VIRGINIA BROADWELL WAS ANGRY. AND ANYONE WHO KNEW Virginia, knew she was a dangerous woman when riled. Her first husband, the Judge, had learned this lesson long before he died, and her only son, Charles, had experienced the sting of her self-contained fury enough times over his forty-five years to be gun-shy. And her new husband would learn it, too, although Virginia would wait until the last thank-you note had been written and the ring was securely settled on her finger before showing Redmon that side of her nature. She would give him a chance to settle into the traces and take the bit firmly between his teeth before applying the whip the first time.
Downstairs she could hear the wedding guests milling about. She looked around the flowered chintz bedroom she had shared with the Judge for nearly twenty-six years, and then spent the next twenty years enjoying in solitary bliss. It would be sad to leave this house, the one she had insisted the Judge build for her all those years ago, before she would agree to marry him. The scene of so many of her social triumphs, the place where she had plotted and schemed her way to the top of the wobbly Ithaca social ladder, and which now, sadly, must be sold to pay her debts. Redmon, like the wily redneck businessman he was, had insisted she enter the marriage debt- free. He had insisted she sign a prenuptial agreement. Despite herself, Virginia had felt a kind of grudging admiration for him then. She would have done the same thing had their circumstances been reversed.
She had survived an unfortunate childhood, widowhood, scandal, near financial ruin, and now Y2K, and it had seemed only fitting that she set her wedding date for January 20, 2000. Let others worry about computer crashes and social anarchy; Virginia had endured enough turmoil in her life to know that victory belonged to the bold and the cunning.
There was a knock on the door and her son, Charles, stuck his head in. “Mother, are you ready?” He wore the same whipped-dog expression he had worn since his meek wife of sixteen years walked out of his life a little over a year ago, taking with her his children, his pride, and nearly six hundred thousand dollars of his assets. His defeatism irritated Virginia beyond words.
“Yes, I'm ready,” she said. “I'm ready to do my duty, to do whatever is necessary to hold this family together—”
“Good.” He knew where this was headed and he wanted no part of it. “I'll give the signal then.” He tried to close the door but Virginia inserted her slim little foot. Charles sighed and swung the door open again. “Yes, Mother?” he said, rolling his eyes skyward like a martyr on his way to the stake.
“Come in and close the door behind you,” she said fiercely. He did as he was told and followed her into the center of the room, where she stood looking at herself in a cheval glass. She lifted a well-manicured hand, indicating a wingback chair by the window.
“Do we really have to do this now?” he said, and when she said nothing, only stared at him steadily in the glass, he sighed and slumped down with his feet stretched in front of him.
“You brought this on yourself,” she said. She sniffed, looking at herself critically in the mirror. There weren't many women her age who could still wear designer clothes and heels. Hadn't she caught the bag boy at the Piggly Wiggly staring at her legs yesterday as he loaded her groceries into the car? And hadn't some ruffians in a pickup truck whistled at her last week as she crossed the street in front of the Courthouse?
Charles slumped in his chair and stared despondently at a spot in the center of the oriental carpet. It was his newest technique, this passiveaggressive slumping, this lumpish inertia, like a sack of grain propped against a table leg. Virginia frowned at him in the glass. “You won't return my phone calls, you hide behind locked doors when I show up at your condo—don't think I haven't seen you peering from behind the blinds— you refuse to see me when I show up at that ratty little place you call an office.”
Good. She had drawn blood. She noted the way his ears flushed, the way he lurched forward with his elbows pinned to the arms of the chair. “That ratty little office is all I can afford,” he said tersely.
“Whose fault is that?”
“Surely, Mother, you're not blaming me for the breakup of Boone and Broadwell.” He lifted his top lip, looking more like the old Charles, more like the surly, sarcastic boy she had raised and tutored, so much like his father, but so much more like her.
“Who should I blame?” she said, lifting one eyebrow. “Who should I blame for the breakup of your father's law firm, for the loss of my annual income and partnership assets?”
He smirked in a way she found particularly offensive. He said, “Well, you're managing to survive pretty well, considering you're marrying one of the wealthiest men in Georgia.”
