I loaded up my grocery cart with all the makings for a multiethnic food fest: frozen burritos, frozen egg rolls, frozen pizza. In an impromptu fit of international goodwill, I even dropped a box of frozen piroshkis into my buggy, wondering, as I did so, if anybody in the entire history of Guthrie, Georgia, had ever sampled a frozen piroshki. To wash down the entrées, I picked up a bottle of inexpensive chardonnay, selected purely because I loved the whimsy of its name, Dimmlylit Cellars. Out of guilt, I even made a run down the produce aisle, to pick up a bag of prewashed salad greens and an anemic-looking cucumber.
The store was mostly empty. As the checkout-line cashier rang up my purchases, I tried not to look too obvious as I scanned the tabloid headlines. The Star claimed it had witnesses who could prove that Princess Diana was living in a Mormon conclave under an assumed name. Since I was planning an evening of gourmet excess, I decided to add a helping of empty literary calories to the agenda. The cashier, a rail-thin middle-aged woman with a frizzy red perm laughed when she saw me add the tabloid to the conveyor belt.
“Yeah, I had to buy that one too,” she said. “Where you reckon these magazines come up with this shit they print?”
“Dunno,” I admitted. “But I guess it’s a safe bet Prince Charles isn’t going to sue them for libel, right?”
“That’s the truth,” she said. She cocked her head and gave me a closer look now that I’d established myself as a confidante. “Hey, excuse my manners, but aren’t you the Dempsey girl who’s fixing up that old house downtown?”
“That’s me,” I said lightly. I held out my hand, and we shook. “I’m Dempsey Killebrew,” I said. “Mr. Norbert was my great-great-uncle, although I’m sorry to say I never met him.”
She gestured at her name badge. “I’m Janette. Janette Hoover. Head cashier, like that counts for anything when there’s just the three of us anyway, and Beatle, he don’t count because he’s only half days.”
“Nice to meet you, Janette.”
“You’re the one from Washington, right?”
“Yes.” I was hoping we were going to leave it at that. I took out my billfold to pay for my groceries.
“Listen,” she said, her voice lowered in a conspiratorial whisper. “There’s something I want to tell you, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“All right.”
“I just wanna tell you that I’ve seen them federal agents running around town the past few days, asking a lot of questions about you.”
“Oh.” I felt my face reddening. I had a sudden desire to join Princess Diana in that Mormon conclave.
“Makes me so mad I could just spit!” Janette fumed. “We got to get the government out of our private lives. From what I hear around town, they’re trying to say you bribed a congressman, and I don’t know what all. I think that’s just a bunch of shit, ya know?”
“Well…thanks,” I stammered. “I appreciate your vote of confidence.”
“Every single one of those jokers up in Washington is a crook, as far as I’m concerned,” Janette said. “And I know you’ve got Mr. Carter Berryhill working for you, so you must be good people. Mr. Carter, he handled my divorce, and my mama’s divorce, and my sister’s divorce too. Next time you see him, you tell him Janette says hey, will you?”
“I certainly will,” I said, handing over my money.
She bagged up my groceries and then, glancing around to make sure no government types were spying on us, she casually flipped in copies of the National Enquirer and the Weekly World News. “On the house,” she whispered. “Check out the article in the Enquirer about John F. Kennedy’s love child with Marilyn Monroe!”
By the time I got back to Birdsong, I’d mapped out a plan for the evening. I would uncork my bottle of Dimmlylit wine, drop in a couple of ice cubes, and enjoy a leisurely dinner while perusing the literature I’d just gotten. Eventually, I promised myself, I would get around to sanding those cabinet doors. But first, I was determined to celebrate my small victory over the FBI.
It had gotten dark out, but I noticed, with appreciation, that Ella Kate had thoughtfully turned on the porch light for me. Maybe, I thought, her attitude toward me was thawing. Maybe we’d even share a piroshki or an egg roll tonight.
I heard cheery whistling as I picked my way up the broken concrete sidewalk toward the house. Did I say cheery? Definitely not Ella Kate.
