If the Shoe Fits (31 page)

He’d been right about that. Just one of the lamps easily illuminated the whole kitchen.

Will swung through the living room and grabbed the Bible he’d left on the end table next to the sofa before returning to his chair out on the deck. After downing the last drops of cranberry juice, he opened the Bible, set it on his knee, and began to read at random from the book of Isaiah.

“Do not remember the past events, pay no attention to things of old. Look, I am about to do something new; even now it is coming. Do you not see it?”

Will laughed out loud at that. He’d been looking for permission to move forward away from Julianne. Perhaps he’d just found it. The Lord certainly knew that a move to Lexington—or even just a shift of thinking where Julianne wasn’t the center of his universe—would assuredly be “something new.”

But then again …

Alison’s words suddenly scraped across his memory:
“It is what it is, Will. You love her. You’ve probably always loved her.”

Fessing up and telling Julianne how he felt—how he’d always felt—well, that would also be a brand-new road.

A terrifying and life-altering
brand-new road
.

Suddenly, a move to Lexington didn’t seem quite so crazy.

“I’ve been thinkin’
about Mandy, Son.”

Will glanced up at his father over their plates of scrambled eggs.

“What about her?”

“I think she spends too much time lookin’ after me instead of livin’ her own life.”

Will couldn’t resist the quiver of a smile. “Really.”

“She needs to meet a good man, Will. There’s still a lotta life in the old girl, and she can’t see the forest for the
me
.”

Will wiped the corner of his mouth and set down his fork. “You’re not about to suggest that I date Mrs. Bartlett, are you?”

Davis guffawed at the thought. “No, Son. I think she might be too much woman for you…. I was just thinkin’ I might sit it out tonight, let you young folks go to the shindig without me. Maybe you can introduce Mandy to a judge or an older lawyer acquaintance you might have.”

“Pop, are you serious? Amanda’s excited about going with you.”

“Nah, I know. But she’s in her prime. She doesn’t need to think about me and if I’ve had enough to eat or if I’m getting overtired. She might cut loose and have some fun if I’m not there to distract her.”

“Pop—”

“Just make my excuses, will you, Son?”

Will shrugged. “Sure. If you don’t want to go.”

“I’ve got a Grisham novel to finish anyway.”

“I saw that. Don’t donate it when you’re finished, okay? I’d like to give it a read before you do.”

“Ohh, it’s a good one, too,” Davis said, and he followed it with a short whistle. “Keeps you thinkin’.”

“Interesting novels,” Dr. Donnelly had suggested. “If he likes to read, it will help keep his mind sharp.” He made a mental note to order that e-reader for his dad.

“So what’s the final verdict, Son?” Davis asked, wrangling Will’s wagon train of thought. “Who’s goin’ with whom to the big shindig? Are you taking Julianne?”

“No,” he answered, shaking his head. “She’s still going with the ditch digger.”

“And you? Alison, is it?”

“No, Pop,” he said, tilting his chair back on two legs. “Alison and I broke up last night.”

“Well, that one’s over before it got revved up, isn’t it? Who decided? You or her?”

“She did,” Will admitted. “Over pizza at LaRosa’s. She sang a very familiar old tune.”

“Don’t tell me. Julianne?”

“Ding-ding-ding. You win the prize, Pop.”

Davis shook his head and clucked, “Mm, mm, mm. Well, you aren’t winnin’ any of them, are you, Son?”

“Not lately.”

“You think there’s anything to this argument? Are you still pining for her, boy? Because if you are, it’s simple enough to—”

“I have to go, Pop. I’ve got to pick up my dry cleaning, run a couple of errands. Do you want to come along?”

“Nah,” he answered, waving a quick dismissal.

Will planted a peck on his father’s cheek as he headed across the kitchen. He stopped in the doorway and looked back at him.

“Hey, Pop. I’ve heard they have some pretty great Parkinson’s research studies going on down at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.”

“Yeah?”

“You know, I was offered a pretty decent job down there recently. Do you have any interest in pulling up stakes and running away from home, just us Hanes boys?”

Davis pondered that for a moment. “You need that, Son? You need to put some miles between you and Cincinnati?”

He sighed. “I don’t know.”

“Well, you figure that out. If it’s what you need, we’ll talk about it again. Fair enough?”

Will nodded. “I’ll see you later.”

“Later.”

“Oh,” he said, stopping in his tracks. “Don’t mention this to Amanda or anyone, okay?”

“Mention what?” he replied without looking up from his eggs.

“All right,” Will said over a chuckle. “I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

“Suzi Q didn’t tell me a thing about how gorgeous you are,” Neil told Julianne’s reflection as he tossed a cape around her neck. “She just said you’re about to win a big award, and you have to be the belle of the ball.”

“That sounds just like her,” Julianne said on a giggle as she admired her subtle—but flawless—makeup. She almost recognized the bright-eyed girl in the mirror as an airbrushed version of herself.

“Now that I’m looking at you,” he observed, “I’m thinking curls. Lots and lots of curls.”

She shrugged one shoulder and nibbled the corner of her lip. “I always wear my hair straight. It might be nice to switch things up tonight.”

“And switch them up, we shall!” he exclaimed with flair. “You just put yourself into Neil’s hands, and let me do the magic.”

Julianne needed a little magic in her life that night. No reason not to start early.

Neil produced a cone-shaped ceramic iron, and he plugged it in to warm up while he combed out Julianne’s hair. When he tossed the comb to the blue enamel counter of his station, he tugged a black knit glove out of the drawer and put it on.

“What’s that for?” Julianne questioned him.

