And then her giant head began to swell into view on the billboard on the highway.
And suddenly she shot to an erect position like a prairie dog popping out of its burrow.
“Johnny. Oh, no. Oh, Jesus. There’s . . . something wrong. ” Her voice was urgent and dumbstruck
His head jerked toward her. “What’s going on? You okay?”
“No,” she said, her voice strange, and about to escalate into hysteria. “No I am not okay at all. Look at my billboard. LOOK AT IT. My billboard! Pull over!”
He slowed down.
He slowed down a little more.
And then he pulled over to the side of the road.
They both stared, utterly arrested.
For different reasons.
There was Rebecca, all right, the way Rebecca always wanted to be: larger than life, high above everyone else, isolated in all that white space like a work of art on a museum wall. Her giant sparkly raspberry lips were still pursed, blowing her dandelion.
But in all that impactful white space someone had drawn a huge and surprisingly detailed . . .
Yeah, it was a clown.
An extraordinarily skillfully rendered, really vivid clown.
He was wearing puffy checked pants and long curly-toed shoes, and great luscious fluffy shocks of hair billowed out from the sides of his mostly bald head. And he was bent over at the waist, his gaze aimed lasciviously out onto the highway drivers.
His butt was high in the air and aimed right at Rebecca’s pursed lips.
“What. The Effing. Hell. Is. That.” Rebecca could barely get the words out through a jaw tight as a vise.
“It’s a clown,” J. T. explained mildly. “It looks like you’re kissing a clown’s butt.”
It was so funny it was practically a religious experience. He almost floated out of his body.
“I CAN SEE THAT.”
He let a heartbeat’s worth of silence get by.
“Good-looking clown,” he said mildly.
Her head whipped toward him. Lightning was practically shooting from her eyes.
He knew instinctively that the milder he was, the more incensed Rebecca would get and the funnier it would get.
He was comprised of total happiness.
“It’s fucking INSULTING.”
“It’s just a clown butt, Rebecca. You’ve probably kissed worse things,” he said. Mildly.
Rebecca was probably about to launch from her body, too. For other reasons completely. She was magnificent when in a temper. And horrible.
On the one hand, landing national ad campaigns and having your face on billboards and bus benches could be viewed as an impressive achievement.
On the other hand . . . clown butt.
It was an epic struggle, but he could not keep the smile from spreading over his face. As big as any grin sported by a circus clown anywhere.
Rebecca saw it and she clamped her mouth shut, mute with fury.
He was pretty sure he knew exactly who’d drawn that clown.
How she’d done it was a little worrisome. That wasn’t an easy climb.
Why she’d done it . . . well, this was the first time he’d ever felt peculiarly heartened by vandalism.
If Britt wanted to deface his ex-girlfriend’s advertisements, surely it was due to an excess of passion.
And maybe . . . just maybe . . . it meant that she cared. Even in spite of those photos.
Either that, or she had completely lost her marbles.
His thoughts were on her as he cruised through town with funeral-procession speed so they could inspect the bus benches. Rebecca’s thunderous face and whitely tight lips were aimed out the window, her arms wrapped around her torso like battle armor.
On one bench, Rebecca bounding with a purse had been transformed into a bunny. A really competent, charming bunny, with a full complement of whiskers and a pair of buckteeth. The purse had been transformed into a basket.
“Buck. Teeth?” Rebecca hissed.
On the next one, the one where she was performing a Julie Andrews twirl and trailing a scarf, the scarf had been transformed into what appeared to be a boa constrictor, which was devouring her arm. Rebecca’s mouth had been turned into a little “O” of distress and she appeared to be trying to shake it off. The boa was wearing a big smile.
Rebecca muttered something unintelligible that ended with a furious, “atrocity.”
The last bench was the coup de grâce, though. The one where her head was tilted back and she was aiming an ecstatic smile upward.
She hadn’t been transformed into anything.
But the artist had given her a single, huge, erupting zit.
Rebecca made a low, feral sound in her throat. Like a cornered badger.
J. T. pulled up in front of the Truth and Beauty. “Here we are!” he said cheerfully. “You’ll feel better after you’ve had a blow-out.”
She flounced out of the truck and slammed the door so hard it should have caused an earthquake in the next county.
And he sat still for a moment, thinking furiously.
The funny part, the sweet part, the part that all but broke his heart right then and there: that Britt couldn’t even be truly mean when she was trying to be mean.
All of those pictures were adorable.
He hesitated.
And then, for God’s sake, even if he waded into the face of her cold rage and rejection, he just had to know if she was okay.
He performed an illegal U-turn in the middle of the street and headed up to Britt’s house.
Britt finally, tentatively, slid one foot out from under the covers and put it on the floor. And the cool floor against her bare foot felt so good to her sore head, she just lay there like that for an indeterminate number of minutes.