“I'm doing what I have to do given the circumstances,” she snapped. “And you'd be well advised to do the same.”
His eyes clouded suddenly and he shrugged and went limp again, and in that moment of surrender Virginia knew the breakup of Boone & Broad- well had something to do with Nita. Something had happened between Charles and his soon-to-be-remarried ex-wife. Something secret but underhanded—and Virginia knew a thing or two about secrets, not to mention underhandedness.
“Speaking of marriage,” she said, smoothing her hair with one hand. “I understand Nita is getting remarried next week.”
Charles stared at his feet. A muscle moved along his jaw. “So I heard,” he said evenly.
“You should have put a stop to all that when you had a chance.”
“This isn't the dark ages, Mother. I couldn't have stopped her from divorcing me if she wanted to.”
“Yes, but you could have made it more difficult for her. You could have tied the case up in court for years and bled her dry, financially and emotionally. You're a good attorney, or at least you used to be.”
He laughed bitterly and put his hands on the arm of the chair as if to rise. “Are we about finished here?”
She looked at him suspiciously. Why hadn't he opposed the divorce? Why hadn't he stopped Nita from running off with that good-looking young carpenter she hired to fix her pool house, an action that made the Broad- wells the laughingstock of Ithaca, Georgia?
Virginia smelled a rat.
And she knew it had something to do with Nita and her two devious friends—Eadie Boone and Lavonne Zibolsky. Some scheme they had cooked up a year ago when Nita and Lavonne left their husbands, and Eadie ran off to New Orleans with her husband, Trevor, to live the life of bohemian artists.
Virginia adjusted the sleeves of her jacket. “Tell them to give me five minutes and then start the wedding march. You can wait for me at the foot of the stairs. And for God's sake, stand up straight and stop slouching.”
Charles went out without another word, pulling the door closed firmly behind him. No, it had been a bad year for everyone but Nita, Lavonne, and Eadie, who had somehow managed to turn everyone else's bad luck to their advantage. And Virginia was determined to get to the bottom of what had happened no matter what it took. But first she must put her own affairs in order. She tucked her bobbed hair behind one ear and looked at her smooth skin appreciatively. Keep your face out of the sun. It was the one bit of childhood advice her mother had given her that actually proved useful, besides her admonition to Virginia on her wedding night, to “close your eyes and think of something pleasant.” Virginia had laughed bitterly then, and she laughed bitterly now, remembering.
She stared at herself in the mirror, somewhat disgusted at the predicament she found herself in now—a bride at sixty-five. Still, beggars can't be choosers, she reminded herself. Desperate times call for desperate measures. She had married beneath herself both times, first, to the Judge, the son of a sharecropper, and now to Redmon, the son of a pine barren hog farmer, but she had done what well-brought-up women of her generation were taught to do: she had married for money. She had her work cut out for her this time, though. Redmon didn't seem the type likely to submit to the crop and bridle of matrimony, although Virginia was certain she would prevail in the end.
She would prevail in bringing her new husband to heel and then she would turn her attention to Nita and her renegade girlfriends. Virginia had never, in her entire life, let anyone get the best of her, and she wasn't about to start now. She stared balefully at herself in the mirror, trying to remember that brides should appear virginal and not homicidal. Her tiny hands curled into fists. Her tiny teeth clenched. Twin spots of color appeared on her cheeks. Below her the wedding march began, low and plaintive as a cow stuck in a bog, slow and ponderous as a funeral dirge.
Virginia forced a bright, artificial grin. She checked her teeth for lipstick stains.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, but Virginia had never been one to turn her responsibilities over to someone else.
SOMEWHERE DEEP IN THE HOUSE, A PHONE WAS RINGING. EADIE awakened from a dream about crickets chirping, and sat up on her elbow to listen. It was her cell phone, but she couldn't remember where she had dropped it the night before. This house was too big. Too damn big, and too damn lonely. The ringing stopped, and then began again, insistently. It was probably Trevor, calling to tell her he'd been delayed in New York. Again.
Eadie sighed, and rolled over in bed.
