He came out of the pantry with a huge smile on his face, and a cardboard box in his hand. “Brownie mix,” he crowed. “Remember?”
“Oh no,” I said, backing away from him. “Not again.”
“Come on,” A.J. said. “It’ll be good.” We got as far as putting the mix in a bowl and adding a couple of eggs and some vegetable oil, before the situation totally deteriorated. Fifteen minutes later we were back out on the patio, eating raw batter with a wooden spoon.
“Mmm,” A.J. said, licking the last of the chocolate from my fingertips. “Remember the brownies we had that night?”
“No,” I said.
“Liar.” He kissed my neck, deliberately smearing chocolate on my blouse.
“Oh, here,” he said, “Let me get rid of that.”
I pushed him away, but he was as persistent as ever. I made a weak attempt to keep things under control, but I wasn’t having much luck, and to tell the truth, maybe my heart wasn’t in it.
“Come on, baby,” he whispered, reaching around me to try to un-hook my bra. “It’s the last night of summer. The worst summer of my life. And it should have been the best. I think about being in Provence, with that ape Nick. God. I stayed drunk most of the time.”
“At least you got to leave town,” I told him. “I was stuck right here in Madison. Your daddy was so mad he tried to force us out of business. Paige’s mom was threatening to sue me for slander, and my daddy got kicked out of the country club. Plus I was the laughingstock of the whole town.”
“Shhh,” he said, shutting me up with a long kiss. “That’s all behind us now, don’t you see?” He twisted his wrist so he could see his watch in the moonlight. “Look. It’s almost midnight. I think we ought to celebrate. Right at midnight. Get a clean start.”
“And how are we going to do that?” I asked warily.
He chuckled and fumbled for the buttons on my blouse. “Just like the good old days,” he promised. “Before everything went to shit. Just you and me, and the moonlight. Remember when we used to sneak off to the shack?” He groaned. “I get wood just thinking about it.”
“So I noticed,” I told him, laughing and pushing him away.
“You know, Kyle finally talked Daddy and Vince Bascomb into putting his shack and ours on the market. Of course, Mama could not be happier, considering.”
Memories of Vince Bascomb’s forlorn cabin came flooding back to me now, and I shuddered involuntarily.
A.J. felt the shudder and pulled me closer.
“I was out at the Bascomb place last month,” I said. “It’s a complete wreck. Why has he waited so long to sell it?”
A.J. had worked his knee between mine, and his voice was muffled. “Damned if I know. Kyle has been after the two of them to sell for ages, but Vince wouldn’t budge, and Daddy thought it would bring more money if they sold off all the lots as one parcel. So he just waited Vince out. To tell you the truth, I think the old guy is in pretty bad shape. He’s broke, and he needs the money.”
“Yeah, I heard he’s pretty crippled up with arthritis,” I said.
A.J. looked up and kissed me hungrily. Nothing ever satisfied his appetites.
“Not just the arthritis,” he said after a while. He had my bra off, and his hands were tugging at the waistband of my shorts. “Now he’s got a brain tumor. Inoperable, poor bastard.”
Suddenly I had a mental image of Vince Bascomb, not as he must be now, ridden with arthritis and cancer, but as he was twenty-five years ago. The image was of him and Sonya Wyrick slipping off to that hunting camp in the woods. And of Drew Jernigan and Lorna Plummer. And yes, of my own mother and Darvis Kane.
I had deliberately pushed all these thoughts out of my mind minutes after we’d left that Waffle House in Kannapolis. But now the images came flooding back, unbidden. I felt my scalp prickle and goose bumps raise up on my arms.
“Come on, baby,” A.J. was whispering. “I can’t get this damn zipper of yours. Help a guy out, can you?”
I struggled upright so suddenly that I knocked A.J. off the chaise longue.
“What the hell?” he yelped. “What’s wrong with you, Keeley?”
I buttoned my blouse hurriedly. “Oh God, A.J. I can’t do this. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be a tease.”
