“It’s all in my head,” Mary Bliss said, tapping her forehead. “Listen. If Matt Hayslip finds Parker, I’m cooked. He can’t be alive—because I already had him declared dead. Remember?”
“Oh yeah,” Katharine said. “Details. Forgive me. It’s a little late in the evening for me to be figuring out all this strategy of yours.”
“I’m sorry,” Mary Bliss said. “Go on back to bed. I’ll be out of your hair just as soon as I get this chicken mixed together.”
“Bed,” Katharine said, making a face. “Bed’s no fun. And anyway, I can’t sleep.”
“Why not?” Mary Bliss asked.
“The usual. Charlie. I don’t know what to do with that man, I swear.”
“Is he having chest pains again?” Mary Bliss asked.
“No, it’s not that,” Katharine said. “It’s him. And the BW. And me. Us. Everything. God. Just when I think I have everything figured out, he has to go off and have a heart attack.”
“Is that what this is all about?” Mary Bliss asked. “You’re worried about losing him?”
“I don’t know,” Katharine said, twisting to and fro on the bar stool. “Everything would have been fine if I’d just let things alone. If I hadn’t dragged him back here and seduced him the other night.”
“He had a heart condition,” Mary Bliss reminded her. “It probably would have happened sooner or later anyway. Maybe with the BW. And he would have died.”
“But I was over him,” Katharine said. “Really and truly. And now everything’s all stirred up again. And I hate it. And now Chip’s involved. And it’s making me crazy.”
“What does Chip think?”
Katharine sighed. “He’s still a kid. He just wants Mommy and Daddy to get back together and take him to Disney World. He’s completely unrealistic.”
“And Charlie?”
“He’s scared. He won’t admit it, but he is. And I won’t take him back just because he’s scared. It’s not a good reason to stay married. I already promised myself, I’m not going through this shit again. I can’t.”
“Charlie’s a good guy,” Mary Bliss said. “Not perfect, but neither are you. And he loves you. I know he does.”
“He loved me so much he had an affair,” Katharine said dully.
“He screwed up,” Mary Bliss said. “What does he say about the BW anyway?”
“That it’s over. He turned fifty and he was looking for a thrill. Only it turned out not to be all that thrilling. So it was all a horrible mistake.”
“That should count for something,” Mary Bliss urged.
“Yeah,” Katharine said, twisting a strand of her hair. “The question is, how much does it count?”
“It’s everything,” Mary Bliss said. “A good guy, with decent intentions? Look at all the creeps and liars running around. Look at Parker. The bastard. And Matt Hayslip.” She shuddered thinking about it.
“What about Matt Hayslip?” Katharine said. “He’s got a thing for you, doesn’t he?”
“He was just trying to get to Parker. Through me. Using me.”
“He can use me anytime he wants,” Katharine said. “The man is totally hot. And you know it too.”
“He’s repulsive,” Mary Bliss said. She was pouring the dressing over the chicken, mixing in the water chestnuts and the chopped pecans.
“So. Nothing physical tonight?”
“Nothing at all,” Mary Bliss said firmly. “We had dinner, I told him what I thought about him and left.”
“I see,” Katharine said. “I guess you were in a hurry when you left.”
“I was steamed,” Mary Bliss agreed.
“So steamed you didn’t notice you’d put your top on inside out,” Katharine said.
Mary Bliss looked down and blushed.
The doorbell rang and they both jumped, startled.
“It’s one in the morning,” Katharine said, wrapping the belt of her robe tighter. “Who in the hell could that be?”
“Chip?”
“He’s got a key, and anyway, he’s down at St. Simon’s for the weekend. I better see who it is before Charlie wakes up.”
The bell rang again, and Katharine started down the hall with Mary Bliss right behind her. “I’m coming,” she called softly.
Katharine peered through the peephole, then jumped back. “Jesus!” she said. “I don’t believe it.”
The doorbell rang again. “Hey, Katharine,” a man’s voice called. “Lemme in. Okay?”
“Shhh!” Katharine hissed, her lips to the door. “Go away or I’ll call the cops.”
“Who is it?” Mary Bliss asked.
