The Cherry Cola Book Club (9 page)

Maura Beth and Connie exchanged expectant glances, and Maura Beth finally said, “You've come this far, Miss Voncille. Follow through. What is it you wanted to tell us?”

“It's my relationship with Locke Linwood,” she began, staring at her hands at first. Then she looked up and caught Maura Beth's gaze. “It's been so long since . . . well, you know what I'm trying to say, don't you?”

Maura Beth reached over and patted her hand with a generous smile. “Since you've been with a man?”

Miss Voncille exhaled and briefly averted her eyes. “You librarians have good instincts. But, yes, that's exactly what I wanted to discuss with both of you. Frank and I were intimate, but that was way back in 1967. It seemed so easy then. All you heard from the media was how
free
love was supposed to be, I mean. What a lie! I think love is the dearest thing in the world—in the old-fashioned business sense of that word. What a price you end up paying for it whether you get to keep it or lose it! But now here it is another century. How do I . . . get back in the saddle again after all this time? How do I . . . free myself?”

“Connie, you're the married woman among us,” Maura Beth said. “Do you want to take this?”

Connie looked briefly uncomfortable but soon drew herself up and patted her big hair—the latter gesture a sure sign that she was ready to tackle anything. “Well, the first thing I'd have to ask you, Miss Voncille, is how far your relationship with Mr. Linwood has progressed. Could you share that with us?”

“It's been very gentlemanly on his part so far, if you catch my drift,” she explained. “I'm always ready to go out when he arrives. He has reservations at The Twinkle or somewhere else for us, and we talk politely over our dinner and wine. Later, when he walks me to my door, there's a gentle kiss on the cheek, and there are moments when it seems like something more should happen. But . . . it stops there. Or to be perfectly honest, I stop it there.”

“Then you've never asked him in—for a nightcap, as they say?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I—well, something tugs at me, and I end up thinking it would be disloyal to Frank.”

Connie grew pensive, touching an index finger to her lips. “And have you ever ended up at his house?”

“Oh, he says he's not comfortable with that yet. But he insists he is trying his best to accept another woman being in the rooms he shared with his Pamela.”

“Well, he is a fairly recent widower,” Maura Beth put in. “Maybe it's easier for him to hold on to his memories of his wife and settle for something platonic with you. And maybe that's what he thinks you want—your memories of Frank and a gentlemanly escort.”

Miss Voncille looked overwhelmed, putting her fingers to her temples. “Yes, I think you ladies must be right. Neither one of us has been willing to . . . saddle up.”

“Do you think you could ever muster up the courage to let Mr. Linwood in for the . . . shank of the evening?” Connie proposed.

“That's such a colorful way of putting it,” Miss Voncille replied, clearly amused. “Reminds me of a big, juicy leg of lamb.” Then she grew more resolute, narrowing her eyes. “Maybe if I worked hard at it, I could try to let go. I keep a picture of Frank by the nightstand. It was taken just before he left for Vietnam. You can see the determination in his face, in the way his jaw was set, in the way he refused to smile and still looked contented with where he was about to go and what he was about to do. It's intriguing the way the camera can sometimes capture your soul on film. But in any case, I suppose I should remove it if I invite Locke into my emerald green bedroom . . . and he actually accepts.”

“I would if I were in your shoes,” Connie offered. “If it gets that far, you need to give the man at least a fighting chance to compete with all those perfect romantic memories of yours.”

“And you don't necessarily have to go out of your way to explain the significance of all the potted palms, either,” Maura Beth added. “Just go ahead and let him think you've gone a little mad. Lots of women have decorating fetishes. For instance, I've gone a bit crazy in my little apartment with a dozen shades of purple. But in any case, it's better than having Mr. Linwood be reminded of Frank everywhere he turns. It could definitely put a damper on things.”

Miss Voncille clasped her hands together with an excitement in her voice that made her sound and seem much younger than her years. “Having girlfriends to talk to after all these years is so much fun. So much better than walking around this empty house talking to my palms while I water them. Therefore, I've decided to try and saddle up after our big
Mockingbird
to-do at the library is over.”

“How brave of you!” Connie exclaimed. “And I'm so glad we could help out.” Then she turned her head to the side, frowning in contemplation. “Ladies, I've just thought of something brilliant. Why should you be the only one with an escort at these literary outings, Miss Voncille? I need to get Douglas out of that damned boat of his and doing something interesting with me for a change. After all, this is my hard-earned retirement, too. So, I'm going to insist that he come to the
Mockingbird
potluck and book review. If he refuses to go along with such a simple and reasonable request, then I'll refuse to clean his unending stringers of fish. Now that'll put the fear of God in him!”

