“But picking out furniture’s a woman’s job.” He checked his watch — a Rolex, Lily noticed. “Lily, if you’d drive us on into town, you’ll have plenty of time to pick you out some stuff over at American Home Furnishings before we meet ole Buzz for lunch at the Bucket.”
Lily, still leaning against the blank wall, smiled wanly. All her needs were supposedly being taken care of, and yet she had never felt so empty.
CHAPTER 7
Lily and Ben had just finished a grueling forty-minute shopping spree at American Home Furnishings, during which Lily kept protesting that Big Ben was spending too much money on them, and Ben the younger kept complaining that all the furniture in the store was too tacky to go in any house of his. “It’s bad enough,” he said, “that I have to live in a ranch-style house. Now I have to furnish it with crap that’s just a cut above cardboard!”
“Oh, for godssake.” Lily sighed. Her furniture preference was for antiques and junk-store finds, but if somebody was gracious enough to buy her a houseful of furniture, she wasn’t going to be rude enough to complain about the store’s limited selection. “Okay,” she announced, “we’ll take that sea-foam green sofa and armchair and the coffee table that goes with it. We’ll also have that round table and chairs over there for the dining room, the oak bedroom suite, the Jenny Lind nursery set, and the maple bedroom suite for the spare room.”
The oversolicitous furniture salesman grinned at Ben. “There’s something to be said for a lady who knows what she wants.”
Every item on the Dinner Bucket’s lunch buffet was represented on Buzz Dobson’s tie. The fact that he seemed to have trouble conveying a forkful of food to his mouth didn’t exactly fill Lily with confidence in his legal abilities. Could a man really have mastered the art of Socratic dialogue if he had never learned how to feed himself?
“So,” Lily asked, “where did you go to law school, Mr. Dobson?”
“Oh, call me Buzz,” he said, trailing his too-short tie through his mashed potatoes as he reached for his iced tea glass.
“Buzz,” Lily corrected herself. While trying not to stare at his gravy-soaked tie, she found herself focusing on Buzz’s toupee, a dark brown, vaguely hairlike mass that was perched on his head like a jaunty hat.
“Ahh, I went to law school at your old stomping ground... down in Atlanta.”
“Emory?” Lily asked, picking at her overcooked macaroni and cheese.
“Naw I went to the Bushrod Washington School of Law...it’s off of Peachtree.”
“Oh, yes, I know it.” Under the table, Lily used her index finger to trace the letters l-o-s-e-r on Ben’s thigh. Spelling out words in this way was a method of communication Dez had invented in order to sit through dull plays and lectures.
Ben traced back on Lily’s thigh: It’s okay.
Lily wasn’t sure she believed him. The Bushrod Washington School of Law was housed in a dilapidated, graffiti-sprayed office building. It was widely known as the Last Resort School of Law, an institution whose only entrance requirements were a pulse and a checkbook.
“Yup,” Buzz said, discarding a thoroughly gnawed chicken bone, “took me six years, but I finally graduated.”
Lily was trying to calculate how quickly she could gather Mimi and her belongings and return to Atlanta when Big Ben said, “Yup, me and Buzz go way back. Ole Buzz was the best running back, Faulkner County High School’s ever seen.”