He groaned and ran his hand through his hair. “Where are you going? You’re not going to just leave me like this, are you? I thought we were going to start over. I thought we had an understanding.”
I stepped into my shoes and smoothed my clothes, and looked around for my purse. “More like a misunderstanding,” I told him. “My fault this time, not yours.” I dropped a kiss on his cheek and ran like hell out of there.
57
I dreaded returning to Loving Cup on Tuesday, but there was no getting around it. I needed decisions on the fabrics for the parlors, the dining room, and the upstairs sitting room, and I needed them fast, if I was going to get my workroom going on drapes and upholstery. I threw the samples and my presentation boards in the front seat of the Volvo and drove slowly out to the plant.
Somehow the fun and excitement of this project had quickly drained away, to reveal just another big, expensive job. I chided myself for getting so emotionally involved in the project. So what if Mulberry Hill wouldn’t be Will’s primary residence? If Stephanie had her way—and she always got her way—Glorious Interiors would soon have another assignment—a big splashy mansion in Buckhead. So what if I’d invested all this time and creative energy for a house that was just for show? If the check clears, my daddy would say, your job is done.
I’d expected to find the bra plant shrouded in doom after Will’s big announcement of the previous day, but what I found was just the opposite. One of those big, portable electric flashing signs had been set up on the plant’s front lawn. “Now Hiring Experienced Stitchers and Pattern Makers. Competitive Pay, Great Benefits. Apply Within.”
Was this somebody’s idea of a practical joke? I wondered. If it was, plenty of people had been taken in. Traffic streamed into and out of the parking lot, and an off-duty uniformed Morgan County sheriff’s deputy directed me to park on the grass behind the plant because all the parking slots were full.
Inside the main building was just as busy. I had to pass through a security guard and pin on a plastic visitor’s badge just to get through the front door—which was a first. As I walked down the hall toward Will’s office I heard phones ringing, the steady clack of computer keyboards, and from the back of the building, where I knew the factory floor had been, I could swear I heard the hum of sewing machines.
Miss Nancy was on one phone line when I went into Will’s office, and I could see all the lights on her phone console had blinking lights for calls holding. She looked up, mouthed “Just a minute,” and went back to her call. I would have taken a seat, but all the chairs in the reception area—all three of them—were already taken. Will’s visitors looked as out of place in that shabby office as a peacock in a henhouse. All three of the women were gorgeous in a vaguely exotic way. All three wore black—black leather, black denim, black spandex. They weren’t all that young, maybe ranging in age from twenty to fifty, but they had that big-city look, tattoos, nose piercings, bizarre hair, and they all carried tote bags. They looked supremely bored.
Miss Nancy finally hung up the phone.
“Well, what do you think?” she asked. “Can you believe it? I knew that boy would turn things around for us, and he has.”
“What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s with the sign out front, and the security guards and all these—people? I thought Will was laying everybody off.”
“Hell no!” she sputtered. “Where were you yesterday, under a rock? Didn’t you hear the announcement?”
“I left early,” I said. “I had a terrible headache. But Stephanie told me that Will had decided to set up production offshore. She said that was going to be the announcement. That he’d lined up one of those maquiladoras in Mexico to do the sewing.”
“In h
er dreams.” Miss Nancy snorted. “We’re going back into production as soon as we finish hiring. The gals in the sample room have already started work.”
I leaned over her desk and whispered “What’s with the chicks in black over there? Is Loving Cup expanding into bondage wear too now?”
“Those are the new fitting models,” Nancy whispered back. “Did you ever?”
“What happened to the old fitting models?”
“The old ones were all about a hundred-leven years old and had titties hangin’ down to their knees,” she said. “We sent off to New York for this bunch. Honey, we’re going uptown all the way.”
Her phone rang, she picked it up and put it down again. “He’s ready for you,” she said.
I pushed the door open to Will’s office and went in. His desk was covered with bras, lace samples, sketches, and paperwork.
“Hey,” he said curtly. “I can only give you like ten minutes. As you can see, I’m really swamped.”