“Sounds good to me!” Miss Voncille replied. “And you know what else would be lots of fun? Getting Becca to bring her Stout Fella to the meeting. I think we'd all like to meet him since we've heard so much about him. Maura Beth, this would be a surefire way to grow our numbers!”

“Yes, it would,” she answered, smiling broadly. “And growing our numbers is the most important thing we can do with this little club of ours. In fact, it's crucial. I only wish I had someone to bring.”

Connie then gave Maura Beth one of her famous friendly nudges. “Oh, don't worry. Mr. Right will come along when you least expect it. I met Douglas at a charity auction, and we were bidding for the same piece of antique furniture. Well, he had quite a bankroll from being a successful trial lawyer, so he outbid me and I lost the sideboard. But it was only a temporary defeat because I liked the fact that he had the good taste to spend his money on such fine things. I thought he just might be a keeper, so I snared him in my web, and when I unraveled that big cocoon, the sideboard tumbled out with him, of course. It's sitting in our dining room out at the lake right this minute, and every time I use it for entertaining, I'm reminded of the crusty old adage, ‘To the victor belongs the spoils.' ”

“Then it's all decided,” Maura Beth said. “I'll call up Becca and tell her to work on her Stout Fella, Connie will work on Douglas, and Miss Voncille, you'll show up with Locke Linwood in tow as usual.”

Miss Voncille was almost giggling. “Oh, I'm so excited. I never thought I'd let myself feel this way again, and here I am actually considering inviting Locke into my jungle lair. But more as soft, sweet Melanie.”

“Men like to think of themselves as the hunters in the game of love,” Connie added, lifting her chin with an air of superiority. “But more often than not, it's we women who do the trapping.”

R
enette Posey was knocking insistently on Maura Beth's office door. “Gregory Peck has just arrived!” she announced with great enthusiasm, sticking her head in with a girlish smile. It was the good news they had both been anxiously awaiting.

Maura Beth shot up from her chair and clapped half a dozen times in rapid succession. “Well, where is he? I want to get my hot little hands on him right this instant!”

“You and me both!” Renette twisted her head around, looking back briefly. “Here comes the UPS guy in his cute brown shorts with the tubes. Wow! Just under the wire, huh?”

Indeed, it definitely fell into the category of close calls. Here it was the morning of the
Mockingbird
meeting, and the movie poster blow-ups of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch were just now showing up. This, despite a guarantee from the online company that they would be shipped to The Cherico Library in two to three business days. But more than a week had passed, and there were no posters in sight. Maura Beth hated fooling with tracking numbers, but her sterling organizational skills and note-taking had paid off handsomely for her this time around. The tubes, it turned out, had been mistakenly bundled off to a library in Jericho, Missouri, thus creating the nerve-wracking delay. Murphy's Law, Maura Beth figured.

“Let's pull them out right away and see what we've actually got,” Maura Beth instructed, after the UPS man had apologized profusely for the mistake and left quickly. “There were supposed to be three different poses.”

Renette began tugging at the tape on one of the tubes, while Maura Beth sat behind her desk and took a pair of scissors to another. A few minutes later, all three black-and-white posters had been retrieved and unfurled. Though the order had gone astray, it was otherwise accurate: There was one pose of Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in a dramatic courtroom scene; another of him as Atticus with Jem and Scout in her overalls standing in front of the little cottage they all called home; and a third of Peck as himself receiving the Oscar for his performance in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. Maura Beth was certain that these stills would create an ambience similar to the one the
Gone with the Wind
posters had.

“We'll back these with cardboard like we did for the other ones, and no one will be the wiser that they practically traveled all over the country before getting here,” Maura Beth added with a sigh of relief. “I want everything to go smoothly this evening. With the two extra men showing up, Councilman Sparks will see that we're building up the club, and we can't be ignored.”

“If you have enough food, I'll be happy to show up myself,” Renette offered. “I had to read
To Kill a Mockingbird
my senior year in high school, and I still remember it pretty well. Even got an ‘A' on my book report. I especially liked the part about the giant ham with the hole in it that saved the little girl's life.”

Maura Beth looked especially pleased at the suggestion. “Well, we won't have ham on the menu, but please come, Renette. I know we'll have more than enough to eat.”

