Tell Me Lies (11 page)

“I woke you.” C.L. leaned in the doorway, his eyes dark with what looked like appreciation but couldn’t be since she was rumpled from sleep and wearing cutoffs and a pink plaid shirt that was older than God. He ducked his head at her. “Sorry I got you up.”

Maddie closed her eyes against the fact of him as opposed to the idea of him. She’d been thinking about dragging him out of that doorway and having her way with him, and now here he was in the all-too-solid flesh, which unfortunately was looking pretty good, dressed as it was in chambray and old denim. It was embarrassing. She opened her eyes and tried to be polite. “No problem. What do you want?”

“Anna heard about your accident. She sent brownies.” He held out a plastic-wrapped plate to her, and she took it, being careful to avoid his eyes. Making eye contact would be bad.

Looking straight ahead gave her a great view of how broad his chest was in his chambray shirt. The shirt looked soft from washing, and Maddie restrained herself from reaching out and touching it. That was the kind of thing that men often misconstrued. She was pretty sure C.L. would misconstrue it.
Get rid of him,
her conscience told her. “Thank you, C.L. Tell Anna I appreciate it.”

“I’ll do that,” he said. “Have you seen Brent lately?”

“No.” Maddie smiled past his left ear and tried to close the door, but he was in the doorframe, leaning against it, and there was a lot of him, and he didn’t move. “Well, it’s been nice seeing you, C.L., but I’ve got to go eat these brownies now.”

His grin widened. “Thanks, it’s great to see you, too.”

Maddie’s heartbeat kicked up a notch. He had to go. She tried to close the door again, but he still didn’t move, so she gave up on subtlety. “I’m sorry to be rude, but this is a bad time. Could you come back later?”

“Sure. When?”

She’d forgotten he could be this persistent. His persistence was how she’d ended up in the back of his Chevy twenty years ago, but she’d forgotten how flatfooted he could be about it. “How about September? Things should have settled down by then.”

He shook his head. “Can’t wait that long. I have to go back to work on Monday.”

Maddie smiled brightly at him. “Well, maybe the next time you’re in town.”

He straightened and lost his grin. “Maddie, it’s hot. I’m tired. I just want to talk for a couple of minutes.”

Since that was the line he’d used to lure her into his car all those years ago, Maddie winced and shook her head. “C.L., my husband is coming home soon and—”

“Great. Brent’s the one I came to see. Can I come in?”

She could see in his eyes that he wasn’t leaving until he’d talked to Brent. Maddie sighed and stepped back, and C. L. Sturgis walked past her into her house.

“Slam the back door,” she called back to him as she led the way. “It’s old and it doesn’t close right.”

She turned and saw him looking at the edge of the door. “You know, you could plane this down a little and it wouldn’t stick anymore,” he told her, running his hand along the edge. “Only take about five minutes.”

She’d asked Brent to do something about it, but he’d been too busy. He built damn houses, but he was too busy to fix his own back door. Maddie’s head hurt and anger made it worse. If she’d stuck with C.L. twenty years ago, her back door would work.

“Thank you,” she said. “We’ll do that.”

They sat on the splintered picnic table with the bottle hidden between them and drank the sweet-tart juice laced with vodka and talked awkwardly. C.L. looked great in the twilight, broad and tan and strong and healthy, and Maddie slurped her drink so she wouldn’t think of any more adjectives. She was married, even if it was unhappily. Adjectives had no place in her life.

“So how have things been?” C.L. asked her, and Maddie almost laughed. “You and Treva still tight?”

“Yep,” Maddie said. “Blood sisters forever.”

“And you both have kids.” C.L. shook his head. “Hard to believe. I leave town for twenty years and you both lose your heads.”

“We just did it to fill in the downtime until you got back,” Maddie said.

“So tell me about your life,” C.L. said.

It’s not really my life. I just live it for the convenience of other people.
“I live in Frog Point. My mother calls every day. I visit my grandmother in the retirement home every Sunday so she can yell at me. I teach art with my best friend, who teaches business. I have the perfect child, who wants a dog. My microwave is broken and my car is dead.” Maddie drank another slug of screwdriver. “That’s about it. Not very interesting.”

“Hey,” C.L. said. “I’m here. That’s interesting.”

“Yes, it is,” Maddie said. “Thank you for stopping by. Without you, I’d be calling around pricing ovens.”
And rehearsing my divorce speech.
“I owe you.”

“Good. Don’t forget it. Tell me about Treva.”

“Treva?”
Treva has a problem she’s not sharing.
“Well, she has two kids, Melanie, who’s eight, and Three, who’s twenty.”

C.L. frowned at her. “They named the kid Three?”

