Welcome to Last Chance

by Hope Ramsay

  “What?” Jane stopped walking. “Would you say that again?”

  Haley turned and looked up at Jane. She had a nice face. If she was a floozy, then floozies must not be so bad.

  “Like I said,” Haley began. “Miz Bray called Granny and told her all about how Uncle Clay had been inside of the Peach Blossom Motor Court with a floozy, and how that made Uncle Clay no good to be the organist at church anymore. Granny got really mad about that. But then Miz Randall called and Granny wasn’t so mad anymore. And then Granny decided you were the answer to her prayers.”

  “Because Mrs. Randall said so?”

  Haley shrugged. “Don’t know.” She squinted up at Jane and asked the main question on her mind. “So, what is it about the Peach Blossom Motor Court that turns a person into a floozy?”

  Jane looked mad for a minute. And then she turned and headed down the sidewalk. “Come on, Haley, this conversation is officially over.”

  Haley followed with a determined stride. “Why?”

  “Because your question was not polite. No one likes to be called a floozy. So you’ll just need to ask your granny about this stuff… when you’re older.”

  Haley let out a deep breath. “That’s what everyone says.”

  Jane didn’t say anything else, and Haley knew she’d messed up her one chance. Jane was mad.

  “Jeepers, I’m sorry,” Haley said, on account of the fact that Granny always told her to apologize if she ever did anything impolite. Not that she completely understood why Jane was mad or anything. But she kind of liked Jane.

  “It’s okay,” Jane said.

  The Sorrowful Angel took a break from crying and nodded like she approved of the apology. Haley took that as a sign and spent the rest of the walk to the playground playing tag with the Sorrowful Angel. Once they reached the playground, Jane sat down on the bench and plugged up her ears with earphones, which put an end to any further conversations.

  There wasn’t much to do, so Haley made her way to the deserted swing set and took a seat and watched the group of workmen cutting up the tree that had mashed one whole corner of the school, including Miss Jackson’s second-grade classroom. The Sorrowful Angel hovered nearby watching Haley watch the men, like maybe the Angel was like a babysitter herself.

  Haley pushed herself off and started to pump the swing and sing “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” which was her favorite thing to sing when she was swinging. A little later, Uncle Clay came down the path, headed for Jane. He had something in his hands.

  Haley stopped singing but continued to pump the swing as Uncle Clay waited for Jane to take the earphones out of her ears. He started talking to her, and jeepers, he talked a long, long time. Jane didn’t say nothing; she just nodded. Haley wished she could hear what Uncle Clay was saying. He might be talking about stuff that would explain what a floozy was.

  Uncle Clay gave Jane something that looked kinda like a CD player. And then Uncle Clay turned and walked back toward town. Jane started rubbing her eyes, like maybe she was crying, and Haley started to wonder if maybe Uncle Clay had been impolite and called her a floozy to her face, too.

  Great, that was all Haley needed, a Sorrowful Angel and a sorrowful floozy. She looked up at the men boarding up broken windows and hammering on the caved-in roof of the school.

  Jesus, Haley prayed fervently, please help me. All this sorrow is starting to wear me down.

  “Look what I found,” Haley Rhodes said as she scampered into the sitting room of the little apartment above the Cut ’n Curl. It was late afternoon on Friday, and dusk was settling over Last Chance. Downstairs in the shop, Ruby was finishing Lessie Pontius’s weekly wash and set.

  Jane pulled the earphones from her ears. “What?”

  “Look what I found,” Haley repeated as she swung Woody’s stupid piece-of-crap necklace in front of Jane’s eyes. Recognition rocked through Jane, followed by a shiver of revulsion. How had the kid found that thing?

  “Can I have it?” Haley tipped her head and gazed up at Jane out of a pair of precocious brown eyes. Haley hadn’t inherited her dark eyes or curly blond hair from her pa, that was for sure.

  Lizzy Rhodes, on the other hand, was a dead ringer for her pa. She looked up from her book, her green eyes staring daggers at her little sister. “Haley, you know it’s not nice to ask for things that aren’t yours. Put the necklace back.”

  “No. You’re not the boss of me.” Haley stuck her nose in the air and turned back toward Jane. “So, can I have it?”

