She turned on the shower, dropped the towel to the floor, and smiled at the multiple images of her naked body. Overall, she was entitled to that smile. Poverty and hard work had kept the pounds off when she was a girl; rigorous dieting and three miles a day on her treadmill kept them off as she approached her forty-second birthday. Yes, she saw the slight drooping of her full breasts, and yes, her waist was a bit thicker than on the day she traded her cherry for a gold bracelet to a dirtbag who went off to Duke and came back with his nose in the air, till she won a seat on the board of commissioners and he needed some favors.
Well, that cost him more than a gold bracelet, a bracelet that was long gone anyhow, stolen by her own pa and hocked for a gallon of Kezzie Knott’s white lightning, and how Deborah Knott ever got appointed to be a judge by a Republican governor with a bootlegging Democrat for a father she would never understand. Bound to be some dirt there somewhere, Candace thought for the hundredth time, and one of these days she was going to pick up a shovel and start digging. They still had the cleaning contract for Lee and Stephenson, Deborah Knott’s old law firm, and—
A small bruise on her thigh distracted Candace Bradshaw’s attention. Now how did she get that? she wondered as she went back to evaluating her body. Her legs had always been too short in proportion to the rest of her body and she used to envy girls with longer legs until it dawned on her that men of power were often short and short men did not take kindly to women who towered over them. Much better to be small and cuddly. Besides, her short thighs were fairly free of cellulite and her calves were still shapely, her ankles still trim. She had been good to her body, and in turn her body had been good to her.
Very good to her.
It had given her a free and clear title to this house. It had helped make her a power in her own right. It would help her take care of that bastard who—
Her head turned alertly. Was that the sound of a door latch?
She quickly stooped for the towel and covered herself even though she was supposed to be alone in the house.
“Deanna?” she called. She had taken Dee’s house key, but locked doors and drawers had never stopped her daughter. Slowed her down, maybe, but never stopped her. Exasperation tinged her voice. “Is that you?”
Silence.
She walked past the mirrored closets, through her bedroom and out into the hall.
“Dee?”
No answer and a quick look through a front window did not show Dee’s car parked on the circular drive outside.
She shrugged and returned to the bathroom. Hot water from three shower heads had begun to steam up the mirrors. She stepped into the stall, lifted her oval face to the needle-fine spray like a sunflower lifting to the sun, and sighed with happiness as water sluiced down her body, pulsating to the rhythm of her heartbeats.
This was her favorite place in the house and it was not unusual for her to shower twice a day. In periods of stress, three times.
She could win the lottery tomorrow, the party could nominate her to run for governor, and nothing—
Growing up in a dilapidated trailer with a broken water heater that was never replaced, the only way to get hot water was if she heated it on the kitchen stove. Even then, she would often come back with a final kettle to find her mother sitting in the chipped and rust-stained bathtub she had so laboriously filled. “Well, hell, Miss Prissy-pants. What’s your problem? When I was your age, the only thing we had was an old tin washtub and five or six of us would have to use the same water. It’d be pure black by the time it was my turn. You’re lucky you got a tub big enough to wallow around in, sugar Candy, and it ain’t like I’m all that dirty or gonna pee in the water like my brothers did.”
For a moment, she almost wished her parents could see her now. That she could show them how far she had come on her own with no help from them. Admittedly, it was only a fleeting wish. The happiest day of her life was when word came that Macon and Alice Wells had died in a fiery car crash, and she was suddenly free to reinvent herself, to legally change her name to Candace and call herself that instead of the Candy on her birth certificate. Not that she could ever pretend that she came from something more than the trashiest trailer park in Colleton County. The communal memory was too long to forget that her mother was a whore and her father a shiftless drunk. All the same, their ashes were now scattered to the four winds and they could never again embarrass her by showing up at her work or by calling her to come bail them out of jail.
She reached for the bar of soap.
Or twenty dollars for a bottle of herbal shampoo?
She rinsed her hair, worked a handful of fragrant conditioner into each long chestnut tress that was artfully streaked with gold every five weeks at the best hairdresser in Dobbs, then rinsed again. Even when every trace of soap, shampoo, and conditioner was gone, she continued to stand under the pulsing water. She cupped her hands beneath her breasts and lifted them up to the water till the nipples hardened. It was as if they were caressed by a lover’s gentle hands, an undemanding lover whose only desire was to pleasure her and not himself. Unlike the brutish pawings she had endured to get where she was today, each pulse was a soft pat that calmed her nerves and suffused her senses with a feeling of well-being.
At last, she reluctantly turned off the taps and toweled her body and hair dry. She smoothed scented lotion on her skin; and when she had finished making up her face, she styled her hair with a hand dryer and a brush until it hung sleek and shining halfway down her back.
It vaguely worried her that women were advised to cut their hair shorter as they grew older, but she figured she had at least another six or eight years before she had to make that decision. Men liked long sexy hair and salesclerks still thought that she and Dee were sisters. Indeed, someone had recently taken a quick look at Dee’s hungover pasty face and baggy eyes and mistakenly assumed that Dee was the mother and she the daughter.
Candace smiled at the memory of Dee’s reaction to that.
