She stepped out on the front porch and waved in his direction. But he was still staring out at the street.
Finally, she walked up to the passenger side of the car. The gold seal on the door was something official, but she couldn’t tell what it was.
“Excuse me,” she said. He whipped his head around, surprised.
“You can come in now,” she said. “I’m decent.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say you were indecent out in the garden,” he drawled. She blushed, noticing he had nice, even teeth, and the sunglasses failed to conceal the smile lines that radiated out from the corners of his eyes.
“It’s Mary Bliss, right?”
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “Have we met?”
“Not really,” he said, getting out of the car. If he was a cop, he was in a weird kind of undercover, including white tennis shorts and a faded raggedy T-shirt. His legs were deeply tanned and muscular.
“I’ve seen you at the club, but never got around to introducing myself.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Matt Hayslip.”
She shook his hand, which swallowed her own. “At the club? Fair Oaks, you mean?”
“I play tennis with Parker. Doubles,” Hayslip said. “In fact, it’s Parker I’m really huntin’. We had a tennis date this morning. At nine. I tried calling his office, and his cell, but got no answer. Is he around?”
She dropped his hand, because her own palms were beginning to sweat. Profusely. “No. He’s out of town. On business.”
Hayslip frowned. “The SOB. This is our standing date. I can’t believe he didn’t let me know.”
Parker had a standing tennis date? Mary Bliss tried not to seem surprised. Now that she thought about it, yes, she had seen this man at the club, though from afar.
“It’s a consulting thing,” she said. “It came up sort of suddenly, so maybe it just slipped his mind.”
“Still,” Hayslip said, glancing around the yard. “The answering machine at the office didn’t pick up. And usually I can get him on his cell phone.”
“His assistant quit this weekend,” Mary Bliss said. “Parker’s been in a tizzy about that, so things are in sort of a mess, you might say. And then this trip came up. Unexpectedly,” she added again, and it sounded lame even to her.
Hayslip was staring up at the house. He was making her edgy, and she hadn’t done anything wrong. Except lie to her daughter. And threaten her mother-in-law’s life. And then there was the off-day watering.
“Are you in law enforcement?” It came out all wrong.
“What, now?” He laughed. Very nice teeth, she thought again. He was actually sort of attractive. She wished she’d put on some lipstick. And this shapeless shirt did nothing for her figure. But if she’d fixed herself up, that would have made him suspicious, wouldn’t it?
She gestured at the emblem on the car door.
“Oh, that,” he said. “I guess it does look kind of official. Actually, I’m retired from real law enforcement.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I did my thirty with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, and got out once the politicians started running the show. These days I’m sort of a fancified rent-a-cop. Southern Utilities Corp. I’m director of security.”
“How nice.” This man really was making her very edgy. There was something dangerous here. “Well, I do apologize on Parker’s behalf, for making you miss your tennis match. And I’ll tell him you came by to see him.”
“When will he be back?” Hayslip asked. “We’re supposed to play Sunday, in the club round-robin.”
“Oh.” Oh God, would he never leave?
“It’s still up in the air,” Mary Bliss said. “The client is having problems integrating his new software with the parent company’s mainframe.”
She had no idea whether this made sense, but it did seem like something Parker might have said in the past.
“Hmm. Who’s the client?”
“The client?” Her voice cracked a little.
“Yes. The client. Is it a big company?”
What did he care who the client was? Why didn’t he just fold himself back into that official car and go away? Why didn’t he mind his own business? And what kind of job did he have that he could play tennis at nine o’clock on a weekday morning?”
“It’s his biggest client,” Mary Bliss said finally, at a loss for any names. “But Parker doesn’t ever name names. He believes in strict confidentiality.”
Hayslip took this in, frowned some more, then nodded.
“Well, if he calls, will you let him know I’m wondering about this weekend?”
“Absolutely,” Mary Bliss said. “I’ll tell him as soon as he calls. Although, to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t plan on this weekend. Apparently, this mainframe thing is a real bear.”
“Apparently,” Hayslip said. Now he was staring across the street again. What was it with this guy?
“That house over there,” he said finally, pointing in the direction of the Bowdens. “Have the owners moved out?”
“No,” Mary Bliss said quickly. “They’re having some family issues, that’s all. Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” Hayslip said.
He had the door of the car open. Good. Maybe he would leave now.
“I like this street. I’ve been halfway thinking of house hunting over here.”
“Where do you live now?” Mary Bliss asked. “Not far, I imagine, since you belong to the club.”
“No, not far,” Hayslip said. “I’ve got a townhouse over at the Oaks. It’s all right, but I miss having a yard.”
The Oaks. That explained why she hadn’t met him before. He was an Oakie. She didn’t know any Oakies. And she wasn’t aware that Parker knew any. But there were a lot of things about Parker she didn’t know, weren’t there?
“With this drought we’re having, you should be glad you don’t have a yard,” Mary Bliss said. “I spend half my day dragging a hose around, trying to keep my pathetic little garden alive.”
“It looks good to me,” Hayslip said. “Must be all that illegal watering you’re doing.”
She started to protest, but he gave her a snotty little smile, and a mock salute, and closed the door and backed down the driveway.
