Sealed with a promise (20 page)

  A few minutes later, their mother, Mary Cole, returned with the good news that her secretary’s husband would likely make a full recovery.

  They insisted on dressing Emmie in her new clothes, so she wouldn’t use her arm too much. Soft, feminine hands buttoned, straightened, folded collars back, and twitched seams into place. Tears welled in her eyes.

  Grace saw them. “What’s the matter, Emmie? Are we hurting your shoulder?”

  “I just remembered something. I was twelve. I was getting dressed to catch the plane to come to live in the States without my parents. My mother came in my room, and she wouldn’t let me button my dress or put on my shoes myself. I was
twelve.
I hadn’t needed her help with things like that for a long time, but she pushed my hands away and said, ‘No. Let me do it.’”

  “It must have been hard, going off by yourself like that.” Lyle’s voice was low, her smile sad.

  “And it must have been hard for your mother to let you go,” added Mary Cole with a misty smile. “She wanted a few more minutes while you were still her little girl.”

  Emmie’s eyes got wet again. She had never seen that memory from her own and her mother’s perspective at the same time.

  Warmth filled her chest and merged into an almost visible bond of understanding between Lyle and Mary Cole and her. They were talking to her, but also talking about Lyle’s need to leave home, and her mother’s need to hold on to her.

  After surveying Emmie’s purchases, Mary Cole said, “That reminds me. I’ve got a sweater I bought last year, but I realize it isn’t right for me. Would one of you like it?”

  When everyone had tried it and all agreed it looked best on Sarah Bea, Lyle showed Emmie how to use the one hundred and fifty dollars worth of makeup she’d bought under Grace’s tutelage, while everyone leaned forward to learn the latest techniques. Then everyone wanted Lyle to “glamorize” them, while Sarah Bea demonstrated different ways Emmie could wear her hair.

  Mary Cole went downstairs and came back with leftover wedding cake and glasses of wine. They rehashed every part of the wedding and congratulated themselves on how well it had gone, while wishing that this or that had been better.

  “I’d better get home,” Grace said at last. “I’ve left my menfolk to their own devices long enough.”

  “Me too,” Sarah Bea stood and stretched. “I’m glad y’all called me though. This has been the best ending to Pickett’s wedding I could have imagined. Emmie, I guess you and Lyle will be leaving early tomorrow, so I’m going to hug you good-bye now.” She hugged Emmie and then her sister.

  Grace came over to hug Emmie. “Thank you, Emmie.”

  “I should be thanking you.”

  “No. Thank you for letting me-” Grace, who was never sentimental, swallowed and blinked suspicious wetness from her eyes. “I feel like you really are my sister now.”

  Do- Lord turned into the drive of a large white house dripping with gingerbread, and, as instructed, drove around it to the back. There, nestled among huge old camellias and azaleas, their dark green leaves glistening in the bright December sun, sat a tiny, one-story house, formerly a servants’ quarters, where Emmie lived. Tall pines shaded it, and a rusty drift of pine needles had piled up along the angle of the tin roof.

  Trust Emmie to live in a storybook cottage. He almost laughed aloud. He’d thought about her often in the couple of weeks since he’d seen her. Knowing he wouldn’t be content to see her only for the weekend, he’d even taken Lon up on his offer to arrange leave. He had two weeks before he had to return to base the day after Christmas. When Do-Lord said he was going to North Carolina, Lon hadn’t blinked. Grinned a lot, but not blinked.

  Discovering her connection to Calhoun had been one of the best pieces of luck he’d had in a long time- right up there with the time he accidentally rescued two SEALs.

  That had been a major turning point. Until then he had lived on the fringes of society-among the poor and the powerless-all his life. Drifting and aimless after the death of his mother, he just wanted to drive around and see stuff until the three hundred fifty dollars he’d gotten for the sale of the trailer ran out. He could look back and see he’d been on a course that would have taken him from the petty crime of his teenage years to major crime.

  He’d been to Six Flags Over Georgia where he rode every roller coaster for a week. He went to Charlotte Motor Speedway, where he lived out of his car and soaked up the aphrodisiacal aromas of chewing tobacco, car exhaust, and beer. The Danville International Speedway was a disappointment. Turned out the little track in the rolling farmland had been shut down a few years before and wouldn’t reopen until 1998.

