LOVING HER SOUL MATE (8 page)

Shay didn’t respond to that.
 
Because she would love to have herself a good
man and raise a family, too.
 
Only the
good man part had pretty much eluded her so far.

The ride became a silent one as
both women looked at the road ahead of them rather than each other.

Finally, a
red light.
 
Rae looked at Shay.
 

“You heard from that Lonnie Resden
fellow?”

Shay looked at the school kids as
they crossed the intersection.
 
“Nope,”
she eventually replied.

“You should call him.”

Shay could not believe it.
 
“I should?”
 

“Yes, I think so.”

“Think again, Aunt Rae, I’m not
calling him.
 
Look, I know you think
Lonnie was a good choice for me.
 
Hell, I
used to love the
guy,
I thought he was a good choice
too.
 
But after what he did, after
fucking everything in a skirt and then slapping me because I refuse to go along
with his bullshit, no way.
 
He’ll be the
last human being on earth I’ll call.”

“But---”

“But what?”

Aunt Rae held up her fingers.
 
“He’s an attorney, number one.
 
He’s great looking, number two.
 
He’s great in bed, and don’t you dare tell me
he’s not.
 
You can look at that brother
and tell he
is,
number three.
 
He’s a great provider, number four.
 
He’ll give you some beautiful babies, number
five.
 
He’s got a lot going for himself,
young lady.”

The light turned green and Shay
drove on.
 
She couldn’t disagree with
anything Rae had said.
 
“Yeah, you’re
right,” she admitted. “He’s all of that you mentioned, but he’s so much
more.
 
Because he’s also a cheater, he’ll
hit a woman if he gets riled up
enough,
he’s not the
kind of man I could trust as far as I could throw.
 
So no, thank-you, Aunt Rae.
 
I’ll never get that desperate.
 
He’s one person I can do without in my life.”

Rae stared at her and then
smiled.
 
“Good,” she said, nodding her
head.
 
“I was just testing you.”

Shay looked at Rae, realized she
was smiling, and smiled too.
 
“Let me get
you out of my car,” she said, and they both laughed.

They arrived at the Brady Senior
Center where vans were unloading the less-mobile seniors and some members of
the staff were helping with
the unload
.
 
Rae grabbed up her bags and pocketbook,
staring at the Center. Then, as was her way, she shook her head.

“This place is filthy,” she
said.
 
“And that staff are the laziest
young folks I’ve ever seen in my life.
 
When I was their age I was working eighty hour weeks without giving it a
second thought.
 
They can barely pull
forty.
  
And look at the grass.
 
Brown already.”

“Why do you do that?”
 
Shay asked her elder.
 
“Why do you sit in my car every morning and
complain about this place?
 
Then you turn
around and show up here every single day.
 
You never miss a day.
 
I don’t get
it.
  
Why do you come if you hate this
place so much?”

“I don’t hate it,” Rae said, still
staring at it.
 
“I just hate the fact
that it’s all I have.”

Shay’s heart dropped.
 
“Auntie, I didn’t mean--”

Rae looked at Shay, saw the
concern in her beautiful eyes, and smiled.
 
“I know you didn’t, dear,” she said, squeezing her hand.
 
“We’ve only known each other for less than
three months but already I know you could never harm a flea.
 
Unless that flea is a
two-timing man.”
 

Shay laughed.
 
But Rae’s look lingered.
  
“Well?” Shay asked, knowing something more
was coming.
 
When Rae just sat there,
Shay smiled.
 
“Okay, let me have it.
 
What’s your pearl of wisdom for me today?”

“Name your price,” Rae said,
pointing at Shay.
 
“And if you can live
with it, stick to it.
 
But make sure you
can live with the price you set.
 
Name
your price.”

Shay knew what Aunt Rae had just
told her had absolutely nothing to do with money, but she didn’t ask for an
explanation.
 
She never did.
 
Because every little pearl of wisdom she had
given Shay ultimately was understood in time.
 
Just never at the time it was given.

“Have a good day,” Shay said as
Rae got out of the VW and, in her always brisk manner, made her way toward the
Senior Center’s entrance as if her life depended on her quickness, all of her
bags in tow.
 
Shay stared at the old
woman, wondered how it must feel to get up every morning to do something she
didn’t want to do and to go someplace she didn’t want to go.
 
But loneliness was a bitch.
 
It could be so crippling that, for some
people, bad company was preferable to no company at all.
 
Shay, however, wasn’t one of those
people.
 
Then again, she thought as Aunt
Rae disappeared inside the Center, Rae wasn’t either, once upon a time.

But Shay couldn’t think about that
right now.
 
Because she
had an appointment of her own to get to.
 
She drove above speed limit along the bustling streets of Brady,
Alabama.
 
She never dreamed she’d end up
living anywhere other than Birmingham.
 
She went to school there, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and,
after graduation she got her dream job there: a reporter for the Birmingham
Union-Star.
 
Her career was on the
upswing.
 
Until a new editor came along,
hired his niece as the new crime reporter, and started relegating Shay, a woman
with, by that time, three years of experience under her belt, as second string
to his fresh-out-of-college-niece.
 

When she didn’t go quietly into
that good night of earning a paycheck without making waves, and protested the
nothing assignments the editor was continually tossing her way, her life became
a living hell.
 
