That seemed to amuse him. “Why didn't you say so?”
They got back to the parsonage around eleven. “Can I see you tomorrow?” he asked her.
“I don't know. Say, why don't you come over and have dinner with us? I'm not worth a thing in the kitchen, but Lacette's a great cook. How about it?”
He turned fully to face her, settling his back against the car door. “We don't have that kind of relationship, Kellie. We're sex partners.”
So he didn't plan to let her pretend that she meant anything to him. She beat back the annoyance that burned in her. “All right. Why don't I come by the office and the two of us go over and take a look at Father's house?” she asked him, thinking that he would welcome a chance to placate her after his crude and, to her mind, witless, description of their relationship.
“I can't do that. It's illegal. No one is to enter that house before Reverend Graham takes possession of it.”
Her bottom lip curled, and she fought to control what she knew would follow. “You listen to me. I'm his daughter, and that gives me the right to enter that house or any other house he owns.”
“Not by a mile, it doesn't. Sorry, but that's out.”
“You don't have to go. Give me the key, or drop it where I can find it, since you're so damned full of integrity. I want that key.”
“I had a feeling that this was what you were after. Sorry, babe. Don't expect me to break the law for you if you spread your legs for me every day for the next ten years. If that's what you were after, you misjudged me. I wouldn't risk my profession and my family for you or any other woman.” He turned on the ignition. “See you around.”
“You will regret this for a long, long time,” she said, got out of the car and slammed the door. She promised herself that she'd get even with him if it was the last thing she did. Vexed and ashamed for the humiliation she tolerated from him in that motel room, and angry at herself for doing what he persuaded her to do, she slipped upstairs as quietly as she could, went into her room and closed the door. She was not going to cry. And she would find another way to get that brooch.
Â
Â
However, Lawrence Bradley evidently didn't plan to allow Kellie to outwit him. Around three o'clock the following afternoon, Lacette answered the door and looked up at a process server.
“Are you Kellie Graham?”
“No. I'm her sister. She's at work.
“Thank you,” the man said. “I'll get in touch with her at her place of business.”
She phoned her father. “Daddy, why would a process server want to see Kelly?”
“You mean old man McGinty's son delivered a summons to Kellie?”
“Yes, sir. I hope she's not in trouble.”
“Tell her to call me.”
She said she would and walked around the house wringing her hands and snacking on potato chips and nuts until, desperate to take some action, she called Lawrence and told him what she suspected.
“You're right. I got a court injunction against your sister forbidding her to set foot in your father's house before he takes possession of it. She's up to something, and I will not be responsible for her devilry.”
So Kellie struck out with Bradley. Nothing would convince her that her sister hadn't made a play for the man. At least she didn't get involved with a married man, Lacette thought with a good deal of satisfaction. Once a month, if not more often, their father began a sermon with the commandment, “Thou shall not commit adultery,” but she suspected that Kellie was capable of rationalizing her way around it.
“She probably wants to find my brooch,” she said to Bradley, “but that jewelry is not worth a battle with Kellie. She has always wanted whatever's dear to me and usually managed to get it.”
“The restraining order stands. I hope it doesn't interfere with your relationship with her.”
At dinner that night, Lacette, Kellie, and Cynthia could have been mistaken for three women who met minutes earlier and ate their dinner together by chance. Kellie's obvious misery prevented normal conversation among them.
Adopting her usual role of peacemaker and soother of agitations, Lacette reached across the dining room table and covered Kellie's hand with her own. “I don't know what you're dealing with, hon, but it will get better; it has to. I'll help if I can.”
She recoiled from the blatant anger that flashed over her sister's face as Kellie snatched away her hand. “Thanks, but considering your lack of experience with men, I doubt you can understand what I'm going through. Besides, the problems that beautiful women have are different from those you've had. No offense meant.”
Lacette looked from Kellie to Cynthia, aghast that a mother would allow one of her children to heap scorn on another in her presence and with impunity. However, Cynthia's mind was not on her family.
“Excuse me, girls,” she said. “I have to get dressed. Lacette, would you straighten up the kitchen, please?”
Half an hour later, Lacette turned on the dishwasher, extinguished the overhead light in the kitchen, started toward the stairs with the intention of going to her room and stopped. She squeezed her hands into fists as if to test her alertness, making certain that she hadn't lost her mind. Cynthia Graham glided down the stairs, a fifty-five-year-old siren dressed as if for a hot date.
This was her mama?
Lacette stared at the woman she had thought she knew, at the brightly rouged lips, the sleekly styled hair, the black velvet pants suit and the pearls at her mother's throat and ears. She sniffed the expensive odor of Hermes perfume that wafted to her from a distance of seven feet, rubbed her nose and shook her head in wonder. What had happened to her mother's passion for Azure perfume?
“It's almost nine o'clock, Mama.”
“I know what time it is, dear, and I'll be back when I get back.”
Kellie came up from the basement carrying a log for the fireplace, looked up at her mother and dropped it, barely missing her toes. “Mama, for the Lord's sake, where're you going this time of night looking like that?”
Cynthia strolled over to the hall closet, put on her mother's mink coat, showed them the keys to the Mercedes she inherited from her mother and said, “Out. I'm going out. You don't tell me where you're going, do you? I'll see you later.”
They gazed out the living room window and saw her get into the big car and drive off. “What do you think has come over her?” Lacette asked Kellie.
