“Oh, Lise, Lise.” Dearie said it as a sigh. “Look. They were too young to get married. Young and selfish. Your mother was hell-bent on being a big movie star. Clint? Looking back on it, I guess he wasn’t a bad person. He was just all wrong for her. He was a good old boy from Georgia who got hired as a stunt driver on that stupid show … what was it called?”
“Dukes of Hazzard.”
“Stupid show. But Clint was a good-looking stud, no doubt about it.”
“I can’t believe she fell in love with a guy with a mullet.”
“What’s that?”
“Nothing. You were about to tell me about their breakup.”
“Breakups. Plural. They’d get to fighting, and the next thing I know, she’d tell me he’d gone off to Vegas with his buddies. Or she’d show up at my place in the middle of the night with you and a suitcase.”
“What was all the fighting about?”
“Everything. Nothing. She didn’t like his friends, he didn’t like hers. She didn’t like him smoking around the baby, he thought she drank too much. But they’d always get back together after a week or so.”
“Until the last time. What happened? What was different about that breakup?”
“Lise never would tell me. I think she was too ashamed of herself. Which she should have been. Look, honey, are you sure you want to hear all this? Your mom’s gone now, so what’s the difference?”
“I need to hear it,” Greer said, her voice steely.
“It was pilot season, February or March, and Lise had a callback for a sitcom on ABC, I think it was. She’d been shut out of so many parts, but this one looked like a real possibility. You’d been sick all winter—nothing serious, mostly ear infections, but oh my Lord, you would be up screaming half the night. I know, because I babysat you a lot on weekends. I thought you’d pop a lung, you’d scream so loud.”
“Go on.”
“That’s really all I know. You had an earache, Lise had an early Monday morning callback. They’d had a fight, and your mom was so mad she threw him out. He stayed gone maybe a week, but when he finally did get home, late on a Sunday night, Lise was gone.”
“She left me there … by myself?” Greer was stunned.
“No, no. She wouldn’t have done something like that. There was a teenager who lived next door. She came over to watch you. Lise just didn’t bother to tell her she wouldn’t be coming back.”
Greer felt her chest tighten with anger.
“You really don’t remember any of this, do you, honey?” Dearie asked.
Greer tried to summon up the memories, but it was like that dark, half-hidden road she’d traveled earlier in the evening. The past was out there, bumping up against her subconscious, like bugs on a windshield. She could sense it, but she couldn’t see it.
“The babysitter. Was her name Claire? She used to give me Pepsis. And let me stay up late and watch TV, but I wasn’t supposed to tell Mom.”
“I think her name was Claire, now that you mention it.”
“And Lise really just walked off and left me? Because she had an early-morning audition? How long before you knew she’d gone? How long before you came and got me?”
“Maybe a week,” Dearie said. “Not that long. Clint finally called and admitted Lise’d left. I think he was too proud to ask for my help before that.”
“And how long before Lise came home again?”
“I don’t know, Greer. It was a long, long time ago. All that matters is, she did come home. She wasn’t perfect, but she loved you, and she did the best she could.”
Greer tried again to summon the past. She had dim memories of being upset because, after the divorce, she’d had to leave behind her swing set when they moved in with Dearie. In all the upheaval in her childhood, her grandmother had been the one constant. Dearie couldn’t have made much money working as a seamstress in the studio costume department, but somehow she’d seen to it that her granddaughter didn’t do without.
“Uh-oh,” Dearie said. “I hear the Beast coming down the hallway, rattling doorknobs.”
“Who’s the Beast?”
“Night supervisor. I’ve gotta go. You won’t forget about my money, will you?”
“I’ll transfer the money as soon as we hang up. ’Night, Dearie.”
“Good night, sweetheart.”
26
Saturday morning was sunny and should have been full of promise, but Greer found the idea of a day off work oppressive. She stared moodily out the window at the glassy waters of the Gulf. Twice she started to put on her bathing suit. A day at the beach was what she needed, she told herself, but the idea held no real appeal.
