Summer Kisses (54 page)

She’d been a fool … and given up some of her most prized possessions.

“Those … you are my best customers.” Lucky shook her head. “Wait, who’s WABROCKS101?”

Lucky knew the answer as soon the question was out of her mouth. “WAB … Willis Arturo Brodie … Will.”

Crap. He knew too. Now her humiliation was complete … or was it? She didn’t feel particularly humiliated; in fact, she felt relieved at not having to hide it anymore. Her friends hadn’t bought her things because they pitied her but because they loved her and wanted her to be okay. Could that have also been the motivation of those well-meaning teachers?

Pity and coming to someone’s aid weren’t the same. One was all about noticing a need while the other was about taking care of it. Deep down, she felt that little girl slide on those white canvas shoes, step out of the darkness, and let it go.

“So where’s all my stuff?”

“The things I bought are in the Airstream. I don’t know about everybody else.” Mama’s eyebrows twitched. They would have done more except for the Botox holding them frozen in place. “I’m keeping the Judith Lieber.” She winked. “I did sleep with Steven Tyler, so I more than earned it. That man can do more with his pinkie than most men could do with their entire body.” She fanned herself. “Good times.”

Lucky clamped her hands over her ears. “Stop talking!”

“You are such a prude. I bet you only wear white cotton underwear.” Mama shook her head. “All that money spent at Frederick’s of Hollywood on making sure you had proper undergarments and you end up as a white-cotton disappointment. Why do I even bother?”

“I don’t think you can use the words ‘proper’ and ‘Frederick’s of Hollywood’ in the same sentence.” Lucky checked the impulse to pull down the waistband of her low-riders and prove that she wasn’t a white-cotton disappointment, but that would have given Mama lots of satisfaction. “Why are you so interested in other people’s underwear?”

“Underwear is the window into the sexual soul. It has many stories to tell. What you choose to wear close to your skin says a lot about you.” Mama was as serious as she ever got.

“Underwear stories. Sounds like an HBO series.” Lucky grimaced. “I don’t want to hear any stories told by dirty underwear.”

Mandy nodded in agreement. “Can we talk about something else?”

“Help me, Jesus.” Mama shrugged in desperation. “I am surrounded by white-cotton disappointments. What is the world coming to?”

Lucky put an arm around her. “You must persevere. We’re counting on you to turn our white-cotton ways into raunchy, red, crotchless Satan panties.”

Mama squared her shoulders. “You’re right. I have work to do.”

“Are you two always like this?” Mandy looked from Mama to Lucky and back again.

“Yes.” Lucky nodded. “And no. Wait until Charlie, Betts, Mama, and I are all in the same room. It’s life-changing.”

“And loud,” Mama chimed in as she put an arm around Mandy. “I’m counting on you to spice things up. Without me, Lucky and her friends would always drive five miles under the speed limit, never return clothes after they’d worn them, and never get thrown out of a bar. They’re just sad-sack blobs of vanilla pudding, waiting for me to sprinkle on the fun.”

“I guess all of that Botox has paralyzed your brain.” Lucky hip-bumped Mama, who passed it on to Mandy.

“You’re probably right, but my face is pretty damn wrinkle-free for a thirty-four-year-old.”

“Stop counting your age in dog years.” Lucky looked at Mandy. “You’ll be happy to know that insanity in Mama’s bloodline seems to have begun with her mother and ended with her.”

“Excuse me. I’m thirty-four. My driver’s license proves it. Wanna see?”

“Really?” Lucky shook her head. “Most people get a fake ID so they appear older. Leave it to you to get one so you can claim to be younger.”

“It is an official government document, so therefore, it must be true.” Mama smiled.

“So were the arrest warrants during the Salem Witch Trials. Do you really believe all those people were doing the devil’s work?”

