by Luanne Jones
Rita looked back at Cozette. “Now it’s just you and Mouse out there on all that property…”
“It is ours, you know,” Cozie sat ramrod straight. “We stayed on and one by one bought the others out so it belongs to us to do with as we please.”
“I was going to say just you and Mouse left to dance naked in the moonlight.” Rita cocked one eyebrow. “But the part about you buying everyone else out is interesting, too.”
“Oh, well, it’s not…that’s not important really. Just thought I’d throw that in.” She jiggled her fingers through her hair to loosen it more. “There have got to be far more fascinating things to talk about tonight.”
“Especially for Rita.” Jillie walked into the room with the portable phone held high. “It’s Will.”
“Will?” The name nearly knocked the wind right out of her.
“My Will?” Miss Peggy’s chin angled upward. “Did you tell him that I will no longer take his calls?”
“Will’s been calling his mother?” Rita whispered to Cozie because she dared not put herself in the middle of the West family conflicts.
“At least once a day. Didn’t you know?”
“He…he never told me.”
“But didn’t you know?”
She should have known. Will was no villain. He was not heartless.
“This phone call is not for you, Mother.”
“Not for me?” She cocked her head. If she wore a hearing aid, she’d probably have tested it to see if it had failed her. “That boy calls every day, and when I finally tell him I won’t speak to him again until it’s face-to-face he calls anyway, then says it’s not for me?”
Will had refused to respond to his mother’s royal summons on principle. She should have realized he would never simply ignore someone he cared about, especially if he thought they might need him.
“Oh, I am such a dope.” Rita put her face in her hands.
“Dopey enough to talk to my brother?” Jillie held the phone down to her.
Rita shut her eyes tight. If not for Miss Peggy sitting so close, she’d have sworn right out loud. Instead she kept it under her breath and held her hand out.
Jillie slid the phone into Rita’s grasp. “If you want to take it out of the room, we’ll understand.”
“We’ll hate you for not letting us listen in.” Cozie bent to speak into her ear. “But we will understand.”
“No. I can take it in here. I’m sure this is just business.”
Their muttering and stifled laughter said they did not believe a word of it.
“I’m sure this is just business,” she said into the receiver as she put it to her ear.
“Monkey business,” the deep voice murmured on the other end. “Come over, Rita. I’d like some company.”
She’d like to know how he expected her to talk when his unvarnished enticing request had turned her mind to mush. “I…I’m already in my nightclothes.”
“I don’t mind.”
“Well…I…”
“I’ll get ready for bed myself if that would put you more at ease.”
“You said that to achieve the exact opposite effect and I know it.”
“He’s always been contrary like that,” Miss Peggy announced.
“Is that my mother?” Will snapped. “You didn’t go somewhere private to take this call?”
“Why would I go anywhere private to take a business call?” She tipped her head down and lowered her voice. “That is the only kind of call you would make to me at this late an hour, isn’t it?”
“You asking if this is a booty call?”
“Don’t you say the sweetest things?” She forced out a laugh as airy as a cream puff, then pressed her lips closer to the mouthpiece. “Damn straight that’s what I’m asking.”
“Rita, I only want to spend some time with you. No obligations. No expectations. Just…to talk.”
She wondered if she should tell him that did not make her feel better.
“What do you say?”
“I say…” She sensed the intensity of the gazes boring down on her. “I say I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“But I want to see you tonight.”
“It wouldn’t be…good business.”
“Business?” He made a sound between a chuckle and a groan. “You’re killing me, girl. Do you know that?”
“I’ll bring breakfast by for the crew bright and early. If you have anything else to say to me, you can tell me then.”
“If you change your mind…”
“Me? Change?”
“I’ll be here.”
“Good-bye.”
“See you later, Rita.”
She hung up and handed the phone back to Jillie.
“Well?” Cozie smirked.
“Well?” Rita smirked right back. “You heard. I’ll see him tomorrow.”
“You won’t go over then?” Cozie shook her head, and a long strand of hair fell over her shoulder.
“Of course, she won’t go over.” The delicate knickknacks on the end table rattled as Jillie clunked the phone down. “She has her pride. She has her priorities. She puts a price on herself, and that price is respect, and she wouldn’t lower herself to be with any man who did not understand that.”
“Yeah.” Rita had not thought it through as thoroughly as Jillie obviously had, but what her friend said made sense. “What kind of woman do you think I am?”
“A woman without a man.” Cozie brushed her hair back.
“A woman doesn’t need a man to find happiness and fulfillment,” Jillie said.
“That’s certainly true.” Rita could confirm that coming and going. “I had a man at my side for many years, and that didn’t bring me happiness and fulfillment. They didn’t come flying in the window for me as he headed out the door, either. Those things don’t come from who you are with, they come from who you are—you gotta find that out for yourself.”
“Can’t argue with that.” Cozie hugged herself and sighed. “Still, once you do find yourself, it sure is nice to have someone to share with.”
“Not if it’s the wrong person.” Jillie hit each word with a cold edge. “Things have changed since the days of communes and times when a girl had gentlemen callers. Right, Rita?”
