Charming Grace (22 page)

I can’t begin to do Boone justice. How incredible he looked standing up there in a soft black shirt and black trousers and black shoes; a soft casing for that tall, hard body and the harder message inside him. He knew how to talk to kids who were growing up without many good choices; he told them what it had been like to make his own not-so-good choices. He told
me
, along with them, about his and his brother’s heart-wrenching childhood, about their survival and their mistakes. He didn’t sugarcoat anything, he didn’t ask for sympathy, he didn’t avoid blame for a lifestyle he called ‘the soap opera of
The Young And The Stupid.
’

He simply told us all how it was, and how it could have been different.

And those kids listened to him, and they trusted him, and they loved him.

And so did I.

Love
. The first time it crept into my mind. Standing there in the shadows of that stage, watching him, it was a feeling, not a word. I’d never have admitted it, to him or to myself. But the warm, worrisome core of it spread inside me. I’d fallen in love with Harp over many years of childhood devotion leading up to a hormone surge that sent us both into an adoring panic. I never had to plan loving him or debate loving him or wonder about the consequences. Love had simply put down more roots every year, like a lady slipper, until finally the bloom proclaimed how special it was.

This time, there was no waiting period.

You two make a good team
, Harp whispered.

A coil of shock tightened and loosened inside me. The most profound sorrow wound around the bittersweet image of Harp—fading just a little in my memory, the edges of his face just a little soft, the idea of his scent, the feel of his mouth and body, the fullness of him inside me, the timbre of his voice, all receding in a painful, necessary moment of beginning to let go. I couldn’t bring him back with imaginary conversations, and now I was hearing him bless my feelings about Boone.

When Boone received the standing ovation he looked surprised—and then he turned toward me for help.
How do I get outta here, Gracie?
he mouthed. I walked over to him, took the microphone, thanked him, thanked the students, then took his hand and walked with him off the stage.

In the shadows, out of public view, he clutched my hand in a big, sweaty fist that shook with astonishment. He had never been applauded, recognized, or celebrated before, and he didn’t know what to think of himself. Gazing at me as if I had performed some kind of suspicious voodoo on him, he cuddled my hand to his chest and said, “I’ll get you for this.”

“Probably,” I answered, smiling, but quickly turned away.

Chapter 11

Grace owed me for pulling that stunt on me at the high school. Not that it hadn’t been for my own good. Not that I’d ever have quite the same opinion of my place in the scheme of things, again. I mean, an auditorium full of tough kids stood up and clapped and made me feel like a . . .hero. Go figure. But still.

“I did my part to talk some sense into your junior-sized gangsta fans,” I told Grace. “So now you have to have dinner with me.
Payback
. But just to show you I’m an okay guy, and since I’m a big celebrity now, I’ll treat.”

And she said, “Do I have a choice,
Monsieur Cajun de l’Ego Grand?
” and I said, “No, I’m a celebrity, and that means I’m irresistible.” And she said, “Don’t count on it, bayou bubba.”

But she said okay to dinner, so I was happy. Happy enough to pretend she didn’t look uncomfortable about spending time alone with me. She
did
like me, I could tell, but I could also tell it made her unhappy. Which made me, well, unhappy to be happy. Damn. In the meantime, Dew, Mika and Leo went down to Savannah’s riverfront tourist strip to browse for trinkets and listen to jazz at one of the clubs.

“Don’t hurry back,” I said to Leo. “And don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

He grinned and nodded. “I’ll take care of the ladies. Kick ass if anyone so much as crooks a finger at them in an ungentlemanly way. Mutter in French when I hear a song by Eminem, the Bee Gees, or any punk band that isn’t even fit to wipe the spit off Bruce Springsteen’s microphone. Just like you.”

“Just don’t kick anybody’s ass. That’s
my
job. Call me.”

He promised. After they left I checked my cell phone twice to make sure the battery was good. “The kid’s trying hard to be Stone Senterra’s son,” I explained to Grace. “Who knows what he might do to impress Mika? Chug two gallons of beer. Dis a Hell’s Angel. Try to calculate the value of pi on the back of a cocktail napkin.”

She watched me with unhappy but admiring eyes. “Dew will keep them out of trouble. She’s a cross between a convent chaperone and a Baptist Sunday School teacher. Her girlfriend calls her Sister Hallelujah.”

“Gracie,” I said, “your family is made up of strange women and nervous men.”

“You think you’re joking. At a family brunch not long ago someone took a group picture of me, Dew, Mika, and G. Helen. I heard Aunt Tess mutter something about a ‘crazy beauty queen, a lesbian, a colored girl and an old trollop.’”

“My kind of babes. Lots of variety.”

“You’re a gallant man.”

I just smiled to myself.
Not gallant enough to let you off the hook for dinner
.

Nighttime on the Georgia coast will break a man’s heart or make him do things he might regret in the morning. It has the voodoo feel of an ancient place on the edge of the world; the sex-scent of water and wilds, the old naughtiness of a bad-ass beauty winking from the shade of her silk-covered bed. The sky was full of the kind of dark early-summer clouds that can soak you when you’re already too drunk to care. Grace and I sat alone in the small courtyard of our inn. Most of the ground-floor rooms opened onto the courtyard. I had a door. Grace had a door. Mika and Leo and Dew had doors. All God’s chillen had a door. Grape vines and hot-pink bougainvillea draped over us; the mermaid fountain splashed softly; the night felt close and damp and intimate.

