Glad as she was for the sympathy, Nadine was shocked to hear her father referred to as anything but Pastor.
Tilly lowered her voice. “Duane’s on the board of elders. He says the bylaws allow for a three-quarters majority and this year we’ll have it—why hello, Ella Mae! Ready for the big day?”
Nadine stiffened.
“I looked in because I forgot to remind Nadine about the marzipan,” said the familiar, hated voice.
Yup. Ella Mae was up to her old tricks, following her around so that no mistake would go unnoticed. Nadine turned.
“I did forget, didn’t I?” Ella Mae said, looking brightly up at Nadine like an eager spider.
I’m too old for this, Nadine thought.
“You did,” she said. “In fact, I think you’d better keep this.” She handed Ella Mae the list of chores, looking her right in the eye. “I’ve got phone calls to make. Great talking to you, Tilly. Tell Duane howdy until tomorrow for me?”
And she walked out into the blistering Goreville heat.
My God. I told Ella Mae no. I walked away.
It occurred to her as she sat in her boiling-hot rental car that Ella Mae hadn’t showed up at her other stops. Those places, the natives were unfriendly. Only at Carpentiere’s Bakery had she turned up to spy.
She planned that list purely to humble me!
Here in Ella Mae’s stronghold, she thought of King Dave. She missed his swagger, his nort’wes’side accent, the way he wore his jeans like an armor of indecency. King Dave wouldn’t know what a big deal it was that she had just told Ella Mae to stick her chores in her ear.
Or maybe he would. He’d called her Ellybelly. A giggle bubbled up in Nadine’s throat.
I’m not preacher’s doormat any more.
I am a waitress. People are nice to me. Or else their coffee comes cold.
Chapter Forty-Two
What stunned King Dave about Goreville was the head-twisting niceness of the natives.
After Nadine’s stories, he’d expected to be snubbed all over town. Instead he found the waitresses friendly, from Stuckey’s on the highway, to the diner downtown, to the cross-the-tracks honky-tonky-fonky or whatever the hell Texans called their bars. Everyone smiled, flirted, and wanted to know all about life in the big city.
The guy at the hardware store was pretty friendly, too.
Q-Drive school was whole ’nother thing. The motors ran by computer. He’d only ever used computers for video games. But once he got the hang of the touch screen, he was in familiar territory: hooking up winches, measuring limit settings, timing travel, learning dozens of set-ups that might never come his way. If he got the Galaxy job, they might. Hope kept him focused.
Thursday night he was cramming for the big Friday test when his roommate stuck his head into their hotel room and asked if he wanted to go for beer. “No thanks. Gotta study.”
“Hey, man, it’s not your whole life.”
“Yes, it is,” King Dave said absently.
Twenty minutes later his roomie was back with a bottle of blush chablis. King Dave refused it with a shudder.
“Bar’s closed,” his roomie said, apologizing. “Everything’s closed. I found this at the gas’n’grub.” He unscrewed the top.
“You that much of an alkie?”
“Yes,” said the roommate, a roadie from Jersey. “I can’t believe a bar is closed in Texas on a Thursday. Only reason the gas’n’grub was open is everybody’s been at a wedding, and the preacher started a public hanging over some runaway. Pissed off the gas’n’grub clerk so bad, she came back to work.”
King Dave grunted.
No, it wasn’t a bad town. People were nice enough. They just wanted to gather in the meeting house of a quiet Thursday and watch the minister rip the skin off some poor teenager.
This was what Nadine had got away from.
At least she’d got away.
At midnight he threw his textbook to the floor and turned out the light.
He wondered where she was now. If she’d thought more about calling her Mom. If she’d called his Mom and Davy Junior. She seemed a million miles away, yet he could still smell her hair and the sweet, strong scent of her lusty body. Sex with Nadine wasn’t more intense exactly—he’d had some pretty heavy thrills with roadie groupies in the past. It was bigger. Slower. It meant more. She made him pay attention to an act that had become an athletic performance for him—the price of crash space near the Opera House, or getting his laundry done.