“Hello?” I called out. As I got closer to the front porch, I smelled fresh paint fumes.
“Well, hey there, lady,” Jimmy Maynard called. I stepped up onto the porch. He’d been painting, all right. In fact, the whole wall had been transformed with a soft green shade of paint that looked suspiciously like dill pickle cut with 25 percent white.
I set my grocery bags down on the porch and gaped.
“You’re speechless with gratitude, right?” He wiped his hands with a rag. He was dressed the way I’d seen him dressed every other time we’d met—in golf clothes. Tonight he wore a pale yellow polo shirt topped with a blue-and-green-striped sweater vest, worn over khaki shorts. He wore Top-Siders and no socks. Despite all the painting he’d done, there was not a drop of paint on him that I could see, and the porch floor was similarly tidy.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said finally. “You’re amazing, to say the least.”
He’d rigged up a work light on a tripod, and it was aimed at the wall he’d painted.
“Amazing.” He grinned, and his even white teeth shone in his deeply tanned face. “The lady says I’m amazing and she hasn’t even seen my best work yet.” He dropped a kiss on my cheek. “But you will, darlin’, you will.”
“Should I ask what you’re doing?”
He shrugged. “I was at the Benjamin Moore store this morning, buying some decorator white for one of my rental properties, and I started looking at paint chips, and I said, dammit, Jimmy, if you don’t put a coat of dill pickle on Dempsey’s house, nobody will. I came over here, knocked on the door, and nobody was around. I went on and ran some errands, and when I came back by, Ella Kate came to the door and said you’d gone out—she didn’t know where, or when you’d be back. She tried givin’ me the old Ella Kate skunk eye, but I flung it right back at her.”
“You’ve painted the whole front of the house,” I said, walking back and forth. “I can’t believe it. In one afternoon.”
“Well, not the whole front,” Jimmy said. “Just the first floor. I thought you might think I was pushy if you came home and found my extension ladders set up and everything. Fortunately for you, Birdsong hadn’t been painted in so long, most of that old pink paint had flaked right off. I ran a palm sander over the front here, cleaned it up with my Shop-Vac, got her primed, and just did manage to get a base coat down before it got too dark to see.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you like it. Say you love it. Say you’ll have dinner with me and stay over for breakfast too.”
I laughed despite myself. “You’re something else, Jimmy Maynard.”
“I’ll take that as a yes then,” he said.
“Yes, I like the paint. Yes, I’ll have dinner with you. But that’s as far as it goes,” I warned.
“We’ll see,” he said, and then he began to whistle again.
35
Jimmy promised to put away my groceries while I ran upstairs to shower and change. I paused in front of Ella Kate’s door on my way to the bathroom. I hesitated, then knocked. “Ella Kate?”
She opened the door a crack and looked out at me.
“Did the vet call? Any news about Shorty?”
“He’s doin’ good,” she said. “They told me we can carry him home tomorrow night, probably. Unless he has a setback or something.”
“Great,” I said. “I’m so glad he’s all right.”
She closed her door without any more idle chitchat.
I had no idea where Jimmy Maynard planned for us to have dinner, but as I stood in front of my closet, I decided any place, even the Canton Buffet, would
be a treat, because it was a change. I didn’t want to get too dressy, because I didn’t want Jimmy thinking that I thought this was a real date. But on the other hand, he had just painted half of my house. The least I could do was put on something other than Uncle Norbert’s flannel shirt and overalls. In the end, I put on a gauzy white embroidered peasant blouse with a drawstring neck, and a turquoise-and-yellow cotton skirt that fell loosely to my ankles. I felt funny about the blouse’s low neckline, so I fished around in my jewelry box until I came up with one of my mother’s necklaces. You’d have sworn it was some expensive Navajo turquoise and silver antique at first glance, but Lynda had proudly told me that the green “gems” were in reality bits of smashed Heineken bottles she’d found on the side of the road, set into aluminum strips made from flattened-out soda cans. I had dangly drop earrings to match, and when I twirled in front of the cloudy old mirror on the back of the closet door, I felt strangely lighthearted and carefree. It was the first time since I’d moved to Georgia that I’d worn makeup—and earrings.
