Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (21 page)

“I’m also the one who’s risking the most. It’ll be a miracle if Leonard doesn’t suspect something and refuse to go through with it.”

“What are you going to do with the money?”

Lavonne hesitated a minute and then said, “I’m going into business with Mona Shapiro. We’re changing her bakery to a deli that serves breakfast and lunch, and opening up a catering service.”

Eadie looked surprised and excited at the same time. “That’s brilliant,” she said. “In that location, you’ll make a fortune.”

“I wish I could figure out something to do to make some money,” Nita said wistfully. “I wish I could figure out something to sell.”

“Do you have anything that might be valuable?” Eadie said. “Something like the Jefferson letter or the Nathan Bedford Forrest medical kit?”

Nita shook her head. “My mother-in-law has most of the family antiques. All I’ve got is a bunch of furniture and a big-screen TV and stuff like that.”

“There has to be something else,” Lavonne said, making scribbles on her notepad. “Something that maybe has your name on it. I don’t suppose the house is in your name?”

“Oh I don’t think so,” Nita said.

“The cars?”

Nita shook her head. “Charles always buys the cars,” she said. “He just brings a new car home whenever he feels like it. I never know what he’ll buy.” She played idly with her hair. Outside in the yard, her father’s old Jack Russell terrier, Winston, chased a squirrel up a pecan tree. He got halfway up the tree trunk before age and gravity forced his descent. “I think my name’s still on the title for that old car, though,” Nita said absently.

“What old car?”

“The old car that belonged to Charles’s daddy that Charles keeps in the storage shed out at the back of our lot.”

“There’s a car in that building?” Lavonne said. “I thought it was a garden shed.”

“Yeah, everybody thinks that. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

Lavonne looked at Eadie. “What kind of car?”

“Just some old car,” Nita said. She knew the name but in the excitement of the moment she had forgotten. “Charles calls it the Deuce.”

“How do you know your name’s on the title?”

“Because I found it the other day in a stack of files on Charles’s desk. He had written, ‘Nita—Change Title Over,’ on the outside of the file and when I looked inside there was this piece of paper that had my name on it. I
think
it was a car title, I don’t know, maybe it wasn’t. I don’t even know what a car title looks like, I guess.”

Lavonne looked at Eadie and shrugged. “It bears further investigation, don’t you think?”

“Hell, yes. Even if it’s only worth a thousand bucks, every little bit helps.”

Loretta got up and went to the sink to stir a pot of soup she had left simmering. She had calmed down considerably once she heard the women’s plan for revenge. She looked less like a pit bull now, and more like a kindly grandmother. She grinned and stirred the pot. “You girls are nutty as a Claxton fruitcake,” she said. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”

“Where’s Charles right now?” Lavonne said to Nita.

“He’s playing golf with Dolph Meriweather and Ed Trotter and then they’re having supper at the club.”

“Can you get into the shed where he keeps the car?”

“He keeps the key in his desk.” All this made Nita nervous. She was beginning to worry this revenge might not work out after all. She was beginning to realize what she had at stake. Charles was a bad man to underestimate. He had enough of his mother in him to be dangerous when crossed. “Ya’ll don’t think we’re making a mistake, do you?” she said, fingering the hem of her shirt nervously. “You don’t think we’re going to make them so mad they come after us with everything they’ve got.”

“Don’t worry,” Eadie said, putting her arm around Nita. “Everything will turn out all right. You’ll see.”

Lavonne closed her notebook and reached for her purse.

“Are we going somewhere?” Eadie said.

“Let’s take a little ride over to Nita’s house,” Lavonne said, gathering her purse and notebook in her arms. “Let’s go over and see what kind of car Charles has been keeping locked up in his little faux garden shed.”

I
N THE END,
they had to talk Loretta out of coming with them. She was determined to be part of their revenge planning, and it was only by reminding her that Eustis would ask a lot of questions if she wasn’t around, when he and the kids got back from fishing, that they managed to convince her to stay home.

Nita retrieved the key and they went down the garden path to the back fence. A sign reading
Wet Paint
hung on the gate, but Nita pulled the latch and they went through. Lavonne had never been back here. She could see the faint tracks of a sandy road running across the heavily wooded lot toward the county road that stretched some miles behind the subdivision. “How many acres do you have, Nita?”

Nita shrugged, trying to fit the key in the lock. “Two or three, I think. It’s a double lot.”

