Million Dollar Road (15 page)

But after the Hannigans finally left, Liz had hit him with some shit CoCo had said to her, some stupid gossip.
That
had required some major Obi-Wan action, too, but in the end a conflict with his wife had been averted. It hadn't been easy, dismissing what people were saying around town. People were always going to talk, he'd told her, especially about a couple as attractive and interesting as they were. People misconstrued so much, they had dirty minds, they wanted to believe the worst.

Et cetera, et cetera.

In the end, at last he'd managed to convince Lizzie there was nothing to worry about. Con had no intention of ever divorcing again, not even for Lireinne. She was staggeringly lovely, yes, but he already had a wife, however rocky things were at present, and alimony was a bitch. Liz's damage was that like all women, she needed reassurance and attention. Well, he'd given her all she wanted, all right. That part was easy—he really did love her. Con lifted his glass to Obi-Wan, toasting Jedi victory all around today.

No, he never intended to go through a divorce again, but this crazy, unreasonable attraction was something new and that was a fine thing all on its own. Lireinne made all of his previous conquests seem too easy now: the same breasts and thighs, the same sighs of completion and release, the same girls again and again. All of them—overripe as dropped fruit. When he thought of his latest girlfriend, Jennifer from the Lemon Tree, with a hint of distaste Con admitted he was bored with the affair after fewer than a couple of weeks. He'd get around to ending it soon, because he was prepared to wait for Lireinne. After all, when they'd worked together for a few weeks she was bound to come around. They always did.

The back door swung open onto the patio, the stark yellow light from inside the kitchen falling over his right shoulder.

“Whatchu doin' out here in the dark, huh?” Above him on the brick steps, Liz stood backlit in the doorway. Taking a swallow from the glass of wine in her hand, she sounded impatient. And drunk. So much for the healing properties of reassurance and attention, Con thought, resigned to this long evening's predictable denouement. Back in the saddle, Obi-Wan. Before he answered her, he finished the last of his scotch, melting ice cubes sounding a muted clink in his glass.

“I was looking for a little peace and quiet,” Con said shortly. He wasn't going to get into it with Liz again, not if he could avoid it. She'd had better than a bottle of wine this evening—and that was only the wine he knew about because he'd poured it for her. A drunk Lizzie was an oftentimes argumentative Lizzie.

His wife stumbled down the steps and dragged another lawn chair across the patio to sit beside him. The screech of metal on the bricks was shrill and piercing, like the scream of the brakes that Saturday, the day when he'd almost hit Lireinne with . . .

“Con? Hello-o?” Lizzie poked him in the ribs. “Earth t'Con!”

“What?”

“Hey, I'm trying t'tell you I want a
puppy
. Hell, it's like you're in 'nother world. For crap's sake, d'you ever lissen t'me?”

A puppy? Was that it now? Liz had proved to have not a nurturing bone in her body, but if a dog would help keep the peace, Con would gladly sacrifice it before the gods of domestic tranquility in a heartbeat. Good thing he'd decided against having children with her. Once, years ago, he'd been an expectant father for about six weeks, hardly enough time to get used to the idea. And, truth to tell, he'd been ambivalent then about becoming a parent—another thing he couldn't share with Emma. She was so blissfully happy, so radiant with joy, he flat didn't have the heart.

But Emma had miscarried and could never get pregnant again. That had been a strange time for Con, finding that he could feel such pain at the death of a child he'd never even held, but now, years later, he was satisfied with the way things were. All the signs pointed to Lizzie's disinclination to being a mother, in any case. No, kids were definitely out, so a dog was inevitable, he supposed.

“Sure.” Con took a deep puff on his cigar, expelling the stream in a plume of acrid smoke. The end of a cigar was never the best part. “So just head down to Mr. Fish and get whatever mutt you want, honey.”

He tossed the butt over the pool, its ember arcing into the flower bed, a meteoric shower of orange sparks.

