Charlaine Harris - A Bone To Pick

The paper exhausted, I padded up the stairs and washed my glasses in the sink. While they dried, I squinted myopically into my closet. What was suitable for the girlfriend of the minister? Long sleeves sounded mandatory, but it was just too hot. I scooted hangers along the bar, humming tunelessly to myself. Shouldn’t the girlfriend of the minister be perky but modest? Though perhaps, at nearly thirty, I was a bit old to be perky.

For a dizzying moment I imagined all the clothes I could buy with my inheritance. I had to give myself a little shake to come back to reality and review my wardrobe of the here and now. Here we go! A sleeveless navy blue shirtwaist with big white flowers printed on it. It had a full skirt and a white collar and belt. Just the thing, with my white purse and sandals.

All dressed, with my makeup on, I popped on my glasses and surveyed the result. My hair had calmed down enough to be conventional, and the sandals made my legs look longer. They were hell to walk in, though, and my tolerance time for the high heels would expire right after church.

I walked as quickly as I safely could from my back door across the patio, out the gate in the fence around it, to the car under the long roof that sheltered all tenants’ cars. I unlocked the driver’s door and flung it open to let the heat blast escape. After a minute I climbed in, and the air conditioner came on one second after the motor. I had worked too hard on my appearance to arrive at the Episcopal church with sweat running down my face.

I accepted a bulletin from an usher and seated myself a carefully calculated distance from the pulpit. The middle-aged couple on the other end of the pew eyed me with open interest and gave me welcoming smiles. I smiled back before becoming immersed in figuring out the hymn and prayer book directions. A loud chord signaled the entrance of the priest, acolyte, lay reader, and choir, and I rose with the rest of the congregation.

Aubrey was just beautiful in his vestments. I drifted into an intoxicating daydream of myself as a minister’s wife. It felt very odd to have kissed the man conducting the service. Then I got too involved in managing the prayer book to think about Aubrey for a while. One thing about the Episcopalians, they can’t go to sleep during the service unless they’re catnappers. You have to get up and down too often, and shake people’s hands, and respond, and go up to the altar rail for communion. It’s a busy service, not a spectator sport like in some churches. And I believed I had been to every church in Lawrenceton, except maybe one or two of the black ones.

I tried to listen with great attention to Aubrey’s sermon, since I would surely have to make an intelligent comment later. To my pleasure, it was an excellent sermon, with some solid points about people’s business relationships and how they should conform to religious teachings, too, just as much as personal relationships. And he didn’t use a single sports simile! I kept my eyes carefully downcast when I went up to take communion, and tried to think about God rather than Aubrey when he pressed the wafer into my hand.

As we were folding up our kneelers, I saw one of the couples who had spoken to Aubrey while he and I were in line at the movies. They gave me a smile and wave, and huddled to talk to the man and woman with whom I’d been sharing a pew. After that, I was beamed on even more radiantly, and the movie couple introduced me to the pew couple, who asked me about twenty questions as rapidly as they could so they’d have the whole scoop on the pastor’s honey.

I felt like I was flying under false colors-we’d only had one date. I began to wish I hadn’t come, but Aubrey’d asked me, and I had enjoyed the service. It seemed now I had to pay for it, since there was no quick exit. The crowd had bottle-necked around the church door, shaking hands and exchanging small talk with Aubrey.

“What a good sermon,” I told him warmly, when it was finally my turn. My hand was taken in both of his for a moment, pressed and released. A smooth gesture, in one quick turn showing me I was special, yet not presuming too much.

“Thanks, and thanks for coming,” he said. “If you’re going to be home this afternoon, I’ll give you a call.”

“If I’m not there, just leave a message on my machine and I’ll call you back. I may have to go over to the house.”

He understood I meant Jane’s house, and nodded, turning to the old lady behind me in line with a happy “Hi, Laura! How’s the arthritis?”

Leaving the church parking lot, I felt a distinct letdown. I guess I had hoped Aubrey would ask me to Sunday lunch, a big social event in Lawrenceton. My mother always had me over to lunch when she was home, and I wondered, not for the first time, if she’d still want me to come over when she and John Queensland got back from their honeymoon. John belonged to the country club. He might want to take Mother out there.

I was so dismal by the time I unlocked my back door that I was actually glad to see the message light blinking on the answering machine.

“Hi, Roe. It’s Sally Allison. Long time no see, kiddo! Listen, what’s this I heard about you inheriting a fortune? Come have lunch with me today if this catches you in time, or give me a call when you can, we’ll set up a time.”

I opened the book to them’s, looked up Sally’s number, and punched the right buttons.

“Hello!”

“Sally, I just got your message.”

“Great! You free for lunch since your mom is still out of town?”

Sally knew everything .

“Well, yes, I am. What do you have in mind?”

“Oh, come on over here. Out of sheer boredom, I have cooked a roast and baked potatoes and made a salad. I want to share it with someone.”

Sally was a woman on her own, like me. But she was divorced, and a good fifteen years older.

“Be there in twenty minutes, I need to change. My feet are killing me.”

“Well, wear whatever you see when you open your closet. I have on my oldest shorts.”

“Okay, bye.”

I shucked off the blue and white dress and those painful sandals. I pulled on olive drab shorts and a jungle print blouse and my huaraches and pounded back down the stairs. I made it to Sally’s in the twenty minutes.

Sally is a newspaper reporter, the veteran of an early runaway marriage that left her with a son to raise and a reputation to make. She was a good reporter, and she’d hoped (a little over a year ago) that reporting the multiple murders in Lawrenceton would net her a better job offer from Atlanta; but it hadn’t happened. Sally was insatiably curious and knew everyone in town, and everyone knew that, to get the straight story on anything, Sally was the person to see. We’d had our ups and downs as friends, the ups having been when we were both members of Real Murders, the downs having mostly been at the same time Sally was trying to make a national, or at least regional, name for herself. She’d sacrificed a lot in that bid for a life in the bigger picture, and, when the bid hadn’t been taken up, she’d had a hard time. But now Sally was mending her fences locally, and was as plugged in to the Lawrenceton power system as she ever had been. If her stories being picked up by the wire services hadn’t gotten her out of the town, it had certainly added to her power in it.

I had always seen Sally very well dressed, in expensive suits and shoes that lasted her a very long time. When I reached her house, I saw Sally was a woman who put her money on her back, as the saying goes. She had a little place not quite as nice as Jane’s, in a neighborhood where the lawns weren’t kept as well. Her car, which hadn’t been washed in weeks, sat in dusty splendor uncovered by carport or garage. Getting in it would be like climbing in an oven. But the house itself was cool enough, no central air but several window air conditioners sending out an icy stream that almost froze the sweat on my forehead.