Then Maura Beth reviewed the menu sitting on her desk. For this second meeting of The Cherry Cola Book Club, Becca would be bringing her healthful version of chicken gumbo with tomatoes and okra; inspired by one of her latest shows, Connie would be throwing together a fresh golden bantam corn and red pepper salad; Miss Voncille was going to bake her delicious biscuits and offer her green-pepper jelly on the side; by popular demand, Maura Beth herself would repeat her chocolate, cherry cola sheet cake; and finally, honorary member Periwinkle had generously agreed to supply another gratis item from The Twinkle—specifically, her knockout tomato aspics with the cream-cheese centers.

“I know a lot of people think men will eat anything you put in front of them, but I've found that they can sometimes be hard to please,” Maura Beth explained. “I think we'll have a good variety on hand tonight, though, and I bet Stout Fella will lead the way.”

Renette seemed about to say something several times and finally got it out. “Should I bring a little dish, too? I could . . . thaw something?”

“Just bring yourself, sweetie. I expect a lively and unforgettable debate this evening.”

 

Inside their opulent mansion out in the country, Becca and her Stout Fella were having heated words in their powder blue master bedroom suite around six-thirty that evening. She was applying the finishing touches to her face at her vanity, while he was pacing around the shag carpet in his bare feet, still half-dressed and mumbling things under his breath.

“This is a very important business meeting, Becca,” he was saying, refusing to look her straight in the eye as he fumbled with his shirt buttons. “I can't help it if it came up at the last second. I've been trying to pin down Winston Barkeley for the last coupla months, and he wants to get together at The Twinkle tonight while he's in town. Maybe I can even close the deal. This is a premium piece of land for my next plat out at the lake, and it's going to be really high-end.”

“As if there are a bunch of paupers out there now,” she replied, briefly eyeing the touch of rouge she had just applied to her right cheekbone. “Sometimes I think all this conspicuous success is the worst possible thing that could have happened to you—Justin Rawlings Brachle. What more do you have to prove to the world?”

He snickered while pulling on his wide-load pants in front of their full-length mirror. “Hey, whatever I need to and with no apologies. There's more to life than winning a football scholarship, you know. Besides, you married me for richer or poorer, and I don't see you turning your back on the richer part.”

“Oh, I've done my share as Becca Broccoli. You know as well as I do that I could go it alone if I had to. Not that I want to, of course.” She caught her agitated husband's reflection in the vanity mirror as she carefully applied lip gloss, and his steady transformation into Stout Fella came sharply into focus.

She had called him on the weight gain and his eating habits early on. “We're going to have to buy you new clothes the way you're going—at the big, tall, and spiffy store, if it exists,” she had said, trying her best to make light of it.

“That's not a bad thing,” he had pointed out. “A well-fed husband is good advertising for your cooking show. Your listeners would lose faith in you if I were the gaunt, skinny runt of Cherico.” And he had kept right on standing and making more “islands” of his ice cream, while taking second and third helpings of her scrumptious cooking at the dining room table.

“You need to slow down,” she had warned on another occasion. “You act like food and time are in limited supply. You're always on that cell phone. I wish the damned thing had never been invented!”

“I sees 'em, and I calls 'em—just like I used to in the huddle,” he had answered, making a joke of it.

But he was serious about cornering the real-estate market in Cherico before he was thirty-five, and he had done so with a succession of high-profile lake development projects. After that, his bank balance and his waistline had expanded simultaneously. Yet there were still vestiges in his fleshy face of the rugged, but handsome athlete who had swept bubbly Becca Heflin off her feet and down the aisle to the altar over a decade ago.

“The least you can do is accompany me to the library and have a bite to eat. You don't have to stay and open your big mouth after that. But everyone is expecting you to show up. They've been just dying to meet you,” Becca reminded him. “You could end up being the star of the evening.”

“And you set all of that up without my permission!” he fired back. “One night, I come home from work, and you tell me that we're going to one of your fussy ‘ladies' night out' affairs at the library. You expect me to jump up and down?”

“I expect us to do something together once in a while, Justin. What's the harm in that?”

He didn't answer her, plopping down on the edge of the huge four-poster bed to pull his socks on. “For cripes' sake, these don't match!” he cried out suddenly, dangling the pair in front of his face. “One's navy blue and the other's black. You spend much more time on the radio than you do with our laundry. I told you to hire someone to help you around the house. Why do you object to our having servants? We can easily afford it!”