  “Honey, why’d you snoop through my trash?” Jane asked.

  Haley gave Jane another innocent-little-me smile. The kid was a danger, really. “Oh, I wasn’t snooping, I swear,” Haley said. “I was just throwing away the empty juice boxes, and when I looked in the garbage can, I saw the necklace. It’s real pretty.”

  “You pulled that thing out of the trash? Ew.” Lizzy wrinkled her nose. “That’s gross.” Lizzy was the antithesis of sweet little Haley. The teen was going through a serious Goth-libber phase, dressed in black jeans and an oversized T-shirt with the words “Feminist: A woman who respects herself” printed on its front. The shirt was so big and floppy it hid a figure that was somewhere between girlish and womanly.

  “Lizzy’s got a point,” Jane said. “It’s yucky to take things out of the trash.”

  “But it’s not yucky. It’s pretty. And if you don’t want it, can I have it?”

  Jane pondered whether it would be good or bad karma to let the child have a necklace jinxed by Woody West. “Why would you want that thing?”

  The little girl took a deep breath and began rattling out an explanation. “Oh, I’ve been wanting a big-girl necklace for so long. I even prayed for one, even though I know it’s not right to pray for things for yourself like that. But I promised Jesus that I would be good if He would find a way for me to have a pretty necklace like the one Jeremiah Jones gave Liz—oops.” The little girl slapped both hands across her mouth and looked at her big sister with terror in her eyes.

  Lizzy, who had been sprawled on the sofa, sat up and glared. “How d’you know that Jeremiah gave me a necklace? Have you been spying on me?”

  Haley shook her head but kept her hands over her mouth.

  “I’m gonna tell Daddy that you’ve been spying on me,” Lizzy said.

  Haley dropped her hands, her fear evaporating. “No, you’re not.”

  “Am, too.”

  “If you do, he’ll find out about Jeremiah, and he’ll be mad, even if Jeremiah is the cutest boy in seventh grade.”

  Lizzy blushed a shade of red that rivaled Mrs. Randall’s nail color.

  Jane had to stifle a smile. “You know, Liz, you ought to think this through. Your pa will probably slap handcuffs on Jeremiah and haul him in for questioning. And he’ll probably ground you.”

  A smug smile split Haley’s adorable little face. Lizzy looked like she was ready for fratricide.

  “You’re going to tell him, aren’t you?” Lizzy said in an angry voice. “Michelle, the last babysitter, was always tattling on us to Daddy.”

  “Me?” Jane pointed at herself and gave Lizzy a what-who-me? look. “I don’t think so. I have a feeling Chief Rhodes won’t listen to a thing I have to say.

  “But,” Jane continued, lacing her hands together in her lap and trying for her best babysitter-friend-mentor voice, “you ought to be on your guard against any boy who gives you a cheap necklace. Not that getting a gift from a boy is wrong. Just remember what it says on your shirt. You’re worth more than a necklace, Lizzy, even if the necklace is made of diamonds.”

  Too bad Jane hadn’t learned that lesson. Wednesday night was the perfect case in point.

  Lizzy nodded like she actually understood.

  Haley hurled her next verbal bomb into the short silence. “So,” she said, “did you throw the necklace away because your last boyfriend was a peckerwood?”

  “Haley!” Lizzy sounded totally grossed out. “Mind your manners.”

  “Wh
at? What did I say?” Haley managed to look confused, which only proved that the kid had a future as an actress. Haley was a danger to any adult who came within range.

  “I think it was that word you used,” Jane said.

  “You mean peckerwood?”

  Lizzy groaned.

  “What?” Haley’s voice ranged up into the higher registers.

  “Not a good word, Hale,” Lizzy said.

  “Oh. But I heard Cousin Lisa call Jack a peckerwood right before she threw the diamond ring into the Edisto River at the Watermelon Festival last summer.”

  “Who’s Jack?” Jane asked.

  “He was Cousin Lisa’s boyfriend. But he cheated on her,” Lizzy said.

  “And when I asked her why she’d thrown her ring in the river, Cousin Lisa said it was because Jack was a cheater and a peckerwood. So, did your boyfriend cheat on you? Is he a peckerwood?”