Outside the long windows, a soft New Orleans rain was falling. Beyond the wrought-iron balcony the garden glistened, a jungle of greenery, banana plants, ferns, bougainvillea, and thick clusters of trailing vines. Through the lush foliage the old bricked wall rose protectively above the courtyard, built in 1737 when the house had been a convent erected on the outskirts of Nouvelle Orleans, and the city itself was nothing but a backwoods settlement laid out in French military outpost style along the swampy banks of the Mississippi. Later, it had been a boys' orphanage. Trevor had wanted the house from the moment he first saw it. He had been entranced with the mystery and tragic history of the place, with its fourteen-foot ceilings and chandeliers that dangled like golden fruit. They had attended a cocktail party here soon after arriving in New Orleans, and standing on the balcony overlooking the moonlit garden, Trevor had taken Eadie in his arms and kissed her. “I can write here,” he said fiercely. These words had proved prophetic.
Eadie plumped the pillows behind her and reached for the TV remote. She scrolled through the stations several times but nothing caught her eye. Thunder rumbled in the distance. She picked up an opened box of Mondo Log Candies and rummaged through the empty wrapper looking for any sticky chocolate pieces she might have missed during last night's binge. Nothing. The box was empty. Eadie tossed it over the side of the bed.
She switched off the TV and then lay back on the bed. A water stain spread slowly across the ceiling like a giant inkblot. Eadie saw a profile of Elvis Presley, the slim Elvis, not the fat one, and then she saw two girls fighting. Finally, weary and exhausted, she did what she always did when she was bored these days and out of Mondo Logs. She picked up the phone beside the bed and called Lavonne.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“I'm working. Or at least I'm getting ready to work. I'm sitting in the back room drinking a cup of coffee and reading the morning newspaper.”
“I've been thinking about the way Myra Redmon kicked the bucket,” Eadie said.
“Look, Eadie, if you're going to call me every day we need to get on one of those shared-minute plans. You're eating up my minutes.”
“I mean, considering Myra was such a pain in the ass, how ironic was the way she died? And can you believe Virginia actually married Redmon?”
“Yeah, I know. How desperate did she have to be.”
“Pretty damn desperate. Myra must be spinning in her grave.”
“Now there's a happy thought.” Lavonne took a sip, opened the paper, and snorted suddenly, spewing coffee.
“What's so funny?”
“Speak of the devil. I'm sitting here looking at a photo of Virginia in the wedding section of the newspaper. Just so you know, it was the Social Event of the Season.”
“Did the bride wear chain mail and carry a battleax?”
“No, interestingly enough, she appears to be unarmed. She's described as being ‘graceful as a swan’ and ‘slender as a willow.’”
“I'll bet Virginia wrote that herself.”
“Actually, they've got Lumineria writing the wedding and engagement section these days, in addition to the ‘Town Tattler.’”
“Oh shit,” Eadie said.
“Town Tattler” was the gossip column of the Ithaca Daily News written by Lumineria Crabb. Lumineria had taught Sunday school for thirty years and she could never bring herself to say anything ugly about anyone, so most of the gossip was pretty tame. Guess which former Cotillion Queen is celebrating another birthday? And she doesn't look a day over twenty! I heard it from a little bird one husband, J.T., bought his lovely wife, L.T., an anniversary ring and a trip to Paris. Isn't he the sweetest? That kind of thing. When Eadie announced she and Trevor were moving to New Orleans, a photo of her taken the day after her Let's Get the Hell Out of Ithaca Party appeared in the “Town Tattler” with the caption, “Guess which little love birds are flying the coop?” The photo, showing a very disheveled and obviously intoxicated Eadie, was probably the only bad picture she had ever taken. Lavonne referred to it as Eadie's Meth Bust Photo and gave her shit every chance she got.
“Well, at least it's not as bad as your Meth Bust Photo.”
“Very funny,” Eadie said.
“Actually Virginia looks really good. Amazingly good.”
“Yeah, well, that's what happens when you bathe in the blood of virgins.”
“I'll have to try that.”
