The Ladies' Room (23 page)

"Let's go. And thank you" I'd remembered my manners at
the last minute. It seemed I had said those words to Billy Lee
more in one summer than I'd ever said them to anyone in my
whole life.

"No thanks necessary."

Riding on a Harley took second place to relaxing on the
pontoon boat and watching a red fishing bobble dance on
the still waters. Billy Lee insisted on smearing more sunblock on my arms when I took off the overshirt; then he
concentrated on fishing. I hadn't cast a line into the water in
more than twenty-five years. Daddy used to take me along
once in a while, back before I found out dating was more fun
than spending the day out on Lake Texoma with a fishing
pole.

"I love your idea of rest and relaxation," I said.

"Do you like catfish?" he asked.

"Love it."

"I was hoping you'd say that, because here comes supper."
He pulled back on the line and brought in a nice big catch.

"How'd you know?"

"He's been teasing my line for several minutes. It was about
time for him to take the bait."

After he'd snagged a smaller one, he put his rod and reel
away.

"Do we have to go?" I almost whined.

He put the fish on ice in a blue cooler and opened the lid on
a red one. "No, I put up the equipment because we have
enough for supper and some left for the freezer. I'm going to
read for a while. You catch anything, we'll do a catch and release. Hungry?"

"Sushi?" I snarled my nose.

"No, sandwiches and Cokes."

"Did you think of everything?"

"Hopefully. Want something to read?"

"Got a John Grisham?" I asked.

"Oh, you like mystery, do you? How about J. A. Jance?"

I removed the plastic wrap from the sandwich he handed
me and took a bite. "I do like mystery, and J. A. Jance is a favorite."

He opened a tote bag and handed me a book. "Okay, then
you can have this one, and I'll read the new James Lee Burke"

"Who is James Lee Burke?"

"Another good author. He can describe Louisiana so well, I
can hear the nutria screaming and smell the swamp water.
You'll have to read one of his books. You'll be hooked if you
like mystery and good writing."

We finished our sandwiches and spent three hours reading
in comfortable silence. The sun had reached its high point and
started falling toward the western sky when Billy Lee fired up
the motor and steered us back toward the pier beside his
cabin.

He cleaned the fish, and I made baked beans and cabbage
slaw. While he fried the fish, I added chopped onions, baking
powder, egg, milk, and a little salt to the leftover cornmeal
and made hush puppies.

"Been a while since I've had fresh catfish. Smells good,
doesn't it?" he said.

"I can't remember the last time I ate fish fixed at home.
Daddy liked to fish, and we had it often, but he's been gone
ten years"

"Did he put cayenne pepper in the cornmeal?"

"Momma did. Said it needed a little fire."

"I agree," he said.

We ate out on the deck. The zapping noise of the bug killer
competed with Mother Nature's night sounds, but there were
no mosquitoes to ruin supper.

When we finished, he carried the paper plates inside to the
trash can and pulled a couple of cold Cokes from the refrigerator. "Think I'll read a little more before bedtime, unless
you want to do something else."

"Actually, I left Sheriff Joanna in a bind," I said.

To anyone else it would have been a boring evening. To me it
was the stuff cotton candy and dreams are made from. No tension. No boredom. Not even a trip to the refrigerator to find
something to eat just to have something to occupy the long
hours. My tummy was full. I had a good book to keep me entertained. And Billy Lee was right there. Life was truly good.

Billy Lee took a shower at about ten o'clock and came out
of the bedroom wearing knit pajama bottoms and a gauze
undershirt. He wasn't as scrawny as he looked in his overalls.
His arms and abs were rock hard. I had to exercise a good
measure of self-control to keep from reaching out and touching the fine brown hair on his chest to see if it was as soft as it
looked.

My voice was a little hoarse when I said, "Good night, Billy
Lee. You sure you don't want me to take the couch?"

"Now you're being nice," he said.

"Yes, I was, and I apologize. I really do want that bed, and
I'm looking forward to a long shower."

He tossed a couple of cushions onto the floor and pulled a
bed out of the sofa. He opened a closet door beside the fireplace and found two pillows. "See? It's a real bed, and I'll be
just fine."

"Then sleep tight. Any time we need to be up and around?"

"When you wake up. Sleep as long as you like. When we
start in on that dining room and living room, we'll be working
from sunup till sundown. Gert kept more junk in those two
rooms than any of the others"

I lingered. "She did, didn't she? But then, that was what
folks saw when they came inside the house. She wanted them
to notice all her collectibles."

"Collectibles? That's not a collection. It's rejects from forty
years of yard sales"

I almost ducked and ran for cover. Surely lightning would
come crashing out of the sky. Billy Lee had just said something derogatory about Gert, and that was even more surprising than the motorcycle momma's prophecy.

"Amen!" I hustled on into the bedroom.

I wasn't really sure how accurate lightning bolts were.
Keeping a wall between me and Billy Lee might just save my
life.

I fought back tears when we left the lake. We'd slept late.
We'd eaten when we wanted. We'd fished. We'd trolled around
the whole lake one day and fed the fish and turtles part of our
sandwiches.

"I don't want to leave," I whispered as we got onto the Harley.

"I never do. But it wouldn't be nearly as much fun if we had
it every day," he said.

"Bet me"

"We can come back anytime you want to, Trudy."

"Is that a promise?"

"It is. But if you had all the candy bars you wanted every
day, you'd get tired of them."

"You don't know me very well." I managed a smile even
though my chin was almost quivering. "Next time we need to
leave for the floor man, will you bring me back here?"

He nodded, and I believed him. Billy Lee had never lied
to me.

