Your Chariot Awaits

by Lorena McCourtney

  “Hi, babe. Hey, you’re looking good!” He grabbed my upper arms and gave me a quick kiss.

  Jerry Norton is the guy I’ve been dating for almost four months now. Granddaughter Rachel shudders at the term. No one dates anymore, she says. But it still works for me. Anyway, Jerry is my first maybe-serious relationship in a long time. No spoken commitment here, but neither of us was dating anyone else. We like hiking together, and he has a little sailboat he keeps at a friend’s dock. We take it out on the bay or inlet, sometimes out into the rougher waters of Puget Sound. He cooks up a mean slab of salmon on my barbecue, he loves my fried chicken, and we both enjoy finding new places to eat out. He’s hardworking, ambitious, fun, and good-looking, with curly, dark hair and a smile and lean body that look especially good braced against the mast of the sailboat. I have that photo on the nightstand in my bedroom.

  With the proper nudge, I think I could be in love with Jerry. Maybe I am anyway, but unwilling to admit it to myself just yet. Maybe just a wariness that comes with this time of life, combined with a bad marriage experience in my past. Plus the fact that Jerry is nine years and ten months younger than I am, and I’ve never been quite sure what he sees in me. Joella, bless her heart, says I sell myself short.

  Now I said, “I thought you were coming right over.”

  “Sorry. I got tied up on some e-mail stuff.”

  “Sending out résumés already?”

  He looked blank for a moment; then his expression sobered, as if the question reminded him this was a day of gloom. “Well, uh, like I said, we need to talk.”

  “Lemonade?”

  “Sure.”

  I went on through to the kitchen, and he perched on one of the tall stools at the counter separating kitchen and dining room. I poured a glass of lemonade for him. The termination letter with the F&N letterhead lay on the counter. He didn’t pick it up, but he apparently knew what it said.

  “Tough break. You’ve been with F&N a long time.”

  “I guess everyone got the same letter.” I knew because in my department we’d compared. Only my friend Letty Bishop was being kept on for the final days, after the department supervisor turned down the job. “You too?”

  “Well, uh, no.”

  “No?”

  “They’ve offered me a transfer to the San Diego office. Findley is going, and they’ve offered me a position as his assistant. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “A transfer?” What I really felt was a big flood of dismay, like the tide surging in over the mud flats of Vigland Bay, but I squelched my reaction. “Jerry, that’s wonderful! You must be one of a very select few.”

  “Findley specifically asked for me, which is probably what did it.”

  “Are you taking the transfer?”

  “I’m not wild about working with ol’ Freaky Findley, that’s for sure. He’s lazy and self-important and . . . well, you know. But I don’t see how I can turn it down. It’s a promotion, actually, with more money. So it’s really an awesome opportunity.”

  “Awesome,” I echoed. I wanted to feel glad for him. And one nice part of me did feel glad. A transfer and a promotion. The problem was that the self-centered what-about-me? question loomed like a skyscraper on a desert island. I cast around for nice things to say, but all I came up with was a lame, “The weather should be great down there.”

  “Right. I’ve never been fond of western Washington’s rain.”

  My world is falling apart, and we’re discussing the climate.

  “How soon will you go?”

  “Probably within the next couple weeks. I’ll be going down ahead of Findley to get things set up.”

  I felt a peculiar hollowness inside. A strangely large hollow, which made me wonder if I wasn’t in love with him.

  “But it makes for a problem, of course,” he added.

  “The condo?”

  Jerry’s condo was in one of the newer complexes in town, and he’d owned it less than a year. It had what the real estate people called a “forever view” out over Vigland Bay and Hornsby Inlet. He could even see the jagged Olympic Mountains to the north.

  “No, not the condo. All the F&N people out of work may depress local prices for a while, but I can hang on a few months before putting the condo on the market if I have to.” He reached across the counter and pulled me around the end of it. “The problem isn’t the condo. The problem is us. ”

  I nodded as I stood within the circle of his arms and echoed the word. “Us.”