  Jane didn’t know whether to be angry or amused. She cleared her throat, determined to act the role of the mature babysitter. “Peckerwood is not a nice word. But if you must know, Woody was a low-down, rotten, peanut-brained weasel. And yes, I threw the necklace away because Woody was not a very nice person.”

  Lizzy giggled.

  “What?” Jane asked, suddenly annoyed.

  “I was just thinking. Woody the peckerwood?” She sank back into the couch and started to laugh.

  Jane tried hard not to laugh with her, because little Haley was watching the two of them like a hawk. The kid was probably putting two and two together in ways that her pa and grandmother wouldn’t be happy about.

  “So can I have it?” the child asked once Lizzy had regained control of herself.

  Well, what the heck, the kid had been manifesting that necklace, and the Universe had caused it to be in that trash can so she could find it. How much bad karma could there be?

  “Sure, honey, you can have it.”

  Haley beamed up at her. “Thanks.”

  “And you,” Jane said, turning toward Lizzy. “Don’t let Jeremiah talk you into anything you don’t really want to do, you understand?”

  Lizzy nodded. “Yeah. I’m not dumb.”

  “Good. And if you have any questions you don’t feel like asking your grandmother, you can ask me.”

  Haley looked up at her with a mutinous expression. “That’s not fair.”

  “What’s not?”

  “You said you wouldn’t answer my question about what the word floozy meant. You told me to ask Granny.”

  Busted. By a seven-year-old with an infallible memory bank. “Yeah, well, that’s different.”

  “How?”

  “’Cause you’re a kid,” Lizzy said. “When you get to be a teenager, you can ask questions like the ones Jane is talking about.”

  Haley gave Lizzy a mutinous look, then threw herself into a corner of the sofa where she proceeded to play with the cheap trinket Woody West had given Jane the day that she left Fort Myers hoping to find a better life.

  Ha! Ha! Ha!

  Jane could almost hear the Universe laughing at her.

  Jane stood on her little stairway and looked up at the starry sky. She took a deep breath, filled with the unique aroma of the Deep South—the tangy scent of copper, overlaid with pine and a hint of something sweet, like jasmine.

  She hunched her shoulders and closed her eyes and hummed a few bars of “I Will Always Love You.” She had learned the words to the song this evening, after Lizzy and Haley had gone home with their grandmother.

  She needed to thank Clay for the gift of the portable CD player and the CDs by Dolly Parton and Lee Ann Womack. She had been so flustered when he appeared at the school playground that afternoon that she’d hardly been able to speak. And he’d been kind of stiff and formal. And then she’d gone off and cried after he left. Just enough for little Haley to have noticed.

  Oh, well, that kind of awkwardness and emotion was to be expected, wasn’t it? She had jumped into the sack with him without even getting his name, and it would seem that everyone in town—even Haley and Lizzy Rhodes—knew about it.

  Now that she had listened to Dolly and Lee Ann, she understood what Clay had tried to tell her last night. Their material fit her voice. She hated to admit that the man was right, but he was right. He had given her a positive plan to achieve her dreams. That was more than Woody had ever done for her with all his big talk about knowing people in Nashville.

  She stepped down the stairway still humming “I Will Always Love You.” It was after nine o’clock, and she had decided to head down to Dot’s Spot, where she suspected folks wouldn’t care if she had ever seen the insides of the Peach Blossom Motor Court.

  She would thank Clay to his face, and then sweet-talk him into letting her sing “I Will Always Love You” when the band took a break. She had visualized the entire evening—the good ol’ boys and rednecks would be impressed. And Clay would be impressed. And maybe the leader of the Wild Horses would ask her to do another number with them. She had it all planned out in her head, and she couldn’t wait.

  She left the apartment, walked down the narrow alley between the Cut ’n Curl and the doughnut shop, and was about to turn right on Palmetto Avenue when she heard the unmistakable whoosh of air brakes. She looked to her left, up the street toward Bill’s Grease Pit, and sure enough, a Greyhound Motor Coach had just pulled to a stop. She checked her watch. It was nine-thirty.

  She watched for a moment as a fabulously platinum woman with a figure like a supermodel stepped down onto the pavement. She wore tight designer jeans, a little cropped jacket fuzzy enough to be angora, and a pair of high-priced high heels with ankle straps that looked like a dominatrix’s dream.

