The Dixie Belle's Guide to Love (12 page)

“Metaphorical sex. Fantasy sex.”

“Never going to happen again as long as I live sex.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No, I’m not kidding. I’m a happily ever after, roots in a small town, plain, chubby girl with one asset to my name.”

“Don’t sell yourself short.”

“I’m not selling anything, Cozie. Not selling, not buying. I’m trying to get things back the way they were.”

“But
why
? The way things were was not all that great, girl.” She took Rita by the shoulders and met her gaze in the mirror. “Wouldn’t you rather find out about the way things
could
be? Even if it’s only a short-term dream?”

“My life is off kilter enough without tossing a temporary lover into the mix.”

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe he’s not here to be part of the turmoil but to provide you with an anchor?”

“Anchor?” She shut her eyes, her head bowed. “Like so much more deadweight? Yeah, I really could use another person in my life like that.”

Cozie patted Rita’s shoulder.

Rita did not meet her gaze, even in the mirror.

Finally, Cozie’s necklaces rattled quietly as she stepped away. “I ought to go back over to Miss Peggy’s and tell her that Will…what should I tell her?”

“I don’t know, you’re her new bosom buddy.” Rita toyed with a half-empty bottle of perfume that Pernel had given her almost a decade ago. “What’s that about anyway?”

“She’s interesting. You ought to get to know her.”

“I’ve known her all my life.”

“You see her through Jillie’s eyes and probably never looked past her public persona. Have you ever sat down and talked to her?”

“She was in the Palace just a few days ago.”

“Not the same. You of all people should understand that passing the time of day, or night, or seventeen years of marriage with someone does not guarantee that you truly know them.”

“Well, amen to that.”

“So I’ll tend to Miss Peggy. Do you have a plan to work on Will?”

“I told you that relationship has no future.”

“Work on getting him over to visit his mother?”

“Oh…I…no. No, that’s not my place.”

“Then why finagle him into staying here to help you with the Palace?”

“Because he…” She sighed.

“If you didn’t want to pursue a relationship or hope to convince the man to make peace with his mama, then why not tell him to hightail it back to Memphis?”

Because he made her mad. Because his refusal to make himself available to his family touched a raw nerve in her. Because he was so insistent that her choice never to give up on people you love was foolhardy, and she wanted to show him different. She shrugged.

“Oh, Rita.” Her friend pulled her into a hug.

Not the usual girlfriend hug, either, but a long, close, healing embrace. Rita shut her eyes and eased her breath out slowly. For the first time since she’d awakened in bed with Will that morning she felt safe again, like she might just make it back to her old life not too much the worse for wear.

Cozette stepped back, bending at the knees to put them at eye level. “What do you want?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“It’s the kind of question you should be asking yourself.”

“Yes, well, since you and Jillie saw fit to meddle in my life I haven’t had time to talk to myself as much as I used to, much less ask questions.”

“You are what you say you are.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“And you get what you say you want.”

“Not always.”

“No, not always. Then again maybe those times when a person doesn’t think she got what she asked for, she didn’t want it badly enough.”

“Cozie, why do conversations with you always end up with my head hurting?”

“Better your head than your heart.” She kissed
Rita on the cheek. “Think this through, sugar. You have the power to go after your heart’s desire. Don’t let anyone—not even yourself—take that away from you.”

“No. I don’t care. Throw out any excuse you want. Throw down a first-class hissy fit. Hell, throw a friggin’ debutante ball and invite real debutantes with real balls.” Will covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “No offense, Pernel.”

“Offense?” The other man stuffed one hand into a stiff canvas work glove. “I was already dreaming up what to wear.”

Will stretched the phone cord into the kitchen, putting his back to the commotion in the dining area of the Palace. “Today is D-day. Demolition day. The biggest single undertaking of the entire renovation.”

“Excuse me.” Pernel pushed his way into the kitchen and immediately began clanging cabinets and opening drawers.

Will clenched his teeth at the intrusion on the
lone island of privacy he’d had in the three full days since Rita had coerced him into staying on. “Do you have to do that now?”

“Just be a minute,” Pernel assured him.

Will hunkered down over the phone and pressed on. “For the past few days we’ve bickered and bartered, kissed behinds, kicked butt, and bent over backward to accommodate a mostly volunteer workforce. Do you understand that?”

A “humph” followed by measured breathing on the other end was his only answer.

“And finally everyone involved in this mammoth undertaking is, at this very moment, waiting in the next room drinking coffee, flapping their jaws, shuffling their feet, and generally getting restless.”

“That’s right.” Pernel shook his head and kept searching.

“In ten minutes we will start ripping out every booth, every bolt, every fixture and bit of flooring that we can get our hands on in there.”

Pernel froze, his eyes shut, and clucked his tongue.

Will kicked at the floorboard with his steel-toed boot, put two fingers to his temple, and forged on talking before his tirade could be interrupted with whatever was on the other man’s mind. “Already today the guys hauling in the industrial Dumpster have busted up the sidewalk. All the utilities have been shut off for the day, so we’ve had to lug in water, had to arrange to use
the church for cooking, and we have a big blue Porta-Potti parked two feet away from the front door.”