Mary Bliss blinked in the bright morning light. Who was this man? She heard a car start then, and as she turned around, Erin’s little Honda came whipping down the driveway.
“Erin!” Mary Bliss called.
Her daughter stuck her head out the window of the car. “Thanks for the lunch, Mom. Gotta go, or I’ll be late for work.”
“We need to have a talk, young lady,” Mary Bliss started, but Erin had rolled the window of the car up again, and she was at the bottom of the drive.
“And you’re still on restriction!” she called.
15
On Monday morning, Mary Bliss realized she must have made it through the weekend. But she couldn’t remember how. She was feeling vague and unfocused—right up until the air conditioning repairman gave her an estimate of fourteen hundred dollars to install a new chiller/condenser.
After he’d left, Mary Bliss emptied the silverware drawer in the dining room. The pieces clanged against the top of the mahogany sideboard as she slipped them out of their mothproof bags and counted them out. The final total was impressive. She had twelve place settings of Frances I sterling silver, a dozen assorted serving pieces, including one strange five-pronged fork she’d never figured out a use for, and ten demitasse spoons.
She ran her fingers slowly over the smooth silver surface of the spoons and knives, held the cool bowl of a soup spoon against her neck. As she traced the whorls and lines of the design, she remembered the first Christmas she had opened one of the pink-wrapped boxes sent by Parker’s aunt Lily, who lived in Charleston.
Aunt Lily wasn’t a real aunt. She was Parker’s godmother, widowed and childless. Together, she and Eula had decided it was a scandal that Parker’s young bride had never registered for a s
ilver pattern. Eula and Lily had picked out Frances I as being suitable for a modern young couple. And every Christmas, right up until her death, Aunt Lily, who Parker said was so rich she couldn’t move without tripping over sacks of money, sent Mary Bliss exactly one place setting of “her” silver. The silver came in the same thin wrapping paper, accompanied by a Christmas card that Aunt Lily recycled by whiting out the previous sender’s name and substituting her own.
For her birthdays, Eula gave Mary Bliss the serving pieces. Frances I was not a pattern Mary Bliss would have chosen. And in the early years of their marriage, when money was so tight, Mary Bliss had gotten nauseous at the sight of the pink box under the Christmas tree, thinking of how much sterling silver cost, and what she could have done with the money instead.
But Frances I had stood by her—through inexorably long visits from Aunt Lily, through the dinner parties and buffets she and Parker had hosted over the years.
She felt a pang as she slid the forks and spoons back into their gray silver-cloth compartments. She would miss Frances I. But she had a perfectly serviceable set of stainless steel to eat off of. And although she’d always intended for Erin to inherit her wedding china and silver and crystal, Erin, at least at this age, had zero interest in the finer things of life. Given the choice, her daughter would definitely have chosen a new chiller/condenser over twelve place settings of Frances I.
With a chiffon scarf tied over her hair and dark sunglasses, Mary Bliss barely recognized herself in the sun-visor mirror.
Incognito, she thought. She was going incognito.
She’d passed Citizen’s Pawnshop many times on her way into downtown Atlanta. It was tucked in the corner of a strip shopping center on Ponce de Leon, between a vacuum cleaner repair shop and a Hispanic grocery store. There were pawnshops closer to her house, but Mary Bliss had a horror of being recognized.
A dark-skinned Mideastern-looking man stood behind the counter of the pawnshop. He was polishing the lens of a large camera and muttering to himself in some foreign language. The shelves of the store crowded in around her, lined with musical instruments, amplifiers, televisions, stereos, computers, even a large, badly tarnished brass bed-stead and a hideous crystal chandelier as big as a bathtub.
“Yes?” he said, glancing up at Mary Bliss only briefly before returning his attention to the camera.
She cleared her throat. “You, um. You buy things as well as sell them, is that how it works?”
“Yes? What you got?” His eyes swept over her, and she felt her face redden.
“Silverware. Sterling silver flatware. Frances I. There are twelve place settings, and some serving pieces, and ten demitasse spoons, and, of course…”
“Show me,” he said, setting the camera down.
“Well,” she said, hesitating.
“You don’t want to sell, forget it.” He picked the camera back up and muttered to himself again.
Mary Bliss hoisted her canvas tote bag onto the counter with a loud thud.
She heard a long, low growl and felt hot breath on her ankle.
“What in heaven’s name?”
A huge German shepherd placed its muzzle directly on top of her shoe and looked balefully up at her.
The pawnshop man glanced over the counter at the dog. “BooBoo!” he said sharply.
The dog’s ears pricked up, but he didn’t move. He was still staring at Mary Bliss.
“Get off, BooBoo,” the man called. “Stupid bastard.”
The dog stood up slowly, swished its tail, and wandered to a far corner of the shop.
“Stupid bastard,” the man repeated. “Oh,” he said, seeing the look on Mary Bliss’s face. “Sorry. My ex-wife’s dog.” He pulled the tote bag toward him. “Let me see what you got.”
He unwrapped the silver-cloth bundles and started taking the pieces from their compartments, holding each one up to the light, turning it this way and that.
