I said, “You always vote with the majority, Mom.”
“Don’t tell me you’re disappointed—the way you’ve been carrying on with her.”
“I vote with her,” I said. “It’s a lousy trick!”
That night I couldn’t think about anything else. Customers who ordered “Homemade Pot Roast fresh from the oven” were just as liable to get “Our Chef’s delicious Fillet of Boneless Chicken Breasts.” Red-wine drinkers snapped that they’d ordered white, and vice versa. McCaffery threatened to demote me to dishwasher.
When I got back to the cottage, I walked barefoot down to the beach, watching the lights of Roundelay, hoping somehow Huguette would show up there.
I stayed for hours. Mom woke up when I returned.
“Lang?” she called out to me. “Are you all right?”
“I’m all right.”
She knew that I wasn’t, knew why I wasn’t.
“Those people solve their own problems in their own ways, honey. She’ll be okay.”
“Yeah,” I answered, but I wasn’t sure she would be.
THIRTY
“DON’T WORRY ABOUT ME,” she said. “Were you worried?”
I was driving. She was sitting beside me, one hand reaching back to calm Plato, who was on his way to the vet to have a sore paw checked.
“Why do you think I called so early?” I asked her. “Of course I was worried!”
“And Uncle Ben doesn’t think Franklin gossips.” She laughed. “So you know everything,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“No you don’t…. You don’t know my side of the story.”
“What’s your side?”
“Stay, Plato! Here’s my side,” she began.
That was when she told me she wasn’t going to Boston with Nevada. Instead, she was going to the Adirondacks with Cog Wheeler on Sunday, after his gig at The House of Stars.
“When Uncle Ben gets back to Roundelay, I won’t be there.”
I tried to keep my voice calm. Plato was jumping around in the backseat, and she was hollering at him in between telling me all this.
“And then what?” I asked her.
“Uncle Ben will never think of looking for me there. He’ll never think I’m with Cog, either. I told him that if he thought his little plan to fix me up with Cog would work, he was wrong! I said I was never going to see Cog again, and I certainly wasn’t going to Boston!”
“He’ll find you,” I said. “You know him.”
“Not for a while, he won’t. And before he does, let him suffer. I want to hurt him!”
Plato leaped to the front seat.
“I’ve got him,” she said. “He’ll sit here on my lap.”
“Do you want to hurt me, too? Because you will.”
“You’ll have Alex…. He can’t have it both ways, can he, Plato?”
“Get him in the backseat,” I said. “I can’t concentrate.”
“He’s all right.”
“He’s slobbering on my sleeve!”
“The way you thought I would when you called?” She laughed. “You thought I would be all in pieces, but I’m a tough dog too, aren’t I, Plato?”
I said, “You don’t love Cog, Huguette.”
“I want to be with someone who loves me more than I love him.”
“You think Cog loves you that much?”
“He loves me more than I love him, because I don’t love him to death! I just love him a little.”
“Nevada will kill Cog!”
“He won’t kill him. And whatever he does do will only be good publicity for The Failures.”
I didn’t say anything for a while. I didn’t know what to say. It was like watching an accident about to happen, like the night in the parking lot when Alex received the first blow and I stood there watching. For a long time after, I kept going over that scene and thinking that I should have done something, helped Alex some way, not just stood there frozen.
She began babbling to Plato, stupid stuff about how they weren’t going to be bossed around by Nevada, making the chow pant and drool all the harder.
As we pulled up at the vet’s, I finally said, “And what’s to stop me from telling Nevada this plan?”
She was attaching the lead to Plato’s collar. “You know I’d only make another plan,” she said, “so you wouldn’t be protecting me, Lang. I don’t need anyone’s protection!” She opened the car door while she said, “And what about your big feeling for me, huh? Would you betray me too?”
I let her go ahead of me, the dog tugging her toward the door. I had to sit there a minute and get control.
She looked over her shoulder at me, that big grin, her hand raised, bracelets jangling down her arm. “C’mon!” she called. “You afraid to visit the doctor?”
A few days later, when I was painting the railings by the gate, Nevada strolled down for a chat. Huguette was up in the pool swimming.
“She’s decided not to go to Boston,” he said. “Did she tell you?”
“She told me.”
“She’s disappointed in me right now, but that’ll pass. And the scene in Boston is going to be chaotic, anyway. It’ll all be videotaped, too. She can watch it someday after she simmers down.”
His control over the rottweilers always amazed me. Not a peep out of them when he was on the scene. Before, they’d barked and snarled at me, and A must have lost three pounds charging the fence.
“Poor Cog is bearing the brunt of it,” Nevada said. “She won’t even speak to him on the telephone.” She spoke to him whenever we drove into the village. Her secret calls were to Cog now, instead of Martin.
“She says she wants nothing to do with any males.” Nevada chuckled. “I guess she doesn’t count gay ones…. Penner, where did you get that paint?”
“Franklin gave it to me.”
“It’s too thin. You’ll need to do two coats.” Then he shrugged. “The thing with Cog wouldn’t have worked, anyway. He’s too pragmatic. He doesn’t have time for a schoolgirl. I think it was Irving Berlin who said the toughest thing about success is that you’ve got to keep on being a success.”
Our “chats” usually went that way, Nevada doing all the chatting. For once I didn’t mind. I couldn’t look him in the eye, either.
As well as I knew him and
