Matchpoint (4 page)

It was a good time to leave.

A COUPLE blocks away, cars filled Grandma’s driveway, and I had to find a parking space down the street.
People were filing into her house as I walked up to the door. For the life of me, I couldn’t recall any big events set for the afternoon, but Grandma’s was a hub of life in Cannes. Since she never left her house, Cannes had to come to her.

I had driven the short distance to my grandmother’s house, thrilled to be away from dentists and lunatics and on my way to Grandma, who was warm and loving and probably had a stash of Pop-Tarts somewhere that she would gladly share with me.

But as I stood in the entranceway, I could see that her front parlor was crammed with lunatics of a different sort. Sweater-set-wearing lunatics. Dockers-wearing lunatics. In other words, Cannes’s movers and shakers.

Mayor Robinson stood in the middle, surrounded by the town’s gentry—the leaders of the Historical Preservation Society, the Neighborhood Watch, and the Craft Show, just to name a few—all gesturing at him and foaming at the mouth as they tried to get their points across. It was a houseful of power.

I had a feeling it would be awhile before I got my Pop-Tarts.

Luckily, my best friend, Bridget, came out of the kitchen right toward me carrying a platter of ham-and-cheese hoagies from Herbie’s Hoagies and Pies. I spotted Herbie himself yelling at the mayor while clutching one of the sandwiches in his hand. As he gestured wildly, bits of lettuce and pepperoncini flew and landed on the mayor’s Ralph Lauren custom-fit shirt with French cuffs. Damn, that sandwich looked good.

Bridget got close enough for me to grab one. “Just in time,” I said. “I’m starving. I guess my diet can wait until tomorrow.”

“Sorry, miss,” she said, pushing her big hoot-owl glasses up on her nose. “Those are for the concerned citizens.”

“Get outta here,” I said, lunging for a sandwich. “I’m a concerned citizen for my blood sugar level. You won’t believe my day. Wait until I tell you about the wackos at Tea Time.”

Bridget leaned forward. Her large eyes were swathed in blue eye shadow and studied me with an interest she usually reserved for ACLU rallies. “Have we met?”

“What? Bridget, are you high?”

“Gladie, is that you?”

“Come on, not you, too.”

“Dang, I would never have recognized you in a million years,” she said. “Did you have plastic surgery? Don’t tell me you have fallen victim to society’s misogynistic dictates.”

“Uh,” I said. I wondered if Bridget would think Ecuadoran Erect was a misogynistic dictate. Probably. So far my new head was not paying off. I was more anonymous than fabulous.

We were interrupted by a cloud of White Diamonds perfume followed by my grandmother, bulging out of her finest Valentino-knockoff black-and-white sheath dress.

“Bridget, get those hoagies into the parlor,” she ordered. “We have to do something to calm the folks. One more minute and they’ll be bringing out the torches and pitchforks.”

Bridget skipped into the parlor, and Grandma turned to me. “Hmm …,” she said, giving me her all-seeing look. Grandma had a way of knowing things that couldn’t be known. “You’ve got trouble,” she said. “Oral trouble.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said. “I’ll brush twice tonight.”

“That’s up to you, dolly. But Frances Farian brought over her coconut sour cream fudge bars, and one bite is going to give you a pain in your upper right bicuspid that’ll shoot up through the nerve endings to your brain.”

My hand flew to my mouth. “I’m on a diet, anyway,”
I said, but I had my doubts about saying no to coconut sour cream fudge bars.

“You’re forgiven about forgetting the chicken.”

“Oh, Chik’n Lik’n! I’m sorry.” My teeth had distracted me.

“Have you ever seen the like?” Grandma asked, the subjects of my teeth and fried chicken forgotten. Half the town was gathered in her parlor. The noise was deafening as they shrieked and hollered. I caught bits and pieces of conversations. “Crazies” and “pagans” seemed to be the most common words thrown around.

“No Second Chancers meeting?” I asked.

“The town is up in arms about the invasion of the pagans. They called an emergency gathering.”

I followed Grandma into the parlor, and the crowd parted like the Red Sea to let her pass. Bridget had saved two places for us on one of the sofas, and as soon as Grandma took a seat, the room quieted. The mayor stood across from us, facing the crowd. After waiting a couple of beats, he cleared his throat.

He was a good-looking man, around fifty years old, clean-cut, well dressed, with perfect, deep-mocha skin and a commanding voice. Single. I wondered why Grandma had never matched Mayor Robinson. It was unlike her to let a single, middle-aged man with money go matchless for long.

“What are you going to do about the wackos, Robinson?” shouted a man to my left.

“I heard you gave those pagans permits to camp out all over town. What do you have to say about that, Wayne?” a lady in a green sweater set said.

“They’re putting up a yurt camp in the playground in the Main Street park,” Bridget whispered to me. “They say the chakras of the path are really strong there.”

“Who are they?” I whispered back. “Where did they come from?”

“They say aliens are living under this mountain and are coming out to take those nutcases away with them when the end of the world happens,” Herbie announced. “Do you have any idea what that’s going to do to my pie business? Pie season is coming, Wayne. What are you going to do about it?”

The mayor scratched his nose and seemed to think about Herbie’s pie problem. The room erupted into murmurs, everyone worrying about how aliens would hurt their businesses.

“They call Cannes ‘the Sacred Mountain,’ ” Bridget whispered to me. “They say we’ve been living on a whole passel of Martians.”

A movement in the entranceway caught my eye. Spencer Bolton, dressed in black sweatpants and a large black hoodie, skulked past and tiptoed up the stairs, like a burglar. I rubbed my eyes to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. Nobody else in the parlor noticed him. They were caught up in their worries about aliens and yurts.

“I don’t believe it,” I said, watching him climb the stairs.

