A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (23 page)

He nodded. “Seemed easier. So you heard we busted up?”

“Yeah,” I said. I pointed at his plain mug. “You didn’t even bring your pig mugs.”

“Razorback,” he said automatical y. It was the echo of an old play fight we used to have, mostly when we were naked, drinking coffee in bed the morning after a night of tumbling al the sheets around. I felt my whole body flush.

His throat had to work to swal ow; he remembered, too.

“Sandy doesn’t even like footbal ,” I said, and I could hear an edge of mad in my voice. How could he remember and stil not have come for me? If he knew about Liza’s stroke, he must also know I was stil single. He should have been on my doorstep thirty seconds after he walked out on his wife.

He shrugged, his eyes on me gone wary. “I wanted out. Wanted something fresh.”

“I guess so,” I said. I couldn’t help adding, “What’s the something fresh’s name?”

His eyebrow cocked. “I meant the place. I wanted a fresh— Stop it.”

“I didn’t start anything,” I said, and that was a lie. I most certainly was trying to start something. Maybe something ugly. My vision had pinholed down to only him, standing there being not Sandy’s anymore, and stil not mine. I was al pent up, wanting to hit him or throw things, make him angry enough to forget everything and put his damn hands on me.

This was exactly wrong. I needed to finesse him. I had to get him to tel me what suspicions Rick Warfield had pinned on Liza, if he was wondering about Mosey.

I took a breath and turned away from him. Liza was standing stil and quiet in her walker, taking us in. I went to her, put my hands over hers, and said, “You need anything?”

She met my eyes. She smiled, like she was bucking me up, and it seemed to me that it was a pretty good smile. Her right side, the bad side, was pul ing up a little, not just twisting as the left-side muscles worked. But then I saw how her good eye gleamed, fil ed to the brim with devilment.

An old Liza look. A Liza-up-to-something look.

I cocked a warning eyebrow at her, though I wasn’t sure what I was warning her off of, and Lawrence said, behind me, “I was going to cal you.”

Smooth. Like he meant it.

“When you got around to it,” I said. I couldn’t seem to get on topic, not at al . I wanted to smack him. Smack him and leave. “I don’t think I can do this right now.” I turned toward Liza, to tel her we should go, just in time to see that her eyes were slipping shut and she was sliding down her walker to her knees.

“Liza!” I yel ed, and stepped in to catch her.

Instantly Lawrence was beside me. Together we got her wrestled over onto the pinewood sofa and sat her down. She made the most pitiful noise, like a sad kitten.

“Oh, baby, are you okay?” I said, furious with myself and her for pushing too hard and with Lawrence for everything, even breathing. The worst part was, Liza had al but fainted, I was worried nigh to death, and yet a teeny piece of me wanted to lean a little closer to Lawrence as he settled Liza on the sofa. Lean in and smel the skin on the back of his neck.

“I’l get her some water,” Lawrence said, and left us.

I found Liza’s pulse, and my anxiety went down a notch. It was steady and even. Then I looked at her face, and she was grinning at me, her good eye wide and ful of mischief. I heard Lawrence coming back, and Liza’s eyes sank to half-mast and her smile vanished.

I gave her good arm a tug, but Liza made a
hmmm
noise and snuggled herself low into the sofa. My jaw dropped. She was playing possum.

“Is she okay?” Lawrence said, holding a water glass.

“She’s just…tired,” I said, not sure what she was doing. I had no way of knowing if she understood our mission, knew we hadn’t accomplished it yet, or if she was simply basking in the hormones thickening the air and the man drama piling up in heaps around the room.

Lawrence took over, setting the water on the coffee table nearby. He grabbed a folded blanket from the back of the sofa and started tucking it around her. I shifted and stood, wanting to get away from him, as he put a couch cushion under her head. I almost ran the three steps across the bare room to the breakfast bar. Lawrence picked her feet up, like he’d been doing this al his life. He stretched Liza out on the sofa, fixing her blanket, and in less than a minute she was tucked in and her eyes were closed, like she was sleeping peaceful. But I knew better. I could see she was smiling, faint, but enough to make the start of the dimple on her good side.

“This was a bad idea,” I muttered, not sure if I meant mine, coming here, or whatever the hel the idea driving Liza was.

