No answer at his house, either.
She hesitated, her fingers poised over the buttons for Linda Flaherty’s number. She might not think Nadine was a total tramp.
Then again, she might. Nadine gnawed her lip.
No. She wouldn’t pester his mother.
“Did you leave him any message?” Momma said, even though she must know Nadine hadn’t, since she was sitting right here.
Nadine snorted out a sigh. “No.” She dialed his home phone again. “King Dave, call me.” And she slapped the phone down.
Would he call back? She shoved the phone away in annoyance. Maybe he was listening, ducking her, lying on the gold coverlet, saying to another waitress, Never mind, just some broad.
“It looks like I’ll be moving in with you, I guess. If you’ll have me.” She looked up and met Momma’s eyes. “One thing I think I have to do, first, though.”
Momma made a face. “Don’t. Don’t go to that wedding, baby. Not unless you feel you have to.”
“I have to.”
“Your father won’t be gracious. He’s already warned you,” Momma said, indicating the invitation on the table.
“I have to go,” Nadine said stoically. Then she smiled. “How else will we know for sure that we have our revenge?”
King Dave left the Lincoln Center five days later, sweating bullets. He hadn’t seen so much algebra since ninth grade, but his score, they said, counted as a solid pass. His heart was beating fast. He walked faster to keep up with it. Two thoughts ding-donged in his brain: I might get the job, and, What will Nadine say when I tell her I passed?
God help him if Q-Drive school was harder.
He checked his cell phone. He’d had missed two calls in the electronically impenetrable fastness of the Lincoln Center: one from his mother and one hang-up from an unavailable number in Chicago. He called Mom. Davy Junior came on the line and made him say hi to the duck. King Dave stuck the phone under his ear, grabbed his carry-on bag, and flagged a taxi.
“La Guardia,” he told the driver. “I’m listening, sport.”
When he’d listened to Davy Junior prattle for as long as he could stand it, he asked the question eating him. “Listen, sport, you heard from Nadine lately?”
Davy Junior said No. King Dave made him put Mom on. Mom hadn’t either. King Dave’s heart sank. For four days he’d done nothing but study and take tests and wonder what she was doing. He wanted to call her. Tell her he’d cleared the first hurdle.
Too soon. Way too soon. So what if he’d done the rigging seminar? He still had to pass training for the Q-Drive. And he had to beat out who-knew-how-many local and out-of-town riggers. He was determined to prove her wrong about him, that he could risk failing. He could get his own house job.
But she was dead right about one thing. He was damned if he would go back to her a failure.
He hit the speed-dial for Bobbyjay’s cell. “Yo.”
“Yo yourself. Where you at?” Bobbyjay said. He sounded like he was in the middle of world war three, which meant he was probably on a carpentry gig at a scene shop.
“New York. I just took four days of a rigging seminar. My brain is fried,” King Dave boasted.
“Good for you.”
“’Sup in Chicago?” King Dave said, wondering how he could drag Nadine’s name into the conversation without looking obvious.
“The street’s hopping,” Bobbyjay said. “There’s work for every permit guy and brother-in-law in the tri-state area.”
“Great. My old man will be in conniptions ’cause I’m gone.”
“You’re coming back today, right?”
“Uh, no. Nope. Not yet. Listen, buddy,” King Dave said, his nerve breaking, “you talked to Nadine lately?”
Bobbyjay was silent.
King Dave said, “What.” His blood pressure was doing the fandango and his imagination was on a meal penalty. The taxi entered a tunnel. The phone crackled and reception went crappy.
She was sleeping with a Ditorelli. She was pregnant. She’d become a nun. She’d told the world he was a scumsucking pig—not the first time such an infomercial had hit the airwaves, but one he’d been hoping to avoid this time around. “What!” he yelled.
Reception got better. “I haven’t seen her. She quit Liz Otter’s.”
“Whaaat?!” King Dave could have banged the phone against the cab window in frustration.
“She quit. She’s gone. I’m sorry, King Dave. I’ve asked around. Nobody’s seen her.” The phone crackled some more.
Nun, then.
