Spring Fever

by Mary Kay Andrews

  Mason took her by the shoulders and turned her around to face him. “First things first. I want you to know that I had no idea Davis was going to fire our ad agency, effectively rendering you unemployed. He didn’t bother to inform me until it was a done deal.”

  “What was he thinking?” Annajane asked.

  “I have no idea,” Mason said with a scowl. “We’re basically only communicating by e-mail these days. But that’s going to change pretty shortly. In fact, a lot of things are fixing to change.”

  “You met with Sallie?”

  “Yes,” Mason affirmed. “We had a fairly long, frank discussion about a lot of stuff. She’s still not totally convinced the family should keep Quixie, but that’s sort of a moot point at the moment.”

  Annajane looked over at the bowl of ice cream she’d just scooped out. “Sounds like this could be a long story. So let me just take this in to Sophie before it melts, and I’ll be right back.”

  * * *

  Annajane came back into the kitchen. “You were saying?”

  “My brother and I can’t keep working at cross-purposes,” Mason said. “It’s hurting the company, and it’s hurting the family. We managed to hammer out a short-term agreement this morning.” He took a deep breath and looked directly at Annajane.

  “I told Davis we have to find a way to get you not to leave the company.” He clamped his hand over hers. “We need you, Annajane. Need your talent, your energy, your commitment. Davis and I don’t agree on much, but it turns out we do agree about that. What do you say? Will you come back?”

  She stared down at their hands and sighed.

  “Please?” Mason’s face looked haunted.

  Annajane looked away, struggling to find the right answer, for the right reasons.

  “I’m all done.” Sophie stood in the kitchen doorway, her tousled blond curls backlit by the sun streaming through the windows. Her pink pocketbook was slung across her chest, bandolier-style. She padded barefoot into the kitchen and carefully placed her bowl on the table where Mason and Annajane were sitting. Without a word, she slid onto Mason’s lap.

  “Whatcha doing?” Sophie asked, glancing down at the intertwined hands on the tabletop.

  Annajane snatched her hand away from Mason’s, but she could feel herself blushing.

  “I’m trying to talk Annajane into changing her mind about moving away,” Mason said.

  “Letha says it’s a damned shame Annajane got chased outta town by that lil’ hussy,” Sophie said brightly.

  Mason choked. “I’m going to have to have a talk with Letha about little pitchers having big ears.”

  Sophie cocked her head and regarded Annajane somberly. “Will you stay, pretty please?”

  “I’m not sure,” Annajane said. “I have a lot to think about.”

  “Like what?”

  “For one thing, I don’t have a job anymore,” Annajane said, keeping her tone light.

  “You can have your old job back,” Mason offered.

  “Yay!” Sophie clapped her hands in delight.

  “Also, I don’t have anyplace to live. My loft is sold, and I have to move out by the day after tomorrow,” Annajane said.

  “Since when?” Mason asked.

  “My real estate agent called right as I was driving into town,” Annajane said. “The closing had to be moved up to Wednesday, which means I have to be totally moved out of the loft by noon that day.”

  “You could come live with us!” Sophie said delightedly. “Right, daddy?”

  Mason coughed politely. “I think Annajane probably wants a place of her own, Soph.”

  “Letha told Aunt Pokey that Daddy and Celia had a big ole fight, and now Celia is gone for sure, thank you, Sweet Baby Jesus,” Sophie reported, mimicking Letha’s slow southern accent with deadly accuracy. “So now, Annajane could sleep in your room, couldn’t you, Annajane?”

  Mason coughed so violently his face turned purple and tears streamed down his face. Annajane couldn’t help herself. Her shoulders heaved with suppressed laughter.

  “I am going to have a serious talk with Letha about spreading gossip,” Mason said solemnly. “And for your information, and Aunt Pokey’s and Letha’s, we did not have a big fight. We had an um, discussion. But Celia is not gone.”

  “Are you still getting married?” Sophie asked, tilting her head to look at her father.

  He looked out the window. “It’s still under discussion,” he said finally. “Anyway, that’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  “Annajane could stay in my room with me. Right?”

