Aftermath Read online

  “Are you okay?”

  Syd nodded. “It’s funny. I mean, this is totally what I wanted . . . but it’s hard not to feel a little sad.”

  Maddie didn’t really know how to respond to that. She tried to push down an irrational surge of anxiety. Why wouldn’t Syd feel sad? You didn’t get a divorce decree every day. It made perfect sense—didn’t it?

  “Do you want to be alone?” she asked.

  “No.” Syd was adamant. “That’s the last thing I want.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, this is just ridiculous.” Syd ripped open the envelope and pulled out the sheaf of papers tucked inside it. Maddie watched her eyes grow wider as she read. “This cannot be happening.” She flipped through the pages, and then tossed them down to the table with a look of disgust.

  Maddie was more confused than ever. “What’s wrong?”

  Syd looked at her. “Well, it’s not the decree.”

  “It isn’t?”

  Syd shook her head. “Nope.”

  “Well, then, what is it?”

  “It’s my official notification that Jeff has decided to contest the divorce.”

  Maddie’s jaw dropped. “He what?”

  Syd nodded. “Yeah. Nice of him to wait until it was within spitting distance of being finalized.”

  Maddie was amazed. “Why on earth would he do that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Maddie went to Syd. “May I look at the papers?”

  “Be my guest.” Syd held them up to her.

  Maddie read through them as quickly as she could. “Sweetie, it says here that what he’s contesting is the grounds for divorce. In other words, he’s denying the charge of adultery.”

  “Oh, that’s rich.”

  “Well, whatever it is, it means you’ll now have to face him in court and prove your claim that he was unfaithful.”

  Syd sat back and glared at her. “You have got to be kidding me?”

  Maddie showed her the relevant paragraph on the form. “Not so much.”

  “I so do not believe this.” She sagged back against her chair. “His mother’s fingerprints are all over this one. I so should’ve seen this coming. It was just too easy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Doris Simon would never be able to sit back and let her precious son’s reputation be tarnished by something like this.”

  “Something like what?” Maddie asked.

  “Adultery. Of course she would have to clean up this little indiscretion for him.”

  “Honey, I really don’t see how taking this into court could be understood as cleaning anything up. On the contrary, it would seem to draw more attention to it.”

  “Oh, trust me. Doris has no intention of seeing this go to court. Her goal is something else entirely.”

  “What might that be?”

  Syd sighed and shook her head. “I wish I knew.”

  Maddie looked down again at the papers in her hands. “It says here that Jeff would be willing to consider mediation or counseling if you’d be willing to rethink your decision.”

  Syd looked incredulous. “A Glock to my head couldn’t get me to rethink my decision.”

  Against her will, Maddie smiled. “I really love you.”

  “It’s a good thing you do,” Syd replied. “I think we’re in for a bumpy ride.”

  “Of course,” Maddie tossed the papers down onto the table. “I mean . . . it’s been such a cakewalk so far.”

  Syd wrapped an arm around her waist and tugged her closer. “I don’t know . . . at least it’s never boring.”

  “You got that part right.” Maddie hugged her and kissed the top of her head. She sighed and looked across the kitchen toward the back stairs, where Astrid sat growling and wrestling with some kind of elongated chew toy. The damn dog had already eviscerated most of Pete’s tennis balls and half of Henry’s shoes, so Maddie figured that she must have found a new prey.

  While she watched, Astrid flipped the bright purple cylinder up into the air, and chased after it as it slid across the floor toward them.

  Maddie’s eyes grew wide, and she pushed back from Syd.

  “Oh my god!” She pointed at the floor. “Please tell me that dog doesn’t have what I think she has.”

  Syd followed her gaze, then she gasped and gripped Maddie’s upper arms. “Where in the hell did she get that?”

  Maddie looked down at her. “I have a pretty good idea.”

  She released Syd and started toward the dog. But Astrid saw her coming, and it was clear that she wasn’t ready to surrender her treasure just yet. Maddie lunged for the “toy,” but, for once, the fat dog moved faster. Astrid scrambled to her feet and bolted toward the front of the house, skidding on the tile floor as she tried to run with her bobbing prize.

  Maddie turned around and gave Syd a hopeless gaze. “Please tell me that I’m not about to go chasing after a dog with a dildo?”

  Syd was laughing—so hard that tears were running down her cheeks.

  Maddie sighed and walked toward the hallway. “Yuck it up, Goldilocks. Paybacks are hell.”

  Chapter 6

  THIS WAS THE most amazing bowl of shrimp and grits he’d ever eaten. Hands down.

  And that was saying a lot, because he’d had the best—at least, until today.

  The fried okra with capreze salad and jalapeño corn bread both were worth the price of admission, too.