“See for yourself,” Katharine said, gesturing toward the peephole.
Mary Bliss pressed her eye to the door and took a look. “Jesus,” she said, her voice shaky. “You better let him in before he wakes up the whole neighborhood. Including Charlie.”
Katharine opened the door a scant four inches, leaving the security chain fastened.
“What do you want?”
Dinky Davis beamed back at her. “Heya, Katharine. I mean, buenas noches, Señora Weidman.”
55
“What do you want?” Katharine asked, leaving the chain in place.
A horn honked and Dinky glanced back over his shoulder, in the direction of the curb.
“Cab fare, to start,” he said. “You know it costs sixty bucks to get a cab out here from the airport? Man, that is fucked.”
“Wait here,” Katharine said, closing the door in his face. She turned to Mary Bliss. “Now what?”
Mary Bliss took another look through the peephole. Dinky was dressed in a loud orange Hawaiian shirt, dirty khaki-colored shorts, and a pair of worn rubber flip-flops. He clutched a wadded-up pillowcase in his left hand.
“He’s dead,” Mary Bliss said. “I saw him being thrown from the boat. He’s dead. He has to be.”
“He’s like a cockroach,” Katharine muttered. She’d gotten her billfold and was extracting twenties from it. “You ever try to kill a roach? You can’t do it. You hit one with a shoe, twenty minutes later it gets up and scuttles away.”
She opened the door again and thrust a wad of twenties at him. “Here, take it,” she said. “That’s two hundred dollars. Go away and don’t come back.”
Dinky nodded thoughtfully. He turned and walked toward the cab. A minute later the cab rolled away. And Dinky was back at the door.
“No,” Katharine said, furious. “That wasn’t the deal.”
Dinky looked sad. “Deal? What deal?” He pointed at his forehead, which bore a vivid scarlet scar that ran from his right eyebrow to his hairline. “Man, this wasn’t in the deal either. Come on, Katharine, just let me in. I just wanna talk. Okay?” He slapped at his bare calf. “You people got some vicious mosquitoes here, you know? Come on, now, I’m getting chewed alive out here.”
Katharine looked at Mary Bliss, who merely shrugged. She took the chain off the door. Dinky walked in, looked around at the marble-floored hall and the crystal chandelier. “Nice,” he said, nodding his head in approval. “Where’s the shitter? I been in a cab, for like, an hour.”
She showed him the maid’s bathroom, which was off the kitchen. When he emerged five minutes later, his hair and face were glistening with water, and he was toweling off with a wad of toilet paper.
“Just wanted to freshen up a little,” he explained.
Katharine waved him into the kitchen and shut the swinging door.
“What are you doing here?” she demanded. “We settled up with you in Cozumel. You can’t just show up here like this.”
“I came for a visit,” Dinky said. “That’s all.”
“How did you find me?” Katharine asked.
He smiled. One of his front teeth had a fresh chip. “I know the desk clerk at the Casa Blanca.”
“I registered under a fake name,” she reminded him.
“Yeah, but you used your real address. And you left a big tip. People remember a lot about big tippers. I loo
ked in your mailbox when I got here. You got the new Victoria’s Secret catalog. Addressed to Katharine Weidman.”
Katharine sighed loudly. “All right. Let’s get down to business. What do you want?”
Dinky seated himself on one of the bar stools. “You got any beer?”
“No,” Katharine said firmly. “No beer. You can have a glass of water, and that’s it.”
“Water!” He looked insulted. “Man, that’s not very friendly.”
“We’re not in a friendly mood,” Mary Bliss put in. “State your business.”
“Geez,” he said, wounded. “I just want a new start. Is that too much to ask? After I got out of the hospital, I said to myself, ‘Dinky, you need to get the hell outta Dodge. You need some new scenery.’ And I thought about my friends up here in Atlanta. And I thought, what the hell? Why not?”
“The hospital?” Mary Bliss said, horrified.
“I had, like, a major concussion,” Dinky said. “My head was split open. I was all fucked up.”
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for him,” Katharine said fiercely. “That was his own fault. He was stoned, drunk, whatever. And he didn’t wear a life jacket. So that’s entirely his fault and not ours. We are not liable!”
