by Cathy Holton
“Everybody makes mistakes,” she said, feeling generous.
Trevor put his hand up to stop her. “Let me finish,” he said. “Let me get this out. For once in your life, stop talking and just listen.” She smiled indulgently and he took a deep breath, and continued, trying to keep his voice low. “I’ve been a lousy husband, but I’m going to be better,” he said.
Eadie felt a sudden surge of hope and confidence. She could see Nita’s pale, sad face in the crowd and Lavonne’s sturdy one. Hadn’t she known in her heart that he still loved her?
“I’ve learned a lot about commitment in the past few months. I know I can do better. I know I can be faithful.”
She nodded and gave him a little smile, encouraging him to go on. She would forgive him. She knew already in her heart that she would. But he would have to fire Tonya. There was no other way she’d agree to take him back.
“I intend to start fresh. To be a good husband.”
He’d have to fire Tonya and he’d have to agree to stop practicing law and write.
“Tonya and I are getting married,” he said.
For a moment she didn’t understand him. She stood smiling foolishly into his tired face. Overhead the insect light buzzed and flick-ered. The truth of what he was saying settled over her gradually. The glittering lights, the throng of guests, the entire lawn had the sudden shimmering quality of an underwater scene. Eadie felt as if she were sitting at the bottom of a deep lagoon, looking up toward some brightly lit world on the other side. Lavonne moved just within the watery perimeter of her vision, followed by Nita, moving toward her like slow somber swimmers.
“You cannot possibly mean that after twenty-one years of marriage you intend to divorce me to marry that child,” she said in a distant voice.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
We’ll see about that, Eadie thought grimly. She swung her head over her shoulder and looked around for Denton. There was no mistaking her expression. Denton put the plate down on the table and trudged across the yard like a condemned man on his way to the chair. Eadie swung around to face him. Following her cue, he stopped and began running his hands up and down her bare back, which her daring dress left fully exposed. He was facing her but he was looking anxiously at Trevor over her shoulder.
“Come on, Trevor, let’s go,” Tonya pleaded.
“Is that the personal trainer you’ve been wasting my money on?” Trevor said. He smiled but didn’t show his teeth.
“Oh, I wouldn’t call it a complete waste of money,” Eadie said, picking up a tray of stuffed mushrooms. She stood with her back to Trevor, feeding mushrooms to Denton, who stroked her mechanically, his cheeks plumped, his arm pumping like a compressor. Trevor watched him, his eyes the color of bone. Tonya held tightly to Trevor’s waist.
Behind them, Charles said desperately, “If I had known there was so much money in baseball, I wouldn’t have gone to law school—ha ha.”
Denton’s hand dipped and swirled and took refuge finally in the lower back of Eadie’s dress. Trevor stared at him like a man in the midst of a psychotic episode. Charles rambled on like a lunatic.
“Who’d have thought there’d be so much money in baseball?” he asked anyone who would listen.
Trevor gave his drink to Tonya to hold. Her face crumpled suddenly like she might cry. Trevor stood motionless with his hands down against his sides, but there was something in his expression, some warning in the set of his shoulders that caused Denton to step back. Eadie spun around, her eyes wide, as though surprised to see her husband crossing the lawn with long, violent strides. With his hand still plunged into the back of her dress, Denton looked like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
“Don’t do anything foolish, Trevor,” Eadie said, smiling sweetly.
Denton finally managed to free his hand. He stepped back again, grazing the edge of the buffet table. Weasel picked up the punch bowl and moved it to safety just as Denton leaned into the table and went down, the table collapsing beneath him, leaving him spread-eagled on the ground while the remnants of Tara glistened around his head like a thorny crown. He lay there like a dead man, staring up at the big yellow moon.
Trevor pushed past Eadie and stopped, looking down at Denton. No one moved. The yard was quiet. Trevor snorted, a sudden, short, violent burst of laughter that shot up over the quiet yard like steam through a pressure valve. Hearing this, Charles began to giggle and slap himself, his frenzied laughter rising above the noise of the party as his guests joined in. He would later brag to his mother that this party could have been worse, that at least Denton and Eadie had been there to provide comic relief, that at least the whole affair hadn’t ended in a drunken brawl.