Her thoughts kept returning to the conversation she’d had with Dearie the night before. At some point she got in the Kia and headed out of town, telling herself she was going out to search for alternative locations for the casino.
She drove north for a half an hour, then abruptly turned east, driving through the lush green swamps and flat pasturelands of the central Gulf Coast. Finally, she pulled into a gas station and typed “Alachua” into her phone’s GPS. According to the map, the route would take her through Gainesville, a big university town, where she might decide to go shopping.
But when she reached Gainesville, she kept going. She lived in Los Angeles, California, where she could buy anything, any time she wanted, although she rarely did.
The Alachua city limits sign gave her pause. Was she really going to do this?
Maybe she would drive past his house, just to satisfy her own curiosity.
The problem with the drive-by strategy was that she didn’t know where Clint lived.
That was easily remedied. She typed “Clint Hennessy” and “Alachua, Florida,” into her phone’s search engine and quickly came up with an address on a county road. According to her GPS, the address was only five miles away.
She found a convenience store, used the restroom, bought a bottle of cold water, then sat in her car, tapping her fingertips on the steering wheel, torn with indecision. Why was she doing this? What could be gained by looking up a man she didn’t really care to see again?
But the glowing dot on her GPS called out to her. She was so close now, what was the sense of turning back?
The county road led her through a rural area of dilapidated houses, stretches of pastureland with grazing white, humpbacked cattle, and scattered trailer parks. Not exactly the promised land. And to make matters worse, what houses she saw were haphazardly numbered, if at all.
Finally she spied a mailbox with the street number matching Clint’s address. There was no actual house in sight, just a sandy road that wound through a lane of oak trees and underbrush. On an impulse she picked up her phone and snapped a few photos.
As she was snapping, her phone dinged to alert her to a text. It was from CeeJay.
Sorry about last night. Meet up at the Coffee Mug and I’ll explain all?
She was so intent on typing out a response that she momentarily forgot where she was. Until a sudden tap on her car window startled her so badly she dropped the phone.
She looked up into the face of a stranger, who was bent down, staring into her window. But this stranger had a familiar face: square jaw, sharply planed high cheekbones, bushy white eyebrows, brown eyes the same shade as her own, with a fine network of crow’s-feet extending to his hairline.
“Can I help you?” The stranger leaned in closer, and now a slow smile spread across the weathered face. “Greer? You’re Greer!” He gripped the Kia’s door handle and she saw that his hands—large, chapped, and banged up, with a network of scars and cuts—were violently shaking.
“I’m Greer,” she said finally.
“Well, what are you doing sitting in the car? Come on up to the house, okay?”
“I really can’t stay,” Greer said feebly.
His smile faded. “Aw, c’mon. Please?”
Ten minutes, and then I am so out of here.
* * *
“Son of a bit
ch,” he said under his breath. “Son of a bitch. Sorry, but I just can’t believe you’re really here. Son of a bitch.”
They were seated in the living room of his trailer, or double-wide, as he referred to it.
He’d removed his baseball cap once they were in the house. Clint Hennessy wasn’t bald at all. He had thinning but still wavy silver hair.
Thank God the mullet is gone.
His living room was small but tidy. Shag carpet, a flat-screen television, a shiny leather recliner, leather sofa, and coffee table and end tables, all matching.
All screaming “I bought all this furniture for less than a thousand bucks!”
Clint was seated on the recliner. Greer was on the sofa, with her hands folded in her lap, wondering just how long she would have to stay.
“You sure I can’t get you something to drink? I got beer, sodas. Or I could make some coffee.…”
“No thanks. I’m fine.” The end of the sentence trailed off. She couldn’t bring herself to call him Dad, but she wouldn’t hurt his feelings by calling him Clint. So she wouldn’t call him anything at all. She would leave just as soon as common courtesy allowed.
