by Marsha Moyer
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
"We're heading down to Vegas for a show tonight. But I'll call you later, okay?"
"Denny. Don't worry."
"Hey—don't tell me what to do." More muffled talk, a giggle or two, then she said, "I've got to go. Are you really okay?"
"I really am. Tell Will I said treat you right or I'll sic your daddy on him."
"I'll do it. Give Daddy a kiss for me. Wait—on second thought, just tell him I sent my love. Jude, too. Y'all behave. Don't make me come down there and straighten you out."
"Don't be silly," I said, like that wasn't exactly what I'd been hoping.
"Love you. See you soon."
chapter three
said I loved her, too, and slowly hung up the phone, then refilled my coffee mug and carried it to the front of the shop and stood looking through the door glass at the street. Things were quiet at this hour on Front Street, but then, things were almost always quiet on Front Street. We were half a block off the main square, away from the bustle of the courthouse and the bank and the cafe, and unless you specifically wanted flowers, there wasn't much reason to come by here. I can't say it didn't appeal to me on some level, this sense of being off the beaten path, several steps removed from the mainstream. I caught myself and smiled. Ash was right; I was a sucker for a good metaphor.
The front door rattled, and I looked out to see Mrs. Florence Binder standing there with a panicky look on her face. I guess the sun was reflecting off the glass because she didn't see me; she frowned at the closed sign, then looked worriedly at her watch. It was still five minutes till opening time, but I stepped forward anyway and flipped the dead bolt. With business the way it was lately, more folks every day buying their flowers at Wal-Mart or off the Internet, we couldn't afford to miss a customer.
"Oh, Lucy!" Mrs. Binder exclaimed, rushing past me into the shop. "Thank goodness you're here. I came just as soon as I heard!" She looked a little crazy, her blue-rinsed hair neatly curled and styled on one side and mashed flat and slept-on-looking on the other. Her blouse was buttoned wrong, and she sported pink terrycloth bedroom scuffs with plaid Bermuda shorts, a look that would get you ridiculed even in Mooney.
"Alene Worley called me, after Susie Castle called her. I told Alene it couldn't be true, but I live the closest, so she told me to rush right on over here and find out for sure. Straight from the horse's mouth."
"I'm afraid it's a fact, Mrs. Binder." I couldn't for the life of me think why Mrs. Florence Binder was so wrought up about Ash coming back to town. Maybe she'd lost a bundle over at Burton's cafe.
"But—how? I don't for the life of me understand how a thing like this could happen."
"I'm not sure myself," I said. I wondered if it would save time if I just made up a flyer and had it Xeroxed over at the Copy Shoppe. I could include a small photo, like a wanted poster, along with the pertinent data: Last night, a truck, the rain.
"But it's the same order we've had for the past fifteen years— why in heaven's name would we change it now?"
"Excuse me?"
"We want lilies. Not carnations. Not roses or daisies or daffodils. Lilies! It's Easter, for goodness' sake!"
I started to laugh.
"Well, I'm glad you think this is funny, Lucy Hatch!"
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Binder, but I don't know what in the world you're talking about."
"I'm talking about this, this plot, or whatever you want to call it, to change our order for Easter lilies to carnations! Why, if that isn't the most outrageous thing I've ever heard! The Methodist Flower Guild has a reputation to uphold!"
"Yes, ma'am. I know you do."
"This is all that new woman's fault—that Kay Dotson, from Avinger. Ever since she and her husband moved here last June, she's been trying to take over the Guild. But our parishioners expect a certain, well, elegant and traditional style of floral decor. I don't think I have to tell you, there is nothing elegant about carnations. Carnations are cheap and tacky and the Methodist Flower Guild will not have them!"
"Yes, ma'am. I couldn't agree more."
I beckoned Mrs. Binder to follow me. At the rear of the shop, I threw open the cooler door, then stepped back and invited her to look inside. Four dozen Easter lilies sat in their foil-covered pots, the plastic webbing still in place to keep the blooms from opening and drooping too early.