“Well, those are rather quaint notions, I suppose.”
“A woman today doesn’t dare let a man think of her as vulnerable, and she certainly doesn’t give in to meaningless gestures and sweet talk. She needs something more concrete before she risks any emotional energy. Right, Rita?”
Concrete. Solid. Dependable. That certainly had its appeal. Whereas the phrase risking emotional anything made her squirm. And yet hearing the kind of woman Jillie described, the demands she would make of a man before expending any energy, discouraged Rita. Did she really want to be that kind of woman?
“Rita? I said, right?” Jillie bumped her shoulder with one knee. “Right?”
“I…uh…”
“Wrong!” Miss Peggy pounded her tiny hand on the arm of the chair. Rita swore if the old gal had owned a gavel she’d have banged with a vengeance to command the floor. “Wrong, wrong, and wrong.”
“Oh, Mother, what do you know about romantic relationships today?”
“I know you girls think you have all the answers. That you think your way of handling men is so far and away superior to the way it’s been done by generation after generation of women before you.”
“The old rules don’t apply anymore, Mother. It’s a new ball game.”
“Still played with balls, isn’t it? Still using the same equipment we had in my day, child.”
“Mother!”
Rita coughed to disguise her laugh.
“Good one, Miss Peggy.” Cozie gave a thumbs-up.
“As for us older ones not knowing about romantic entanglements, well, women must have done something right all this time. Else there wouldn’t have been generation after generation leading right down to you.”
“Not the same.”
Jillie shook her head.
“What? Do you think your generation invented sex?”
“Reinvented it, maybe—with a whole new set of rules and problems, Mother. Your approach to love simply isn’t relevant today.”
“Oh, and yours is working out so well for the pair of you?” Miss Peggy gave them both long, searing looks. “Is that why you’re sitting here with a cantankerous widow and charming married woman with an adorable husband waiting in bed for her?”
Jillie looked at her hands.
Rita glanced over at the portable phone lying on the end table.
“What’s gotten into you tonight, Mother?”
“Tonight?” Cozie said. “Honey, your mama is always full of piss and vinegar.”
“It’s true. I’m going to have to get me some of them bladder-control underpants if it keeps up, too.”
Cozie hooted a laugh as she reached out to put her hand on Miss Peggy’s wrist. “But she is usually a pure fount of inspiration and insight if you’d only listen.”
“Yes, them underpants might take care of one end but there’s nothing invented yet going to keep me from speaking my mind.”
“Commitment papers come to mind.” Jillie batted her lashes and shook back her red curls.
“Commitment?” Miss Peggy turned an icy glare on her child. “What do you know about that? You show more commitment to your hairdresser than you ever have with any young man you’ve dated.”
“I can depend on my hairdresser. Men these days? A woman doesn’t dare get reckless in the relationship department anymore. She has to guard her heart.”
Does she? Rita wondered. Does a woman have to guard her heart so well that nothing ever penetrates her defenses?
“I swan, you young things have it all back ass-wards.” When she pulled her back up straight Miss Peggy looked a good six inches taller and maybe a few years younger. “Here you are careless with your hair, careless with your self-esteem, even with your bodies, but cautious to a fault with your hearts.”
“I am not careless with my hair.” Jillie glowered.
“You’ve had more new shades on your head than a table lamp in a lighting-store window.”
Rita tried not to giggle at that. Tried but didn’t succeed.
“That’s funny?” Miss Peggy aimed the spotlight on Rita now. “Well, how about you? You haven’t done a thing but run a brush through once a day and trot down to the Swift Klip for a ten-dollar cut now and again. It’s careless. Careless of you both. There’s no other word for it. And if it were just the hair, well, I suppose I could bite my tongue.”
“Don’t you do it.” Cozie lent her support like a zealous churchgoer urging on the preacher at a hot revival. “You tell them, Miss Peggy.”
“But it’s those other things I can’t abide in silence.”
“Mother, isn’t it a bit ironic for you to criticize my…careless self-esteem?”
“I have made plenty of mistakes as a parent, honey. I wasn’t always right, or patient, or even particularly kind, but I did give you one of the damndest examples of high self-esteem I could to follow.”
That made even Jillie laugh, though she looked down when she did it.
“Instead you let strangers in magazines tell you if you are too fat or too thin. You let the media tell you if you are too old or not sexy enough. You listen to the wrong voices and let them drown out what you know—that you are just fine the way you are. Better than fine, you are wonderful, wonderful girls.”
Jillie jerked her head up, tears in her eyes. “Mama, you really think that?”
“I do.”
Rita sniffled and blinked the dampness from her lashes.
“But you are careless. You’ve been throwing away your youth and beauty on men who don’t amount to a hill of beans.”
Rita could hardly argue that.
Jillie looked like she wanted to try, but she couldn’t manage a sound.
“What do you think as you cast off one man or another for not measuring up? That when the last of your youth is spent, your bosom sags and your eggs are about to expire, when you get desperate enough then you can finally take a chance on a less-than-perfect man? Then you can let the walls down around your heart?”
“Doesn’t sound like a very good plan.” Rita toyed with the top button of her pajamas and thought of Will’s offer for her to come by and talk.
