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After lunch, they’d all come on over to the bar. It was Tuesday, which was usually slow, so they’d figured they would have the place pretty much to themselves. Darla’s brother, Boone, who’d been working the day shift for almost five months now, had already been there when they arrived.
Now Boone sat with Darla, his chair scooted close to her. He had his arm wrapped around her and his sandy-colored head bent close to hers.
“It’s okay, sweetheart.” Boone tried to soothe her by rubbing her back a little. “Darla, come on, it’ll be all right.” But Darla Jo only wailed all the louder. She was inconsolable.
The two women at the bar glanced toward the back table and shook their heads some more.
“Sad,” said Tiff. “No. Worse than sad. Downright depressing.”
Softly, so the two in back wouldn’t hear, Rose stated the obvious. “It’s tough to lose a husband when you’re twenty-one and pregnant with no job skills to speak of.”
“Yeah,” said Tiff. “But that girl has been cryin’ every day for three weeks now. It can’t be good for the baby. She needs to lighten up a little.”
Phoebe spoke then, quietly, bending close to her lifelong friends. “She loved him and now she just can’t deal with the fact that he’s gone. It’s tearing her up inside.”
The other two looked at her, looks that displayed the endless wisdom acquired once a girl approaches thirty and has had plenty of opportunity to witness—and participate in—what goes on between women and men.
At last Rose said low, “Pheeb, darlin’. She may be brokenhearted. But she’s also flat broke. Ralphie left her nothing. No money, no life insurance, no bar. I’d say at least half of all this endless bawlin’ is about a total lack of c-a-s-h.”
Tiffany burped—but delicately. “Oh. ’Scuse me.” She hunched to the bar and whispered so Ralphie’s sobbing child bride wouldn’t hear, “Well, she did get the double-wide, didn’t she? Not that it’s paid for, or anything.”
“Pardon me.” Rose kept her voice low and faked a snooty accent. “That is no double-wide. It is a manufactured home.” She slapped a hand on the bar. “Music. Now.” Sliding off her stool, Rose straightened her jean jacket—causing the rhinestone appliqués on it to glitter wildly in the dim light—and sauntered to the jukebox. Draping her lush self over the side of it, she punched out a few tunes. First off was Creed: “My Sacrifice.”
“Oh, God.” Tiff whined. “Did you have to?”
But Rose only grinned and strutted back to her stool, black salsa skirt swaying. Just as she was settling in, the unmistakable roaring rumble of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle rattled the wide window across from the bar.
Phoebe glanced up from polishing yet another glass as a big guy with shoulder-length crow-black hair rolled a gleaming two-wheeled hunk of chrome and steel off the street and into one of the spaces out front. The afternoon sun glinted off his black sunglasses. Phoebe had to squint against the glare.
The girls at the bar had also turned to look.
“Oh, my, my,” said Cimarron Rose. She pretended to fan herself.
“Nice Harley,” added Tiff out of the side of her mouth.
Rose loudly cleared her throat. “But back to the task at hand…” They both faced the bar again and lifted their glasses. Rose proposed the toast. “Ralphie. He was one of a kind and that is no lie.”
“Ralphie,” Tiff echoed after her, eyes glittering with moisture again. They drank in unison as Darla sobbed all the harder and, beyond the window, the black-haired hunk, in faded denim, a black T-shirt and a black leather vest, got off the Harley. He kicked down the stand with his big black boot. And then, for a moment, he just stood there, muscular arms hanging loose at his sides, staring at the front window as if he could see Phoebe in there behind the bar, staring right back at him. He couldn’t, of course. It was darker inside than out and the window was tinted. But still, a shiver like a dribble of ice water slid down her spine and a sizzle of heat flared low in her belly.
“Darlin’ Phoebe, another round,” said Tiffany.
Phoebe set to work on two more margaritas, glancing up as the big guy came strolling in.