"Are those ours?" She sounded skeptical, like a bunch of Baptists might rush in and seize them at any moment.
"Two dozen," I said. "The rest are for the shop and the Easter party at Golden Years."
"No carnations?"
"No, ma'am."
"Were there ever any carnations?"
I shook my head.
"Kay Dotson didn't call here?"
"Not to my knowledge."
"The whole thing was a rumor, then."
I smiled. "Imagine that."
"I'm sorry, dear." Mrs. Binder took off her glasses, wiped them nervously on the hem of her blouse, put them back on again. "Alene said that Susie said that somebody else called her like snort. "Like we'd ever give somebody from Avinger the authority to do a thing like that."
"It sounds like the kind of thing somebody from Avinger would do."
"I've lived in this town my entire life," she said as I walked her to the door. "You'd think by now I'd know better than to believe every old thing I hear."
"It's a pretty common affliction around here."
"We need those lilies over to the sanctuary by five," she reminded me, stepping out onto the sidewalk. "Good Friday service starts at seven, but Major Weatherby wants to get in there early to rehearse the choir."
"They'll be there."
I looked up the block as a white Chevy pickup turned the corner. It was possible there was more than one truck like this one in Cade County, Texas, but I doubted it. It looked sparkling, fresh-washed, and I could hear Hank Williams from two hundred feet away.
"Sakes alive, will you look at that," Mrs. Binder said as the truck pulled up to the curb in front of the shop. Behind the tinted windshield, the driver raised a hand in greeting. Mrs. Binder raised hers hesitantly back. "Now who can that be?"
"Mrs. Binder?" I said. "Pardon me for saying so, but your blouse is on crooked."
"Oh! Oh, goodness me." She glanced down. "I ran right out the door the minute Alene called. I must look a fright!" With that, she turned and scuttled off in the opposite direction, her pink scuffs slapping against the sidewalk.
I walked over to the truck as the driver's-side window went buzzing down and Hank Williams stopped in mid-yodel.
"You can't park there," I said. "It's a fire lane."
"I'll keep the motor running." Ash's hair was damp and combed straight back off his forehead, though there was still several days' stubble on his cheeks. He was wearing a pair of expensive-looking mirrored sunglasses.
"You're out early," I said. "The package store doesn't open till ten. But then, with all the trips you made there over the years, I'm sure you remember."
He lifted the sunglasses and looked at me, then lowered them again across the bridge of his nose. "I see you haven't lost your edge."
"I've had lots of time to work on it. It's nice and sharp by now."
"I called here earlier."
I decided not to say that I'd tried to call him back. "Were we out of your favorite soap? I'd have stocked up, but I wasn't expecting you."
"What the hell happened at the house?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, where is everything? My books are gone, and all my old LPs. Even the dishes and the towels are different. About the only thing I recognized was the blanket on the bed."
"The renters took it."
"What?"
"Or hauled it to the dump, pawned it, something."
"You mean those people Shirley Tinsley at the real estate office picked out, that she said would be the perfect tenants? Speakes or some such? They cleaned us out?"
"They got mad when
Shirley told them I wanted to move back. Maybe we messed up their bootlegging enterprise or something. I guess this was their way of paying us back for kicking them out. I was just glad they left the furniture."
"Well, son of a— Did you call the sheriff?"
"Of course I did. But people like that don't leave forwarding addresses, Ash. They just kind of melt into the woods, like leaf rot."
"Jesus! I'd had those books, some of 'em, since high school! What the hell would a bunch of Speakeses want with the likes of Faulkner and Hemingway? I doubt they can read anything more complicated than a Lotto ticket. And my records—do you know what those records were worth?"
"Fine. Hire a PI and a lawyer. Spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars looking for people who can't be found so you can sue them for money they haven't got. Be my guest. I haven't got the time or the energy."
