Heaven to Betsy (Emily #1) (21 page)

I pulled out my phone and hit a number in my favorites.

“Emily?” Katie’s voice was a happy squeal.

I cut her off fast before she could congratulate me and said, “Something bad has happened.”

A pause. The sound of a small child’s laughter. “Hang on,” Katie said. “Let me ask my mother-in-law to put Thomas in bed, and I’ll go where I can hear you better.”

“Okay.”

I heard jostling and muted voices for thirty seconds or so. Then she came back on. “I’m here. Tell me.”

I started talking, fast, trying to beat the blubbery tears I knew would come. I almost made it. “I lost the baby today. Miscarriage. And I lost Rich, I lost the condo and our savings, and I’ve lost the baby, too. And now, and now . . .”

“Shhh. It’s okay, I’m so sorry. Shhh now.” Her beautiful soothing voice harmonized with my sobs until I got myself under control.

“I may not be able to have a baby now.”

Katie knew my background, so I filled her in only on the new development.

“I lost most of my only fallopian tube.”

I downed the rest of my wine in one swallow.

“I’m sorry, honey. Very sorry.” She paused. “You sound a little slurry.”

I barked a laugh. “Yeah, I’ve been nipping at Mother’s stash of box wine.”

“Do they have you on pain meds?”

“Some.”

“Go easy on the booze. Take it from a semi-pro. It’s not going to make it better.”

Maybe not later, but it would now. “You know what else?”

“What?”

“I’m working for a criminal attorney, and his client’s little girl disappeared, and it’s like I’m the only one who really, really cares. How messed up do you think that is?”

“I think what’s messed up right now is my sweet friend Emily. I think you need to stop thinking and go to sleep. Things will look better in the morning. You can start working on all this then.”

“I’m not sweet,” I said. “I haven’t been sweet since Stormy came to dinner.”

Shows how little she knew. Why had I called her again? What I needed was another glass of wine.

“I gotta go, Katie.”

“I love you, Emily,” she said. “Call me tomorrow—or any time.”

“Love you.”

I ended the call and snuck to the kitchen for another refill. I left the lights off, opened the refrigerator and pulled the box out. It felt almost empty. I shook it and the meager remains sloshed around. I knew that this was at least my third glass, but certainly no more than my fourth. And they were very small glasses. It sure wasn’t my mother who’d drained the box. She drank thimblefuls every Friday night and then apologized for it. If she were Catholic she’d probably even confess it—though, to her, Catholicism was a sin in and of itself. My head spun. Religion was just too dang confusing for me.

I lifted the hem of the red flannel nightgown I’d borrowed from Mother and wiped the tears from my face, then lost my balance just a little bit. I caught myself against the doorway to the kitchen. I sipped my wine. I couldn’t end up like my mother. I didn’t want to be a bitter church secretary living alone in a house as far past its prime as me, judging and begrudging everyone else. I loved her. She was my mother. But that didn’t make these things untrue. I weaved down the hall, trying to be Sacajawea again and running headfirst into the door to my room instead.

“Ouch,” I whispered.

“Is that you, Emily?” Mother called.

I shook my head and put a finger over my lips. “Just using the bathroom. G’night.”

“Goodnight.”

I opened my door. Maybe this was my fourth glass after all. I crawled back in bed, leaned against the wall, and pulled the cowgirl-covered bedspread up to my chin. So, yeah, I couldn’t have hope, and that included about Jack. Still, I couldn’t
not
answer the man’s nice text. He was worried about me. I stared at my phone on the bedside table until my eyes closed. Opened them and stared at it some more. Thought about Jack’s half smile and dimple and twinkling eyes and great boots. I really did love his boots. And his jeans. Yes, I loved those Wranglers. My eyes closed again.

The phone rang, waking me. I had listed over and drooled on my pillow. I reached for the phone and turned it to face me. Wallace. Adrenaline coursed through my veins, and I sat up straight again. It could be about Valentina.

I answered. “Hello?”

“Hey, I’m driving Nadine home, so I decided to call instead of text and die.”

“Good choice.” Choice came out like “choyse.” I touched my lips, but they felt okay.

“Your voice sounds funny. Did you take too many pain pills?”

I spoke carefully, enunciating brightly. “Nope. I only took one.”

“Emily?”

“I’ve had a little . . . wine.”’

