“Hot sauce?”
“If you’ve got it.”
Linton, grinning, plunked a tray on the stainless steel counter. It was loaded with six kinds of hot sauce. “Pick your poison.”
“Don’t go for the one with purple flames on the label,” Jeremiah told her. “Trust me. You’ll regret it.”
Jeremiah’s patronizing air made her want to choose the purple flames to spite him. Faye knew that this was not a mature response. The man was only trying to be helpful, and spiting him could cost her the lining of her entire digestive tract. Still, the purple flames were calling out to her.
As Faye perused the sauces, she heard an unfamiliar voice behind her. There was only one unfamiliar person in the store, so it had to be Mayfield.
“Same old Jeremiah. Pretending to be important when he’s really just a sack of shit.”
Eight heads swiveled his way. Faye knew that this was what Mayfield had wanted, and she wished they hadn’t given it to him so easily. The man knew how to get people’s attention.
Linton grabbed everyone’s attention right back. “Takes a sack of shit to know a sack of shit,” he said, but somehow he made it into a joke. On her last visit, Linton had been sullen and silent. She would not have expected him to have charisma, but he did. All eyes were on his handsome face.
Finally, Faye could see why Frida had married him. Remembering his cold eyes on her when she first saw him, she also had a pretty good idea why Frida had divorced him.
Mayfield stopped talking and turned his back on Linton. Unbothered, Linton threw some bacon onto the hot griddle and some chicken breasts in the basket fryer, before filling several toaster ovens with biscuits. As everything sizzled and browned, his eyes darted from face to face.
While the food cooked, Linton focused on Jeremiah. “You coulda called me. I know you got one of these.” He pulled a smartphone out of his pocket and held it out on an open palm. “Don’t you?”
Jeremiah’s eyes flicked down to the phone in his hand. “Haven’t called you since eleventh grade. Why do you think I oughta do it now?”
“Because I shouldn’t have gone a day and a night without somebody telling me my wife was dead.”
“She was your ex-wife. The rules are different when you’re divorced.”
Jeremiah sounded like he was spoiling for a fight and Faye thought he was overreacting. She also thought he would be smart not to challenge Linton. He was marginally bigger than the man cooking his breakfast, but Faye would have predicted that Linton would come out on top in a fist fight. She wondered how much thought Jeremiah had given to the wisdom of provoking this man.
Not much, apparently, because he was still talking. “Besides, Sylvia did the calling. If she thought you should know, you’d know.”
“Sylvia never had any good reason to hate me. But she did.”
“All you had to do was to make Frida happy. Then she would’ve liked you.”
“Frida always—” Linton stumbled on his words like a man who was realizing too late that there was no good way to criticize your recently murdered ex-wife.
Standing there searching for words, Linton looked like a Greek god, but not the Hollywood kind made of washboards, sinew, and zero percent body fat. No, Linton was built like the old statues of Zeus, the ones with thick chests, thick arms, thick necks, and heavy-lidded faces. Even his slick-shaved skull looked heavy, as if forged of bronze.
“Frida couldn’t afford a lawyer. I didn’t want to afford a lawyer, because I wanted to be married to her. No papers got signed. She was still my wife till the day she died.”
“Well, she’s dead now and the funeral’s tomorrow,” Jeremiah said, taking a step closer. “You planning to come? If you do, folks will expect you to help Laneer pay for it.”
“I can chip in, now that I won’t be paying anybody rent every month.”
“Where you planning to live that won’t charge you rent?”
“My house. The one that’s mine, now that my wife is dead.”
Jeremiah took a big step forward, fists clenched, and Linton hustled out from behind the counter. “You wanna fight? We can fight, but we gotta take it outside this store. I don’t want to break anything important with your head.”
Neither man moved toward the door. To Faye, it looked like Jeremiah and Linton didn’t really want to fight. Not yet. They just wanted to stand face to face and yell at each other.
“Frida’s house?” Jeremiah demanded. “That she got from her grandmother? You think that’s your house now?”
The bronze-heavy head nodded once. “The law says it is.”
It had never occurred to Faye that Frida had owned her home, not seriously. Frida hadn’t even owned a car. If she truly had owned the house, it changed everything. Kali still needed to live with Laneer but, properly invested, the money from renting or selling that house could send her to college. Or cooking school. Faye could totally see Kali in cooking school.
But if Frida’s possessions went to Linton, house and all, Kali would have her clothes to start her new life, and that was about it. Faye had only known for a moment that inheriting the house had even been an option for Kali. Now, she felt the loss almost as keenly as if it were her own.
“Don’t be thinking that Laneer will let you anywhere near that girl,” Jeremiah said.
“She’s my stepdaughter. She can live with Laneer if she wants to, but she don’t have to. If she lives with me, I’ll feed her and make sure she’s got clothes. Make sure she goes to school. All those things that dads do, I’ll do ’em. Laneer ain’t got no reason to keep me away from her.”
“He thinks he does.”
Linton gave him the tiniest possible shrug. “Let him think what he thinks. I got a lawyer looking into things.
