Ain’t She Sweet?

“And if I do marry you, my lord? You’ll let me go my own road? You’ll not come near me unless I wish it? You’ll not fly into rages with me, nor tyrannize over me?”

“I swear it,” he said.

She came to him, her eyes full of tender laughter. “Oh, my love, I know you better than you know yourself!”

GEORGETTE HEYER, Devil’s Cub

Winnie waited until they reached town before she told him. “You’re not going to like this.”

“Honey, there’s not a single thing you could say to me tonight that I wouldn’t like.”

“I can’t go home with you yet.”

He hit the brake. “Okay. You found the one thing.”

“I know it sounds crazy, but I need to stay with Sugar Beth for a while longer.”

“Crazy doesn’t begin to describe it.” He pulled to the side of the road, turned off the ignition, and draped his arm over the back of her seat. She extracted a leaf fragment from his hair, just above his temple. He kissed her fingers, but he didn’t look happy. “Sugar Beth is poison, Winnie.”

She trailed the backs of her fingers along his jaw. “She’s changed.”

“That’s what everybody keeps saying, but I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong.”

She rested her head against his arm. “We fight all the time, and I’ve said more rotten things to her in two days than I’ve said to everyone else in a lifetime. But she’s not going to be around much longer, and this may be the only chance I have to figure things out with her.”

He massaged the back of her neck with his thumb. “Honey, she doesn’t have your best interests at heart.”

“That’s not entirely true.”

“Believe me, it is.” He withdrew his arm, tapped the steering wheel. “I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but . . . She came on to me last night.”

She smiled. “I know. I was there.”

“What?”

“Colin and I were standing on the stairs. We heard the whole thing. Sugar Beth set you up.”

“You and Colin stood there and listened to her throw herself at me?”

“We were weak. And we had a vested interest in the outcome.”

“I don’t believe this.” He smacked the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “She set me up?”

“She’s a devil, all right.”

“I don’t like that admiration I hear in your voice.”

“She’s aggressive, but she’s not mean-spirited—not the way she used to be. And she’s great with Gigi. I want to know her better.”

“You don’t have to stay at the carriage house for that. You can meet her for lunch, for God’s sake. Go shopping together.”

“It wouldn’t be the same. It needs to be just Sugar Beth and me, sink or swim, nobody else around.” She kissed the corner of his mouth. “I have to do this.”

“For how long?” he said begrudgingly.

“I’m not sure.”

“What about us? Our marriage?”

“That’s lookin’ real good to me right now.” She dabbled with his bottom lip. “Would you mind so much if we dated for a while?”

“Dated?”

“For a while.”

“You want to date?”

“Just for a little while.”

“Damned right I’d mind.”

“Then we’re going to have a fight about it, and as much as the idea appeals to me, can we wait until tomorrow to do it?”

“You want to fight with me?”

“Oh, yes.”

He shook his head. “I know that someday I’ll understand this, but right now I’m too wrung out from trying to satisfy your insatiable lust.”

“Get used to it.”

He laughed, started the car, and drove her back to the carriage house where he walked her to the front door and kissed her good night like a perfect Southern gentleman. With a pair of blue panties tucked in his pocket.

Sugar Beth didn’t see Colin again until Wednesday morning. As she left for the bookstore, she spotted him pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with stone toward the tree line behind Frenchman’s Bride. Gordon trotted off to join him, and Sugar Beth frowned. Colin should be writing.

When it was time for her lunch break, she carried her bag of taco chips and a Coke across the street to Yesterday’s Treasures. The store had reopened for business the day before, and there’d been a steady stream of customers ever since, including the same busload of senior citizens who’d visited the bookstore a few hours earlier. She still couldn’t get used to the idea of Parrish being a tourist destination.

She greeted Donna, Winnie’s assistant, then headed for the back of the store where she found Winnie sitting at her desk looking starry-eyed and sleepy. Sugar Beth pulled up a straight-backed chair, propped her feet on the desk, and opened the taco chips. “I heard you sneak in again in the middle of the night. Why don’t you just move back home?”

“I’m not done torturing you.” Winnie yawned, then smiled. “Ryan and I had a huge fight last night.”

“Ah, well, that explains the look of bliss.”

“We never used to fight.” She smiled as she reached across the desk to swipe some chips. “Fighting’s wonderful.”

“Each to his own. Although the two of you are such big pansies, I can’t imagine it gets too dangerous.”

“We yell,” she said defensively. “Or at least he did last night. He really wants me to come home. He’s trying to be understanding, but he’s getting frustrated.”

“Not from lack of sex, that’s for sure.”