He sighed. “Stop it. You’re going to make yourself sick mixing booze and painkillers. And I need you to sober up so I can tell you about Harvey. I’m putting you on speaker, okay?”

I stretched my jaw and eyelids, trying for sober. “I’m good. Tell me.”

“Hi, Emily.” Nadine’s voice.

“Hi,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

“No problem. This is fun.”

Wallace took over. “Okay, so here’s the scoop. We followed Harvey home, and—”

“Noooo, Wallace, that’s dangerous.” As hard as I’d tried, dangerous came out “dangerush.”

“Look who’s talking—or trying to,” he said.

I nodded to myself. True on both counts. “Whaddya find?”

“We know where he’s shacking up—with one of the Polo Club dancers. Not one of the better-looking ones, if you ask me, but my opinion may not count for much.”

Nadine said, “You have a keen eye for beauty, Wallace.”

“Thank you, Nadine.”

I made a gagging sound. “Not important. What about Valentina?”

“I couldn’t exactly barge in after him, or knock on the door in the middle of the night. But I can tell the cops about him now, and we can check it out, later.”

I tried to sound like I was in charge. “Tomorrow morning.”

“You’re on bed rest through tomorrow,” Wallace said. “And you’re about to have a wicked hangover.”

“But the cops won’t do spit.”

He laughed. Nadine did, too. She asked, “Did you just say spit?”

“What?” I asked. “What’s wrong with spit?”

They both laughed harder, and Wallace clucked. “Go to sleep, Emily.”

I hadn’t said anything funny, at least I didn’t think I had. Plus, I needed to know something. “Wallace, wait.”

“What?”

“Do you think any man will ever want to marry me now that I’m thirty and barren?”

He yelled in my ear. “What? A) You’re gorgeous. Maybe even more gorgeous than I am, thanks to that perfectly precious gap between your teeth, although it’s still a very close contest. B) You’re not barren, and no one uses that word anymore. C) Stop choosing gay men and you’ll find plenty who want to marry you. Shit, you’ve almost got
me
wanting to propose.”

Did I choose gay men? I counted back. Rich. That was one. Now Wallace. That was two. Hardly a trend. Then I remembered. Gordon, my rodeo team mentor, had come out his sophomore year. Okay, that made three.

Nadine chimed in. “I’d marry you.”

This confused me. “I thought you were straight, Nadine? You have kids.”

“I’m just jumping on the bandwagon.”

I held my hand up in the stop gesture, then dropped it because I realized they couldn’t see. “But even if some straight man does want to marry me,” I said, “if I do turn out to be barren, he’ll leave me then. Or he might even leave me anyway, regardless.”

Both of them yelled “No” at the same time. Then Wallace said, “No shit, Emily, stop drinking right now. Pour the wine out. You’ve poisoned your brain.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are, but you’re also wrong.”

“So I should text Jack back?”

Wallace sort of shouted at me and I pulled the phone away from my ear, staring at it in surprise. I could still hear him, though. “What? Where did that come from? Oh my God, woman, you make no sense. Yes, if Jack texted you, answer him, after you sober up. Right now, pour out the wine, and when you’re done with that, go to bed. And don’t get up until tomorrow night. You hear me?”

I put the phone back to my ear. “I hear you.” I started to hang up. “Wait!”

Wallace sighed. “I’m pulling up in front of Nadine’s place. Make it snappy. I want to get home and go to bed.”

“You said you skipped church. What church do you go to?”

“Unitarian.”

Nadine said, “Agnostic here.”

“I’m not sure what I am.” I stopped, thinking hard. I wasn’t one hundred percent sure what agnostic was either and how it was different from atheist, but now probably wasn’t the time to ask. I knew, though, that the three of us, we were like refugees from the Island of Misfit Toys. Thinking that made me smile. “Wallace, I need a church. Can I visit with you?”

“Yes, you can. Now, goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

I pressed end and stared at Jack’s text again, trying to think of what to say to him, this time holding my phone by my head on the pillow. I typed:
Had minor procedure, I’m fine. Thanks for checking on me. I’ve been thinking about you all day, and I was really happy to get your text.

That sounded ridiculous and schoolgirl-ish. I changed it to:
Had minor procedure, I’m fine. Thanks for checking on me. See you Friday.