A candle flickered in a crystal globe on the table between us. The caterer I’d hired had just disappeared with the scraps of a five-course lobster dinner. Grace held a champagne flute in front of her like a shield and looked everywhere but at me. She’d changed into soft jeans and a long white silk blouse, a sweet-hot look that made me think of gourmet vanilla ice cream with a double-shot of raw tequila on the side.

I took a deep breath, leaned across the darkness and the espresso cups, and laid a computer disc in front of her. “There’s the finalized script for
Hero
. The one Mika was planning to steal with Leo’s help.”

Her hand shook as she set the champagne down. Her eyes, tired and haunted, gleamed with surprise. She picked up the square black disc and turned it like an ace in a poker game. “Why are you doing this for me?”

“Because it’s the right thing.” I paused. “No strings attached.”

“Would Stone forgive you for
this
breach of faith?”

“That depends on what you do with the information.”

“It won’t change my opinion of his film, if that’s what you’re hoping for.”

“All I care about is your opinion of
me
. I’ll settle for that.”

“My opinion of you is. . .
open-minded
, already. I think I’ve made that clear.”

“Good. So don’t look a gift Cajun in the mouth.”

She laid the disc down. “I need more explanation than that.
Why are you doing this to me?
”

To
me, she’d said. Not
for
me. She looked like she might cry, kiss me, or bolt.

Tell her. Just tell her how it is
.

I settled back in a wrought iron chair under the stormy night sky. “I realized I loved you,” I said quietly, “on the day your husband died.”

On that day my body-guarding schedule called for nothing more exciting than an ice-cream run for Stone’s daughters. I was about to load Shrek, the girls, and their nice little Irish nannies, Mary Kate and Rosemary, into one of Stone’s fifty-thousand-dollar Humvees.

“Hey, Sir Boone, not so fast there,” a female voice said behind me with a Midwest plow-the-fields flatness. Kanda cornered me by the potted Italian cypress in the courtyard of Casa Senterra, Beverly Hills, California. “Only one cone each for the girls,” she lectured. “And don’t let them beg you into making any stops at the Godiva store on the way home.” She wagged a finger at me. “And no secret gallon of vanilla praline for you-know-who. He has to be on the set of
Commando Renegade
in two weeks—looking like he can actually
survive
in the jungle as leader of the world’s most elite covert recon team—not looking like a sumo wrestler in a flak jacket.”

Stone was three hundred pounds of disciplined gristle, so she was mostly kidding. Except she wasn’t. “No vanilla praline,” I said solemnly. “But when he fires me I’ll tell him you said so.”

“You won’t get fired. I’ll tell the big sweet lug to behave.”

“Thanks. He hates it when I call him a big sweet lug.”

“And no pecan caramel cookies for Shrek. They make him fart. God forbid. I should kill him but my parents would never forgive me if I ate him. Next time we’re getting a kosher pet.”

“Single cones. No Godivas. No vanilla praline. No nuts for the pig.”

“I mean it. Tell Stone and the girls
Mother
said so. Because face it: Under that fearsome hide you’re a soft touch, and just like Stone, they know it.”

She had figured me out. Most people never looked past my hide and its accessories. I liked Kanda. Kanda had knighted me with a tap of her Wisconsin Dairy State ceramic cheese spreader: Sir Boone, Protector of My Daughters and Keeper of the Kosher Cheddar. “I’ll be fearsome,” I deadpanned.

I drove the oinking, giggling, faith-and-begora, kiddie-piggie-nannie crew down from the Beverly Hills hilltops into an area of shops so expensive they were spelled
shoppes
. Casa Senterra overlooked a palm-tree-and-Rolls Royce part of greater Los Angeles you’d recognize from TV and celebrity magazines if the local show biz royalty let you past the gates and the security guards and the private knuckle-crackers like me, who will pound you for trespassing.

Thirty minutes later I was standing in the shadow of a pink hibiscus shrub outside a fancy pink ice cream parlor, drawing nervous glances from the shoppers going by on the pink sidewalk. Like I wasn’t standing in front of a pink ice cream parlor and leashed to a three-hundred pound calico pet pig with a pink tail. Shrek sidled around to the other side of the shrub, slobbering and grunting as he nosed a china plate filled with mocha munchie something, his favorite flavor next to pecan caramel. The nannies and the girls ate waffle cones at little pink marble tables inside the pink parlor.

I heard crying and peered through the hibiscus. A handful of upset ice cream scoopers in pink jeans and pink blouses were huddled on the shop’s outside cafe, some of them wiping their eyes as they stared up at a television on the pink stuccoed wall. Only in southern California will you find TV’s even on the patios at kiddie ice cream parlors. Everybody’s in show biz or wishes they were, and they don’t want to miss a minute of the boob tube.

But this time it wasn’t entertainment news. The tube was tuned to CNN helicopter footage of cops rushing around the roof of some high-rise building. And the colors were all dark and real.

CNN Breaking News
appeared in big letters on the bottom of the screen.
Year’s Siege of Terror Ends. Turn-Key Bomber Killed
A newswoman’s voice started explaining that the scene was a hospital rooftop in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, that only an hour ago local news helicopters had filmed a dramatic hand-to-hand fight between the Turn-Key Bomber and the GBI agent who had been tracking him for months. The agent had been shot but still managed to nail the Bomber with a twelve-inch hunting knife before the Bomber could push the button on a remote detonator that would have blown up the hospital. The hospital was safe, and the Bomber was dead.