Jimmy gave an appreciative wolf whistle when I walked into the parlor. He put down the paper he’d been reading—the National Enquirer—and stood up. “Well, Miss Dempsey Killebrew,” he said. “You do clean up nice. Now I guess I’ll have to go home and change into something that won’t make you embarrassed to be seen with me.”
“Not at all,” I said. “You look fine. I just felt like dressing up tonight. It’s sort of a celebration, actually.”
“I’ll want to hear all about it,” he said. “Right after I slip into something a little more comfortable.”
We pulled into the driveway of his house, which was, as he’d promised, only a few houses down from Birdsong. “I’ll wait in the car,” I told him. I was secretly feeling a little uneasy about being alone in a house with a man who’d cheerfully told me—from the first moment we’d met—that he planned to seduce me.
“Awww,” he said. He put one finger under my chin. “I swear, I’ll be a perfect gentleman. Come on inside, I’m a real estate agent, I got to show off my place, you know.”
I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but I can honestly say I wasn’t expecting what I saw when I walked through the door of Jimmy Maynard’s tidy brick Colonial Revival cottage.
“Wow.”
The inside of the house was light years away from the outside. It had been totally gutted, leaving exposed whitewashed roof beams and rafters, and exposed air-conditioning ductwork. The wooden floors were stained ebony, and finished with a high gloss. I was standing in one large, multipurpose room. A kitchen—all high-tech and industrialchic stainless steel—was situated at one end of the room, at the other, a wall of glass blocks sectioned off what I supposed was the only private space in the house, the bathroom and bedroom. Each wall was painted a different, bold color—tomato red, cadet blue, school bus yellow, acid green. The furniture was contemporary—and surprisingly good. I walked over to a scooped-out white leather lounge chair.
“Is this?”
“Yup,” he said with a smirk. “Eames. Walnut base. Signed and numbered, original leather upholstery. I bought it for ten bucks from a guy who sets up at a flea market at the drive-in in Atlanta. Told me he got it out of a dentist’s office.”
I walked over to the sofa, a low-slung chrome and black leather creation with characteristic strapping. A white tulip Saarinen table stood to the side of the sofa. “And this?” I asked, patting the sofa.
“Florence Knoll,” he said. “Now this, I did buy off eBay. I got it for two hundred bucks, but of course, the seller hit me up for another two hundred bucks in shipping.”
“And it’s worth?”
He showed me the teeth again. “Last time I checked? A couple thousand.”
“You’re really into contemporary furniture,” I said. “I’m impressed.”
“I’m impressed that you’re impressed. You sure you’re a lobbyist?”
“I read a lot of shelter magazines. You sure you’re not gay?”
He laughed. “Touché.”
He pointed toward the kitchen. “There’s a bottle of wine in the fridge. Pour a glass for both of us, and make yourself comfortable. I won’t be but a minute.”
I wandered over to the kitchen. The refrigerator was the one I’d lusted after, a glass-doored Traulsen. I saw the wine, and took two glasses from a rack that hung over the sink. I poured two glasses—and took my own glass over to the sofa.
The cell phone he’d left on a console table near the door rang.
“Just ignore the phone,” Jimmy called from the other room. “The damned thing never stops ringing. One of the hazards of being in real estate.”
I sat down and sipped my wine and leafed through a magazine on the coffee table. I glanced toward the wall of glass blocks, and nearly died. The blocks didn’t just separate the bedroom from the main room, they also housed a walk-in shower. There, outlined in all his wavy glory, was a very naked Jimmy Maynard, lathering up and whistling up a storm. I took a gulp of my wine and tried hard to concentrate on the April issue of Elle Decor.
Ten minutes later, Jimmy strolled out, dressed in a starched button-down blue oxford-cloth shirt, knee-length black shorts, and black loafers buffed to a high sheen. He smelled like soap and aftershave and his damp hair still bore comb marks.
“Hey,” he said, picking up the glass of wine I’d poured him.