He began to badmouth her
around the newsroom, decimating her hard earned reputation as a strong
reporter.
 
And when the decision was made
to lay off some staff in a cost-cutting move, her name was at the top of the
list.
 
She fought it, she even made it
all the way to arbitration, but she lost in the end.
 
There was no malice aforethought, the
arbitrator concluded.
 
They had a right
to get rid of their dead weight.
 
Dead weight
, they called her, because of
the nothing assignments she was forced to work.
 
And the fact that she had taken on her mighty boss at all became the
death knell for any bright future in Birmingham.
 
No newspaper would hire her after that.
 

That was why, when she was offered
a job with the smaller Brady Tribune some two-hundred miles away, she took
it.
 
It was a major step-down from her
glory days in Birmingham, but she was nobody’s fool.
 
She had to eat and pay her bills.
 
Her parents, who had moved to Philadelphia
before she graduated college, were school teachers barely able to pay their own
bills.
 
And her only sibling, a sister in
California, had her own life to live.
 
Her
ex Lonnie Resden offered to help her, but she turned him
down.
 
No way, she had thought at the
time, was she allowing herself to be that dependent on some man.
 
She gladly accepted the Brady job.

Now she was twenty-six years old
and felt as if she was starting over; as if she still had so many points to
prove.
 
Sometimes she even felt like the
untalented rookie her former boss tried to make her out to be.
 
Mainly because her new
employer seemed to have heard those Birmingham rumors and was treating her as
if she wasn’t quite up to their standards either.
 
They even had another reporter as her team
leader, as if a woman with her years of experience still needed some strong man
to guide her along the way.
 
But she
didn’t complain.
 
She needed the Brady
Tribune far more than they needed her.

She turned into the parking lot of
the City Hall complex refusing to relive all of that past pain.
 
This was a beautiful new day, she thought as
she found an empty spot and killed the engine, and she was embracing the
day.
 

“Thank you, Lord, for this day
that
You
have made,” she took a moment and said.
 
“I will rejoice and be glad in it.”
 

And then, with only seconds to
spare, she got out of her vehicle quickly and raced up the steps of the huge
building.
 
Ronnie was waiting at the top
of the steps.
 

“It’s about time,” he said as his
round, cherubim face looked like an orange pumpkin against the Alabama
sun.
 

“I’m not late,” Shay said as she
made her way to the top.
 
She lifted her
shades off of her face and placed them on the top of her head.
 
“I’m exactly forty-one seconds early.”

Ronnie grinned.
 
“My bad,” he said and she grinned too.
 
“Ready?” he then asked her, his small, green
eyes trailing down the length of her low-cut white blouse that contrasted
gorgeously with her dark skin, and the very feminine, sheer scarf she wore
around her small neck.
 

“Yes, I think so,” Shay replied.
 
Although she still didn’t feel she needed a
team leader, she had to deal with the fact that she had one.
 
And sometimes he was great, giving her
pointers on local history and how to handle the deep racial tensions that
always seemed to bubble just below the surface in Brady.
 
Other times, however, she felt leery of him,
as if his geeky, golly-gee persona hid a darker side where something was off;
where something just wasn’t quite right.

“Remember what I said,” Ronnie
said.
 
“Keep your mouth shut and I mean
shut tight.
 
If you go on and on all
you’re going to do is alienate the veteran reporters, and anger the brass.
 
Just keep it zipped and you’ll be fine.”

“Ronnie, this isn’t exactly my
first press conference,” Shay politely reminded her leader.
 
“I’ve been a reporter for over four
years.
 
I’ve been to a ton of these press
conferences.”

“I understand that.
 
But this is your first press conference with
the chief of police here in Brady.
 
You
don’t know that guy like I know him, Shay.
 
If you ask questions he doesn’t want to answer, it’ll be hell to
pay.
 
Keep your mouth shut I’m telling
you.”

Shay nodded as if she agreed,
although she didn’t see how she could.
 
A
reporter was supposed to ask questions, not just stand back and let the chief
of police or anybody else recite their talking points unchallenged.
 
But she had to keep it together.
 
She wasn’t there to ruffle feathers.

Besides, she was reasonably
certain that John Malone, as the Chief’s right hand man, would be at the
presser too.
 
And seeing him again, after
three months of avoiding seeing him at all, was going to be a challenge.
 

Ronnie, however, was completely in
the dark about her concern.
 
He was
looking down at her outfit again.
 
“You
look real pretty,” he said.

“Thanks,” Shay said with a smile,
but was uncomfortable when his look lingered.
 
“Ready?” she found herself asking him.

“I was born ready,” Ronnie said
with a grin, his green eyes moving back up to her brown ones.
  
And then they hurried through the revolving
doors.

After rushing home to shower,
shave, and brush his teeth, John Malone also ended up at City Hall. He walked
through the revolving doors smoothing back his thick brown hair, buttoning his
smartly tailored suit, stepping hard and fast in his tasseled leather loafers.
 
Looking, to the average eye in his average
southern town, as if he’d just stepped off of the pages of a glam magazine
rather than out of the bed of a strange woman whose name he still couldn’t
recall.
 
Last night he was Hit-and-Run
John: drinking too much, sexing too much,
not
living
right by even his own barometer.
 
Today
he was Captain John Malone, senior investigative officer for the Brady, Alabama
Police Department, and the department’s Mister Fix-it.