Wave after wave of laughter washed over the yard. Denton rose slowly and, brushing his pants off, made a bow and held his arms above his head in a victory salute. The crowd applauded. Lavonne swam her way through the throng, moving slow and dreamlike toward Eadie. Nita floated behind her, her face pale and delicate as a sea urchin.
Beneath the neon glow of the bug lights, Eadie Boone looked dazed. She watched Trevor like a long-distance swimmer watches the horizon. She was no quitter. Eadie reminded herself of this, the words sloshing through the waterlogged corridors of her brain. I am no quitter. She could hear the voice in her head like a drowning woman.
“You’ll never find a girl like me,” she said to Trevor; and the moment she said it, she knew it was true. In that same moment she became aware of the moon shimmering over the trees like a mirage, and she thought with a sudden yearning for something better, I should paint that. A change came over her, her face softened gradually, and it was then that Eadie realized that loving someone, and being loved by them in return, isn’t always enough.
Trevor saw her transformation and he stopped laughing. Eadie’s eyes looked past him, fixed on some future that didn’t include him, and it was so quiet and unexpected, this withdrawal from him, that it left him stunned. He had not expected her to give up so easily.
All around them the crowd, loosed from their enchantment, began to chatter and move around. Lavonne put her arm around Eadie and began to propel her gently but firmly toward the scuppernong arbor. Nita joined them on the other side putting her arm around Eadie. Little Moses passed carrying two water pitchers on a tray and Lavonne took the pitchers and dashed the water on the ground. “Do me a favor,” she said, handing the empty containers back to him. “Fill these up with frozen margaritas and bring them to us in the arbor. Then unplug the machine and put an ‘out of order’ sign on it. This party’s over.”
Trevor and Tonya left, the gate banging shut behind them.
LAVONNE AND NITA sat out on the patio drinking coffee and watching Eadie and Little Moses dance slowly around the pool to the mournful crooning of Tony Bennett. The guests had left hours ago. Charles had long ago stumbled upstairs to bed. Leonard had gone to drive his unconscious secretary home. The Burning Bush boys had finished most of the cleanup and Little Moses had driven them and Mona home, and had come back to give Eadie a ride. Eadie had been drinking tequila shooters and he figured she might need a designated driver.
Nita watched Eadie and Little Moses dance slowly around the pool. He reminded her so much of Jimmy Lee Motes, with his dark hair and tall slender body. That’s what Jimmy Lee’s arms would feel like, she thought, seeing how tightly he embraced Eadie. That’s how gracefully Jimmy Lee would dance.
Beside her Lavonne flipped absentmindedly through a photo album that Charles and Leonard and Trevor had compiled over the years of their trips to Montana. “See, here’s Leonard when he had hair,” she said, jabbing the page with her finger. “Look how young they were in this picture.” She shoved the book at Nita, but Nita was watching Eadie and Little Moses with a strange expression on her face. Lavonne looked again at the photo. They did look young. And hopeful, with their unlined faces and bright smiles. But Lavonne could see a change in each succeeding photograph. With the passing of the years their faces became less h
opeful and more secretive, hardened into lines of resignation and distrust. Lavonne flipped to a photo taken on last year’s trip. It was a close-up shot of all of them standing with their arms around one another’s shoulders out in a field somewhere. Something about the picture was wrong, something flickered for a moment in her brain, an uneasiness, a warning, but she was tired and she could not focus on what it was that bothered her. She turned the page.
“Where’s that tequila bottle?” Eadie said, letting go of Little Moses to look for it.
Lavonne watched her warily. “You might want to drink some coffee instead. I believe you’ve had enough tequila for one evening.”
Eadie, looking more and more like the old Eadie and less like the dazed wounded woman at the party, grinned and lifted her glass. “One more shot,” she said. “And it’s all over.”
Lavonne went back to the photo album. “This one is a little out of focus,” she said.
