Million Dollar Road (22 page)

“At least he loves me, you shithead!” Liz shrieked. The wind gusted. Her hair blowing in molasses-taffy-colored snakes, she leaned on one crutch and hunted for something deep in the pocket of her slacks.

“Now hold on a minute, Liz—what's this about?”

“
This,
asshole!”

His missing cell phone was in her fist. Without an instant's hesitation, Lizzie heaved the phone at Con's head like a drunken pitcher from the mound. Unbalanced by the effort, she dropped a crutch and almost fell off the other one as the cell phone hurtled past Con's head and sailed into the pond with a splash.

“Who in the hell is
Jennifer
?” Liz's face was rigid with fury. She had reclaimed her crutch and pointed it at him with what felt like real menace.

Jennifer? Oh, fuck me, Agnes.

Con had been meaning to break things off with the hostess from the Lemon Tree, but had completely forgotten she even existed because he'd been so wrapped up in Lireinne, Lizzie's condition, Lireinne, Emma, Lireinne, farm business, and Lireinne. The last time he'd seen Jennifer—ten days ago?—she'd been a little clingy, but why had she called his cell phone? What had possessed her? What had she said?

Meanwhile, Liz had regrouped and closed what little distance remained between them. Behind her on the edge of the pond the hysterical dog struggled in the maid's arms, yapping its little jaws off at the screeching peacocks.

“Es-stop it!” Consuelo clutched the wriggling puppy tighter, her round brown face annoyed.

“Answer me, you bastard.” Toe to toe with Con, Lizzie's eyes were dangerous sherry-gold slits, her knuckles white on the crosspieces of her crutches. “For the last time, who's this
Jennifer
?”

What could he say to her that wouldn't make this worse, especially since he had no idea what Jennifer had said in her voice mail? Buy time, Con ordered himself even as the dog's shrill barking and the peacocks' alarmed cries threatened to drive all thought from his brain.

“What do you mean, ‘Who's Jennifer?' ” he asked loudly.

“Don't you dare try to lie your way out of this.” Liz's rage-filled contralto turned high and poisonously sweet in an imitation of Lemon-Tree-Jennifer. “
‘I miss you, Con darling. Why haven't you called me? I bought us some naughty underwear from Victoria's Secret.'
That Jennifer!” Lizzie swung at him with her crutch, cracking him across the shin. Con nearly fell to his knees at the shock of it, stunned by the sudden, vicious pain.

“You cheating son-of-a-bitch—I hate you!”

This was worse than he could've imagined. The situation was moving too fast to control. His shin throbbing, Conn felt his mouth fall open uselessly, all his talent, all that miraculous Obi-Wan-Kenobe-mind-control action failing him in that singular, critical moment.

“And who's
this
?” Lizzie sneered. She pointed her crutch at Lireinne, forgotten but likewise agape and frozen in place.

But before Con could answer—and how could he answer his wife, how could he explain the gorgeousness that was Lireinne without laying it all out there? She's the girl I left Jennifer for, darling, I gave her a job—the maid cut the humid air with a fire-alarm scream.

“
Madre de Dios! El perrito,
he es a-loose!”

And sure enough, Lima Bean was pelting away from Consuelo lickety-split, flying as though the gusting wind had lent him fluffy white wings to sail free above the mud at the pond's edge.

“No,”
Lizzie wailed. “Lima Bean, come back. You'll get dirty!”

“I'll get him!” Desperately grateful for the distraction, Con seized his chance and took off after the dog.

But he was hampered by his throbbing shin—Christ, it felt like Liz had fractured it—and Con had only gotten off the dam when Lima Bean had run almost halfway around the pond. Before Con was even close, panting and swearing breathlessly, Lima Bean had come to a stop at the far end down by the willow trees. His tiny legs braced, the puppy was barking shrilly at a huge presence, the white, knobbled head the size of a floating Kenmore dishwasher that was parting the water and swimming straight for him.

Snowball
.

Praying he could reach the puppy in time, Con put on an extra, limping burst of speed. Behind him on the dam the women were shrieking for him to hurry, hurry! Fifteen yards ahead of him Lima Bean was standing his ground and yapping at the gator. Con's labored breath sang in his ears.

Almost there, he thought with a frantic determination. Still running, he reached for the puppy to snatch him to safety.

But then his alligator loafer got stuck in the muck at the water's edge. Arms wind-milling to recapture his balance, Con just missed catching Lima Bean, went to one knee in the mud, and sprawled, falling fully prone with a dirty splash in the shallows of the pond.

