She opened her mouth to torture me. “I was just telling Doug Munroe what a wonderful paralegal you are,” she said, “and he wants to meet you. His law firm is really the best in town, and—”
“I’m not even sure if I’m staying,” I said. “And I have a job.” And the beginnings of a killer headache, I thought.
“A job in Dallas. If Rich isn’t going to do conversion therapy, then you’ve really got to—”
I pushed back from the bar and flashed her a megawatt smile. Before I could answer, though, Jack’s voice interrupted. “Agatha Phelps, always good to see you.”
My mother took notice of Jack, tilting her head to the side, and shaking it.
“Oh my, if it isn’t the infamous Jack Holden,” she said. “What trouble are you causing tonight?”
He wiped a smile from his face. “I have a question for you.”
She twinkled. “What is it?”
Jack’s voice dropped lower, and Mother leaned in. I tried not to. “What’s the difference between erotic and kinky?”
“I’m sure I don’t know.” She raised her brows. “And I can’t think why any decent man should.” She leaned closer, twinkled brighter.
“Erotic uses a feather and kinky uses the whole chicken.” He smiled on the dimpled side of his face only. “And you know it’s only part of my job.”
My mother giggled like a tween girl. “That’s the only reason I’ll forgive your manners.”
I shook my head. “I’ll come find you later, Mother.” They both looked at me, my mother’s eyes wide like she’d forgotten I was there.
***
I studied my gap-toothed smile in the bathroom mirror, it and me in a gilded frame, and fluffed my bangs. They needed a spray of dry shampoo and blast of Aqua Net, neither of which I had with me. I turned to the side and smoothed my hand over my stomach. At least there was no baby bump, yet, and my dress was nearly dry. I lifted my chest and shoulders. “Put ’em on a shelf, ladies,” my pageant coach used to remind us before we went onstage. That was more than twelve years ago, though, and my shelf was a little lower than it used to be.
A woman’s voice from behind a stall door crowed, “Did you see Emily Phelps? I can’t believe she showed her face tonight.”
A second voice snarked from the stall next to her. “I hear she’s not woman enough to keep her man.”
They both laughed like she was Melissa-flippin’-McCarthy or something.
I picked my drink up from the counter and tossed it at the ground outside the two stalls. Overpriced lemonade splashed its target, eliciting a squeal.
“Woops,” I said. “I guess I’m not woman enough to hold my drink either.”
Damn, that felt good. I tucked my five-pound clutch under my arm, pushed out the door, and headed for the pool area as fast as I could wobble on my heels. I’d look for my mother later. For now, I just wanted to stand outside the fence around the little pool at the center of the atrium and imagine myself 3000 miles away from all of this pettiness. I wouldn’t have a care in the world, and I’d gaze peacefully into the aquamarine ocean off of St. Marcos, the island home of my best friend, Katie. She used to be an attorney at Hailey & Hart, the law firm I probably still worked for in Dallas. Thinking of her in the same breath as I thought of my woes made me feel guilty, though. She’d emailed that morning asking if I’d heard from her husband, Nick, who hadn’t come home last night. I hoped Nick was only a big douchebag like my husband, Rich, and not truly missing. I needed to call her. Well, why not now? Or when I got to the pool, anyway. It’s not like I wanted to talk to anyone else.
But I had to make it past the happy couple’s receiving line—which I’d already been through, thank you very much—before I could stare at the swimming pool. That is, I had to get through the throng of people who probably thought that I regretted giving Scott back his promise ring when I left for Texas Tech—a throng of very familiar faces, all of them reacting visibly at the sight of mine. A former neighbor, from back when we lived in town. A classmate I hadn’t seen since graduation from AHS. Some kid I’d babysat when I was twelve. I fended off each greeting as I braved the gauntlet to the pool, repeating myself into a mantra.
“Oh my goodness!” Lean in, hug without touching bodies. One-handed shoulder-pat three times. “So great to see you. I’m meeting someone, can we catch up later?” Air kiss. “You, too. Bye-bye now!” Keep walking.