“Speaking of looks, there's something I've been meaning to ask you.” Eadie put her hand behind her shoulders and probed with her fingers. “There might be something wrong with my back. It feels like I have a lump there, where my neck comes in.”
“A Dowager's Hump,” Lavonne said. “We all get them. It's part of aging.”
“Remind me not to call you when I'm depressed.”
“Are you depressed?”
“I wasn't until you mentioned the Meth Bust Photo and the Dowager's Hump.” Eadie slumped down in the pillows. She raised her legs into the air, admiring their long lean shapes, pointing with her toes toward the ceiling. Except for the slight paunch around her midsection, her figure was still good, which was amazing considering her recent inactivity and constant candy cravings. “And speaking of depression, I'm out of Mondo Logs. I need you to order me a case and I'll pick them up when I get to town.”
A Mondo Log was a pecan log covered in chocolate with a marshmallow center. It had been known to cause Type II diabetes after just one slice. The logs were made by the Mondo Candy Company out of Stations-ofthe-Cross, Georgia, and were rumored to have a special secret ingredient known only to the Mondo family. Eadie suspected heroin. She had been addicted since childhood but she had held her addiction at bay for nearly twenty years. Since she moved to New Orleans, however, her Mondo Log habit had returned with a vengeance and now she ordered cases of the stuff.
Lavonne, who'd grown up in Cleveland, and even after twenty years in the South, had yet to assimilate Southern culture said, “I'm not going down to the Mondo Candy Factory to buy you a case of Mondo Logs. I'm not enabling you to continue this disgusting and unhealthy habit.”
“You know, Lavonne, now that you've lost seventy-five pounds, you're not near as much fun as you used to be.”
“You'll be down for Nita's wedding in a few days. Just pick up a box when you get here.”
“They'll be sold out by then! You know they only turn out a limited number of logs and then they close down till September.”
The reason for Eadie's repeated phone calls became suddenly, glaringly apparent to Lavonne. She grinned, leaning back in her chair. “Oh my God,” she said, “you're homesick. You're homesick for Ithaca, Georgia.”
“Don't be ridiculous,” Eadie said, a little too forcefully. “I live in the greatest city in the world. I can get any alcoholic drink imaginable at three in the morning, read the New York Times in the Quarter over café au lait and beignets, eat in a different restaurant every night and not hit the same one twice.”
“But you can't get a Mondo Log.”
“Are you going to order it or not.”
Lavonne folded the newspaper and used it to blot up the spilled coffee on her desk. “How does Trevor feel about this latest addiction of yours?”
“Who?”
“Trevor. Your husband. The man you left town with a little over a year ago.”
“Oh him,” Eadie said.
Lavonne crumpled the wet paper and threw it into the trash can. “Trouble in paradise?” she said.
Eadie yawned and stared at the inkblot water stain. It reminded her now of a witch riding on a broomstick. “You'd have to be here to understand what's going on. It's hard being married to a celebrity.”
“You sound jealous.”
“Not jealous. Just bored.”
“Oh shit. That can't be good.”
Eadie frowned and put her hand over her eyes so she wouldn't have to look at the inkblot water stain. “He signed that two-book deal with Random House and now he's up in New York meeting with the publicity boys to plan his book tour.”
“So let me see if I've got this right,” Lavonne said. She tapped her com puter screen and waited while it booted up. “You spend twenty years hounding Trevor to quit practicing law and finish his novel, and now that he's done it, and managed to sell it to one of the biggest publishing houses in the world, you're depressed? You're married to a smart, good-looking man who adores you, and you're not happy?”
“Well, you know what they say,” Eadie said, yawning. “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”
“Remind me to smack you the next time I see you.” Lavonne went online to check the e-mails on her Shofar So Good Deli website. She scrolled down the list, holding her cell phone against her ear with one shoulder.
“About the wedding,” Eadie said, dropping her legs and rolling over on her stomach. “Are you sure it's okay if I stay with you? Are you sure Ashley won't mind?”
“Ashley's on winter break and Louise doesn't go back to Tulane until next week. They're down in Florida with Leonard and his trophy wife.”