King Dave swore. The taxi popped out of the tunnel in time for King Dave to hear Bobbyjay say, “—day before yesterday. She walked off the job and grabbed a cab. Next we hear, she’s quit. I’m sorry, buddy,” he said again. “I’ll ask around.”
“You do that,” King Dave said numbly. He almost hung up, then added, “Uh, thanks, buddy.”
“Take it easy,” Bobbyjay said, not sounding very hopeful.
She’d quit! King Dave swore again, quieter. He had her home phone on his cell. Ten seconds later he was listening to a recording saying Nadine’s phone had been disconnected.
His guts went cold. Where could she have gone? Was that her call, the “unavailable number” on his caller ID? Maybe she’d called his home. He realized now that he had outsmarted himself by not telling her he would be gone a few days. Shit.
He tried his home phone. Two calls. He cursed the home answering machine, which wouldn’t tell him the number on remote playback. There was no message for the first call, but for the second he heard, with a gush of relief, Nadine’s voice.
King Dave, call me. She sounded crisp, anxious, a little mad, and a little sad.
That would tally with the way she’d looked at the Skyline, with her hair dripping wet and her tears mixing into the artificial rain falling out of the fly loft. He shut his eyes. Was she scared? In trouble? Or pissed as hell with him?
He lost the connection, called his home phone back, and replayed her message. King Dave, call me.
No doubt about it, she didn’t sound happy. More sad than mad, if he had to guess.
And now she’d disappeared.
In a panic, he tried to work it out. Where would she have gone? She knew darned well he would try to track her down.
He forced himself to take a deep breath. What would she do?
His brain was solid wood. He couldn’t guess.
So never mind that. What would Nadine do if she was me? If she had decided on a course of action that would get results only if she could tough it out, stare down the twin threats of humiliation and the old man’s eternal displeasure?
Well, that was a no-brainer. She’d go to fucking Texas and pass this course.
Chapter Forty-One
Nadine arrived in Goreville at eight o’clock at night on the Thursday before Daddy’s Saturday wedding. She’d flown into Dallas, rented a car, driven fifty miles, got a flat tire, fixed it, and now wondered where in heck everybody was. The streets were sizzling hot and empty. Daddy wasn’t home. The diner was closed. Aliens couldn’t have cleaned the place out so neatly.
She headed for church.
Sure enough, here was every car in town. She pulled over, combed her hair and re-braided her French braid, rubbed in vain at a smudge of grease on her lilac silk Magic by Myrna pantsuit knee, and walked up to the big oak doors.
Daddy was conducting a wedding. On a Thursday night?
Everyone in Goreville was here. Looking over the celebrants, she recognized Carla Dettridge as the bride and a skinny, adam’s-appley guy in a powder blue tux as the groom.
As she sneaked through the air conditioning to a place among the standees, feeling her silk camisole stick to her sweaty back, she heard whispers behind her.
“Harlot.”
“Nice pantsuit.”
“Haven’t seen hide or hair of her since last summer.”
“Where you been, girl?”
She slipped into a back pew. The Detteridges occupied most of
the front pews on Nadine’s side. On the other side sat a handful of strangers—Carla’s bridegroom’s family. Closest to the pulpit sat Ella Mae Amory in Nadine’s place, looking up at Pastor Fisher with earnestness in the set of her thin shoulders.
Did I used to do that?
The whispers around her got louder.
“Slut.”
“Hey, Nadine, welcome back.”
“Wearing pants in church.”
Daddy finished pronouncing Carla and her guy “man and wife.” Then he looked straight out across the massed heads. At her.
His eyebrows snapped together. “Dearly beloved.”
Beside Nadine, Vera Jones groaned. “Here we go.”
Daddy’s church-organ voice dropped an octave. “We seem to have a lost sheep among us today.” He threw out a hand in a gesture Nadine knew well.
Here we go.
“Come forward, Nadine Fisher, and be known among us again!”
Nadine heard more whispers behind her as she made her way up the side aisle. There was Bub Smith and his rich daddy in a front pew. Patsy McPherson sat next to Bub. Ella Mae looked like a cat who’d caught the canary out of her cage at last.
All Nadine’s favorite vultures. Her heart sank.