“Me either,” Bridget said. “Aliens and the end of the world. Cannes used to be a sleepy town.”

The mayor cleared his throat, and the room was dead silent, waiting for his response.

“Barbra Streisand,” he said, his big voice resonating in the room. “She said it best in
Funny Girl
.”

I heard the pipes rumble, the sound of my toilet flushing. When I got my hands on Spencer, I was going to wring his
GQ
neck and punch him in his metrosexual face. What was he playing at?

“ ‘People who need people are the luckiest people in the world’!” Mayor Robinson shouted, making me jump in my seat. “Would Barbra be happy?”

I didn’t know if this was a rhetorical question or not.
Nobody moved in their seats. Herbie’s mouth was open, a half-eaten bit of sandwich out for everyone to see.

“I hate when people say ‘Hello, everyone,’ ” the mayor continued. “Who’s ‘everyone’? Everyone is not people. I’m not everyone. Barbra is not everyone.”

Grandma leaned over to me. “No dumber man ever walked the earth on two legs,” she muttered in my ear.

Out the window, I saw Holden’s truck drive by. My heart skipped a beat, and my stomach fluttered. The last time we went out, we got to second base and were sliding into third when he got a phone call and rushed away into the night. He sent me flowers to apologize, but I hadn’t seen him in nearly two weeks, and I was jonesing for the tall, hot man of mystery. And his hands. He had great hands. Especially when they were on my breasts.

I leaned forward and, before I realized what I was doing, grabbed one of Frances Farian’s coconut sour cream fudge bars off the coffee table and shoved it in my mouth. I had a moment of pure sensual pleasure as the fudge bar settled onto my taste buds, but it was quickly followed by a searing hot pain that shot through my teeth and into my brain. I clutched Grandma’s knee for support, my eyes squeezed shut against the agony. I heard her
tsk-tsk
.

“I’m not saying a word,” she said diplomatically.

The mayor finished his crazy speech, and the meeting dissolved into chaos, with people forming into groups. Grandma was right. It was just a matter of time before they got out the torches and pitchforks.

“Grandma, what does this all mean?” I asked her.

“Dolly, this means war, and in war someone is going to get hurt.”

GRANDMA’S HOUSE cleared out quickly. The movers and shakers stormed out like angry villagers on a mission, shouting about pagans and wackos and aliens. I might have also heard something about yurts and kerosene, but it could have been the dental pain distorting my hearing.

Bridget stuck around to help me clean up the paper cups and hoagie wrappers. Grandma was napping in
her room after refusing Jocelyn Porkish’s request to be set up with the mayor. “I just couldn’t do it to Jocelyn,” Grandma explained to me. Saying no to a potential client was more than Grandma could bear, and it sent her straight to bed.

The front door opened, and my other best friend, Lucy Smythe, stomped in in a swirl of peach organza. “Did I miss it? Did I miss it? Oh, please tell me I didn’t miss the alien apocalypse meeting!” she drawled, her accent dripping with Mississippi Delta.

She spun around in the entranceway, her dress billowing up in a feminine wave, just like Scarlett O’Hara. I popped my head out of the parlor, a trash bag in my hand.

“You missed it,” I said. “But Bridget and I are in here. We can give you the recap.”

Lucy stared at me. “Is that you under all that va-va-voom?” she asked.

“I didn’t recognize her, either,” Bridget said.

“I only straightened my hair,” I moaned. If I wanted to become a superhero, my disguise was set. I didn’t even need a cape.

“It’s lovely, darlin’,” Lucy said. “Very straight.”

Lucy sat on a couch and crossed her legs. “Damn,” she said. “I wanted to make this meeting, but business held me up. I drove up from L.A. as fast as I could.” Lucy was in marketing, whatever that was.

“The mayor even spoke,” Bridget said.

“I missed that?” Lucy asked. “Drat. What did he say? Did he talk about his hemorrhoids again?”

“I remember something about Barbra Streisand,” I said.

“Shoot! That’s better than hemorrhoids.” Lucy picked up one of Frances Farian’s fudge bars and took a big bite.

“They filed out of here on the warpath. It’s the Episcopalians against the vegan, end-of-worlder, New Agey
alien worshippers. I think this is how the Crusades started,” Bridget said, stuffing cups into a garbage bag.

“That’s it?” Lucy asked with a mouthful of fudge bar. “You got nothing more? You said more last week when I said ‘God bless you’ after you sneezed.” Bridget was not a fan of religion, and her rants against the “sexist, paternalistic, religious dictatorship” were legendary, though recently we discovered she was a closet Catholic.

“I’m still battling self-doubt,” she said. “I can’t take sides yet.”

“Well, you’re the only one,” Lucy said. “On the way here, I saw a group of barefoot hippies with ‘The Arrival’ signs blocking traffic on Main Street, and the Cannes Ladies’ Saturday Sewing Circle was facing them off, shouting ‘God hates aliens.’ I almost crashed my Mercedes.”

“I wonder where all this came from,” I said. “Aliens sleeping under the mountain, waiting to take away the worthy when the end of the world comes? It’s so out of the blue, like they came out of nowhere.”

Lucy pointed at me. “I’ll tell you what else came out of nowhere, what else I saw on my drive over here. Mr. Tall Drink of Water, your mysterious boyfriend-neighbor.”

“Holden’s not really my boyfriend,” I said, turning red. I wanted him to be my boyfriend. He could be a really good boyfriend if he would stick around and take me out and do boyfriend things consistently. “What was he doing?” I asked, trying not to sound desperate.

“He was skulking. I think he was talking to one of the wackos, one of the khaki-colored ones.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Not a khaki woman, darlin’,” she said. “A khaki man. Don’t worry.”