“Ooh,
really
?” Liz squealed. Leaping out of her chair, she threw herself into his lap. Her wine sloshed the rim of her glass but, with that particular drunken deftness of hers, somehow his wife flung her arms around his neck without spilling a drop.

“Oh, Con Costello—I jus'
love
you!”

Burying her face in the side of his neck, Lizzie commenced nuzzling in a gale of enthusiastic, loose-lipped kisses. “Thankyouthank-youthankyou. To hell with ol' CoCo and the shit she says, you know? That bitch. I'm getting a puppy!”

She was heavy as a mound of sandbags across his lap, too warm in the balmy night, too insistent with her kisses. Con shifted uncomfortably in the lawn chair, buried under a soft avalanche of attention-demanding woman.

“I'm gonna call th' breeder in the morning,” Liz announced. “I want a Beesh, a
Bichon
Frise. Gonna call him Lima Bean. Don't y'think thass cute?” Mercifully, she struggled up out of his lap, commencing a gleeful, teetering dance around the flagstones bordering the pool. “I'm gettin' a puppy,” she sang.

“Lima Bean. Adorable,” Con said, sourly wondering if she was going to stumble and fall into the water. He'd probably have to jump in and save her from drowning, she was so hammered, but at least she was over being difficult for now.

“I'm gettin' a puppy, I'm gettin' a puppy.” It was an off-key, little girl song that was irritating to Con, but somehow, a little . . . well, sad.

Disconcerted by that realization, Con debated having another drink and decided it was a good idea: he might as well get sufficient scotch on board to get to the place where he didn't care anymore. He wanted to tell Liz to please shut the hell up and go to bed, but
that
would create a conflict for sure and he'd already had enough of being Obi-Wan for one night.

Tired and a little drunk himself, Con got up from his lawn chair and was in the brightly lit kitchen, pouring himself a Glenmorangie, when outside Lizzie was suddenly screaming as though she were being hacked to pieces with a garden shovel.

His drunk vanished. With a crash of splintered Irish crystal, Con dropped his glass in the sink and ran to the back door. He bounded down the steps onto the patio. Next to the trampoline, Liz lay in a hysterical heap, pitifully moaning in a mass of crushed impatiens and liriope. Con knelt beside her in the flower bed. He lifted her shoulders and Lizzie flung her arms around his neck in a panicked, suffocating grip. She screamed in his ear.

“Con!”

“Calm down, babe.
Please,
” Con said with difficulty. “Come on, tell me what happened, sweetheart.”

She couldn't answer him. Her inarticulate, breathless shrieks were shrill as a steam engine on a steep grade: the neighbors would be calling the police if she didn't stop soon. Shaking his head in disbelief, Con scooped his wife up and carried her back inside the house where slowly, through a storm of tears, the story emerged. Even though she was so drunk she could barely see, Lizzie had nevertheless somehow climbed onto the trampoline, wanting to express her delight at the prospect of her new puppy. Bounding with elation, she'd somehow bounced right off the damned thing over the azalea bushes into the impatiens, landing on her ankle. Swollen alarmingly, it was twice its normal size.

Liz swore it was broken.

“It's probably just sprained,” Con said, feeling thoroughly helpless.

“Fuck
that
—it hurts, it hurts, oh, Con, it hurts so bad, it's
got
to be broken.” Lizzie was weeping and adamant. “Take me to the hospital!”

There was nothing to do at that point but to load her up in the Lexus amid her sobbing and swearing at him for jostling her ankle (“Careful, Con! M'God, you trying to make things
worse
?”), and hurry to the St. Tammany General Hospital's emergency room for an X-ray, an evaluation, and then, finally, a cast.

“Tole you it was broken!”

In the ER, her doctor wouldn't give Liz a shot of Demerol for the pain—two hours later, she was still obviously shit-faced—and then there was the matter of the HMO's requiring a blood test before he could administer the local anesthetic prior to setting her ankle.

Lizzie, as it happened, was pregnant.

“What?”
the proud parents-to-be screamed in unison.

