Seidel, Kathleen Gilles (36 page)

It was nearly an hour before she came back upstairs. He was still awake, reading.

"You're nice to me, do you know that?" she said.

"Only because you have money. Was that call anything you can talk about?"

She rolled her eyes. "I know some strange people."

"Tell me."

"Actually, it's not that interesting. I do get some odd calls. This was pretty straightforward."

Her caller was Tim Salterstahl, a publicist romantically involved with the editor of a new, but highly visible, magazine, and he had gotten his girlfriend to agree to a "cover or nothing" deal for one of his clients. "Cover or nothing" meant that if the personality was not featured on the cover of the magazine, the article would not appear at all, the assumption being that for this celebrity anything less than a cover was an insult and it would lessen his or her chances for a cover on another magazine.

Jack Nicholson and Mel Gibson, Jill said, deserved "cover or nothing" deals. Tim's client did not. Indeed, as the romance waned, the editor invoked the "or nothing."

"So why did he call you?"

"Because he was too angry to sleep. He wanted me to come home, talk to Brenda, force her to change her mind. I was to insist that she put his client on the cover and insist that she stop making such a big deal over him not wanting to give her a key to his apartment."

"So what are you going to do?"

"Talk to him tomorrow, talk to Brenda. For this client inside coverage is far better than nothing. They'll both see it," she said confidently.

"What about the apartment keys?"

"That I'm not going to get involved with."

He laughed and slung his arm around her shoulders, pulling her to him. "Do you know who you remind me of?"

She shook her head, her soft hair tickling his chest. "No, who?"

"Your brother Brad. Everyone is always calling him when they're in trouble. He'll do anything for anyone."

Jill winced. "So the pathology must be hereditary."

"I don't see what's so pathological about it. You're two loyal, generous people."

"Who may be enabling other people to be very weak. But loyal and generous is my goal," she acknowledged. "We could go five years without seeing each other, but if you called at three a.m. needing guns, money, or lawyers, I'd recognize your voice and get you what you needed."

Doug didn't think much of the idea of not seeing her for five years. "Orthopedic surgeons were always what I needed at three a.m."

"I know the one the Lakers use."

"That's good information to have. Do you know what you should be when you grow up?"

She tilted her chin back to look up at him. "No, what?"

"An athletic director. You'd be great at it."

"I probably would be. Late-night bad news is one of my specialties."

"College athletics has plenty of that." Actually, Doug was semi-serious. What an asset she would be to a college program. Some coaches had wives who contributed whales to the teams, helping in the recruiting, mothering the troubled players, looking pretty on camera. If you could just hide how much money Jill had, as that would be a barrier, then she—

This was a truly profitable line of analysis. What was he planning to do? Fix her up with some of the guys who still had jobs?

He tightened the arm around her shoulders. "Tell me one other thing. All these people who call you at three a.m., what if you called them? Could they get you guns and orthopedic surgeons?"

"I don't know... I've never tried. I generally don't need things at three a.m."

"Neither does Brad."

The next day Doug left the barn at lunch and drove to the Radio Shack in Woodstock, bringing home yards and yards of phone wire. He deftly fished it through the walls, installing phone jacks throughout the house.

He was working in the front bedroom when he saw, turning up the lane, something that had probably never visited Aunt Carrie—a Federal Express truck. He didn't know they came out here.

He stepped out of the window, onto the roof of the veranda. "You can leave it on the porch," he called out to the driver.

The brown-uniformed driver stepped back, shielding his eyes with his hand. "I need a signature."

"Throw it up."

Throwing a clipboard and pen up twelve feet seemed like the simplest of acts to Doug. He was continually amazed at what klutzes other people were. The clipboard struck the underside of the gutter.

"Oh, hell," he muttered, not wanting to go inside, through the house, down the stairs, out the front door. So he sat down at the edge of the roof. He twisted, lowering himself down, holding on to the facia board for a moment so that, with his arms extended, it wasn't much of a drop to the grass.

