A Forever Thing (2 page)

She swerved to miss it and hit the curb, bounced back, overcorrected, and hit the curb again. By the time she had control of the
car, the black cat had shot across the street to the courthouse lawn
and climbed the nearest tree, and there were red, white, and blue
lights flashing behind her. She dutifully pulled over and rolled down
the window-and the aroma of almond extract hit her nose.

Ignoring the approaching cop, she grabbed the brown bag with
the leaking bottle and had it in hand when she looked up into the
mossy green eyes of the policeman. His expression was pure disgust as he stared at the small brown bag.

“I can explain,” she said.

“License and registration, to begin with.”

No smile; not even a hint of one in his eyes. The man was all
business.

She carefully set the bag on the floor while she fumbled through
her purse for her license and the glove compartment for the registration and insurance verification. There was barely an inch of extract left in the bottom of the bottle. Three dollars sucked into the
carpet, and her car would smell like almonds for weeks.

“Fake ID if I ever saw one,” he mumbled. “This says you’re thirty years old. Does it belong to an older aunt who looks like
you?”

Fancy narrowed her blue eyes into slits and glared at the man. “I
can explain this mess. A black cat ran out in front of me. I swerved.
The bag has almond extract in it-for baking-and it must have
fallen off the seat and broken when I stomped on the brake.”

“Would you get out of the car, please?” He ignored her explanation. He’d heard better excuses from teenagers before, and never
had he been snookered into believing a single one of them. He
wasn’t starting that night; not with the aroma of amaretto liqueur
seeping through the window and the blue-eyed teenybopper wearing cutoff jean shorts and a tank top holding the evidence in plain
sight.

Fancy Lynn opened the door, climbed out, yanked her jean hems
down, then tugged the bright yellow tank top to cover her bra
straps. A portion of her hair escaped its ponytail and stuck to her
neck within seconds of her leaving the air-conditioned car. She’d
forgotten just how hot Texas could be in August. One step outside
of an air-conditioned car or house could flat suck all the breath out
of a person before she could count to five.

He shoved an apparatus in front of her face. “Blow into this.”

“I have not been drinking,” she said from between clenched
teeth.

“Blow.”

She did.

He checked it and made her repeat the test.

“Well, I guess you were telling the truth, but I’m still taking you
in for having an open bottle of alcohol inside the car. You can call
your mommy and daddy to come get you. So hands behind your
back.”

Cuffs appeared out of nowhere. The snap was as loud as cracking thunder. Fancy was surprised that everyone in the little town
of Albany, population less than two thousand, wasn’t out on the
front porches looking to the southwest to see if a tornado was on
the way.

“Why are you doing this? I told you the truth.”

“We’ll see, young lady.”

“I’m thirty years old, so stop treating me like a child,” she protested.

“Let’s go call your parents and find out how old you really are.”
He nodded toward the courthouse.

She giggled. Her mother wasn’t ever going to believe this; neither were Sophie and Kate. In all her fourteen years of driving
she’d never even had a speeding ticket, much less been handcuffed
and dragged to jail. Leave it to a black cat to cross the street right
in front of the Sheriff’s Department and the Shackelford County
Courthouse.

“You think this is funny?” he said.

“Yes, I do, but then, you are acting just like a short man, all
cocky and jacked up on ego. Never met one yet who didn’t think he
had to throw his weight around to show he was just as important
as a tall man,” she said.

He led her across the lawn and into the sheriff’s office, then put
her into a jail cell and removed the cuffs. “We’ll see who’s `cocky’
after I make a phone call. What’s your parents’ number?”

She rattled off two numbers. “First one is the house. Second is
Momma’s cell. You’ll want my stepdad’s also. He’s retired but still
working for the Air Force at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida.
The office number is …” and she rattled off another number from
memory. “I’d give you his cell phone, but he doesn’t carry one,
much to my mother’s dismay.”

He pulled out a cell phone and dialed the first number on the list.
“This is Auxiliary Officer Theron Warren of the Albany, Texas,
police department,” he said. Then he listened to someone on the
other end.