“Funny, you don't sound bitter. Why don't you sound bitter?”
Lavonne grinned. “Because now the trophy wife's stuck with Leonard. And I'm not.”
From deep within the house, Eadie could hear whispering. In French. She turned her head to listen, and after a minute, it stopped. “I think my house is haunted,” she said. She was pretty sure it was a child. She had, several times, caught something small and fleeting out of the corner of her eye. “Lights go on and off. I hear whispering all the time, like someone is standing behind me and when I turn around, there's no one there. Sometimes I hear footsteps on the stairs.”
“What does Trevor say?”
“He says I'm crazy. He says I spend too much time shut up in the house, alone.”
On the other side of the wall, the old mixer made a wump, wump sound as it mixed the dough. Lavonne could hear Little Moses Shapiro, her partner's son, moving around the kitchen, taking bread loaves out of the ovens and sliding them onto the cooling trays. “Look, Eadie, I've got to go. We're catering Nita's wedding and I've got a lot to do before next Saturday. E-mail me your flight plan and I'll pick you up at the airport on Wednesday.”
“Is Nita having a bachelorette party?”
“She says she doesn't want one. She's acting kind of weird about the whole thing. I'm starting to think she might be getting cold feet.”
“What do you mean? Is something wrong with her and Jimmy Lee?”
“Oh no, they're as happy as ever. I just get the feeling she doesn't want to get married. I don't know, I could be wrong.”
“Well, let's you and me take her out to Bad Bob's and see if we can ply her with tequila and find out what's going on.”
Lavonne said, “Well, that might be a problem since Bad Bob's is no more. Two guys named Thom and Petor moved down from Atlanta and bought the place. They decorated it to look like a New York loft, put up a screen of trellises to hide the concrete plant, and built a deck overlooking the river. Now it's a wine bar called Malveux Robert.”
“Shit, what's happening to that town?”
“You'll see when you get here,” Lavonne said, and hung up.
EADIE HUNG UP THE PHONE, YAWNED, AND ROLLED OVER IN BED. The house was quiet again. The ghost had gone. The rain had stopped and the sun now peeked from behind a bank of low clouds, slanting through the long windows. A patch of blue sky appeared above the neighbor's roofline. They had bought the house on Prytania Street soon after they sold Trevor's ancestral home in Ithaca and moved to New Orleans. Most of their furniture was still in storage back in Georgia, and except for the bedroom, the kitchen, and the library, the mansion was empty. They had gambled that everything would work out over their first year there. That was all the time Trevor had given himself to finish his novel.
“If it doesn't work out, we can always go back to Georgia,” he said. “I can always go back to practicing law. And you can work anywhere. It doesn't matter where we live.”
But, apparently, it did. There were art galleries all along Magazine Street and Eadie told herself that she would work again, but instead she fussed over Trevor like an overbearing mother. She would wake him every morning and bring him café au lait in the garden, watching anxiously from the French doors until he began, tentatively at first, and then with a steady tapping of his fingers over the keyboard, to write. He would break for lunch and then go back to the garden. Eadie would allow no one to visit until four o'clock in the afternoon, cocktail hour in New Orleans, and then the garden would be crowded with neighbors and college professors and lawyers who had graduated from Tulane but never practiced law a day in their lives. Gradually, Eadie succumbed to the easy charm of the place, the dusty bookstores along Carrollton Avenue, the cafés of Maple Street, the bon vivant attitude and wit of the people she met at cocktail parties and art galleries and book signings. A general feeling of sloth and lassitude overtook her. She set up her studio in the dining room but kept the door closed and locked. Instead, she began to take long naps in the afternoon.
Trevor, on the other hand, seemed energized by the place. He worked feverishly, and after two months had a rough draft of the novel, a legal thriller, completed. By then he had landed an agent, based on his outline and the first three chapters. Four months later he had signed a two-book contract with Random House. It had all gone as perfectly and predictably as a Hollywood movie plot. The novel was due out in May and Eadie had no doubt it would become an overnight bestseller. That was the way her luck was running these days.