“You’re as pretty as Lise said you were,” Clint said, his gaze fastened on her face.
“Lise was always given to exaggeration,” Greer said.
“No. You’re beautiful. You were a pretty baby, but you’re beautiful now. Just like your mom.”
Greer felt herself squirming under the intensity of his stare.
“This is nice,” she said, gesturing toward a picture window that showed a small backyard with a brick patio, barbecue grill, and picnic table. “Have you lived here long?”
“I moved to Alachua twelve years ago, after I finally got fed up with California. Four years ago, I found this place. This trailer was already here. I bought it for the land, and the fact that there was a barn big enough for the cars.”
“You keep your cars in a barn?”
What kind of redneck has a barn full of cars but lives in a trailer?
“Oh yeah. I can’t have them out in the weather.”
“Why’s that?”
“Those cars are my bread and butter. Didn’t Lise tell you about my business?”
“No. She just told me you guys had reconnected.”
“Facebook,” he said eagerly. “That’s how I found your mom again, you know. We talked on the phone, too. Right after she found out, you know, about the cancer.”
“She mentioned it,” Greer said stiffly.
“Uh, well, I wanted to come to the funeral, you know.”
But you didn’t.
“It was small. Just a few old friends.”
But no MIA ex-husbands.
“It’s hard for me to travel that far, all the way to California, me running a business and all. I got a couple guys who work for me part time, doing body work and painting, but I do most of the long-hauling myself, delivering cars to locations.”
Greer tried desperately to think of an excuse to leave. She’d done what she came to Alachua to do. She’d seen Clint, talked to him. Her obligations had been met.
“How come you don’t do Facebook?” Clint was asking. “I thought everybody your age was into that. You don’t even hardly have any pictures of yourself on there.”
“I have a professional page, for my scouting business, but I don’t bother with a personal page,” she told him.
Clint’s face lit up at the mention of her location scouting business. “How about that? You’re the third generation in the business. Guess you could call that a dynasty, right?”
She shrugged. “I guess. Unlike Dearie and Mom, I never was an actress.”
He started to say something, hesitated, then started again. “Good old Dearie. Is she still as full of piss and vinegar?”
“Definitely.”
Clint grinned. “She never liked me. And I probably gave her good reason not to. She thought I was some redneck hillbilly. But I always admired your grandmother. In a town full of liars, phonies, and ass kissers, Dearie was the real thing. You always knew where you stood with her.”
“To say the very least,” Greer agreed.
Must leave. Must leave. Must leave.
“I’d probably better get going. It’s an hour drive back to Cypress Key, and I’m sure you have stuff you need to do. It was probably bad manners of me to just drop in on you like this.”
“You’re leaving already?” Clint’s shoulders drooped. “I was hoping maybe you’d let me buy you lunch and we could spend some time catching up.”
As if a hamburger and a Coke could bridge a gap of more than three decades.
“Maybe another time,” Greer said, sounding deliberately vague. She stood up.
“Let me just show you around the place before you leave,” Clint said. “You haven’t even seen my cars.”
“Okay, maybe just a few minutes,” Greer said. “We’ve got a production meeting this afternoon.”
Humor him. He doesn’t know it’s your day off.
She followed him down the worn wooden steps and through the overgrown, grassy backyard, down a well-packed sand driveway that ended in front of a huge, industrial-looking prefab metal warehouse.
He was shorter than she’d remembered, maybe five ten, and skinnier. His jeans bagged in the seat and were too short, showing off white athletic socks and black tennis shoes with Velcro fasteners, and his gait was stiff-legged.
Just another sad old man. Nothing to me.
Clint took a set of keys from his pocket, unlocked a heavy steel door, and flicked on a light switch.
“My inventory,” he said proudly.