“You are protecting the wrong things, my darlings. You are careless with yourselves but holding in an iron fist the one part of you that can’t survive without risk and freedom—your hearts.”
“Hearts get broken, Mother.”
“And grow stronger for it, child. And if the man you risk your heart on isn’t the one, you’ll be all right. Because a smart gal once told me, you don’t need a man to find happiness and fulfillment.”
“That’s right,” Rita said softly.
Miss Peggy tipped her head to one side and fanned her feathered lapel dreamily. “But my, how they do come in handy on a warm moonlit night like this.”
Rita chewed at her lower lip. She checked the grandfather clock. Will would probably still be awake.
The room fell silent for what seemed forever until Jillie spoke up. “Y’all feel a chill in here?”
“A chill?” Cozie frowned. “But it’s June in Tennessee.”
“I know.” Jillie got up and walked across the room, stopping alongside Miss Peggy’s big chair. “But my mother just paid me a compliment and said something that made a whole lot of sense. I figured hell must have just frozen over.”
“You’re welcome.” Miss Peggy held her frail hand out to her daughter.
Jillie leaned down and gave her mother a kiss on the cheek. When she stood she took a deep breath. “Now, I have a phone call to make, and Rita?”
“Hmmm?”
“I have a feeling that if you pretended to be terribly sleepy and excused yourself nobody here would even notice if you slipped out of the house instead. If you were so inclined to do that.”
Rita smiled to her companions. “I think I’ll call it a night, if y’all don’t mind.”
In less than ten minutes, she slipped out the front door and headed for her car.
Chapter 13
EVERY DIXIE BELLE EXPERIMENTS:
…dare to change, even if it’s just for an evening.
What had he thought? One phone call from him and Rita would come-a-runnin’? He must have, or he’d never have gone to so much trouble.
He switched off the karaoke machine he’d dragged down from Rita’s apartment and stared up at the tiny white Christmas lights he’d strung across the exposed brick of the back wall. His footsteps echoed in the shell of the room.
A halo of light from a workshop lamp focused on a single stool at the center of his makeshift stage.
The small generator that powered it all hummed in the background.
At least he’d hadn’t deluded himself into thinking that she would come at his calling because no woman could refuse him. His ego was not entirely that big. But his faith in Rita was.
He never thought she’d turn down a heartfelt invitation from a…from a friend. Maybe he and his keep-everyone-at-a-distance philosophy had influenced her more than he suspected.
He pushed his fingertips down through his shower-damp hair and rubbed his scalp. The rollaway shoved in the corner called to him. It had been a hard day of work and now a hard lesson learned. If he could put the latter out of his mind, he’d probably fall fast into a deadened sleep.
Thanks to the generator he’d have a fan to provide some relief from the heat of a Tennessee summer night. But not the real relief he needed. To see Rita, to be alone with her one more time. He’d have to do without that for tonight and for the rest of his life. It surprised him how heavy that weighed on his mind.
He reached for the plug on the twinkling lights.
“Don’t tell me you’re giving up on me that easily?” Rita stood in the doorway, one hand flat against the painted pig, the other holding a la
rge wicker picnic basket.
“You came.”
“After all you’ve done for me I thought the least I could do was come over and bring you a late-night snack.” She held the basket up.
“Thank you but I wasn’t hungry”—he folded his arms over his bare chest—“for food.”
“Too bad.” She lifted the top on one side of the green-and-yellow basket to show a change of clothes, a makeup bag, and something under a layer of cling wrap. “I have cake.”
“Rita…” He stepped toward her.
“Don’t screw this up with the standard disclaimer about not offering me anything beyond this evening.” She let the basket lid drop shut.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“Or how you’re not a long-term kind of guy.”
He cocked his head. “Long-term enough to get the job done, I hope.”
“Or how you can’t be pinned down.”
He stroked his jaw. “But how I do love the thrill of the match.”
“Or that as soon as the Palace is done you’ll be out of town faster than a sudden storm on a summer afternoon.”
He took another step in her direction. “I don’t believe I ever used those words.”
She held her hand up. “Promise me you won’t resort to any of that.”
“Come in and close the door.”
“Not until you promise not to sacrifice a single second of whatever time we have together worrying about talk around town, expectations of others, or the future.”
He raised his hands in surrender.
She pressed her back to the still-half-opened door. “That you will embrace me and the moment and nothing more.”
“That doesn’t sound like you, Rita.” If she caught the hint of sadness in his tone, her expression did not betray it.
“Promise.”
“If I don’t?”
“Quit being such an impossible bastard, Will!”
He’d been called worse and under less-promising circumstances.
“You’ve got what you wanted all along. Why question it now?”
Because somewhere “all along” what I want became a little less important to me than what you want, Rita. The words rushed into his thoughts, but somehow he found the presence of mind to keep them from gushing out of his mouth. True as the sentiment might be, it came with a proviso that she already said she did not need to hear. “I just hope you know what you’re really getting into. When I head back down the road to Memphis—and I will head back to Memphis soon and to stay, Rita—that you will have no regrets.”