Was I as conspicuous as I felt? I tried not to imagine the inevitable whispers in my wake, because, sure as shooting, everyone here knew my business as well as if it had been front-page headline news—above the fold. I tested my face for the confident half-smile I was determined to wear and adjusted the corners of my mouth up ever so slightly.
The chlorine smell of the pool cut through to my cerebral cortex and I sharpened—in a good way. I placed my hands on the black metal top rail of the fence and looked over at the people gathered around the pool at patio tables. It wasn’t as crowded as the bar area, but that wasn’t saying much. My ex had married another local and they’d sprung for an open bar, so almost everyone in town had shown up. But I didn’t care if I was alone in the crowd. I didn’t care if I was standing in the stripper heels that I’d been forced to borrow from my mother who thought they were high-class. I didn’t care if my life was in shambles and my marriage was history. I only cared about the next few good breaths. My eyes found the water, and I sucked in the chemically poisoned air like it was a magic potion. If I could just have about two minutes of this to shock my senses, I might survive the night.
Still breathing deeply, I pulled out my phone, scrolled through my favorites page, and pressed Katie’s name. As it rang, I worried about the time difference. I could never remember which time of the year she was two hours later, versus the regular one hour later than me in Texas. Either way, it was only eight thirty here. It would be okay. After three rings, she picked up.
“Emily?”
“Katie! Has Nick shown up? I haven’t heard from him at all.”
“No, and his plane is missing and the police are no help.” Her voice sounded brittle and shrill.
“Are you, um, holding up okay?” She used to have a problem with alcohol. I’d nearly added “sober,” but she didn’t sound drunk. Just scared.
“I’m not sure. But my in-laws are here—you remember Kurt and Julie?—and our nanny, Ruth. Kurt and I think Nick headed to the Dominican Republic on a case he’s working. We’re headed there in the morning.”
Nick worked as a private investigator, so this didn’t sound totally implausible. “I’m praying for you guys.”
“Thank you. I was about to try to sleep, not that I’ll be able to. How are things with you? Everything good?”
Now was not the time to weigh her down with my problems. I crossed my fingers. “Fine. I’m great, other than worried about you.”
“Yeah, you and me both. Thanks for calling.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
We hung up, and I stood staring at the water, my phone still in my hand. It sounded serious. Nick and Katie had twin baby girls and a preschool-age boy. I closed my eyes and said a short, silent prayer for Nick’s safe return, then added, And help me maintain just a little dignity as I go through all my . . . stuff. Amen.
A throat cleared beside me, and I jumped.
“So, you’re looking for a job?” a man’s voice asked.
My eyes, the traitorous little magnets, tracked to the right, following the pull of the sound that I already knew was the voice of Jack, the man formerly known as Little Joe.
“You following me?” I asked.
The dimple twitched. “I do believe I staked my claim here first.”
Oh. I didn’t have a response to that. I just tried another breath of bleachy air.
“Agatha Phelps is your mother.”
I pursed my lips, then answered. “I take it the two of you know each other.”
“She roped me into teaching a class on Apache
religion and its Mountain Spirits a few weeks ago in an ‘Understanding our Neighbor’ series on different religions at her church.”
I snorted. “I didn’t think the Panhandle Believers congregation was into comparative religions.”
“Let’s just say it felt more like they were gathering information to convert the last of the heathens.”
“So why do you go there?”
“I don’t.” Jack raised an eyebrow at me—the one on the dimple side. “Your mother practically runs the place.”
“Tell me about it.”
“She talks about you.”
The muscles around my eyes and across my forehead tightened up. Someday, I’d owe half my wrinkles to my mother and the other half to Rich. “That’s great.”
He cleared his throat. “I’m looking for a legal assistant at my law firm.”
I reevaluated his cowboy authenticity again and decided he was still the real thing, just urbanized. I opened my mouth to say I wasn’t looking for a job, but what came out was, “What type of law?”
His nice, rumbly voice said, “Criminal defense, mostly.”
I shook my head. “No offense, but yuck. I do employment law.”