  “The thing is, I don’t think it’s practical to carry on a long-distance relationship, do you?”

  I caught my breath. We’d talked around marriage in a generic way, but we’d never really discussed it on a you-and-me basis. Jerry had been married when he came to F&N five years ago, but they’d divorced, and his ex had taken the two kids and moved back east somewhere. I had the impression he wasn’t totally disillusioned with marriage, but wary, which was about how I felt. Was now the time to let the past go and look at a future together?

  Sure, I’d had some doubts about Jerry. Sometimes I had the feeling there were parts of his life he wasn’t sharing with me. And sometimes that almost ten-year difference in our ages loomed higher than the Olympic Mountains. But did anyone, with our unhappy past experiences, go into marriage 100 percent sure?

  “Yes,” I agreed with a catch in my voice at the looming possibilities. “Long-distance relationships can be a problem. How do you think we should handle it?”

  Quick ceremony before he left for San Diego? Or a settling-in time for him there, and then a trip to a wedding chapel in Reno or Vegas? Or maybe even a little church somewhere? Yes, a church. I’d like that.

  “I’m thinking you’ll agree that making a clean break would be best for both of us.”

  A jaw can drop. It really can. “What? ”

  “The thing is, I’ve been in contact on the Internet with a woman in the San Diego area for a while. In fact, she’s looking for a nice apartment for me down there right now. She’s a fitness instructor at a health club, and she loves sailing and surfing. And we just discovered we’re both interested in skydiving too. It seems like we really click.”

  I was stunned. I’m thinking about the possibility of closing the long-distance gap between us with a wedding ring, and he’s thinking skydiving with a fitness instructor. No doubt with thighs of steel.

  But in case I was jumping to some unwarranted conclusion here, I backtracked and put it as a blunt question. “So what you’re saying is, you and me, we’re over?”

  “I’m saying we’ve had great times together, Andi. Lots of fun. But I’m going to be down in San Diego, and you’re going to be here. And I think we’ve both always recognized that our relationship has . . . certain limitations, and we both need to widen our horizons and pursue new interests.”

  “But we can still be friends.”

  He missed the sarcasm in that old line, because his face lit up in a relieved beam. “Exactly. Friends! I knew you’d under-stand. You’re such a good sport, Andi. The best.”

  I didn’t feel like a good sport. I didn’t even want to be a good sport. What I wanted was to dump the glass of lemonade over Jerry’s head.

  “What about your sailboat?” It was a dumb, irrelevant question, but it was all I could think of to fill space while I tried to keep my hand off that glass.

  “I’ll sell it before I leave. I’ll get a bigger and better one down there. Hey, maybe you’d like to buy it? I can give you a deal on it.”

  “I . . . I don’t think so. Thanks anyway.”

  “If you hear of anyone who might be interested, let me know. We’ve had fun times in it, haven’t we? You’ve turned out to be very good sailor.” He leaned forward to give me an affectionate kiss on the nose. A good-sport kiss.

  I backed out of his arms. Joella was right. The man had the sensitivity of a toadstool. Breaking up with me and telling me how wonderful this new woman was, trying to sell me his old sailboat. And then
kissing me on the nose.

  He kept on talking, telling me enthusiastically about how the company was going to pay his moving expenses, but I wasn’t really listening. I was standing there feeling like the time I’d been dumped overboard from his sailboat. In over my head and floundering in deep water.

  Downsized.

  Dumped.

  Depressed.

  And the week was only half over. What next?

  As if in ominous answer to my unspoken question, the doorbell rang. Given the way things were going, it could be anyone. IRS agent, terrorist, serial killer . . .

  3

  The young guy who stood on my doorstep was unfamiliar, but he looked harmless enough. Midtwenties, brick-red hair, freckles, baggy khaki pants with pockets down to the knees, sloppy gray T-shirt, scruffy running shoes of some indeterminate brand. But who knows what a serial killer looks like?