  Blondie carried a Louis Vuitton handbag and a matching Pullman suitcase. She belonged in this picture the way the queen of England belonged at Wrestlemania. Why would a woman wearing Rodeo Drive chic come to this no-man’s-land on a Greyhound bus?

  It was an intriguing question. No doubt, Blondie was down on her luck.

  Jane stepped into the shadow of the alley for a moment, watching like a voyeur. Forty-eight hours ago, she had stepped off that same bus, feeling that same down-on-your-luck feeling. Would Last Chance be as positive for Blondie as it had been for her?

  Blondie pressed her lips together in a grimace as she surveyed the town. It seemed as if the woman wasn’t happy to be here.

  She began walking toward Dot’s Spot, and Jane stepped further back into the shadows to let her pass. When she was more than half a block ahead, Jane dropped in behind her and followed her all the way down the street.

  Ricki Burrows Wilson wore sprayed-on jeans, high-heel shoes, and some kind of fuzzy jacket in a puce yellow as she sashayed into Dot’s Spot for the first time in almost seventeen years. She captured the attention of every male in the place, which wasn’t all that surprising, since Ricki had always been able to capture the attention of the opposite sex.

  But it was real interesting how fast Ricki lost those good ol’ boys when Wanda Jane walked in right behind her.

  And Clay, who was trying to play his fiddle and not objectify these two women, felt a little like déjà vu all over again. Hadn’t he done this on Wednesday night?

  God, his life was in some kind of rut.

  Ricki cut a swath through the smoke and the tables and came to stand right in front of the stage looking up at him. She smiled that sultry smile of hers like it had been yesterday the last time they’d crossed paths. Like she wanted to roll back the years and start all over again—before she had smashed his heart into a million bleeding pieces.

  He played his fiddle and looked down, trying to figure out how he felt about this situation. The first thing that crossed his mind was that Ricki had just gotten off the nine-thirty bus from Atlanta, and that Miz Miriam Randall had some kind of weird talent when it came to making matches.

  And the second thing that crossed his mind was that Ricki was some kind of beautiful. He was not immune to that beauty or to the allure of the past. Was
it possible that Ricki was his soulmate?

  After all this time?

  Well, that would be one hell of a discovery, wouldn’t it?

  When he was seventeen and ran off with her to Nashville, he truly had thought she was the love of his life. He’d asked that girl to marry him when he was all of eighteen.

  But he hadn’t thought about Ricki in a long, long time. And certainly not since he’d fallen in love with Tricia.

  God, she looked good. Maybe not as good as Wanda Jane, but good enough for a woman who was thirty-four.

  Which made her mature. And that point was punctuated by the fact that Ricki’s body was showing a little wear around the edges. Not that that mattered. He was above that kind of immature objectification.

  Wasn’t he?

  She smiled up at him. He smiled back.

  “I declare, that’s Ricki Burrows,” Dot said as she placed a Coke in front of Jane.

  “And she is…?” Jane asked, trying not to expire from a lethal dose of curiosity, laced with the tiniest little bit of jealousy. Which was disappointing, because this afternoon, when Clay had given her the CD player, Jane had decided that all she wanted from Clay was friendship—not a repeat trip to the Peach Blossom Motor Court.

  So why did she want to march over there and take Ricki by her very straight, very platinum hair and start a cat fight?

  “Clay and Ricki were practically engaged back when they were seniors in high school,” said the man sitting beside Jane. He was the same guy that she’d seen on Wednesday night—the guy with the Astros hat, the killer blue eyes, and the craggy face.

  “I’m Dash Randall, by the way, and I’ve already heard all about you,” he said with a little crooked smile.

  “Are you related to Miriam?”

  “Yes’m, she’s my great-aunt. She’s quite happy with her manicure.”

  “And I’m quite happy with my tip.”

  “I’m assuming that means the gratuity and not the marriage advice.”

  She blinked at Dash. “How did you…?”

  He waved one large hand. “Oh, everyone knows about my aunt. She’s considered the only real matchmaker in Allenberg County. Of course, she will tell you that she never meddles in anyone’s business; she just reveals the secret plans of the Almighty.” He winked.