The warehouse was full of cars and trucks and dozens of vehicles of every description, their paint gleaming under the glare of overhead lights. She spotted an antique cherry red fire engine, a rusty old Ford pickup truck with a wooden stake bed, a flashy pink 1950s Cadillac with flaring fins, even a vintage yellow school bus.
Holy shit. My father is a car hoarder.
“What is all this?” Greer asked, mystified. “Do you drive all these cars?”
“Oh, hell no,” Clint said. “I guess Lise didn’t tell you. I’m still in the business, too, in a way. All these vehicles? They’re picture cars. I rent ’em for television and movie productions. Some print ads too.”
“Really?” Greer felt herself drawn into the warehouse, as though by a magnet.
At the end of the first row she saw the car she’d been wondering about: the orange Dodge Charger with the Confederate battle flag painted on the roof.
“Is that—”
“Yup,” Clint said. He walked over to the Charger and gave the hood a loving pat. “The General Lee. This is the same car I drove for The Dukes of Hazzard.”
“It’s not a replica?” Greer asked. The car had no windows. She walked around to the passenger side, leaned down, and peered inside. The padded tan dashboard appeared to have been spray painted. Looking up, she touched a chrome roll bar.
Clint reached across and leaned on the horn, and the first twelve notes of “Dixie” blared so loudly she jumped backwards.
That horn. “Dixie.” Suddenly she was four again, sitting on her daddy’s lap
Do it again. Again. Again. Please, Daddy.
Until Lise came out of the house and yelled at him to cut it out before the neighbors called the cops.
“A replica? Not on your life,” Clint said. “We used hundreds of Chargers during the life of the series. This was one we wrecked doing a stunt jump for an episode at the end of the third season, in 1981. I bought it, restored it, and for years I’d take it around to car shows all over the country.”
“Does it run?”
“They all run,” Clint said, gesturing around the barn. “Some of ’em I bought as is, others I restored myself. That’s what I’ve been doing since I quit driving—buying, selling, and restoring cars.”
He rested a hand lightly on Greer’s shoulder. “This one I’ll never sell. Do you remember it at all?�
��
Lise’s voice, shrill, on the phone with Dearie. “Goddamn General Lee. Yeah. The car has a name. He has a kid he can’t support, but he treats that car like it’s his baby.”
Greer closed her eyes, thinking back to that long-ago day. “I have a vague memory of you coming home with an orange car. But that one, the front end was bashed in. I remember you let me sit in it, and we’d honk the horn, but Mom wouldn’t let you take me for a drive because she said it wasn’t safe.”
“God, she hated this car.” Clint’s laugh was wheezy. “I had a herniated disc, you know, from work. I was getting workers’ comp, but I was bored as hell, hanging around the house, so I bought it without telling her.”
“You did what? You paid seventy-five dollars for that piece of shit? Jesus, Clint!”
“Seventy-five dollars,” Greer whispered.
Clint stared at her. “That’s right. I paid seventy-five dollars for it. But how…”
She shook her head, as if that would shake off the memory. “I better get going. My meeting…”
His face crumpled like an old brown paper sack, dry and creased. “Son of a bitch. You must have heard us fighting that day. Right?”
Greer took a deep breath. “I heard her yelling ‘Seventy-five dollars!’ over and over.”
“We thought you were sleeping,” Clint said. “Money was tight. We had all these doctor bills because you kept getting ear infections. And it was pilot season, and she wanted a new outfit to go out on callbacks. But I’d spent every spare dime on this thing.” He ran a gnarled hand slowly over the windshield.
“I had a plan, you know. The way I saw it, the General Lee was an investment. All it needed was some bodywork. I was gonna fix it up, then rent it back to the studio for the show. But Lise thought that was just some wild hare of mine. She was furious.”
“I’d never heard Mom cry before,” Greer whispered.
Clint patted her shoulder awkwardly. “It didn’t occur to me to tell her what I was doing. I was the man of the family, right? Why should I ask her permission?”
“When I woke up from my nap, you were gone,” Greer said accusingly.
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