Leo and I walked outside and stood looking across a shady backyard filled with a swimming pool and Stone’s exercise equipment. I could just see a little whitewashed house on the knoll next door, buried behind honeysuckle vines and the thick arms of giant oaks. High up in the oaks, a little-boy face peered out at me like a midget in a leaf suit. He lived in the little house. I had gotten the low-down on him at the Wagon Wheel. Brian. Parents dead, living with his granny, and granny worked for Helen Bagshaw as an assistant housekeeper. He was spying on Stone’s backyard for Grace’s benefit. And I let him.
I winked at him.
He disappeared like a squirrel on dog alert.
Leo slumped. “You saved my wimpy bacon in there. Just like you did on that insane raft trip down the Colorado. Thank you.”
“Nah. You did it yourself.”
“He hates me. He wishes I’d drowned that day on the river. Died like a man when he threw me out of the raft. Blub blub. See? I can take it like a man. Blub. If you hadn’t disobeyed his orders and dived in after me—”
“He loves ya. Loves ya like crazy. He just doesn’t know how to deal with a son who has a big brain and little biceps, instead of the other way around.”
Leo sighed. “He thinks I’m capable of cold-blooded seduction. But I refuse to treat Mika as a sexual conquest. My mother would revoke my lifetime membership in the National Organization of Women.”
“Relax, hoss. Mika’s already on your side.”
He brightened. “You think so? Really? I’m crazy about her.”
“If she was any more on your side she’d pull out her feathers and make a love nest in her computer bag.”
Leo grinned. “So I’m chick bait, huh? I like it.” He rubbed his hands together gleefully. “Okay. So what do we do, next?”
I pondered the spring sunshine and listened to the birds. I looked at the spot high up in the trees, where Grace’s miniature spy had hidden. All for the love of Grace. Have faith in love, a chickadee sang. Risk falling out of the nest.
“We’ll take our birds a gift,” I said.
As I headed out the door at Bagshaw Downs to meet my cousin Dew and start on my latest multi-state lecture tour of high schools, G. Helen followed me in a froth of silk blouse and snug tan pants. Mika was already waiting in the car. “I’m not leaving her with you, you bad influence,” I told G. Helen.
My grandmother wasn’t fazed. With her tinted red hair up in a twist and her girly figure making her look a good deal less than nearly seventy years old, she sashayed after me with a white-tipped nail wagging in the dappled sun of the veranda. “May I speak frankly?”
“G. Helen, have you ever not spoken frankly?”
“You’re still determined to be pissed over my pragmatic deception, which was for your own good.”
We halted in the towering shadows of the veranda’s jasmine. White columns held up the mansion around us, held up the sky, held up a cushy Bagshaw world. I couldn’t stop thinking how Boone had looked sitting there in that softly fractured light, a force of his own nature, a deep Southern river of stubborn hope and sex and damaged dreams, pulling my pristine mountain light to himself. “I’m listening,” I said, a little breathless.
“After your grandfather died I took up with a boyfriend within six months. No brag, just fact. And I’ve kept myself in the pink ever since. Even now, in my dotage, I’m getting plenty.”
“Like that’s a surprise? The whole family, the whole town, the whole county knows you and your new honey are cavorting around the woods at Chestatee Ridge like teenagers with a blanket and a bong.”
“Jack Roarke doesn’t cavort. We’re partners in a real estate project. We’re going to build houses. When you come back from your trip I’ll introduce you to Jack. You’ll like him.”
“I’m glad you have a wild and wonderful sex life.”
“No, you’re not glad. You adore me but deep-down you suspect I’m self-centered and hedonistic. So let me explain something to you, in case you haven’t paid attention to the family’s whispers over the years. Your grandfather married me over the horrified objections of just about every Bagshaw in this county. I was nothing, nobody, too young and too coarse to be a Bagshaw—he knew it and I did, too. But he was homely and shy and I was the most beautiful tight-assed white-trash teenager he could ever dream of owning.”
“G. Helen,” I said gently.
