Love and Other Wild Things

by Molly Harper

  Wayne had known she wasn’t happy, toward the end; he just didn’t understand why. He worked hard to provide for them. They lived in a beautiful home, took luxurious vacations, joined the best clubs. Sure, he had his dalliances with pretty much any female employee of Crenshaw and Associates, but that was par for the course for their circle. Hadn’t the other company wives told her to expect as much? Hell, it wasn’t exactly unheard of for men from Lake Sackett to stray, either. Besides, he didn’t drink as much as his friends did, and he didn’t spend that much money on his affairs. So why couldn’t she at least be content with their life? And the worst part was that she couldn’t make him understand, even when they’d gone two years without having sex because she wasn’t about to expose herself to whatever he might have picked up from his “friends.”

  She didn’t love him anymore. She wasn’t sure she ever had, really, beyond the first wash of teenage hormones and blissfully stupid life-planning one did at eighteen. Wayne didn’t see how sleeping with other women should affect his relationship with Lucy, an “evolved” opinion he’d neglected to share with her before they’d stood in front of a priest and promised to forsake all others. And while Wayne didn’t see cheating as a reason to end the marriage, she wasn’t about to let her actions teach Sam that those patterns were acceptable. She’d insisted on counseling, and Wayne had made a half-hearted effort. He hadn’t stopped cheating, of course, but he had admitted that he should stop being so obvious about it. Then gravity had sort of ended the marriage for them, and sometimes she was at a loss as to how to feel about it.

  “It’s been difficult. But Sam and I are going to be okay. We’re staying at my dad’s place. Sam’s raring to start kindergarten, but he’ll settle for running the preschool like his own personal kingdom for now,” she said with a snort.

  Duffy’s brows drew together again, noting her darker expression. “Yeah, Tootie said something about that. Is ‘Mamaw Evie’ still giving you a hard time about putting him in preschool instead of leaving him with her?”

  Lucy rolled her dark brown eyes so hard she almost dislodged a contact lens. “No more than usual.”

  “It will get better,” Duffy assured her. “Evie’s just not used to anyone telling her no.”

  “Oh, she’s used to it. She just refuses to hear it,” she grumbled.

  Duffy placed one of his enormous hands on her arm. “She’s mourning. You all are. Wayne’s death was a shock, and people lash out when they’re grieving. They’re scared, they’re hurt. If anyone would know, I would.”

  Lucy nodded. Duffy had a unique understanding of grief. His family had owned the McCready Family Funeral Home and Bait Shop, the largest funeral home (and bait shop) in this end of Georgia, as far back as anyone could remember. While Duffy worked on the marina side of things, leading fishing tours and selling tackle, he’d seen enough funeral fistfights break out to recognize emotional wear and tear.

  She’d hoped that moving with Sam back to Lake Sackett, living in her late father’s home, would simplify their lives. In Dallas, she’d had “friends” that she lunched with and planned charity events with, but no one she could trust with even half of the personal details she’d mentioned in this single afternoon’s conversation with Duffy. She’d hoped that things would get easier once she was in more familiar territory, with people she knew and cared about. Yes, most of her own family was gone, but she could swing a cat down Main Street and hit three people who had known her since birth. She wanted that for Sam, that permanence and familiarity, even if it did come at the cost of living near her in-laws, which was enough of a negative on her pro/con list that it had almost convinced her not to move back.

  She pursed her lips and nodded. “I’m sure that’s it.”

  “Well, if you need anything, just let me know.”

  Her traitorous knees could immediately name about ten things she needed, most of them requiring nudity and dim lighting. Very. Bad. Influence. Her brain scrambled for a much more appropriate and less naked answer.

  “Um, actually, I need to get this cake over to Maddie. It’s kind of warm out for February, and buttercream melts pretty easy. You can only imagine how much worse that thing looks when it’s . . . melting.”

  Duffy shuddered at the image. “Yikes.” “Maybe you could come by tomorrow?”

  “Ah, can’t, I’ve got a charter tomorrow. Bunch of guys from Clarksville, want to try their hand at crappie.”