“I
only
said
I'd do it the one time, Sarah.” Emma lifted her arm and wiped a fine film of sweat from her forehead. “Don't tell me you don't remember.”

The blistering, oven-like days of summer had passed and this Saturday was a bright, mild mid-September morning, ideal for working outside in the garden. Emma sifted the loose dirt over the seeds lying in the row of mounded earth, taking care not to cover them too deeply. She deliberately didn't look up to meet her neighbor's accusing gaze. Across the row, Sarah's shadow obscured the future kales and collard greens, as dire as a bowed-shouldered hanging judge. When Sarah didn't reply, Emma glanced up at her friend.

Sarah's return glare was stony.

Oh, come on, Emma thought with some impatience. Just let it go, why don't you?

The row finished, she picked up her trowel, hoe, and seed basket, stood, and moved on to the next. Sarah could disapprove all she liked, but the garden wasn't going to plant itself this morning. Emma had work to do. She chopped at the ground with her hoe, breaking the dirt into dusty clods, all the while wishing the old woman would talk to her instead of just . . .
glaring
.

But Sarah remained stubbornly silent. The woman's sharp eyes on Emma's profile felt like being poked in the head with a stick, and much to her irritation, Emma found herself somehow compelled to defend her decision again.

“Look, your car's fixed, and in any case she told me she's going to get the use of one of the alligator farm's vehicles. Lireinne doesn't need
me
to haul feed out to the trailer. She can get it herself.”

Clods dispatched, Emma began to loosen the soil, preparing it for the leeks and artichokes she'd planned for her fall garden. Damn Sarah, Emma thought. When it came to Lireinne, she offered Emma all the understanding of a glowering garden gnome in a John Deere cap.

With a stifled sigh, she put the hoe aside and knelt again in the dirt, working the soil with her gloved hands. “I'm busy putting these seeds in today,” Emma pointed out, as though Sarah couldn't see that for herself. “And besides, in a couple of weeks I'll be back at the farmers' market every Saturday. I won't have time for toting feed all the way out to Million Dollar Road, even if Lireinne still needed me to.”

The still of the morning answered her, quiet except for a mockingbird calling high overhead, its piercing lilt the only sound besides the scrape of her trowel. After a few minutes more of the silent treatment, Emma conceded defeat. She sat back on her heels and looked up at her friend, shading her eyes against the hazy sunlight with her gloved hand.

“Come on, Sarah. You hear what I'm saying, don't you?”

Her arms folded, Sarah Fortune nodded curtly, her wrinkled mouth pinched.

“Oh, I hear just fine. You're cutting out on Lireinne,” she said. “You're going to wrap yourself up in this goddamned twenty-acre womb again.” She kicked an errant hunk of dirt with the toe of her diminutive cowboy boot. “What I don't understand, though, is why the hell you keep saying Lireinne doesn't need you anymore.” Sarah eyed Emma contemptuously from under the worn green visor of her cap. “If I'd thought you were going to act like a damned baby about this, I'd never have put you two together in the first place.”

“I'm not acting like a baby! And why do you care, anyway?”

Sarah snorted. “Because you're a lonely goddamned mess and she's a good girl who needs a woman in her life. When I was a kid, my own mother raised me like a yard dog, but even that was better than what Lireinne's mother did to her. These excuses of yours are bullshit. You know better, even though you're acting like a cold bitch.”

Stung, Emma threw down the trowel.

“Oh, all right, then!” she cried. “Here's what I know. Lireinne's working directly for my ex-husband. She's his
personal assistant
. That's just too close to home, Sarah. That's more than I ought to have to take, okay? I've done the best I can up till now, but this is too much.” Emma bit her lip, wishing Sarah would give her a break.

“Do you know how hard it is for me, just hearing his name?” she went on, trying to explain. “God, the other night she couldn't stop talking about him—Mr. Con this and Mr. Con that. It was like she'd been enchanted by him or something. You couldn't possibly understand since you've never met him, but Con has this huge . . .
effect
on people.” Emma looked away, muttering under her breath, “Especially pretty young girls.”