It took him fifteen minutes to examine all of Mary Bliss’s silver. Occasionally he would stop and write something down on a scratch pad of paper. When he was done, he looked at the pad, did some addition, and sighed.
“Business sucks,” he said. “Nobody wants silver. Nobody wants to polish it. People eat off plastic. They want to throw things away, not polish them and put them back in a drawer. I give you twelve hundred dollars.”
She felt like he had slapped her across her face. Tears rose up in her eyes. “This is very fine sterling silver,” Mary Bliss said, feeling defensive. “People will always want lovely things in their home. Southerners, especially, love silver. Why, this silver would cost at least five hundred dollars a place setting, even at an antique shop.”
“You love it so much, why don’t you keep it?” he asked, shoving the bundle back at her.
“I have to have fifteen hundred dollars,” Mary Bliss said, gritting her teeth. “I looked it up in a reference book. This is Frances I. Five hundred a place setting is what it sells for. That doesn’t even take into account the serving pieces and the demitasse spoons.”
“Too bad,” the man said. He picked the camera up and looked through its lens.
“You’re saying you won’t buy it?” She felt a surge of panic. The temperature in the kitchen had been eighty-six degrees when she went downstairs in the morning. By that night, when Erin got home, the place would be like an oven.
“I told you, business sucks.”
“How much?” Mary Bliss repeated. “Surely you can do a little better than twelve hundred.”
He picked up the five-pronged serving fork, pinged it with a fingernail.
“Say…thirteen hundred.”
“Thirteen-fifty.” Mary Bliss could not believe she was standing here, in this cheesy pawnshop, dickering over her wedding silver.
“You’re nuts.”
But he got a clipboard with a sheet of paper on it and gave it to her. “Fill this out,” he told her. “And take off the glasses and that scarf.” He nodded toward a small wall-mounted camera on the wall behind him. “For business purposes. We like to see our customers, you know?”
“It’s not stolen!” she cried. “Is that what you think, that I stole this silver?”
He shrugged. “Lady, I don’t know you. You don’t know me. And that’s a lotta expensive silver you got there.”
She felt her shoulders sag as she removed the glasses. “It was a wedding gift. And a Christmas and birthday gift. For a lot of years.”
“You love it so much, why you sell?”
Mary Bliss filled out the blanks with precise block lettering. “I need the money.” She looked right at the camera then. “There’s been a death in the family.”
16
Mary Bliss was poring over the help-wanted ads in the newspaper when Erin walked into the kitchen and went immediately to the refrigerator.
Huge sigh. “We’re out of skim milk.”
“I’m sorry,” Mary Bliss said quickly. “I’ll get some today.”
“Whatever.” Erin ducked into the pantry and came out with the cardboard Pop-Tarts box. “And this is the last Pop-Tart, too. When was the last time you went grocery shopping?”
The last time there was money in my checking account, Mary Bliss wanted to snap. Instead she bit her lip. “I’ll go today.”
“Whatever,” Erin said. She picked up her purse off the kitchen counter and started toward the door. “What about my phone?” she asked. “Did you find out what the problem was?”
Mary Bliss knew what the problem was. “I’ll try to get it taken care of today. You know how those phone places are. Customer service is deplorable.”
“The people who work there are all a bunch of retards,” Erin sneered. It was the closest they’d come to agreement all week.
Erin was headed out the door, without a good-bye.
“See you tonight,” Mary Bliss called over her shoulder.
“It’ll be after nine,” Erin said. “Coach called a special practice.”
Erin was on a select socc
er team, but the season was over.
“In June?” Mary Bliss asked.
“There’s a big invitational tournament in September. He’s all spazzed out about getting us in condition.”
“You’re in great condition,” Mary Bliss said, annoyed. “You run nearly every night, work out at the gym. It seems to me this soccer team is taking up every minute of your time.”
Erin shook her hair over her shoulder, a sign of her own annoyance. “You know what Daddy says. Sports are great for girls. Keeps ’em off the streets and out of trouble.”
“As if you’d be on the streets,” Mary Bliss muttered.
“You never know,” Erin said. And she was out the door and gone.
Mary Bliss turned back to the classifieds.
The pickings were pretty slim. She couldn’t, in good conscience, take a full-time job, knowing she’d be starting back to school in mid-August. But it was only June. She was broke, and a part-time job seemed the only answer.
She skimmed over the ads for advertising sales, computer programmers, data entry clerks, and HVAC technicians. She had no idea what an HVAC tech did, but she was pretty sure it would be out of her realm of experience.
She paused when she came to an ad with large bold print: PRODUCT DEMONSTRATION HOSTESS. It was the word hostess that caught her eye. Everybody said she was an amazing hostess. She loved to cook, loved to entertain. Of course now she’d be entertaining without her Frances I flatware, and if she didn’t find some employment soon her repertoire would be reduced to instant oatmeal and squeeze cheese.
“Energetic people-magnet needed to demonstrate exciting new food products. Self-starter. Flex hours. No experience necessary.” All of that sounded good. But it was the last line of the ad that sounded best: “$22.00 per hour.”
Little Bitty Lies Page 8