I Want Candy (6 page)

Their mother chose that instant to return to the dining room, a smile on her face and two servings of strawberry-rhubarb pie balanced in her hands. “This is such a treat having both my boys here on a plain old Monday!” She set the plates in front of the men.

“Thanks, Mama,” Turner said, shooting Reggie a sharp look.

“Looks delicious,” Reggie said, his eyes throwing daggers right back.

“I heard Candy Carmichael is still in town,” Mama said, raising her teacup to her mouth, a move that didn’t quite hide the remnants of her smile. She wagged an eyebrow at Turner. “Have ya’ll been getting together with Cheri and J.J. often? Do ya’ll get along like you used to?”

Reggie coughed delicately and held a napkin up to his lips. Turner rolled his eyes at his brother.

“Once in a while,” he mumbled, digging into the pie. As always, the tart-and-sweet filling meshed perfectly with the rich, flaky pastry crust. “Mama, you still make the best pies in all of Cataloochee County.”

She shrugged like the compliment didn’t mean anything to her. “As long as you boys enjoy it, then I’m doing all right, I suppose.”

“So what’s Candy up to these days?” Reggie’s question sounded innocent enough, but the way his eyes danced with laughter made Turner want to stand up and smack him upside his shiny head.

“Not much. She’s only passing through, probably be leaving any day now.”

“Now, that’s odd, because I heard she’s been putting in applications for jobs all over town.” Mama looked truly puzzled. “Word is she even applied for a spot on the line out at the tannery, and that’s no work for a young lady with a college degree.”

“Jesus,” Reggie said. “She sounds desperate.”

Turner focused on his pie.

“Where’s she living?” Mama asked.

Turner continued to focus on his pie.

“Turner?”

He looked up at his mother. “Uh, with Vivienne Newberry.”

“Oh, my.” Mama made a hissing sound with her tongue against her lips.

Reggie chuckled.

“Does Candy still make those mouthwatering cakes?” she asked. “Remember those cakewalk fund-raisers the cheerleaders used to put on for the football team? Candy’s cakes were always grand prize, right? Remember that? Oh, my, they were as delicious as they were beautiful.”

“Mmm, mmm,”
Reggie said. “Delicious
and
beautiful.”

Turner was damn near ready to stick a fork in his brother’s bare skull. “I don’t know if she still bakes, Mama,” he said, though in his heart he sure hoped to hell she did. She owed him a chocolate cake.

“Well, the next time you see her, tell her to stop by the Quick E Mart. If she’s really that desperate for work I’ll put in a good word for her with your uncle Earl.”

“That’s sure nice of you, Mama,” Turner said, finishing up with his dessert, “but I doubt I’ll be running into her any time soon.”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“Work. Things are pretty busy. Don’t have a lot of time for socializing.” Turner stood up and took his dirty dishes out to the sink, then swung through the dining room, grabbed his ball cap from the back of the chair, and kissed his mother good-bye. “Thank you so much for a wonderful lunch, as usual, but I gotta run. I’ll call soon.”

By the time Turner made it out the front door, he knew his brother was behind him. Two hundred seventy pounds of six foot five couldn’t exactly sneak up on a person.

“Hold up.”

Turner ignored him, and climbed in the SUV and turned the ignition.

Reggie banged on the door until Turner rolled down the window.

“What?”

His brother gave him a crooked smile and leaned in. “You don’t still got a thing for Candy Pants, do you?”

By that point, Turner had had enough of his brother. “Don’t call her that, okay? I need to go, man.”

“Hey, I don’t mean anything by it. You and J.J. used to call her that all the time back in school. I remember—”

That made Turner perk up. He cut the ignition and gave his full attention to Reggie. “Tell me what you remember.”

“All right.” His brother nodded and pursed his lips in thought. “I remember how much you secretly liked her. Hey, I didn’t blame you, man. It was obvious that she was going to be a brickhouse when she grew up.”

“Anything else?”

Reggie frowned. “You talking about that night I heard you on the phone with her dad?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let’s see. I was back home for Thanksgiving break right after my Achilles tendon surgery, so that was my senior year at State, right? So you had to be, what, about seventeen?”

Turner nodded.

