Jenx said, “What a bitch.”
Stretched out across two chairs in my lobby, Abra snored.
“I’m talking to you,” Jenx said, getting in my face. “Jeb loves you. Why give him a hard time?”
“Because he’s acting like… Jeb always ends up acting,” I whined.
“Meaning what?”
“He loves the ladies and his music more than he can ever love me.”
Jenx plopped down in Tina’s reception desk chair. She put her steel-toe booted feet, one at a time, on the counter and leaned way back.
“You know what your problem is, Whiskey?”
“I have a strange feeling you’re going to tell me.”
There’s no stopping the law, especially when it takes the form of somebody you grew up with. Somebody who knows you better than your own mother.
Jenx said, “Jeb would do anything he could for you. Anything you’d let him do. Your problem is you don’t know a good thing when it wants to move in with you.”
“I know my ex-husband! He never grew up. If he hadn’t connected with Fleggers and cut that Animal Lullabies CD, he’d still be living out of his old Nissan Van Wagon-and liking it!”
“You’re right,” Jenx said. “It doesn’t take much to make Jeb happy. What the hell’s your problem?”
“This is about Jeb’s problems!”
I recited my usual and customary laundry list of Jeb’s faults, starting with his easy attraction to other women. Jenx’s eyes glazed over, but I kept talking, building my case against my ex-husband. When the chief’s cell phone rang, she stood up.
“Hold that thought,” she told me. “Hold it cuz nobody wants to hear it.”
She stepped away to take the call. A moment later she was grinning at me.
“Fleggers to the rescue! That was Deely. They found Silverado and Ramona.”
True to their word, Deely and Dr. David had watched for black Cadillacs all the way home from Nappanee. While filling their tank at a Shell station near Union Pier, they spotted an unattended black Seville parked at an adjacent pump and asked the cashier where the driver had gone.
He pointed toward the woods behind the station. “She’s chasing her big gray dog. It got out when she opened her door.”
In other circumstances, Dr. David and Deely might have cheered Silverado’s run for freedom. But they recognized a felony in progress and notified local authorities. Within fifteen minutes, deputies had retrieved and busted Ramona. It took less time for Deely and Dr. David to secure Silverado.
“He came right to us when we called for him,” Deely told Jenx.
Dr. David added, “Animals instinctively know that Fleggers are on their side.”
Maybe some animals. My Bad Example bitch wouldn’t care. Watching her snooze, I doubted she gave a damn about anybody.
If Abra had a heart, it belonged to one human-Leo-and one dog- Norman the Golden, father of Prince Harry the Pee Master. Sure, she’d looked happy loping along Route 20 with Silverado, but Norman was her real mate. Her soulmate.
I explained that to Jenx.
“Remind you of anybody?” she asked.
I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. I had to dash to the john to barf again.
Afterwards I put the lid down on the toilet and sat there, head in my hands, telling myself that everything was all right. Or would be eventually. Before I could convince myself, however, the cell phone I’d been looking for earlier rang inside my purse. I scooped my bag from the floor, accidentally dumping half the contents.
“Have you finished searching for Abra?” Odette inquired when I answered. “And please note that I’m not asking whether you found her.”
“Duly noted. The answer is yes. You’ll be pleased to know I’m back at the office.”
“Excellent! Anything new at Mattimoe Realty?”
“Aside from the fact that Tina doesn’t work here anymore because she was an accessory to her husband, who killed two people and also shot me? Nah. Nothing new.”
“I see,” Odette said. “Well, I have news from Chicago.”
Part of me wanted to make sure she’d understood my news. But a bigger part of me needed to know what was happening on her end, so I listened.
“Last night Liam officially propositioned me, and I officially turned him down. We’re still working together, of course. We’re both mature adults.”
“Of course,” I said automatically.
“I thought you had doubts,” Odette remarked.
“Not about you. Never about you.”
That was almost completely true. I had certainly wanted to believe that Odette would stay true to Reginald… if only as an antidote to my own doubts about Jeb.
Then she pressed me for details about Tim and Tina, so I gave her what I had. She was less surprised than I was by the turn of events-further proof, I suppose, of my tendency to tune out unpleasant indicators. Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s the kind of bliss that can cost you.
Happily for me, Odette was in top form heading into her meeting with Liam’s favorite Chicago investors. No doubt she would dazzle them with her vision of Big and Little Houses on the Prairie. I expected construction to start before all the leaves were off the trees.
When I emerged from the bathroom, Jenx was gone. In her place sat Avery Mattimoe. My first reaction was to run for my life.
“You look like shit,” Avery said by way of greeting.
I would have returned the compliment except that Avery looked pretty good. For a big girl with bad skin, thin hair, and a permanent scowl. I gave silent thanks that her tongue wasn’t flicking.
“Where are the twins?” I said. “Don’t tell me you left them with Chester.”
“They’re with Peg Goh. She was opening her shop early, in case anybody wants a tattoo before breakfast. She couldn’t wait to hold the twins.”
Something was different about Avery. And it wasn’t the hint of suntan on her sallow face or the conspicuous lack of tic. Her voice, usually strident, was pleasantly modulated. Serene. How was that possible? MacArthur had just dumped her.
“Everything all right?” I asked cautiously.
“Wonderful. We loved our Mommy and Me Retreat in Sedona. I learned so much.”
“I mean is everything all right at the Castle?”
In the brief pause before she spoke, I saw Avery compose her response. Her lips moved silently, as if chanting a newly learned mantra.
“MacArthur is gone. But the twins and I will follow our bliss and find our destiny.”
She smiled in a way that made me extremely nervous. Probably because Avery never smiled. At moments like this, she ordinarily threw things.