They went in through the small side door, and Nita switched on the light. She opened the window blinds so they could see better. Eadie grabbed one side of the tarp, and Lavonne grabbed the other, and they pulled it back over the roof of the car like they were pulling a blanket over a sleeping child.

“Oh, my God,” Lavonne said. The Deuce, all chrome bumpers and flaring fenders, gleamed like a scepter in the dim interior of the garage. Dust motes swirled on the beams of sunlight slanting through the windows. The air was thick with the scent of paste wax and leather.

Eadie whistled. “That’s some old car,” she said.

“It’s not just a car,” Lavonne said, walking around to the front grille. “It’s a Duesenberg.” She was so excited her voice cracked. The hand lightly stroking the front grille trembled. “And it’s worth a hell of a lot more than one thousand dollars.”

“How much more?” Eadie said.

“I’m not sure.” Lavonne walked slowly around the car. “Leonard was watching an antique car auction on TV the other day, and they had a car like this one featured. I wish I had paid more attention now to what it sold for, but I’m pretty sure it was close to seventy-five thousand dollars.”

Nita looked from one to the other. Eadie grinned and put her arm around Nita’s shoulders. “Do you know what this means? If your name is on the title and it’s worth seventy-five thousand dollars and we’re able to sell it—well, all right then. There’s your little nest egg.”

“I can’t sell this car,” Nita said. “Charles loves this car more than anything in the world.”

“When was the last time he drove it?” Eadie asked, arching one eyebrow. “When was the last time he took it out for a spin?”

“Never,” Nita said. Whether or not he enjoyed owning the car was not the issue. The issue was that Charles would be furious that Nita had sold something that belonged to him without asking his permission.
Still,
Nita thought, selling the Deuce was a symbolic gesture that needed to be made. It put Charles on notice that their marriage, although continuing, was changing to something he might not like. In renegotiating the terms of her marriage, Nita felt she should speak softly and carry a big stick. And a seventy-five-thousand-dollar bank account in her name might be just the stick she needed.

Eadie let go of Nita and turned to Lavonne. “The question is who do we sell it to? And how quickly can we do it?”

“First we’ve got to find the title and make sure it’s in Nita’s name. Then we have to figure out how to have it appraised without Charles knowing about it, and
then
we have to figure out how to sell it quickly.” She stepped back and knocked over an oilcan.

“Is this an example of goddamn synchronicity or what?” Eadie said, grinning. “I mean can you believe how this is all coming together?”

“Don’t get too cocky,” Lavonne said. “We haven’t pulled it off yet.”

Nita put her hand over her mouth and giggled like a schoolgirl. “Charles will be so mad if I sell this car,” she said. “Ya’ll, he might leave
me.
”

Eadie and Lavonne looked at each other. “Look, Nita, we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Lavonne said. “We don’t have to sell the car.”

Nita thought about it for a moment. She couldn’t imagine Charles leaving her no matter what she did to him. Who else could he find to dominate and bully, who else would cater to his every whim like a docile slave girl?

She looked at Lavonne and grinned. “Let’s do it,” she said.

T
HE FILE WAS
where Nita remembered seeing it last, sitting in a stack on the corner of the library desk. Lavonne sat down in Charles’s chair and opened the file and Nita said nervously, “Just make sure you put everything back the way he had it or he’ll know we’ve been in here.” Eadie went down the hall to use the bathroom, and Nita went into the kitchen to check messages on the answering machine. A few minutes later she heard a metallic coughing sound, followed immediately by a high-pitched yodeling scream, the closest Lavonne Zibolsky would ever come to a rebel yell. Eadie and Nita sprinted down the hallway to the library.

The file was opened on her lap. Lavonne held a piece of paper between two fingers like she was holding a winning lottery ticket. “Do you know what this is?” she said, her hard metallic voice vibrating. They both shook their heads. “It’s an appraisal Charles had done six months ago. That car’s a 1931 Duesenberg Model J Sedan, and it’s worth—are you ready for this, are you fucking ready for this—it’s worth
seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
” She set the file on the desk and looked at them in wonder and amazement. Eadie took Nita in her arms and began to dance her around the room. “And what’s more,” Lavonne said, putting her reading glasses back on and shuffling through the file, “not only is Nita’s name, solely, on the title, but there’s correspondence in the file to indicate that Charles was supposed to sell the car when his father died to a doctor in Atlanta, a doctor by the name of”—Lavonne checked the file—“Marshall Osborne, and when he didn’t, the doctor threatened to sue, which explains why Charles transferred title over to Nita. There’s also correspondence in the file, dated three years ago, indicating the doctor is still interested in purchasing the car, should Charles ever decide to sell it. He must have realized he’d never get it by suing, so he decided to try the honey approach.”

