His machine picks up, which is probably just as well. Jessie has been sitting on this for so long that acid fills her mouth. Things the bastard bastard needs to hear pile up in her head – packed in like enough nitro to blow up the world. If they spoke, it would all come out too fast, and Brad is stupid. Let the walking slime mold dangle by the short hairs for a little bit. She wants to see him hang by his guts, twisting in the wind while she takes her sweet time, laying it out for him.
As it is, the slick, radio-announcer track he laid on the machine goes on forever, smoothly supplying his cell-phone number and the number at the club. She has a full minute to compose before she spits:
‘Now, don’t call me back and don’t ask questions. Just be aware that nothing you did is ever over. In fact, it’s come to town. After what you did, it damn well serves you right.’
Shaking with fury, she ducks into the office. She has to compose herself before she can do makeup and put on her chic silk jacket and her diamond studs and high heels for lunch at the prestigious Fort Jude Club. She hates that she can’t stop thinking of it as the prestigious Fort Jude Club. People who couldn’t see her for dirt in high school have changed toward her since she came back to town in her Lexus and bought this hotel outright, thanks to the late Billy James, her fourth and final ex. The shittiest snots from Fort Jude High are her new best friends now, and even the boys look at her differently. Last year she sat down on the club patio with the Friday Lunch Bunch – on a trial basis, she thought, but she’s been sitting down with them regular ever since.
It’s silly, but given that everybody used to think of Jessie James, née Jessie Vukovich, as that cheap girl from Pierce Point, it’s a very big deal. She has to get her shit together and get her smile working right so she can go down there and face them.
Even though it’s the desk clerk’s day off, she shuts the office. When he comes back down to the lobby, cute Dan Carteret will think she’s gone for good, which is just as well. She likes the kid, but she doesn’t want to talk to him, not as raw and hopeful and helpless as he is. There are things he doesn’t know and things he should never have to know.
Poor kid, she thinks. Thinks he can walk in cold, ask around, and everybody will open up and tell him everything. Fat chance. There are some things only Jessie knows, and she’s not about to tell anybody anything. She sighs. Poor kid, his knuckles were white when he signed the book, this is a very big deal for him.
Then she focuses on the real problem. The Lunch Bunch. What to say when they ask why she’s late. They’re nice enough to her now, but underneath Jessie knows who she is and they know who they are and there’s still a huge difference between them. She’s learned to hide it. In Fort Jude, the littlest things can give you away, so she has to be careful. Appearances are that important.
7
Bobby Chaplin
It isn’t pathetic, really, it’s just the kind of thing you end up doing when you’re not yourself. He’s been out of work for so long that he isn’t sure who that person is.
For the seventh consecutive day since Nenna McCall limped by, Bobby is out in the sunshine, weeding around the cement lions on the front steps. In the dawn of his doomed real estate venture, Grandfather planted cast cement sphinxes and lions at every intersection in Pine Vista, which is what the late Herman Chaplin named his dream tract at the height of the Florida real estate boom. He poured thousands into private roads out here in the Twenties, when the sky was the limit and a thousand dollars bought something. The old man bought up every plot between here and Far Acres, in the happy expectation that the rich would come clamoring to moor their yachts on private docks behind their new houses. He envisioned a Spanish stucco wonderland out here: golf course, tennis courts, Moorish castles on the waterfront, as many as the traffic would bear. The last of his money went into building his