“And I saw your face fall when her daddy answered. And then Candy came on the phone and gave you some kind of bullshit answer while that racist son-of-a-bitch father of hers breathed down her neck.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And you got really upset. You were shocked more than anything. You just couldn’t believe that someone you’d known all your life could freak out like that the second you wanted to date her. But since I’d been down that road once or twice myself by that time, I took you out into the backyard and—”

When Turner busted out laughing, Reggie stopped talking. “Did I say something funny?”

“Nope,” he said, letting his laughter die down to a bitter chuckle. “Thank you, Reg.” Turner patted his brother on the shoulder. “See, I was starting to think maybe I’d made the whole thing up in my head or exaggerated it all out of proportion, because when I asked Candy about it last night, she didn’t even remember the conversation. She said I’d never asked her out.”

Reggie’s mouth fell open. “You’re shittin’ me.”

“I am not.” Turner sank back into the headrest.

“So you asked her out again last night? Did she say yes this time?”

Turner’s head popped up. “
Hell,
no.”

“She said no again?”

Turner sighed and started up the SUV once more. “I didn’t ask her out, all right?”

“Well, why not? Jonesy Carmichael was wrapped up in his pointy-headed white sheet and laid in the ground a long time ago. This is God giving you a second chance, little brother. You need to jump on that.”

“I am not ready to date,” he said, backing out of the drive even though Reggie was still leaning in the window. “And if I were, you think I’d be fool enough to start with Candy Carmichael?”

Reggie began to jog along by the side of the vehicle, pivoting when Turner put the gearshift into drive. “Whoa! Damn, T! Why are you still touchy about that chick?”

Still touchy?
Hardly. Until she came back to town a few weeks ago, she’d barely crossed his mind. The last time he’d seen her had been more than five years before, at J.J.’s ill-fated wedding to Cheri’s flaky sister, when Turner and Junie had exchanged pleasantries with Candy. More importantly, Turner hadn’t had a decent conversation with Candy since before she went away to college and he joined the corps, which had been seven years before
that
.

So as he drove back to the municipal complex, Turner thought about his brother’s fool question, and decided Reggie could be a real ass sometimes. Ridiculous! Of course Turner wasn’t
still touchy
about Candy Carmichael.

He was touchy all over again.

In fact, as he picked up his messages from Bitsy, he decided “touchy” might not even cover it.

Turner closed the door to his office. He sat down in his desk chair. He nodded to himself. He wasn’t touchy. No. It was far worse than that.

His fuse was lit and he was damn near ready to detonate.

Chapter 5

“All right then,” Jacinta said, smoothing her caftan around her in the easy chair. “First off, no men in the apartment. Also, no late-night phone calls. No alcohol. No smoking. You’ll have to sleep here.” Jacinta pointed at the cream and white floral tufted-back sofa. “And two weeks is the absolute maximum you can stay. It’s in the tenant association contract—only immediate family can spend the night and only for a total of fourteen days per year.”

Candy nodded, dropping her overnight case on the plush carpet of Jacinta’s sitting room. From what she’d gleaned in the last hour—at the lunch table and from her mother’s ongoing commentary—this place had more official and unofficial rules than a federal prison.

“And I’ll expect you to busy yourself on Monday and Friday evenings. That’s when I play bridge. And you’ll need to find somewhere to go every Tuesday and Saturday evening from between seven and ten, so that I can have my privacy.”

Candy stared, then blinked.

“I entertain, you know.”

No doubt.

Candy had seen evidence of that at lunch, when it became clear she’d landed in some kind of wrinkle in the space-time continuum where the plot lines for the movies
Cocoon
and
Mean Girls
had merged, where the cattiness far surpassed anything she’d experienced as a Tri Delta pledge at Florida State, and where the laws of supply and demand had gone haywire when it came to the most precious commodity of all at Cherokee Pines—
men
.

She’d counted seven male residents in the dining room during lunch, each surrounded by a dedicated harem of females. The coveted seat Jacinta had feared would be snatched up was at the left elbow of Hugo Stevens, cock of the walk. He was a retired plumbing contractor who still had all his own hair, sported a pencil-thin mustache, and was partial to ascots. Candy had watched, impressed, as Jacinta managed to bat her eyes at Hugo while simultaneously beating off the competition with vaguely threatening hand gestures and snide remarks.

