Linny's Sweet Dream List (6 page)

“I'd planned on it,” Linny admitted sheepishly, as she stroked Roy's coat.

“Well, don't,” Kate urged. “Work on the trailer. Physical work always helps me when I worry.”

A shadow crossed Kate's face, and Linny reached out and touched her sister's shoulder. “I'm Miss Me-Me-Me lately. Sorry, Kate. I don't even know how things are going in the baby department.”

Kate struggled to keep her smile, but it wobbled. “It's not, and we're almost out of time. I'll be forty before I know it.”

“I'm sorry,” Linny said quietly, and hugged her sister's shoulder. The two were quiet for a moment. She wasn't the only one with a hole or two in her life. “How's Jerry?”

“Busy. Everybody's building and renovating. Last week one of his best guys quit, he had to fire another guy for coming to work drunk, and a crew accidentally broke a gas line with a trencher. The fire department came, and the neighbors went berserk.” Kate rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Poor guy.”

“Hug him for me, and tell him thanks again for helping me move.” She didn't know how she could have made the lightning fast move if Jerry hadn't shown up with a truck. The puppy wiggled and lapped at her face.

“I'll tell him.” Kate made a shooing motion with her fingers. “Now, go, git. Go pull down a wall or rip up some carpet. Do something besides drive yourself crazy.”

Back home, she switched off the ignition, opened the car door, and stared at the faded aqua trailer. Such a far cry from the life she thought she'd have by now. She scrubbed her hands across her face.

With sweet Andy, she'd had all she wanted to be happy. They did normal things like go to The Southern Ideal Home Show, watch the History Channel, ride bikes along the greenway, and experiment with overly complex recipes for Béchamel Lasagna or Shrimp Remoulade. They wanted kids, but they hadn't gotten around to it. The normal things they did were gracious plenty then. They dreamed about the future, had fights and made up, and were both just so happy they'd found each other.

Andy had been helping her clean out a shed one moment, and hooked to a respirator the next. All it took to obliterate her homey, quiet, lovely life was a brown recluse spider, a rush to the hospital, a staph infection, and a single week. She was so lost after he'd died.

Things got better with time, but, secretly, she'd thought a white-picket-fence life might keep her safe and ease her loneliness. Two and a half years after she was widowed, Buck had hooked her by dangling that dream in front of her. “Anything you want, darlin', you and me, the babies, the PTA meetings, t-ball, trips to Disney World. Quit work if you want.” He'd waved a hand in an extravagant motion. With a shuddery sigh, she thought about how that marriage had turned out.

Giving herself a shake, she imagined
Jiving jubilantly with her jaguar goddess,
but didn't feel much better. Indigo wasn't hitting on much today. Calling the puppy, she lifted him from his seat, “Come on, Roy Boy. At least you love me.”

The fairy postman must have visited the trailer while she was gone. Linny glanced curiously at the flowers and mail sitting on her porch. Pulling a yellow envelope from under the doormat, she read her mother's spidery scrawl.
Thought you could use these.

Inside was a paper clipped bundle. Linny smiled as she riffled through the coupons for dog food and chew treats. Kate must have told her about Roy. Her smile faded when she came to the last few—discounts for Slim Fast protein shakes, fat-free Melba toast rounds, and Fat Blast Off chocolate energy bars.

Linny shook her head. She had stress eaten through the last few weeks, but it always irked her that her mother felt so free to comment on her weight; Dottie was no wood nymph herself.

On the floor beside the door, two lushly blooming roses draped over the side of a glass jar. Tucked under the jar was a folded piece of purple paper.

Linny sniffed the blooms. The roses smelled lovely. Opening the flyer, she read the note printed in a calligraphy font:

A handwritten sticky note stuck to the flyer read, “You must be still catching your breath from the move, but please come! As you face your home, I live through the field on your left. M”

She read it twice, intrigued. Dottie had told her a lot of professionals were moving to the sleepy, unincorporated town of Willow Hill to escape the hustle and bustle of Raleigh. Would the guests lean toward hot dogs and hamburgers, or Korean turkey burgers and cauliflower steaks?

Re-folding the flyer, she tapped it against her knee. She was lonely out here in Podunk. Mingling with people and making new friends might be comforting. When Linny pictured running into old friends from Willow Hill, though, she fell down a deep well of self-doubt. Most of the people she'd known as a kid had moved away, but what if she ran into someone like Sarah Beth Baker? She'd heard Sarah Beth was a judge who'd married well, competed in marathons, and ran a summer camp for low-income kids. Her mother also told her that Randolph Henson, a nerdy boy whom Linny had spurned in high school, had morphed into a Ryan Reynolds look-alike, become a thoracic surgeon, and married Linny's high school pal, the then-buck-toothed Mitzi.

All her teachers had said she had had so much potential, but Linny sure had let them down—not to mention herself. Rubbing her eyes with her fingers, she thought about bringing old friends up-to-date. “I'm a serial widow with no children to show for all the marrying and I am now living in a falling down trailer right next door to my Mama.” Conversation would screech to a stop like at a rush hour crash on I-40. Sheesh. She shook her head. She was not ready for prime time.

But still, without knowing why, she slipped the flyer under a magnet on the refrigerator.

As Linny opened her laptop to check email, she felt a pang of guilt. For the past week, she'd not opened the texts from Diamond. Her nerves were so jangled from her frenzied move that she'd even let calls from the attorney's office go to voice mail. Linny needed to stop dodging the woman, but she was afraid of what Diamond might tell her.

Screwing up her courage, Linny made herself read Diamond's texts. She saw nothing too alarming, but her last note asked her to call her on her cell. Taking a deep breath, she tapped in her number.

The attorney trilled, “Hello-oh-ho, Linny.”

Lord, she hoped that wasn't her courtroom voice. “How are you, Diamond?”