  “Well, text me, and we’ll work out a time.”

  Duffy scratched the back of his neck. “I don’t have your number.”

  “Sorry,” she said, her cheeks flushing pink.

  Of course Duffy had no way to contact her, beyond the gossip grapevine. They’d emailed occasionally after she’d left, and stayed Facebook friends . . . until one day she’d checked her friends list and found that he wasn’t on it anymore. She’d wanted to believe it was some sort of techno-error, that he couldn’t possibly have unfriended her. But she’d never had the guts to contact him and ask if he’d meant to end their digital friendship, or even to try to refriend him. And now, realizing that he didn’t even have her number? It made the distance between them stand in even sharper relief.

  “Give me your phone,” she said, holding out her hand. He slapped a very heavy chunk of plastic in her palm. “Sweet baby Jesus, can you call 1987 on this thing? Does it text or do I need to use Morse code?”

  “Smartass,” he grumbled, taking the phone back and opening his texting window. Or at least, he tried—it took him several seconds to think about it.

  “I don’t see a point in getting the fancy-schmancy models that can Google and scratch my back for me,” he said. “It’s not like I’m big on social media.”

  “Really?” she asked, her mouth going slightly dry. Was he really going to bring this up now? Just minutes after seeing her for the first time in years?

  “Yeah, I quit Facebook years back,” he said. “I just didn’t see the point in it. Do I really need to know that the guy I used to sit next to in math class is ‘drinking the weekend’s first beer, hashtag-blessed?’ And do I need to ‘like’ it?”

  An old wound Lucy hadn’t even realized was there closed just a little bit. He hadn’t unfriended her; he’d walked away from the service entirely. Duffy hadn’t intentionally cut her from his life. Life had just happened, as it had with so many of her old friends, and they’d lost touch. Sure, she’d thought her friendship with Duffy was different, that it would last until they were old and gray, living next door to each other and watching their great-grandkids wrestle in their backyards. If someone had told her as a teenager that they would be standing there on the sidewalk, virtual strangers, she would have laughed in their face. And maybe kicked them in the shin for good measure. But knowing that he hadn’t deliberately pushed her away was welcome news.

  “Probably not,” she conceded. “But it’s handy, when you move far from home. And when you’re planning on opening a business.”

  “If this becomes the kind of place where people post pictures of their coffee instead of drinking it, I will boycott it,” he warned her, though he was grinning. “Publicly. There may be dead fish involved.”

  “There’s not much I can do about that,” she told him. When Duffy’s text function finally launched, she texted a message to her cell number. This is Duffy.

  “You could bake ugly cupcakes that don’t make for good pictures?” he suggested.

  “That gets you on the Internet for other reasons,” she said, pursing her lips. Duffy threw his head back and laughed.

  “That’s what I’ve been missing, that sense of humor,” he told her.

  “You’re surrounded by women who have good senses of humor.”

  “Yeah, but they use them against me, which isn’t as fun.” She snorted. “I’ve missed you, Duffy.”

  A truck drove by and honked, a typical greeting in Lake Sackett, but she felt oddly awkward standing on the street, where anyone could see her, laughing and typing her number i
nto his phone. It seemed like something a widow shouldn’t be doing with an old high school friend just six months after her husband’s funeral. Especially a widow who was hoping to open a business that depended on community goodwill in the off-season.

  “I’ve missed you, too, Lucy. And the rest of my family will be descending on you soon enough. Be prepared for more gossip than your ears can stand.”

  She grinned. “I’m looking forward to it. I was so sorry to hear about your dad passing. I’m gonna miss having someone who’s willing to eat my baking mistakes, no matter how misguided. Especially now that those mistakes will be on a commercial level.”

  Duffy smiled, the light in his eyes going just a bit sad. “Thank you. And he would have loved to see you open this place, no matter how many mistakes you bake. He always liked you, said you were a darling.”

  “Well, he was right, because I am a darling,” Lucy said primly.