“Beats me. All that eye makeup, permed hair and enough perfume to make a pig's trough smell good. She had more gunk on her eyelids than I would ever think of wearing. I sure hope this isn't a psychological reaction to Daddy leaving her.”
Lacette walked into the living room and sat on the arm of their mother's precious green velvet sofa, in an act that was testimonial to her present absentmindedness. “What else could it be? When she went to the Board of Education the other day, her face was scrubbed clean, her hair was kinky and in a knot at her nape, her skirt was ten inches below her knees and her shoes resembled leather sneakers. This kind of metamorphosis demands psychiatric care. Trust me.”
“I don't think so,” Kellie said. “I expect Daddy's leaving humiliated her, and she's out to show him she doesn't need him. Bully for her.”
“Maybe, but I'm worried about her.”
“Don't be,” Kellie said. “Mama was gorgeous when she was young, and she's just reaching back and grabbing some of that.”
“You think she's trying to get Daddy to come back?”
Kellie got up, retrieved the log she dropped earlier and walked over to the fireplace with it. She stood there for a while gazing at the hot coals, then put the log on the fire. “I sure as hell hope not, Lacette. If I know Daddy, he's gone for good.”
“Yeah. I guess so. Too bad.”
As she walked up to her room, it occurred to her that that was the friendliest conversation she'd had with her sister since the lawyer read their grandmother's will to them.
Â
Â
Cynthia had expected her daughters to look askance at what she considered her new self. She'd made what was probably a life changing decision, and she prayed that she could stick to it. Everybody was entitled to one mistake, whether it was a short one or a long one, and she didn't intend to spend the rest of her life beating herself to death and moping about that one. People didn't think a minister's wife should look like a woman? Well, she hadn't been a minister's wife for more than six weeks. If Marshall didn't announce that he'd left his wife and daughters, people would think his wife no longer respected him. Well, let them. She pulled up to Carriage Inn and cut the motor. She'd never been in a bar, and it was time she learned whether the people who frequented them seemed headed for hell, as Marshall preached. She stepped inside, looked around for her cousin Jack and headed toward him, smiling in relief that he'd gotten there before she did.
He walked to meet her, more resolute than was normally his wont. “Hi, babe. Say . . . can I . . . uh . . . buy you a drink?”
She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with cigarette smoke and her nostrils with the odor of liquor, both fresh and stale, and stepped backward until the edge of a baby grand piano sent shock through her right rib cage.
“I want you to know that . . .” She gaped at the man.
“Jack! What the devil's the matter with you?”
“Hold it! Hey, wait a minute.
Cynthia?
What have you done to yourself? If you hadn't opened your mouth, I never would have known who you were.” A sheepish expression marked his face, and then he began to laugh. “I'll bet my head Marshall didn't see you when you left home. You revved up my engine. I thought I saw this gorgeous dame walk in alone, case the joint and pick me out of the crowd of Joes hanging around here. Biggest let-down I've had in years. Let's go back to the cocktail lounge and get a drink.”
She had wanted a change, but maybe she'd gone too far. And maybe not, she thought, for as they walked through the bar, half the men took the pains to catalogue her assets, and some of those who did smiled in approval. She ordered a Lime Rickey, because it was the only drink whose name she knew other than wine, and toyed with it for nearly an hour.
“If you're in a mid-life crisis, Cynthia, be sure you don't get into trouble. You still have your looks, and there're a lot of lonely guys out here.”
“Oh, Jack, you know I'm not going to pick up a man.”
However, as she walked along Bolton Street in Baltimore the next day after a visit to a spaâher firstâshe couldn't help noticing the appreciative looks men gave her. “I'm going to make a play for the next good-looking man I meet,” she told herself, “just to see what kind of reaction I get.”
She noticed a tall, well-dressed, African-American man wearing a black chesterfield coat and a gray hat, who walked directly toward her, and decided that he would be her first target. As the man got closer to her, she prepared her smile and a flirtatious air and began to slow her steps. He was about twenty feet away when she gasped and ran across the street, barely missing contact with an oncoming car. She got behind a dark blue sedan and leaned against it, panting for air. So much for flirting with strange men; the first one she picked had, until recently, been her husband for over thirty-five years. How Marshall Graham would love to have been the object of her indiscretion!
After some time, she made her way to where she parked her car, got in the Mercedes and leaned her head on the steering wheel.
I'd better get myself together. I'm not the first woman to find herself without a husband and needing a sex life.
She put the car in drive and headed for Route 70.
Heck! When I had him, he was too busy half the time to pay attention to me.
She pushed the thought from her mind.
As soon as I can brooch to Kellie and Lacette the idea of their getting an apartment for themselves, I'm going to move out of that parsonage and get a place where people don't feel they have the right to barge into my house whenever it suits them. I wonder why I ever thought being a minister's wife was such a big deal. I've spent almost thirty-six years pretending about a lot of things.
She stopped at Brady's Chicken and Ribs and bought two sides of barbecued baby back ribs, her contribution to supper. With their father gone, both girls had become lazy about cooking, and she'd as soon never see another kitchen. Her earlier resolve to be her age forgotten, she went to Francis Scott Key Mallâhalf the important places in Frederick were named for an historical person, place, or eventâand bought a pair of spike-heeled, beige leather boots that were more suitable for her daughters than for her. She sucked her teeth and shrugged it off with the lift of her left shoulder; when she was Kellie's and Lacette's age, she dressed like an old woman to suit the brothers and sisters of whatever church Marshall was pastoring at the time. Let them say what they liked; she had paid her dues.