the screen wearing a gold lame evening gown as tight as a scuba suit.
“Tonight’s top story involves tequila, a tavern, and one heck of a tussle,” she said with a toss of her lacquered brunette mane. “Let’s travel to boondock country in Cayboo Creek, South Carolina, and find out what’s up with Chiffon Butrell.”
The camera zoomed in on the outside of the Tuff Luck Tavern as “Dueling Banjos” played in the background.
“Enough with the banjos already,” Chiffon said as the cameras closed in on a shot of a grinning Donovan Tate interviewing the waitress from the Tuff Luck Tavern.
“Chiffon Butrell was here drinking tequila,” the waitress said, using the tip of her pencil to scratch her thigh. “Straight shots. I lost track of how many she ordered.”
Chiffon sprang up from the couch. “What’s to keep track of? I had one shot the entire night.”
“She was flirting with all kinds of men,” the waitress continued in her heavy Southern drawl. “And strutting her stuff in some mighty tight britches.”
The camera panned to Jonelle Jasper, wearing large hoop earrings and jawing on a wad of bubble gum.
“I was minding my own business when Chiffon came at me like a linebacker,” she said in a blubbery voice. “I was scared silly because she’s the size of a battleship. Then she sicced her friend and sister on me, and I saw my life passing in front of my eyes.”
There was footage of Chiffon and Attalee dragging Jonelle by the hair, followed by a shot of Chenille beating Jonelle’s butt with a dog bone.
“That’s such a lie!” Chiffon shouted at the television. “She was taunting me, calling me a tramp. I turned around to confront her, and she shoved me first. I notice they don’t have any pictures of Jonelle banging my head on the ground.”
“Thanks, Donovan,” Godiva said, shaking her head in dismay. “Such chilling images. Now we have a surprise for our viewers tonight. Earlier this afternoon, Janie-Lynn Lauren granted Hollywood Hijinks an exclusive interview. Let’s take a look at that tape now.”
The camera showed Janie-Lynn curled up in a wingback chair, wearing a tight, cropped T-shirt that said, Be Gone, Chiffon.
“First off, Janie-Lynn,” Godiva said, leaning toward the actress in a chummy manner, “what statement are you trying to make with that T-shirt?”
“I think it’s obvious,” Janie-Lynn Lauren said, folding her shapely arms over her chest. “Both Lonnie and I are fed up with Chiffon. She refuses to sign the divorce papers and let Lonnie go. It’s time for her to ‘be gone’ from our lives.”
Godiva nodded sympathetically. “What do you think about her latest antics at the Tuff Luck Tavern?”
“Completely in character, according to Lonnie,” Janie-Lynn said, her eyes flashing with righteousness. “She’s a hard-drinking, unfit mother, always on the prowl for a man and a good time.”
“What a shame for those three children of hers!” Godiva said.
“Yes. Lonnie and I have talked at length about those dear little tots. Even though he seriously doubts he fathered them, he still loves those children and wants to make certain they’re well cared for.” She looked straight into the camera. “Chiffon, if you’re listening, please get the help you need, for the sake of your children; otherwise, we’ll be forced to fight you for custody.”
“What?” Chiffon said, with bulging eyes.
“Does this mean that you and Lonnie are together for the long haul?” Godiva asked.
“Yes,” Janie-Lynn Lauren said with a coy smile. She extended a hand to Godiva, and the camera panned in on a walnut-sized diamond engagement ring. “We’re planning a wedding as soon as Lonnie’s divorce is final.”
Godiva squealed and drew Janie-Lynn into a hug. “You heard it here first on Hollywood Hijinks,” she said as she signed off.
“That conniving, lying little—” The ringing of the phone interrupted Chiffon’s tirade. “Take it off the hook. Everyone in town will be calling.”
The answering machine picked up. “Chiffon, this is Janie-Lynn Lauren. If you’re there, pick up the phone.”
“You listen in on the other extension,” Chiffon hissed to Chenille. Chenille darted to the bedroom phone, and Chiffon picked up the cordless phone on the coffee table.
“You have a lot of nerve calling here after that interview on TV. There’s no way you’re getting custody of my children,” Chiffon said.
“Don’t start with me,” Janie-Lynn said haughtily. “You should have learned by now that I’m the one calling the shots.”
“Why are you doing this to me? What did I ever do to you?” Chiffon demanded.
“I warned you that if you didn’t sign the divorce papers, things would get ugly.” She laughed. “Of course, even I couldn’t have engineered your little barroom brawl. Luckily I hired a detective and a pair of photographers to tail you constantly, just in case you did something stupid. And you didn’t disappoint.”
“Why did you tell Godiva you’d try to get custody of my kids?”
“Because you won’t sign the divorce papers,” Janie-Lynn said with an impatient sigh.
Chiffon paused for a moment. “You’re bluffing. Why would you want to be saddled with three kids?”
“Don’t test me, Chiffon. I’m a multimillionaire. It’s not like I’ll be wiping their noses. When they’re not with a nanny, they’ll be in boarding school. I’ll never even know they’re around.” She lowered her voice. “Besides, lately Lonnie has been a little overly sentimental about your tykes, especially the little boy, Dennis.”
“Dewitt!” Chiffon said.
“Whatever. He might start pushing the custody issue, but I can dissuade him. He does whatever I say. But you have to sign those papers.”
“Of course Lonnie’s sentimental,” Chiffon retorted. “They’re his kids. I don’t know why yo
u keep suggesting they aren’t. There are paternity tests that could make you look like a liar.”
Janie-Lynn Lauren yawned. “You’re trying my patience, Chiffon. You don’t think I’d go on national television and make up lies that could get me in trouble, do you? You and I both know there’s some truth in what I said.”
Chiffon’s heart hitched. “What do you mean?”
“Skeet Watson,” Janie-Lynn said, with bravado in her voice. “The traveling satellite dish salesman from Tick Bite, North Carolina? Sound familiar?”
Chiffon gasped. “Lonnie told you about Skeet?”
“He tells me everything.”
The line went dead silent. Chenille was afraid Chiffon might have fainted. She was about to run into the living room to check on her sister when Chiffon took a big gulp of air and spoke in a rush of words.
“I only slept with Skeet because I wanted to repay Lonnie for all the hurt his cheating caused me over the years. Skeet was a good listener, he was kind, and it just...happened. I had terrible regrets, and I confessed to Lonnie as soon as he got home that evening.”
“Yes, you did,” Janie-Lynn said. “And nine months later you had your third child. Unfortunately, you couldn’t be sure who the baby’s father was.”
“No, we couldn’t,” Chiffon said, struggling to talk through her tears. “But we both made a pact that we’d never talk about it again. It was just that one time with Skeet versus dozens of times with Lonnie, so we figured Lonnie had to be Gabby’s father. Neither of us had the desire to prove anything different.”
“Now you can prove it,” Janie-Lynn said brightly. “We’ll order a paternity test for your dear little daughter. Are you a gambler, Chiffon?”
There was no response.
“Well?” Janie-Lynn prodded.
“No,” Chiffon said in a whisper, knowing she’d been licked. “I’m not a gambler. I’ll send those divorce papers back to you today. Obviously, my marriage is over.”
“Good girl!” Janie-Lynn Lauren said. “I’ll be sending you a check for child support, but expect some deductions due to your bothersome delays. Bye-bye.”
A Dollar Short (The Bottom Dollar Series Book 2) Page 17