“Let me see,” Little Moses said. He sat down beside her and leaned in close. The candlelight flickered over his face. He squinted his eyes and pointed. “What’s this?” he asked.
“What?” Lavonne leaned in closer.
“This.” He tapped the photo with his finger.
Lavonne stared at the photograph. “Oh my God,” she said. She flipped back to the picture that had bothered her. She pushed the album closer to the lantern, and leaned in close and looked down into the sly smiling faces of her husband and his partners.
“What’s the matter?” Nita said.
Lavonne sat back in her chair. “Look at this picture,” she said in an odd voice. Nita sighed. She leaned over the album. “What do you see?” Lavonne asked.
“I see . . . I don’t know,” Nita said. “It looks like a hand.” It was a bit blurry, resting there on Leonard’s shoulder like a furry animal.
“What kind of hand?”
“A hand with red fingernails,” Nita said, still not comprehending.
“And here.” Lavonne flipped through to the last photo and jabbed it with her finger. “What does this look like?”
Nita peered intently at something lying on the ground beside Leonard’s hunting locker. “A shoe,” she said.
“What kind of shoe?”
“A high-heeled shoe. A leopard-print high-heeled shoe.”
Lavonne flipped back to a photograph taken fifteen years ago. There at the edge of a field sat a folding camp chair and draped across that chair, unmistakably, was a pair of lace panties.
“Leonard’s hunting locker smells like cheap perfume,” Lavonne said, remembering the day she came home to find him cleaning it out.
Nita stared at her, hard, for ten seconds. She blinked. “Charles has condoms in the pocket of his hunting jacket,” she said.
Little Moses ducked his head and checked his fingernails for dirt.
“Either our husbands are transvestites, or they’ve been bringing women with them,” Lavonne said.
Eadie quit looking for the tequila and lurched over to the table. “Let me see that book,” she said. “Let me see that damn book.”
“Maybe they found the shoe,” Little Moses suggested. Being the only male present, he felt a certain obligation to play devil’s advocate. “Maybe they picked it up in the woods.”
“They picked up something in the woods,” Eadie said darkly, looking at the photos.
“What about the panties?” Lavonne asked Little Moses. “What about the cheap perfume and the condoms?”
Little Moses was a musician in a Jewish reggae band. He had long ago learned to recognize futility. He shrugged and put his head back, and looked at the stars.
“I can’t believe it,” Lavonne said, trying desperately to believe it wasn’t true even though, somewhere deep in the pit of her stomach, she knew it was. “Maybe there’s some explanation.” But she knew there wasn’t. Not one she’d be willing to settle for, anyway.
Eadie set her shot glass down on the table and flipped slowly through the book. Coming so soon after the realization that her husband had walked out of her life forever, this revelation settled over Eadie like a blow to the head. “How could we be so stupid,” she wheezed. “How could we be so blind?”
Tony Bennett sang of love and heartbreak. Japanese lanterns flickered in the treetops like fallen stars. Lavonne had a sudden memory of her mother lying in an opened coffin, her face oddly pleasant, the sickly sweet odor of flowers and embalming fluid filling the room.
“All these years we’ve been sitting home worrying they’d catch pneumonia or accidentally shoot each other or die in a plane crash,” Lavonne said. “And they’ve been bringing women along.”
Eadie struggled to draw breath. “Well, this has been an evening we’ll never forget,” she said flatly.
“I wish I’d had more to drink,” Lavonne said. “I wish I wasn’t stone cold sober.”
“It’s not too late to fix that.”
“I need to keep my wits about me while I figure out what in the hell I’m going to do.”
Nita stirred and shook herself like a woman waking from a deep and implacable slumber. “Those bastards,” she said. “Those lousy, cheating bastards.”
CHAPTER
* * *
SIX
THE NEXT MORNING they met at Eadie Boone’s house to plan revenge.
“The thing that gets me,” Eadie said, setting a bottle of tequila and three glasses down on the table between them, “is that they got away with it for so long.” She cut up some limes and poured salt on a plate in the middle of the table. “How stupid can we be?” she said. Eadie’s eyes had a feverish quality. Her hair was unwashed and uncombed. She looked like a woman on the edge of something dangerous. Some women had a knack for decorating and some had a knack for picking wardrobes and some were real good with arts and crafts or gourmet cooking. Eadie Boone had a knack for revenge. She’d been practicing it, in one form or another, all her life.
