The Cantaloupe Thief (19 page)

Branigan tried to smile but it came out twisted. “I'm so sorry you can't have a drink or two and stop,” she said. “The bad luck of brain chemistry.”

“Don't I know it.”

 

They stayed at the rooftop restaurant after the meal, comfortably stuffed, listening to an acoustic guitarist singing an eclectic mix of Jimmy Buffet, the Tams and Johnny Cash. When the singer was joined by a keyboardist who blasted out the brass section for “Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy”, Branigan pulled Davison from his chair.

“On your feet, big man.”

He laughed. “I can't dance without a six pack in me.”

“Mom taught you to dance before you started drinking,” she said, kicking off her shoes. “Come on.”

It took only a moment for muscle memory to take over, and Davison twirled her non-stop through the laid-back moves of the shag, an East Coast dance that resembled a slow jitterbug. The point was to make it look effortless, their mom used to say, teaching them to keep up a 1-2-3 shuffle from the waist down while pretzeling their arms in intricate maneuvers. Davison had learned well, and he led Branigan expertly. When they had finished, the other patrons applauded.

They grinned, gave mock bows and sat back down. They left when the musicians took a break at 11 p.m., but when they arrived at the house, Branigan wasn't sleepy.

“Guess it was the nap,” she said. “I'm going to sit on the deck and listen to the ocean.” She wrapped herself in a blanket, because the wind coming off the water was cool. Davison popped open a Sprite and joined her. The moon was at three-quarters and lit a sparkling stripe across the gently heaving water. With no porch lights, the stars seemed touchable.

“Ah, this is what I remember,” Branigan said dreamily. “Being out here with all the Harrison and Barnhill kids while the adults played cards. Did you know Pete Barnhill is a judge in Gainesville?”

“I heard. Scary.”

“How'd you hear?”

“I go on Facebook sometimes in public libraries. That's the one place in most towns where street people are welcome.”

Branigan was silent. She had heard Liam say the same thing. Somehow it was worse hearing it first-hand from Davison.

“You know, you're only forty-one,” she said tentatively. “Do you ever wonder how you might like to spend the second half of your life?”

He was quiet for a long time. She looked over, and the moonlight showed his jaw was taut. She knew that look.

“Yeah,” he said huskily. “I think maybe I'd like to train as a paralegal. I'd like to build a little fishing cabin on Lake Hartwell — nothing fancy. A place where Chan could come visit from college. A place where we could go out in the early morning and fish like I did with Pa and Dad. A place where I could get to know him.” He paused. “How about you?”

“How about me what?”

“Second half of
your
life?”

“Oh. Well, I guess... Actually, that's a good question. The way journalism is going, I'm not sure I'll have a job in five years. Or two. I sure don't want to get into that fifty-five to sixty-three age bracket and get laid off. I've seen too much of that.”

“I didn't mean career-wise,” her brother said. “What about personally? You said the other night you didn't want to be single.”

This conversation had gotten way too personal way too fast.

“Any near misses?” he pressed. “Are you dating anyone?”

“Yes and no. Two near misses. Right guy, wrong time. Wrong guy, right time. I'm not dating anyone right now, or you'd be sitting in his lap.”

“Who was the ‘right guy'?”

“A reporter named Jason Hornay, who came to Grambling from Birmingham. We were sort of getting serious when I got the offer in Detroit. He couldn't find a job there, so we went our separate ways. In retrospect, I'm not sure it was the right decision.”

“Nah. You wouldn't want to hear ‘Branigan is Horn-ay' the rest of your life.”

She gave him her best withering look. “Since I don't hang around eleven-year-olds, I doubt I would.”

“One of my addiction counselors — who were legion, by the way — told me that an addict is often emotionally arrested at the time of addiction. That makes me sixteen.”

“With your clean time, maybe you matured to nineteen or twenty.”

“Okay, smart-ass. One more question. We all know I've messed up my life as much as a human being can. Has your life turned out like you wanted?”

There it was. The vise was squeezing her chest.