“Absolutely. You can’t trust people who move halfway across the planet in search of a more wholesome life. It’s not like England was the freak-parade capital of the universe.” She shrugged. “Plus, men who wear shiny buckles on their shoes aren’t exactly sexy. On second thought, they probably moved halfway around the world to get some. Let’s face it, there’s no better setup than being the only white men around for thousands of miles.” Mama nodded to herself. “Now, I’m thinking that demon possession was a possibility. Think about it—how else could those men have talked the women into leaving everything behind, getting on a boat, and moving to the middle of nowhere? Satan certainly had a hand in it, because no sane woman is going to give up semi-adequate toilet facilities for love.” She cocked her head to the left like she was weighing the odds. “Then again, I like to think that Satan has better fashion sense and wouldn’t have chosen people who wore those stupid white collars. Now I’m not so sure about the possession.” She nodded. “Maybe it was some sort of copycat demon, you know, like designer knock-off purses? He looks like Satan from faraway, but up close, you can always tell. The devil’s in the details.”

Confusion played across Mandy’s face.

“We call them Mama’s random ramblings. Just nod and smile.” Lucky nodded and smiled.

Mama stuck out her tongue. “I thought I taught you to respect your elders.”

“Hush, now, the grown-ups are talking.” Lucky smiled at Mandy.

They walked into Lucky’s bedroom and headed for the closet.

“Now, Mandy, I plan on teaching you the fine art of flirting both with words and body language. Honestly, though, men are so terrible at reading body language that I don’t know why I bother, but still, on the off chance that you meet a guy who picks up on it, you should know the basics.” Mama headed to the closet and threw back the double doors.

Lucky had always been particularly proud of her closet. It was two stories of sheer beauty. In the back, floor-to-ceiling shoe racks lined the wall. The walls on either side of the shoes held racks for hanging clothes. The remaining wall, apart from having the door, held hooks for purses, hats, scarfs, and other accessories. A spiral staircase joined all the levels, and in the middle of the room was a waist-high island that held all of her jewelry.

Mandy walked in and stopped, taking it all in. “Wow, this is bigger than our old house and Mrs. Crawley’s next door combined.” She didn’t sound angry, just awed.

“Good closet space is so important.” Mama nodded. “You never can have enough.” Mama gestured to the shoe wall. “Pick out your flirting shoes.”

Lucky glanced at the shoe wall. There were five empty rows, and the remaining twenty rows were half-full. That was still a lot of shoes. Now, all the time she’d spent acquiring all these things seemed wasted. For so long, her life had been about buying things to fill the loneliness. Whenever she’d brought up the subject of loneliness with Ricky, he’d sent her off on a shopping spree. Therapeutic shopping to fill the void in her life…. How shallow did that make her?

Slowly, she turned around, taking in the wall-to-wall designer items. This was the only accomplishment she had a right to claim. It was a poor substitute for a family.

“What size do you wear?” Mama was helping Mandy try on shoes.

“An eight.” Mandy still looked a little shocked by the size and amount of stuff.

“Lucky is a ten regular, so these will be a little large.” Mama selected some six-inch stilettos in black silk. “These are okay, but some rhinestones would class them right up.”

“You’re not bedazzling those Christian Louboutins.” Lucky walked over to stand behind Mandy. “How about those Lanvin pumps?”

Mama turned around and looked down her nose at Lucky. “Those are the single ugliest things I have ever seen. Somewhere there’s a nun missing her shoes. You better start the Hail Marys now, because God strikes down those who steal from nuns.”

Lucky stuck out her tongue. “Ricky loved these shoes.”

For a split second, she thought about putting them on and prancing around in front of him, but then the reality that he was dead stabbed her right in the heart. He’d been gone for more than a year and a half, but sometimes her brain failed to register that fact.

She smiled to cover the sadness. She picked up the shoes and ran her fingers over the smooth black leather. He’d called them her sexy librarian shoes.

Both Mandy and Mama stared at her. The moment turned awkward. The only time she’d spoken of him in front of either one was about his being a father. She’d never referred to him as a man or in the context of their marriage.

“Whatcha doing?” Vivi called from the bedroom.

“Learning the valuable life skill called flirting. Come on in … no wait…” Mama handed Mandy the ultra-high Loubies. “Go round up your younger sister. She needs to know the basics too.”

An hour later, Mama, Lucky, and the girls were all dressed up in cocktail dresses, tiaras, jewelry dripping from ears, necks, and arms, and all wearing high-heeled shoes. Mama had showed the girls the fine art of flirting, along with how to walk, run, prance, and skip in high heels.

“What’s in here?” Vivi called from the bedroom.

Even from deep inside her closet, Lucky could hear the handle turning on the other set of double doors in her bedroom.