“No, ma’am, your mother is fine as far as I know. This concerns
your underage daughter, who was driving with an open bottle of
liquor in the car,” he said. He listened some more. “Yes, ma’am, the
whole car smells like amaretto liqueur. What is so funny, ma’am?”
Fancy giggled again, and he shot her a dirty look.

“I see. Then she really is thirty years old? Could you give me
her date of birth?” He checked the driver’s license and glared at Fancy. How in hell did a woman get to be thirty and still look sixteen? Beauty-supply manufacturers would pay her big money to
vow that she’d kept her looks by using their products.

“Thank you for your cooperation and assistance,” Theron said.

“So?” Fancy flipped back her shoulder-length brown ponytail.

“You blew zero on the Breathalyzer, and I had another officer
check that bottle in your car. It was almond extract for cooking,
not liquor, and it was broken, not open,” he said grudgingly. “I
guess you’re free to go. So you are thirty.”

So his name was Theron Warren, and he thought he was only
a step down from God. Well, today began Officer Theron Warren’s voyage into reality. He was fairly good-looking, with those
dark green eyes and thick brown hair feathered back from his
face. He filled out the uniform really well too. But it all looked a
bit surreal, as if he were a little boy playing cops and robbers instead of a grown man. From behind, he could be a high school
sophomore in a school play. But when he turned around, his
steely eyes and chiseled face with a five o’clock shadow told a different tale.

He opened the cell door and stood to one side. What kind of
name was Fancy anyway? he wondered. Was her mother a byproduct of the hippie days and high on pot when she had the kid?
No decent woman would name a girl Fancy.

“I could have saved you a lot of trouble if you’d just listened to
me. It’s almond extract to make cookies with tomorrow, not amaretto,” she said.

He unlocked the jail cell. “You are free to go, Miss Sawyer.
What are you doing in this part of Texas anyway?” he asked.

“That, sir, isn’t one bit of your business,” she threw over her shoulder as she marched out the door. He didn’t deserve answers about her
personal life after he’d cuffed her and taken her to jail.

To her surprise, he walked with her all the way out to her car,
which was still sitting beside the curb. Then, to her astonishment,
he climbed right into his cruiser and followed her. Was he spying
on her or simply at the end of his shift? She drove at exactly twentyfive miles an hour, far below the limit, and hoped it annoyed the
devil out of him. When she pulled into her grandmother’s driveway, he sailed by without even looking her way. Just a coincidence, then.
He was on his own way home.

Two vehicles were already in the driveway. Sophie McSwain
climbed out of the red club-cab Ford truck and Kate Miller from
the white club-cab Chevrolet. Neither of her best friends, Fancy
was happy to see, had changed all that much in the past five years.

Sophie was tall and had kinky, curly strawberry-blond hair she
still tied up in a ponytail and tamed with mousse. But she now
wore a sleeveless tank top and jeans with cowboy boots-a very
different look from the time when she was the fashion queen among
the three of them, always wearing designer suits and spike heels.
Her eyes were smoky gray and framed with heavy, dark lashes,
thanks to mascara, and her eyebrows were arched naturally and
needed no plucking. A very faint sprinkling of freckles danced
across her nose, and she did nothing to cover them.

Kate wore khaki shorts and an orange tank top and had her jet
black hair pulled up in a clip with the ends going every which way.
She had pecan-colored eyes, was slim built, and stood five foot six
inches in her stocking feet. Her skin gave testimony to the fact that
she was half Hispanic, and her lips suggested that Angelina Jolie
could be a distant relative.

None of the three had aged much from twenty-five to thirty, and
they acted like fifteen-year-old girls as they gathered in a group
hug right next to Fancy’s car and all talked at once.

“Good Lord, what is that smell?” Sophie asked.

Fancy held up the leaking bag. “I broke a whole bottle of almond extract. Stupid black cat ran out in front of me. I stomped on
the brakes, broke the bottle, and wound up in jail, and that’s why
I’m late. Come on inside. We’ll catch up, and then I’ll tell you the
whole story over our six-pack of root beer.”

The house was a little white frame structure sitting on a small
lot between two other houses that looked practically identical.
Petunias and marigolds bloomed in the flower beds; the lawn was
mowed and the porch swept; all was stereotypical of a small
Texas town. The difference was the sign hanging above the garage that years before had been turned into a beauty shop. Most
people driving down the street probably didn’t even see the sign anymore on the now-closed-up shop that read HATTIE’S CUT AND
CURL.