She got the rest of her body up in cautious increments in a similar fashion, and inched across the floor with shuffling steps, as if she were carrying a live grenade, careful not to jostle her head or her stomach. She made it to the kitchen and discovered about two inches of old, cold coffee left in yesterday’s pot. She dumped it in a cup with shaking hands and put it in the microwave.
Feeding Phillip about did her in. She gagged at least four times when his little column of meat slithered out of the can and splooped onto his dish.
And then she took the coffee outside and very, very carefully, in tenderly careful increments, stretched out on a lawn chair.
The morning sun was on her toes, and she was pretty certain that lying motionless like that was all she was fit for today.
That was how J. T. found her about fifteen minutes later.
She’d closed her eyes for a little while, and she was never certain whether she fell asleep again.
But when she opened them, J. T. standing over her, peering down.
She stared at him for what seemed like an inordinately long time.
Her heart leaped up like a puppy.
And then it crash-landed when she remembered he was the reason she had a vicious hangover.
“Did you spend the night out here, Britt?” He touched her arm as if to test whether it was clammy. He sounded worried.
“No,” she said. “I just got here.”
She said it as though she’d been traveling with a passport for days.
He settled back against the railing to study her. His face was a veritable lantern of suppressed glee all shot through with concern.
“So you’re back from Napa.”
“Yeah.”
“Have fun?” she managed the faintest hint of acid.
“A modest amount,” he said, matching her irony.
He was a big boy. He could do his own dirty work and bring the photos up.
He hesitated a beat, and then:
“So . . . what about you? Y
ou do anything . . . I dunno, fun . . . last night, Britt?”
Uh-oh.
She thought her answer through for what felt like quite some time. “Went out with a friend.”
Her voice sounded dreamy. She’d forgotten how thoroughly alcohol savaged every single one of your senses. She wanted to speak quietly so as not to jar her head.
“Mmm. Friend, huh?”
“Casey.”
“Ah, Casey. What did you ladies do?”
Another little delay while her brain searched out the word.
“Drank,” she whispered.
He stifled a laugh. “You don’t say.”
She had nothing to say to that, really.
“You know . . . as I was driving back into town from Napa this morning . . . I saw a lot of new artwork.”
Oh. Crap.
“And since I know how you like to transform things, I thought you might be interested to hear how some of the Hellcat Canyon’s public art has been, shall we say, transformed.”
She remembered he played a cop on Blood Brothers. He knew how to interrogate a suspect. He could just corner her into the truth with these innocent little comments.
She remained silent. You can’t incriminate yourself if you don’t talk. She’d learned that from cop shows, too.
The intent of this long, long silence was clearly to shred her nerves to pieces.
“I just have one very pressing question, Britt.”
“Okay,” she whispered.
He paused strategically.
“Why a clown?”
It took her a long while to answer.
Finally she decided she didn’t have it in her to attempt a defense.
“Fun.” Her voice was a shamed, resigned hush. It was almost peaceful to surrender to truth this way.
“Fun?” His voice was peculiarly taut.
“Fun to draw. All the curves.” She got her hand up in the air to demonstrate. “Their big balloony pants and curvy shoes and . . . and . . . their . . . foofy hair and . . .”
She faltered when she risked a look up and saw his expression.
His face was peculiarly brilliant and tense, and his eyes appeared to be watering, as if he was holding in a sneeze.
“And?” he prompted on a hush. Like some hybrid of a prosecutor in court and a child hearing the best bedtime story ever.
“And . . . I love animals. But I hate clowns.”
She confessed this in the shamed, whispered monotone she recognized from that part in crime dramas when the perp breaks down and confesses.
There was a silence.
“Britt.” He sounded as though he was strangling. “I’m going to step off the porch a moment so I don’t hurt your head.”
A few moments later from a distance away, she heard him smack the oak tree with his hand as he roared with laughter. She heard flapping as he frightened off a few roosting birds.
Flapping, she recalled, was one of his favorite sounds.
“Oh, that’s so sweet,” she murmured. “You’re so thoughtful.”
He really was. The bastard really was.
He was a nice person. A nice person who had canoodled with his ex at a wedding in photos the whole effing world could see.
He returned a moment later, apparently having got all of that out of his system.
“I guess you decided you were ready to show your artwork to the world. You sure did it with a bang.”
“Guess so,” she said, with faint irony since she didn’t have the energy or brain cells to debate that.
“The one with the zit. That was pure evil genius.”
“I know. Her skin is so pretty.”
She covered her eyes with her arm and heaved a sigh. She would make a terrible criminal if this was how easily she confessed to things.
Her new credo, she decided, was, “Margaritas are not the answer.”
She should get that printed up for Casey to hang on her living-room wall.
“Could you stand right there and block the sun again, J. T.? It’s not my friend this morning.”
He shifted to the right obligingly.