  He’d always heard that the food at Odell’s Midway Café was good, but he’d never been able to make it over here. The little roadside restaurant was situated halfway between Jericho and Jefferson, and they didn’t serve supper—just breakfast and lunch. And Michael was always too busy during the daytime to get out and scour the county back roads in search of local cuisine. But after he took his first bite of Wednesday’s lunch special, he knew that he’d missed a lot. And he also knew that he wasn’t leaving here until he shook the hand that cooked this incredible food.

  He looked around the tiny place. The décor, if you could call it that, left a lot to be desired. There were four small tables with gingham oilcloth covers and mismatched chairs, and a row of booths along the front wall, upholstered with vinyl that had seen better days. The pale green linoleum floor was cracked and chipped, and half the sockets in the ceiling lights were missing bulbs. Presiding over it all was the inevitable portrait of Jesus at Gethsemane. It hung high over the short-order grill—warped and shiny with grease, and faded to the point that the Savior’s hair looked almost neon in the fluorescent light.

  Strangely, that sort of worked, too.

  But the place was clean—squeaky clean. A blue-and-white certificate posted behind the cash register boasted a sanitation grade of 100.5. That was saying a lot for a backwoods greasy spoon that cooked everything it served on a griddle and a gas ring.

  He lifted another spoonful of the spicy, fragrant grits. Good god. He’d swap his damn Bertazzoni range for a one-lunger hotplate if he could whip up something this good.

  His server strolled by, carrying a sweating pitcher of sweet tea.

  “You need more to drink, mister?” she asked.

  He nodded. She was a pretty girl—sixteen or seventeen, he was guessing. She was tall and slender, with a beautiful coffee-colored complexion. When she reached out to refill his plastic tumbler, he noticed that she had a tattoo on the underside of her forearm.

  “Nicorette?” he asked.

  “It’s my name,” she explained.

  “Really? That’s unique.”

  “Yeah.” She rolled her eyes and turned her arm over so he could get a better view of the tattoo. It was a beauty—lots of scrollwork and curlicues on the letters. “My mama loves to tell everyone how she had to quit smoking when she found out she was pregnant with me. She says she named me after her best friend.”

  Michael laughed.

  “I don’t really mind,” Nicorette said. “It could’ve been a lot worse.”

  “How so?” he asked.

&nbs
p; “See that girl over there?” She gestured toward the young woman behind the cash register who was busy restocking a tray of Beeman’s gum. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “That’s my cousin, Maybelline.”

  “I see your point.”

  They smiled at each other.

  “I haven’t seen you in here before,” she said. “Are you from around here?”

  “Not originally. But I’ve lived here for a few years now. I run the Riverside Inn near Jericho.”

  Nicorette’s jaw dropped. “You do? We all heard about what happened to it in the tornado.”

  Michael held up a placating hand. “Well . . . some of those stories were pretty exaggerated.”

  Nicorette shook her head. “Well, they sure weren’t exaggerated around here.” She turned around and called out to her cousin. “Hey, May-Bell. Show this man the spoiler!”

  Maybelline walked toward the kitchen area and pointed up at a bright red, fiberglass ornament that was tacked up over a swinging door like a lucky horseshoe.

  “Mama found that the morning after the storm,” Nicorette explained. “It was sticking out of the compost heap out back.” She turned back toward him. “We cleaned it off real good before we brought it inside.”

  Michael just shook his head. “Is your mama here? I’d really like to talk with her about this food.”

  Nicorette looked at him with alarm. “Is it bad? Do you need me to get you something else?” She reached out to take his bowl.

  “No!” He intercepted her hand and gave it a pat before releasing it. “No, honey. The food is wonderful. I want to ask her about who cooked it, and see if I could talk with them.” He smiled at her. “I’m a chef, too, but I haven’t had shrimp and grits this good since I left South Carolina.”

  Nicorette relaxed. “That’s Mama and Aunt Evelyn. They do all the cooking. I’ll go get her for you.” She turned and walked back toward the kitchen, stopping to refill half-a-dozen glasses of tea on her way.

  Michael stared at the flaming red memento from The Storm That Changed Everything. It hung up there on the wall, in a ludicrous face-off with Faded Jesus. It was a tossup to guess which one of the two icons would persevere and lay claim to the most exalted place in the shared imaginations of this small community.

  He looked again at the painting.

  Nope. It was no contest.

  As long as people in Jericho kept finding pieces of Deb Carlson’s car, Jesus was going to remain stuck on his knees in Gethsemane for a good long time.

  The door to the kitchen swung open, and a middle-aged woman, wearing a hair net and a bright yellow apron, emerged. She was wiping her hands on a red-and-white striped towel. Michael raised his hand and waved at her. She nodded at him and walked across the small restaurant toward his table, stopping along the way to greet other diners. She appeared to know everyone by name.

