“I think he’ll be as relieved to hear you’re going to be seeing other men as you’ll be to tell him. I imagine there are women in New Orleans he’d like to go out with. Women who want to live in that town.”
“What if he starts seeing somebody there and I change my mind and want to go there and he doesn’t want me anymore?”
She shrugged. “You take a risk when you love somebody.”
I groaned again and slid forward in my chair like a frustrated kid.
For several minutes, we sat silently and let the sun seep into our bones. Until I’d said it, I hadn’t realized my secret fear was that I might decide I wanted to be with Guidry and it would be too late. As Cora had said, I wanted to hedge my bets. I wanted to keep Guidry and at the same time explore other possibilities with a man like Ethan. I didn’t need Cora to tell me that besides being dishonest and cowardly and manipulative, that was just plain wrong.
After a while, I sat up straight.
“Do you want to stay out here, or would you like me to help you inside?”
She thought about it, considered it from all angles, and decided to go to bed with her hot water bottles and watch TV. I carried the bags and tea things inside, and while she went to the bathroom and got into a nightgown, I refreshed the hot water in the bags, put a bottle of mineral water on her bedside table, made sure her phone and TV remote were at hand, and helped her get situated against her pillows. In her white cotton nightie, she looked like a little girl.
I hugged her, kissed the top of her wispy hair, and made her promise to call me if her stomach started hurting again.
She said, “You’re a good girl, Dixie. I hope you know that. You know, that may be why some people put on fake ways. Maybe they don’t know they’re good, so they try to make people think they’re somebody else.”
I blinked back sudden tears and hugged her again. Cora believes everybody in the world came good, no matter how they turned out. I don’t know that I agree with her, but I’m glad she thinks I’m good.
Before I left her apartment, I peeked into the hallway to see if Miss Taylor was lurking about. She wasn’t, but she got off the elevator before I got in it. She had changed into clingy black velvet pants and a sequined top.
Surprised to see me, she said, “Leaving so soon?”
I nodded. “Their wives are there, too. I didn’t know there would be wives.”
Her face fell, and she stepped back into the elevator with me. We rode down in heavily perfumed silence. I don’t know what she was thinking, but I was giving silent thanks that she wasn’t anything like my mother. My mother might have deserted me and my brother, but she would never look like Miss Taylor. It was nice to know I hadn’t inherited bad-taste genes.
Downstairs, Miss Taylor turned with an air of resignation toward the activities room where people played cards and chatted before the dinner hour, which, in Sarasota, is five o’clock.
At the concierge desk, I stopped with a phony smile. “Ms. Mathers seems to have a touch of food poisoning from the carrot cake at the birthday party yesterday. I think she’s going to be okay, but I’d appreciate it if you’d pass along a suggestion to your chef to refrigerate those cakes until they’re served. We wouldn’t want a resident to get seriously ill from one of them.”
She wore colored contacts, too, but they weren’t oversized. Her eyes rounded in alarm, and her gracious smile was just as phony as mine.
“We haven’t had any other complaints. It must have been something else Ms. Mathers ate.”
“Could have been, but just to be on the safe side, I think it would be a good idea to keep an eye on her—but not so she knows you’re keeping an eye on her.”
This time the smiles we exchanged were genuine. Everybody at the retirement condo knew how much Cora hated being fussed over.
She said, “Somebody will check on her tonight. If she’s not feeling well, we’ll see that she goes to her doctor.”
As I waited for the aged valet to bring my Bronco, I thought about how phoniness is so pervasive that we’ve come to take it for granted. Not just phony political rhetoric but phony smiles and phony conversations by ordinary people in which nobody says what they really think. With digital technology, photographs may have settings or people added or removed, and recordings of speeches or conversations may actually be random words spliced together to create a seamless whole. Most of us wear shoes and watches and jeans and T-shirts with fake labels in them, society matrons carry expensive handbags with fake labels, cigar aficionados puff pricey stogies with Cuban labels that are really from someplace else, and heroic athletic feats may be due to muscles or stamina falsely created by steroids. I wondered if living in a phony world changes the way our brains and cellular structures operate. If we accept phoniness, will we do away with honesty and integrity altogether? Will we make up new selves from day to day, with no obligation to mop up the messes the old selves have made? Most important of all, is it possible to be real in a phony world?
The rules of Cora’s condo forbid tipping the valet, but I always tip anyway because I appreciate not having to lope around on the parking lot for my car. The new valet pocketed the money with a smile, and I drove away smiling back. I’m not sure if either of our smiles was genuine.
Everything in the world had begun to seem fake to me, so it was a huge relief to start making my afternoon pet rounds. If a dog wags its tail at you, he really means it. If a cat purrs at you, that’s not a fake purr. And there’s not a dog or cat in the world who would wonder if a change of eye color might make him more popular, or if dying her hair would bring her more attention. Animals may be the only creatures on earth who are content with being who they are.
I usually start at the south end of the Key and work my way north, but since I was crossing the north bridge onto the Key, I changed my usual routine and called on two cats at the north end. They were sisters, sweet Siamese mixes named Gumdrop and Licorice. Young enough to find their primary entertainment in chasing each other through the house, they didn’t let tile floors dampen their enthusiasm for racing. They slid and skidded a lot going around corners, but they seemed to find that an additional thrill.
When I unlocked their front door and went inside, I could hear the soft thudding noise of a wild galloping chase. The noise stopped when they heard me, and I called to them to set their minds at ease.
“It’s just me, Dixie.”
They came charging to look at me with that Siamese expression of alert intelligence. They followed me to the den, where I pulled a peacock feather from my bag. For a cat, a peacock feather waved over its head is an opportunity to leap into the air and grab a bird of its very own. For a cat sitter, waving a peacock feather over a couple of cats is an opportunity to sit on a hassock and enjoy watching the grace and style with which cats spring into the air. Since I had groomed them during the morning call, I was there solely to play with them and feed them. With all the running they did, they got plenty of exercise on their own, but it’s as good for cats to have new experiences as it is for humans.
The cats were fascinated with the feather, I was fascinated with the cats, and none of us knew Briana had come into the house until she was in the room with us.
20
I felt her before I saw her. A faint scent of perfume, perhaps, or just the rearrangement of the air’s molecules by a foreign body. Curiously, I wasn’t surprised. That white convertible I’d seen in traffic had really been following me, then, and a thief who knew how to disengage a specific area of a security system would surely have no trouble creating an electronic signal that would bypass a home’s security pad.
Briana wore an outfit similar to the one she’d worn when we met at the beach pavilion—sheer, wide-legged white linen pants and a matching loose tunic. Not the same outfit, of course, just similar. Briana probably never wore the same clothes twice. Her silky red hair was twisted into a knot on the top of her head. Her hands hung loosely at her sides. She had glittering green stones in her ears, and I knew they were real emeralds. Briana wouldn’t have been caught dead in fake emeralds.