“Oh, man!” Dinky winced. “I get these headaches now. I get dizzy, can’t see. Pretty soon I’m pukin’. I think I feel a headache coming on.”
“No puking!” Katharine said sternly. She found two aspirin, went to the refrigerator, got him a Coke. “Here. Take the aspirin. I’ll call you a cab.”
He looked at the white tablets. “Aspirin? You don’t got any Percocet? Dilaudid? Somethin’ like that?”
“Take them!” Katharine ordered. “Now. What else? Money? I’m not a rich woman, you know. This house belongs to my husband. He’s a cheap bastard.”
“Money?” Dinky rubbed his scar. “Is that what you think? That I’m blackmailing you?”
“Aren’t you?” Mary Bliss asked.
Dinky took a swig of the Coke. “Naw, man. Blackmail, that’s not cool. I just need a coupla favors. A job. A place to stay ’til I get my feet on the ground.”
Mary Bliss and Katharine looked down at his feet. Simultaneously. Dinky Davis’s feet were filthy, with long, curving yellow toenails.
“You can’t stay here,” Katharine said quickly.
“He can’t stay at my place,” Mary Bliss said. “What would Erin say? What would the neighbors say? Hayslip is already watching me like a hawk. And that insurance woman…”
“Hey, chill,” Dinky said. He got up and walked around the kitchen, running his fingertips over the white marble countertops. “Man, this is a nice place. Like a mansion, right? Big old house like this, you gotta have, what? Six, seven bedrooms?”
“It’s only four bedrooms,” Katharine said. “There’s a lot of wasted space. And my husband is here. He’s recuperating from a heart attack. So you can see, it’s impossible.”
“Husband?” Dinky looked interested. “I thought you were divorced.”
Katharine’s face flushed. “We’ve reconciled. He’s not a well man. He can’t have any stress.”
“No stress,” Dinky agreed. “You won’t even know I’m here.” He walked over to the basement door. “Hey. Is this a basement? Cool. I can sleep down there.”
“No,” Katharine said, closing the door and locking it. “My husband’s down there.”
“In the basement? Damn.” He looked at Katharine with new-found respect. “You’re a hard woman.”
“You don’t know how hard,” Katharine said, her eyes narrowing. “You can stay in my son’s bedroom. He’s away for the weekend. But he’ll be back Sunday. And then you’ve got to go.”
“Where am I gonna go?” Dinky whined. “I got no job, no money.”
“We’ll find you a job. But you’re out of here on Sunday,” Katharine said.
“Sunday,” Mary Bliss repeated.
“Fine. Whatever. Where did you say my crib was at?”
“Upstairs, last door on the right,” Katharine said, pointing toward the stairs. “And don’t come out until I tell you to. If my husband gets a look at you it could be fatal.”
Dinky picked up his pillowcase and headed up the stairs. He stopped on the top landing.
“Hey, Katharine,” he called.
“Quiet!” She glared at him.
“You guys got any rolling papers? ZigZags, something like that?”
“No smoking!” she yelled, taking the stairs two at a time. “No smoking. No drugs, no drinking.”
“Fuuuck,” Dinky said. “Forget Sunday. I’m outta here after tomorrow.”
56
There was a message on Mary Bliss’s answering machine. It was from Erin, but Mary Bliss did not recognize her daughter’s voice. Her child’s voice should be warm, full of love, familiar as an old sweatshirt. The voice on the machine was so chilly that it made Mary Bliss shiver.
“Mom. It’s me. I’m staying at Jessica’s for a while. I came home and got my things. Bye.”
Mary Bliss stared down at the answering machine, but really that was a lie. The answering machine had no answers. She went upstairs and crawled into Erin’s bed. She buried her nose in her daughter’s squishy pillow, inhaled the scent of her shampoo, laid her cheek against the cotton pillowcase worn smooth by so many washings.
She tried to think how she could fix this thing with Erin. Maybe the rip between them was too big to patch. How had she done this? How had she allowed her husband and daughter to drift so far away? Parker had been living a secret life, all these months, becoming someone she never knew. And now Erin. Her daughter was sleeping with Josh, making decisions that could change her life forever, and Mary Bliss had been completely in the dark.
