Sugar Daddy (4 page)

I’d wanted to get off, with him. An instinct so strong it took root inside my body, leaving me luxuriously aroused.

“But you already have my application.” Come to think of it, the questions on the four-pager should’ve tipped me off in the first place. Chock full of Myers Briggs type one-liners, it’d read like a probing getting-to-know-you more than a test of professional know-how.

“Designed to provide insight into your personality and the likelihood of accepting my proposition. I also need your professional details.”

He straddled a fine line between boudoir and business. “You’re not gonna demand a trial run, are you?”

Turning me to him, he’d swept his fingers along my cheek, “No need, Shay
.
” My heart walloped, my lips opened in anticipation of his next stroke, but he’d only hummed against my ear. “I’ve no doubt you’ll live up to my very high expectations.”

“Dammit!” Into the muddy slop of the garden plot, I knelt once more, squaring away the plants I desperately wanted to nurture.

A looming shadow provided sudden relief from the harsh sun. Augie
.
He was about to become the other, other man in my life, not that I was going to tell him any such thing. I’d hardly admitted it to myself.

Dapper as hell, he glared at me, his silver foppish coif jutting over his brow. He didn’t deign to speak, merely lifting an eyebrow in his very remonstrative way while he tapped the face of his enormous gold watch.

I smiled and patted the ground next to me.

He heaved a grave sigh. “Angry gardenin’ again?” Careful of the soil I flung left and right, he pinched the creases of his seersucker trousers to take his turn-ups off the ground, simpering, “Hmm, you might be onto somethin’, honey. Maybe we could get you a show along the lines of
Hell’s Kitchen
? What about
The Gardening Angel
?”

I threatened him with an interloping wildflower.

Sitting further away, he suggested, “
The Hothouse Hellion
?”

“Now you’re talkin’, Augie.” The warmth of laughter bubbled inside me.

We went way back, Augie and me. I’d met him as the twenty-five-year-old harried personal assistant to Ginger Wentworth. My second month on the job, she’d decided to redecorate her sprawling downtown mansion, and I was to vet all potential designers before presenting my finds to her.

Unfortunately I knew shit from shinola about interior design.

Taking one look at me as I shuttled stacks of paper back and forth, barely managing a tremulous smile at the personable popinjay, Augie had tsked me. “Oh, honey, she got you run ragged already? Let’s get you a cup of tea,” he’d stage whispered, “and I’ll treat you to a cocktail after we get this over with.”

A good twenty years older than me, August DuBose took me under his wing and managed not only to land Ginger’s account, thereby launching his third career as a much sought-after designer to the Charleston elite–he’d first been a carpenter of fine furnishings and secondly a solicitor, a true Renaissance man–the gay gad-about-town became my closest friend.

“And in your blue flowerbed?” Only family and close friends knew about the genesis of this part of the garden, started with bulbs of grape hyacinth last autumn. I was no Picasso, but I had my reasons for this blue hued homage to sadness.

Deflecting further questions, I concentrated on the centerpiece of the somber flowerbed.

Augie didn’t take the hint, musing, “Interview went well, then?”

“I don’t wanna talk about it.” I pouted.

“I can see it now. Y’all charmed them with your vocabulary and vulgar wit, didn’t you?”

“Actually…” I brushed off clots of dirt, flicking bits at him before fetching my sweet tea. “I got another interview day after tomorrow.”

“Lawdy, lawdy. That is a turn out for the books.” Standing up, he scanned me conspiratorially. “What you gonna wear, honey?”

“It’s always nice to see you have your priorities straight.”

“’Bout the only straight thing about me.” He winked. “Y’all can’t deny you’re a hot mess, Miss Shay. I seen you all gussied up, but right now? You’re a disgrace to your womanhood, and I ain’t takin’ you out like this.”

He strolled a full circle around me before laying in. “With your rich claret hair properly styled, your milky white skin, those strikin’ gray eyes, you could turn yourself out right nicely. Girl, with those tits...if I were into babes instead of boys, a whole lotta you is easy on the eye. You just gotta believe it.”

“Oh, I believe it alright, I believe you’re full of shit.”

“Y’all could be a glamazon, but instead you’re lookin’ like Priscilla Queen of the Desert, ’ceptin those drag queens had better clothes and makeup than you.” He opened the door for me.

I deflected his comment, with my middle finger. “Shut the hell up so I can get ready before Palmer comes home.”

Upstairs, I grabbed a sundress and continued to the bathroom. Turning on the shower and listening to the hot water clang its way into the old pipes until it burst out with a splutter, I flung open the small window–flung it all of three inches before it shuddered to a stop in the warped jamb–sat on the sink and lit a smoke. Palmer didn’t approve of me taking up this bad habit again, and he definitely didn’t like me doing it in the house. So I appeased him by smoking on the sly, freed by this harmless rebellion.

Showering and dressing, I turned the question over and over, like the pile of mulch I kept in the back yard. Why was I even tempted by Mr. Boone’s proposal?

Hmm, let’s see. Get a minimum wage job at Lowe’s pickin’ up shifts whenever I could, or have my panties seduced off me by a tall, dark and delicious sex god? Apply for a job with Doody Calls: Premier Pet Waste Removal Specialists, or shack up with the Golden Shaft? Yeah, scoop poop or make whoopee, that was the damn question.

Then I remembered Reardon’s expression when he’d told me I was free to leave. Beneath his delectable exterior there’d been loneliness in him.

Not that I was looking to be his savior. Hell no. He’d sooner turn to the so-called gentleman’s club of The Southern Belle before turning to the Southern Baptist or
this
non-southern belle for deliverance from whatever demons might chase him.

He could keep his skeletons in the closet. I’d do the same with mine.

