The Dixie Belle's Guide to Love (13 page)

“Me?” He put his hand to the bib of his dusty overalls. “By what?”

She noticed he had on a pale opalescent nail polish that the morning’s hard work had not chipped. “By the fact that you think I should get out of Hellon and out of your hair.”

Pernel swept his sandy brown bangs to one side with his fingers.

“I know you think I shouldn’t waste my talents here. That I should take up singing in smoky lounges for tips and the occasional hotel key. That’s just the kind of story you’d love to go around telling about your ex-wife, now, isn’t it?”

“I admit, it would make a hell of a conversation starter.” He laughed, then crossed his legs at the ankles. “But then I never needed someone else’s good stories to start a conversation, Rita.”

“True.”

“Fact is that despite all the antipathy between us…”

“Antipathy,” she whispered with a smile, knowing it was just the kind of word Pernel loved
to sprinkle into even the most mundane exchange to impress people. Something Will would never do. But then, he didn’t have to. What impressed people about Will—what impressed her—often came from what he didn’t say.

“Despite our recent unpleasantness,” Pernel went on, “I do remain your most devoted fan.”

After all they had gone through, she still welcomed the sense of comfort she found in his company. Pernel gave her a sense of things as they once were, of continuity and—heaven help her—of having a safety net. No matter what became of them both she knew she could count on Pernel to be there for her, probably driving her crazy. “You must be pretty devoted to have come walking over to the church in the midday sun just to help me load up the lunch fixings.”

“Anything to help. You know that.”

“I know anything but that. The minute I saw you walk through the door of the church basement I figured you were up to something.” Driving her crazy seemed his long-term ambition. That in itself was a form of continuity, she guessed. “If you came to stir up more trouble…”

“I came to help. To maybe make amends a little for how bad I acted when you started all this renovation nonsense.”

“Really?”

“No, not really. I just had had enough of ‘Wild Willie’ ordering everyone around. And frankly, I hated watching people tear down and rip apart what it took most of my adult life to build up.”

She thought of mentioning that she had felt the same way when he left her and later sold her house with her still living in it. Instead she patted his shoulder, nodded, and hummed a non-response. “Hmm.”

“I know it was a dive. I know it seems at odds with the way I want to live the rest of my life, but I still hate what you’re doing to my Palace. I doubt I’ll ever fully accept it.”

“Continuity, Pernel, honey.” She sighed and gripped the wheel. “You do provide me with that.”

“And an appreciative audience for your singing.”

“Yes, that too.”

“Though I do confess if you’re sitting here in the middle of the road waiting for me to demand an encore, you had better switch off the motor to save gas. I’ve had enough entertainment already. I’m hungry, and I’d wager your voice is just about to give out.”

“True again.” She’d been singing all morning. Sultry numbers of aching sexuality and longing followed by sweeping, sorrowful tunes that all but broke your heart to hear. Singing and cooking.

Cooking because she had to and because it acted like a poultice on her raw emotions. And singing because it tore those emotions wide open again and let them soar. Singing gave them voice and power, and a legitimacy that she only dared to claim in the name of the blues and the ballads.

“It’s West, isn’t it?”

She looked in the direction of the Palace. Sitting back from the stop sign like this, she could make out the parking lot. She could see who went in and came out perfectly between the rows of trees that hid her car from view.

She’d discovered the vantage point when Pernel had first left her. She’d spent way too much time parked there, hoping to get a glimpse of the goings-on. She’d told herself she wanted to try to understand her then-husband’s actions by keeping an eye on him. Mostly she was too scared to let go. So she had sat on the edge of her old life and looked in as often as she could.

It left her a tiny bit weak-stomached to sit there now with Pernel at her side, talking about the man she had made love to in that very building.

“He said he wouldn’t hurt you, Rita.”

“He…said?” She swallowed hard but her weak stomach felt like it had crept into her throat. She blinked at her ex. “You two…you talked about me?”

“Only in a roundabout way. Now, don’t get mad, Rita. I still care enough to worry what happens to you, you know.”

“He didn’t
tell
you anything, did he?”

“No, he didn’t; but your reaction sure as hell does.”

She held her head up and shook her hair back. “What reaction?”

He laughed and rolled his eyes. “If there was nothing between the two of you, then those people providing you with all the volunteer labor
would be eating right now instead of starting to wander out into the parking lot, checking their watches. You’re holding back here for a reason.”

