Charming Grace (30 page)

Even on a good day, Angola made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. All that concrete, the metal bars, the smell of men in cages. Yeah, most of them deserved to be there. I had. Armand did. Still, if I could have said some magic words that set him loose three months earlier than his parole date in the fall, I’d have grabbed him and headed for Mexico. Since my release I’d visited my brother once a month without fail, flying in from wherever I was working with Stone, with Stone’s blessings. But every time we sat across a barricade from each other, Armand in prison blues and me not, I might as well have been back inside a cell.

“Bro, what’s with the early visit this month?” he asked, smiling under serious eyes. Armand was 39 now, but still the swankest con man in the world. He never talked about the misery of ten years in Angola and counting. He never admitted the gambling scams I knew he was running. He never let me see anything but the same old jaunty smile and the same old big-talk.

“Aw, I saw an ugly dog in a pet store window and it made me lonely for you.”

He laughed. His eyes grew harder. “You worry about me too much. I’m the king of this hellhole, Bro. I’ve got the easy life. I’m down to eighty-nine days and countin’.”

“I’m marking the days off, too.”

“We’re hitting Las Vegas the day I get out. Like I keep sayin’. You be waitin’ at the gate with airplane tickets and plenty of cash. I plan to party with the prettiest women and the best bourbon and the hottest blackjack tables in Nevada.”

“You got it. I promise.”

“Don’t look so glum. I’m rehabilitated, Bro. I
swear
it. Just let me shake the cobwebs out of my soul in Vegas and then I’ll be ready to put my nose to the fourteen-carat grindstone for Stone Senterra. I’m lookin’ forward to the job, Bro. Believe me. First-class travel, Armani suits, movie premieres, a Beverly Hills address, and all those starlets. But most of all, I’m lookin’ forward to workin’ alongside my little brother.” He smiled, this time, sincerely. “The fact that the work includes limousines and five-star restaurants is just the icing on the cake.”

I sat there feeling like shit. I’d come to tell him his job prospects were kaput, just like mine. I had over half-a-million dollars stashed in good investments, so it wasn’t like we didn’t own a nest egg. We could buy a little bayou ranch, build a couple of nice little houses, raise cattle and ponies that looked like Frenchie, sure. But the glamorous future I’d hoped to give Armand, the future that would have been too tasty for even Armand to ditch in favor of some scheme, that future had gone up in smoke. I had my doubts he’d settle for livin’ like a Cajun John Boy Walton.

“No matter what we do for a livin’ after you get out of here,” I said, “you’re gonna stay on the right side of the Hail Mary’s. If you go down, I’m going with you, fightin’ you all the way. I’m not goin’ to let you end up back in prison.”

His smile faded. “Bro, the last thing I want is to see you get hurt again on my account. Don’t worry about me. I’ll take care of business.”

I didn’t like the look in his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Armand leaned back in his chair and laughed. “It means I’m goin’ to be the sharpest bodyguard Stone Senterra ever hired. You watch out, Bro. Your biggest worry is gonna be how to make the job look as easy as I do. So. . .tell me all the gossip about this movie. This
Hero
thing. Man oh man, every monkey in this zoo grabs the
Enquirer
each week to see what else Grace Vance has done to your boss. And to his sister. You know, Diamond Senterra is a fine lookin’ woman. I don’t mind the muscles, not when they’re stacked like hers. And I really like her attitude. The first thing I want to do on the job, Bro, is be introduced to
her
. You watch, I’ll have her purring like a kitten. But hey—no more serious talk right now, Bro. Tell me all the goofy stuff that’s been going on the set of
As The Senterra Turns
since you were here the last time.”

I couldn’t say it. Couldn’t make myself admit I didn’t belong to that world anymore. That I’d quit my job as a point of principle. For my honor. For Grace’s. Couldn’t bear to knock that smile off his face. Around us, the concrete and bars began to close in. I knew that every time I left him and walked back out into free air, he died a little inside. He only had three months to go, but sometimes the last stretch in a long hitch is when a man gets careless, gets too desperate to see the sky without walls around it.