  “That’s a very generous invitation, Sophie,” Annajane said, giggling despite herself. “But if I do stay in Passcoe, which I’m not sure I will, I’ll need to find a house of my own.”

  “Why?” Sophie looked puzzled. “Don’t you like us?”

  “I like you a lot,” Annajane said. “But I’ve lived alone for a long time now. I’m used to my privacy, and doing things my own way. It would be best for everybody if we left it like that.”

  Sophie yawned widely and leaned her head back against Mason’s chest.

  “Time for you to go take a nap,” he told her, gently sliding her down from his lap.

  Sophie threw her arms around Annajane’s neck. “Will you come over and watch Milo and Otis with me tonight?”

  “Hmm,” Annajane said. “I wish I could, Soph, but now I’ve got to go home and get my stuff all packed up to put in storage. But I promise, as soon as that’s done, we’ll have movie night again.”

  “Okay,” Sophie said, trying to suppress another yawn.

  Mason waited until Sophie had gone to find Letha before returning his attention to Annajane.

  “Will you at least agree to come back to work at Quixie?” Mason asked. “I’m dead serious, Annajane. I told Davis I want you back on our team. You’d report directly to me. I know it’ll be awkward, but that can’t be helped. Will you do it?”

  He gave her that slow, winning smile that had always worked on her in the past.

  “I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I really don’t want to get between you and your brother. Or Celia. I’ve complicated things enough already.”

  Tell her, damn it. You’re only making things worse by talking her into staying.

  “You’re not what’s between us,” Mason said. “Davis and I have been having issues for a long time now. And Mama, she’s got her own agenda. But I do want to talk to you about this new marketing scheme; I don’t like it.”

  Annajane bit her lip, hesitant to trash Celia.

  “You know,” she said finally. “Yesterday, I was cleaning out my office and taking some old file boxes that had been in there for years and years out to the Dumpster. One of the boxes was so old it fell to pieces as I was unloading it. Inside it I found all the old magazine and newspaper mechanicals and tear sheets for Quixie ads from the ’40s and ’50s. They were so charming, so right, so Quixie, for want of a better phrase. For me, they just really captured the essence of what we’re selling—fun, refreshment, and yeah, the idea of celebrating the moment. I honestly think that’s what we’ve forgotten with all these slick, sophisticated campaigns we’ve bought into in the past few years.”

  Mason nodded thoughtfully. “I remember those old ads. There was one, from the sixties, probably, showing teenaged girls in a speedboat…”

  “I saw that one,” Annajane said. “It made me want to run out and get a permanent wave and a Jantzen bathing suit, maybe buy a Chris-Craft outboard.”

  “Mama and my aunt Lu posed for that ad,” Mason said. “They took the photo that the illustration was based on, out on the lake, back in the day. Dad had it framed and hanging in the basement playroom for years and years, when we were growing up.”

  “Those are the ads that everybody remembers,” Annajane said. “Quixie is never going to be Coke. It’s never going to be Pepsi. It shouldn’t even try. The brand is iconic in its own way, and I think that’s what the message needs to return to. Retro is
in again, you know.”

  “My granddaddy always said he just wanted us to be the best independent regional soft drink company in the business,” Mason said. “He never touched coffee, but he drank a bottle of Quixie from his own special Quixie icebox just about every morning of his life, as soon as his feet touched the bedroom floor. As far as he was concerned, our product was unique, and he really believed every bottle of Quixie that left the plant was the thing that would sell the next one.”

  He grinned. “That and ads with curvy girls in bathing suits.”

  Annajane stood up. “I better get going. I’ve still got to finish packing and, I suppose, start looking for a temporary place to live, at least until I figure out my next move.”

  “Think about what I said, will you?” Mason said, touching her arm lightly. “I think you’re on the right track with your ideas about returning to our original brand message. If I can just get Davis to listen, I think he’d realize it’s brilliant.”

  “Maybe,” Annajane said. “I will say that if he’s dumped the ad agency, he’s gonna have to come up with a new summer campaign in a big hurry.”