Lawrence stood up and turned to face me. His hound-dog eyes had gone al sorrowful. I looked back at him, and there was nothing to be said. I was furious and Liza was faking, but neither of these facts could stop the mother in me from noting how gently he’d handled my hurt kid. I had never questioned the choices of Lawrence-the-daddy. What I couldn’t understand were his choices now, after the boys were raised and gone to col ege and his marriage was over. I understood that my idea about slipping questions at him sideways through a casual conversation was not going to work. I couldn’t chitchat, couldn’t ask how his momma was or say,
How ’bout them Bulldogs?
Every avenue of conversation led right to me throwing his plain white coffee mug at his head; his sweetness with Liza made me not want to do that, exactly, either.

We stood looking at each other, and there wasn’t anyplace to go from here. So I simply asked him direct, “What’s Rick Warfield thinking about those bones in our yard?”

Lawrence regarded me with unreadable eyes. “That’s why you came to see me?”

“Yes,” I said, trying for staunch, but I could feel my lower lip trembling. His gaze dropped to my mouth, and I knew he’d seen. I said, very sharp and too loud to sound truthful, “That’s the only reason.”

Liza made a snorty noise, like my raised voice had disturbed her. He watched her until she subsided, and then he said, quiet and calm, “Let’s go back where we can talk.”

He crossed the room to the closed door, and I fol owed. It led to a short hal way open to a couple of bedrooms. He closed the door to the den behind us and started down the hal . I could hear a radio playing soft.

“I can’t say much about an open investigation, Ginny,” Lawrence said. “Ask me what you want to know, specifical y. I’l tel you what I can.”

I said, blunt, “I’m worried he’l think Liza had something to do with it simply because it’s our yard. She didn’t, of course, but she can’t tel him so.”

Lawrence opened the door at the end of the hal , and as we went in, he said, “I wouldn’t worry about that. That’s not the direction the investigation is going. Not at al .”

He was saying exactly what I’d hoped, but I couldn’t answer. I’d gone speechless. He’d brought me to his bedroom, so smal that the act of going inside had fetched us up against the side of a queen-size bed. The wal s were stark and white here, too, and the dresser and the bedside table were more pasteboard IKEA dorm stuff, but the bed…I knew this bed. It was Lawrence’s old cherry four-poster, and I knew the butter-yel ow sheets with the cranberry pinstripe, too, thin and cottony soft from a thousand washings. It was unmade, the sheets in a stir. A faint scent rose up from them, familiar. Tide detergent and, under that, the warm, oaky smel of Lawrence, clean and sleeping.

He was being tight-lipped, but he’d said enough to reassure me, and here we were, alone with the bed we’d made love in half a hundred times. I couldn’t swal ow. He was stil him, and I knew him, and I knew this bed.

Everything I’d thought was anger blazed up in me, higher and hotter than any rage could go. Almost unable to help myself, I went up on tiptoe and I put my mouth right on his stil -talking mouth. My arms wound themselves around his neck, feeling the cool, summer-grass spring of his short hair against my forearm and the warm skin at his nape. It was the same, al the same, and my body remembered perfectly the shape of him and melted to it.

His body remembered, too. His mouth opened against mine, opened to the taste of Lawrence and Crest toothpaste. His hands went right where they belonged, cupping my ass and pul ing me into him, lifting me so I was almost off my feet and we were hip to hip.

“Goddamn it,” he said into my mouth, but it sounded more like a prayer than cussing. His breath mingled with mine. Al the days that had passed with the sun coming up and going down with him not touching me, they had al been wrongful and off-kilter, and now, with his hands on me, at last the world spun right. I slid a hand between us, cupped him, felt the hard, familiar weight of him wanting me; he folded at the knee, pul ing me with him. We tumbled sideways onto the mattress, spil ed together into the sunshine splashed across it. And there we were.

It was me and Mr. Friend; I’d brought a chaperone and come to weasel information, but that hadn’t stopped me from choosing my prettiest panties, hopeful pink and lacy. Panties for company, a few years old but looking brand-new from lack of wear. Lawrence’s clever fingers were already seeking things inside of them, and I arched and clung and I let myself forget, for a little while. He took everything—my hurt child, the chance we could lose Mosey, how scared I was, how sad I was for Liza’s lost baby. I gave it al up, and I gave myself up, too, opening to al the things he was doing to me in the sunshine, and it was like coming home.

