"I don't live at home anymore."
"Since when?" She tried not to show her surprised pleasure.
"Day before yesterday. I got an apartment at Charlotte Woods, on Woodlawn."
"Then I'll take you there," she told him.
"My car's here," he reminded her.
"And you've been drinking all night," she said, buckling her shoulder harness.
"We'll come back and get your car when you're sober."
"I am sober," he said.
"Compared to what?" She drove.
"You won't remember any of this tomorrow."
He would remember every second of it for the rest of his tormented life. He yawned, and rubbed his temples.
"Yeah, you're probably right," he agreed, deciding it had meant nothing to her. It also meant nothing to him.
"Of course, I'm right." She smiled easily.
She could tell he was indifferent. He was one more typical asshole-user guy. What was she, anyway, but a middle-aged, out-of-shape woman who'd never been to a city bigger or more exciting than the one she had worked in since she had graduated from college?
He was just trying her on for size, taking his first test drive in an old, out-of-style car that he could afford to make mistakes in. She felt like slamming on the brakes and making him walk. When she pulled into the tidy apartment complex parking lot and waited for him to get out, she offered not a word of friendship or meaning.
Brazil stood outside her car, holding the door open, staring in at her.
"So, what time tomorrow?"
"Ten," she said, shortly.
He slammed the door, walking away fast, hurt and upset. Women were all the same. They were warm and wonderful one minute, and turned-on and all over him the next, which was followed by moody and distant and didn't mean what happened.
Brazil didn't understand how he and West could have had such a special moment at the truck stop, and now it was as if they weren't even on a first-name basis. She had used him, that's what. It was empty and cheap to her, and he was certain this was her modus operandi. She was older, powerful, and experienced, not to mention good-looking, with a body that caused him serious pain. West could toy with anyone she wanted.
Vy So could Blair Mauney III, his wife feared. Polly Mauney could not help but worry about what her husband might engage in when he traveled to Charlotte tomorrow, on US Air flight number 392, nonstop from Asheville, where the Mauneys lived in a lovely Tudor- style home in Biltmore Forest. Blair Mauney III was from old money, and had just come in from the club after a hard tennis match, a shower, a massage, and drinks with his pals. Mauney had come from many generations of banking, beginning with his grandfather, Blair Mauney, who had been a founding father of the American Trust Company.
Blair Mauney Ill's father, Blair Mauney, Jr. " had been a vice president when American Commercial merged with First National of Raleigh. A statewide banking system was off and running, soon followed by more mergers, and the eventual formation of North Carolina National Bank. This went on, and with the S amp;L crisis of the late 1980s, banks that had not been bought up were offered at fire sale prices. NCNB became the fourth-largest bank in the country, and was renamed US Bank
Blair Mauney
III knew the minutiae about his well-respected bank's remarkable history. He knew what the chairman, the president, the vice chairman and chief financial officer, and CEO got paid.
He was a senior vice president for US Bank in the Carolinas, and routinely was required to travel to Charlotte. This he rather much enjoyed, for it was good to get away from wife and teenaged children whenever one could, and only his colleagues in their lofty offices understood his pressures. Only comrades understood the fear lurking in every banker's heart that one day Cahoon, who tolerated nothing, would inform hard workers like Mauney that they were out of favor with the crown. Mauney dropped his tennis bag in his recently remodeled kitchen, and opened the door of the refrigerator, ready for another Amstel Light.
"Honey?" he called out, popping off the cap.
"Yes, dear." She briskly walked in.
"How was tennis?"
"We won."
"Good for you!" She beamed.
"Withers must have double-faulted twenty times." He swallowed.
"Foot-faulted like hell, too, but we didn't call those. What'd you guys eat?" He barely looked at Polly Mauney, his wife of twenty-two years.
"Spaghetti Bolognese, salad, seven grain bread." She went through his tennis bag, fishing out cold sweat- soaked, smelly shorts, shirt, socks, and jock strap, as she always had and would.
"Got any pasta left?"
"Plenty. I'd be delighted to fix you a plate, dear."
"Maybe later." He fell into stretches.
"I'm really getting tight. You don't think it's arthritis, do you?"
"Of course not. Would you like me to rub you down, sweetheart?" she said.
While he was drifting during his massage, she would bring up what her plastic surgeon had said when she had inquired about a laser treatment to get rid of fine lines on her face, and a copper laser treatment to eliminate the brown spot on her chin. Polly Mauney had been filled with terror when her plastic surgeon had made it clear that no light source could substitute for a scalpel. That was how bad she had gotten.
"Mrs. Mauney," her plastic surgeon had told her.
"I don't think you're going to be happy with the results. The lines most troublesome are too deep."
He traced them on her face so gently. She relaxed, held hostage by tenderness. Mrs. Mauney was addicted to going to the doctor. She liked being touched, looked at, analyzed, scrutinized, and checked on after surgery or changes in her medication.
"Well," Mrs. Mauney had told her plastic surgeon.
"If that's what you recommend. And I suppose I am to assume you are referring to a face lift."
"Yes. And the eyes." He held up a mirror to show her.
The tissue above and below her eyes was beginning to droop and puff.
This was irreversible. No amount of cold water splashes, cucumbers or cutting down on alcohol or salt would make a significant difference, she was informed.
"What about my breasts?" she then had inquired.
Her plastic surgeon stepped back to look.
"What does your husband think?" he asked her.
"I think he'd like them bigger."
Her doctor laughed. Why didn't she state the obvious? I Unless a man was a pedophile or gay, he liked them bigger. His gay female patients felt the same way. They were just better sports about it, or pretended to be, if the one they loved didn't have much to offer.
"We can't do all of this at once," the plastic surgeon warned Mrs. Mauney.
"Implants and a face lift are two very different surgeries, and we'd need to space them apart, giving you plenty of time to heal."
"How far apart?" she worried.
Chapter Twenty-three
It did not occur to West until she was home and locking herself in for the night that she would have to set her alarm clock. Perhaps one of her few luxuries in life was not getting up on Sunday morning until her body felt like it, or Niles did. Then she took her time making coffee and reading the paper, as she thought about her parents heading off to Dover Baptist Church, not far from the Chevon, or from Pauline's Beauty Shop, where her mother got her hair fixed every Saturday at ten in the morning. West always called her parents on Sunday, usually when they were sitting down to dinner and wishing her place wasn't empty.
"Great," she muttered to herself, grabbing a beer as Niles sat on the window sill over the sink.
"So now I've got to get up at eight-thirty.
Can you believe that? "
She tried to figure out what Niles was staring at. From I this section of Dilworth, West would have no reminders of the city she protected were it not for the top thirty stories of US Bank rising brightly above West's unfinished fence. Niles had gotten really peculiar lately, it struck West. He sat in the same spot every night, staring out, as if he were ET missing home.