  “One more thing,” she added, her hand on the back door. “I bumped into Celia as I was sifting through that file box I just mentioned. She urged me to throw all of it in the Dumpster, and not to bother you with any of that old crap, but I told her you might like it for the company archives. There are a bunch of the old original Quixie bottles, too, the ones with the ribbed glass…”

  Mason looked horrified. “You didn’t throw them out, I hope.”

  “Nope,” Annajane said. “I put it all in a new box and stashed it in the trunk of my car, just in case.”

  “Great,” he said. “I’d really like to see those ads, maybe use them to persuade Davis it’s time to go retro. Hell, maybe we’ll even resurrect Dixie the Pixie.” He did a mock leer at Annajane’s legs. “I’ll bet you’d still fit in the suit. And the Fourth of July is just around the corner. Right?”

  “No. Frickin’. Way,” she said succinctly. “But maybe Celia would like to wear it.”

  28

  Pokey picked up a plastic tub of winter clothing and balanced it on her hip. Annajane swiftly snatched it away from her.

  “No lifting! Folding, packing yes, lifting no. How many times do I have to repeat myself?”

  Pokey stuck out her tongue and took the tub back. “Don’t you think that little chunk o’ love Clayton weighs waaay more than these clothes? I tote him around all day long, just like I toted Petey when I was pregnant with Clayton. Relax, will you? I’m pregnant, not crippled.”

  Annajane looked around the loft at the barely controlled chaos. It was Wednesday morning. She was dressed in the only clothes she hadn’t packed: a bleached-out Durham Bulls T-shirt and a pair of ratty cutoff jeans. Pokey wore an oversized blue and white oxford cloth dress shirt she’d borrowed from her husband and a pair of stretchy yoga pants. They’d been packing all night.

  “I’ve got to be at the lawyer’s office in three hours,” she reminded her friend. “And the movers I hired still aren’t back from the storage place to pick up the second load yet. I honestly don’t know if I’ll be out of here by noon.”

  “You will,” Pokey assured her. She held up her cell phone. “I just texted an SOS to Pete. He’s sending over a truck and a couple of the guys from the furniture store to give us a hand. This is the last of your clothes to go into storage. So if you’ll just get your rear in gear and pack up the clothes and toiletries you need for the next month or so, I think we’ve got it licked.”

  “You really think so?” Annajane pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m so overwhelmed I guess I can’t see the forest for the trees.”

  They heard a horn honking out on the street, and Pokey ran to the plate-glass picture window and looked out. “See here? Pete’s guys just pulled up, and your movers are right behind them. Why don’t you grab some clothes and head over to our house? The boys won’t be back from Pete’s mom’s house until two. You can get a shower and change into some halfway decent clothes and still have plenty of time to get to the closing. I’ll stay here and supervise. You know how I love to boss around men with trucks.”

  “That would be great,” Annajane said. “Are you sure Pete’s okay with me staying with you guys for a couple of days? Just until I find a place of my own? I mean, I really could go to the Pinecone Motor Lodge…”

  “Pete probably won’t even notice you’re there,” Pokey said. “With everything going on at the new furniture store, he barely notices I’m there half the time. You, on the other hand, will probably get tired of the wild bunch way before we get tired of you. The boys are superexcited you’re coming. Denning even offered to let you sleep in his tree fort, which is saying a lot. You know he’s pretty antigirl these days.”

  “That’s the second best offer of a crash pad I’ve had from a member of your family in the past couple days,” Annajane said drily.

  “Fascinating! Who made the first and best offer?” Pokey asked.

  “Sophie did. I stopped by to check in on her after she got home from the hospital Monday. She heard me telling Mason my tale of woe about having to move out of the loft early, and she just piped up and invited me to sleep in her daddy’s room.”

  “She didn’t!”

  “Oh yes, she did.”

  “Out of the mouths of babes,” Pokey snickered.

  They heard footsteps in the stairwell, so Pokey opened the door with a grand sweep, and the room began to fill with men and furniture dollies.

  “Okay, then, I’m outta here,” Annajane told Pokey. “Just as soon as I find the carton with all my clean underwear.”