After, we lay together in a tangle. My company panties were hanging from his plain IKEA floor lamp like a cheery pink flag. The top sheet was a twist at the foot of the bed. I pul ed it up over us and then put my head on his chest, listening to the thump of his big heart, trying to tel myself this hadn’t solved damn-al . But I couldn’t help feeling good.

He said, quiet, “So much for doing it right this time.”

I laughed. “Trust me. You did it exactly right.” I lifted my head and rested the point of my chin on his chest. “This is your real bed.”

“Yeah,” he said. I raised my eyebrows, asking, and he said, “When Sandy came home, she wanted us to get a new one. She said this one wasn’t hers anymore, and she was right. We got a sleigh bed, and I put this one up in the attic. It’s the only thing I moved over here from the house.”

I nodded, digging my chin into his chest, and he blinked a long, slow blink. I remembered this, how he got so slow, lol ing around like a sleepy zoo tiger after, while I always wanted to get up and bake bread or garden or go dancing.

Panties aside, I hadn’t planned this. But my chaperone had apparently had another agenda, and so had my body, and I’d landed here. My jumbled feelings were one thing, but I’d come for a reason. I found myself stil wil ing to use him and this glowy aftermood, both.

“So what direction
is
the investigation going?” I asked, as if our conversation had never been interrupted at al . Meanwhile my finger was tracing a pattern in his chest hair.

He smiled and said, “I told you I can’t share details, Ginny. How many commandments do you want me to break today?”

I realized that the pattern I was drawing on his chest was a little heart, over and over, like a teenage girl doodling in her notebook. I stopped myself and sat up. “You know I’m not asking so I have the best gossip when the PTA meets. I’m asking because I’m worried about my kid.”

His smile went down a notch, and he propped himself up on an elbow. “If I thought Liza was in trouble, I’d tel you. I’d have told you myself, before this, if I thought you had reason to be worried.”

Al at once I didn’t like being naked. I reached over and snapped my happy panty flag down. I turned away from him to put them on.

“Is that a fact,” I said, but not like a question. I got up and started struggling back into my dress. “I have to get home. Mosey has a friend over, and I don’t like to leave her.”

His eyes had reset to wary. “Want me to help you get Liza to the car?”

“I think Liza probably feels real y quite rested now.” My voice was hard and sharp.

I checked the mirror, frowning helplessly at the dark riot of auburn curls my careful y blown-out hair had become. I started for the door, but his voice stopped me.

“Ginny,” he said. “I’m serious. I would have been on your doorstep long before this if I thought Rick Warfield was barking up your tree.”

I paused. I found I believed him. After al , the day Tyler had taken out the wil ow, Lawrence had come by to chase the looky-loos from the yard. But he hadn’t rung the bel . I said, “I don’t want to dig al this up, but, Lawrence, you left your wife months ago. I haven’t noticed you showing up on my doorstep, no matter what trouble came my way or didn’t.”

“I was going to,” he said, earnest, sitting al the way up in the bed so the sheet fel from his chest and puddled in his lap. “I was going to cal you.

November fifteenth.”

My eyes narrowed. The whiteness of his bare wal s was bothering me. His words sounded truthful, but who could tel in such a stark, bare place?

The room seemed too whol y unfinished to have corners and nooks to hide things in, as if anything he said must be plain speaking. I asked, “What’s so al -fired special about November fifteenth?”

“It’s my court date. I’l be divorced.”

That hit me in exactly the wrong way. I took a step toward him, and my words came out so forceful it was like I hissed them. “You were waiting on
the paperwork
?”

“Not the paperwork,” he said, terse. “Waiting to be free.”

“
Seriously?
” I said, like Mosey in a snit. “That didn’t stop you last time.”

“Yeah. See how wel that turned out?” he said, his own voice rising now.

“If you real y wanted—” Then, al at once, I got it, and even my knowing that Liza was a few feet down the hal couldn’t keep my voice from going louder and higher with every word. “Oh, holy shit, it’s because of God. No, not even God. That I could maybe see. But you were worried what that stick-in-ass whispery pack of vicious Baptists down at your church would think of you if—”

He swung his legs around, out of the bed, this time sitting up for real and talking over me. “Wait a second, now—”