Lily choked back a sob. “Once the hearing is over, I might not have my daughter.”
“That’s true. But even if you don’t, you don’t have to be all alone.”
“Well, thank you for saying that. You’re—”
“A good friend? I know. And if that’s all I can be now, I accept that. I just had to let you know, Lily. I had to tell you because the other mornin’, when I woke up knowing you were in my house ... the house was a lot happier place because you were in it.”
Lily’s emotions were scattered all over the place. She felt simultaneously trapped, terrified, and touched.
Jack rose from the couch. “I know you’re not in a position to make any promises, Lily. I just wanted to say my piece, and I reckon I’ve said it.”
“Yeah, I guess you have.”
“There’s just one more thing, though. I wanna make sure this isn’t my imagination. When our eyes meet, when you look at me...there’s somethin’ there, isn’t there?”
Lily thought of the first time she saw Jack — the moment she realized Jack was a woman. She thought of Jack’s hands working to heal a wounded animal, of Jack rolling on the floor playing with Mimi. As much as she’d like to, there was no denying it. “Yeah,” she said, avoiding eye contact. “There’s something there.”
Jack flashed a wide grin. “I didn’t think it was my imagination. I guess that was all I really wanted to know.” She headed toward the door. “I’m sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I’ll go now.”
Lily knew that Jack wanted her to tell her to stay. But Lily was ready for Jack to leave. She had reached emotional overload, and all she could think about was curling up in a fetal ball in the womb of her bed. “Good night, Jack.”
“Good night.”
In her bed, Lily cried because Charlotte had died before Lily had finished loving her. She cried because she knew that if Charlotte had died at the age of eighty, she still would have died before Lily had finished loving her. She cried because of the choice that lay before her: to stay married to a memory, or to move on.
Rationally, Lily knew that Jack had a point — that Charlotte would have wanted Lily’s life to go on. But the problem was that Lily wasn’t sure she wanted her life to go on. Life seemed like a dangerous contact sport, full of opportunities for loss and injury, with victory being only the dimmest of possibilities.
Right now, Lily wasn’t sure she even felt like being a spectator of such a sport, let alone a player.
CHAPTER 16
Lily rarely drank beer before noon. As a matter of fact, this was probably the first time she’d drunk a beer before two P.M. in her life. But today was a special occasion — in the same sense that the day you’re scheduled to get a much-dreaded pap smear is a special occasion.
The hearing was two weeks from today, and yesterday she, Ben, and Buzz Dobson had sat down to plan their strategy. Buzz, once again, had turned his meager thoughts to the subject of Lily’s
“I was thinking, Lily,” he’d said, biting into a sloppy hamburger that squirted ketchup all over his shirt. “It’d probably be a good idea to go ahead and pay some attention to your appearance. Get a nice hairdo, buy yourself two or three pretty dresses, go around for a couple weeks before the trial looking...looking—”
“Normal?” Lily had offered helpfully.
“Well, I wasn’t gonna put it that way, but yeah. You know, just let people see you out with Mimi at the playground, at church maybe, looking the way people around here expect a young mother to look.”
So yesterday afternoon Lily had grudgingly called Sheila and asked what beauty shop she and Tracee would recommend. If any women embodied “the way people around here expect a young mother to look,” they were Sheila and Tracee.
Sheila had been hysterical with joy at Lily’s call, sure, Lily thought, that the Faulkner County chapter of the Stepford Wives had just recruited a new member. “Ooh, me and Tracee already have an appointment over at the Chatterbox for tomorrow at eleven-thirty,” she’d squealed. “I’m sure they wouldn’t mind if you tagged along. Oh, it’ll be so much fun! We can get our hair done and get facials, and you can even get a Mary Kay makeover if you want. Me and Tracee won’t, though, ’cause we don’t need a makeover. And I heard they got some new dresses over at the La-Di-Da. Maybe we could walk over there after we get our hair fixed, and spend some of the McGilly boys’ money.”
And so here Lily sat, swilling beer in the morning, waiting for Sheila and Tracee to come get her.
If Ben hadn’t already taken Mimi to Jeanie’s, she’d be tempted to grab her daughter and flee, before the peroxided pod people could turn her into one of them. She disposed of the empty beer bottle and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth. Just as she was spitting, she heard the horn of Sheila’s Lexus.
Lily had hoped that the stylist at the Chatterbox would be a gay man—a Faulkner County queen who, out of allegiance to his family, had chosen to live and work in Versailles. Lily had no such luck.
Instead, the Chatterbox was run by a creature who called itself Doreen and who worked with the theory that one could make more money in the beauty industry by undermining the self-esteem of one’s customers.
When Sheila and Tracee presented Lily to Doreen, she shook her head and mumbled, “My, my, my. Look what the cat drug in.”
Not that Doreen looked that hot herself. Her straw-textured hair was dyed neon orange, and her eyelids were shadowed with bright turquoise. But the most fascinating thing about Doreen was her eyebrows— or her simulated eyebrows.
The old lady (how old was impossible to tell beneath the layers of pancake makeup) had plucked or shaved her naturally occurring brows and painted on violent black slashes that began at the bridge of her nose and ended up at her hairline above her temples. If this was the woman who was in charge of her makeover, Lily thought she was more likely to end up looking like an extra from Star Trek than an ordinary wife and mother.