Slow Dollar

Came home to lick his wounds, my sisters-in-law decided after Jonna divorced him and got custody of their little boy. “He needs somebody to make a new home with so he can have Cal down more often,” they said as they pushed their unmarried friends at Dwight.

Hell, they even push me at him whenever I’m between men and that hasn’t worked any better than their other candidates. This time around, though, April was starting to preen herself on her success. Dwight and Sylvia had been seeing each other on a fairly regular basis since June and here it was a week away from October.

To be fair about it, Sylvia Clayton’s a perfectly nice woman.

Which is part of the problem, of course.

Ever since the two of us got kicked out of the Junior Girls’ Class at Sweetwater Missionary Baptist Church for less than sanctified behavior, Portland and I have never been real comfortable around perfect women. It’s not that we smoke like wet bonfires, drink like the crappies in my daddy’s pond, or curse like farmers trying to hitch a set of forty-year-old plows to a thirty-year-old tractor, but everybody in our crowd indulges in one or the other on occasion.

Sylvia doesn’t smoke or swear and while she’s never actually said anything about the evils of alcohol, we’re acutely aware of her awareness if any of us order a second round while she’s still toying with her first glass of wine as if it were the threshold on the doorway to hell. Not that Por orders anything stronger than ginger ale these days. (We only get rowdy, not reckless.) Rut Sylvia’s hair is always perfect, her nails look as if they’ve just been manicured, and she seems to have discovered a lipstick that never wears off because it’s usually as fresh at the end of an evening as it was at the beginning and we never see her touch it up.

(“Bet you a nickel she does it in the stall,” Por says.)

Dwight’s first ball hit one of the bottles and pushed it back but not over and my cousin Reid groaned in sympathy.

Like Portland and Avery, Reid Stephenson’s an attorney here in Dobbs, and like me, he’s not seeing anyone special these days, so I’d invited him to come along to the carnival tonight to even the numbers.

Dwight pessimistically gave the second ball a sidearm pitch almost level with his belt buckle and over went all the wooden milk bottles with a satisfying clatter.

Sylvia squealed with excitement, and when the concessionaire told her to take her pick of the big stuffed animals at the top of his canvas wall, she said, “Oooh, Dwight, honey, I can’t decide!”

She finally settled on a black-dotted white plush Dalmatian that would have been sticky with elephant ears and corn dogs by evening’s end if it were mine, but would probably arrive at her house as pristine as it began. The thing was the size of a real Dalmatian sitting up on its hind legs and just as cumbersome to carry. I figured Dwight would wind up with it on one of his broad shoulders as soon as Sylvia tired of cooing at it. She’d already decided it would be a perfect guard dog by the door of her bedroom.

“That’s right,” I said pleasantly. “It’s all white, isn’t it?”

I knew for a fact that it was. April and I had stopped by her rented townhouse one day back in July and it hadn’t been hard to get the fifty-cent tour.

(Okay, so I’m nosy, but Dwight’s like another brother and I wanted to see what he was letting himself in for.)

Sylvia’s bedroom reminded me of the inside of an eggshell. Carpet, curtains, rocking-chair cushion, and bed linens were white. Bed, chests, and chair were a pale oak. The coverlet and lampshades were ruffled white eyelet and the bed was piled thickly with white ruffled pillows of various sizes. April told her it was just lovely. I had trouble keeping a straight face and Por had whooped when I described it to her later.

“That was the bedroom my mother decorated for my twelfth birthday,” she said, laughing. “Poor Mama.”

(For her thirteenth birthday, while her mother was out, we striped the walls silver and midnight blue and screwed black bulbs into the dainty milk-glass lamps.)

“More to the point, poor Dwight,” I’d said, and we’d both laughed again, trying to imagine Dwight’s muscular six-foot-three body taking its pleasure amid fluffy white ruffles. Dwight? Who’d once described himself as looking like the Durham bull in a pea jacket? Imagination faltered.

“I’m sure it’ll look darling there,” Portland said with such wicked innocence that Dwight gave her a suspicious glance.

“What about you, Avery?” I said hastily. “Don’t you need to win a teddy bear for the baby?”

“Hey, I won us a goldfish. What else you want?” Avery asked, holding aloft a plastic bag. The bag held about a quart of water and a contused-looking little black-and-orange fish that he intended to add to his koi pond. It’d only cost him about four dollars to win the thing.

“Every baby needs a teddy bear,” said a husky voice behind us. “Guess your age, guess your weight, guess the baby’s due date?”

We turned, and there, standing a little apart from the others, was a head-high hinged set of shelves stuffed with small pastel bears beside a large step-on scale. In front was the woman who’d been in my courtroom earlier this month—tall, blue-eyed, dressed tonight in a white shirt tied under her bare midriff and cutoffs that showed long, tanned legs.

Aines? Tampa Aines?

No, not Tampa or Miami. Tallahassee?

Yes, that was it. Tallahassee Ames. And she had recognized me, too.

“Hey, Judge! Guess your weight?”

As if I’d step on a scale anywhere except in a doctor’s office.

My horrified expression made her laugh. “How about your birthday, then? Get it within two months or any bear’s yours, okay?”

I peeled off two dollars, and she eyed me up and down as she added my money to the wad of bills in her pocket, then said, “Virgo, right? End of August?”