Eadie stopped twirling Nita around the room. “So, all we have to do is contact the doctor and make arrangements to sell the car to him, and Nita is pretty much set for life.”

“By the year 2010, one out of every two businesses will be owned by women!” Lavonne shouted.

Nita’s eyes were bright as a little bird’s. “But I couldn’t keep all of the money,” Nita said hesitantly to Eadie. “Could I?”

Lavonne and Eadie looked at each other and then back at Nita. “Honey, with seven hundred fifty thousand dollars, you could do whatever you damn well please,” Eadie said.

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

J
IMMY
L
EE’S HOUSE
was just the way Nita had pictured it. He lived in the older section of town, not too far from the antebellum mansions of the rich, in an area of small, shotgun-style raised cottages. The house had a wide porch that extended across the front and around one side, overlooking a small, well-kept yard. Azalea bushes rimmed the lawn. An old live oak stood in the middle of the side yard, spreading its huge branches protectively over the house. A peeling concrete bench rested against its trunk.

Nita parked at the end of the drive closest to the garage, hoping no one she knew would drive by and see her car. If anyone saw her and asked questions, she would tell the truth. She was there to learn woodworking. She was there to learn a hobby.

An old yellow lab ambled across the yard to greet her, his tail swinging back and forth with each step. Nita’s heart fluttered in her chest like a wren throwing itself against a plate-glass window. She combed her hair with her fingers, took a deep breath, and climbed the steps to the front porch. The front door was open. She stood at the screen door and called timidly, “Hello?”

There was a smell of bacon in the air, and fresh-brewed coffee. She could hear noises from deep inside the house, the clatter of silverware, the clanging of pots, the distant whine of a radio. A wide hallway ran the length of the house. On one side, through an opened doorway, she glimpsed a bedroom, and on the other side, a formal room filled with tall bookshelves and a leather armchair and floor lamp. She opened the screened door and stepped inside. “Hello,” she said loudly.

“Hey, come on in,” he shouted. He stuck his head around a corner at the end of the hall, wiping his hands on a towel. “Are you hungry? Do you want some breakfast?” He came out to greet her.

“Just coffee,” she said, following him down the long hallway. He wore jeans and a T-shirt and his feet were bare.

There was another bedroom on the left and to the right a room filled with two sofas and a TV in a tall armoire. The back of the house was an enclosed porch with a bathroom on one end, and the kitchen on the other. She followed him up a step into the kitchen. Tall windows overlooked the yard. A small table and four chairs nestled in a corner between two windows. The ceilings in the house were high, at least fourteen feet, and covered in beadboard. She sat down at the table and he poured her a cup of coffee, then sat down across from her.

“I like your house,” she said, reaching for the creamer.

“Thanks.” He put one foot up on his chair and rested his arm across his knee. His hair was still wet from his shower and curled slightly at the ends. “Did you park out front?”

“No.” She shook her head and sipped her coffee. “At the end of the drive.”

“That’s probably best,” he said. He cleared his throat and she realized he was as nervous as she was. “Did you tell your husband you were coming over here?”

“No. I didn’t think it mattered,” she said, looking at him and trying not to feel guilty.

He tapped his spoon against the creamer, a blue ceramic dish in the shape of a cow. “It might have mattered to him.”

Nita watched the yellow dog amble across the backyard. “He’s got a lot on his mind right now. He’s going hunting in two weeks.”

“Really?” Jimmy Lee tapped his knee with the spoon. There was a frayed hole in the fabric just above his shin. “Where does he go?”

“Montana. For six days.”

Jimmy Lee put his foot down and dropped his hand to the table. It rested inches from her own. She picked up the spoon and stirred her coffee.

“Men are fools sometimes.”

She put the spoon down and looked at him over the rim of her cup. “Not all men,” she said.

L
AVONNE AGREED TO
negotiate the sale of the Duesenberg with the wealthy doctor from Atlanta. She figured she’d be better at lying than Nita. She took the file home with her with instructions that should Charles ask for it, Nita was to say that perhaps the housekeeper had misplaced it. Lavonne figured, correctly, that Charles had more pressing things on his mind to worry about than the Duesenburg file, which he assumed to be safely in his possession.