  She stopped next to his table and looked down at him with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. “I’m Nadine Odell.”

  She had a husky voice. Michael wondered if her “friendship” with Nicorette’s namesake had been short-lived.

  He got to his feet and held out his hand. “I’m Michael Robertson. I’m a professional chef, and I have to tell you that I’ve spent most of my adult life studying low-country cooking. And I have never, ever eaten food this good—anyplace.”

  Nadine stared at him for a moment before taking his hand. She smiled, and he saw where Nicorette got her good looks.

  “Where are your people from?” she asked.

  He pulled out a chair for her. “Aiken, South Carolina.”

  She nodded and sat down. “You go to culinary school?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “In Charleston.”

  She nodded again. “Well. I suppose they can teach you how to do some things.”

  He gestured toward his bowl of grits. “Not like this, they can’t.”

  She sighed. “I never went to school to learn how to cook.”

  “Where’d you learn to do it, then?”

  “My grandma, Harriet.”

  “She taught you?”

  Nadine snorted. “Hell, no. I just paid attention. And when I got older and moved up here from Georgia, I tried to make things taste like I remembered.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I get it right. Other times, not so much. But what I don’t remember, Evelyn pretty much does.”

  “Evelyn?”

  “My sister.”

  “So you both cook here?”

  Nadine sighed. “Usually. But Evelyn hasn’t been able to work much lately. Her mother-in-law is sick, and they’ve been taking care of her at home. I’ve had to cut back on our hours because I can’t handle the place by myself six days a week.”

  Michael’s mind was racing a mile a minute.

  He had a fantastic idea. The universe had just served him up a super-sized plate of opportunity that was every bit as miraculous as the food that now sat on the table in front of him. He leaned forward in his chair.

  “Nadine,” he said. “Have you ever thought about taking on a partner?”

  DAVID BALANCED THE flat box full of glass vases against his hip and knocked again on the aluminum screen door. He was sure that Gladys was at home. Her bilious green Reliant K was in the driveway, and the interior door to the house was standing wide open. He waited, but there was no sound of movement from inside.

  He’d borrowed two-dozen bud vases from Gladys several weeks ago, when they were getting the inn ready for the big wedding event that never happened. Fortunately, the vases had been safely stashed away in an outside storage building, along with twenty-four rented tables and ninety-six folding chairs. The tornado never touched the unit, so he and Michael didn’t have to worry about paying for those damages. Too bad they couldn’t say the same for the six rented Port-a-Johns that ended up strewn along the path that led down to the river. What a nightmare that cleanup was going to be.

  He craned his neck toward the end of Gladys’s tiny front porch.

  Where the hell was she?

  He noticed that her car was backed into its space, commando style—like she wanted to be able to flee the scene in a hurry, should the need arise.

  He thought about that one. Living all those years with that ne’er-do-well son of hers would certainly be enough incentive for that. It was hard to believe that it had been nearly two years since Beau died from complications related to his meth addiction—after his nightmarish attack on Syd and Lizzy, and his clumsy attempt to burn down the town library.

  How much had all of their lives changed since then?

  But most of them had managed to pick up the pieces and move on. Lizzy was now dating Syd’s hunky brother, and she was well into the second year of her hugely successful tenure as the county’s parish nurse. The only fly in the ointment for her was whether or not that lecherous old skinflint, Tom Green—who controlled his weight in United Way dollars—would decide to renew the program funding at the end of Lizzy’s grant.

  Asshole. It was anybody’s guess how that one would turn out.

  And Syd? Well. Syd was Syd, and Syd was a survivor. And she had Maddie.

  But Gladys? Gladys hadn’t fared quite as well.

  Nobody in the county held Gladys responsible for the things her son did, but Gladys seemed unable to move beyond it all. She still kept her tiny flower shop open, but she didn’t do much else. She didn’t go to church anymore, and she didn’t show up at any of the community events where she used to be a fixture. She just seemed to want to fade into the landscape.

  David looked around. Even her tiny front yard—which at one time had been choked with an explosive array of colorful flowers—now contained only a few scraggly-looking foliage plants in cast-off containers.

  He shook his head. It was really too bad.

  He had just about decided to write her a note and leave the box on the floor next to her front door when he heard footsteps on the crushed gravel driveway. He turned toward the sound.

  It was Gladys. She stood near the bu
mper of her K car and looked back at him with a sober expression.

  “I was out back in the shed,” she said, unapologetically. “I didn’t hear you drive up.”

  He hefted the box of vases up so she could see it. “Hello, Gladys. I wanted to return these to you before any more time went by.”

  She nodded, but didn’t say anything.