"I'm not talking about the money! I'm talking about the, the sentimental value. My whole life was in that house! What gives a bunch of goddamned rednecks the right to haul it all off in a cardboard box?"
This from a man who was currently living out of the back of a pickup. "I'm glad to see you've got your priorities straight," I said.
"What are you talking about?"
"Nothing. Never mind." I hated those sunglasses. All I could see when I looked at them was myself, all my spiked and gleaming edges.
"This wouldn't have happened if you'd let me sell the place, like I wanted."
"If I'd let you sell it, I wouldn't have had a place to come back to."
"Well, maybe that wouldn't have been such a bad thing."
Suddenly my eyes filled, and I turned my head. How, I wondered, had what we'd had turned into this—a competition to see who was sharper, who had the upper hand?
"Ash, I can't… This isn't…"
"What? It isn't what?"
"I don't know! I can't think. Could you please take off those glasses?"
He yanked them off with a flourish and set them on top of his head.
"Thanks," I said. "You reminded me too much of a cop or something."
That made him smile. "I. Remind you of a cop."
"I told you I couldn't think."
"Can I come back later? Buy you lunch?"
"I don't think that's a good idea."
"You got another date or something?"
"It would serve you right if I said yes."
"Yeah," he said, nodding solemnly, "it would."
"Just give me a little time, okay? I'm still trying to get used to the idea that you're here."
He held up his hands and opened the palms wide. "Ladies and gentlemen, Ash Farrell, live and in person. Spreading joy wherever he goes."
I smiled, thinking of what Dove had said earlier: If that ain't Ash, through and through.
"I stopped by Dove's this morning," I said. "I told her some fool showed up in my yard talking about borrowing her crawfish pot."
"I'll go see her. Maybe at least one person in this sorry town'll be happy I'm home."
"I almost forgot—Denny called," I said. "Do you know anything about a fellow named Will Culpepper?"
"I've seen him around. Shifty-eyed tomcat. What about him?"
"He's sleeping with your daughter, that's what."
Ash's face went stupid for a second, then quickly resumed its former expression. "She told you this?"
"She's madly in love with him, were her exact words."
Ash scoffed. "I give it a week. Two, tops."
"And then I hunt him down and wring his goddamned neck." His hands flexed on the steering wheel. There was something scary in his eyes, something flinty and cold. It reminded me of the old Ash, the one I'd last seen one August night in Nashville, storming down the driveway behind my speeding pickup, his face contorted by whiskey and rage. It gave me a chill, but in a way I was grateful for the reminder. I hadn't spent eight months honing my hard edges for nothing.
He sighed, turned loose of the wheel, sat back, and raked a hand through his hair.
"Forget it," he said. "Forget I said that. She's twenty-one. Free to screw up her own life like the rest of us."
"Denny's got a pretty good head on her shoulders," I said. "Maybe she'll do better than we did."
From the direction of the courthouse I saw Peggy headed in our direction, carrying a box of what I knew to be lemon-filled doughnuts. It looked like she'd managed to pick up a few hangers-on along the way.
"Better get your game face on," I said. "Here comes your fan club."
Ash tilted the side mirror and looked into it. "Who's that? The one up front, in the pink?"
"You mean Peggy?"
"Peggy Thaney? Your boss? No way! Peggy's big as a house."
"Like I tried to tell you," I said. "Not everything's the same as you remember it."
"Reckon I can make a run for it?"
I turned and waved to Peggy, who broke into a trot. "I wouldn't, if I were you. Seems to me you need all the fans you can get."
As I stepped away from the curb toward the shop door, I saw Ash glance at himself in the rearview mirror, his eyes for just a second as blank as a deer's in headlights. Then he notched his mirrored sunglasses back in place, and by the time Peggy and her crew caught up with him, he had on his old, well-worn skin again: live and in person, spreading joy wherever he went.