“Don’t feel sorry for me, goddammit. I knew exactly what I was doing. I took the opportunities God gave me along with my tight ass and I made something good happen. Life is basic and practical, Grace. Money, fame, beauty, smarts—none of it means anything if you’re not getting any. And by ‘any’ I mean more than sex. I mean joy.”
“I’m sorry, but please just leave me alone to be a boring, neo-Victorian throwback. I’m happy being frustrated and miserable.”
“What an absolute pile of horseshit. You lost the only man you’ve ever slept with and so you think you owe it to him to ponder the subtle meanings of sex forever-and-ever-Amen before you sleep with someone else.”
“I haven’t cared much about sex, one way or the other, since Harp died.”
“Horseshit, I say again.”
“I’ve had offers. Lots of them. I haven’t been cruel in my rejections.”
“A baseball player, a big businessman, an artist—darling, you haven’t just rejected men, you’ve rejected the whole spectrum of fantasy manhood.”
“I don’t need fantasy. I’m just not ready. My. . .loneliness is preferable to my. . .neediness.”
“Please. Drop the Jane Austen euphemisms. Loneliness? Neediness? How about plain old-fashioned horniness? You’re desperately in need of a good—”
“Why did you pick this moment, when I’m walking out the door for a long trip, to go green-gold on me?”
“You’re only thirty-four. You’re healthy, you’re damned fine looking, and you’ve grieved honorably long enough. You need to get naked and get yourself a pet pecker with a man attached.”
“I love it when you talk like a Teamster.”
“I have a pecker in mind for you. You know whose.”
“I’ll pick my own pet pecker, thank you.”
She took me by the shoulders. “From the moment Mika and I started corresponding with Boone Noleene I knew he was special. You don’t think I’ve checked him out thoroughly? Of course I have. He’s a loyal man who puts up with that dumbass lug, Senterra, and he’s practically become a big, kind uncle to Senterra’s son, and Senterra’s little girls’ adore him, and Senterra’s wife trusts him to guard those little girls. He’s not your average ex-con. He’s had some shitty luck in his past, and if he’s not careful his charming, ne’r-do-well brother will hand him another shitty run of luck in the future. That brother is getting out of prison soon and that could mean trouble. That’s why Boone needs you. He needs you to stand between him and the call of the wild. He’s a lost soul in search of an anchor. He’s another Harp—only he’s got more potential than Harp had. You know I loved Harp, but I have to say Harp was born looking for ways to die but Boone was born looking for ways to live.”
A feeling like hot ice slid down my cheeks. The truth is more than skin-deep. You can feel it in your bones, even when you’re ignoring it on the surface. “I don’t want to hear you talk that way about Harp. Ever.”
“Give Boone a chance.”
“He works for Senterra. I have my principles.”
She pried her hands off my shoulders, brought her hands to my lips, and kissed my knuckles. “Life is short, nights are long, and principles without common sense are not green gold. They’re fool’s gold.”
I’d traveled all over the world as Stone’s bodyguard—movie sets in the wilds of New Zealand, tuxedo premieres in Paris and Tokyo (the Stone Man was huge in France, where they called him The Rock Grand, and Japan, where they called him The Very Big Rock,) and even on Senterra family vacations. From the snowy ski slopes of Aspen to the hot beaches of Tahiti, I’d been there, done that.
So when I say the coast of Georgia is special, I know from special. Savannah is a city like my own stomping grounds, New Orleans. Old and old world, with moss-draped live oaks and the smell of the sea in the air. The in-town historic district is built on block after block of deep, green money and snooty good looks and the kind of houses where the curlicued iron gates of the courtyards have longer pedigrees than yo’ mama. Everywhere I went I heard the lady-whisper of park fountains and the clack and jingle of horsedrawn tourist carriages. I like a place where there’s a fancy pub on one corner, a fancy two-hundred-year-old church on the other, and a statue of a fancy French pirate in between.
Leo recited technical stats on the giant cargo ships sliding by the riverfront and figured the volume of the mermaid fountain in the courtyard of our little hotel. “One hundred liters per hour, give or take a liter,” he said. “Allowing for the splash factor and evaporation.”