“No, wait.” In four strides, she was out of the closet and just in time to see the doors thrown wide open.

Ricky’s closet. It was just as he’d left it. Shoes carelessly tossed all over the floor and clothes hanging half on, half off the hangers. His favorite leather jacket was slung over the back of the chair he used for tying his shoes. Sheepskin-lined slippers—his favorites—were right next to the door. He’d been wearing them the morning of the live show but had stepped out of them in favor of leather boots because he thought slippers weren’t dressy enough for TV. One small corner of her mind had her craning her neck looking for him in the closet. Her heart waited for him to come walking out, smart-ass grin on his face, and tell her to hurry up because they were going to be late. But that was ridiculous because he was gone…. He was dead.

Her feet were glued to the carpet. She couldn’t move forward or turn around and run away. She just stood there staring into a closet full of mementos that had made up a life. He was gone … forever. She would never hear his voice calling her name or feel the rasp of his five o’clock shadow on her cheek or run her fingers through his unruly tangle of blond hair. She would no longer be the victim of his practical jokes or hear his laughter or wait up half the night for him to come home, now knowing that he was with another woman. Every piece of clothing had memories woven into the fabric and love stitched into the seams. Every item was a reminder of a life lived and the promise of a future that would not be.

Vivi slid her thin arm around Lucky’s waist. “These are his things … my father’s.”

Lucky nodded because she didn’t trust her voice.

“Why do you look so sad?”

“I just…” Lucky’s voice cracked. “I miss him.”

Recognizing it and saying it out loud gave the grief a little less power.

Vivi leaned into her and rested her head against Lucky. “Me too.”

She missed that he hummed when he was in a good mood and loved peanut butter and always had butterscotch lifesavers in his pocket and couldn’t read a map and liked C.J. Box novels. He loved Lucky Charms but hated the marshmallows so he picked them out and gave them to her. She was beginning to forget the details that had made the man. She’d spent so much time focusing on the bad that the good things had faded into the background.

For the last eighteen months, she’d been running from the grief. She’d nursed her ball of hate to fill the void he’d left in her life. It was time to let him go. On shaking legs, she walked into the closet. Vivi followed alongside her.

Picking up the leather jacket, she brought it to her nose. His scent was everywhere, and she drank it in. Her eyes went to the lonely slippers waiting for his feet to fill them.

Tears came hard and fast.

Lonely slippers… The feet they’d molded themselves around were gone and never coming back. The slippers dissolved into a watery haze. Arms came around her, and she looked down to find not only Vivi but Mandy and Dawnie hugging her. It occurred to Lucky that they were all Ricky’s girls, and they were now standing together—holding each other up—as they each sifted through their own memories of the man they’d loved. In a roundabout way, Ricky had given her the family she’d always wanted. It wasn’t perfect or traditional, but it was hers.

In the company of the only family she would ever know, she finally allowed herself to let go and embrace the heartache. Lucky went quietly and thoroughly to pieces, and with each sob, the love and comfort that her daughters surrounded her in mended the deep cracks of her shattered heart.

Will leaned against the doorjamb of Ricky’s closet and just watched. He didn’t ever think he’d seen anything as beautiful and heartbreaking.

“Are these leather?” Mandy held out a pair of black pants for Lucky’s inspection.

Lucky nodded. “Unfortunately. Your father had a thing for leather pants.” She pointed to the back of the closet. “See that rack on the back wall? That was the leather pant rack.”

“Green leather pants?” Vivi sounded like she couldn’t believe her eyes.

“Again, unfortunately.” Lucky smiled. “I called them the Jolly Green Giant pants. He never wore them after I made fun of them.” She cocked her head to the left. “On second thought, I should have made fun of more of his clothes.”

“I like these.” Dawnie stepped into a pair of rhinestone-studded cowboy boots he’d used on stage. The boots came up over her knees. She clomped around in them. “Can I have them?”

“Sure.” Lucky turned around and caught Will staring at her.

She was dressed in a skintight black sequin dress and mega high heels. The woman had legs for days. He couldn’t have stopped his eyes from roaming down her body if he’d tried. When they landed on her face, he noticed that her eyes were swollen and red. She’d been crying, and hard. He went to her and pulled her into a tight hug.