  “With a penis cake in her truck,” Duffy noted. “Come on, we’d just forgotten about the penis cake.” Duffy shook his head. “Had we?”

  “Oh, I’m already pretending it never happened,” she told him. “Solid plan.”

  Chapter 2

  DUFFY DROVE THROUGH town at a snail’s pace. He was clearly getting too old for after-charter drinks with clients. He knew a greasy breakfast from the Rise and Shine would help his sorry condition, but he wasn’t sure he had the energy to get out of his truck to buy it. So he crept along Main Street and prayed for Aunt Leslie’s chewy coffee to work its dark magic.

  He’d meant to get up much earlier to run to the post office and pick up the shipment of lures, but he’d overslept and ended up leaving his mother to open the bait shop on her own. Donna was not going to be a happy camper when he returned. Maybe he should stop and get a greasy breakfast for her, just to avoid the inevitable ass chewing.

  If Lucy’s bakery were already open, that would have solved his problem. Donna was a sucker for a cinnamon roll, with the rare exception of Ike’s over at the Rise and Shine. She said they tasted like “frozen, prepackaged crap,” which seemed impossible given that Ike prided himself on making everything from scratch. Donna swore Bud Dunbar made the only decent cinnamon rolls in town, but Dunbar’s Bakery was the last of Lake Sackett’s businesses to fall victim to the water dump. Well, the bakery had also fallen victim to the fact that Bud’s son, Junior, was an idiot and Bud had serious doubts about letting him run a business that involved sharp objects and hot appliances. But the water dump hadn’t helped.

  Cousin Margot’s Founders’ Festival had reversed Lake Sackett’s plummet into the outhouse. His uncle Stan’s girl had spent years in the big city planning parties for fancy people, and she’d channeled all of that know-how into planning the Founders’ Festival the previous fall, an event so aggressively quaint that it showed up on travel blogs and magazines all over the country as a “spot to watch.” And then they’d had an especially rainy winter, which was slowly building the lake back to normal levels.

  Despite running late, Duffy paused and pulled to the side of the street as a funeral procession rolled into view, a nicety that his grandpa E.J.J. had drilled into his head from childhood. As his uncle Stan drove past in the hearse, he pointed at Duffy and then pointed at his watch. Duffy nodded his head and gestured back for Stan to speed it up because it was Stan’s slow-ass driving dragging the funeral procession in the first place.

  The key to making McCready’s work was keeping the marina side fun for the boaters while remaining respectful to the people who were grieving for a lost loved one. And the poor Burtons were grieving the death of their matriarch, Mama Winnie, to a decade-long battle with breast cancer. Winnie was one of those rare women who had spent her entire life getting her way, but being so loving and supportive of her family that they never minded her total control. Grandma Tootie had aspired to be just like her, but the McCreadys were a little tougher to wrangle than the Burtons.

  At one point, he’d been distantly related to the Burtons through his marriage to Lana. Her mother, Wanda, was the daughter of a distant Burton cousin. But the Burtons had always been quick to assure Duffy that they had little to do with his wife or that branch of the family, even before he married Lana . . . which should have been a red flag, he supposed.

  Duffy and Lana had been “nod in the hallway” friends for years, but never thought about dating until her friend Carletta Leehigh set them up for homecoming junior year. They just sort of fell into being a couple. Lana’s high school friends had teased her for years about being the only one in their group without a steady boyfriend or a pre-engagement ring. And Lana was deathly afraid of being left behind.

  Like a lot of couples in Lake Sackett, they’d gotten married right out of high school. She’d come to him while they were lining up for graduation in their royal blue caps and gowns, her eyes wide in panic because her period was late. She must have gotten knocked up on prom night, she’d told him, when they’d joined the rest of their class partying on Make-Out Island. On prom night, Duffy had been six beers in when Lana sidled up to him, and he hadn’t quite built up the hops tolerance he had now. Earlier that night, he’d heard that Lucy was going to follow her sweetheart, Wayne, to Texas A&M that fall instead of going to Georgia State and staying close to home. His best friend in the world was leaving him for longhorns and a shithead. Consolation sex with his not-quite-girlfriend had sounded like the best idea Duffy’s beer-soaked brain had ever heard.