One kiss with Nadine meant more than that. It meant she liked him. Not a dumb crush or love or bullshit like waitresses were always going on about, but simple human respect and affection. He got that from his friends—again, it was Nadine who had showed him that. He prized the friendship of Bobbyjay and Weasel and Mikey Ray more than he would ever be able to admit.
But the idea that you could like a waitress, and be liked back, was totally foreign.
He could get used to it.
Of course now was a perfect time to realize all this. He kicked himself for not telling her earlier about the Galaxy interview. There was only one reason he hadn’t told her, one reason why he didn’t give up, hunt her down, crawl to her, and beg her to take him back.
It was his pride. His fucking stupid working man’s pride.
There must be lawyers out there who care about their work the way I do. Doctors or somebody. He was a cut-up in the Local, a flunk-out in school. He had damned little to be proud of beyond his name and his work. And his name didn’t impress him nearly as much as it had five years ago.
That left the work. The old man handed him that, too. Without a fancy house job, his only chance to shine was in sheer volume of labor and, like any other mope from the office, he prided himself intensely on putting in the hours, breaking his back for as many shifts as he could wangle out of the office.
To hell with the money. It was the work.
Nadine had made him admit to himself that he had skills. If she hadn’t dared him, he would never have walked into the Galaxy to shoot the shit with old Lew Labow.
It was a perfect double bind. Without her he was a workaholic mope from the office, doomed to spend the rest of his life doing waitresses and humping boxes.
With her, he could take his kid to the beach, blow his mind in bed, even get on Mom’s good side for the first time in years—as long as he was suspended. He could go to New York, prove what he knew. He could pass automated fucking motion control school.
Didn’t mean diddly unless he got the job. Without the job, it was back to pushing boxes.
And so long as he pushed boxes, no Nadine.
He turned over and dogged the pillow to the bed like it was an escaping football.
It will happen. I will find her. A man who’d come this far had earned his job of choice, won his kid back from his Mom and his ex, was entitled to sleep in his own bed with his own waitress.
He concentrated on this thought until he fell asleep, weighing the pillow down with his body.
Late Saturday morning he clocked out of Q-Drive school with good grades and a diploma which he faxed to Labow.
Only one thing was left on his list and he could kiss Nadine’s home town goodbye. For five days he’d been mildly obsessed with punching old Pastor Fisher in the snoot. That’s for torturing my girl all those years. Now, as he threw his suitcase into the rental car, he thought, Why bother? She got away. She got her freedom.
Besides, he couldn’t look a minister up in the phone book and drive to his house to punch him in the snoot. You needed a conversation starter for that. Nevertheless he cruised for a while, hoping to spot him on the street. Shouldn’t be hard to spot. Only one minister in town.
Maybe he should have gone over to church Thursday night. Stuck up for the runaway. Pastor Fisher would have come the heavy preacher, and then King Dave could have done it—kapow!
So much for might-have-beens.
The joint seemed deserted. The hardware store was closed. And the grocery. E
ven the tonky-fonky was locked up tight. Jersey would have to leave town unless he wanted pink wine again.
King Dave gave up his quest for preacher snoot.
He was standing at the cash register in a gas station so primitive, it didn’t even have automatic pay pumps, when he saw Nadine pull up at the stop sign outside.
Forget it, dumbass. You’ve got Nadine on the brain.
But it was her. Her hair was done up in that braided crown. She wore a familiar pair of Day-Glo orange earrings, and the back of her Escort was piled high with what looked like a cloud.
“Isn’t that Nadine Fisher?” King Dave said.
The yokel at the cash register looked up, the picture of rural befuddlement, following King Dave’s finger.
“Yup. That’s her. Sign here, sir.”
Nadine drove away. The car was full of—white foam peanuts?
She’d run home. This is where she disappeared to. This shit-hole. “I thought she was in Chicago.”
“Nope. Saw her in church Thursday night,” the yokel said.