“Hungover, but nothing a little Bloody Mary can't fix.” Linny heard the slurping sound, and sighed inwardly. Hiring an attorney who drank in the morning didn't seem like a good idea, but Diamond—the short-skirted, poufy-haired blonde with swoopy eye liner—had been Mary Catherine's best pal from law school. More importantly, Mary Catherine called her “a brain trust.” High praise from her friend who saw compliments as an utter waste of breath.

“Let me get to a quiet place. We are in Cabo and the reception is horrid.” A moment later, Diamond came back on, with a mildly reproving tone. “You're not returning my calls or texts or emails, missy. How can I help you if I can't get hold of you?”

Linny flushed, chagrined. “I moved out of the house, and things have been crazy.” She explained the Shark Brothers' eviction.

“Whoo, that's trashy behavior. I'm sorry.” She sighed noisily. “You need to sit your pretty self down and take some deep breaths. Let me bring you up-to-date.”

“I'm sitting.” Linny braced herself, barely breathing. “Go ahead.”

“First the good news. Your late husband's new development, Silver Birch, was profitable. The Boomers are digging the Over-55 Active Adult Communities.”

Linny felt weak with relief. “He'd said it was making money, but I worried he'd lied about everything.”

Diamond went on. “Buck had a buy/sell agreement with his partners. They funded it with a life insurance policy, so that purchase will take place once everything is valued.”

Linny breathed out, the tension in her shoulders starting to ease.

Diamond sighed gustily. “Here's the bad news. We're just starting to sort through the debt, but he looks like a high roller with serious cash flow problems. He owes a pretty penny on his toys, too.”

“No.” Linny was glad she was sitting down. She shivered, picturing herself living in a refrigerator box under an overpass. Softly, she banged her head against the desk, but collected herself and got practical. “Which toy? The Caddy was old, and he bought the boat used. How expensive could those be?”

“Not the Caddy,” she scoffed. “That's only worth about fifteen grand, but the boat is a Pepperdine.”

“So?” Linny rubbed her forehead. Buck had bought it after they'd married and the boat didn't seem that special—at least what she could remember of it from her vantage point in the head, where she threw up continuously the two or three times she'd gone fishing with him.

“Are you near your computer?” Diamond asked.

“Yes.” Her fingers were poised over the keyboard.

“Go to Boats.com and type in a fifty-two-foot Pepperdine sports fisher.”

When the site came up, Linny peered at the copy, gasped and felt sweat break out along her hairline. She croaked, “How can a used boat cost half a million dollars?”

“It's the crème de la crème of boats—a sports fisherman's ultimate trophy. Boys and their toys,” Diamond gave a world-weary sigh. “Honey child, let's take it one step at a time. We'll dig in and bring it all to light.”

Linny pinched the bridge of her nose, her head starting to throb. “You may need to dig deep. Buck was very private about his business affairs, and had an aversion to paper trails.”

“I know the type.” She spoke to someone in a muffled tone, and came back to Linny. “I have to dash. I'll be in touch, and this time please answer your texts and emails.”

Linny stared out the window seeing nothing, and remembered that in Chapter 4 of
Snap Out of It
, Indigo Merriweather suggested using colorful imagery to manage toxic emotions, so she gave it a whirl. She pictured a seascape, the waves gently rolling toward the shore, and her holding a glugging Buck's head under water. She imagined the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains stretching endlessly into the horizon, and her shoving Buck over a two-thousand-foot-high scenic overlook. She conjured a verdant meadow like in
The Sound of Music
, with her in a threshing machine hurtling toward an unsuspecting Buck. Linny grinned. She did feel better. That Indigo Merriweather was one wise woman.

Giving herself a shake, she threw on shorts and got down on her hands and knees and took a box cutter to the carpet.

Later, Linny stood in the yard with her hands on her hips, dripping with sweat. Surveying the towering pile, she relished checking that nasty chore off her to do list. But she frowned and rubbed the back of her neck with a dirty hand. How she was going to get it hauled away? It sure wouldn't fit in her four-door. She shook her head. Housekeeping had been a lot easier when she had someone else to do it with.

Back inside, she used needle nosed pliers to pull up as many carpet staples as she could from the plywood subflooring, but exposed metal spikes remained. They'd cut bare feet to pieces. Mulling it over for a moment, she smiled and carved up the remaining packing boxes, and duct taped the cardboard over the rough spots. Andy would have given her a thumbs up and grinned at the fix, calling it
Southern engineering.

 

Friday morning, a freshly showered Linny shook out the wrinkles in a particularly flattering linen shirt, and realized she was primping. For what? To impress the married vet? She shook her head at her pathetic-ness. But still, on the way out the door, Linny slicked on lip gloss.

Behind the counter at Red Oak Animal Hospital, Ruthie was on the phone, but gave Linny a friendly wave and handed her a package.

As Linny turned to go, the vet appeared holding several charts. Seeing her, he gave her a smile that started out slow and ended dazzling. “Hey there.” But his face clouded. “Uh, oh. Do we have an appointment? I sure don't have it on my schedule.”

Linny grinned. “Hey yourself, and no, we don't. Just stopped by to pick this up.” She held up the flea and tick preventative.

He looked relieved. “Ah. Great product.” He rocked on his heels, and nodded. The pair of half-glasses pushed up on his head slipped to his nose.

She couldn't help but stare. The glasses frames had a yellow daisy motif and were encrusted with rhinestones.

Jack took them off, examined them and pushed them back on top of his head. “I'm getting blind as a mole, and keep forgetting my glasses. I borrowed Ruthie's this morning.” Linny struggled to suppress a smile. She tilted her head to give him an appraising look. “They're becoming.” She liked the fact that he looked a little crazy, especially after her graceless first meetings with him.