And they were quiet again. That blue jay who liked to harass Phillip let fly with a series of squawks.
“I’m not proud of it, J. T.,” she said finally. “It just kind of . . . happened.”
“Well, we all do things we’re not necessarily proud of.”
“You’re the expert,” she muttered.
He didn’t rise to that bait.
He was just quiet, but it was the sort of quiet of someone who has something on their mind.
“Casey’s my friend now,” she said, idly. After a moment. “We call each other and everything.”
She could feel him smiling. “Your friend is a delinquent.”
She smiled slowly and faintly. “I know.”
They were quiet together, and even when he wasn’t saying anything it was just lovely to have him sitting there even though he was peculiarly the greatest source of happiness and the greatest source of pain she’d ever known, greater than a cigarette ground into her skin. She didn’t know why he’d come.
“Any more where that came from?” He pointed to her coffee.
She passed her cup to him.
He took a sip. Then winced mightily. “This is yesterday’s.”
“Yep.”
“Had any aspirin yet?”
“Nope.”
“I’ll go make more coffee. Don’t move.”
“Couldn’t if I tried.”
He was gone for what felt like quite a while, and then he returned with a cold rag and a pillow, which he punched to cloud-softness and folded neatly. He lifted her head as tenderly as if it were spun glass and slid it beneath.
He handed her a little glass of water and a pill. She took them with incriminating pen-stained fingers.
Then he went back inside and puttered about in the house, probably making the coffee. She heard him talking to Phillip like he was an old friend. She smiled. That was how her house was supposed to sound.
And then her heart hurt horribly because it was never going to sound like that again.
He returned.
“Feeling a little better?”
“Yes.”
But actually, no.
“Good. I came to tell you something.”
And all of a sudden she was rethinking the need to hurl, because her stomach violently knotted.
It would just be her luck if the last image he took away of her was her retching over the side of the deck.
“Britt . . . those photos on TMZ? . . . I take it you saw them . . .”
He took her absolute held-breath torturous silence as an affirmative.
“I know how this is going to sound . . .”
She kept her breath held.
“But it’s not what they look like.”
“Wow,” she managed. A scorn-laden whisper.
Several seconds later.
“There weren’t even supposed to be any photographs taken there. Some asshole paparazzi managed to get in anyway. TMZ had it totally wrong. And Franco was way out of line to give them a quote. Rebecca and I are not back together, and we never will be.”
It was hard to rejoice at these words. Let alone believe them.
The photos had been branded on her soul since yesterday.
“If you’re wondering how it looked to me,” she managed to coat her languid hungover voice in irony, “it looked like Rebecca had her head dreamily on your shoulder and it looked like you liked it. And it looked like you’d just been kissing in some kind of dark alley.”
It was the longest sentence she’d managed today. Each word of it felt she was calling up ground glass from her very depths.
He went still.
He took a long breath. “Okay . . . I know you don’t want to hear this but just try . . . try to imagine all the split seconds of your life you would hate to have freeze-framed. Imagine, for instance, a photo of Truck’s hand on your ass while you’re smiling. Because I saw that moment at the Misty Cat, and I saw the moment after that. Imagine everything you’ve ever done, your entire life as a whole, broken down into split-second fragments of time, each of them photographable. Now imagine them without context. Imagine a photographer watching you like a fucking hawk looking for a moment that means a payday for him. I basically shrugged Rebecca off my shoulder, but you didn’t see that photo. Becks was drunk and she asked me to walk her back to her room. It was dark. It wouldn’t have mattered who she was, Britt, I wouldn’t have let her walk there on her own. Maybe I should have looked for someone else to walk her, but she is who she is now, for better or worse. There aren’t a whole lot of people she can trust. I am who I am, and I couldn’t just let her go alone. I did not kiss her. She did try to kiss me.”
A little murderous spike of jealousy pierced her hangover over that last sentence.
God. For better or worse, she knew this was true: he wasn’t going to let Rebecca Corday wobble drunkenly off to her room alone.
He wouldn’t be J. T. if he’d done that, no matter how she loathed thinking about it.
It all sounded true.
But it didn’t make the photos any less painful.
“Where is she now?” Britt managed.
“I just dropped her off at the Truth and Beauty to get a blow-out.”
Britt froze.
And then she tried to sit up. “Oh, God. Oh God, no.”
Rebecca was going to walk into the Truth and Beauty and see that Casey had a bunny face.
It was the funniest, most horrifying thing she could imagine.
“Britt, honey, you need something to hurl into?” J. T. was on his feet and poised to grab a flowerpot.
“No . . . I’m . . . just . . . thinking about bunny faces.”
Casey, Britt was pretty sure, could handle herself.
And then what he’d just said about Rebecca fully penetrated.
“J. T. . . .” she said slowly. “Why is Rebecca still here with you?”
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