Rose had got it right. My, my, my…
The stranger in question claimed a stool at the end of the bar and took off those black sunglasses. Tossing them down by the ashtray, he sent a glance Phoebe’s way.
“Be right with you.” She gave him a nod and he nodded back. Phoebe served the Queens and then moved on over to stand opposite him.
“Shot of Cuervo.” He had a deep, kind of velvety voice. With a little sandpaper roughness around the edges. “Beer back.” He laid down a twenty and as he did that she looked at his hands. Big hands.
She glanced up and their gazes caught. My, my, my. Eyes as black as his hair. And a mouth that made her think of deep, wet kisses….
Inside Phoebe’s head, alarm bells started ringing.
Don’t you even think about it, girl.
Phoebe had made plenty of mistakes in her thirty years, but she liked to think she’d learned from them. There had been other men in her life since Ralphie, every one of them big and wild and dangerous.
No way. Not again.
She broke the eye contact and concentrated on setting the guy up, free-pouring the tequila with a flourish, plunking the salt in front of him along with the fresh wedge of lime, tipping a beer glass under the tap, topping it off with a perfect inch of head.
“Enjoy,” she said, flashing him one dead-on glance, not letting the look linger.
“Thanks.”
Down the bar, Tiff complained, “Enough of this Creed shit.”
“Baby, your wish is my command,” said Rose.
Right on cue, the song ended and Rose stuck a fist in the air as though she’d been personally responsible. Phoebe moved back to her post near her friends and the Queens laughed together as the jukebox whirred and a much mellower Dave Matthews tune came on.
At Ralphie’s table, Boone was helping the still-sobbing Darla Jo to her feet. She sagged against him and he tightened his hold on her. Swaying together like a pair of bomb victims staggering away from a deadly explosion, they started for the door at the end of the bar that led through the storeroom to the employee parking area in back.
“Mind if I see she gets home all right?” Boone asked, steadying Darla as she stumbled.
“Go ahead,” Phoebe said. “Take the day. I can handle things here till Bernard shows up.”
“Happy birthday, Pheeb,” Darla Jo said in a tiny, broken voice, leaning heavily on Boone. Her honey-brown hair hung lank around her pale baby-doll face.
It caused an ache in Phoebe’s heart to see her hurting so much. “Thanks, sweetie. Take it easy, okay?”
“Take care, Darla Jo,” said Rose.
And Tiffany added, “Later, hon.”
They all watched, wearing solemn expressions, as Boone guided Ralphie’s pregnant widow to the swinging door and on through.
“Ralphie, Ralphie,” Rose pondered aloud, casting her gaze heavenward, once the door swung shut behind Darla Jo and Boone. “Ralphie, what were you thinkin’?”
Tiffany was nodding, looking severe, her famous dimples nowhere in sight. “You are so right, Rose. He never should have gotten the poor little thing pregnant. Almost sixty years old, and he didn’t have the sense to put a raincoat on that big thing of his.”
“Sense? Ralphie?” Rose made a scoffing sound low in her throat. “Now, there are two words never meant to be spoken in the same sentence.” They all nodded at that, even Phoebe. Then Rose’s face softened. “Think about it, though. That baby will be the only child that wild man ever had.”
Tiffany corrected her. “Well, that we know of.”
Tiff did have a point. Chances were Ralphie had other children somewhere. Ralphie had loved women. And women had loved him. It didn’t matter that he was too skinny and too old and his nose was too big for his face. When he turned those lazy-lidded eyes on a girl, she would fall hard and fast and not give a good damn that the landing was bound to be rough.
Back when Phoebe and Ralphie were married, both Tiff and Rose had been in love with him, too. Though she knew her friends would never betray her, Phoebe had resented them for not being able to keep themselves from wanting her husband. Secretly, she’d feared that the day would come when Ralphie started falling out of love with her, the way he had with all the others before her. She’d dreaded that the unthinkable just might happen: she’d find him doing the wild thing with Rose or Tiff.