She looked in his eyes and felt nothing more than she would if she were staring at a face in a high-school yearbook. Affection and fond memories, but nothing more. Even so, how could she talk to her ex-husband about Will? He simply would not understand.

It had all been so simple when she and Pernel had stopped having sex. It brought a kind of relief, really, to both of them. Neither of them talked about it, or planned it, but after a time they just seemed to know that that part of their relationship had passed. That sort of took the pressure off the rest of it. They fell into an easy friendship. And they had Lacey Marie to act as a bond between them.

Rita had never
stopped
having sex with anyone else before. She had no idea what a miserable experience it would be. Or how awkward it would make her feel around the person she
wasn’t
sleeping with. There had to be a gracious, sophisticated way of dealing with the end of a purely sexual relationship. Perhaps she could put black sheets on the bed, find a sympathetic doctor to start an IV with fine chocolate, and have notecards printed up to send to her friends that would announce “Guess who’s celibate again?”

“Rita?”

She was already picturing greeting cards with
adorable woodland animals in chastity belts when Pernel interrupted her daydream. “Hmmm?”

“It’s a cowardly thing to sit here while people who have worked hard all morning wait for their lunch,” he reminded her like a dog with a bone.

Cowardly. Yes, that described her to a T. Still, she couldn’t put her foot to the gas and go.

“You need to get going now, Rita.”

“Going? I can’t.” Her head thudded against the window as she slumped to the side. “Going means facing Will.”

“So?”

“Facing Will means facing the ugly truth about myself.”

“I refuse to believe there is any such thing,” he said with such conviction he almost had her convinced.

“Well, there is in fact such a thing. And you know, Pernel, the one thing my whole life long that I have worked harder at than singing, or cooking, or maintaining impossible relationships is avoiding the ugly truth about myself.”

“We all do that to some extent.” He slipped his arm over her shoulders, gave her a little shake. “I can’t imagine you are any worse than average and a lot better than…well, a few people who shall remain nameless but could be found in your innermost circle of friends and family.”

She managed a chuckle. “Truth, ugly or not, about anyone else I can handle, you know.”

“Given time, yes, I believe that’s so.”

“But facing up to myself?” She clenched her
jaw and struggled to keep the tears from flooding her eyes. “How could I do that and not have it shake my world to its very foundations?”

“Your world is a lot more solid than you think, Rita.”

“You don’t understand. It will change my world because it will force me to change. If a person knows the worst about herself, then works up the gumption to admit it but doesn’t do anything about it—what kind of a person is that?”

“Damned miserable.” He rubbed a fingertip beneath one eye, careful not to smudge his liner and light mascara. “At least I was for a long time.”

“Stupid,” she whispered. “That’s what this makes me.” So, she’d come full circle since that first day Jillie brought her brother to the Palace. Now just imagining looking Will in the eye made her feel like a first-class chump. A dumped chump, to boot.

All right, technically
she
had dumped
him
—in a preemptive dump because she had known what was coming. And it gave her no consolation these past few days, as they’d tiptoed around one another, never looking in each other’s eyes, talking only about curtains and colors and cushioned versus hardwood chairs.

She should never have maneuvered to make him stay. Stubborn fool of a man had not gone to see his mama and, to hear Cozie tell it, that only dampened Miss Peggy’s spirits all the more. He’d done the work he promised, in record time and
far better than she ever could have managed on her own. But he had not done the work she had hoped.

Then again, neither had she. That’s why she couldn’t push on that pedal and go. She pressed her forehead to the steering wheel. “Lord, but I feel awful.”

“Are you heartbroken, Rita?”

She eased out a long sigh. “No. Heartbroken implies my heart has gotten involved. It hasn’t.” Her head, her hopes and, heaven help her, her hips were involved but not her heart. “I’m just so…disappointed. And embarrassed. And stupid.”

“Now that’s not true. I will not allow you to talk that way about yourself.”

“I am what I say I am,” she whispered. “Then I am…a mess.”

“You are amazing, Rita. You could do anything you put your mind to.”

She took a deep breath, and the smell of ham salad and baked beans, corn-bread muffins, and peach pie filled her senses. “You think I can sneak in and out of the Palace without once crossing paths with old Wild Billy?”

