by Sara Evans
“Isn’t it Reb’s money, June?”
“Who do you think keeps Rebel and Benson Law in proper society? Who plans the parties, sends the gifts, charms the clients and colleagues?” She paused in the doorway, gazing at the key in her hand. “The money is just as much mine as his, and each month when I write you a check, I’ll remind myself exactly how much every dime, every dollar, has cost me.”
Standing at the kitchen sink, Jade washed up dinner dishes. For Mama, crackers and broth. For Jade and Max, leftovers. Meatloaf, green beans, and corn with a wilting salad. Being raised by her granny, a woman who grew up in the Depression, Jade learned to never waste food. Even limp lettuce.
Mama had thrown up at the shop today for no reason, so Jade had to cut short her work at the Blue Two and hand control over to Emma. If the shop stood in the morning, Jade would consider it a huge victory.
Once the shop was squared away, she’d hire a new manager. But for the moment, the Blue Two had her undivided attention.
Beyond the window, a purple wash tinted the fading March day. Jade turned the window’s handle and shoved open the pane. A cold, moist breeze rushed inside, scented with the aroma of charcoal.
Jade breathed in, eyes closed. Such a glorious fragrance.
“Makes me think of home, the old farm.” At the sound of her mother’s voice, Jade swerved around. Mama shuffled into the kitchen, holding on to the wall and counter. “Tents pitched all over the yard, everyone sitting around a bonfire until late in the night, showering with a hose behind the barn.”
“You’re feeling better?”
“The broth and crackers hit the spot.” Mama opened the cupboard for a cup. “Thought I’d get my legs moving and come down for my ginger tea.”
Jade picked up the kettle to fill it. “It was just a bunch of naked, high hippies.”
“Naked? Jade, no one was naked.” Mama sighed. “Well, mostly no one.”
“Daddy exploded when I caught Eclipse showering behind the barn.” Mama’s friend was a tall string bean of a man with waist-length hair who spoke in rock-and-roll platitudes.
“I remember.” Mama lifted the top from the tea canister. “We had a big fight over that one.”
“His daughter was eight.” Jade gathered the wet dish towel and replaced it with a clean one. “What did you expect?”
“I’m sorry about Eclipse, Jade.” Mama tossed her tea bag into her mug. The same mug she used every night. “But if you want an apology about the way I lived, I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
“If I’ve learned anything from you, Mama, it’s ‘never apologize about the way you live.’”
Jade carried the damp dish towel to the laundry room between the kitchen and basement door. She paused, listening. A dog barked. A car drove past, blaring the radio. On the porch, Max paced, his heels scraping against the boards as he talked on his cell phone in deep tones.
“Is Max on the phone?” Mama peered out the door, folding her arms over her chest, shivering and hunching up her shoulders.
“Must be a client.” He’d been out there for almost a half hour. Left dinner to take the call.
The screen door clicked as Max entered. “Hey.” He held up his iPhone. “A friend.” Max popped open the fridge, stooping to see inside. “Do we have any Diet Cokes?”
“I think there’s one in there. I haven’t had time to shop.” Jade rounded the kitchen island, taking out a spoon and handing it to Mama. “Which friend? Mama, go on upstairs and get warm. I’ll bring up your tea.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice.” Mama inched out of the kitchen.
Max popped open the coke can. “I was talking to Rice.” Blunt, to the point, without prelude.
Rice McClure had worked at Benson Law until she moved to California a few months after Jade and Max’s wedding. “How’s she doing? Still liking California?” Why was he standing so stiff? “Babe, it’s okay if you talk to your ex-fiancée. I’m fine with it. I like Rice, remember?”
“Yeah, right, I remember.” Max swigged his drink. “She said to tell you hi, by the way. And she loves California and the firm she’s working for. She just called to talk shop.”
“Is she coming home this summer for your high school reunion?”
“Don’t think so.” Max shook his head, still with his stiff posture and an air of reservation. “Reunions are not her thing.”
“Not her thing? Since when? She was on every prom, homecoming, and reunion committee since ninth grade.”