“No,” she said softly. “I feel guilty even saying it because I've been blessed in so many ways. Mom and Dad. Gran and Pa. The farm. Work. Financially. Even Liam and Liz. But I wanted this.” She swept an arm to indicate the ocean, the beach, the house. “I wanted to fill it up with a husband and children and friends like the Harrisons and the Barnhills. I wanted a family. I wanted to be the mom in a family like we had.”

“Before I blew it up.”

“Well, partly. But you didn't keep me from having my own. I managed that all by myself.”

“I wonder,” he said. “Or did I cast a stain so wide you were afraid to try?”

She was genuinely startled. “I never laid that on you.”

“No. But what you said on the way down, about my choices affecting you and Mom and Dad and Chan: I never thought about that. I knew I'd hurt you. I knew you missed me. But I'd never really thought that I might have changed the course of your lives. I guess I thought you'd gone right on without me.”

She murmured a response.

“What?”

“Fat chance,” she repeated.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

JULY 4, TEN YEARS AGO

Rita Mae Jones watched Bennett Brissey Jr and his fast drinking. He was a quick drunk, but he looked to be the most promising male here. Plus, he was a Grambling heir. Nothing shabby there.

Rita Mae's dad and Mr Resnick had been work colleagues, so the Joneses were charter members of the July 4 guest list. The elder Joneses had since moved to Atlanta to help Rita Mae's sister, but in a town like Grambling, you didn't get kicked off the list unless you did something heinous. The fact that Alberta Resnick considered Rita Mae cheap wasn't enough to get her disinvited.

Rita Mae counted Ben Jr's trips to the bars, matching him drink for drink. But four hardly affected her; at thirty-two she had built up considerably more tolerance.

When Ben took drink number five and stumbled down the porch steps, she followed, around the side yard, across the parking area and onto the overgrown path leading to the pool. She heard him drop his drink and curse. She covered her mouth to stifle a giggle.

She remained in the shadows while Ben Jr crashed through a bathroom window in the rear of the pool house, giggling again at his ungainly head-first entrance while his butt and legs dangled outside. Through the open window, she could hear him opening and shutting drawers, bumping into furniture, mumbling to himself. Then she was startled by a sharp rap on the front door. Though she was far out of sight behind the pool house, she crouched instinctively.

She couldn't make out the conversation between Ben and another man, but it didn't last long. The other man left. Rita Mae sidled around the house to find Ben stretched out on a lounge chair at the pool's edge.

“Hi,” she said brightly. He didn't even startle, but opened one eye lazily. “Well, hi,” he said, openly taking in her tight capris, halter top and tanned shoulders. “Were you — are you — at the party?” he asked, sitting up.

“Sure thing.”

“Well, things are looking up,” he said. “I'm Ben.”

“And I'm Rita Mae. You got anything stronger than your grandma's bourbon?”

He blinked. “As a matter of fact, I do. You ever smoke crack?”

“No-o-o,” she said slowly. “I prefer powder.”

“I saw something,” he said, and stood. She followed him through the dim interior of a recreation room and into a bedroom. He pulled open a bureau drawer and extracted a crack pipe and a cloth bag. She had never tried cocaine in crack form, but she'd seen it smoked a few times.

“Got a lighter?” she asked. Ben scrambled further in the drawer and found a cheap one, encased in blue plastic. He thrust his hand into the far corner and came up with a tarnished spoon.

“Well, you've got everything we need,” she said, gathering the paraphernalia and walking back to the pool, her hips swinging a little more than necessary. She placed a rock in the spoon and lit a flame under it. “Get ready to fly, big boy.”

 

The high was incredible, intense and warm and multicolored. It was the best twenty minutes of Rita Mae's life. When she came down, dreamy and satisfied, she saw that Ben Jr had fallen asleep on the lounger.

Big party man, indeed. There are more rocks in that drawer, I do believe,
she thought, so she walked back through the pool house and opened the bureau. She placed the cloth bag in her pocket for later, took out a single rock and fired up again.

This time she didn't bother going back to the pool, but simply lay back on the bed. Perhaps this one was a bit short of the first high, but it was still darned good. She closed her eyes and drifted away.