“Four feet away if it’s an inch.” Pernel went right on rummaging around the kitchen, muttering. “Think a master carpenter would be a better judge of that kind of thing.”

Will put his finger in his ear and lowered his voice to a commanding rumble. “That’s what I’m dealing with today. I do not have time for frauds, or whiners, or lag-abouts wasting my precious time with a bunch of nonsense.”

The slam of the phone in the cradle hung in the air in a way that reminded him of the guilt he felt at lashing out at the innocent caller. Guilt that just as quickly turned to anger and then to frustration. He rubbed his forehead, right between his eyes. “Damn it. When did everyone’s problem become
my
problem?”

“How
is
your sweet mama?”

He thought of denying he’d just hung up on his mother, but knew it would do him no good. Rita’s ex-husband was on to him. How or why, he could not say. Still, the man standing there in freshly ironed white painter’s overalls and an undershirt—the kind usually called a wife-beater of all things—with the creases still in it from the packaging seemed to have him pegged from the git-go. And that fact just plain chapped Will’s butt.

“Why aren’t you wearing a dress today, Starla, darling?”

“Same reason you aren’t in your old football jersey, Wild Billy, baby.”

“I haven’t worn a football jersey in years.”

“Doesn’t matter. You don’t have to have it on for all the folks in town to see you that way.”

He gritted his teeth. “So what? Are you saying that even in that getup people see you in a dress?”

“People see me the way they want to see me. You can’t deny that.”

He didn’t try.

“And people see you the way they want to see you. The only difference is that I’m okay with how they look at me and what they think. It just doesn’t bother me anymore.”

“But it bothers me? How people in Hellon see me? That your point?”

“Honestly, my point is that clothes do not make the man. Least not in our cases.”

He folded his arms and cocked his head. He’d listen to Pernel’s theory on this, but he’d be damned if he’d seem receptive.

“In our cases, the man makes himself. In my case that translates to makes himself over. In yours—makes something more of himself than a rich, lucky, son of a bitch—no disrespect to your mama—”

“Understood.”

“High-school jock.”

Will gave the briefest I’m-following-you nod he could muster.

“The clothes we use to express or downplay
those choices may help us face the world with our illusions, but they don’t mean squat here in Hellon.”

Pernel made sense, and that made Will want to punch the wall.

“You dress like you don’t belong here, West. Like you have no stake in this town. But it will always be a part of who you are. You will always be adored here.”

“You’ve got your share of admirers around and about I’d dare say, Pernel.” His mother was one, it seemed. And Rita. Will dug the thumb of his right hand into the palm of his left, like a baseball player working his glove. “What of it?”

“Just seems to me that if a body finds a place where folks accept the person he
wants
to be as much as the person he
seems
to be, well, maybe that ain’t the worst place under the sun after all.”

“Damn it, Pernel.” He gritted his teeth and shut his eyes.

Pernel laughed. “It’s killing you, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“That I’m not the thoughtless, evil jerk you want me to be?”

“You screwed Rita over royally.”

“Word around town is that I’m not the only one.”

“If you weren’t a lady under those overalls, Pernel, I’d knock you on your butt for saying that.”

He folded his arms and puffed his chest out. “And if I
weren’t
a lady, I’d do the same to you.”

“I’m not the one who sold Rita’s home out from under her.”

“House.” Pernel put both hands in the deep side pockets of his overalls. “That was no home excepting how Rita made it one.”

“No surprise. Rita has a way of making something damn fine out of whatever life hands her.”

“She tried to do that with our relationship, for sure.” He eyed Will in way that left no doubt that, given the opportunity, Rita would apply the same kind of loyalty and compassion to a relationship with Will. “But ours was no marriage except in her desire to stick it out till death do us part. As Lacey Marie got older we had less and less in common and I…I just couldn’t be the man she needed me to be.”

“I’ll imagine my own cross-dressing joke and laugh quietly to myself to save time.”

“Appreciated.” Pernel gave a nod and drew a long breath. “Thing was, I saw us both growing older but not really growing at all, not as a couple or as individuals.”

“Yeah. I’ve had that ‘where am I going and how will I know when I get there?’ dialogue with myself a few times these last few years, too.”

“Finally, I woke up to the fact that I was running out of time to become…well, to become myself.”

“Okay. Understood.” Had he and Pernel actually agreed on something? Will set his jaw and wrapped his knuckles on the burnished stainless-steel countertop. “But you could have made a
gentler exit, could have eased your way out and left Rita with—”

“You think I didn’t try? Look around you! Why do you think I put a brand-new kitchen in a dump like this?”

“Good business? Improve customer relations?”

“Customer relations? You’ve gone over this place with a fine-toothed comb—you honestly think the Pig Rib Palace clientele are the type who care about the state of the kitchen? Hell, as long as the beer has a head and the ribs don’t have hair, they are one happy crowd.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that.”

“I tried to tell Rita in a million ways I wasn’t happy.

When I redid the kitchen she should have seen I was getting ready to change everything.”

“Starting with the Palace.”

“I hoped to gradually turn this place into something…well, that’s water under the bridge now because there is no gradual with Rita. There’s the way things are, the way things are going to stay, and the only way out is to kick up a hailstorm and force her to deal with the aftermath.”