Carla and her bridegroom stood at the altar, looking affronted (Carla) and confused (bridegroom), and the out-of-towners on the right side of the aisle craned their necks.
“Friends,” Daddy boomed, as Nadine approached, “we rejoice for Carla and Jeff tonight, but we also have a special joy when the lost one is returned to the fold.”
He put his hand on Nadine’s shoulder and pressed. Dutifully she knelt. She didn’t dare look at Carla.
“Here is my daughter back from the city! What sins, what outrages has she not seen there? What dissolution may a young girl not descend into if she leaves the ninety and nine and ventures into those cesspits of the haunts of men? Did she fornicate?” Daddy speculated at the top of his voice. “Did she consort with ungodly persons? Did she even go to church?”
Nadine humbly bowed her head, grateful that only Carla’s parents could see her burning cheeks. It was true. She hadn’t been to church. Not once in nine whole months.
And the first time I do set foot in church, this happens. I should pick my churches better. Momma, this isn’t much of a revenge yet.
“Did she see the moral filth and degradation of human beings who have lost touch with their families, their congregation? Women immodestly dressed? Men prowling the streets, seeking a runaway whom they might introduce to drugs or prostitution?”
Daddy went on listing all the wicked things she might have got up to. He had quite an imagination for a man who never left Goreville but two weekends a year. The catalog of her potential sins ranged from fornication to lewd dancing, from card-playing to sampling the wares of marijuana dealers. And low company. Low company got a lot of airplay. Daddy had seen it with his own eyes, meaning Anvilhead Arnie, Weasel, Bobbyjay, and Rob the Snob, when he found her in Liz Otter’s, which he referred to as a French establishment of ill repute.
Nadine felt the old familiar misery boil up—and stop.
The misery stopped.
She was so astonished, she almost raised her head.
“Might she have borne a child out of wedlock?” Daddy demanded unfairly. She’d already told him she hadn’t. And she hadn’t had time to have a child out of wedlock since he last saw her. “Might she,” he dropped his voice to a whisper that carried all over the church, “have destroyed an unborn bastard?”
Daddy kept his hand on the back of her neck. Every now and then, in his emotion, he pressed harder.
Nadine held still, amazed at her own feelings.
Three little words echoed in her head. It. Doesn’t. Matter. The worst was happening. She knelt there, feeling the carpet grind into her knees through her new silk suit, feeling no pain, only wondering how long this would take. It didn’t matter.
Backsliders and drunks must feel like this when Daddy lays into them, she thought. No shame, no discomfort. Just a kind of dispassionate curiosity. How long can he keep it up?
Daddy seemed to feel he was losing his audience, for he changed the tone of his impromptu sermon. “Friends, let us welcome my daughter home after a year, a long year without seeing the brightness of her face!”
The Detteridges in the front pew shuffled their feet. Out of the corner of her eye, Nadine saw the bell of Carla’s wedding dress swing impatiently.
“Let the celebration begin!” Daddy cried hurriedly, and took his hand off her neck.
Mendelssohn rang out from the church organ.
Everybody stood up. Her father moved away toward the altar to watch the newlyweds proceed down the aisle.
Nadine took a long, deep breath. Time for phase two of the homecoming humiliation.
The first person she saw when she raised her eyes was Ella Mae Amory.
Ella Mae’s face was a study in triumph. Then she turned her shoulder.
Oh, well, if Ella Mae wasn’t speaking to her, that was a plus.
May as well get on with it. Nadine got to her feet.
Carla’s mother, Wilma Detteridge, reached across the pew wall to grasp her by the hand.
“Welcome home, Nadine!” she hissed. “This is the last straw! I swear, he’s gone his length this time.”
“I’m so sorry this happened,” Nadine said sincerely. “I had no idea he was going to do that.”
“Never mind,” Wilma said, and pulled her close to kiss her cheek over the pew wall. “Come and have a piece of cake. And tell me where you got your lovely, lovely pantsuit!”
“Uh, Chicago,” Nadine said. She didn’t feel ready for a fresh explosion over that lowest of backsliders, the former Mrs. Myrna Fisher. She stuck close to Wilma for a few minutes, grateful to have one ally in a barrelful of sharks.
She needn’t have worried. Most people were glad to see her.
