in the years I’d lived in Shakespeare.
He’d really made an effort today.
When Claude saw Carrie coming up the sidewalk, his face changed. I watched the hardness seep out of it, replaced by something more. He took her hand, and brought his other hand from behind him to present her with a bouquet.
“Oh, Claude,” she said, overcome with pleasure. “You thought of this.”
Good. Much better than my corsage. Now Carrie looked truly bridelike.
“Claude, Charles,” I said, by way of greeting.
“Lily, thanks for coming. Let’s go do it.”
If Claude had been any more nervous he would’ve made a hole in the sidewalk.
I spied Judge Hitchcock peering out of the door.
“Judge is waiting,” I said, and Claude and Carrie looked at each other, heaved a simultaneous sigh, and started toward the courthouse door. Charles and I were right behind.
After the brief ceremony, Claude and Carrie had eyes only for each other, though Carrie hugged Charles and me, and Claude shook our hands. He offered to buy us lunch, but with one voice we turned him down. Charles wanted to crawl back in his cave, wherever it was, and I was not in a festive mood after my morning’s work, though I was making an effort to be cheerful for my friends’ sakes.
Charles and I were glad to part, and as Carrie and her new husband drove away to their weekend prehoneymoon, I went back to my house, despising myself for my nasty mood, which I hoped I’d hidden well enough. Changing back into my working clothes, hanging my good outfit in the closet, and grabbing a piece of fruit for lunch, I was restless from the dark feeling inside me. As always, it translated into a need for action. It would have been a good day for me to be mugged, because I would have enjoyed hurting someone.
While I cleaned the tiny house of the very old Mrs. Jepperson, while the round black woman who “sat with” Mrs. Jepperson every day did her best to catch me stealing something, I carried that core of anger within me, burning and painful.
It took me an hour to identify my anger as loneliness. It had been a long time since I’d felt lonely; I’m a person who enjoys being alone, and the past few years had afforded me plenty of that. For a long time, I hadn’t made friends; I hadn’t taken lovers. But this year had seen so many changes in me, and unfortunately, side by side with the willingness to have friends traveled the capacity for loneliness. I sighed as I put Mrs. Jepperson’s stained sheets in the washer to soak in bleach.
I was just plain old feeling sorry for myself. Even though I knew that, I didn’t seem to be able to quench that resentful smoldering inside me.
I went to my next job, and then home, without being able to find a thought to still my inner restlessness. Jack, whose timing was often off, chose that moment to call me.
Every now and then Jack told me all about a case he was working on. But sometimes, especially in a case involving financial transactions and large sums of money, he kept his mouth shut, and this was one of those times. He missed me very much, he said. And I believed him. But I had unworthy thoughts, ideas that dismayed me; not their content, exactly, but the fact that
Not surprisingly, the conversation didn’t go well. I was at my most clipped and inaccessible; Jack was frustrated and angry that I wasn’t happier he’d called right in the middle of his busy day. I knew I was being impossible, without seeming to be able to stop it, and I believe he knew the same.
We needed to be together more. After we’d hung up, just barely managing not to snarl at each other, I made myself face the facts. One weekend every now and then wasn’t enough. It took us hours to get re-accustomed to ourselves as a couple, together. After that we had a wonderful time, but then we had to go through the detachment process when Jack returned to Little Rock. His hours were unpredictable. My hours were generally regular. Only by living in the same town were we likely to see each other consistently enough to establish our relationship.
Your own life is plenty hard without complicating it with that of another. For a moment I wondered if we should stop trying. The idea was so painful that I had to admit to myself, all over again, that Jack was necessary to me.
I didn’t want to call him back when I was so fraught. I couldn’t predict what he would say, either. So what I ended up doing that evening was going into the empty guest bedroom and kicking the hell out of my punching bag.
Chapter Five
Thursday was biceps day in my personal schedule. Bicep curls may look impressive, but they’re not my favorite exercise. And they’re hard to do correctly. Most people swing the dumbbells up. Of course, the more swing you put in it, the less you’re working your biceps. I’ve noticed that in every movie scene set in a gym, the characters are either doing bicep curls or bench presses. Usually the guy doing bicep curls is a jerk.
Just as I put the twenty-five-pound barbells back on the weight rack, Bobo Winthrop walked in with a girl. Bobo, though maybe twelve years younger than me, was my friend. I was glad to see him, and glad to see the girl accompanying him; for the past couple of years, even after all the trouble I’d had with his family, Bobo had been convinced that I was the woman for him. Now that Bobo divided his time between college in nearby Montrose and visits home to check on his ailing grandmother, visit his family, and do his laundry, I seldom got to visit with him. I realized I’d missed him, and that made me wary.
As I watched Bobo start working his way around the room, shaking hands and patting backs, I moved from free weights to the preacher bench. The short young woman in tow behind him kept smiling as Bobo, shoving his floppy blond hair out of his eyes, introduced her to the motley crew who inhabited the gym at this early hour. She had a good, easy, meet-and-greet style.
The early-morning people at Body Time ranged from Brian Gruber, an executive at a local mattress- manufacturing plant, to Jerri Sizemore, whose claim to fame was that she’d been married four times. As I put weights on the short curl bar at the preacher bench, I marked Bobo’s progress with a touch of amusement. In his golden wake, he left smiles and some infusion of joie de vive.
What did it feel like, I wondered, to be almost universally known and liked, to be attractive to almost everyone, to have the backing of a strong and influential family?
With a shock like a dash of ice water, it occurred to me that I had once been like that, when I’d been about Bobo’s age: before I’d gone off to live in Memphis, before the media-saturated nightmare of my abduction and rape. I shook my head. Though I knew it was true, I found it was almost impossible to believe I had ever been that comfortable. Bobo had had some hard times himself, at least in the past year, yet his long look into darkness had only made his radiance stand out with greater relief.
I’d finished my first set with the curl bar and returned it to its rests by the time Bobo worked his way around to me.
“Lily!” His voice was full of pride. Was he showing me off to the girl, or the girl to me? His hand on my shoulder was warm and dry. “This is Toni Holbrook,” he said. “Toni, this is my friend Lily Bard.” The gaze of his dark blue eyes flicked back and forth between us.
I waited for my name to ring a bell with this girl-for the horrified fascination to creep into her gaze-but she was so young I guess she didn’t remember the months when my name was in every newspaper. I relaxed and held out my hand to her. She stuck her fingers up against my palm instead of grasping my hand firmly. Almost always, the offenders who shake hands in this wishy-washy way are women. It felt like getting a handful of cannelloni.
“I’m so pleased to finally meet you,” she said with a sincere smile that made my teeth hurt. “Bobo talks about you all the time.”
I flashed a glance at him. “I used to clean for Bobo’s mother,” I said, to put a different perspective on the conversation. I’ll give her this, she didn’t flinch.
“What you want on there, Lily?” Bobo asked. He waited at the disc rack.
“Another set of dimes,” I told him. He slid off two ten-pound discs, put one on each end of the bar, and then