“Oh, Rita.” Pernel put his hand to his forehead and looked toward the Palace. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Stay quiet and hang on.” She sat up and looked both ways down the street. She urged the car on slowly, negotiated the turn onto Winter, and made a beeline for the Palace. She had to de
liver the lunch, but she didn’t have to deliver it directly to Will.

She’d just steer clear of him. Judging from the group gathering, it wouldn’t be hard to avoid one person. Simple as that. In and out so fast he wouldn’t know she’d even been there. She began to hum as she pulled into the lot, a happy tune with words she struggled to remember.

That distraction did her a disservice when her tire hit a chunk of wayward sidewalk cement.

Suddenly, her would-be stealth lunch wagon careened to the right.

She overcompensated by yanking the wheel hard to the left. She jammed her foot on the brake.

Pernel yelped like a scalded pup.

Gears ground. Her brakes squawked.

Every head in the parking lot swiveled just in time to see her big old car coast to a bumpy halt directly against the door of the blue portable toilet a few feet from the building.

Like everything else in her life just then, Rita’s plans to keep a low profile had gone up in smoke.

“Are you trying to kill me?” Pernel popped the door open and scrambled out.

“You? What about the people in the parking lot?” she called after him, hoping no one took that to mean she’d wanted to run down her friends instead of killing her passenger. “What if there had been someone on the sidewalk? What if there is someone in the…”

Pernel slammed the door.

“No!” She lurched to the side as if she could soften the
wham
of the heavy door.

Too little too late. The car rolled gently forward until the bumper wedged itself just beneath the handle of the rent-a-privy’s door.

People in the parking lot gasped.

Rita didn’t dare back the car away and risk dragging the bathroom door open or worse. In
fact she wasn’t sure she should even risk getting out and throwing things off-balance. All she could do was roll down the window and address her appreciative audience. “First one to say this is when the shit hit the fan—”

“More like when it hit the fan belt Rita!” Cozie’s husband Mouse looped his arm over his wife’s shoulder and grinned.

Everybody
laughed.

Great.
Everybody
. She couldn’t pull a stupid stunt like this without witnesses, could she? She had to do it when everybody she knew had gathered in one place, standing in the parking lot waiting for her arrival, no less. She scanned the crowd of familiar faces looking for one in particular. “Um, where’s…”

A muffled curse rose from behind the blue door.

She dropped her head forward onto the steering wheel. The horn blared!

The curses increased in creativity and volume to match her rude blast.

“Tell me the person I have just trapped in that traveling outhouse is
not
—”

“Where the hell you learn to drive? From my mother?” Will stepped over some concrete debris to rest his hand on the side mirror.

She blinked, relieved for only a moment. “If you’re not in there, then who is?”

“The Industrial-waste guy.”

“Do I know him?”

“No, he rents out this stuff.” He motioned to
the long black and rust—real rust, not the color rust—Dumpster in the parking lot, then to the portable toilet tilted against her car. “I called him over to make him take responsibility for busting up your sidewalk. He said it wasn’t his fault, and he wasn’t paying for it.”

“Will it cost a lot?”

“It’s not just the cost of the sidewalk. There’s the legal responsibility should anyone trip or have an accident because of it.”

“Wonderful. I could get sued and lose the rest of what I don’t have to begin with.”

“Man told me there was almost no chance of this sidewalk causing a problem, by the way.” He lowered his head to speak to her through the car window. “Sweet irony, huh?”

“Sweet? Hardly the word I’d use to describe his situation right now.”

“You are a wonder, Rita. Even when you don’t try to be—maybe especially then.” If a man could laugh with his eyes, Will did just that. His smile remained quiet, almost sad, but his eyes…“Poor guy doesn’t know what hit him.”

She had no basis for it, but danged if she didn’t believe right to the very depths of her heart that Will was not talking about the man in the outhouse.

“What do we do now?” she asked, well aware that her own response had a double edge to it.

The waste-management fellow bellowed out his own suggestion.

“He’s certainly in the right place for that kind
of language.” She gripped the wheel and sat back in the seat to better survey the situation. “If I back up slowly enough, can y’all keep that privy from tumbling over?”

“Yes, but why would you want to? Looks to me like you have yourself a prime negotiating stance.”

“Negotiating? Oh…no. No?”

“Have you looked at the state of your sidewalk here, Rita?”