The package was addressed to Jill. He signed for it, then carried it around to the side of the house where she was working in the garden.

Except she wasn't working. She was standing there, slapping her gardening gloves against her leg and grinning wickedly.

"You could have come around front and signed for it," he pointed out.

"And you could have come down the steps like a normal person. What is it?"

"Beats me. It's for you."

She leaned around his arm to look at the address. "Oh, shit."

Doug had never heard her use naughty words before. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing... or at any rate, nothing new. It's the dress my mother said she was going to get me."

He couldn't see what was so scatological about that. "Open it."

She slit open the packing tape with the blade of her pruning shears. Wiping her hands on the seat of her jeans, she folded back the tissue paper packed inside and pulled out a dress.

It was pretty. No, it wasn't just pretty—Doug's vocabulary started to fail him—it was elegant. A pale brown, sort of a tobacco-y color, it reminded him of a French Foreign Legion uniform although it was really rather simple, with a double row of low-set silver buttons and a pair of welted pockets at the hip.

Jill lifted out the layer of white tissue paper that had been padding the bottom of the box. She checked the box, seeming surprised to find it empty. She shook the tissue paper and then looked around to see if something had fallen out. She was looking perplexed.

"Are you missing something?" he asked. "Here's the card."

He read it over her shoulder.
Jill dearest, I do hope you like this. I assume you're traveling with your silver jewelry. It should work well. You may have to pick up some ivory or bone shoes.

Jill was now looking dumbfounded. "I don't believe this." She was shaking her head. "This is not like my mother."

"How so?"

"She sent a dress, just one. No shoes, no accessories, no nothing. Ivory or bone shoes! She has this thing about shoes. They have to be exactly right. Ivory or bone—that's not like her. It's just not like her."

This was much too technical for Doug. "I'm not sure I follow you here. Is this good news or bad?"

"It's the most amazing news in the world. Mother could have spent the better part of a week looking for exactly the right shoes, tobacco piped in cognac, something like that. I asked her to send me a dress, and she sent me a dress— one."

"Did you think that she might send you more than one?"

"I honestly wouldn't have been surprised if there had been four or five."

"Four or five?" He was astonished. "Five new dresses? Are you serious?"

"Oh, yes. My mother is a compulsive shopper." She looked down at the one dress again. "Or she used to be."

Doug finally understood. "So this is very good news indeed." He couldn't imagine what it would be like to have a mother as troubled as Jill's.

"It is, indeed," she said lightly. "I may never have to shop again."

Life was becoming remarkably pleasant. Of course, Aunt Carrie's house was not comfortable. The mattresses were lumpy, and the sofa was covered with dog hair. The water was so hard that Jill had to use twice as much shampoo to get any kind of lather. The electrical wiring couldn't handle the simultaneous use of the toaster and the clothes dryer. In the bathtub every morning was an offering of what Randy and Doug called caraway seeds, but was, of course, mouse droppings. But comfort wasn't important to Jill, or she wouldn't have joined the Peace Corps. Nor would she ever visit Henry, whose magnificent ducal home was always a freezing minefield. Since none of the antique-filled rooms at Bickering had enough electric outlets, the floors were always a tangle of extension cords.

Fortunately privacy also didn't matter to Jill. The bathroom was right off the kitchen. Doug and Randy never folded their laundry and so were forever sprinting nude across the kitchen and down the cellar steps to dress out of the dryer. Moreover, they had a combined total of eight sisters. Not a day went by when at least one sister did not appear, bringing half of a lasagne, part of a cake, some early garden produce. Randy's sisters had been the most frequent visitors, but with Jill and Doug openly gallivanting about together, his curious sisters started appearing more. All eight sisters felt entirely at home in the house. None of them ever knocked. They opened the front door, called out "Hello," and without waiting for an answer, walked in.