“It’s more like a hundred-twenty-two liters per hour, given the rate of flow and the circumference of the basin.”
He stared at me, impressed. “Why do you hide your engineering skills behind a façade of down-home rhetoric?”
“If I answer that you’ll know I know what rhetoric means.”
“You could design houses. You have all the know-how. Dad would help you get started—”
“I’m a bodyguard, not an architect. What’s done is done. And your dad didn’t take me to raise. No.”
“But—”
“Time to go. Ditch the beignet.” I pointed to the pastry in his hands. Leo was trying hard to put some meat on his skinny bones.
He took another huge bite and swallowed it whole. “This thing is good. I’m a secret sugar freak. Mother says it’s the only major trait I inherited from Dad. She says during the one year they were married he lived on doughnuts and steroids. He was a pro wrestler, then.”
“Wrestle that beignet into the trash and let’s go lure some women .” I brushed powdered sugar off the NASA vest Leo wore with baggy jeans. “You want your lady to think you’re sweet, not fluffy. The ladies like a man who dresses sharp and shows a little cuff.” I tugged on the floppy cuffs of the too-big dress shirt he wore under the vest. A pang twisted my heart. I’d learned my lady-cuff lore from Armand.
Bro, Armand had written just the other day from Angola, when I get out the first thing I want is a great Armani suit showing an inch of fine cuff on each sleeve. A man can get away with any magic trick if he dresses his hands up. I’ll take you to Vegas for a helluva time at the tables.
That kind of talk didn’t exactly ease my worries about keeping him out of trouble.
Leo grinned as he tossed the French version of a doughnut into an outside trash can. We headed for a taxi waiting at the curb. “But you’re not a cuff man, and you do all right with the babes.” He nodded at my black pants and black golf shirt. I’d spent a lot of time picking out an outfit that would look like what I thought Grace would like. Dark, but casual. I shrugged. “Darth Golfer,” I said.
“Ninja Golfer,” Leo countered.
“Shaddup. Do as I say, not as I do. I was born to be a bad example.”
Thirty minutes later we walked into the plain little lobby of a plain little public high school in a low-rent part of the Savannah suburbs. Leo eyed the surroundings with a frown. “If Grace wants donations for the Harp Vance scholarship fund, why doesn’t she speak at the private schools to rich kids who have rich parents?”
“She’s not looking for donations. She’s looking for poor kids who need scholarships.” Gracie. Gracie. You’ve got my poor-kid heart in your hands, already.
The principal knew we were coming; I’d pulled strings using Stone’s name. “How nice to have a representative of Mr. Senterra’s here to support Mrs. Vance’s efforts on behalf of her late husband’s scholarship fund,” he said. “Mrs. Vance must be so thrilled.”
I made a mental note. He doesn’t read the Enquirer.
“We’re just here to lend moral support. So we’ll just stand in the back and be moral.”
The principal walked us into an auditorium where about a thousand teenagers sat in rapt silence, caught in a spell. That spell was Grace, standing on a bare stage with a microphone in my hand and an eagle-angel look in her eyes. She wore a pale blue dress suit just tight enough and short enough to make the boys in the audience run their eyeballs up on stems and keep them there, but not racy enough to piss off the girls. She paced the stage, long legs gliding, her mane of red-brown hair moving on her shoulders in long waves of silk, her voice strong then soft and just a little hoarse, that whiskey drawl, a song of sex. Every teenager in the room was gap-jawed and silent, awed, hypnotized, listening to her.
And me, too.
“Wow, she’s a force of nature,” Leo whispered.
“Nature should be so lucky.”
“Passion,” Grace intoned up on the stage, her feet planted apart, one fist drawn up at her heart. “Passion. Harp Vance knew you had to fight for what you believe in, for what and who you love, and for what you passionately wanted to do with your life. And by ‘fight’ he didn’t mean seek out trouble, he didn’t mean provoke trouble, no, he meant face trouble. Face it and conquer it through patience, and courage, and determination. If you can do that, if each and every one of you sitting here today can make a vow to face your troubles that way, your lives will be filled with—”
As if I were a lightning rod in a trailer park, her eyes suddenly went straight to me. I tightened all over, on guard, thrilled, scared, hot. She stopped cold. Lost her train of thought, or dumped it at the station. Just looked at me like I couldn’t possibly have tracked her to Savannah. I nodded to her.