No. I couldn’t tell him the truth. I’d wait three months, until he walked out of the gates, free and clear and in my clutches. We’d hit Vegas and raise some hell and I’d tell him. Then I’d find some new plan to keep him out of trouble, just as he’d tried, in his own way, to take care of me when we were kids. Not that that had turned out well.

“Bro?” he asked, watching me closely. “Everything okay?”

“Sure. Just thinking where to start talkin’.” I told him about the Savannah high school speech and how Grace had dragged me out of the shadows and made me look good despite myself. I didn’t tell him that I loved her more with every breath I took.

The walls closed in a little more, stealing my air.

I taught Harp to understand fine art and classical music, how to choose the right wine glass, and where to hide the quail bones on his plate when eating gourmet finger foods at the Atlanta steeplechase. He taught me, among other skills, how to pick a lock.

I let myself into Boone’s small motel room, pulled a hard vinyl chair near a dingy window looking out on a gas station and a hot two-lane Louisiana road, and waited. His luggage—a duffel-like leather tote—lay open on the bed, clothes spilling out among jumbled sheets. I couldn’t help picturing him stretched out naked there, big and lean and ready for me. Turning my attention to less dangerous thoughts, I looked at two well-thumbed books sprawled on the cheap pine nightstand.

A Prosperous History Of Dahlonega From Gold Rush To Golden Future
, by E. H. Bagshaw, a relative of mine who’d made a fortune in real estate that just happened, magically, to be located along the paths of mountain highways the state DOT refused to admit it planned to build until, magically, it did. The book was full of typical Bagshaw vanity and cheerful, money-making propaganda. The kind of attitude Harp had shunned even while stuck in the middle of it, with me. I could only hope Boone was studying my family for kinder reasons, since our largesse didn’t seem to matter to him one way or the other. Next to E. H.’s book lay a self-helper titled
Loving For Living
, by a pro football player turned minister and marriage counselor. I opened it to a page Boone had turned down. The topic?
The Good Family Man—Husband, Lover, Friend.

“My god,” I said softly. “Boone, you don’t need a book to tell you how to be a good man.”

A set of black wooden rosary beads were laid neatly on that same dresser. I couldn’t resist, went over, picked them up, and looked at the inscription on a small sterling charm that dangled from them.

To Gigi, Love Drew.

Boone and Armand’s parents. The beloved Gigi, the long-gone, mysterious Drew. I gently put the beads back in place, returned to the chair, tried to breathe calmly, and watched the door. By the time Boone walked in an hour later, a single hot streamer of late-afternoon sun heated my back. It cast just enough light in the shadowy room to show his troubled surprise when he saw me silhouetted there.

He halted in the open doorway. I stood. I was dressed in a soft blue skirt, low shoes, a simple silk blouse. I’d opted for a neutral mood. Not business, not pleasure. But he looked at me as if I were naked. “I happened to be in the neighborhood,” I quipped desperately. “Thought I’d drop by for a chat.”

He slowly shut the door behind him. “I just came from a place where the kind of woman who breaks-and-enters is mightily admired.”

The low, melodic drawl of his voice made me dizzy. “Oh? I flew for two hours, rented a car, drove all morning, and had to ask three truck drivers and a bait-shack clerk how to find this motel. I wasn’t going to let a little thing like a locked door keep me out of the air-conditioning.”

“When I come to visit my brother, I don’t stay anyplace fancy. It wouldn’t feel right.”

“He suffers, so you suffer with him. Until he’s safe and sound, you can’t allow yourself to live your own life. Have I described it right?”

“Gracie, why are you here—”

“I’ve only had one lover in my life, before you. The only time he left our bed and didn’t come back was the day he got killed. I accept death as an excuse for a man leaving me, but nothing else. So forgive me if I’m not accustomed to being unceremoniously abandoned.”

“I’ve got no defense. There’s husbands and then there’s lovers. They’re not necessarily the same kind of animal.”

“I was lucky. My husband was also my lover.”

“What am I, Gracie?”

“I don’t know, yet.”