  * * *

  At eight that night, Annajane wearily dragged her suitcase onto the front porch of Pete and Pokey Riggs’s cheerful pale blue Dutch colonial revival home. She opened the heavily carved mahogany front door with her hip and walked in unannounced, letting the door bang behind her.

  The sound of a television echoed in the high-ceilinged hallway. She stepped out of her shoes and left them on the worn rug at the foot of the stairs.

  “Is that you?” Pokey called from the direction of the back of the house. “If it is, come on back. We’re in the den, and it’s cocktail time.”

  Annajane made her way toward the den, stepping over a spilled box of Legos, a green rubber dinosaur, and an enormous cardboard box of Pampers. She found her best friend sprawled out on her back on an overstuffed bottle-green damask sofa, with her bare feet resting in her husband’s lap.

  Pete Riggs stood up and gestured toward a silver cocktail shaker resting on a tufted leather ottoman in front of the sofa. “Care for a martini?”

  “I would kill for a martini,” Annajane said gratefully. She slumped down into a wing chair and looked around the room suspiciously. “It’s awfully quiet around here. Where are the heathens?”

  “It’s grown-up time,” Pete said, handing her a pint Mason jar. “Hang on a sec,” he added, plunking an olive into her drink. “Now you’re ready.”

  “The rule around here is, everybody under the age of eight has to be in bed by eight,” Pokey said. She was noisily slurping on a large chocolate Blizzard. “It’s the only way we keep our sanity.”

  Pete rejoined his wife on the sofa. “So—did your closing go all right? We were starting to get a little worried when we didn’t hear from you earlier in the day, but Pokey didn’t want to jinx things by calling you.”

  “We closed,” Annajane said. “There was some minor panic when one of the loan documents still hadn’t arrived at noon, but by the time we finished signing all the other paperwork, the courier had arrived with it. I’m no longer a homeowner.”

  “You’ll find something else just as nice,” Pokey said. “Here in Passcoe—right?”

  Annajane sipped her martini appreciatively. “I guess. Susan Peters showed me three more listings this afternoon. That’s where I’ve been all this time.”

  “And?” Pete asked. His red
hair shone dully in the light from a pair of antique brass sconces on the wall behind the sofa, and, close up like this, Annajane noticed with a start that he was beginning to get just the slightest hint of silver around his temples and paunch around his midriff. He wore a pink button-down oxford cloth shirt, rumpled khaki slacks, and oxblood penny loafers with no socks.

  She was struck by how much he’d changed since the first time Pokey brought him home to meet her family. Pete Riggs was a twenty-four-year-old stud, a rich, cocky kid from Charleston, who’d started on the varsity golf team all four years at Wake Forest, and he was enrolled in grad school when he’d met Pokey and gotten her pregnant right before the end of her senior year at Chapel Hill.

  The Baylesses had been devastated, but Sallie had assured Pokey the family would take care of her and the baby, no matter what. Nobody could have predicted that Pete Riggs would do what he did—drop out of grad school, marry Pokey, and get a job working in his family’s furniture business. And the biggest surprise, to everybody, including Pokey and Pete, was that the two of them would make a success of all of it—including marriage, parenthood, and, eventually, running and expanding Riggs Home Fashions.

  “It’s hopeless,” Annajane said of her house hunt. “The cottage on Mimosa—the one she thought I’d be so crazy over? It’s Old Lady Harrison’s house. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have bothered to take a look.”

  “Eeewww,” Pokey said, wrinkling her nose. “Mama used to make me sell her Girl Scout cookies every year when we were kids. She used to pay for the cookies with nickels and dimes that looked like they’d been scraped up out of a sewer or something. That house was nasty way back then, and she’s been dead and gone at least ten years. I don’t think anybody’s lived in that house since she died.”

  “Correction,” Annajane said. “There’s a family of raccoons living there now. Or maybe squirrels. I didn’t get past the living room, where they’d been nesting in an old sofa, so I couldn’t say for sure.”

  “What else did you look at?” Pete asked, absentmindedly stroking Pokey’s hair. “How about Clay Snider’s house? I hear he and Whitney have split up.”