Randy was the youngest in his family, and his sisters still babied him terribly. In Jill's mind this accounted for how cavalier he was with the feelings of the innumerable Young Lovelies he dated. Doug, on the other hand, had been the middle child—"think of a vicious volleyball game from the net's point of view" was how he described it. His sisters treated him with an easy-going, off-hand contempt. It was clear from the way they spoke about him behind his back that he had long since earned their respect, but they never let that admiration pollute their manner of dealing with him. They kept the boy in his place.

No wonder he had thrived amid the pressures of college coaching. Being caught between the team's starters, the non-starters, the athletic department, the administration, and the alumni must have felt normal.

Every morning Jill went to the 7-Eleven with Doug and Randy for coffee. She loved it. She liked the little routine of pouring one's own coffee, selecting from one of four cup sizes. She liked how neat the stainless steel counter stayed; the customers threw out the little cream containers and mopped up stray drips with paper napkins. She also liked the people she met there—working men, all of them, quite different from the affluent, professional Caslers and Ringlings.

If Randy was shorthanded, she'd spend the day in the henhouse, working in the thick, sour air. Otherwise, she'd work in the flowers or clear out the house. She called Alice, now comfortably retired in a cottage on one of Henry's estates, and had a transatlantic refresher course on the difference between nosegays and bouquets, between cottage gardens and country gardens. The flowers now arrived at market with deliciously English labels that left the suburban Anglophiles swooning.

On Memorial Day she had gone with Brad and Louise to put flowers on family graves and then asked if either minded if she were to clear out the house. Brad had protested at her even asking. It was her house, she should do what she liked.

"I don't think that the contents are mine," she pointed out. "I really have no right to throw them away."

"I don't think any of it has much quality," Louise said.

"That's what I thought." Jill was surprised that Louise was being gracious about something.

"So you're asking if any of us want or need such shoddy items?"

Randy later told Jill that his mother and sisters had already been through the house, taking everything that they wanted. For three weeks she determinedly dragged bags and bags of trash out to his truck. She vacuumed the dog hair, pulled up the carpets, and took down the heavy, dusty drapes. She had the floors sanded and bleached, the walls painted. She washed the windows and left them uncurtained. She persuaded the volunteer fire department to come take half the furniture for their annual sale. She picked up a few things at local crafts stores—some willow baskets, a pair of pine rockers, a simple pottery lamp. Soon it was looking like her—clean, simple, sparse, but with enough of her mother's touch that it was comfortable.

Every Friday she and Doug went to the Farmer's Market. Every Wednesday she rode with Allison. Every Tuesday she went to group.

After her third trip the twenty-seven-hour journey started to feel like an ordeal. The problem was that, because few people wanted to arrive in Washington between midnight and dawn, the commercial airlines had no eastbound flights scheduled for late afternoon or early evening. So Jill chartered a twin-engine Lear Jet with its sexy swept-back wings. It could take her in and out of Winchester, which saved the long drive to Dulles and brought her back east at her convenience. She could be back in her own bed as early as one or two in the morning. It was staggeringly expensive—truly breathtakingly so—but she didn't care.

One Tuesday after the meeting had finished, Cathy Cromartie stopped her in the parking lot. "Is something going on?"

"What do you mean?"

"For the last five weeks you've come wearing the same clothes, but arrived with a different car and driver. That struck me as a little odd, that's all... but I'm sorry. It's really none of my business."

"Sure it is," Jill said breezily although, in fact, this was the sort of thing Cathy should have brought up during group, not after hours. "Except the truth is even odder. I seem to be spending the summer in Virginia. I just come back for group."

"In Virginia?" Cathy was amazed. "What's in Virginia?"

"Cooler air, and remember that hotshot former basketball player who was interested in
Weary Hearts?
He's there."

"Jill! You're not in love, are you?"

In love?
Jill had never phrased it so directly. She pulled off her sunglasses. "You know, I think I am. Yes, I am. I really am."

"Oh, Jill!" And suddenly Cathy—rigid, controlled Cathy— embraced her. That's wonderful. So am I."

"You are?" Jill stepped back, delighted. "How splendid. Tell me everything. Who is he?"

"You're going to die. It's stranger than someone from Virginia. He's a carpenter."