As it turned out, Ralphie did fall out of love with her. And into bed with someone else. Not Rose or Tiff, though. Thank God. In her pain and rage at his doing her that way, she’d divorced him and taken her half of the bar in the settlement. She’d dropped out of the band, and Rose and Tiff hadn’t had the heart to carry on without her.
For a while, Phoebe had hated Ralphie Styles with a passion as powerful as her love had been. But her hatred didn’t last. She just couldn’t stay mad at him forever. He’d give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. Only later would you find out it was a shirt he’d borrowed from someone else.
You just had to love him, even when you weren’t in love with him anymore. Besides, once a couple of years had gone by, Phoebe really was over him in the romantic sense and truly immune to the passionate insanity he could inspire.
Rose and Tiff weren’t immune to him, though. They’d each married him—Rose first, Tiff later; short marriages that ended the same way his marriage to Phoebe had: in heartbreak and divorce. Eventually, both Rose and Tiff had forgiven him. And in time, each found herself calling him a friend.
Down the bar, the big biker caught Phoebe’s eye and raised his empty shot glass. She went on over there and served him up another round, her throat kind of tight suddenly with all the memories swirling around in her brain. That time, when she set the beer in front of him, she gave the guy a longer look. He looked back. Another shiver went through her—one that crackled with heat all the way down to where it went liquid and spread out into a warm pool low in her belly.
No, she thought.
But deep inside someone was sighing out an endless string of yesses—yesses, she reminded herself, she would do nothing about.
It was a bad day, that was all. A day that had her polishing every glass in the place and imagining what it might be like to celebrate turning thirty by doing something dangerous with a guy she’d just met—a guy who’d spoken exactly six words to her so far: Shot of Cuervo. Beer back. Thanks.
No doubt about it. Soulful eyes. Lots of muscles. Coal-black hair and a couple of shots. These were the beginnings of a truly deep and meaningful relationship.
When she returned to the Queens, they’d moved on to the subject of Ralphie’s suspicious demise.
“I’m sorry,” said Rose. “But I do believe we are dealing with foul play here.” Whoever had run Ralphie over and then fled the scene had yet to be apprehended.
“Well, duh,” said Tiff. “A hit-and-run is foul play by definition.” She sipped her margarita, frowning. “Isn’t it?”
“A hit-and-run is foul play by accident,” Rose clarified. “And I don’t believe Ralphie’s death was any accident. I am talking about someone finally getting fed up with Ralphie in a murderous way. I am talking premeditation. You hear what I’m saying? And it’s not like it’s never been done before. Remember that woman up in Tulsa last year? Got into her SUV, drove to where her husband was doing the nasty with his girlfriend, and ran the bastard down when he and the other woman came out of their favorite motel. Ran him down and then backed up over him, slammed it into drive and ran over him again.”
“I don’t think that was in Tulsa,” said Tiff. “It was on Law and Order, wasn’t it?”
Rose gave her a look. “Not the point—and think about it. As long as nobody sees you and you don’t blow it and leave the guy alive to identify you, a hit-and-run would be better than a bullet or rat poison or a stabbing to the heart.” She paused to gaze deeply into her jumbo margarita glass. Glancing up again, she added, “Yeah, you’d need a way to get rid of the car….”
“Well,” said Tiff. “Somebody did find a way to get rid of the car. Or to hide it. Or somethin’. They got rid of it after the fact. They don’t want to face the consequences of their actions. That doesn’t mean it was preplanned or anything.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Rose. “I think it was.”
Phoebe, who’d heard all this before, just wished they would stop. But they didn’t.
Tiffany insisted, “Some drunk, that’s all. Or some soccer mom on her cell phone.”
“Ha,” said Rose. “That’s a stretch. A soccer mom driving around in the Paseo in the middle of the night, calling…who?”
“I’m only trying to get you to see,” said Tiff in her most patient and reasonable tone, “that we basically know nothing beyond the fact that someone hit him and then drove away.”