The dimple again, but not so much that it pulled the side of his mouth up.
“Based on your taste in jokes, you’d probably enjoy the sexual harassment cases.”
“My clients make your CEO harassment defendants look like they’re still wearing training pants.”
I remembered flipping through the paper that morning, over dry white bread and black coffee, because that’s how we roll at my mother’s house. What I recalled was a big criminal case, and quotes from the attorney. What was the name? Had it been Jack Holden? Yes. Yes it had.
“You’re that attorney who got the super pimp acquitted last week, aren’t you?” I said. “Whose client was the guy who ran the prostitution ring cleverly disguised as hot women delivering pizza in tap pants and bustiers? What do they call guys like him? Marketing geniuses? Or sleazeballs?”
He turned to me and dipped his head, speaking only after an uncomfortably intense and lengthy pause.
“You’re that woman whose husband took all her money and left her for a man who pretends to be a woman, aren’t you? What do they call that, experimentation? Or a fetish for transvestites?” He asked, sipping his Bourbon.
Boom! A sound like a cannon shook me to my pointy toes, followed by a nanosecond of stunned silence. A woman’s scream pierced the air just as a loud, slapping sound reverberated from the surface of the pool. Water splashed up on my dress and I gasped. Jack pushed himself in front of me. There was another moment of profound silence, then noise exploded all around us. I was tucked behind Jack, his arms extended low behind him, on either side of me. I stepped around him to get a view of the pool. A cloud of red was growing in the water around what looked to be a man’s torso.
“Well, that’s something you don’t see every day,” Jack said.
I looked up from the grisly scene. The man had fallen from above the pool. My eyes climbed, searching each floor of balconies, moving like one of my grandmother’s old Selectric typeballs across a blank page. There! I saw her, three floors up, a gun dangling in her two hands, her black hair pulled back, her white apron tied over her burgundy maid’s dress. The shooter.
I leaned in toward Jack and pointed at the woman. “Better hurry, she looks like she needs a lawyer.”
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Excerpt from Puppalicious and Beyond
I am not a whackjob.
I am not some whacko who writes about her labradoodle Schnookums. Let’s just get that straight right off the bat. Hell, I’m practically anti-animal, and I don’t believe in the Loch Ness Monster, either. Dogs? They shed. Poop. Pee. Barf. Drool. Chew. Bark. Cats? Ditto, except make that yowl instead of bark, plus I’m deathly allergic. That’s why currently we have only three dogs and one cat. Oh, and five fish. And I hardly even like them, except for maybe a little. We’ve cut back, too. It wasn’t so long ago the dog count was six, the cat count three, and the fish count innumerable, along with guinea pigs, birds, ducks, rabbits, and a pig. As in swine.
My most vivid memories of growing up in Wyoming and Texas are of animals. We had the normal sorts of pets, plus the absolute luxury of living in the country. I raised sheep for 4-H and rode my horse to sleepovers. We had visitors furry, feathered, and scaly, of both the hooved and clawed varieties. My husband grew up on St. Croix where the animals were different, but his wild upbringing, close to nature, matched mine. His mother tells stories of her sons bringing geckos on the plane from the island to the mainland, and finding their little skeletons outside the family’s summer home in Maine months later. Eric’s favorite photograph from his youth shows him standing on the beach holding the booby he rescued while surfing, then nursed back to health and released.
As a child, I devoured books about animals, like Black Beauty and Where the Red Fern Grows. I idolized James Herriot and Jacques Cousteau. I could never quite decide whether to be a veterinarian or a marine biologist or Shamu’s trainer. Somehow I sold out early on and became a lawyer, but that didn’t stop the animal love. There, I’ve admitted it: animal love. I ♥ animals, with a big red heart and sparkly glitter. All of them, nearly, except for maybe insects and reptiles. Also I am not a big fan of rats. But other than that, I love every one. Eric and I spend all the time we can outdoors looking for critters, whether we do it from bicycles or cars, or in the water or on our own four feet. We watch All Creatures Great and Small on Netflix. Our offspring naturally love God’s creatures, too, at least as much as they love their smartphones, and a whole lot more than they love us.