  Looking at a map, he saw that from Danville, Highway 58 went straight across Virginia and ended at the Atlantic ocean. Something about that appealed to him-to just get in the car and drive smack-dab to the ocean and finally see that “end of the road” that everybody talked about.

  As it happened he arrived in Virginia Beach on his eighteenth birthday. He parked the car in a lot where the highway really did
end,
took the concrete steps down to the beach, and walked on the sand with a nor’easter buffeting his ears under a gunmetal gray sky that spit stinging pellets of rain from time to time.

  The bar, The Sea Shanty, looked like a place to get warm and buy himself a beer to celebrate his first sight of the Atlantic and his birthday. It hunkered down, less than a block from the ocean, under a massive freeway that connected the beach to Norfolk. It gave the impression that the highway had simply been built over it-which he gathered, was pretty much the case. It had existed there for forty or fifty years in the same state of stubborn dilapidation. Paint had long since been scoured off by salt winds, and with the freeway overhead it didn’t need much roof.

  He used the one fake ID (of the five fakes he had) that showed his real birthday-although the year was off a bit, and none of the other facts were right either. It made for a lonely celebration though, since telling anyone why he was there wasn’t an option.

  He was two sips into his second beer when the fight broke out. It wasn’t his fight. Staying clear of swinging fists, he retired with his beer bottle to a short hallway that led past the restrooms to a back door exit and stayed there to watch.

  Suddenly, he was grabbed from behind. It felt like being clutched in the arms of a tank. He knew dirty moves. He tried them. The tank effortlessly immobilized Do-Lord with a half nelson forcing his face forward and down. He couldn’t see a thing except the way-past-filthy cracked vinyl floor.

  “Weed! What the hell are you doing? Leave the kid alone,” a voice, that didn’t seem to be talking to him, demanded.

  “I’m getting the kid out of here,” the human tank yelled over the melee, insulted.

  “Shit! Are you out of your mind?
Leave him.
We got to get ourselves out. You know what’s going to happen if we’re picked up by the Shore Patrol.”

  The shoulder hold didn’t let up one iota. “Tha’s the
reason
we
gotta
save the kid. Can’t let him get picked up. He’s underage,” Weed explained with drunken perspicacity.

  “You are so drunk. Okay, okay! We’ll take him with us. Just move!”

  Do- Lord was grabbed on the other side by another arm, equally steely.

  A thousand thoughts went through Do-Lord’s mind. Noticing he was taller than either of the two men who had him now by each arm. How massive were the arms that held him. Whether he wanted or needed rescue, fighting was pointless. He was dragged backwards through a rear exit and yet without unnecessary roughness.

  Then they were outside among haphazardly-parked cars in the chilly wet night. Sirens could be heard in the distance. His two drunken Don Quixotes set him on his feet. They were in their early twenties, dressed in jeans and T-shirts, and as he’d already noted, shorter than he. They outweighed him by a good fifty pounds of muscle.

  He could have run. He’d been poised to as soon as they loosened their hold the least bit, but Do-Lord had a lifetime of summing up others’ intentions in a split second. Whatever they intended, it wasn’t harm, although the casual competence with which they had immobilized him said they were no strangers to violence. Being saved was a novel experience. He was curious about what they would do next.

  “Hell Tim, my fucking car’s been stolen!” Weed roared.

  “Locatelli, you idiot, you didn’t
drive
your car.”

  “Did we drive yours?”

  “We took a cab. You’re the genius that said we’d be too drunk to drive home. You’re too drunk, but I’m not.”

  Do- Lord doubted that. True, Weed acted drunker, but both were in DUI territory. Anybody who had distributed moonshine since he was ten was a fairly good judge of sobriety.

  “You know what the Master Chief says. ‘A SEAL’s gonna git drunk. A SEAL’s gonna git in fights. But a SEAL that gits drunk and gits in fights and gits
caught,
ain’t gonna be a SEAL for long.’”

  “Too late now.” The more sober of the pair pulled his buddy by the arm. “Come on, time for us to become one with the shadows.”

  “What about the kid?”