“Huh. Pardon me. We know he was in the Paseo, on foot, after midnight.” The Paseo, the old Spanish district, with its stucco buildings and clay-tile roofs, was best known for its thriving artists’ community. Ralphie was no artist. He didn’t live in the Paseo, have friends there or do business there that the Queens knew of. “I ask you,” said Rose. “What was he doing there?”
Tiffany blew out a hard breath. “I’m only saying, why assume it had to be murder?”
Rose had her margarita glass in her hand again. She took a big gulp and set it down hard. “Because it was Ralphie who got killed, that’s why. We all know how he was. Everybody loved him—except for when they hated him.”
Phoebe had heard enough. More than enough. She grabbed the cast-aluminum ice scooper from the top of the ice machine, pulled open the slanted steel ice machine door, braced her free arm on the rim and stuck the scooper in there. Taking a wide stance for balance on her pointy little heels, she used the scooper to beat at the ice. It had been clumping for a few days now, which meant the machine was leaking. She’d need to call a repairman.
Haven’t done that in a while, she thought as she pounded away. Not since Ralphie came back to the city—to stay, this time, he’d told her—and started in with Darla Jo.
“Tiff, you are in denial,” she heard Rose insist.
“I’m in denial….?”
Phoebe pounded harder, glaring into the globs and clumps of ice as she attacked them with the scooper, every blow beating back the voices behind her.
She pulverized that ice and in her mind’s eye, he took form.
Ralphie…
She could just see him, see that road map of a face with the laugh lines etched deep as craters on either side of his fleshy mouth, see the wild hair he dyed a reddish-black not found in nature, which in the past few years was thinning so high at the temples, the bare spots threatened to meet at the top of his head.
He’d always been handy with machines. “Step aside,” he would say when the equipment started acting up. “Let Ralphie work his magic—and hand me that wrench over there, will you, babe?”
Phoebe beat the ice harder. She wanted to smash every clump to a sliver, crush it all into powder.
“Phoebe, hon.” It was Rose. Phoebe slammed the scoop into the ice one more time. Rose shouted, “Hey!”
Squinting hard to hold back the gathering tears, Phoebe pulled her head out of the ice machine and sent a glare over her shoulder at the Queens.
Rose told her tenderly, “Honey, put that scoop down.”
Phoebe tossed the scoop into the machine, slammed the door and whirled to face her friends. “I am sick of hearin’ about it.”
“Sorry,” said Rose.
“Not another word,” vowed Tiffany.
Phoebe wrapped her arms around herself and looked down at her high-heeled sandals. They were red as the roses on her dress. Red was a power color—she’d heard that somewhere. Lately, since Ralphie’s death, Phoebe felt like she needed all the power she could get.
Tiff said weakly, “Aw, Pheeb. Come on.”
Phoebe squeezed her arms tighter around her middle, lifted her head and jerked her sagging shoulders back. “I miss that sorry sleazeball, I truly do.” Her throat locked up. She had to whisper the rest. “I just can’t believe he went and got himself killed.”
There was a silence, except for Gwen Stefani bopping on the jukebox, singing that “Hollaback Girl” song.
Rose got that soft-eyed, mother-hen look. “Oh, honey…”
Phoebe pressed her lips together and tightly shook her head. “Uh-uh.” She put out a hand. “I am not going to lose it. I am going to be fine.” There’d been enough crying. Darla Jo had done plenty of that for all of them.
“It’s okay,” Tiffany said in a careful voice. “Sometimes a girl can’t help herself. She just needs a good cry.”
But Phoebe wasn’t going to cry. Not now. Not today. She gulped to clear the tightness from her throat, pressed her fingers under her eyes to ease the burning ache of tears unshed and drew herself up tall again. “So. ’Nother round?”
But the fun was over and they all knew it. Phoebe looked from Tiff to Rose and back to Tiff. They both wore that shiny-eyed, tears-on-the-way look. One more drink and things would get seriously weepy.