“Fine,” I said. I took my own stack of fabric samples out and set them in front of him. “These are for the two settees in the parlor, the armchairs, and the drapes. Plus the fabric for the dining room drapes, and two of the upstairs guest rooms. I’ll have a better idea of what to put in the family room once I’ve found some new sofas…”
But he wasn’t really listening. “No,” he said, putting one swatch aside. “No. I like this. Not this. Too shiny. Too busy. Too cheesy. Fine. This’ll work. Okay.”
He pushed the two stacks of fabrics, the rejects and the chosen ones, across the desk toward me. “Anything else?”
“I just need your approval for one more buying trip. It’s too late to have sofas custom-made, but once the International Furniture Mart is over in High Point, I can run up there and pick up some really high-quality showroom samples.”
“Fine,” he said. “Do it.”
“Okay.” I got up to leave.
“Where’d you get off to yesterday?” he asked. “I went to look for you, after the announcement, but you’d vanished. Did you and your ‘date’ take off for a nooner?”
I felt the color rising in my cheeks. “I had a terrible headache. We went out to the lake, if you must know.”
“Shacked up? I thought you hated that place,” Will said.
“Not the shack. The big house, over at Cuscawilla.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Nothing happened.”
“You don’t have to make excuses to me,” Will said. “I’m your client, not your father.”
“I’m not making excuses for anything,” I said curtly. “I’m an adult.”
“Absolutely,” Will said. “Anything else I need to look at?”
“That’s it for now,” I said. “Pretty busy here today. So, you’re not closing the plant after all?”
“I was never going to close the plant,” he said sharply. “Where’d you get that idea?”
“Stephanie told me yesterday, and all those overseas trips of yours…”
“She must have misunderstood,” Will said, frowning. “The overseas thing didn’t pan out. It was an all-or-nothing deal. It wasn’t feasible to keep the plant here and do partial production over there as I’d hoped. So we’re going another route.”
“You can do that?”
“We can now,” Will said. “We couldn’t compete head-on with the big brands, Warnaco and Sara Lee and Vanity Fair. All their garments are made offshore. But what we can do is niche market. That’s where the UnderLiar comes in.”
“UnderLiar?”
“That’s the name we came up with for the underwire bra you tried on. Nobody else has it. Nobody else knows how to make it. Except us. We’ll make it here in Madison and sell it private label to Victoria’s Secret. We have no marketing, sales, or distribution headaches, or expenses. We just make bras. Very, very good bras.”
“But they’ll be sold as Victoria’s Secret UnderLiar. Does that mean the Loving Cup label is history?”
“Our people know who they are and what we do. And what they care about most, as you pointed out to me some months ago, is having good jobs.”
“Then it’s good news,” I said. “That’s great.” I scooped my samples up and headed for the door.
“Keeley.”
I turned around.
“Stehanie really dislikes that mural thing in the foyer out at Mulberry Hill. She thinks it’s going to look stupid.”
“Stupid?” I yelped. “Kip Collins is the most sought-after decorative painter in the Southeast. His work has been published in all the big magazines. Maybe if I showed Stephanie some of the layouts, she’d see what I’m after.”
“She hates it,” Will said. “How ’bout, instead, some nice flowers? Can your guy do that? Or maybe just some nice flowered wallpaper. Maybe something with red in it? Stephanie really likes red.”
Now I was seeing red. I was seething, steaming, smoking. I’d already commissioned the mural. I’d paid Kip a third of his fee in advance for the preliminary sketches, which Will had loved, and even booked Kip’s time to come to Madison to paint. And that fabulous console table—the whole room had been planned around it.
“Red flowered wallpaper,” I said out loud.
No effin’ way, my subconscious screamed.
“I’ll see what I can do.” I had to get out of there before I exploded.
“Hey Keeley? About A.J. I know it’s none of my business…”
I turned again, impatient now. “I thought you could only spare me ten minutes. I think probably you should concentrate on bras, don’t you?”