Just as he raised his head and wiped his eyes, Snowball crawled out of the water not two feet away from him. The milk-white leviathan's massive pink jaws opened wide as the doors to hell itself, her breath a rank, miasmic cloud.

Con, mud-caked from his eyebrows to the tip of his remaining shoe, looked directly into the deadly blue-lapis gaze of the gator.

Strangely not feeling anything other than a hair-raised awe at this primordial threat, still Con raised his left fist in futile protest at the grotesque irony of it. He was going to die here, die now, mangled to death by the one alligator he could never doom to slaughter.

“Wait!” Con screamed.

She lunged.

Snowball's jaws slammed shut and Con felt an enormous, excruciating
pressure
across the edge of his left hand. Bright blood exploded in a plume of gore. He rolled away through the mud in a horrified, gagging reflex, clutching his bleeding hand to his chest. Snowball lumbered out of the water. Throwing back her head, she gulped her mouthful of his flesh.

Con knew then this was the end of him. He was a dead man.

But there was a God. Con would never know why, but unaccountably Snowball changed her awful course. She waddled away from him, pursuing the still-yapping puppy instead. Soaked in blood and mud, grasping what was left of his spurting hand as he tried to struggle to his knees, Con turned his face away with a sick horror because he couldn't bear to watch.

Out of nowhere, strong hands grabbed his shoulders, dragging him to his feet and up the slope, away from the eleven-foot alligator. Churning mud-curds, foul-smelling fume, and sheets of brown water into the air, Snowball thrashed through the shallows after Lima Bean.

“Hold on—I got you!” The hands on Con's shoulders belonged to a Sykes twin, one of the grass cutters. Heedless of his boss and his brother, the other Sykes twin ran down the hill waving a coil of rope and a roll of silver duct tape, his normally bored face wild-eyed with excitement.

“Holy shit, Ricky—help me get a handle on her,” he shouted. “That's a hundred bucks!
Goddamn
!”

In the ensuing epic struggle to wrestle Snowball into submission, to wind her jaws shut with the tape and hog-tie her, no one had any attention to spare for the wailing pair of women on the dam down at the other end of the pond. Lireinne had somehow vanished. Then, sobbing as unrestrainedly as though it had been her own hand in the gator's teeth, Tina loaded Con up in the Escalade and drove him to the emergency room while Lizzie and Consuelo followed. The Sykes twins dragged Snowball back to her tank.

None of them ever saw Lima Bean again after that eventful Tuesday.

Snagged in the corner of Snowball's terrible jaw, a white gossamer strand of fur was all that remained of the most adorable puppy in the whole wide world.

“W
ell, hell! Come on in. I just this minute took a loaf of bread out of the oven.”

Sarah Fortune, wearing a flour-smudged, rickrack-trimmed apron over her faded blue housedress, held the kitchen door open for Emma on this Thursday afternoon.

“I was wondering when I'd see you again,” Sarah said, sounding satisfied that, just as it always must, her will had triumphed again. “You took your time. Now, what's all this?”

Standing on the back steps, four of Sarah's seven cats winding around her ankles, Emma smiled with an embarrassed lift of her shoulder. “Kind of a peace offering, I guess.” She held out the bouquet of late zinnias—deep magenta-pink, golden-orange, and yellow—and the small tin pail of brown free-range eggs. “I, well . . . I missed you.”

Her old eyes sharp in her lined face, Sarah squeezed Emma's arm briefly. “Shit, you're a stubborn woman, Emma, but then, so am I. I missed you, too. Here, let me put those in some water.” She took the flowers over to the sink, gesturing at Emma to come inside.

“Well, don't just stand there on the doorstep like one of them tract-waving Jehovah's Witnesses. Get in here and sit. I've got a jar around here somewhere.”

The cats came inside, too. Putting the pail of eggs on the counter, Emma drew a caned chair up to the white-painted table. The kitchen smelled of fresh-baked bread. Taking a deep breath of the fragrant air, Emma smiled, remembering Sarah's housewarming gift of a homemade loaf and the bottle of cheap vodka. Sarah was right: it had been too long.

“I'm sorry,” Emma began, but her friend interrupted her.

“You haven't talked to Lireinne yet, have you.”