“No, they named him Howie Junior.” Maddie poured herself another orange juice and surreptitiously slopped in some more vodka. The alcohol was loosening her muscles nicely. The hell with Tylenol 3. “Howie didn’t care, but Treva insisted and she wouldn’t budge. Then Howie’s mother— Do you remember Irma Basset?”

“School secretary?” C.L. grinned. “Hell, yes. She saw me at all my worst moments. Not a woman to mess with.”

“Well, Irma pointed out that the baby couldn’t be a Junior because Howie was a Junior, so he’d have to be Howie the Third. Treva was going to fight her on it until she found out that the only way for the kid to be Howie Junior was for Howie Senior to die, which would make her Howie the Senior and the baby the Junior.”

“Only in Frog Point,” C.L. said. “I bet it took weeks to work this out and the whole town discussed it.”

“Easy guess,” Maddie said. “So then they took to calling the baby Howie Three, and eventually they just shortened it to Three and it stuck. And now he’s twenty, and I’m middle-aged.”

“Beats death,” C.L. said.

The alcohol loosened Maddie’s muscles and she felt her tension evaporate, but C.L. started every time a car door slammed, and every now and then he checked his watch before asking her another mindless question.
What does he want?
she wondered, and then,
What do I care?
Brent was coming home any minute, and she was leaving him, and her life as she knew it was over, and all her concentration had to go on not making a mess for her mother and Em. C.L. was just a very attractive subplot at
Gotterdammerung.

An hour and three screwdrivers later, C.L. stopped checking his watch and they’d both relaxed. Frog Point was semidark with the thick velvety dusk that comes on hot August evenings. The crickets were vocal but slowing down, probably from exhaustion. Maddie pictured them rubbing their legs together frantically in unison. They must have the thinnest thighs in the insect world. Her glass was empty.

“Let’s just pour the vodka into the juice carton and drink from there.” She tucked her tongue between her teeth and poured.

C.L. looked at her. “You develop a drinking problem since I saw you last?”

“No.” Maddie raised the carton to him in toast. “As a matter of fact, I just started drinking tonight.”

C.L. arched an eyebrow at her. “Anything you want to tell me about? Money troubles maybe?” She looked at him sharply, and he added, “Just asking.”

“No. There is nothing I want to tell you about. In fact, this will all be over in September, but no, you’ll be out of town then.” Maddie swished the carton around and took a drink. “If you don’t like it, go home.”

“No. Hell, I love it. Give me the carton.” She passed it over, and C.L. took a healthy swig and choked.

“I know,” Maddie said. “We’re a little low on orange juice. Em keeps drinking it.”

“Healthy little devil.” He tipped the rest of the carton into the grass.

“Hey.”

“It slipped. What happens in September?”

“You spilled my vodka.”

C.L. looked at the screwdriver-soaked grass. “I was thinking maybe we should pace ourselves.”

“Come on.” Maddie shoved herself off the picnic table. “There’s wine in the house.”

C.L. followed her. “Why don’t we have a Coke? And then you can tell me what’s going to happen in September. If it’s good, I’ll come back and watch.”

Maddie picked her way to the house.
I’m a little drunk,
she thought,
but I’m not stupid. This guy is after something.
She leaned against the screen door, and C.L. stopped on the porch step behind her.

“Maddie?”

“I was thinking,” she said, and went into the house.

“Bad sign.” He followed her, slamming the screen door behind them. “It was you thinking that ended our last relationship.”

Maddie headed for the cupboard where they kept the wine Brent’s parents gave them every holiday even though they didn’t drink wine. “Two hours in the back of a ‘sixty-seven Chevrolet is not a relationship.”

C.L. leaned against the refrigerator. “Wrong. Two hours in the back of a ‘ninety-seven Chevy is not a relationship. You could raise kids in the back of a ’sixty-seven. God, that was a great car. I wonder whatever happened to it.”

Maddie pulled a bottle of wine out of the cupboard. “You ran it through the guardrail out on Route 33.”

“I mean, I wonder what happened to it after that,” C.L. said with dignity. “Somebody might have fixed it up.”

Maddie snorted and handed him the wine bottle. “Yeah, into ashtrays. They found pieces of it for years.” She began to rummage through the junk drawer looking for the corkscrew. “As a matter of fact, you became a sort of folk hero. Every time somebody’d pick up a piece of scrap iron, they’d say, ‘Must have come off of old C.L.’s Chevy. Good old C.L.‘” She found the corkscrew and passed it over.

C.L. took it from her and began to screw it into the cork. “Well, that’s nice. That’s real nice.”

“And then they’d snicker.”

He stopped twisting at the cork and grinned at her. “You’re a hard woman, Maddie Martindale. Good thing I like hard women.”

She leaned against the counter and narrowed her eyes at him. He couldn’t possibly still be carrying a torch for her after all these years. He couldn’t possibly be thinking she’d go to bed with him again. That was out of the question.