You mean he was here in the shop and I missed it?" Audrey cried when she came in at eleven. "Oh, man, I am so bummed!" We were loading up the van to deliver the party goods to the old folks' home.
"He wasn't in the shop," I corrected her. "He was out front, at the curb. Could you take these, please?"
I handed her a bunch of balloons and wrestled open the van door. After all these years, we were still driving the same old Econoline as when I first came to work for Peggy. It had been elderly and unreliable then, and the intervening years had not done a thing to improve its condition. The only consolation was that it was impossible to go too fast in the thing, since it would buck and shimmy wildly anytime you tried to push it over fifty. Audrey had had four speeding tickets in her Dodge Charger since getting her license the year before, so I counted this as a blessing.
Audrey slouched against the side of the van and pouted. Or maybe it was just an optical illusion, caused by the silver stud sticking through her bottom lip. The hem of her T-shirt rode up to expose a little roll of flesh above the waistband of her jeans. you wish, the shirt said in baby-blue script across the chest. Audrey was seventeen and had style to burn, if style is what you call youth and beauty and the complete disdain it took to try to disguise it with dyed-black hair and raccoon eyeliner and jewelry inserted through various unorthodox pieces of skin. She had a lanky, sleepy-eyed boyfriend named Joe who worked for the cable company, and they smelled like pot and sex and patchouli oil, separately and together and constantly.
I can't believe it, she said. I live my whole entire life in the most boring town on the face of the earth, and then the one time something exciting does happen, I'm in fucking Spanish class and I miss it."
"Watch your language," I said, without any real reproach or conviction. I knew that under the skin, where it counted, Audrey was, like me, a hometown girl. In spite of her edgy appearance and mouthy attitude, she couldn't hide her basic sweet and earnest nature. In an hour or so, at Golden Years, she'd be passing out the cake and corsages, getting the ladies and gents all lined up with their wheelchairs and walkers, and it wouldn't faze her a bit when Mrs. Mundy got so excited she dropped her punch, or Mrs. Virgil kept thinking Audrey was her long-lost sister. I could send Audrey to funerals or the hospital, and in two minutes flat she'd be holding hands and passing out Kleenex and helping visitors find the bathroom. It wasn't part of her job description, but it was worth its weight in gold. Folks always appreciate a hometown girl when they see one.
"There," I said, shuffling the lilies around in the back of the van, making sure they wouldn't tip over in transit. "Is that everything?"
"I don't get it. How can you be so coo
l? If my ex showed up in town for the first time in a hundred years, I'd be a basket case."
"In the first place, he's not my ex. And it hasn't been a hundred years—not quite."
"Lucy! This is Ash Farrell we're talking about!"
"So?"
"So he's the biggest deal to ever come out of this shitty town."
"Now there's a glowing compliment."
"My mom used to hear him sing at the Round-Up. She said he was the hottest thing on two legs around here."
I shook my head. People always think it would be so great to hook up with somebody they see on a CD cover or on TV. I
guess they believe those guys really are the way they seem in front of the camera, that their lives are just one long music video. I used to think that, too.
"So how long's he sticking around for, anyway? You think I'll get a chance to meet him?"
"I don't know, Audrey. Maybe you'll luck out and he'll invite you to his crawfish boil."
"Huh?"
"Never mind. Have you got the keys?" She held them up and dangled them. "I'll meet you there, okay? I've got to run by Dove's and pick up the kids. Miss Jeanrette will help you unload if you get there before me."
"In this thing?" Audrey kicked the van's right rear tire affectionately. "You could drive to Houston and back and still beat me."
I wasn't surprised to find Ash's new truck parked in Dove's driveway. I pulled in behind him and sat looking across the garden at the house. The front door was open, and the sound of the B-52's poured through the screen, down the sidewalk, and into the street. As I unlatched the gate, I could hear Jude and Lily yelling at the top of their lungs:
Love shack bay-bee Love shack baby!