He took a step toward me, then halted. The warm pulse of desire rose between us regardless of any other doubt. But also the chain of restraint. “I didn’t want to leave you. But it’s a bad situation and the compromises aren’t good ones.”

“Stone wants you back.”

A sardonic smile crossed Boone’s mouth. “A few dates and a goodnight kiss, and damn! He thinks he owns me.”

“I know why you quit. I know it was about me. My. . .honor. My virtue. My privacy. All those old-fashioned and noble reasons.” This time, I was the one who took a step closer. “Whatever some idiotic movie star says, or does, or thinks about me is of no consequence to me, unless it hurts someone else. It’s hurt
you
. I can’t allow that.”

“You didn’t take me to raise. I’m not a husband, and I was only a lover for a couple of hours.”

“Unless you can honestly say that two hours in bed with me are more than enough for you, I think speaking in the past tense is a little premature.”

He crossed the rest of the floor between us in two strides, took me by the shoulders, and pulled me close. “I’ll never get enough of you,” he said. “But you just said yourself you don’t know what to do with me.”

I held him by his shirtfront, anchoring him as he anchored me, angry, nervous, desperate. “I can’t predict the future. I can’t tell you whether being with you is right, wrong, good, or bad. But I know this much: I can’t stop this film of Stone’s. What I’ve tried to do isn’t working, and innocent people are getting hurt. So. . .I’ve told Stone I’ll support his film—no more opposition, give it my seal of approval—but only if you came back to work for him.”

“You let him bulldoze you. For my sake. I won’t have that,
chere
.”

“No. My best hope of protecting Harp’s memory is to work on this movie from the inside.”

He went very still. “You mean
sabotage
it.”

I shook my head. “I prefer the description, ‘alter beyond all semblance of its original form through evil charm and patient manipulation.’”

Boone’s dark laugh sent chills over me. “Gracie.”

“I’m not asking you to help me do an inside job on the movie. But I’ve made it clear to Stone I’ll only cooperate if you get your job back, and if no further questions are asked about your relationship with me.”

His hands tightened on my shoulders. “We won’t have a further ‘relationship,’ Gracie. Every stunt I’ve pulled up to now has been for good intentions—to do my job for Stone as best I could while trying to see your side of it. But what you’re talking about now falls in a whole ‘nother category.”

“I know. I understand. You can’t be part of my wicked schemes. I don’t expect you to.”

“Oh? You came all the way here to rescue me in a lousy roadside motel,” he whispered, “but no matter what you say, nothing about you and me makes you happy. So why are you here?”

“I was with Harp for over twenty years, from the time I was a little girl. You and I have known each other less than two months. We’re still strangers, dancing in the dark. But with a crowd watching us. And a lot at stake. I realize all that—and I don’t know what to promise you. Just that . . . I want you to come back. Please.”

“So this is where we are—” he gestured at the tiny room, its dim sunlight fading on plain pine furniture, the dingy bed—“this is all we get to remember until the movie’s done—and if you wreck the movie, maybe this is all we get to remember, period. If I go back, it’s to play for keeps, meaning I work for Stone and I do my job so when my brother gets out of prison in three months he has a job, too.”

“So at the end of filming we may go opposite ways.”

“Yeah. And this—this goddamned lousy room is where we start saying goodbye, tonight.”

“We could be in a shack in the woods, for all I care. It’s not about where we are, or how fine it is, or isn’t—it’s who we are when we’re together, and why we have to hope for the best, and this.” I cupped his chin in my hand. “
All I can promise you is that I want to feel the way I did the other night, with you
.”

He kissed me roughly. I wound my arms around him and he slid my blouse over my head. With a quick jerk of his hands my skirt came up to my waist, then he lifted me off the floor and I wrapped my legs around him. Hard against me, he climbed on the cheap, jumbled motel bed and lay down with me underneath him, my hands already working quickly to unfasten his soft gray trousers. He put his mouth to my breasts and bit carefully on each nipple as they strained against the white lace of my bra. I arched upwards, drugged by the sensations.