The Wedding Gift (6 page)

Chapter 8

God almighty, you never
heard the like of the fight Jessie and I had that Saturday
afternoon. She called me a gold digging little whore, and I called
her jealous white trash, and hell it went on for about two hours
all during which I was busy getting ready. I had told George that I
would get a ride to the airstrip and meet him at three. I had
assumed Jessie would just be happy for me, but that girl went nuts.
She was all “
He’s a hundred years old,
short and ugly as sin. What if your daddy finds
out?
” Shoot, I thought she would never calm
down. I finally had to grab her by the shoulders and slam her down
on the bed and talk to her straight.

I said to her
“
Listen Jessie, it’s okay for you …you
have Mark, and he is your soul mate and all that, but I don’t have
anyone. I think George is real nice and cute too and he ain’t a
hundred, he’s not even thirty. And anyways, every girl likes an
older man, and I’m going to do this, and if you’re my friend,
you’re going to help me
.”

She calmed down then, but
Jessie being Jessie she just had to needle me a little more.
“
Okay, Leeann, y’all go for it, and have a
ball, but you just make sure to remember that you’re loaning me
whatever you get him to buy for you today. But I gotta know
something though. Since when did the older man you been thinking
about become fat old George Willets and not Donny God almighty
Readle?
”

Oh sometimes I just hated
Jessie.

Donny Readle had been my
brother Charlie’s best friend, “
his
brother from another mother
” is what we
kids called him. Donny and Charlie, they had always been together.
Mama said if you saw one the other weren’t but two feet away, and
the day Charlie died they had been together then too.

Donny had been around the
house a lot when I was growing up. He would come over to eat Mama’s
pies, and help out Daddy with projects around our house. I guess he
didn’t have any parents of his own because he lived with his Uncle
Hank in a nasty looking trailer down by the river. After Charlie
died, I guess Donny must have missed our family almost as much as
he missed Charlie because he was always there.

Mama and Daddy loved him;
so did Randy, and so did I. But I never, ever loved him like a
brother. From as far back as I can remember, I loved Donny Readle
and planned to marry him. While other girls in fourth grade were
writing down the name of their future husbands who in most cases
was the boy sitting in the desk in front of them, I was writing
down 'Mrs. Donald Readle' or 'Leeann Readle'. He was so beautiful
…Donny. Not that you call boys that but he was - he is -
beautiful.

Donny he cleared six foot
by the time he was fifteen and he got another couple inches after
that. He has this thick gold hair that goes almost white in the sun
and these real long narrow green eyes that always looked like they
were squinting. You want to know how pretty he is, well think Heath
Ledger only better. He’s got the whitest teeth you ever saw on a
person when he grins, which wasn’t very often when I was growing
up, and so when he did, I nearly died each time he
smiled.

Even though Donny had that
real blond hair, he was always tan, even in the winter. Daddy
called him a blond injun, and that always made Donny laugh. He may
have looked at me like Charlie’s baby sister, and his unofficial
little sister, but I knew all my life that he was it for me; the
one and only man I would ever want or need. And see, because I knew
that, in that deep way that I think only a girl can know, I was
patient.

You always hear that old
line guys say to girls … “
I’m waiting for
you to grow up
”. Only this time it was me;
I was waiting for me to grow up, and when I did, I would tell him,
and, oh hell I would show him too! I had been planning how to do
just that since I was about eleven years old, so after all these
years of planning, I figured I could make that boy forget ever
looking at me like a little sister again.

And then, last year, when I
was almost there … almost ready, he got married. It happened out of
the blue. He was up in Kansas City on a job (he drives long haul)
and he met Carlene in a bar, and married her a week
later.

Mama and Daddy were shocked
and Randy, he thought it was funny. Me? Well I think I died right
there and then and I have just been haunting my old life now. Mama
said Carlene was trash and I guess she was but it didn’t matter
none. Mama said if I wanted to look for proof, why just look at
that nasty tattoo of Donny’s name she had on her shoulder. I
pretended to agree with Mama but, oh shoot, I would have loved to
have his name tattooed on me, and have his hands on me at night
too.

Thinking on all this, I
just looked at Jessie when she said that. I looked at her long and
for once she dropped her eyes first. See Jessie had been in love
with Mark Smokels since they were both about five, I think, and she
had known her whole life just where she was going and with who.
Since grade school we had planned how it was going to be; she would
marry Mark, and I would marry Donny in a double ceremony the day
after we graduated from high school and then we would get
apartments right next door to each other. And she would support
Mark while he went to school, and wait to have babies for a few
years. I would have my babies right away because my man was already
an adult with a career and everything. I would, of course, have at
least one baby when Jessie did though - a girl - so our daughters
could grow up together and be best friends forever just like
us.

Instead of that, I had the
rest of my life to wonder what Donny would have said if I hadn’t
waited to grow up. Shoot, I had all the time in the world to lie
around crying and wondering what might have happened if I had just
gone to him last year when I was already “
the prettiest girl in Dalton
”… gone
on up to him and told him straight out what was true, and told him
that it always would be. But I didn’t do none of that, so he
married trashy Carlene and I was fixing to go on my big adventure
with George.

Knowing how I felt about
all this, Jessie she backed down real fast then, and even lent me
her zirconium earrings to go with my jeans and lace blouse and Frye
boots. I could tell Jessie felt real bad about bringing up Donny
'cause, about halfway to the airfield which was nearly thirty miles
outside town, she pulled the truck over and said with this big poop
eating grin “
Shoot, Leeann, don’t be all
nervous; that ole boy may be richer than God but he’s still just a
damn man and when he gets a look at you, he’ll drop his teeth down
his throat. Here let’s have us a little J and T to calm you
down
.”