In a little over a year, Trevor had become a local Literary Figure. He had succumbed completely to the siren's song of adulation and praise. Eadie was consumed by jealousy, not of the women who threw themselves at her husband at cocktail parties and gallery openings, but of the fact that Trevor could work and she could not.
And now, lying in the house on Prytania Street and yawning in her antique bed, Eadie was overcome by a numbing sense of boredom.
Jealousy and boredom. Always a dangerous combination for Eadie Boone.
NOW THAT HER WEDDING WAS LESS THAN A WEEK AWAY, NITA was not even sure she wanted to get married again. She sat out on the screened porch drinking coffee in the mornings after Jimmy Lee had gone to work and the children had left for school, wondering if she was doing the right thing. Steam rose off the surface of the Black Warrior River and catfish the size of terriers splashed in the dark pools between the cypress trunks. Nita loved the quiet isolation of the place, their little cabin in the woods. Jimmy Lee had bought it soon after she left Charles Broadwell for good and moved in with him. She brought her two children with her, Whitney and Logan. They liked to take the boat out on the river or feed the catfish from its pine-strewn banks. In the summer, they swam in the dark water, cavorting like otters, enjoying themselves in a way they had never done when they lived in the big house in River Oaks with its kidney-shaped swimming pool. Jimmy Lee hung a rope swing from the top of a tall tree and watching the three of them swing out over the water, laughing and twirling and kicking their feet, Nita realized she had what she had always wanted—a happy family.
They lived simply and frugally on the money Jimmy Lee made as a self-employed carpenter. The children went to public school now and seemed much happier than they ever were attending the prestigious Barron Hall School. Nita herself had gone back to school, taking classes at the small college in town where she was trying to decide whether to major in elementary education or women's studies. The money she had taken from Charles Broadwell sat untouched in her bank account, insurance against Charles ever filing a custody suit to take the children away from her. Her love life with Jimmy Lee, thirteen years her junior, was passionate and intensely satisfying. All in all, Nita's life was turning out to be everything she had ever dreamed it could be, and she was hesitant to upset that delicate, happy balance by marrying Jimmy Lee.
Already there were ominous signs. He had begun to hint at fatherhood although Nita had told him that, at forty, and with her own children nearly grown, she did not want more children. He said he understood, but she saw the way he looked at young mothers pushing babies in the grocery store. And lately he had begun to grumble about money, to insist, despite her assurances to the contrary, that a man with a family must do more to provide for them than work as a self-employed carpenter.
Nita, who was writing a college research paper on the histories of black women who worked as domestics in the South in the 1930s and 1940s, had begun to question how long her happiness would last. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons she went out to the Suck Creek Retirement Home with her tape recorder and notebook and boxes of chocolate that she handed out to the women she interviewed. There she heard tales of social injustice and love gone bad, stories of the cruelty of nature and the capriciousness of fate. Immersing herself in the histories of these sad women made Nita realize how fleeting and illusionary moments of genuine happiness can be, and she could not shake the feeling that her happiness, too, was doomed to failure.
But then Jimmy Lee would come home from work and take her in his arms, and she would forget all that. Then her doubts would be nothing more than a slight gnawing sensation in the pit of her stomach. She would go about the small cabin planning her wedding and feeling like she was pushing something large and heavy up a hill, and if she stopped, it would roll back down and crush her. She hurried through her days. The flowers were ordered. The menu was decided upon. She loved Jimmy Lee and she knew he loved her. But there was a part of her, a cynical part born of sixteen years of marriage to Charles Broadwell, which knew that a wedding ring is not always the blossoming of a love affair.
Sometimes it's the death knell.
