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She came out of her chair. “He’d never do anything to hurt her. I can’t believe you tackled him. You’re lucky he didn’t break your stupid neck.”
She was right. Although he stayed in shape so he could keep delivering the high-octane concerts that were his trademark, he was hardly a match for a thirty-one-year-old pro athlete. “That’s not all of it.” He rose from the step. “Afterward, Dean and I had a talk, or at least I talked. I hung out all my sins. Complete honesty. Needless to say, he was thrilled.”
“Leave him alone, Jack,” she said wearily. “He’s taken enough shit from both of us.”
“Yeah.” He glanced toward the door. “I’d rather not wake Riley. Is it okay if she sleeps here tonight?”
“Sure.” She turned away to go back inside, and he almost made it down the steps. Almost, but not quite. “Aren’t you the least bit curious?” he said, gazing back at her. “Don’t you want to know what it would be like for us now?”
Her hand stilled on the screen door handle. For a moment she didn’t say anything, but when she finally spoke, her voice was a ribbon of steel. “Not even a little bit.”
Riley couldn’t hear what April and her dad had been saying, but their voices had woken her up. She felt cozy lying in bed inside the cottage, knowing they were talking to each other. They’d made Dean together, so they must have loved each other sometime.
She scratched an itch on her calf with her big toe. She’d had so much fun today she’d forgotten to be sad. April had given her cool jobs to do, like looking for flowers to make a bouquet and getting drinks for the painters. This afternoon she’d gone on a bike ride with Dean. Pedaling on the gravel had been hard, but he hadn’t called her pokey or anything, and he’d said she had to throw the ball around with him tomorrow so he could get in some practice. Just thinking about it made her nervous, but excited, too. She missed Blue, but when she’d asked Dean about her, he’d started talking about something else. Riley hoped him and Blue weren’t breaking up. Her mom had always been breaking up.
She heard April moving around, so she pulled the sheet up to her chin and lay very still just in case April decided to check on her. Riley had already noticed that she did that kind of stuff.
As the next few days passed, Blue told herself it was a good thing Dean was staying away because she needed all her wits to deal with Nita. Still, she missed him badly. She wanted to believe he missed her just as much, but why should he? He’d gotten what he wanted.
A good old-fashioned case of loneliness settled over her. Nita decided she wanted to be in the portrait with Tango, but she also wanted Blue to paint her as she’d been, not as she was. This involved digging through a stack of scrapbooks and photo albums, with Nita’s crimson-tipped fingernail stabbing at one page after another, pointing out the flaws of everyone she’d been photographed with—a fellow dance instructor, a slutty roommate, a long series of men who’d done her wrong.
“Do you like anybody?” Blue said in frustration on Saturday morning as they sat on the white velour living room couch surrounded by discarded photo albums.
Nita flicked the page with her gnarled finger. “I liked them all at the time. I was naive about human nature.”
Despite Blue’s frustration at not being able to get started on the painting, she found a certain fascination in seeing Nita’s life unfold from her teenage years growing up in Brooklyn during the war, to the oft-mentioned fifties and early sixties when she’d taught ballroom dancing. She’d had a short-lived marriage to an actor she labeled “a drinker,” sold cosmetics, worked as a model at trade shows, and been a hatcheck girl at various high-end New York restaurants.
In the early seventies, she’d met and married Marshall Garrison. Her wedding photograph showed a voluptuous platinum blonde with a beehive, heavy eye makeup, and pale frosted lips gazing adoringly at a distinguished-looking older man in a white suit. Her hips were slim, her legs long, her skin firm and unwrinkled, exactly the kind of woman who turned male heads.
“He thought I was thirty-two,” Nita said. “He was fifty himself, and I worked myself into a fit worrying what he’d do when he found out that I was really forty. But he was crazy about me, and he didn’t care.”
“You look so happy here. What happened?”
“I came to Garrison.”
Turning the album pages, Blue watched as Nita’s anxious-to-please smiles gradually turned to bitterness. “When was this taken?”
“Our Christmas party the second year we were married. When I’d lost the illusion that I could make everybody like me.”
The resentful expressions of the female guests showed exactly how they felt about the brash Brooklyn interloper in her big earrings and too short skirt who’d stolen the town’s most important citizen. On another page, Blue studied a photo of Nita standing off by herself at someone’s backyard party, a tense smile plastered on her face. Blue flipped to a picture of Marshall. “Your husband was very handsome.”
“He knew it, too.”
“You didn’t even like him?”
“I thought he had a backbone when I married him.”
“You probably sucked it out of him while you were drinking his blood.”
Nita’s bottom lip curled, and she took a pull on her teeth, her favorite way of expressing disapproval. Blue had heard that unpleasant sucking sound more times than she could count.
“Get me my magnifier,” Nita demanded. “I want to see if Bertie Johnson’s mole shows up in this picture. The homeliest woman I’ve ever met, but she had the gall to criticize my clothes. She told everybody I was ostentatious. I fixed her.”
“Knife or gun?”
Suck. Suck. “When her husband lost his job, I hired her to clean my house. Mrs. High and Mighty didn’t like that at all, especially since I always made her do the toilets twice.”
Blue had no trouble imagining Nita lording it over the unfortunate Bertie Johnson. Nita had been doing exactly that to Blue for the past four days. She demanded homemade c