  However, he was obviously at the wrong house. Probably even the wrong neighborhood. Because parked at the end of my walkway was the longest, sleekest, blackest vehicle I’d ever seen, the likes of which had surely never touched the potholed asphalt of Secret View Lane before. Across the street, Tom Bolton had left his deck and come out to his gate for a better look.

  “You’re driving that?” I said.

  The guy gave the vehicle a disinterested glance. “Yeah. I drove it up from Texas.”

  “But it’s a limousine.” A stretch limousine. And he didn’t look as if he could afford to drive a ’79 Pinto, let alone tool around in a limo.

  “I’m looking for Andalusia McConnell. Is that you?”

  Andalusia. “Well, yes,” I said, “but—”

  Jerry was behind me, hands on my waist. “Is that your real name? Andalusia? Sounds like some awful disease.” He deepened his voice to somber newscaster tones. “We’ve just gotten the latest update, folks, and the Andalusian flu is going to be really bad this year.”

  The young guy gave Jerry an odd glance. “It has something to do with Spain, doesn’t it?” he asked me.

  I felt an unexpected rush of warmth toward him for knowing that much. “Yes, it does. And, yes, I am Andalusia McConnell.” With a good reason for the name, although I didn’t intend to explain it now.

  “Okay, I have some papers for you.” The guy thrust a big manila envelope at me. It looked as if it had been kicked around the floor at Burger King for a couple of days. “Sorry. I guess I dropped it a time or two.”

  Given the bad news that had already come my way today, I eyed the envelope suspiciously and kept my hands at my sides. “What kind of papers?”

  “About the limousine. Or limouzeen, z-e-e-n, as old Uncle Ned called it in his will. His favorite possession, also according to the will. He left it to you.”

  “Andi, you had a rich relative who left you a limousine?” Jerry asked, his tone incredulous. “How come you never told me?”

  I could hear in his voice that I’d just risen several notches in his estimation. Did becoming a limousine-inheriting heiress put me up there with the sailing/skydiving queen? Too late if it did. Jerry had already taken a fatal skydive in my estimation. About all I could give him credit for was that he had come over to dump me in person. I knew a couple of women at F&N who’d been dumped by e-mail.

  “Who are you?” I asked the red-haired guy.

  “Larry Noakes. I think we’re cousins or something.”

  I ran the name through my limited knowledge of the family tree. Nothing clicked. No surprise, since I’d never met more than a couple of them. My mother hadn’t bad-mouthed the family, but she’d never had much good to say about them either.

  “I’ve heard of Ned,” I said cautiously. He was the rich member of the family. I think my folks tried to borrow money from him one time, but he’d turned them down. “He’s your uncle too?”

  “Actually, my great-uncle. He and my grandmother were brother and sister. I guess your mother was another sister. You did know Uncle Ned was dead, didn’t you?”

  “No, I didn’t. Look, you want to come in so we can talk about this?”

  Jerry interrupted. “Let’s go look at the limousine first.”

  “You go look if you want. I need to talk to Larry here.”

  Larry looked at the watch on his wrist. “I don’t have much time. I have to catch a bus at 6:45. Can you believe that? Those cheapskate lawyers didn’t even give me a plane ticket home. I got a bus ticket. To Texas. It’ll take me a month to get there.”

  A slight exaggeration, but I couldn’t blame him. A bus trip to Texas wouldn’t be high on my list of fun things to do either.

  “I was hoping you could drive me to the bus station,” he added. “I don’t even know where it is.”

  “Me? I can’t drive a limousine.”

  He pointed out the obvious, which my rather dazed mind had missed. “You don’t have to take me in the limo. You can use your own car.”

  He looked with interest toward Jerry’s flashy Trans Am sitting in the driveway. My own little Corolla was out of sight in the garage.

  “But sure, you can drive the limousine. Why not? It’s long, but no different otherwise.”

  “Don’t you have to have a special license or something?”