“I guess they’re not her thing anymore. People change. Sheesh, Jade, don’t make a federal case of it.” Max opened a cabinet door, looking, then slammed it shut. Then another. “Where are the Duke basketball glasses? Can’t we keep anything in the same place?”
“First of all, the Duke glasses are here.” Jade opened the cabinet by the refrigerator. “Where they always are, Max. Second of all, I’m not making a federal case out of anything.”
The kettle whistled. Oh, Mama’s tea. Jade snapped off the burner and poured steaming water in Mama’s mug. She glanced back at her husband. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” Max filled the Duke glass with ice, then with the remains of his soda. “By the way, Dad beeped in while I was talking to Rice and wanted to know if you’d talked to Mom. He said they were supposed to have dinner with the McClures tonight, but she didn’t show.”
“Haven’t talked to her.” Jade squeezed in a spoonful of honey into Mama’s tea. At least not since yesterday when she asked to move into the loft. This morning she heard footsteps as she opened the shop, but June never showed in the Blue Umbrella.
“What’s that expression on your face?” Max, gruff and loud, tugged loose his tie as if he were suffocating.
“You mean the expression of me making Mama tea?” Her heart burned inside her chest, fueled by the secret she didn’t want to keep. Pulling the tea bag from the water and draining the excess, Jade welcomed the small chore as a valid distraction.
“No, the one of you hiding something.”
“You concluded that from my expression?”
“Call it lawyer instincts.” Max stepped around the island and lifted her chin with a touch of his finger. “Do you know something about Mom?”
“Why don’t you ask your dad?” Jade met his gaze as she headed out of the kitchen with Mama’s tea.
“Jade?” He followed her upstairs, then waited by the door while she situated Mama with her tea and helped her find a program to watch.
“I’ll check on you in a bit.”
Down the stairs, Max calmly descended behind her, rounding the staircase to meet her in the family room. She clicked on the lamp by her desk and launched e-mail and QuickBooks.
“Jade, there’s no guessing now. You’re hiding something.” He propped himself on the arm of the club chair. Jade had bought it at an estate sale a few months ago, and Max claimed it as his favorite chair.
“Max, if I tell you, don’t shoot the messenger.”
“Why would I get mad at you?”
“Because it’s bad news, and bad-news messengers get shot at, knocked down, and labeled all the time.”
“I think I can rise above it, Jade.” He waited. “We’re friends. Lovers. No secrets once we married, right? Wasn’t that the deal?”
She regarded his face for a long moment. She, his wife, his lover and friend, was about to scourge his treasured childhood memories by telling him his hero was a cheating scum. Forever he’d associate her with the day he learned his father was an adulterer.
Jade had grown up hearing her parents fight, listening to every accusation. She’d watched her daddy drive away at midnight never to return. Max, even at thirty-eight, clung to the idea that his flawed and imperfect parents maintained an idyllic marriage.
“No, I can’t.” She turned back to her computer. “I won’t. Just ask your parents, Max.”
“I’m asking you.” He touched her arm to draw her attention. “How do you know what’s going on with them anyway?”
“I was there.” Jade’s fingers wrapped around a pen, and she absently tapped it against her desk.
“Where?”
“At Orchid House . . . last Thursday. I picked up your mom in the city when Honey dropped her off after their shopping trip.”
“What happened?” Max shoved up from the arm of the chair and stood, feet apart, arms crossed.
Jade jiggled her leg. Seeing Claire . . . hearing Rebel’s cold tone . . . witnessing June’s stone composure. Just what did Jade witness that evening?
“Jade?” Max grew impatient. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll imagine the worst thing possible.”
“Go ahead.” Jade exhaled a bit. What if he just guessed? “What’s the worst thing you can imagine?”
Max paced to the fireplace. “I don’t know . . . Cancer? Losing their home? Losing their faculties? Dad gambling the family fortune on a horse race and losing? Mom walking down Main Street naked like old man Arnold?” He watched her. “An affair?”
Jade didn’t fade or lessen her gaze. Could he read the answer from her soul?