Winnie actually giggled. “I never thought we’d have so much passion.”

“You are a lot weirder than me.”

Twenty minutes later, when Sugar Beth returned to work, Jewel passed over an envelope. “This came for madam while she was out.”

Sugar Beth opened it and found a round-trip air ticket to Houston. She gazed at the date. The ticket was for tomorrow, her day off, a flight leaving in the morning and returning that same night. She pulled out a separate sheet of paper and found a confirmation number for a rental car.

She bit her bottom lip and gazed across the street at Yesterday’s Treasures. It could have been Winnie who’d done this, but she was too preoccupied now to have thought of it. Sugar Beth pressed the envelope to her breast. Colin.

Less than twenty-four hours later, Sugar Beth stood in the doorway of the second-floor lounge at Brookdale and gazed at Delilah bent over a jigsaw puzzle. Her gray hair fell straight and smooth to just below her ears, and a headband printed with ladybugs held it back from her chubby face. Today she wore the pink jumper Sugar Beth had brought her several months ago, along with a lavender T-shirt. For a moment Sugar Beth simply gazed at her, then she spoke softly. “Hey, sweetheart.”

Delilah stiffened. Her head came up slowly, her eyes already filled with hope. “My Sugar Beth?”

A moment later they were in each other’s arms, with Delilah saying her name over and over again.

For the next half hour, she couldn’t seem to stop talking. “I didn’t think you’d ever come . . . You said you wasn’t mad, but . . . And then I gave Henry my extra muffin . . . Dr. Brent filled my tooth . . . And Shirley knows you’re only allowed to smoke outside . . .” As she spoke, she held Sugar Beth’s hand, and she continued to hold it as they took a walk across the grounds. She chose Taco Bell for lunch, and afterward they went on a shopping expedition that finished off Sugar Beth’s paycheck. She didn’t let herself dwell on the fact that she had only six more weeks until the next payment was due.

Delilah’s anxiety finally set in, and she wanted to go back to Brookdale. “Meesie gets worried if I’m gone too long.” Meesie Baker was Delilah’s favorite aide.

“I think it’s harder on you bein’ so far away than it is on her,” Meesie said later when Sugar Beth caught her alone. “She misses you, but she’s doin’ fine.”

Sugar Beth stroked Delilah’s hair as they said good-bye. “I’ll call you on Sunday. And I’ll think about you every day.”

“I know you will, my Sugar Beth. Because you love me so much.”

“You got that right, ace,” she replied, which made Delilah giggle.

On the flight back, Sugar Beth gazed out the window and fought the lump in her throat. How many people were lucky enough to have someone in their lives who loved them so unconditionally?

As she drove home in the dark, she tried to figure out how she could thank Colin. In the end, she took the coward’s way out and wrote him a note. Her first three attempts revealed too much and ended up in the wastebasket, but the version she stuck in his mailbox as she left for work on Friday morning did the job without the sentiment.

Dear Colin,

I saw Delilah yesterday. Thank you. Being with her meant everything to me, and I take back nearly every bad thing I’ve said about you.

Gratefully,

Sugar Beth

(Please do not mark for spelling and punctuation.)

Colin crumpled the letter in his fist and tossed it on the ground next to the wheelbarrow. He didn’t want her gratitude, damn it, he wanted her company, her smiles. He wanted her body—he couldn’t deny that—but also her quirky point of view, that irreverent humor, those sideways glances she gave him when she didn’t think he was looking.

He threw down his shovel. Ever since Sunday, he’d been tense and irritable. He couldn’t write, couldn’t sleep. No big mystery why. Guilt wasn’t a comfortable companion, and it was time he did something about it.

The phone call came at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, an hour before the bookstore closed. “Gemima’s Books,” Sugar Beth said.

“If you want to see your dog alive again, be at Rowan Oak at five o’clock. And come alone.”

“Rowan Oak?”

“If you call the police, the dog’s . . . dog meat.”

“I dumped you!”

But he’d already hung up.

She wouldn’t do it. She wouldn’t let him manipulate her. But not long after the store closed, she found herself on the highway heading toward William Faulkner’s legendary home in Oxford. Colin had made it possible for her to see Delilah, and she owed him this. Still, she wished he didn’t have to make everything so hard.