When I didn’t smile back, she said, “You really do look like shit. And you smell like puke. Are you pregnant?”
At that point I responded the way Avery usually did: I burst into snotty, snuffling tears.
“I think so!” I wailed. “I’ve missed two periods! But I’m scared to pee on a stick!”
At the sound of my sobs, Abra snapped at the air and then sank back to sleep. Avery, on the other hand, took practical action. She reached into her purse and pulled out a home pregnancy test kit.
“You carry that around with you?” I asked.
“If you were as fertile as I am, you would, too.”
My stepdaughter placed it in my palm and closed my fingers around it.
“Wow,” she said. “I thought you were too old to have sex. Let alone get pregnant.”
“I’m thirty-four!” I said.
“Wow,” she repeated, shaking her head in amazement. “Just think, if you have a kid, by the time he starts high school, you’ll be, like-“
I could see the wheels turning as she struggled with the math.
“You’ll be forty-eight! That’s older than my dad was when he died. When my kids start high school, I’ll be the same age you are now.”
She narrowed her piggy little eyes, either picturing herself at my advanced age or imagining my looming decrepitude.
“How does Jeb feel about being a daddy?” she said. “It is Jeb’s… isn’t it?”
I watched Avery’s mental machinery grind as she ran the known list of Whiskey’s Possible Sexual Partners. I allowed myself the pleasure of her apparent self-torture as she considered-and discarded-MacArthur from that list.
“It’s gotta be Jeb’s,” she concluded, more for her benefit than mine. “Have you told him?”
“Not yet. Maybe not ever.”
“You gotta tell him!”
“This from the woman who never notified the father of her twins.”
“That was so completely different!” Avery said. “I didn’t even know that guy. You used to be married to Jeb!”
“And then I divorced him. For a lot of very good reasons.”
Although now, staring at the pregnancy test kit, I wondered which mattered more: forgiving Jeb or being stubborn enough to raise a kid on my own.
“You’re right,” Avery said suddenly.
“About what?”
I was immediately suspicious since my stepdaughter had never admitted I could be correct about anything.
She said, “You don’t need Jeb. We can do this ourselves! We can raise our kids together!”
“I’m not following you…”
“The twins and I will move back to Vestige. And you’ll hire a nanny for all three kids!”
I flicked my own tongue and told Avery I’d think about it… as seriously as I’d think about bungee-jumping from the Mackinac Bridge. Then I located a brand-new box of tissues for her; it would come in handy when the Sedona trance wore off, and she resumed her sobbing, screaming ways.
Moments later Abra was stretched out on the back seat of my car, snoring. I had locked all the doors in case Avery cracked up fast and tried to join us. Instead of starting the ignition, I stared at my cell phone. Jeb had not called since taking off for Chicago with Susan. About now he’d be playing animal lullabies at her fund-raising country club brunch. That meant I could leave him a voicemail message instead of talking to him live. Maybe it would be easier that way to explain my current… situation.
When I speed-dialed his number; the call went straight to voicemail:
“Hey,” Jeb’s crooner voice said. “What’s happening? Tell me now, and I’ll call you later.”
I opened my mouth with every intention of telling him what I knew: That I was scared to my bones I might be pregnant. Me, the Queen of Denial. A woman who couldn’t keep track of a dog much less a child. Just ask Chester, whom I’d lost more times than a set of keys. And I’d accused Cassina of being a lousy mom! How could Bad Example Me ever handle motherhood?
I listened for the beep and opened my mouth, but nothing came out. A recorded voice kindly suggested that I try again. When I remained mute, the voice said to call back later and disconnected me. Probably just as well. I really didn’t have a clue how to speak my deepest fears. So I started the car and headed home.
Somewhere along Broken Arrow Highway, my favorite radio station played Once in a Lifetime by the Talking Heads. When I was married to Leo, that was our song. In fact, it was the last song I heard while he was alive. A year and a half ago, we were holding hands on a late-night drive home from Chicago, Abra asleep in the backseat just as she was now. With the windows rolled down, and the fresh spring air rushing in, we savored our special tune and our happy time together. Naively, I thought those tranquil years would roll on and on. I dozed off, waking when we hit the ditch. Abra was howling behind me; Leo was silent beside me, dead from a ruptured aorta.
Now I found myself sobbing so hard I couldn’t keep the car on the road. I pulled onto the berm, shifted into park, and collapsed against the steering wheel, letting my heart break all over again.
“Oh, Leo,” I moaned. “Why did you have to go? You should be here with me right now…”
Something gentle yet firm was nudging my neck. I turned my head and made contact with a cold wet nose, followed by a warm wet tongue. Abra was awake and, unless I was badly mistaken, trying to comfort me. She vaulted into the passenger seat.
“Hey, girl,” I said. “You got knocked up, too, didn’t you? And things turned out all right. Without any help from the daddy.”
I stroked her head. Her stately Afghan hound head.
“Oh, sure, Norman came around later. After we gave your babies away. Which isn’t an option in this case…”
Then I did something I’d never done before. Something I hadn’t imagined Abra ever letting me do: I pulled her close and held her tight in a soothing big-dog embrace. Burying my face in her tangled, sticky, not-so-sweet-smelling coat, I sobbed 'til I had no tears left. Squeezed between me and the steering wheel, Abra didn’t budge. The diva dog patiently allowed me to hold her as long as I wanted to, which was exactly as long as I needed to.
We were both a mess. A couple genuine bad examples. But we were also survivors; Abra and I could muddle through damn near anything. Leo had brought us together, and we would carry on. The dog, for one, had decent instincts.