“I'm well aware of that, but let's argue one thing at a time,” she continued as he headed toward his closet. “All I'm asking right now is that you go and at least meet my new friends. Won't you do that much?”

Momentarily, he emerged with a matching pair and then surprisingly gave in, nodding his head grudgingly. “Okay, okay. I'll put in an appearance to keep the peace around here. But after that, I'm off to The Twinkle to meet up with Winston. You can stay and yak about
To Kill a Mockingbird
'til the cows come home and the early bird gets the worm.”

“Now that's original commentary if I ever heard it,” Becca remarked, rising from her vanity with a pert little smile firmly in place.

 

Connie was standing at one of her great room windows admiring the way the early evening sun played off the slack water of Lake Cherico in the distance. The horizon was tinged with orange and gold, except for wild brush strokes of coral that were doing their best to blot out what remained of the day's blue allotment. It was now quarter to seven, and she had spent the better part of the last hour luring Douglas out of his precious bass boat—which he had named
The Verdict
—and into shaving and showering mode.

“You smell like bait,” she had told him, once she had him on the terra firma of the pier's faded planks and he had stowed his stringer of fish in the cooler. “Not that that's anything new. But I don't want everyone at the library to smell you coming. So, please, give yourself a thorough scrubbing.”

Once inside, he had good-naturedly fallen to, even to the extent of singing in the shower. She could hear him trying to work his way through “Singin' in the Rain,” although he was far from a Gene Kelly in the vocal department. Fishing most of the day had that effect on him, though. In short, he was in paradise. Connie, however, felt she had not yet punched her ticket, and she hoped that this
Mockingbird
evening would be the beginning of a shared retirement experience for them.

“I wouldn't mind seeing ole Justin Brachle again, now that I think about it,” Douglas said out of nowhere, emerging from getting dressed at last and heading toward his wife with a snap to his step. He had chosen a silver guayabera shirt and dark slacks for the occasion, complementing the first waves of gray that had invaded his slightly receding hairline. “He did sell us this land seven years ago when we were first thinking of building the lodge.”

Connie turned away from the window and the ongoing prelude to the sunset. “I told his wife, Becca, that I thought I remembered him as being quite a catch.” Then she took in her own husband's still-trim physique, ending with the devilish smile that never failed to melt her in the bedroom. “Speaking of looking good, I don't think you've been this presentable since we left Nashville. And you smell divine!
To Kill a Mockingbird
be damned! I may have to attack you. What have you got on?”

He inched his sunburned but carefully shaven face closer to hers and lightly kissed her cheek. “Just a splash of Old Spice. I found a bottle in the bedroom closet. It was in one of those boxes we still haven't opened.”

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him back. “Weren't you wearing that when we first started dating thirty-something years ago? That bottle belongs in the Smithsonian.”

He pulled away and enjoyed a good laugh. “Not this one. I think Lindy gave it to me for Father's Day not too long ago. Maybe just before we moved down. She knows her old man's history, that's for sure.”

“Not as well as I do,” Connie added. “And I've begun to think you've given me up for the fishes. Maybe I should grow scales.”

He narrowed his eyes and played at taking offense. “Okay, I haven't been that bad, have I? I even managed to reread five whole chapters of
To Kill a Mockingbird
so I'd be up to snuff and wouldn't embarrass you at the thing tonight. It's been more than a few decades since high school, you know.”

“Let's just see how it goes at the library. Then we'll talk,” she said, managing a smile as she checked her watch. “We need to get there while the food's still hot. Or before Stout Fella eats it all.”

Douglas looked puzzled. “Who?”

“Your Realtor friend, Justin. Oh, I explained everything last week. I'll remind you on the way there.”

 

Miss Voncille got to her feet and smoothed out the wrinkles in her emerald green bedspread. She had been sitting beside her pillow, riveted to her beloved picture of Frank Gibbons on the nightstand for the past five minutes. “I'm going to hide you temporarily in the potpourri,” she said out loud to the photo as she cupped it in her hands as if it were an injured baby bird. “The deal is, I may have company tonight, and I don't need you making me nervous standing guard the way you always do. But don't worry, I won't leave you with my scented hankies forever.”

For a split second she imagined that her sturdy sentinel might just spring to life and answer her, giving her permission to change things up. But she knew only too well that she could not seek permission from anyone but herself. So she headed toward her chest of drawers, giving the picture a little peck before tucking it away among her many fancy sachets. “There!” she exclaimed, nodding proudly. “That's done. Onward and upward!”