Sure, Jory Lee Simpson glared at her as they waited for punch. Sherralyn Majors hissed. But several people crossed the church basement to say hello. If she didn’t exactly have a rival receiving line, she always had someone to talk to.
Ella Mae Amory ignored her.
Daddy stuck like glue to Ella Mae’s side.
Jerleen Jones, her oldest ex-best friend who hadn’t spoken to her since they were eleven, talked to her for fifteen minutes about Chicago. Nadine’s waitress-sense told her that Jerleen was not long for Goreville herself. They exchanged phone numbers and Nadine made Jerleen promise to come visit her.
“Hey, Nadine,” Bub Smith said, looking embarrassed. He had Patsy McPherson on his arm.
“Nice to see you again, Bub. Patsy.” Nadine looked down from her superior height on her more-recently-ex-best friend and pitied her from the bottom of her heart. “My goodness, is that great sparkly thing a diamond? Congratulations, Patsy!”
“I’m speechless,” said Bub’s daddy, Elmer Smith, patting Nadine’s hand. “He did it at a wedding! Won’t be long now.”
“You didn’t deserve that, Nadine,” maid of honor Jane Detteridge said. “I wanted to tell you, the other night my sister and I put flowers on your mother’s headstone for you. On the anniversary.” So Jane took Momma’s burial seriously!
“Missed you, funnyface,” old Bill Winger said, pulling her down to kiss her cheek with his mouth full of cake.
It wasn’t bad at all.
In fact, they seemed to like her.
On Friday, the next day, Ella Mae, a size two, took Nadine to the only dress shop in town and remarked in front of Sherralyn Majors that Nadine had gotten fat in Chicago. She also searched Nadine’s purse while Nadine was in the dressing room, found the last three gold-foil condoms wedged in the bottom, and showed them to everybody just as Nadine came out looking like a gauze houseboat in the “best woman” dress Ella Mae had chosen for her.
Sherralyn looked smug. Lucia Jiminez circled and tugged and pinned and marked, saying nothing.
And Nadine thought, Get t
hrough tomorrow. “May I have those back, please?” she said coolly. She held out her hand.
Ella Mae stuffed the condoms back in Nadine’s purse, glaring.
Over lunch they sat across Daddy’s kitchen table from each other. Daddy shoveled in his chili and left without saying a word to either of them.
“—and the florist, because you know Jory Lee Simpson hasn’t a lick of sense, he’ll order the baby’s breath late—” Ella Mae was saying, looking at her list of chores for Nadine.
Nadine thought, You slept with my Daddy while he was married to Momma. I don’t have to do a darned thing you say. The thought was like cool water in her throat.
This was true. But she’d come to Goreville to attend to a great deal of old business. Telling off Ella Mae would take no time at all, and then she’d have to leave quick. She needed time to run Goreville through a sieve. Identify those like Jerleen who were worth keeping.
“Give me the list,” Nadine said. “I’d like to drive around town and see everything.”
She drove in hundred-degree heat from flower shop to baker to dress shop to the homes of all nine bridesmaids, being scorned to her face sometimes. At nineteen, after Bub Smith’s story hit the grapevine, she had crumpled under the town’s disapproval.
But for a woman of twenty who had stood up to rude actors in Liz Otter’s and brought the great King Dave Flaherty to his knees, it was all in a day’s work.
“That’s fifty dollars deposit. Hussy,” Jory Lee Simpson said as he handed her the receipt for the red carpet rental. “You’re a disgrace to your mother’s memory.”
Nadine looked him right in the eye. Jory flinched. Maybe he remembered the time he’d tried to drive his truck up a cliff and broke both legs, and she’d administered spiritual comfort and correction in the hospital.
Yes, but then I was fifteen and a fool.
Now I’m twenty.
And I’m a waitress.
Nadine looked him in the eye, smiling a little, until his gaze fell. “Have a great day, Jory Lee.”
That was the second person to mention her mother’s “death.” Interesting! How many others still believed that lie?
The bakery was a much nicer experience. “Nadine, you’ve grown awful pretty!” Tilly Carpentiere said. “I felt so sorry for you last night.” She scowled. “Jim’s got way out of hand.”
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