“Oh yeah,” he said sheepishly. “I gotta take a look at the fitting models the agency sent down from New York. They get paid a hundred bucks an hour, plus airfare and travel expenses, so every minute they spend sitting around here fully clothed, instead of having bras fitted, is costing me money.”
“Poor you,” I said.
58
A week later, when I went back to Loving Cup with the most recent set of sketches for Will and Stephanie, the place was at fever pitch. Miss Nancy had installed her own assistant in the outer office, and had given herself a bigger, grander office down the hall.
Will thumbed rapidly through the sketches. “Stephanie will call you about any changes,” he said, obviously distracted.
I ground my teeth. Stephanie was no longer contenting herself with a long-distance role in the restoration process at Mulberry Hill. Every other day now, it seemed, when I arrived on the job site, her white Porsche Boxster was parked in front of the pump house, and I could hear the clip of Erwin’s nails on the polished hardwood floors. She’d already cost us ten thousand dollars in last-minute change orders—demanding that the downstairs powder room wallpaper be ripped down and replaced with a limited edition hand-blocked paper that had to be special ordered from Italy—for two hundred dollars a roll, sending the Sub-Zero refrigerator back to the distributor because she’d seen a bigger, glass-fronted number in a decorator showhouse in Buckhead, and insisting that the Stark carpet in the den, which I’d had custom colored to match the exact shade of Erwin’s coat—be changed, because, as she put it, “That disgusting color bears no resemblance to my angel. Erwin is fawn colored. That carpet is brown!”
“I’ve got another assignment for you,” Will said, leaning back in his chair.
“What now?”
“Aw, this is a fun one,” he said, laughing. “No change orders, I promise. We’re gonna have a dove hunt out at Mulberry Hill, and I need you to help make the arrangements.”
“Since when did you turn into the great white hunter?” I asked.
He reached in his top desk drawer and took out a glossy sporting goods catalog. Cabela’s. I sighed. He was gone for good.
“I used to do some bird hunting growing up,” he said. “Till my folks moved to the city, and we couldn’t keep a dog anymore, and I didn’t know anybody with land to hunt on. I’ve been thinking about taking it up again. Get me out of the office, out onto the land.”
<
br /> “You’ve got the land to hunt on now,” I admitted. “I think my daddy used to go dove hunting out there, years ago. He knew somebody who had permission to go on the property.”
“A big dove hunt used to be a yearly tradition back in the day,” Will said. “Every year they’d have a big hunt breakfast the first day of dove hunting season. The Cardwells invited folks from all around. People really looked forward to it. I’ve been talking to the fellas at Ye Olde Colonial, and they think it would be a good community gesture if I started the hunt up again.”
“Since when do you eat with the breakfast club guys at Ye Olde Colonial?” I demanded. “Aren’t you kind of young for that group?”
“I’ve been stopping by for a while now,” Will said. “Anyway, we can’t have it the first day of hunting season. I’ll be out of town. We’ll do it October 20.”
“I don’t know anything about dove hunts,” I said.
“Don’t you worry about the hunt part,” Will said. “I just want you to take care of the arrangements. Nancy’s already hired the caterer. We’ll have scrambled eggs and grits, sausages, bacon, fried apples, biscuits, all that kind of thing.”
My stomach growled at the mention of all that food. “Sounds good.”
“I need you to line up a tent, not as big as the one for the picnic. I think we’ll only have maybe a couple dozen guys. And tables and chairs. And I want some hay bales scattered around, you know, nothing fancy, really, but folksy. Outdoorsy. It’s gotta look good. I’m gonna invite some business associates. One of the executive VPs from Victoria’s Secret is a big quail hunter, and he’s coming down.”
“October 20,” I said, making a note of it in my planner. “Folksy. Outdoorsy. I think I can handle that.”
“Oh, uh, Keeley,” Will said offhandedly. “Let’s just keep this dove hunt on the Q.T. from Stephanie, okay? As far as she knows, I’m meeting with some out-of-town clients that day. The less said about it, the better.”
“You want me to lie,” I said. “To Stephanie.” That would be a day brightener.
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