  “I don’t, and I was Uncle Ned’s chauffeur for a year and a half before he died. That’s why I got the job of delivering the limo to you. Anyway, I don’t know why you’d need anything special. Look at all those old geezers barreling around in their dinosaur-sized motor homes. They’re twice as big as a limo, and they don’t need any special licenses.”

  Jerry cut in before I could decide whether to be insulted by the “old geezer” reference.

  “So why didn’t this Uncle Ned leave the limo to you?”

  “Who knows why Uncle Ned did anything? He was eccentric. With a capital E.”

  “Did he leave you something else?” I asked.

  “Oh, sure. Seven electric toothbrushes. Five of them were still in the boxes, unused.”

  I gaped at him in disbelief. “But Uncle Ned was rich. Who got all the money and oil wells and the mansion?”

  “Most of it went to various Save-the-Blank organizations.”

  “Save the blank?” I repeated doubtfully.

  “You fill it in. Whales. Whooping cranes. Chickadees. Depressed dolphins. Left-handed monkeys.” He gave a shrug that expressed his frustration with Uncle Ned’s charitable recipients. “The lawyers got a big chunk. None of the real heirs got any actual money.”

  With that, Jerry lost interest. He headed for the limousine. I still thought there must be some mistake here. A limousine?

  “What caused Uncle Ned’s death?”

  “He was eighty-nine,” Larry said, as if that were explanation enough. Then he added, “He had all kinds of stuff wrong with him. Including a mean, cold heart. But it was kidney failure that finally did him in.”

  “Okay, c’mon inside and start from the beginning. How about some lemonade?”

  “Yeah, I could use some lemonade.”

  He sat on the same stool Jerry had occupied earlier, and I filled another glass. I set out some day-old peanut butter cookies Joella had brought home from the bakery. He grabbed a cookie, ate it in two bites, took a long swallow of lemonade, and swiped the back of his hand across his upper lip.

  “It’s like this: Uncle Ned kicked the bucket about a year and a half ago. He had a will, but it was handwritten. Holographic, I think is the fancy word. They’re legal in Texas, if they’re done right, and his was, even though he misspelled everything from limousine to pencil sharpener.”

  “There was a pencil sharpener in his will?”

  “He left it to Aunt Jasmine. It wasn’t even electric. Anyway, I think because the will was handwritten, it took longer than usual to probate. He didn’t have any kids of his own, but there were something like twenty-six various other heirs in the family, and everybody got something. I guess that’s the way to do it so no one can challenge the will by saying they were forgot-ten. You must have been his favorite
, because you got the only inheritance worth anything.”

  “How could I be his favorite? I didn’t even know him.”

  “Everyone figures that’s why you were his favorite. He knew the rest of us and got even for every dinky little thing he thought we ever did to him.”

  “Did you do something to him?”

  “I may have gotten a few traffic citations in the limo, that he had to pay,” Larry said, his offhand tone suggesting this was hardly worthy of notice. “I guess Aunt Jasmine teed him off when she refused to name any of her kids after him. Although there’s another theory on how he decided who got what.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That he put all the family names on slips of paper in one hat and the stuff he wanted to leave on slips of paper in another. Or, knowing Uncle Ned, he probably used something he considered more appropriate, like a couple of old chamber pots. Anyway, the speculation is that he drew a person’s name out of one and an item out of the other, and however they matched up, that’s what the person got.”

  “And I really got the limousine?”

  “Yep. The limouzeen”—he emphasized the z sound—“is yours. I figure he threw in that one big prize to make everyone else envious and maybe get them fighting. He liked to do stuff like that. The papers you’ll need to get the title transferred are all in there.” He nodded toward the envelope that now lay on the counter. “And I put my two old chauffeur’s uniforms in the trunk. There’s a framed photo of Uncle Ned back there too. Everybody got one.”

  “What am I going to do with a limousine?” Or a framed photo of an eccentric uncle?

  “I don’t know. Drive around in it. Sell it. Take the neighbors for rides. Get in a parade. Start a limousine business. Turn it into a hot-dog stand.”