  So when Lana had come to him with tears in her eyes, Duffy had done the “right thing”—immediately after the graduation ceremony, he’d dropped to one knee and proposed with his class ring. After his mother, Donna, stopped screaming at him, they arranged for the quickest quickie June wedding ever performed in Lake Sackett.

  Tootie said that when everything involved in the ceremony is a rental, it should be considered an omen for a short-lived marriage. Why she felt the need to cross-stitch that on a sampler and give it to them as a wedding present was another matter entirely. And then, about three weeks after their honeymoon in exotic Knoxville, Lana told him that her period had shown up after all, that sometimes she was irregular and had these little “scares.” Donna had an outbreak of the “I told you so’s,” insisting Duffy should have demanded a pregnancy test and an ultrasound before the wedding. Duffy started having nightmares about bear traps and having to gnaw off his own foot to escape. Between her plans to move to Texas and Duffy’s new status as a married man,

  Lucy kept her distance and faded from his life.

  And he was stuck in Lake Sackett, in more ways than one. Duffy turned the truck onto the McCready’s lot, wondering whether he should head back to town and grab that greasy breakfast after all, because he was not prepared to face a busy day tuning up boat engines. He pressed his hands over his eyes to try to relieve some of his headache. He hadn’t been this hungover since the morning after he’d heard Lucy had gotten married. He and Carl had gone through four jars of Dawson family brew, which didn’t sound like much, but Carl’s family moonshine recipe could easily power a space shuttle launch.

  His marriage had dragged on longer than it should have through mulishness (Duffy’s) and infidelity (Lana’s) because, well, Duffy had the unenviable combination of the McCready stubborn streak and the refusal to admit his mother was right. But Lana had gotten it into her head that sleeping with one of Duffy’s well-off friends was going to lead to greener pastures, and had filed divorce papers. Duffy had recognized a reprieve when he saw it and signed them immediately.

  He knew he wasn’t in love with Lana anymore. He wasn’t sure if he ever had been, truly, or if he had just been so blinded by loneliness and disappointment that his teenage brain had got- ten its wires crossed. He did know for damn sure that he didn’t want to be married to her anymore. But unfortunately, he was just attached enough to let her slip back into his life every now and again when her ego got bruised.

  Every few months, Lana came to him crying, hoping for some comfort over her latest he
artbreak—some dipshit ATV salesman who didn’t keep his promise to take her to Daytona for the weekend or, worse, that time a dipshit Jet Ski salesman did take her to Daytona for the weekend and left her without a way to get home. And the sight of a woman he’d once thought he loved, miserable and broken . . . it was like he had no control over his pants.

  In the morning, Lana would skip off with boosted self-confidence, leaving Duffy soaked in Designer Imposters perfume and resignation that the whole cycle would start over again in a few months. He knew it was unhealthy. He knew he should keep her at a distance. He just didn’t want to be one of the extensive line of people who’d added to her hurt over the years. She got so caught up in attention from men, in the whirlwind of a new relationship, but she never looked before she leaped. She was sensitive. She was insecure.

  She was waiting for him in the parking lot of McCready’s.

  Duffy opened the truck door and spotted her climbing out of her El Camino, which was parked outside the back staff entrance for the funeral home.

  “Oh, shit.”

  E.J.J. had made it very clear that unless Lana was burying somebody, she was not welcome on the McCready’s property. There had been several “confrontations” between Lana and Duffy’s mama. One of them involved a boat anchor. What was she doing here, instead of following the funeral procession?

  Lana leaned against her El Camino, waggling her fingers at him. He crossed to her, scanning the parking lot for Donna. If he could get Lana back in her car without incident, maybe he could get through his morning without bloodshed. He glanced toward the bait shop, where he could see his mama rummaging around in the tackle racks, facing the lot. Maybe not.

  “Hey, Lana, what are you doing here?” he asked.