“Why are we drinking tequila at nine-thirty in the morning?” Lavonne said. She still felt hung over from the night before. A plate of brownies rested on the table in front of her and, looking at it, Lavonne realized she didn’t want one. She knew she would never again gorge herself on brownies or Rocky Road ice cream or Peach Paradise; that part of her life was over forever.
“We’re drinking tequila because it feels like the right thing to do,” Eadie said. If Eadie was hung over, she hid it well. “Tequila gets me in my revenge-planning mood.”
Nita sat there with her hands clasped on the table. There was a stillness about her, a composure that seemed artificial and slightly sinister.
“I’ve got a few ideas for the revenge part, but before we talk about that, there’s something else we need to talk about first,” Lavonne said.
Eadie dipped the glasses in salt, poured out three shots of tequila, and pushed them around the table. Lavonne stared at hers. Nita picked hers up but didn’t put it to her lips. Eadie swallowed her shot, and set the empty glass down on the table. She picked up a lime slice and sucked it, hard.
“I’ve got my own idea for the revenge part,” Eadie said, grimacing. “I say we have them killed. I say we take out a contract on them or, hell, even do it ourselves.”
“Let’s be serious,” Lavonne said.
Eadie stared at her steadily and Lavonne could see she was serious. “Forensic technology makes it real hard to get away with murder these days,” she reminded Eadie.
“So you have thought about it,” Eadie said.
“I’ve thought about murdering my own husband, but I’ve never considered murdering yours.”
Eadie nodded as if she understood perfectly the logic of this statement. Nita said in a quiet voice, “You have to make it look like an accident.”
No one said anything. After a moment, Lavonne patted Nita’s hand nervously and said, “Yes, Nita, of course you’re right. We could make it look like an accident if we murdered one of them, but not all three.” Lavonne lifted the glass to her lips and sipped her drink. It tasted
worse than anything she’d ever drunk. It was one thing to drink frozen margaritas; it was something else entirely to toss back straight shots of tequila.
Eadie, the tequila connoisseur, said, “Lavonne, you don’t sip it. You down it in one gulp.”
“You drink it your way, I’ll drink it mine,” Lavonne said stubbornly. She didn’t want to drink it at all, but she felt it signified something meaningful, some important ritual blood sisters might do on a moonlit night in front of an open fire. Only instead of cutting themselves and sharing their blood, they were sharing tequila. It was the same concept. Beside her, Nita lifted the glass to her lips and put her head back. She slowly set the empty glass on the table. Her face was expressionless. Eadie offered her a lime slice but she shook her head, no.
“Nita, what do you think?” Lavonne said, noticing Nita’s blank look. She hoped Nita wasn’t getting ready to go postal on them. Wasn’t it always the quiet ones who were the most dangerous?
“I think they should be punished,” Nita said quietly.
“Well, all right then.” Eadie poured herself and Nita another glass. “Maybe we could hire the Burning Bush boys to kill them. Hell, if we’d known last night we could have paid the boys to poison them.”
“The Burning Bush boys are a Jewish reggae band,” Lavonne reminded her. “They’re not contract killers.”
“That Johnny would do it,” Eadie said, lifting her glass. “Or Little Moses. I could talk him into it. I could talk Little Moses into just about anything.”
Lavonne lifted the shot glass to her lips and swallowed. The tequila ran down the back of her throat like battery acid. She could feel it burning a hole in the bottom of her stomach. “Good God,” she choked. “That’s nasty.”
Eadie grinned and poured her another shot. “After awhile you get used to it,” she promised. “After awhile, you don’t feel a thing.”
“Look,” Lavonne said, suddenly all business. “We have to plan this revenge right. We have to plan this so those sons of bitches don’t know what hit them. Murder is easy. Anyone can do it. We’re intelligent women and we can plan something better than murder. Something creative and truly humiliating.”