“Mom’s having an affair?” Max knelt in front of her.
“Your mom? June Benson?” Jade scoffed. “When pigs fly.”
“Dad?”
Jade nodded. “Not his first, from what I could tell.”
He stood, hands on his belt. “You heard my dad confessing to my mom he’d had an affair? Or was having an affair?” Max’s expression morphed as he spoke from surprise to anger. “You two walked into the house and Dad said, ‘How was your trip, June? By the way, I’m having an affair’?”
“No. Your mom and I walked in on him . . . in the media room.” Jade winced. How many details should she reveal? “He was with your mom’s friend Claire. They were . . .” If she added the visual, she’d regret it. Max didn’t need to deal with that image.
“They were . . . what?”
“Half-naked.” There. Get it and stop pushing.
Max’s eyes narrowed with ire. “You and Mom walked in on Dad, at the house, with a naked—”
“Half-naked.”
“Woman? Claire Falcon?”
“Yes.”
He exhaled like a charging bull and bolted from the room.
Jade tapped the pen on the desk and then threw it at the doorway. “I said, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger.’”
Five
When June came down from the loft, the morning light had hurdled the Main Street shop roofs and landed on the Blue Umbrella’s glistening floor.
Jade was in her office, so June peeked inside. “Shall I run across to Plumbs and get some of Mae’s sticky buns?”
Her daughter-in-law snapped the filing cabinet drawer shut. “Max knows.”
June stiffened and the light barely shining in her soul flickered. “You told him?”
“I had to, June. He asked.” Jade walked into the shop with a handful of fliers and business cards for the edge of the glass-top sales counter. “Rebel called looking for you, and Max started asking questions.”
“How’d he take it?”
“How do you think he took it?”
“I’m sorry, Jade.”
“Are you? Really? Then why didn’t you tell Max yourself?”
If June had the courage, she would’ve. “I’ll talk to him.”
Jade stooped to pick up a UPS package left by the counter. “And why have you let Reb step out on you for all these years?” She peered into June’s eyes. “It has been years, right?”
“‘Love keeps no record of wrong,’ Jade, if I recall Scripture accurately.”
“And ‘Thou shall not commit adultery,’ if I recall Scripture accurately,” Jade shot back.
“‘Forgive seventy-times-seven times.’” June watched Jade disappear into her office and come out with empty arms.
“Seventy times seven? He’s cheated on you that many times?”
June crossed to her daughter-in-law. “Don’t hate him, Jade. I’ve learned to deal with Rebel despite his flaws. He’s a good man, in his way.” So she’d convinced herself. “Now I’m going grocery shopping. Can I get you anything?” June slung her bag over her shoulder.
“Good man? How can a ‘good man’ keep cheating on you?”
June considered the question, patting her lips together, careful not to smear her lipstick. “I suppose we’re back to ‘love keeps no record of wrong.’”
“But where does Scripture command us to allow ourselves to be wronged over and over?”
“I’m not sure it does.” Until now, June had endured Rebel’s wanderings to pay the penalty for her own sin. To be sure her penance was at last complete. And when she found her payment complete, then and only then would she not go back to him.
At The Market, June eased her Lexus into a slot right up front. Getting out, she cleansed her soul with the crispness of the day. Noticing the grocery cart by her car, June grabbed hold and wheeled toward the store, dropping her Birkin into the kiddie seat.
She’d shop devil-may-care today. No list. No mind toward eating healthy.
June just touched the store’s portico when she stopped short, her floating emotions deflating and sinking. Claire Falcon exited The Market’s second door, her cart loaded, her white-blonde hair piled on her head and held in place with a pink head scarf.
Pausing to put her wallet in her bag, Claire shifted her gaze and froze when her eyes glanced over June. Their eyes met, and telepathic passion exploded between them.
Claire lurched into a hasty, sloppy run, her heels skidding over the slick, painted pavement. Her loaded cart swerved and rattled across the roadway and up the main thoroughfare. “Stay away from me, June.”
“Hold up, hussy!” June dashed after Claire, her empty cart shimmying and shaking.