The house and grounds closed to the public at four o’clock, but someone obviously had important connections because a burgundy Lexus sat in the otherwise empty parking lot and the wooden gate was open. Having grown up in northeastern Mississippi, Sugar Beth had been to Rowan Oak many times—with a Girl Scout troop, church youth groups, the Seawillows, and during senior year, in a big yellow bus with Mr. Byrne’s English classes. William Faulkner had bought the decrepit Greek Revival plantation in the early 1930s. At the time the house had no indoor plumbing or electricity, and Faulkner’s wife was rumored to have spent her days sitting on the stoop crying while her husband began making the house livable. Until his death in 1962, Faulkner had lived here, gotten drunk here, frightened his children with stories of a ghost he invented, and written the novels that had eventually won him the Nobel Prize for literature. In the early 1970s, his daughter had sold the house and grounds to the University of Mississippi, and since then, visitors from all over the world had come to see the state’s most famous literary landmark.

She approached the two-story white frame house through the imposing avenue of cedars that had been planted during the nineteenth century. Long before she reached the end of the old brick walk, she saw Colin leaning against one of the house’s square columns with Gordon lying at his feet.

“Pat Conroy called Oxford the Vatican City of Southern letters,” he said as he stepped off the porch.

“I didn’t know that, but I do love the man’s books.” She scratched Gordon’s head. “My dog’s still alive, I see.”

“I’m nothing if not merciful.”

He wore a white sweater and an immaculate pair of gray slacks. The outdoor work had left him tan, and she was once again struck by the contrast between his masculinity and his elegance. He was a mass of contradictions, haughty and cynical, but also tender and a lot more sentimental than he let anyone see. How his wife’s suicide must have devastated him. “What’s this about?” she asked.

“I have something I want to give you.”

“You’ve given me more than enough. That plane ticket—”

“Faulkner has always been my favorite American writer,” he said, cutting her off.

“Not surprising. You share a fascination for the same literary landscape.”

“We don’t, however, share the same facility with language. The man was a genius.”

“I suppose.”

“Don’t even contemplate saying anything disrespectful about William Faulkner.”

“As long as I don’t have to read another one of his books, I’ll be completely respectful.”

“How can you say that? Faulkner is—”

“He’s a man, and I have a limited patience with dead white male writers. Or even living ones for that matter, you and Mr. Conroy being notable exceptions. Now Jane Austen, Harper Lee, Alice Walker, their books deal with things women care about.” She let herself rattle on. “Margaret Mitchell isn’t p.c. anymore, but that was one heck of a page-turner. Then there’s Mary Stewart, Daphne du Maurier, LaVyrle Spencer, Georgette Heyer, Helen Fielding—but only the first Bridget Jones. Nope, Faulkner just doesn’t make my final cut.”

“Your list is a little heavy on romance for my tastes.”

“You try spending six months sitting at somebody’s bedside waiting for them to die and then tell me that the happy-ending love story isn’t one of God’s good gifts.”

He planted a quick kiss on her forehead, and the tenderness of the gesture nearly undid her. “Let’s go inside.”

He opened the door for her, and as they entered the empty house, she gazed at the foyer, where a set of stairs led to the second floor. “Can you get me into George Clooney’s place, too?”

“Some other time.”

They wandered through the hallways of Faulkner’s home, gazing into each room but not entering. She couldn’t resist pointing out the stack of paperback potboilers on display in Faulkner’s bedside bookshelves, but Colin was more fascinated by his office. As he took in the old Underwood typewriter, he contemplated how modern word processing might have changed Faulkner’s writing. Sugar Beth refrained from pointing out that Microsoft wasn’t doing a thing for Colin’s output, and the only work being done at Frenchman’s Bride these days involved stone.

They left the house and walked around the grounds. Dusk was settling in, but she could still see the forsythia and wild plum blooming in Bailey’s Woods behind the house. Before long, the dogwood would be in flower. Gordon waddled at Colin’s side, occasionally stopping to investigate a shrub or sniff at a clump of grass. As they returned to the house, Colin took her hand. “I’ve missed you this week.”

She felt the hard ridge of calluses on his palm and didn’t want to draw away, but what was the point in torturing herself. “You’re just horny.”

He stopped walking and ran his finger along her cheek, regarding her with such tenderness that her heart missed a beat. “I want more from you than sex, Sugar Beth.”

She had a saucy comeback all loaded and ready to fire, but she fumbled with the trigger. “You . . . you know I don’t do windows.”

“Please stop it, darling.” The request was gently uttered, and the endearment, which would have sounded pompous coming from anyone else, fell over her like cherry blossoms.

She swatted an imaginary bug to give herself an excuse to move a few steps away. “What do you want?”

“I want you to give us time. Is that too much to ask?”

“Time for what? I’m a three-time loser, Colin. Four if you count Ryan.” She tried to sound saucy, but she was afraid she’d merely sounded sad. “I feed off men. I lure them with my sexual tricks, then bite off their heads while they sleep.”