It still sucked, I knew, but I couldn’t send the first one, and I couldn’t come up with anything better than the second. I sent it, then stared at the ceiling, thinking about Jack in his boots and babies and lost little girls until I fell asleep.

***

When I walked into work Friday morning, I had the wicked two-day Vicodin and box wine hangover Wallace had predicted. I also had a bad case of the blues over my single remaining Fallopian tube—a sliver so tiny it was about as useful as teats on a boar hog. I thrust the door to the Williams & Associates office open. Lost in my own thoughts, I nearly ran over the man kneeling to lay tile in the lobby/my office. It was beautiful tile—a large, beigey-rusty-streaky tile. The brand new carpet that had been removed to make room for the tile was now in a roll leaning against the wall. If the lobby had needed remodeling, this tile would’ve been a great choice. But it hadn’t, unless something drastic had happened since I’d last seen it on Tuesday.

Snowflake danced back and forth between the tile guy and me. I reached into my handbag and tossed her some toast crusts. She gobbled them and returned her full attention to the tile guy.

“Good morning,” I said.

“Mornin’,” he replied.

He didn’t stop his work. He was kneeling on the concrete subfloor in dirty white kneepads over baggy blue jeans. He had just finished smoothing and cutting lines into gray grout, wielding his hand trowel like a paintbrush. Now he placed one of the tiles on the grout, perfectly aligned with the one beside it. When he’d finished securing it, he wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his New Orleans Saints sweatshirt, knocking his LSU Tigers cap loose and revealing his shaved black head.

I walked around him to my desk and sat down. It was going to be hard to concentrate with a construction project going on in my personal space, not to mention with the shrill whir of the tile saw and the chalky smell of fresh cut tile. I rested my head in my arms for a moment, trying to pull myself together. I’d slept until five p.m. yesterday, and my days and nights were all mashed and mixed up. I breathed in and out slowly. All I had to do was manage to get through today. After that, I could take my last few Vicodin and put my brain to sleep for the weekend, with my door shut, and the world at bay.

“You okay?” The tile guy had stopped working and was staring at me with eyes of deep black ink.

“Oh, yes, sorry. I just need some coffee.”

He grunted and went back to work. I grasped the bell on my desk and rang it, then walked down the hall, stopping by the door to the kitchen.

“Jack?”

He appeared at his office door and said, “Good morning.” He pulled out his half smile-dimpled-raised eyebrow magic.

It made my heart sing, but today it was a sad song. “Teardrops on My Guitar.”

I avoided eye contact and said. “Thank you for the flowers.”

I’d discovered the arrangement on the porch when Wallace and Nadine woke me the previous afternoon to let me know the police had found no sign of Valentina at Harvey’s. Mother had come home while they were there. Her discombobulation over my obviously gay and biker chick friends was the brightest part of my last few days, other than punching Melinda Stafford.

“You’re welcome.”

I ducked into the kitchen and took a seat.

“How are you?” He sat down, but at a sideways angle. Our knees were inches apart.

“Fine.” Physically, anyway, but I kept the rest to myself. “What’s going on in the lobby?”

“New tile.”

“No, I mean
why
? Was there a water leak or something?”

He jerked his head toward the door, speaking softly as he did. “That’s Freeman, our client. He does tile. So he’s doing ours.”

I clenched my fists. Five minutes after I got to work and Jack already had my eyes crossed. I just wanted to know why we were getting new tile. It didn’t seem like a complex question. Could the man ever answer me straight? I opened my mouth to snap at him, but snapped it shut instead. Jack and Clyde had talked earlier in the week about the new carpet. A client that couldn’t pay his bill. Services in kind. Okay, it took me a while, but I got it. My eyes grew moist and my hands relaxed. Something about crying most of the last few days had loosened my on-off switch. I swallowed the tears back.

Jack filled the silence. “I read your Johnson report. I think we’re good to go there.”

I gave him a leaky smile. “Thanks. And it appears he can afford to pay in cash.”

Jack leaned back in his chair, which scooched his knees forward. They bumped mine, and I jerked my legs away by reflex. Jack didn’t appear to notice.

“I had a very entertaining call from ADA Stafford yesterday,” he said. “She claims to have suffered physical injury and mental anguish at the hands of one Emily Phelps Bernal.”

I slouched back down, which bumped our knees again. “I’m sorry. I can explain.”