Riding on the back of a cycle for more than two hours gave
me lots of time for thinking. If we hadn't put so many long
hours and elbow grease into redoing the top floor, I might
have gathered up some twenty-year-old newspapers from a
corner, soaked them in ten-year-old gasoline from the garage,
and set fire to the whole house. The only thing that saved the
place was the furniture Billy Lee had built. That and the brandspanking-new big deep Jacuzzi the plumbers had installed in
the bathroom. I couldn't very well torch something that expensive. But the thought of having to do the whole downstairs was enough to make me tell Billy Lee to turn the bike around
and take me back to the lake house, where I intended to live
permanently.

It was dusk when we got home, and Billy Lee didn't even
come inside. He said he'd see me the next morning bright and
early and went on home. I was tickled with the new, shiny floors,
but all that junk in the living room and dining room hadn't mysteriously disappeared while we were gone.

I wandered through the downstairs, which was almost a
perfect square. The foyer and living room extended across the
entire front, taking up half the downstairs. Whoever had designed the place hadn't been thinking of rowdy children who
could slide down the banister into the living room and run
circles from the living room, through the dining room, into
the kitchen, and back to the living room. Visions of the lake
house danced in my head, and it became the light at the end
of the tunnel.

The next morning we had breakfast together, and Billy Lee
went straight up to my new office, where he would be assembling the desk and cabinets. I would rather have been helping
him than boxing up all the junk.

"Hey, when you get all that done, you can come up here and
keep me company," he yelled down the stairs.

"You're going to die a lonely old man!" I yelled back. "I'll
have gray hair before this is done. I'm not totally sure that doing this job won't cause Alzheimer's. Going through Grandmother Matthews' old stuff is probably what snatched my
mother's memory. You've got time to construct a new home
complete with three stories and a basement and attic in the
time it'll take me to empty the dining room."

He went back into the office. "Then when I get done, I'll help
you °"

With one last little whimper, I steeled myself and took a step
into the room. Flattened cardboard boxes were stacked on the
table, along with duct tape, wide packing tape, and a Magic
Marker. I popped a box into a square, taped the bottom, and
started on the bookcase along the back wall. In the beginning
the shelves had been installed to hold fancy dishes and shiny silver platters. Gert had long since packed away anything of
worth, and the shelves were now covered with junk.

I wished Gert would appear like a hologram right beside
me. First I'd ask her what gave her the right to buy a turkey
from the store when she knew how to wring a neck and pluck
feathers. And then I'd make her tell me what was worth keeping and what was junk.

The doorbell rang before I had time to put a single item
into the first box. I didn't care if it was Marty or Betsy, just so
long as I could procrastinate a few more minutes. I opened
the door to find a smartly dressed woman and man on my
porch, each with a briefcase. It was definitely not my day. It
didn't matter if they were selling encyclopedias or religion-I
wasn't interested.

"Trudy Matthews?" The man had a high-pitched voice with
a lisp.

Maybe they'd been sent straight from heaven to punish me
for thinking about burning down the house. How else would
they know my name? Or maybe Crystal had really declared
me insane, and the briefcases were filled with drugs to sedate
me until they could get a straitjacket onto me.

"Why do you want Trudy?"

"Mr. Tucker called last night and made arrangements for us
to come by. We are antiques dealers from Ada, and..

I swung the door open and motioned them inside. "Please,
come right in. I'm about to clean out the dining room."

"Hey, Trudy, I forgot to tell you I called an antiques dealer
to ... Guess it doesn't matter now," Billy Lee shouted from
the top of the stairs.

I shook a finger at him. I'd deal with him later. He was full
of surprises, and I truly loved most of them, but someday he
was going to forget to tell me something that would cause a
heart attack.

The woman made introductions as they followed me. "I'm
Linda, and this is my husband, Art. Is it all right if we set up
shop on the end of this table?"

They were the same height and age, somewhere around
sixty, and all business.

He gasped at the dining room table. "It's oak. Late eighteen
hundreds. Are you selling it?"

"No, we're keeping it," I said.

"Please let us be first to bid on it if you decide to sell. Now,
what would you like us to catalog and make an offer on?"

"Oh, Art, look at these precious salt and pepper shakers,
and they're clearly marked on the bottom. I can see a lot of
items we'd be interested in purchasing, so let me explain our
rates. We will pay sixty percent of book value on any antique.
We will show you the item in the catalog, so you'll know we
are not cheating you"

Heck, I didn't care what they paid me. Anything was better
than the nothing I'd get when I took it all to the Goodwill
store in Durant.

"Just keep a list, and I'll look at it when you're finished.
What you don't want, please . .

"For the honor of getting to go through this stuff, we'll
gladly box what we don't want so you can store it." Art
popped open a briefcase, brought out several books, a yellow
legal pad, and a calculator, plus a hardbound business checkbook.

We all took a break at lunchtime. They asked about a restaurant, and I sent them out to the Western Inn for the lunch
buffet. Billy Lee stopped work, and we made sandwiches in
the kitchen.

"So, are they finding anything good?" he asked, as I looked
over the paper where they'd listed what they had found so far.

"About ten thousand dollars' worth so far. That's six thousand
to us" That last word came out so naturally, it scared me.

"And is it making a dent in the junk?"

"Not nearly enough. Could we take what's left to the Goodwill down in Durant?"

"Anytime you want, we can load it up in the van and run it
down there. Got any more of that coconut cream pie?"

I brought a frozen pie out of the refrigerator, cut off two
slabs, and put them on paper plates.

He reached for his. "Gert used to tell me she'd had a fortune in this house right under Lonnie's nose. Guess she did know
the difference between good antiques and pure junk. I thought
she meant it was hidden in the attic or basement, but then, that
wouldn't have been right under his nose, would it?"