“Is that how Emmett felt about you?”

“He was the exception that proved the rule.”

“I’m not too worried about my untimely decapitation, so I don’t see why you should be.”

“Okay, I finally understand why you’re being so persistent about this. You want to make me fall so desperately in love with you that I can’t think of anything else. Then, when I’ve turned into a big bowl of mush, and I’m begging for a few crumbs of your affection, you’ll laugh in my face and walk away. This is what you’ve been planning from the beginning, isn’t it? Your ultimate revenge for what I did to you in high school?”

He sighed. “Sugar Beth. The romance novels . . .”

“Well, it’s not going to happen, bucko, because I’ve spent way too much class time in the school of hard knocks. I’m past my obsessive need to center my life around another piece of beefcake.”

“As much as I appreciate the description, I think you’re just afraid.”

Something snapped inside her. “Of course I’m afraid! Relationships do bad things to me.” He started to respond, but the pain had gone on long enough, and she didn’t want to hear it. “You know what I want? I want peace. I want a good job and a decent place to live. I want to read books and listen to music and have time to make some female friendships that are going to last. When I wake up in the morning, I want to know that I have a decent shot at being happy. And here’s what’s really sad. Until I met you, I was almost there.”

His face set in hard lines. She knew she’d hurt him, but better this sharp, quick pain than a dull ache that never stopped. “I’m sick of this,” she forced herself to say. “I told you I didn’t want to see you anymore, but you wouldn’t listen. Well, it’s time to pay attention. I’m tired of you stalking me. Now get the message and leave me alone.”

His face paled, and his eyes emptied of all expression. “My apologies. It wasn’t my intention to stalk.” He snatched up a manila envelope from behind one of the columns and thrust it at her. “I know you’ve been looking for this, and now you have your very own copy.”

She watched him walk away, proud and haughty, his powerful stride devouring Faulkner’s lawn. “Gordon! Come back here,” she cried.

But her dog had a new master, and he paid no attention.

She heard the sound of his car driving away. Finally, she gazed down at the envelope and drew out what he’d brought her.

A copy of Reflections.

Colin was thirty miles outside Oxford when he heard the siren. He glanced at his speedometer and saw he was going eighty. Brilliant. He backed off and pulled over. Gordon sat up on the seat. The perfect ending to a miserable day.

A stalker. Was that how she saw him?

As he handed over his license, he thought about how much differently the evening had unfolded than what he’d planned. Getting Sugar Beth out of Parrish had seemed like a good idea, and Rowan Oak a convenient choice. He’d tried to impress her with a private tour, and he’d imagined the combination of a romantic setting and his personal charm would lull her enough so he could talk to her about Reflections, so he could explain. But he’d forgotten personal charm wasn’t his long suit, and she’d undoubtedly grown immune to contrived romantic settings before her twenty-first birthday. He hadn’t planned on throwing the book at her, that was for certain. He’d intended to lead up to it gradually, to explain how he’d felt when he’d been working on it and point out that he’d finished writing it months before she’d come back. Most of all, he’d planned to warn her. And then he was going to tell her about the painting.

“You’re the author,” the trooper said, gazing at Colin’s license. “The one who wrote that book about Parrish.”

Colin nodded but didn’t try to strike up a conversation. He saw no honor in attempting to talk himself out of a ticket he deserved. But the trooper had a book-loving wife and a basset hound, and he sent him on with only a warning.

Colin reached the edge of town, but instead of heading directly for Frenchman’s Bride, he drove aimlessly through the quiet streets. There’d been a fierceness about her tonight that scared him. She wasn’t playing games. She’d meant every word she’d said. And he’d fallen in love with her.

The knowledge felt old and familiar, as though it had been part of him for a very long time. With his lifelong appreciation of the ironic, he should be amused, but he couldn’t find a laugh anywhere. He’d misjudged, misplayed, and misbehaved. In the process, he’d lost something unbearably precious.

Sugar Beth wanted to be alone when she read Reflections, so she declined Winnie’s invitation to join her for church on Sunday morning. As soon as her car pulled away, she threw on a pair of jeans, grabbed an old blanket, and set off for the lake. She’d have liked to bring Gordon with her, but he hadn’t come back. It was beginning to look as though he never would.

She laid out the blanket in a sunny spot not far from the deserted boat launch and gazed down at the cover of the book. It was marked “Uncorrected Proof Not for Sale,” which meant he’d given her one of the editions printed up for reviewers and booksellers before the real book came out in another month. She ran her hand over the cover and braced herself for what she was fairly certain he’d written about her mother. Diddie might have been high-handed, but she’d also been a force for progress, and if Colin hadn’t acknowledged that, she’d never forgive him.