  “They catch him with us, and they’ll nail us for contributing to the delin… the lelinq… the you know, of a minor.”

  Light bulbs went on in both bleary sets of eyes. “Hey kid, how
are
you getting’ outta here?”

  “My car.”

  Tim and Weed looked at each other. The more drunk one spoke. “Did you hear him?
He’s
got a car.”

  Now both turned to him with giant, slightly loopy grins. It was the grins that decided the matter-full of sly goodwill and drunken opportunism, yet innocent of malice.

  These were men he understood. They would have fit right in to the world he had come from. A world on the wrong side of the law where men looked to get away with everything they could, and took advantage of any weakness they saw. But they also had a largeness of spirit and a sense of purpose that made them assume- however mistakenly-that they should rescue him. He pulled his car keys from his jeans pocket. “Come on. Looks like it’s my turn to save you.”

  The three scrambled into the car, the older men crouched low in the backseat. Do-Lord drove away slowly.

  They let him spend the night in their digs, and a friendship was born. Tim Johnson and Louis “Weed” Locatelli. Weed was so called because someone once remarked he was crazy as a horse who had been eating Loco Weed. It quickly got shortened to Weed.

  They were tougher, smarter, and more streetwise than anyone he’d ever met. They had every quality life had taught him to respect. They were exactly who he wanted to be. They weren’t criminals. They were SEALs.

  Now he was at another turning point. With Emmie at his side he could enter into another area of society. A kind of society that lay at the other end of the bell curve-that of the rich and powerful. “The rich are different” as F. Scott Fitzgerald had said. Emmie understood them, got their nuances. And best of all, despite her insider status, she wasn’t one of them. And if there was the added possibility he might get laid, well, that just meant he might get lucky indeed, so the smile spreading over his face every time he thought of Emmie was explained.

  She had been just what he was looking for-although he hadn’t known it.

  He killed the engine and checked the dashboard clock. He was early.

  Emelina was ready early. Twenty-eight minutes early by the clock on the computer, the only clock in her tiny house that displayed the correct time. Emmie caught sight of the woman in the mirror over her dresser. She felt like her home had been invaded by a doppelganger. She couldn’t connect any feelings about herself to the woman she saw. Anxiety about how long it would take had made her get dressed far too early, and now she wasn’t sure what to do with herself. To top it off there seemed to be a strange woman in the house.

  The absurdity made her laugh out loud. The woman in the mirror got the joke and laughed too.

  Though she’d already memorized it, she studied the checklist Grace had given her. “You’ll start thinking about some arcane theory and forget to fix your hair or put on mismatched shoes,” Grace had said.

  Emmie would have been insulted if it weren’t true. But at least this once she hadn’t forgotten anything. Hair, makeup, dress, shoes-even her lingerie coordinated with the total picture. Total picture. That’s what Grace had insisted on. “Don’t look at your waist or hips or fixate on one area. That’s the mistake so many women make. Look at how the proportions and all the elements go together.”

  She’d also said, “You don’t have to look trashy and cheap in order to look sexy. This is about strategy. Men only want an easy woman if they don’t want her much in the first place. It’s in your best interests to eliminate the men who don’t want you much. Trust me. You want to send a message that any man who wins your favor will have to come up to
your
standards.”

  This way of thinking about man-woman interactions was new to Emmie. In the past she’d never thought about it at all. She’d dressed to make sure no one would notice her.

  Her heart beat a little harder every time she caught sight of herself in the mirror in the cherry red dress Grace had picked out. Long-sleeved and unadorned, its simple wrap design outlined the shape of her breasts and fastened with just two buttons at the waist, before flaring into a skirt that floated around her knees. “Just what we’re looking for,” Grace had announced. “Demure but not girlish. Trust me, any man will look at those two buttons and the way the overlap of the skirt moves and be fascinated.”

  She still didn’t feel connected to the woman in the mirror, but why a man would want a date with that woman was obvious. She had practiced the posture Grace had taught her. Her shoulders were over her hips. At first it had felt awkward, like she was leaning backwards, but in a day or so, she had realized how much more balanced her whole body was and how much easier many movements were. Grace had showed her not how to “hold” her head but how to balance it on her neck so that it pivoted, turned and tilted-able to move with the slightest effort.