The runaway at the public hanging! Nadine came home with her tail between her legs and a broken heart, courtesy of King Dave Butthead, and got bitched out in front of God and everybody! King Dave growled in his throat.
“She’s gonna be late for the wedding,” the yokel said, watching the Escort disappear up the street. “And so am I. Hurry up, mister. Soon as you’re done, I’m closing the station.”
“Wedding,” King Dave said numbly.
King Dave remembered that Pastor Fisher had showed up in Liz Otter’s. Tried to force her to come home and marry some Bub. That’s what was in the back of her car. A wedding dress!
He stuffed his credit card into his wallet so violently that the card cracked. “Where’s the church?”
“Why, it’s at the corner of Lee and Main,” the yokel said to his back. King Dave was in the car, gunning it up the street, before he’d had time to turn the sign from OPEN to CLOSED.
Chapter Forty-Three
“Daddy, I’m not standing up for you until we have a talk.”
The office was the only quiet room in church. Nadine’s heart blattered so loud in her ears, she feared she was going deaf. She’d put this moment off as long as she dared, but she couldn’t bear another minute of Ella Mae picking on her.
At his desk, Daddy looked like a peevish penguin in his tuxedo. “You’re in disgrace.”
“Then I’ll leave now,” she said. She unpinned her corsage from the houseboat dress and tossed it on the desk. “I mean it.”
Slowly, Daddy stood up straight. “I can’t believe this. After you knelt in church and took your medicine.”
She looked him right in the eye. He was shorter by three inches. His face was bright red over his white butterfly tie, and his eyes rolled. Suddenly she was sickened by his phoniness and bluster, and by the way she’d always ignored those pitiful qualities. She almost walked out. Then she remembered she was on a mission from Momma.
“I don’t intend to humiliate you in public, Daddy. Unless you force me to.” He blurted something but she kept talking. “You lied to me, Daddy. For eight years you lied. Momma is alive and well. She didn’t leave you. You messed around.”
She couldn’t bear to say, with Ella Mae Amory, of all the disgusting choices.
“Then you kept Momma away from me, and you lied to everybody in town, and you punished me for something Momma didn’t do, and I want an explanation.” Her chest heaved from pent-up injustice and the doggone tight girdle under the houseboat.
In that moment she realized there could be no explanation.
“What could I do?” Daddy whimpered. “Ella Mae suggested that we tell them that Myrna was dead. After that it—it snowballed. And then she wanted to marry me. I had to keep her at arm’s length. If I hadn’t, your mother could have won custody,” he pleaded. “I couldn’t lose you, too.”
Nadine blinked. “You waited all these years to marry her.”
Sweat beaded on his face. “I put it off as long as I could.”
“Put it off?” She squinted. “You mean you don’t want to marry Ella Mae?”
“Sh-sh!” Daddy rolled his eyes at the shut door. “It was a moment of weakness.”
“A two-year moment of weakness?”
He looked dazed. “How do you know we...did it for two years?”
“Daddy! I told you, I’ve been talking to Momma!” He wilted another inch at that. She said, tasting nastiness, “You were sleeping with Ella Mae while you were telling Momma she couldn’t wear her Fredericks, and then you faked her death and destroyed her reputation, and then you blackmailed her out of her custody and visitation rights, and then you told her eleven-year-old daughter that her loving Momma died in mortal agony over a plate of shrimp in Austin.” Nadine’s blood boiled over. “You told my Momma I didn’t want to see her!”
“I never slept with Ella Mae after your mother left—” Daddy whimpered, but she interrupted him.
“It’s on your conscience, Pastor Fisher.” She pulled herself up to her full height. “Wrong is wrong.”
But Daddy didn’t seem to be listening. “I see. I see,” he said feverishly. “You disapprove. Fair enough. You could stop it. You could step forward when we get to ‘just impediment’ and say you object. Go ahead,” he said, nodding now, rubbing his hands together. “Tell them. Yes! Expose us. Expose it all! You can stop it!” he said excitedly, seizing her by the arms.
She pulled away. “You want me to stop the wedding?”