Mary Bliss rolled over. She scrunched her eyes tight. Sleep. Maybe sleep would change things.
She slept badly. Made lists of things to worry about, checked them off as the list unspooled in her mind. At seven o’clock she’d had enough.
Mary Bliss showered and dressed. She drove over to Katharine’s house, cursing herself for forgetting to tell Kate she would come over early to retrieve the chicken salad. There was a key hidden near the back door. But Katharine was always forgetting her own key, retrieving the spare and forgetting to replace it.
The newspaper was still in the Weidmans’ driveway. Damn. She’d been hoping Charlie, the early riser in the family, had gotten up and would have coffee brewing. She needed to talk to Charlie. Ask him about Parker, sound him out, see if he could be trusted with the details of Mary Bliss’s secret.
She picked up the newspaper and walked around to the back of the house. Dew clung to her sneakers. An orange tabby cat, a stray, mewed at Katharine’s back door. Katharine claimed to hate cats, yet there was always a bowl of cat food by the back door, an invitation to all the strays in Fair Oaks.
Mary Bliss scratched the cat’s ears as she searched under the doormat for the key. It was there!
As she was standing up, the back door opened. Dinky Davis yawned, blinked, scratched his crotch. He was wearing a pair of faded gray boxer shorts and a pair of orange-and-black tiger-striped bedroom slippers that must have been Chip’s.
“Hiya,” he said, reaching for the paper. He turned and went back inside the house. Mary Bliss followed him in.
One of the foil pans of chicken salad was sitting on the kitchen counter. A large fork was stuck in the pan, which was now only two-thirds full.
“You ate the chicken salad!” Mary Bliss said, staring down at the pan in disbelief.
“Yeah,” Dinky said. “Not bad. If you like chicken salad.”
“That pan had twenty pounds of chicken salad in it,” Mary Bliss said. “How could one person eat that much food in one sitting?”
He grinned. “Hey. I didn’t eat it all. Man, I had a bitchin’ case of the munchies. You wanna Bloody Mary?”
“No. I want my chicken salad back. That’s two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of food you helped yourself to. I’v
e got a wedding to cater today, and they’re expecting a hundred pounds of chicken salad. Now, thanks to you, I’ve only got about ninety pounds.”
“Tough shit.” Dinky smirked. “What are you gonna do? Arrest me?”
She felt the blood rush to her head. And suddenly, it wasn’t just Dinky Davis giving her a bad time. It was Parker McGowan, and it was Matt Hayslip. It was the pawnshop guy who’d ripped her off, the mechanic who’d overcharged her for a lube job, and it was the air conditioning guy and the bill collectors who kept leaving threatening messages on her answering machine.
One minute she was a reasonable, sane suburbanite. The next she was a screaming whirling dervish.
“I want my chicken salad, goddamn you,” she screamed. When he laughed, she picked up a wooden spoon and started beating him on the head with it. He laughed again, as though it were hilarious. She picked up the next thing at hand, which happened to be the rolled-up Atlanta Journal-Constitution. She slapped him flat across the face with the newspaper, slapped the smirk clean off his face.
“Hey!” he said, throwing his arms up to ward off her next shot. “That ain’t funny, man.”
She slapped him with the paper again. He snatched it away and threw it down. She picked up something else, a full liter bottle of Diet Coke, cocked her arm, and pounded him square on the skull with it.
“Cut it out,” he screamed, cowering on the kitchen floor.
She had him cornered by the kitchen table. He scooted underneath, and her arm wasn’t long enough to reach him with the soda bottle. She whirled around and found Katharine’s broom. She held the bristle end and stabbed blindly at him with the broom handle.
“Stop,” he screamed. “Ow. Fuck. I think you fuckin’ pierced my fuckin’ kidney.”
He scrambled out from under the table and was headed for the back door. “Help,” he hollered. “She’s fuckin’ killing me. Jesus, somebody help.”
She had never once raised a hand to anyone in anger in her life. But now she fully intended to beat this man within an inch of his life.
Little Bitty Lies Page 30