Sarah squashed the zinnias into an old Mason jar and added water from the tap. Turning to look at Emma, she planted her hands on her hips and cocked her head like a wizened mockingbird. “I was out there yesterday afternoon with those crazy damned therapeutic riding folks, picking up Mose. You'd have thought it was some kind of come-to-Jesus, tent revival meeting, the way those people carry on around horses. Shit, it's a wonder Mose got on the trailer at all with the amount of fuss they made, but he was the only one of 'em with any sense. Like I said, he's a good old creature. But I noticed Lireinne didn't mention hearing from you.”

Sarah sat down across from Emma and put her elbows on the table. Her eyebrows were raised, waiting for an explanation.

Emma shifted uncomfortably in her chair. A gray tabby jumped into her lap and she stroked it before she answered.

“I know. That's because I haven't talked to her yet,” she muttered. In the intervening days, resolving to see Lireinne had turned out to be simpler than actually doing it.

“I'm going to go see her,” Emma said more loudly, abashed. “I guess I wanted to start with something a little easier, such as coming to visit you to apologize. You were right, Sarah. Cutting Lireinne off the way I did was a wretched thing to do. I, I mean to head out there the day after tomorrow, on Saturday, to catch her when I know she'll be home.”

And on Saturday Con wouldn't be out at the alligator farm, just a mile down Million Dollar Road from the Hootens' place, but Emma didn't mention that. While she'd finally learned to deal with the hard truth of how deeply angry she was with her ex-husband, she was still leery of seeing Con face-to-face. Remembering that last night and what had happened between them, Emma knew she didn't want to be near him again until she felt she was strong and composed enough to look him in the eye without slapping him a second time. Finding such a balance would require a measure of forgiveness, Emma knew.

And that might take a while.

Too, as far as her other question was concerned, Emma wanted to believe that perhaps her suspicions about him and Lireinne were only that—suspicions. It was still possible that she was wrong. Even if she wasn't, though, wouldn't the girl need a friend now more than ever if she'd become one of Con's many conquests? The real question, one Emma wasn't quite ready to answer, was whether she could get past that possibility and survive. Her memory of how close she had come to killing herself over him was still raw enough to make her flinch.

“That's my plan, anyway,” Emma said with a self-deprecating tilt of her head.

Sarah Fortune nodded slowly, her expression considering.

“Good,” she said at last. “Goddamned good for you, and good for Lireinne, too. It's going to be hard for you, but you can do it, Emma—I know you can.” Sarah patted Emma's hand and nodded in approval. “That's a nasty scratch you've got there,” she remarked. “And an ugly cut on your palm, too.”

Involuntarily, Emma's hand moved to the self-inflicted wound on her arm.

“Oh, I did that to myself by accident . . . gardening,” she lied. “I wasn't paying attention.” That, at least, was true—in a way.

“Well, just don't let that shit get infected. You want some coffee?” Sarah got up and put the kettle on to boil without waiting for a reply. “I'll cut you a hunk of new bread.”

The two friends sat in the kitchen together for another hour, sipping coffee, eating warm bread with honey, and gradually mending the rift, until Emma glanced at the clock on the wall.

“I need to go,” she said. “But this has been . . . so great. Thank you for being patient with me.” Emma pushed the purring cat off her lap, got up, and gathered her keys.

With a muted pop of eighty-one-year-old knees, Sarah stood, too.

“I'm damned proud of you, Em. That girl was mighty sad when they loaded Mose up, you know. I think she's going to be needing a friend while she gets used to him being gone. Told me he'd been back there in the field behind their piece-of-shit trailer for as long as she could recall—the only friend she really had when she was growing up. Hell, that'd make Mose at least twenty, twenty-five, and that's getting on for a horse. Lireinne did right, seeing him off to a new home, even though it was hard for her to do. Now you go on and do the right damned thing, too. Let me know how it goes.”

The zinnias were bright as a sunrise on the kitchen counter as Emma hugged her friend, bright as her renewed resolve to do what she could to repair her fledgling friendship with Lireinne. Her fearful questions wouldn't stop her this time.

But as Emma drove home, she couldn't help turning it over endlessly in her head—the possibly unfair but nonetheless threatening suspicion that had reared its head the instant she'd learned of Lireinne's elevation from lowly hoser to Con's personal assistant.

Lireinne.

Con.

How long before the inevitable came to pass? Despite her resolve, Emma was sure in her bones that Con's appetite was at the bottom of the girl's promotion. True to his nature, her ex-husband wouldn't be able to resist the temptation.

Would Lireinne?