So, sure. Candy would find something—anything—to do while Jacinta “entertained” Hugo on Saturday nights. Maybe she’d take up bowling.

“Anything else I should know?” she asked her mother.

“I’m sure there’s something I’m forgetting, but we’ll cover it as we go along.”

There was a knock at the open door to Jacinta’s apartment, and Gerrall poked his head in. He was carrying a box that Candy had intended to fetch from the lobby.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she told him, reaching out to take the cardboard container from his hands.

Gerrall laughed. “Oh, yeah I did. Mr. Miller was freaking because it was sitting on the floor near the entrance. He said it looked unteamly or something.”

“Unseemly?”

“That was it.”

“But I was coming right back for it,” Candy said.

Gerrall actually smiled at her. “Miller can be a little stiff sometimes. Just try to ignore him.”

“God knows we all do,” Jacinta said.

Candy laughed as she put the box down by her suitcase. She’d already decided to leave the rest of her stuff in the car, since she was getting sick of packing and unpacking. Besides, she already doubted she’d last a whole fourteen days at the Senior Citizen Sing-Sing. It wasn’t intentional, but she let go with a loud sigh as she plopped down on the sofa.

“Here. I snuck this out of the kitchen for you.”

Gerrall reached down over her shoulder and gave Candy an up-close view of a piece of greasy chocolate cake wrapped in a napkin. Gerrall must have been carrying it around in his pants pocket, since it looked flattened.

“Oh!” she said, accepting the gift, trying not to make a face. “How nice of you!”

She’d attempted to eat a piece of this cake at lunch, and it had tasted like Styrofoam frosted with peanut-butter-flavored wallpaper paste, and she’d decided that no one—no matter how catty they were—deserved desserts that bad. In fact, the entire lunch had been lousy.

Candy put the brakes on her racing thoughts, very nearly laughing at herself. Eighteen months ago, she was dining at Florida’s finest restaurants, drinking exotic cocktails at the best Miami Beach clubs, partying at private estates from Ocala to Key West. And now she was back in Bigler, an itinerant unemployable person, lucky to have food and shelter of any kind. And she was bitching about the cake at her mother’s retirement home?

She needed to get a grip.

“Thank you, Gerrall. I’ll just stick this in the fridge.”

“Oh, that reminds me,” Jacinta said. “Any leftover food goes in a Tupperware container. No exceptions. It’s part of the bylaws.”

“Got it.”

Candy took a moment to check out Jacinta’s tiny but chic kitchenette, noting the quality tile, countertops, and cabinetry. Then she poked her head into the bathroom, where she found the same attention to detail. Her mother’s bedroom was large, featured two walk-in closets and a built-in window seat. She estimated that the apartment had to be close to a thousand square feet.

Yep. This place was expensive. Candy swallowed hard at the prospect of telling Jacinta that she’d squandered the sixty thousand her mother had given her to invest in real estate.

“I’ll catch you later then,” Gerrall said, waving good-bye to Candy as Jacinta shoved him out the door.

“Little pecker-head,” her mother mumbled under her breath.

“He seems nice enough,” Candy said, revising her original opinion of the guy as she came back to the sitting room.

“He doesn’t come from good people, Candace. Keep an eye on him. Do not trust him. And that goes double for Miller.” Jacinta pointed to the sofa again. “We might as well get down to business. Have a seat. I want to know how it is that my big-shot daughter has shown up on my doorstep without a dime to her name.”

“Uh, well…”

“Your daddy always said you’d shoot yourself in the foot.” Jacinta settled into her chair once more, spreading her caftan in an arc around her. “Thank God he’s not alive to see this. That man was insufferable when he turned out to be right.”

*   *   *

“Why the
hell
didn’t you say anything?” Cheri’s voice was sharper and louder than usual. It was so loud, in fact, that Candy feared Jacinta could hear her best friend’s phone voice all the way through the closed bedroom door.

“I’m sorry if you’re mad ’cause I left Viv’s,” Candy whispered. “I appreciate you getting her to let me stay for a while, but I just couldn’t stand it.”

Cheri made a hissing sound of impatience. “Oh, Lord, Candy. I don’t blame you one bit for leaving—she told me you two had a run-in when you got home last night. I’m talking about
Turner
! Why didn’t you tell me about what happened with Turner when he pulled you over yesterday?”