“Hey yourself,” I said. “Do you ever wear long pants?”
“Nope,” he said. “And I’ll tell you why. In the nineties, when I was in between marriages, I told myself, Jimmy, it’s time to grow up and work in the adult world. I got myself a job as a financial analyst. Worked in a high-rise tower in Buckhead. Drove a Jaguar, had an hour and a half commute every day. Made in the high six figures. And I hated every damned minute of it.
“One day, I just up and left. Took my parking pass and my security pass, and just left ’em on my desk. On my way back down here to Guthrie, I threw my necktie out the window, doing eighty on I-75. I came home, sold the Jag, bought myself a four-wheel drive, and threw out every goddarned pair of custom-tailored long pants I owned.” He preened a little and stuck out an ankle to admire himself. “Many women have told me my legs are my best feature.”
“You do have nice muscular calves,” I observed.
He sat down beside me and threw an arm over my shoulder. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, darlin’.”
I scooted away and put down my empty wineglass. “I hate to be obvious—but didn’t you promise me dinner?”
“I did,” he said. “And I never break a promise to a beautiful lady.”
Jimmy had the top down on his Jeep. He handed me a new yellow baseball cap with maynard realty embroidered across the bill. I tucked my hair up under it, and off we went. The moon was nearly full and the sky was a deep velvet blue. He drove with one hand draped across the steering wheel, and the other across the back of my seat. His cell rang twice; both times he looked at the caller ID, shrugged, and let it go to voice mail.
“You like prime rib?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Good,” he said. “It’s prime rib night at the country club.”
He turned on the radio, and punched buttons until he came to the station he wanted. “‘The Sixties on Six,’” he said. “God, I love satellite radio.”
I recognized the song that was playing, “Under the Boardwalk,” by the Drifters, because it was one of Mitch’s favorites.
Jimmy glanced over at me. “How ’bout beach music? You like beach music?”
“Sure.”
Another grin. “You’re battin’ a thousand.”
“I grew up listening to the Drifters, the Tams, and the Platters,” I told him. “My dad’s a beach music nut.”
“Ouch. Now I really do feel like an old fart.”
“You’ll get over it.”
We pulled up in front of a sprawling one-story white stucco building nestled in ribbons of blooming azaleas. A discreet stucco sign told
me we’d arrived at pine blossom country club.
Jimmy zoomed up beneath a portico, and a valet-parking kid trotted out to take the keys.
We strolled through the foyer, a tasteful affair with overstuffed sofas and glass display cases bristling with silver trophies, and into the dining room, a large, glass-walled room that looked out on the up-lit golf course.
“Mr. Maynard,” cooed the hostess, a middle-aged blonde with a short skirt and long legs. “We’ve got your regular table ready.”
The room was crowded with well-dressed people, the men in sports coats, the women in spiffy pants outfits or dresses. It made me glad I’d forsaken my overalls for the night. But nobody seemed to be looking askance at Jimmy in his shorts.
“Don’t they have a dress code here?” I whispered as we made our way through the room.
“Sure,” he said, steering me with his hand on the small of my back. “There’s rules, and there’s exceptions to rules. I try to be the exception whenever I can.”
Every other diner, it seemed, turned from their table to say hello, or got up to pump Jimmy’s hand.
“Do you know every single person here?” I asked as he pulled out my chair for me.
He scanned the room. “Hmm. Nope. There’s a couple of people I don’t recognize. Yankees, probably.”
The waiter brought over a large tumbler of ice and a beaker of what looked like bourbon. “Here’s your Knob Creek, Mr. Maynard.” He looked at me. “And for the lady?”
I shrugged. “I’ll have what he’s having.”
Jimmy laughed and patted my hand. “You’re a fast learner, Dempsey Killebrew.”
The waiter brought a basket of warm bread, and salads, and I dove into mine without any prompting.
“I love a lady who appreciates good food,” Jimmy said, leaning back in his chair to watch me eat, and ignoring his own salad.
“I’m starved,” I admitted. “I’ve been living off what my mom calls ‘bird food’ for days now.”
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