“Huh.” The old woman sniffed, unimpressed. “Sure seems to have one hell of an effect on
you
. Poor kid doesn't know why you won't talk to her anymore. She called me, you know, wanting to find out if you were mad at her or some stupid shit like that. You've got no damned call acting that way. Lireinne thought you two were friends and then you go and cut her off just because she got a promotion? Big deal, she's working for your ex-husband. You know that's not goddamned right, no matter what you say.”

Hearing that, Emma's heart swelled in not-unwilling sympathy. Poor Lireinne. Of course she wouldn't understand. Of course she'd think she'd done something to have offended her new friend. Sarah wasn't wrong about that—this really wasn't kind at all. In a way, it was almost . . . cruel, and she didn't want to be cruel to anyone, not ever.

But Emma hadn't been able to bring herself to talk to Lireinne since she'd let the girl off at the trailer that Monday night, nearly two weeks ago. The girl's happy chatter on the long drive home about her new job and her new boss had been well-nigh unendurable, and while Emma hadn't had a panic attack in the truck, it had been a constant, silent struggle.

And later, when she'd come home to her darkened house, there'd been only Sheba, an unusually large dose of Xanax, and the radio standing between her and the voices whispering that it was only a matter of time before Con focused his attentions on Lireinne—if he hadn't already. She was terribly sure he had: Con wouldn't see any reason not to. For days afterward Emma couldn't bring herself to listen to Lireinne's many voice mails, erasing them unheard even as she knew she was being both childish and cowardly. She'd hated having to do that, but Emma had already fought too hard for her precious equilibrium to put herself voluntarily in the way of more pain.

No, she'd been right to cut off this entanglement before things got any worse.

With an uncomfortable shrug, Emma went back to work with her trowel. “I'm sorry, Sarah, I know you don't believe me, but it's better this way. In the long run. Really.”

Sarah grunted in response. She took a giant step over the row between them, sitting down in the dirt beside Emma without ceremony. The folds of her housedress billowed around her skinny shanks as she settled on the dusty ground like one of the broody hens.

“No, it's not ‘better this way,' ” Sarah said, blunt as a mattock. “You're still letting that asshole ex-husband of yours mess around in your life, even though he doesn't seem to give a good goddamn about
you
. Think he goes around giving a shit about what you're up to? I doubt it, Emma, I sincerely doubt it. Running away from your damned divorce—'cause that's what this is, running away—isn't helping you worth a rat's ass. Listen to me.”

Sarah drew a deep breath, apparently preparing for some serious ordering-around. “Woman, you need to do something different 'cause this crap of yours isn't working.”

Emma crumbled the rich soil in her hands to avoid saying what she really wanted to say, that Sarah had no idea, no idea at all. She had no right to judge her.

“So what would you suggest?” Emma answered instead, gritting her teeth in what was turning into real anger. “Shall I call Con up? Do
lunch
? Invite him and his new wife over for dinner? I don't think so. Shall we all become great friends, do a little barbecuing, share a bottle of wine on the patio? Wait—I don't have a goddamned patio. So that's out, too.”

Her breath was running rough and fast, hot in her chest. She didn't have to defend her decision, not to anyone. No matter how Sarah tried to bully her this time, Emma had no intention of confiding the truth about the death of her marriage, the tearing, constant agony and humiliation of it, but if Sarah didn't shut up soon Emma was going to need a Xanax just so she could finish planting her damned garden.

“So back off,” Emma muttered with a vicious stab of her trowel.
“Now.”

“Ooh, you're getting mad, aren't you? Good! It's high time you let yourself in on a little secret,” Sarah said, nodding self-righteously. “You're so pissed off with your ex that it's making you crazy as a betsy-bug, but instead of letting him have it, you're holed up out here, hoping you won't ever goddamn hear his name, even.
He's
the one you should be giving the business to, not some motherless girl who needs a friend! You don't know a damned thing about what might be going on between Lireinne and him. And even if there is something to that, you can't do shit about it anyhow.”