Fancy threw open the front door and led the way into a square
living room with a kitchen directly ahead. A narrow hallway opened
off the room to the left, where two bedrooms and a bathroom were
located. When Fancy had arrived earlier that day, she’d put her
things into her old bedroom and didn’t even open the closed door
to her grandmother’s room.

Sophie stopped in the middle of the living room and did a threehundred-and-sixty-degree turn. The sofa was the same: brown and
yellow floral straight out of the sixties. The old Zenith floor-model
television sat in the same corner. Crocheted doilies and lamps were
on the end tables that flanked the sofa. The recliner looked new; at
least maybe from the eighties.

“This is eerie. As if we’re stepping back in time. I half expect to
see Hattie come out of her bedroom and tell us we can’t bring food
into the living room,” Sophie whispered.

“We’d better keep all food in the kitchen. I’m here to tell you that
that woman will know if we don’t, and she’ll rise up out of that
nursing-home bed and crawl here on her belly if she has to,” Kate
said.

“And beat us all with a peach-tree switch,” Fancy said. “Come
on. We’ll keep it in the kitchen so she won’t get any crumbs under
her nails as she claws her way in”

“Don’t tease. Hattie could put the fear of God into Lucifer himself,” Sophie said.

The kitchen sported a red-topped chrome table with four red
padded chairs around it, white cabinets, and a single sink. A
rounded toaster sat on one corner of the counter, metal canisters
on another. The stove and the rounded-front refrigerator were both
vintage sixties. If Sophie opened the fridge, she figured she’d find
Kool-Aid and egg salad inside.

Fancy set about pulling cold root beer in bottles from the refrigerator. “Have a seat, and tell me what’s going on with you two.
Imagine, real voices and real faces-no e-mails or phone calls,”
she said with excitement.

“I was listening to the oldies radio station on the way over here, and remember that song K. T. Oslin sang? ’80s Ladies’?” Kate
said.

“Yes, I do. Momma played it all the time when I was a kid. Sometimes I wondered if she wasn’t reliving her past through that song,”
Fancy said. “I even have it as her ringtone now”

“It says that one of the girls was pretty, one was smart, and one
was a borderline fool. Sounds more like us three than your momma
and her pals,” Kate said.

“Well, we sure know which one of us is the pretty one, don’t we?”
Sophie, the obvious “smart one,” looked straight at Fancy Lynn.
“Girl, you don’t look a day over twenty”

Fancy’s blue eyes twinkled. “The policeman who pulled me
over thought I wasn’t even sixteen. I’d better start buying all those
miracle skin creams they advertise on television if I look as old as
twenty.”

“The policeman who was tailgating you when you drove up?
Talk. We want to hear the whole story,” Sophie said.

By the time Fancy finished recounting her experience, including Theron Warren’s calling her momma, they were all laughing
so hard that Kate had lost her breath and Sophie had the hiccups.
She had no sooner finished telling the tale than the first bars of
“80s Ladies” began playing in the vicinity of her purse.

“It’s Momma.”

She answered it and spent a couple of minutes telling her mother
the short version of the jail story and then giving her an update on
the house. “Thanks, Momma. I’ll call the minute I know anything
for sure.”

She flipped the phone shut and turned around. “Now, where
were we?”

“You are the one-was-pretty among us three. We were talking
about that, remember?” Kate said.

“Oh, hush,” Fancy said.

“What I want to know is, why the devil aren’t you married yet?
You’re one of those little women that men drool over. One of
those I-can-protect-you and you-make-me-feel-all-big-and-macho
women. So how is it you’re in the same boat with the smart one
and the borderline fool?” Kate asked.

“Haven’t found a man who can say the magic words and make
me believe them” Fancy tipped up her root beer and gulped.

Sophie giggled. “And those words would be I love you?”

“That’s part of it. But any fool with the ability to speak can say
the words. I want to hear the words and know there’s one of those
forever things attached to them. Why aren’t you married?” Fancy
looked at Kate.