She came within a breath of saying,
Yes and it’s the perfect illustration for my life.
But with Will just inches away and wearing that look—she found herself hard-pressed to see her circumstances as anything but on the upswing. “You are one wicked, wicked man, William West.”

“That a complaint?”

She let the squawk of her setting the parking brake be her answer.

He laughed. Then he turned and shouted directions to the group milling around the lot.

Immediately, Cozie and Pernel started unloading the lunch goods while Mouse and a couple of men helped brace up the Porta-Potti.

Will put one foot on her car bumper and began talking to the blue door.

She couldn’t hear the exchange word for word; however, Will’s tone stayed steady and calm while the man’s on the other end of the conversation grew more angry and threatening. Once or twice Will cut loose with a good-ol’-boy belly laugh—the kind any longtime Southerner recog
nizes as a pure power play and nothing to do with good humor. Still, he didn’t come off mean with it, like some men do. He simply sounded confident and unwilling to back down when he was in the right.

In response, a string of vulgarities poured out from behind the door. Curses so imaginative and complex that Cozie—the ultimate queen of many-paths-all-lead-to-the-same-God—made the sign of the cross over herself, her eyes wide.

Boot to the bumper, Will jounced the car once lightly, then again, harder.

Rita hung on to the steering wheel and shut her eyes. All she needed was to get carsick in a parked vehicle to put that crowning jewel in her near-perfect day.

A stillness fell over the whole scene. An eerie stillness, they’d say in books, the kind that came over battlefields when no men stood left to fight. Will not only stood, he strode toward the driver’s side of her car, his expression dark.

“Scoot over, I’d better do this.”

Will nudged her over to the passenger side so he could take the wheel without so much as a
do you mind if
or a
please
.

“Should I get out?” She scrambled for the other door.

“We’re both getting out.” He grabbed her by the wrist and slammed the door shut. “Getting the hell out of here.”

Her heart raced.
Well, your heart would race
, she told herself. Good gravy, not every day a girl gets
herself into a fix like this and has the man of her dreams charging to her rescue.

“Sit tight and don’t say anything that might come back to haunt you.”

“Always good advice.” She gritted her teeth and tried not to dwell on having just thought of Will as the man of her dreams. Instead she focused on how it just figured that her one chance at playing damsel in distress involved outdoor plumbing and strong-arming a stranger with his pants around his ankles.

Will shifted into reverse and eased the car back just a bit, then leaned out the window. “Don’t let him out until you see our taillights round the corner.”

“Taillights around the corner? Where are you planning on taking me?”

“Doesn’t matter, just so he doesn’t come out and realize who had him pinned in.” He gunned the motor, shifted again, and tore out of the lot. “If he knows it was you, he might claim we set him up.”

“Oh, right. Like I could really have planned anything that perfect.” She shook her head. “If they took it to a court of law, all I’d ever have to do is submit my life as exhibit A.”

He came to a stop at the intersection just north of the Palace—where the road to the left led to Miss Peggy’s grand old home and, to the right, headed out of town to the narrow dirt lane that ended in the cemetery. He made a quick glance in either direction. “Exhibit A?”

“Incontrovertible evidence that I no longer have control over anything that goes on with me anymore, at least not since
you
showed up.”

“Only since
I
showed up?” He made a right. He didn’t look at her, but he didn’t have to for her to see that smug expression.
See it
? Hell, she could
hear
dripping snake oil in his voice.

He scrubbed bent fingers along his jawline. “I confess I did aim to have an impact on you.”

All right, snake oil was too strong a description. Without stealing so much as a glance his way, she sensed a gentling in his demeanor.

“And not just the impact of…making the earth move for both of us the other night.”

Merciful heavens, the man was showing understanding and kindness. Trying to reach her on an intimate level to make sure everything between them was all right. That
she
was all right. If he hadn’t been driving, she would have strangled him for it.

Her only goal for the day had been to avoid Will. Barring that, she had wished simply not to look a fool in front of him. And if that proved impossible, she did hold out the one last auxiliary, backup, please-Lord-I-never-ask-for-much-but-just-this-once hope that there be not so much as a hint of reference to their lovemaking and subsequent failed good-bye.

“Rita, I—”

“Shut up and drive.”