“I can't . . .” Emma began anew, determined to make Sarah understand.

“Oh, grow the fuck up.”

Motionless, Emma stared down at her gloved hands, stricken mute with this injustice.

Meanwhile, Sarah Fortune had managed to struggle to her feet. She shook out her skirt, briskly dusted her hands, and adjusted her John Deere cap.

“I'll be going now,” she said. “I'm headed out to Bud's place to see if I can't convince Lireinne that it's high time Mose gets his ass out of that piss-poor pasture. If he's as quiet and easy as she says he is, those handicapped riding folks up to Folsom say they can take him. It's a good place for an old horse. I think she's ready to see that now, 'specially since she's got a new job. That's a real opportunity for a girl like that, and you should be damned glad for her, you hear me?”

Emma didn't raise her eyes from her work, although she was keenly aware of the scuffed toes of Sarah's cowboy boots planted beside her in the dirt. She was afraid that if she looked up at the old woman she'd burst into tears. Instead, Emma reached into the basket beside her, squinting at one of the feed store's small brown paper bags of seeds because her eyes were too wet to make out Ricky Montz's careful grammar-school printing. If she wasn't going to try to understand, then
why
wouldn't Sarah let this alone?

A slow minute passed.

Finally, Sarah exhaled a disappointed-sounding sigh. “Guess I'll see you around the feed store, then.” She reached down and put a gentle age-spotted hand on Emma's shoulder, rested it there for a moment, and then she was hobbling back through the garden, where her old Mercedes was parked under the shade of the live oak.

“Get the hell out of the way before I run you over, you idiot birds,” she scolded the meandering chickens. “Think about it,” she called to Emma as she climbed into the front seat of the car. “You sure need to.”

Emma didn't answer.

The old diesel coughed to life, and then Sarah was gone in white plumes of gravel dust and oily gray exhaust.

 

Indeed, Emma thought about it. Try as she might, she couldn't stop thinking about it. The rest of the morning drew on while she doggedly prepared the ground, planting her seeds, her unhappy thoughts skipping from Lireinne's glowing face in the Banana Republic store to the searing echoes of Con's devastating confession, from her therapist Margot's advice to Sarah's shrewd—and intrusive—observations.

When she'd finished the last rows of fennel and arugula, Emma rose to her feet with a groan, her hand pressed to the small of her back, feeling as though she were a woman standing on the edge of the earth, tired and alone with no road ahead of her.

Come on, none of this matters very much, Emma chided herself, seeking the elusive peace of dispassion. Sarah will get over it eventually, and Lireinne's bound to be so happy with her new job and . . . whatever else, that she'll forget all about you. Call the dog, put up the chickens, take a bath, clean the house. There's still the rest of a long day to get through, so be here now, why don't you?

But
here
was a lonely place, and
now
felt guilty, somehow emptier than ever.

“Sheba! Come, girl.” When the hound didn't come trotting across the pasture, Emma whistled for her, waiting in the newly planted garden. The bantams were still having a high old time, pecking at the bugs and worms turned out from their life underground: the busy flock was reluctant to leave the rows when she herded it back to the pen. To Emma, their clucks sounded almost as disapproving as Sarah had.

“Shoo. Hurry up—go home.”

After the squawking brood was cooped safely under the live oak, though, Sheba still hadn't returned. Emma shrugged and headed to the house, a little disquieted. The dog almost always came within a few minutes of Emma's call. Where could she be?

 

The afternoon passed as slowly as it ever did, and still Sheba didn't come home.

Even though Emma tried to tell herself that the dog was probably out on an extended hunt, nonetheless she was becoming uneasy about her absence. The farm was far enough off the highway that she'd never been much concerned about Sheba getting hit by a car, but what if her ranging had taken her too close to that well-traveled road? She'd been spayed, so it wouldn't be likely that she'd taken up with a roaming male, even less likely that she'd gotten lost.