A church bell tolled in the distance, and she began to read:

I came to Parrish twice, the first time to write a great novel, and more than a decade later, because I needed to make my way back home.

He’d put himself in the book. She was startled. He hadn’t done that in Last Whistle-stop. She rushed through the opening chapter, which told of his first days in Parrish. In the second chapter he used an encounter with Tallulah—Your hair is far too long, young man, even for a foreigner—to take the story back to the late 1960s, when the town’s economy had begun to fall apart. His account of the near bankruptcy of the window factory read like a thriller, the tension heightened by funny, hometown tales such as the Great Potato Salad rivalry at Christ the Redeemer Church. As he moved into the 1970s, he personalized the human cost of the town’s racial politics through Aaron Leary’s family. And, as she’d suspected he would, he wrote of Diddie and Griffin. She didn’t care so much about the portrait he’d painted of her father, but her cheeks burned with anger as he showed her beautiful, high-handed mother marching through town trailing cigarette ash and condescension. Although he didn’t neglect her accomplishments, it was still a devastating portrayal.

With nearly a hundred pages left, she closed the book and wandered down to the water. She’d assumed he’d end the story in 1982 when the new factory had opened, but there were three chapters still to go, and apprehension had begun to form a knot in her stomach. Maybe Diddie wasn’t the only person she should have worried about.

She returned to the blanket, picked up the book again, and began the next chapter.

In 1986, I was twenty-two years old and Parrish was my nirvana. The townspeople accepted my oddness, my staggering shortcomings in the classroom, my strange accent and haughty pretensions. I was writing a novel, and Mississippi loves a writer more than anyone else. I felt accepted for the first time in my life. I was completely, blissfully happy . . . until my Southern Eden was destroyed by a girl named Valentine.

At eighteen, she was the most beautiful creature anyone had ever seen. Watching her saunter up the sidewalk to the front doors of Parrish High was watching sexual artistry in motion . . .

Sugar Beth finished the page, read the next, kept reading as her breathing grew shallow and her skin hot with rage. She was Valentine. He’d changed her name, changed the names of all of them who’d been teenagers at the time, but no one would be fooled for a moment.

Valentine was a teenage vampire, sipping the blood of her hapless victims along with her Chicken McNuggets after school. She didn’t turn truly dangerous, however, until she decided not to limit herself to the plasma of teenage boys and began looking for older prey.

Me.

The sun dipped low over the lake, and the air grew cool. By the time she reached the end, she was shivering. She set the book aside and curled into herself. Her story took up less than a chapter, but she felt as if every word had been written into her skin, like the ink tattoos the boys punched in their wrists with ballpoint pens when they got bored in class. Everything was there—her selfishness, her manipulations, her lie—all of it exposed for the world to see and judge. Shame burned inside her. Anger. He’d known from the beginning. While they were laughing, kissing, making love, he’d known what he’d written about her, what she would someday read, yet he hadn’t warned her.

She stayed at the lake until it grew dark, with the blanket pulled around her shoulders and knees drawn to her chest. When she returned, the carriage house felt empty and oppressive. Winnie had left a note on the table, but Sugar Beth walked past it. She hadn’t eaten all day, and now the thought of food nauseated her. She went upstairs and washed her face, lay down on the bed, but the ceiling Tallulah had gazed at for forty decades felt like a coffin lid. Her aunt’s life had been a dirge of regret and misery lived out in the name of love.

Sugar Beth couldn’t breathe. She rose and headed downstairs, but even here, Tallulah’s bitterness permeated everything. The shabby furniture, the faded wallpaper, the yellowed curtains—all of it stained with the anger of a woman who’d made lost love her life’s obsession. Her head began to pound. This wasn’t a home, it was a mausoleum, and the studio was its heart. She grabbed the key and made her way out into the night. She fumbled with the lock in the dark. When it gave, she pulled open the doors and flicked the switch on the bare, overhead lightbulb. As she gazed around at her aunt’s pathetic memorial to lost love, she imagined Colin’s explanations, his justifications. The book was written long before you came back. What good would it have served if I’d told you earlier?

What good, indeed?

She stepped into the chaotic heart of her aunt’s dark spirit and began ripping away the dirty plastic. She would not live her life like this. Never again. She wouldn’t be a prisoner to her own neediness. She’d strike a match to all of it, send this mad energy of paint and loss up in flames.

The colors swirled. Her heart raced. The frenetic dabs and splatters spun around her. And then she saw it.

The painting Lincoln Ash had left behind.