In the Virgin Islands of Eric’s youth, Christianity made plenty of room for the ghosts, spirits, and jumbies of obeah, a folk-magic religion with elements of sorcery and voodoo. The locals couldn’t comprehend why continentals like me scoffed at what was so plainly true to them, but scoff I did. Ghosts? Jumbies? As in Casper the friendly? It was hard for me to follow—until I met Eric. He and the islands opened my eyes to a world that existed just beyond the visible. Sometimes these non-humans scared me, and sometimes they comforted me. I liked my pets and the animals of the wild better, but I was captivated by the jumbies. Especially the one guarding Annaly, the house we bought in the rainforest.
When my lawyer career morphed into human resources and then I finally started writing, non-humans started spilling out of every story. Sometimes they are the stars, and sometimes they are the supporting actors. No matter their role, they always manage to steal the show from the unsuspecting humans who believe they are the center of the universe.
Froggy Went A' Courtin'
All the signs were there. We even talked about them, way back when. “The owners must love frogs,” Eric said as we toured the back yard of the house in Houston that would become our home when we left the islands. He nudged a knee-high pottery frog planter with his foot.
“Umm hmmm,” I said. I couldn’t have cared less. I was calculating our offer.
“That one is odd,” he said. He pointed at a large concrete frog Buddha, almost hidden by giant elephant ears and bougainvillea beside the waterfall that poured from the top pond into the middle one. You could see the ponds all the way from the front door, through the seamless full-length back windows. It reminded us of home, of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands, of our beloved rainforest home Estate Annaly. How could we not buy this house? Eric continued, “It’s like a frog shrine.”
I remember saying something noncommittal, like, “Whoa, that is odd,” as I walked back into the house with the real estate agent. In retrospect, she seemed . . . in a hurry.
We moved in on the ninth of March, springtime in Houston. Beautiful springtime. For roughly six weeks, the temperatures are in the seventies and there’s a soft breeze
. Flowers bloom but mosquitoes don’t yet. Sunlight dapples the ground through the vibrant foliage of the trees. Birds don’t chirp, they sing. The fragrance is clean, more than sweet. It’s heaven. We moved in, and our new house was like heaven.
Until everything arrived from the islands in another month, we had exactly one piece of furniture: a standard double mattress on the master bedroom floor. The kids slept in sleeping bags. It was spare. We ate our meals on paper plates sitting cross-legged on the floor. When we called to each other, our voices bounced from wall to wall in our 4,000-square-foot echo chamber. Still, it was like heaven.
But around midnight during our fateful third week in Houston, the first frog croaked. His piercing rasp drew our attention, but not our consternation. What was one frog to us, here in heaven?
Oh, had it only been one frog. Or one hundred frogs. Or even one thousand. By three a.m., Eric was standing pondside in his skivvies with three hundred pounds of canine looky-loos beside him in the forms of Cowboy the giant yellow Lab, Layla the Gollum-like boxer, and Karma the emotionally fragile German shepherd. I stood in the doorway.
“Fucking frogs,” Eric said, no trace of love in his voice.
Well, yes. Yes, they were. Frogs were, ahem, fornicating everywhere. It was overwhelming, really. I swear, if you’d Googled “swingers’ resort for frogs,” you’d get our address. The amorous amphibians held their tongues as soon as Eric switched on the backyard light. Muttering more curses, he snatched them up in stubbornly conjoined pairs and flung them over the fence. I did not dare ask his plan and after ten minutes, I sneaked off to bed.
Night after sleepless spring night, Eric battled the frogs with a homicidal drive. Day after spring day, he shirked his work as a chemical engineer and looked online for ways to off them. This campaign was beginning to drive me insane, too. Their sounds had long since become white noise, or at worst, bedtime music to me. Eric’s tossing, turning, cursing, and trips in- and outside, on the other hand, kept me wide awake. He would report the body count when he returned to bed.
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