The woman had a point. And if he had a lick of common sense left, he’d do just that. He’d shut
his mouth and drive around town in blessed silence until it felt safe to go back. “Rita, don’t you think we need to talk?”

“No.” She faced straight ahead, one hand braced on the faded green dash. “That’s the very essence of the phrase ‘shut up.’
No
talking. Shutting up of the entire frontal face area in order to prevent the escape of words or even accidental vocal intonations.”

“Got it.” He guided the car around a long curve, eyes peeled for a driveway or wide shoulder where he could turn around.

“I should have seen this coming a mile off,” she muttered, her face to the passenger window.

“I guess the shutting-up portion of the ride only applies to the driver’s side of the vehicle then?”

She exhaled loudly.

“Okay.” He could sit and listen. Maybe then he’d learn something about what went on in that amazing mind of hers. He could live with that.

“I took on this day with one objective—feed the people helping me with the Palace without once having to deal with you directly. And by directly, I mean all alone, one on one, no witnesses or buffers. That’s the thing I set out to avoid.”

“Mmm.” It was the only noise he could make while still complying with her orders to keep his mouth shut.

“Was that asking so much? It’s all I wanted. But now look at us. A pair of renegade toilet tippers, on our own and on the lam.”

“Just trying to…”

“Don’t say it!”

He raised an eyebrow and finished his justification. “…help.”

“I told you not to say it. I’m sick of hearing it, you know. Sick of hearing you tell me how you’re here to help me—
again
.”

“That’s bad?”

“Every day I climb out of my bed thinking I am one day closer to the end of this chaos. And every night I fall back into that same bed weighed down with the realization that I am mired even deeper in your debt.”

“How can you be in debt to me when I set out to do all this to try to repay you?”

“Repay me?”

“You gave me something very precious.”

“I didn’t want to talk about
that
either.”

“That?”

“That little piece of heaven the other night.”

“That
was
precious.” More than he could describe without taking his hands off the wheel and his mind off the real subject. “That will always remain precious to me, Rita. But it was the little piece of your mind that you gave me more than six years ago that I’m talking about.”

Even with her head bowed, he could see her cheeks redden. “I had no call to talk to you that way.”

“Somebody had to.” The whole car jostled as the tires rumbled from the pavement to the dirt road. It wasn’t the movement that made his pulse
pick up or the coldness gripping the pit of his stomach. His eyes on the tree-lined lot up ahead, he whispered, “You gave me a great gift then, Rita.”

“I hardly think—”

“Time with my son.” He pulled up to the ornate iron gate between two rows of windswept pines.

Rita put her hand on the dash. The kind sadness in her eyes cut away all pretense and in the same instant offered healing and hope. “This is where he’s buried, isn’t it?”

He could not answer that question without giving away too much of himself, so he only nodded.

“Do you want to get out?”

“No.”

“Do you want to talk?”

He nodded again.

She took his hand and waited.

He drew on the strength of her compassion and looked down the gravel lane between the rows of marble headstones. “If you hadn’t chewed me out up one side and down the other about my responsibilities to Norrie, the responsibilities of being that baby’s father, I might never have gotten the chance to hold that precious boy in my arms.”

“Oh, Will, of course you would have.”

He shook his head. “You don’t know the situation, Rita. The way things were and the way things turned out, if you hadn’t had the nerve to give me hell, I might never have looked into that child’s eyes and told him that I loved him.”

She gripped his hand tighter.

“He was so tiny.” He fixed his gaze on the small marker in the distance, the one with the carved white lamb on top. “He couldn’t have understood, but it meant the world to me to have even that short time with him.”

“I think he understood.”

“Yeah?” He wanted to believe her. He looked into her eyes, and he did believe.

“Some people say babies are born knowing everything that’s important—like love, trust, and joy. It’s only as we grow older that we forget.”

He put his hand to her cheek. “You’re still giving me comfort, Rita.”

She turned her face into his palm. “Then I guess I can let go of the shame I’ve carried all these years for daring to confront you about the way you were acting.”

“You’ve nothing to feel ashamed of. I was acting a perfect ass. Drinking a little too much, ignoring the person who was counting on me.”

“Norrie?”

He nodded. “I didn’t care that I’d moved her to Memphis from Nashville and she didn’t have any friends—at least not any
girl
friends—there to help her and comfort her.”

Rita tipped her head, her eyes already conveying the question he knew she wanted to ask of him.