“Stay away, June. I’m warning you.” Claire circled her Escalade and peeked at June over the hood, keeping the vehicle between them. “Come nearer, and I’ll call the police.” She fumbled around inside her purse, raised a small tube. “And zap you with this . . . mace.”
“Do it. Zap me. Call the police. I’d love to tell my side.” June stalked and circled the SUV, ramming her cart into Claire’s.
“Are you crazy?” Claire backed away, tripping on the curb, losing a brown pump in the process. “June, come on, this isn’t the place.”
“Oh really? Then where?” June rammed Claire’s cart again. “My house? The club? At the spring dance? I could have the bandleader dedicate a song to all the women Reb’s bedded. How about a duel in Laurel Park? Ooo, even better, up on Eventide Ridge.”
“Are you threatening me?” Claire hunched close to her cart, white-knuckling the handlebar.
“How do you have any right for indignation? I caught you half-naked with my husband, Claire.”
“You could let me explain.”
“Explain?” June crossed her arms and waited. This ought to be rich. “There’s an explanation? Well, then what am I all riled about? Let’s hear it, all the glorious details of how you came to be naked with my husband in my own home.”
“He told me you two were . . . well, that you two had an agreement,” Claire said through a clinched jaw.
“Agreement? What kind of agreement?” June shoved her cart out of the way and stepped toward Claire. “You’re lying.”
“Honest to heaven, June. Reb told me that you two, well, stepped out on each other once in a while. He made it sound like an open marriage. I saw it on Oprah once. Did you see that episode?”
“Oh my stars . . . Oprah? Claire, are you so stupid?” Hands on her hips, June bent toward Claire. “Do I look like a woman who’d live in an open marriage?”
“Well, no. But the prim and proper women are the ones who shock us the most. I didn’t see why he’d lie to me?”
“You couldn’t see why he’d lie?” Ha! “Reb got exactly what he wanted, Claire. Sex without consequences.”
A couple of women heading for their cars slowed and lowered their voices as if to listen.
“
Hey, busybodies, this is none of your business. Scoot, scoot.” June flicked her hand toward them. They hurried past. “Claire, did you think to challenge him? And you came to my house. Did he tell you I didn’t mind if he brought his whores home?”
“That’s enough, June.” Her faced paled, and she shimmied like an uprooted reed. “There’s been a misunderstanding—”
“Misunderstanding? Adultery is a misunderstanding?”
“If you’ll hear me out, June . . . I’m sorry for what happened, but I’m not a whore.” Claire shoved the mace back into her bag, her hand trembling. “During my divorce from Walt, Reb was so kind to me. One night at the club he gave me advice that saved me financially. Then it seemed I saw him everywhere. We started talking one night at Diamond Joe’s, and he asked me to dinner. I was flattered. I mean, Rebel Benson. I remember him from high school and thought a man like him would never go for a girl like me.”
“He’s married, Claire.”
“All right, June. I get it. I was stupid. But believe it or not . . .” Her voice quivered and it angered June. She didn’t want her compassion stirred. “I trusted him.” A single rivulet ran down Claire’s polished cheek. “I’m not proud of what I did, but Reb made me feel special, made me feel desired and wanted. He’s so exciting, powerful, and handsome.”
Claire’s words and sentiment resonated, adding color to the reason June returned to Reb year after year, indiscretion after indiscretion.
“You are one of dozens, Claire. The latest in a list of women he’s made feel special. Don’t be foolish.” June yanked her cart and started to back away, gathering her sympathies and compassion. Enough of this. She’d not feel solidarity with the woman she’d caught with her husband.
“One of dozens?” Claire lifted her chin. The wind whipped the end of her scarf against her cheek. “Well now, doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy, June? Who’s the real fool standing here?”
June walked toward The Market, head high, back straight, eyes swimming, heart bleeding.
Two a.m. Jade jumped out of Max’s Mercedes before he came to a complete stop. “Oh my gosh.” She pressed her hands to her face. No, no, no. The bed of a Ford F-350 protruded from the front window of the Blue Two.