ONCE SHE HAD SWINDLED HER EX-HUSBAND, LEONARD, OUT OF his dream home and embarked on her career as a small-business owner, Lavonne Zibolsky was amazed at how quickly success came. In a little over a year, she and her business partner, Mona Shapiro, had increased the revenue of their Shofar So Good Deli thirty percent, and had even turned a small profit in their first year. Which was pretty good considering the amount of equipment and advertising they had bought, not to mention the expensive website they had paid a company out of Atlanta to design. Leonard's participation in all this had, of course, been forced, which was unfortunate but unavoidable, given the circumstances. Survival of the fittest was applicable not only to Darwinian theory, it would seem, but also to matrimony. Lavonne was the only divorced woman she knew whose standard of living had not gone down after the divorce, and it was only because she had been willing to do whatever was necessary to protect herself before the first petition was filed. She had taken the steps necessary, however unethical, morally questionable, or potentially criminal they might be, to ensure that she didn't spend her golden years living in a mobile home eating Feline Delight for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Besides, Leonard had only gotten what he deserved.
She stood at the counter of the Shofar So Good Deli on a rainy Tuesday morning, contemplating this. Lavonne used to daydream about moving to the south of France with Leonard after the girls were grown. She used to daydream about writing a series of travel cookbooks. But perhaps a book on protecting yourself financially from bad husbands might be more timely.
The bell on the front door tinkled and Lavonne looked up and smiled at two tourists who entered carrying I Survived Shopping in Ithaca bags. The tourist trade accounted for most of the deli's sales. They drove down from Atlanta by the busloads to tour the quaint town and antebellum homes that Sherman had somehow forgotten to burn on his March to the Sea.
Lavonne said, “Can I help you?” Her business partner, Mona Shapiro, was on a Caribbean cruise with a group of widows from the synagogue. It was her first vacation in nearly fifteen years.
“I think we'll have lunch,” the woman said, eyeing the menu board on the wall behind Lavonne. The man shook his umbrella out and put it in the stand and then took the woman's raincoat and hung it over the back of a chair.
“Let me know when you're ready,” Lavonne said. “The soup of the day is tomato artichoke.”
Little Moses came out of the back of the store. He had cleaned himself up recently, had cut his dreadlocks and now wore his hair short. He still sported a lip ring and the tattoo of a serpent on his forearm, but all in all, his appearance was much improved over what it had been when Lavonne first met him and the rest of his Jewish reggae band, Burning Bush. The band had moved away from their Jamaican roots and was more into the blues now. They were talking about moving to New Orleans. Eadie had offered to let them stay with her in her rambling mansion in the Garden District.
“Hey, can you cover for me up front?” Lavonne said. “I've got some work I need to do in the back.”
“Sure.” He grinned and went up to the counter to take the tourists' order.
Lavonne took off her apron and went into the small office to work on payroll reports. It was her least favorite thing to do but she was finding that success carried its own price. She worked fifty hours a week in the store, and an additional two to four hours on the weekend helping with the catering business. She had also begun contemplating possible franchise opportunities, and now she sat up late every night in bed alone with her laptop computer, researching the possibility of further expansion. She had bought a small house over in the Historic District of Ithaca, which she shared with her Jack Russell terrier, Winston, and, sporadically, with her daughters, Louise and Ashley. Leonard had moved to Atlanta to practice law soon after Boone & Broadwell went down in flames among rumors of shady real estate deals and something unsavory to do with the partners themselves. Louise was a freshman at Tulane and Ashley had graduated early from the Barron Hall School and had left home for the University of Georgia. All in all, Lavonne lead a somewhat fulfilling, if lonely, existence.
And there were advantages to being a workaholic. Her weight, for instance. After nearly twenty years as an obese housewife, she now weighed seventy-five pounds less than she had when she was married to Leonard. Not that this had made much difference in her personal life. The truth was, she was forty-seven years old and she hadn't had a date in twenty-two years. The idea of having to hold her stomach in and shave her legs on a regular basis, not to mention the disturbing prospect of a bikini wax, was enough to make Lavonne contemplate permanent celibacy.
Still, there were times when she missed the companionship of having a man around. Then she would daydream of having someone to go to dinner with, someone who could take her to flea markets on the weekends or out to the Whistlin' Dixie Drive-In for the Friday-night double feature, someone who could appreciate her sense of humor and the fact she played a mean hand of euchre.
Lavonne had her nearly grown daughters, her successful business, her laptop computer, and Winston, and now, if she could only figure out something to do about the loneliness, her life would be just about perfect.