Probably.

He looked great, tall and broad, and she was a sucker for tall and broad. Of course, he wasn’t as tall and broad as Brent. Well, that was okay. Brent looked like a pretentious biker. C.L. looked like, well, an adult. Actually, what C.L. looked like was a damn good time. And she was due for a damn good time. Just once, she deserved to do something just for herself. Screw Brent.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

C.L. popped the cork on the wine and stood there with the bottle in one hand and the corkscrewed cork in the other. “Go where?”

“Up to the Point. The way we did in high school.” She smiled, enthused with her idea. This was a plan. This would make her feel better. This was
action.
Revenge, that was the answer. She’d go up to the Point with C.L., and Bailey would tell everybody, and then she wouldn’t be the nice little wife being cheated on anymore. It would be like screaming “Fuck” on Main Street, only better. She beamed at C.L.

He did not look enthused. He looked horrified. He put the wine on the counter and said, “Maddie. Honey. You’ve had enough to drink.”

Her smile deflated. “Is this rejection?”

“No, no.” C.L. ran his hand through his thick dark hair, looking more distracted than she’d ever seen him. “Well, maybe. You’re married. A small point, I know, but—”

Maddie scowled at him. “You coming with me or not?”

“To the Point.” He seemed to be having trouble coping with the concept. It seemed clear to Maddie.

Maddie picked up the wine bottle. “Yeah. Re-create our youth.” She tried to smile temptingly at him, but it wasn’t very good, and he shook his head and took the bottle from her.

“Not a good idea, honey. I was a lot younger, and cars were a lot bigger then, and you weren’t married. You don’t want to do this.”

Maddie glared at him. “Fine, forget it. You can go now.”

“Wait.” C.L. put the wine back on the counter and held up his hand. “Let’s discuss this.”

Maddie crossed her arms over her chest and glared harder. “You don’t discuss adultery. You just do it.”

“Well, that’s a real turn-on.” He leaned against the wall and folded his arms, too. “I didn’t think it was passion that was driving you into my arms. You know, I’m about two beats behind here, and it’s confusing me. What’s going on?”

Maddie looked at him, really looked at him this time, leaning there grinning at her, his face all edges and angles, his dark eyes glittering. For the first time in forty-eight hours, she forgot Brent and the anger.

“You’ve changed,” she said. “You’re—”

“Older?” He straightened up and took the wine from the counter. “Twenty years, honey. It makes a difference. Got any glasses?”

She got them from the cupboard as she went on. “I suppose. But it’s not age. You look good. You really do. You look. . . centered. Sure of yourself.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not a junior in high school anymore. Thank God.” He looked at the glasses. “You want Pebbles or BamBam?”

“Oh, sorry.” She reached for them. “Those are Em’s.”

He moved them out of her reach. “If you have no preference, I’ll take BamBam. Us guys have to stick together.” He poured the glasses half-full and pushed hers toward her. “To Em,” he said, lifting his glass, and she clinked hers with his.

She drank about half of it and then turned and went into the hall, taking her glass with her, to stand before the mirror in the entryway. “I can’t remember what I looked like,” she said as he came to stand behind her. He was only four or five inches taller than she was, so he put his head beside her to see. Brent always towered over her; he used to put his chin on her head when people took pictures of them. She hated it, especially the way his chin would dig into her head.

“You looked like this,” he said. “Only smoother, sort of unalive.”

She made a face in the mirror. “Unwrinkled is what you’re getting at.”

“No.” He shook his head. “You were sort of unlived-in then. Nobody home yet. You were cute and spunky and sort of sexy in an Ivory Snow sort of way, but you weren’t quite there yet. Sort of a pod person. Now you’re there.”

Maddie took another drink and considered. What thoughts had she had in high school? What passions had she suffered? She was appalled to realize there weren’t any; her memories were of what other people had done, what other people had wanted. What Brent had wanted. And it wasn’t just high school, either. That was her whole life. If somebody asked her who she was now, she’d say, “Martha Martindale’s daughter” or “Brent Faraday’s wife” or “Emily Faraday’s mother,” but she wouldn’t be able to say anything that was just Maddie. Even her career depended on her being somebody’s teacher. Her whole life was defined by relationships. “That’s awful,” she said.

“Except for one night,” C.L. said close to her ear. “You were there for me one night.”

Maddie sighed. “I think all you saw that night was your reflection. I think you’re right. I don’t think I’ve been there until now.”

“Now?”

“I’m having a very maturing week,” she said, and finished her glass. He was very close beside her, and she liked it. She smiled over her shoulder at him. “Want some more?”

He looked thoughtful. “I don’t know. Does alcohol still have the same effect on you?”