The doctor from Atlanta was quick to figure out what was going on. “Broadwell doesn’t know a thing about you selling this car to me, does he?”

“He doesn’t need to know. The title’s in his wife’s name. And he signed the transfer himself.”

“Selling behind his back, while perhaps not illegal, is certainly immoral and unethical.”

“Yes,” Lavonne said. “It’s similar to what Broadwell did to you eighteen years ago when he reneged on the promise made to his father. I guess it would fall under the category of ‘what goes around, comes around.’ ”

The doctor laughed. They dickered for a while over price. Lavonne was a shrewd negotiator. She convinced herself that it didn’t matter whether Nita sold the car to him or not, and by doing so, bargained from a position of power. He politely declined her price, and hung up. Forty minutes later he called back.

The final price, a compromise, was less than the appraised value but more than enough to give Nita a powerful bargaining chip when it came to renegotiating the terms of her marriage. A renegotiation was probably the best Nita could hope for since Lavonne was sure she would never seriously contemplate leaving Charles. Nita was one of those women who wrap themselves up in one man and then stay until the bitter end, or at least until the children are grown. Kind of like her mother had been. Kind of like Lavonne herself had been until she found out about the prostitutes and her husband’s hidden bank accounts.

“I can have my attorney draw up the bill of sale or whatever other legal documents we need,” he said.

“I think the title transfer alone will suffice. As you can understand, the fewer legal documents she signs, the better. I’ll schedule the closing here at the bank. You can choose the time convenient to you since you’ll have to drive down. We’ll need to close either Tuesday or Wednesday the week of the twelfth. And, of course, we’ll need a certified check made payable to Juanita James Broadwell.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow and we can discuss the final details.”

“Fine. Needless to say, I trust you’ll be discreet.”

“You can trust me,” he said, laughing. “I would never cross you. Women like you scare me.”

“I must admit,” Lavonne said, closing the file. “Sometimes I scare myself.”

T
HE FOLLOWING MORNING,
Eadie called the Ithaca Awning Company and ordered a tent to be set up on the front lawn. Then she called Denton Swafford. She hadn’t talked to him since the night of the firm party.

“Yeah?” he said, sounding like he was still in bed even though it was almost one o’clock in the afternoon.

“I need you to get over here,” Eadie said. “Now.”

“Look, Eadie, I’m real tired. I can’t be expected to perform at just the drop of a hat.”

“I don’t want to sleep with you, peckerhead. That’s over. Period. I need you to help me move some furniture is all.”

“What furniture?” he said, his voice thick with sleep and resentment. The last thing he needed was to throw his back out moving furniture. Then how would he make a living?

“The furniture I’ve got stored in my attic and cellar. The furniture that belonged to my sorry-ass husband and his sorry-ass family for the last two hundred years.”

“I can’t afford to throw my back out,” he began.

“I’ll give you five hundred dollars,” she said.

“I’ll be over in fifteen minutes,” he said.

I
T TOOK ABOUT
three hours to get the china, vintage clothing, trunks, mahogany and rosewood furniture, and oriental carpets out onto the front lawn. Eadie had put aside those pieces she thought Trevor might want to keep; no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t be heartless enough to throw away heirlooms that might have sentimental value for him. Still, many of the heirlooms had spent the last fifteen years locked away in the cellar and the attic without so much as a visit from Trevor, so she was pretty sure if she hadn’t insisted they store them, he would have sold them long ago. Trevor never was one to dwell in the past. He wasn’t sentimental that way.

Eadie made a large hand-lettered sign advertising antiques and heirloom collectibles. It didn’t take long for the tourists to congregate like pigs around a trough, and by the end of the afternoon she’d made enough money to last her three months, if she economized, and that didn’t include the family silver and the Jefferson letter and the Nathan Bedford Forrest medical kit she had arranged to sell to the history museum, or the jewelry she had yet to pawn. The assets on her asset list had dwindled considerably but she figured it was better she get the money now before Trevor and Tonya got wind of what was up and tried to cut in for their share.

She remembered and went upstairs to the spare bedroom where Trevor kept his clothes. It was an old trick of his, leaving clothes in the bedroom closet that he would return for later. He had been doing this for years. It was one of the ways she always knew he planned on coming back, because he never came for the clothes, he just eventually moved back in.