“That’s what I’m telling you! Good gracious, you don’t imagine I want to be married to that woman!” Daddy boomed in his church-organ voice. With a gasp, he looked over his shoulder. He whispered, “I’m begging you, daughter. I can’t right the wrongs of the past, but I—I—please! Please don’t force this on me! I’m your father! The author of your being!”
Music came through the shut office door.
Nadine felt her resolution weaken. “You told everyone in town that I did awful, awful things, Thursday night. You used your power to humiliate me.”
“I had to be sure you would stay for the ceremony.”
“That was supposed to make me want to stay?” She shook her head. “Did you plan for me to stop the wedding all along?”
“No, no. I had no idea—that is, I thought you’ve come back to Goreville to stay.”
Incredulous, she said, “To stand between you and Ella Mae. To chaperone you again.”
His white tie bobbed. “Well, yes.”
Someone rapped on the door. “Ready when you are, Pastor.”
She picked up the corsage and pinned it back on the shoulder of the houseboat dress.
“Nadine, what are you going to do?” Daddy had never looked so small and pitiful.
She stepped forward and straightened his tie. “I’m going to lead you to the altar. Ella Mae will think she’s won. You’re gonna promise me that you will never, ever do what you did to me Thursday night, ever again, to anyone else, so long as you live.”
“I promise. I swear it. Whatever you ask,” Daddy babbled.
She felt shaky inside and horribly confused. She would have to walk out there and do this with the whole town in the pews.
“And when the time comes,” she said in a turmoil of indecision, “I—I guess I’ll stop the ceremony.”
Daddy collapsed, looking relieved.
She looked him right in the eye. “I want a nice clear confession from you, backing me up. And, Daddy, I’ll be staying in touch with people here in Goreville after I leave today. So I’ll know if you do anything mean to anyone.”
“I promise,” Daddy said, sounding pathetically grateful, his power over her broken forever and ever, amen. “I swear, I’ll never ever, I swear it,” he gabbled, his voice dropping to a murmur as they walked out of his office to meet the ushers.
The church was full again. They thought she was a harlot, after Daddy’s denunciation. Now she had to break up this wedding all by herself. And then ru
n away for good.
She felt slightly more cheerful. If they took away her preacher’s daughter merit badge and drummed her out of town, it couldn’t be anything worse than they’d already done.
“Here Comes the Bride” began. From the foot of the aisle, Ella Mae Amory swept forward in a cloud of white roses and gauze.
Outside the church, King Dave heard the wedding music and nearly crashed his rental into the bridal limo. He left the keys in the ignition, fantasizing a kidnap at the altar, Nadine fleeing with him to the border, shotguns banging behind them.
He shoved into the back of the packed little church.
“Dearly beloved,” said a limp voice. King Dave elbowed his way along the wall, straining for a view of the bride.
She looked small beside the groom. A huge veil covered her head. A string of runners-up stood left of center stage, and to the right, one guy in a tux. That would be the Bub doofus who was shortly about to die. And another bride. A really tall one.
King Dave shook his head, blinking. A second bride?
He hadn’t been to all that many weddings. Surely the bride was the one who wore a veil.
“Nadine looks awful in that dress,” said someone behind him.
He made sure to step on the speaker’s toes as he shoved another twenty feet closer. What the hell, they couldn’t throw him out, unless he started yelling.
Yell he would. Soon as they got to the bust-up line.
There was Nadine. She looked righteous, like she was about to do good and yet regretted it. King Dave made a secondary plan to kill Pastor Fisher on his way out the door. That had to be him holding her arm: red face, white tie, anxious look. But if Daddy was giving her away, who was the gook in the backwards collar?
King Dave shouldered closer yet.
Wait a minute. Nadine wasn’t the bride. Her dress was big enough, but he knew better. All runners-up at weddings looked like a sofa had exploded under them.
No, the bride was this short babe in the veil.
Nadine wasn’t getting married! Her father was getting married. Nadine was giving him away! Relief flooded King Dave’s body. He tottered and stepped on more pointy snakeskin toes.
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