 

* * * 

 

Ben woke with a start, his brother Drew shaking him, and his rat cousins Caroline and Ashley dancing around like idiots. Two more kids he'd never seen were with them. “Ben's drunk!” they squealed, laughing uproariously.

Drew was hardly better. “Get up, man. You don't want Mom's wrath tonight.”

The rat cousins and their friends leaped into the pool, screeching madly. Drew jumped in right behind them, calling for Ben. He got to his feet. Wait a minute. Where was that woman? He'd better hide any evidence of the crack before his loud-mouthed cousins saw it.

He walked back into the pool house, seeing more clearly because the lights were on. “Rita Mae?” he whispered. In the bedroom, he could see that the old chenille spread was wrinkled. There was a lump where the spread met the floor. He lifted it to find Rita Mae's strappy sandals. She must have left barefoot. He opened the drawer and saw immediately that she'd taken everything else — the pipe, the cloth bag, even the damn lighter.

All that was left was the tarnished spoon.

Ben walked back outside, but made it no further than the flower bed beside the front door before a wave of nausea hit. He threw up a good bit of the evening's bourbon.

After five minutes, he felt better and cannonballed into the pool, setting off a cacophony of squeals among the young teens. He hadn't been in there two minutes when Drew held a brown snake above his head and flung it into the bushes. The ensuing screams from the rat cousins were ear-splitting; that was pretty much it for any further swimming.

As Ben toweled off and dressed, he peered into the jungle that was his grandmother's back yard. Where had the lovely and adventurous Rita Mae gone? Was she watching him still?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

PRESENT DAY

At the farmhouse on Monday morning, Branigan woke before the alarm went off. Cleo wasn't on her pillow beside the bed.

She padded into the den in bare feet. Davison was dressed and sitting on the couch, the Burberry bag packed on the floor at his feet. Cleo sat with her head in his lap.

Branigan's heart pinched, as it had so often over the weekend. He looked like a little boy, anxious about camp.

“Couldn't sleep?” she asked.

He smiled nervously. “Just ready to get this over with.”

“We can't check in until eight,” she said, putting on the coffee. “Want to watch cartoons?”

That got a laugh out of him.

She stirred up a pot of grits, which they shared along with coffee, toast and the newspaper. When it was time to leave, he buried his face in Cleo's neck. Branigan thought he might be crying, but when he raised his face it was dry.

“Let's go,” he said.

They drove in silence to the Grambling Rescue Mission. He didn't want her to come inside, so when they pulled into the parking lot, he kissed her on the cheek.

“Wish me luck,” he said shakily.

On impulse, she said, “What would you think if I prayed for you? Too weird?”

He looked at her oddly. “You've been around Liam too long.”

“I know. But it's something I want to do.” He shrugged, so she started. “God, please watch over my brother. That's all I ask. Amen.”

“Don't quit your day job,” Davison said, but he was smiling. He tossed the Burberry bag over one shoulder and walked into the mission.

 

Branigan drove to the newspaper office feeling unsettled. From long experience, she knew work would help. As soon as she sat down, she placed two calls — one to Ben Brissey Jr in New York City, and one to Liam. She left a message for Ben Jr that she needed a phone interview to follow up on something his cousin Ashley had told her. Liam answered his phone.

“Just calling to confirm lunch,” she said. After hearing Liam's assent, she paused. “I dropped Davison at the mission this morning. I found him sitting on the couch at sunrise with his clothes all packed. I don't think he slept at all.”

“How was it?”

“Sad. I enjoyed having him at the farm all week. And then the beach trip was good. A little deep at times, but good.”

“You're doing the right thing,” Liam said. “Those guys at the mission know what they're doing. You know what I always say.”

“I know. I know. ‘If Charlie or Chan were on drugs, that's where I'd put them.' I do listen to you, you know.”

“Doesn't make it any easier. He's out of touch for awhile, right?”

“Right. No visits the first week. But they do allow cell phone calls one hour each night, so we'll be able to talk. I've got my fingers crossed.”

“It's the best thing,” Liam repeated. “Want to come here at noon?”