“Sounds harsh.”

Pernel shook his head.

“But not just on Rita. You had to consider your daughter.”

“Lacey Marie knew I was going to do it, even encouraged me.”

“For a fact?”

“She’s a smart girl. Has a good heart. That’s her mama’s doing.”

“Rita really could do anything if she wanted.”

“You have no idea.”

Will wondered at that but knew a direct question would get him nowhere. Coaxing Pernel to keep talking might yield some answers, however. “She could do a damn sight better than ending up a cook in this piss-poor excuse for a roadside restaurant.”

“Aren’t you going to say ‘no offense’?”

“Nope.”

“I’ll accept that.”

“One thing
I
won’t accept. If Rita ends up stuck here, instead of following her dreams…”

“So, she did tell you.”

“Of course, she told me.” Will paused, half-expecting to feel the ground begin to shake. That lie had come so fast and so smooth, he figured at least two generations of gentleman Wests had just rolled over in their graves.

“Have you heard her, then?”

Will cleared his throat. “Not exactly heard, more—”

“You have to hear her. Make her drag out that karaoke machine I got her for our last Christmas together.”

“Karaoke?”

“Went to the city and got her top of the line, like they use in small bars. Thought it would inspire her to want more for herself and maybe
she’d just up and leave me to go start a singing career in Memphis or Nashville.”

“She sings?”

“Hmm?”

“Uh, she sings…like an angel.”

“I guess so—if angels sing torch songs and the blues. But that don’t seem right, does it?”

Torch songs and the blues.
Sexy, he’d bet, rich and full as the woman who belted them out. He smiled.

Pernel opened one last drawer and muttered under his breath, “Finally.”

“Find what you came in for?”

“Yeah.” He neither said what it was nor took anything from the drawer. “How about you?”

“I only came in here to have some quiet so I could give my dear sweet little mama the hell of a chewing out she deserved.”

“Like everybody in town doesn’t know you’ve checked with her doctors and that you call her every day to make sure she’s all right.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Who’da ever thought me and you would have so much in common, huh?”

“I don’t see…”

“Like this clean, fancy kitchen behind the doors of that gulp-and-gobble exterior. Things ain’t always what they seem with either of us.”

“Yeah. Imagine that. We do have
that
in common, I suppose.”

“You thought I meant Rita, didn’t you?”

“No, why would I?”

“Because she’s my ex-wife and she’s your…What is she to you, West?”

“Friend.”

“You are good at it, I’ll tell you that.”

“Good at what?”

“Keeping the act up. You’re so good at it you may have even fooled yourself for a while.”

“Not only are you overstepping your bounds, buddy, but you’ve made a wrong assumption about Rita and me.”

“Have I?”

He wouldn’t dignify that with an answer, much less another whopping lie.

“Fine. I get it. You think I
don’t
get it, but I do. Just because of what I done, don’t think I don’t appreciate your protecting her good name and keeping the gossips and meddlers from going at her.”

“As long as we understand each other.”

“Better than you think.”

“We have a lot of work waiting.”

“That we do.” He started for the door. “By the way, if you hurt her, I will forget I’m a lady and come after you. That’s a promise.”

“I won’t hurt Rita.” He meant it even if he remained skeptical of the odds on carrying it off. “I can’t. We just aren’t close enough for that.”

“I don’t believe that, and neither do you.”

“Then believe this, I won’t hurt her because I won’t have the chance to. We’ve got two days to tear everything out of the dining room, then a couple days’ break while the flooring guys come
in. After that, one crew after another to bring in and fit the new fixtures.” He snapped his fingers in quick succession to show how fast the work would go. “Then the finishing work. Rita and I won’t have a moment alone. That should put an end to any talk or speculation.”

“You think talk’s the only thing that can hurt Rita? Man, she’s weathered a lot more of that than even you could inspire.”

“If I don’t see her, I can’t hurt her.”

“You really are a master of denial, you know that?” Pernel headed through the door empty-handed, with the drawer he’d last looked into still hanging open. “And that’s coming from one of the best this town ever saw.”

Will went over and shut the drawer with a
wham
that made the coffee spoons on the counter rattle and dance. He grumbled a curse, stole a glance at the back door, then to the stairway that led to Rita’s apartment.

She’d taken off early that morning, gone to do the grocery shopping to feed her volunteer work crew. She wouldn’t be back until she’d finished that and cooked lunch down at the church.

He was glad he wouldn’t see her. Glad he had not seen much of her these last few days. That would make it so much easier to take his leave when this job was done.

“Torch songs and the blues?” The hair on the back of his neck prickled. He rubbed his knuckles under his jaw. What he wouldn’t give to hear her sing just once before he left.

“Ooo-ooo-oo-yeah.” Rita improvised an ending to an old scorcher of a torch song as she pulled the car to a stop a few feet back from the corner of Winter and Providence.

“The best!” Pernel indulged in an overplayed golf-clap to reward her performance. “As always.”

“Your opinion can’t be trusted. You’re unduly influenced.” She looked across the car seat at her ex-husband.