There were several Brooks Brother suits and a stack of sweaters, some nice leather shoes, two big boxes of books, a golf bag, and a telescope that had belonged to Trevor as a child. Eadie stood just inside the closet door, smelling the faint scent of his cologne, and trying not to think about love and loss and the absurdity of fate.

She heard the shelter truck pull up to the curb, its brakes squealing loudly, and she went to the window and looked down at the lawn still dotted with tourists. Whatever she didn’t sell today she was donating to the women’s shelter. Denton saw her and waved. She opened the window.

“Do you want us to start loading this stuff in the truck?” he asked her.

“Yes.” Eadie stood on her tiptoes and shouted, “Folks, everything left is half price. You’ve got five minutes to make up your mind before it all gets hauled away.”

“How much for the portrait?” one woman asked, pointing to a full-length painting of Trevor’s mother done the year she graduated from high school.

Eadie thought,
I’ll give you ten thousand dollars to take it off my hands.
Eadie said, “Sorry, that one’s not for sale.” She motioned for Denton to bring the portrait up to her. “Come up here and get the rest of this shit out of the closet,” she said.

“What shit?”

“Some Brooks Brothers suits. Sweaters. Shoes.”

“Brooks Brothers suits?” Denton was interested. It was hard to afford decent suits on his income. It was hard to afford anything on his income. He was beginning to realize he was going to have to find a better way to make a living. “Can I have them?” he said, coming across the lawn to stand under the window. “The suits, I mean.”

Eadie didn’t hesitate. “I won’t need them,” she said, and closed the window.

N
ITA HADN’T TOLD
her mother about Jimmy Lee, but somehow Loretta just knew. “Bring him around,” she said to Nita, the Friday before Charles left for Montana.

“Bring who around?”

“Whoever it is that’s putting the roses in your cheeks and the smile on your lips,” Loretta said.

Nita told her. When she had finished, she said, “Do you think daddy will get mad?”

“Honey, daddy just wants you to be happy. Daddy knows that love may not make the world go round but it sure makes the trip a lot more pleasant.”

“I can’t help the way I feel.”

“I just hope you’re being careful is all. I hope you haven’t done anything to give Charles Broadwell the right to take those children away from you.”

“I’m being real careful, Mama. Nothing’s happened between us. We’re just good friends, is all.”

“Uh-huh,” Loretta said. “Do the children know?”

“That me and Jimmy Lee are friends? Of course. I can’t tell them everything until after the hunting trip and this mess is all cleared up. At least I hope it’ll all be cleared up after the hunting trip, if everything works out the way we planned. Pray for us, Mama. Pray it all works out the way we have it planned.”

“Bring him around so I can meet him.”

“We’re supposed to take the children fishing tomorrow. I told them we were going fishing with a friend.”

“That seems kind of risky. If Charles asks them, and they tell him, won’t it look suspicious?”

“Charles won’t ask. He’s hardly ever home anymore. He spends all his time at the office getting ready for his trip. He doesn’t even get home until the children are in bed and he leaves before they get up.”

“Bring him around. Your carpenter, I mean.”

“We’ll come tomorrow for dinner, after the fishing. Tell daddy to be nice.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Jimmy Lee met Nita and the children at the public boat ramp. It was still early; fog rolled in over the surface of the Black Warrior River, and the air was cool and thick with the scent of pine. They took Jimmy Lee’s boat into the coves where the catfish liked to sleep, where the bank was slick and overgrown with tall trees and the water was dark with tannin. The catfish were big as puppies, and almost as friendly, and after awhile Jimmy Lee and Logan quit catching them and throwing them back, and instead sat watching as Whitney fed them small pieces of the sandwiches they had brought along for lunch. Jimmy Lee taught Whitney the magical “Catfish Song,” which had been used by generations of fishermen to lure the big fish, and soon, whether from the “Catfish Song” or the feast of sandwiches, the water around the boat was teeming with fish that wagged their tails and raised their whiskered snouts out of the water.

“I didn’t know you believed in magic,” Nita said, laughing at him from the stern of the boat while her happy children hung over the bow and patted and stroked the glistening fish.

“Magic happens every day,” Jimmy Lee said, looking at her like she was proof of this very statement.

“You shaved off your goatee,” she said.

He shrugged. “I thought you’d like it better,” he said.