I was digging out.

I was planting up.

I had an escape plan and now an offer
.

The telltale rattle of Palmer’s truck intruding on my thoughts, I flushed my second cigarette down the toilet. Our vehicles were matching his and hers: Tweedle-Dee-Piece-of-Shit and Tweedle-Dum-Wheeze-and-Hum. Palmer’s truck bed was filled with debris from the job, his exhaust burping a litany of fumes. The Bulls Bay Marine Contractors decal was graffitied with road muck, pebbles sticking to it like barnacles.

I noted his heavy tread and his voice, low and sharp. He was tired and I bet the ranch he carried a brown-bagged beverage along with the remnants of his brown-bagged lunch.

He wasn’t always like this, my Palmer. He’d been a real heartthrob back in the day, a loving husband, interested in everything about me, in building our life. Pain and self-hate had destroyed him.

On the foot of the stairs, I hung over the newel post and peered into the living room. He lounged against the doorframe and Augie sat on the arm of the sofa.

Their silent stand-off threatened imminent detonation.

Brushing past Palmer to defuse the tension, I was caught off guard when he pulled me to his side, kissing my temple.

I bristled at his fake show of affection and his obvious pissing contest comment.

“Hey, babe, thought you were goin’ out with your girlfriend this evenin’.” He chuckled before he got to the very old punchline of the joke. “Oh, right, so you are. Hi, Ass-Auger.”

They’d always goaded one another. It used to be good-natured and amusing; now it was nasty and antagonizing.

“Palmer, please.” I stayed put, shooing Augie outside.

At the door, he shot back, “So nice to see you again, Palmer.” In an undertone he mentioned, “Maybe if you spent less time palming your dick, you could do right by your wife.”

I glared at Augie. I did not want them to do this now. “You. Car. Now.”

I remained pressed against Palmer when the door closed, my heart pounding in my chest.

“Sorry, Shay.” Unused to the feel of me so near, he shifted away. “Long day is all.”

“I didn’t mean to–”

He held up his hands, always warding me off. “No, it’s fine.” His lips turned down. “Just have fun tonight.”

Tears sprigged in my eyes. I blinked them back fast. “I won’t be late.”

“’S okay. I’ll probably sleep in the spare room. Got an early start tomorrow.”

If I’d hoped for a hug, a kiss, I would’ve been disappointed by Palmer’s taciturn send-off. But hope for us was long gone.

Down the overgrown walkway, I piled into Augie’s open top roadster and slammed the door. “Totally uncalled for, Augie.”

“If he’s gonna dish it out, I’m gonna serve it back, honey. Besides, you deserve–”

I interrupted. “I ain’t never getting what I deserve, so don’t. Please. Not tonight.” At his nod, I gripped his hand and joked, “Now how’s about we go get some fruits for the fruit?”

We spent the evening wandering around the Mt. Pleasant Farmers Market. Beneath brand spanking new barn-style awnings, we made from one end to the other. Almost everything in this formerly Podunk town had been prettied-up, made over into a suburbanite spread with pinpoint pockets of real folk dotted between. Snowden, Five Mile, Six Mile, the Old Village, were communities where the born and bred families of Mt. Pleasant hung on. Selling their sweetgrass baskets and yellow barbeque and fried catfish lunches by the side of the road.

A whole lot of Mt. Pleasant had been airbrushed by new money settling in. Not me. Growing up, we never knew a stranger. Easy-going, slow-paced, the smell of honeysuckle arbors and us kids yelling from one yard to the next...someone always had an eye out for us when it was still a front-porch culture.

We’d lived in the Old Village, at the mouth of the Charleston Harbor. My daddy a longshoreman at the docks, my momma had inherited our cottage from her grandmammy. Our small parcel of land was a Jussely birthright, something to keep in the family, right next door to my Mimi’s house. On the other side of us were neighbors whose family had been there since the Old Village was the original Greenwich Village, populated in the 1800’s. Though the area caught a fair sea breeze, it was never an enclave for the plantation gentry seeking relief from the threat of mosquito and malaria. Genuine people resided there, still did, amidst the stifling new rises of four story houses blotting out the riverside vista.

With my daddy’s accident, we’d lost our property, and Momma and I lost him. His chest was crushed by an ill-handled crate from an Evergreen cargo ship. My brawny, stevedore daddy–the man who’d set the sun on his able shoulders–was more dead than alive when we’d reached the hospital.

He’d opened his eyes when I’d touched him. “Shay.”

Sobbing, I’d grabbed his hands. “Daddy!”

He’d managed to turn his head to me, and into my ear he’d whispered, “Y’all take good care of your momma.” A trapped breath pinballed inside his torso. “You make good on yo’self. You’re almost a woman now. I’ll be countin’ on you, Tiger Lily.”

I’d been inconsolable when they’d pulled Momma and me off him to check his vitals. The inconstant bleep-bleep-bleep ended in an alarming high-pitched siren that still woke me up at night.

Daddy’s hospital bills bankrupted us, health insurance already on the rise. His funeral was paid on credit to J. Henry Stuhr. My momma became a broke single mother and a widow.

Me, fatherless.

Us, homeless.

Landowners no more. It was a hell of a thing to endure the end of my second year in high school, but at least I had Palmer.

We couldn’t keep pace with escalating Old Village property taxes at any rate, not without Daddy’s paycheck. Good thing Momma was frugal because she hardly had any time to mourn.

Grief was an old friend to me and Momma, one that kept on a-callin’. But that didn’t stop us Motte women from settling our skirts and getting on about our business.

Setting my sunglasses on my nose, I found Augie haggling over a punnit of strawberries, asking the vendor why he should pay the high price when he could head out to Boone Hall Plantation and pick them himself.