Neil chuckled as he snapped the wrist of the glove. “So I don’t burn the skin right off my fingers in the name of glamour.”

He wrapped a section of golden hair around the cone of the iron and held it into place with his gloved fingers. A few seconds later, a beautiful spiral curl bounced into place, and he did the same with the next section.

“Your hair is like spun silk,” he told her. “Not like our Suzi’s. It takes monthly gloss treatments to tame that mop of hers.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Oh, no,
giiirl
,” he sang, an animated smirk on his handsome African-American face. “But she’s a stunner when I’m through with her. Can I get an amen on that?”

Julianne giggled, shrugged one shoulder and said, “Amen.”

She smiled at Neil in the reflection of the mirror as he continued to turn her sleek tresses into spirited, exuberant curls.

“You wouldn’t believe what I can take and turn into something,” he told her as he worked. “Not for you, though. You were a head-turner when you walked in here. But some of my clients, child. A lesser artist would turn them away with a screech!”

Julianne tumbled into a fit of muffled laughter. “Mister Neil,” as her friend called him, had turned out to be everything Suzanne had depicted over the years. “A drama queen with an attitude,” she’d once told Julianne over lunch. “But a DaVinci with a blow-dryer.”

“Girl, I’ve got a client coming in here in thirty minutes that any other artist would have turned away on the second visit. Every time she comes back to me, she’s turned my work into a helmet of hair spray.”

“So why do you keep doing her hair then?” Julianne asked him. “I would think that would be frustrating.”

“Ooooh, girl, you have no idea.” A moment later, he leaned over her shoulder and whispered, “Rumpelstiltskin! You get to see for yourself. Look what she’s done to my body wave!”

Julianne glanced into the mirror to catch the reflection of the front door.

“Hi-dee hi-dee,
Mistah
Neil!”

Her heart thudded downward as she caught a glimpse of Lacey James standing at the front desk.

“Julie?!”

“Ooh-ooh,” Neil hummed. “How could I ever have known you would be friends with her?”

“You couldn’t. And I’m not. There’s a hundred bucks in it for you if you give her a bad perm.”

Neil cackled like a hen. Julianne could see that he loved a good catfight, and she sensed that he wasn’t above starting one himself, a suspicion set in stone when he seated her elbow-to-elbow with Lacey for their pedicures a short while later.

“I can just hardly believe you’re a client of Mister Neil’s!” Lacey exclaimed after several minutes of ignoring each other. “I mean, I can usually tell, you know? With that plain-Jane hair of yours, it just wasn’t even in the realm, Julie.”

“Well, your record stands. I am not a client. In fact, this is my first visit.”

“Oh, well, that explains it, doesn’t it then?”

“Yeah,” Julianne said with a sigh as she closed her eyes and leaned back to enjoy a relaxing foot massage—to pretend at least. “Normally, I just cut it myself with the chicken scissors from the kitchen, rub a little Crisco through it for shine, and call it a day.”

Lacey’s total silence indicated that Julianne’s mother had, as suspected, been one hundred percent wrong all those years when she declared that “sarcasm accomplishes no good purpose.”

“Color choice?” the manicurist asked her, and she opened her eyes with regret.

“Very pale pink,” she replied. “Or clear.”

“Nothing so provincial for me,” Lacey told the woman at her feet. “I’d like Pink Hottie for my toes, and Tickle Me Pink for my fingernails. They’ll go perfectly with my evening gown. Tonight’s going to be my night.”

Lacey looked over at Julianne and sighed when she didn’t get a reaction.

“You’re going somewhere special?” the woman asked her, and Lacey fell into her most Southern explanation of the Person of the Year nomination process, the award’s ties to the Bar Association, and her supposed ambivalence about winning.

“It’s such an honor to be nominated,” she declared, and she took in a sharp breath before adding, “Isn’t that so, Julie?”

“Mm-hmm,” she said with a smile and a nod before turning away again and closing her eyes.

After several minutes, Lacey spoke so quietly that she almost missed it. “Why do you hate me so much?” Julianne’s eyes fluttered open, and she looked at Lacey curiously. With an unexpected amount of emotion, she repeated the inquiry. “Please just tell me, Julie. I really want to know.”

Julianne sighed, and she locked eyes for a quick flash of a moment with the woman painting Lacey’s toenails a shocking shade of neon pink.

“I don’t hate you.”

Lacey clicked her tongue and puffed out a sigh of exasperation. “We both know that isn’t true, so can’t you just do me the courtesy of telling me what it is about me that screeches on you like unmanicured fingernails on a classroom blackboard?”

The sudden prick to her conscience surprised Julianne. She hadn’t counted a single cell in her entire body or spirit that cared one iota what Lacey thought. And yet in that moment, sitting next to the woman who rubbed her the
wrongest
way of anyone she’d ever met, she felt an unexpected apology bubbling up inside her.

“If we’re going to have this conversation,” Julianne said, “you’re going to have to tell me something, too.”

“What is it?”

“Why are you so mean to me all the time?”

The wheels turned behind Lacey’s dewy eyes, and then she groaned. “When am I mean to you?” she asked. She sniffed before adding, “When it’s not provoked, I mean.”

“Every chance you get, you make side jabs about my hair, my clothes, my love life.”

Lacey’s lips parted for only an instant before she clamped them shut.

“See!” Julianne exclaimed. “You were just about to say something, weren’t you? You were going to say, ‘What love life?’”

Lacey’s eyes lowered and she smiled. “You’re right. I was.”

“See what I mean?”

“That’s why you hate me so much?”