She continued to just stand there, staring at me.
One-thousand puzzled teenagers began to follow her lead. Little patches here and there, then bigger groups. All turning to stare. Lemmings were less organized.
“There’s Mika,” Leo said, happy and clueless. Mika sat on a front row, looking like a hip-hop pink martini in a tie-dyed pink top and pink jeans. She burst into a smile then gave him the Vulcan live-long-and-prosper hand thing. He grinned and gave it back. Beside her lounged the infamous Dew Matthews, femme de la femme de la cousine Sapphos, as swank and lean in trim white linen as a red-headed catwalk model. She eyed me the way snakes look at rats.
I decided to keep my attention on Grace. I had no choice. I raised a hand like a Hollywood Indian saying How in an old western. Me come in peace. Please, Holy Mary, start talking again and make these kids stop staring at the big bad white man in black.
“I have a surprise guest,” Grace announced as if coming out of a deep sleep. Her eyes turned sly. “I want to introduce a man who can tell you all about the other side of life and the law. A man my husband would have respected, once upon a time—but also might have arrested.”
Jaws fell on the floor and rolled around. Eyeballs bounced off the walls. Hearts stopped. Mine included.
Beside me, Leo picked up his teeth and said, “You are so screwed.”
“Mr. Boone Noleene,” Grace said loudly. She held out the microphone. “Mr. Noleene, come up here and tell everyone your life story.”
Okay, a smart man would have waved, grinned, and said, “I’ve got to meet an alien spaceship for my monthly ass probe,” then ducked out the doors. But she locked me into place with her eyes, not just challenging me but supporting me—if I had the guts to walk up on that stage and tell these poor kids that you don’t get where you want to go by scamming the system. At least not for long.
I made my way up a center aisle under the stares of teenagers I suddenly realized were young enough to be my babies. I was thirty-five years old. I had been them at their age, and I was a good example of a bad example to show them, now. I felt old.
Only Gracie didn’t see me that way. When I walked across the stage to her she held the microphone away from us and leaned close and said, “A winner never gives up. If you’re a winner, then tell them so.”
She smiled like
a beauty queen who just ate the canary, placed the microphone gently but firmly in my hand, then left me standing there. I turned slowly and faced the crowd. Me, who’d never gone to high school, much less spoken to one. I looked out at those poor kids who were just like me. All those dreams, not dead, just asleep. Grace had set me up. Now I had to deliver.
“The first thing I want to tell you,” I said to the crowd, “is don’t fall off your pony when you’re being chased through the swamps by a cop in an old Buick cruiser.”
It got stranger from there on out.
But an hour later, those kids gave me a standing ovation.
And Grace led it.
I can’t begin to do Boone justice. How incredible he looked standing up there in a soft black shirt and black trousers and black shoes; a soft casing for that tall, hard body and the harder message inside him. He knew how to talk to kids who were growing up without many good choices; he told them what it had been like to make his own not-so-good choices. He told me, along with them, about his and his brother’s heart-wrenching childhood, about their survival and their mistakes. He didn’t sugarcoat anything, he didn’t ask for sympathy, he didn’t avoid blame for a lifestyle he called ‘the soap opera of The Young And The Stupid.’
He simply told us all how it was, and how it could have been different.
And those kids listened to him, and they trusted him, and they loved him.
And so did I.
Love. The first time it crept into my mind. Standing there in the shadows of that stage, watching him, it was a feeling, not a word. I’d never have admitted it, to him or to myself. But the warm, worrisome core of it spread inside me. I’d fallen in love with Harp over many years of childhood devotion leading up to a hormone surge that sent us both into an adoring panic. I never had to plan loving him or debate loving him or wonder about the consequences. Love had simply put down more roots every year, like a lady slipper, until finally the bloom proclaimed how special it was.