J and T was Jessie’s way of
being funny 'cause her mama was always saying “
Oh I need me a G and T to calm me down
,” which in Jessie’s mama’s case was a gin and tonic, which is
all she drank on account of she said it was a way to stay thin and
still have fun. In our case, Jessie’s and mine, J meant a joint and
T was a shot of Wild Turkey from the flask with her initials on it
which had been Mark’s gift to her on her seventeenth birthday; it
matched the one he had. So I told her hell yes, that was just what
I needed, and we fired up the J and drank a couple long swallows of
the T and I started to feel pretty good. Jessie hollered
“
hell yeah
” real
loud and then she cranked up the radio and drove us to the airstrip
at about a hundred miles an hour.

When we got there, she
turned down the radio, and looked over at the plane which was
really a small jet, and just grinned and shook her head.
“
All right, Girl, you go on and do this
thing up right. I’ll be waiting right here at midnight to pick you
up and hear every detail, so don’t do nothing I wouldn’t, you
hear?
” Then she hugged me real tight, and
in the rearview I saw George driving up real fast in the Humvee
which I guess was his winter car; the Jaguar being what he drove
all summer. I hugged her back and got out of the truck and walked
towards him.

George looked real good; he
had on faded jeans and a white shirt, and he grinned from ear to
ear when he saw me
. “Hey, Leeann, don’t
you look like something? Well come on in, and let’s get this show
on the road
.” I looked back for Jessie but
she was already driving off, and then the pilot came to the door of
the plane.

“
Hey, Mr. Willets, Ma’am,
shall we be heading out? I have a landing scheduled for four p.m.
in the Big D
.” I followed George up the
little stairs and into that plane and, oh my lord, it was
something. Instead of rows of seats it had suede couches and there
were these real fancy paintings of nude women and flowers in big
old gilt frames. The plane had its own bathroom with a pink marble
shower, and there was even a bedroom with a mink spread on the bed.
I backed out of there real fast, though. When we sat down on the
couch, George reached into a little refrigerator and pulled out a
whole bottle of champagne, and that’s how we started.

Chapter 9

By the time we landed, I
was more than half way drunk, but George, he just thought it was
cute. When we got out of the plane there was the biggest damn limo
you ever saw waiting for us at the private airstrip. It wasn’t a
rental either; it had the Willets Petroleum sign on the door.
George said they kept a car and a suite in town as they did so much
business in Dallas.

Before I knew it we were in
downtown Dallas and pulling up at the Galleria. When we got inside
Neiman’s it was so beautiful and smelled so good, that I figured
heaven must be a lot like a good department store. (God help me if
my mama ever reads this). And what with me not being any too sober,
it all seemed like a dream.

There was this real pretty
salesgirl and she acted like she knew George. She took us into this
real fancy room called a private dressing salon where she made a
huge big deal, raving over my figure and my hair. Then she brought
out like twenty dresses for me to try on. George just sat outside
my dressing room in a big chair like a damned sultan and, shoot,
they even brought him a whiskey and poured me more champagne -
which I did not need - while I modeled the dresses for
him.

In the end he bought me
five of them, and the total was almost twenty thousand dollars;
then the saleslady added a pair of high black heels that she called
Jimmy Choos which both George and I thought was hilarious, and a
black Kelly bag. The total for all this was another five thousand
dollars. So when George suggested that we have a drink in his suite
at the Mansion on Turtle Creek before dinner, I knew what was
coming all right, but by then I was awful drunk, and I was pretty
giddy, what with thinking about my clothes and all. I didn’t much
care about what he was gonna do to me and anyway I needed to lie
down right about then, which I did. I just sprawled out on that
pretty gold duvet like Marie Antoinette or somebody. That hotel
room was the fanciest room I had ever seen and George, well he was
real nice, but he was pretty drunk so he didn’t even bother to get
my jeans all the way off or his own either.

I wasn’t a virgin. Even
though I always only loved Donny, well last year at homecoming I
had way too much of everything and I let Billy Danwood, my date,
have his way with me. It didn’t matter … I hadn’t really cared
about being a virgin, and being one was never a part of my big
seduction plan with Donny anyway, which to be strictly honest
played out in my head more like a naughty schoolgirl in 'Girls Gone
Wild' than the whole virgin sacrifice thing.

So it wasn’t like George
defiled my innocence or nothing. But there was one thing; even
though. I was drunk, well I had been drunk last time too, and I
specifically remembered Billy messing around for what seemed like
an hour with his damn condom, and George hadn’t done none of that.
Right before I passed out, I remember thinking that maybe he had
put one on ahead of time knowing this was going to
happen.

After that first time,
George and I started meeting up at his daddy’s hunting cabin,
mostly on Saturday afternoons but sometimes after I got out of
school too. The hunting cabin was the one place that Miz Willets
hadn’t gotten her nasty French manicured nails into. It was just a
little one room place with a pot bellied stove and two old camp
beds that we would push together to make one.

I liked it though … the
little place sat right at the edge of Lake Injun. The lake wasn’t
really named that. It had some long Native American name that none
of us could pronounce worth a damn. Lake Injun was just what we
called it. I have always loved being at that lake more than
anyplace in the world. I used to come out with my daddy and fish
for wide mouth bass sometimes. It’s kind of funny, but back when I
was still planning out my life with Donny, I would see us out there
in a boat a lot of times in my head.

That sort of thinking
didn’t help me much now that I was with George. What helped with
George was the Wild Turkey we would drink, and sometimes the line
or two of coke which George almost always had on him.

George, he was different
too at the cabin, more relaxed, happier. He acted more like a guy
my age than his when we were out there. He told me it was his
favorite place in the world and said it had been his daddy’s
favorite place too. His daddy and his brother Roger used to come up
there all the time to fish and shoot at grouse.