J Jance - Queen of the Night

He had called Zack from Albuquerque, just to say hello. He hadn’t planned on stopping by to see him, but Zack had shamed him into it.

“If you’re on your way back to California, we’re right on the way.”

That wasn’t exactly true since Albuquerque was a lot farther north, but Jack had allowed himself to be persuaded mostly because he wasn’t eager to get back to California. His kids still lived there, but Jack no longer did.

The fateful phone call had taken place toward the end of June. At the time Jack had known nothing about Zack’s and Ruth’s involvement with Tohono Chul. As docents they would have lots to do the night of the bloom party, but they didn’t mention the possibility of a party on the phone when he gave them his ETA. In hindsight he now understood why that was-they hadn’t known exactly when the party would take place because no one knew exactly when the night-blooming cereus would do its thing.

He had driven up to their house at nearly five o’clock on a very hot June afternoon. Zack and Ruth had ushered him and his suitcases into the house. Then, after a little bit of small talk and giving him half an hour to shower and change clothes, they had loaded him into the car to go to the park to, of all things, a flower show.

At least that’s how Jack understood it. Jack Tennant had learned several things about himself during his months of solo traveling. Irene had always loved flowers-all kinds of flowers-but Jack didn’t much care for them. His low opinion about them hadn’t improved, not after visiting the Rose Festival in Portland, Oregon, nor after seeing the autumn leaves in New England and the cherry blossoms in Washington, D.C. So although Jack had no interest in flowers and wasn’t particularly excited about the one they were raving about, he behaved as a polite guest should and went along for the ride.

Once inside Tohono Chul, Zack had raced off to make sure the luminarias that lined the park’s dirt paths that night stayed lit. Ruth had a job to do, too, in the gift shop, so she handed Jack a glass of punch and introduced him to Abby Southard. Then his sister-in-law had taken off, leaving Jack and Abby chatting.

Not long after that, a rotund old Indian man dressed in boots, jeans, and a splashy black cowboy shirt took to the microphone. For the next half hour he regaled the people in the audience with a story-a Native American legend-about the supposed origin of the flower in question. Since Jack had yet to see a night-blooming cereus with his own eyes, he supposed this was a lot of fuss over nothing.

As this grown-up version of story time ended, one of the volunteers had hurried up to notify Abby Southard that they were about to run out of punch and ice. She had no more than dispatched someone to the nearest grocery store to handle that crisis when a frantic guest had appeared with the disturbing announcement that a rattlesnake seemed to have taken up residence close by one of the blooms.

On the way to the park, Zack had explained that Tohono Chul was devoted to preserving native desert flora. It was only natural, then, that the park would preserve some of the local fauna as well. Without turning a hair, Abby explained to Jack that rattlesnakes were as likely to show up at the Queen of the Night party as people were. Then she used a handheld walkie-talkie to summon a man with a snake-stick to take charge of the offending reptile and move it to a somewhat less traveled part of the park.

Jack had been intrigued. He had never met a woman who could handle both a punch crisis and a rattlesnake crisis at the same time. Irene had been petrified of snakes-and lizards and spiders and bees and wasps. By comparison Abby had seemed downright fearless, and good-humored besides.

“So you have to wrangle both the punch bowl and the rattlesnakes?” he had asked.

“Yup,” she said with a grin. “That’s me all over.”

Fascinated, Jack had spent most of the rest of the evening hanging out with her, and it was with Abby Southard at his side that he had seen his first-ever night-blooming cereus. Truth be told, he wasn’t that impressed-with the flower, that is. Oh, he managed a polite ooh and aah over the size of it and over the smell-which didn’t do that much for him, either, but he could see that Abby was enchanted with the night-blooming cereus, and he was enchanted with her.

He made like the old woman in the Indian legend and put down roots right away. After only two nights in Zack and Ruth’s guest room, he had taken himself off to one of those corporate long-term-stay hotels, the kind that come furnished with everything from sheets and pillows (bad ones) to pots, pans, and dishes.

Zack thought paying rent was a bad idea. He said that if Jack was going to stay around Tucson, he ought to find himself a real condo to buy, maybe one on a golf course. But Jack had no interest in going on a real estate hunt. He had set his sights on some other prey, and Abigail Southard was it. Because she came with a perfectly nice home of her own, he saw no need to fork over money to buy another. He figured two would be able to live as cheaply as one, especially if they had more money in the bank.

Jack Tennant and Abby Southard had met on the twenty-sixth of June and had married on the twenty-sixth of July. Everyone had told them it was stupid to jump into matrimony that way. Zack and Ruth had both disapproved, and so had Abby’s older sister, Stephanie.

“What’s the big rush?” Zack had asked. “I mean, at your age, it’s not as if you knocked her up or something.”

Emmy and Lonnie, Jack’s own forty-something kids, hadn’t much liked the arrangement, either. They had both been invited to the justice of the peace ceremony, and both had declined. Jack suspected that Abby’s son, Jonathan, would have taken much the same position, but he had been estranged from his mother for years-in fact, he hadn’t spoken to her in over a decade. The good news there was that Jack and Abby hadn’t had to deal with Jonathan’s disapproval along with everyone else’s.

All the naysayers were still nay-saying, waiting for the “hurried” marriage to end in disaster. In the process Zack and Ruth Tennant had pretty much removed themselves from Jack and Abby’s circle of friends. They had even gone so far as to sever their connections with Tohono Chul, including resigning their docent positions. Abby had worried about that, but their departure hadn’t fazed Jack.

“So much for what the relatives think,” he had told her with a grin. “If they can’t take a joke, screw ’em. The only thing that matters is what you and I think. By the time we met, both of us were old enough to understand we don’t have all the time in the world. Let’s make hay while the sun shines.”

And they had done so. On the fifth anniversary of their meeting and one month short of their fifth wedding anniversary, the two of them were as happy as they had ever been. They were better matched, too-better matched than Jack had been with Irene, once he retired, and than Abby had ever been with Hank.

Irene hadn’t been that bad initially, he reminded himself. When Jack had been a young hotshot executive, working his way up, she had been a powerhouse. She had been a good mother to his two now grown children. When the kids were little and Jack was putting in the long hours at work, Irene had been the parent who had done most of the child rearing. By the time the kids were out of the house, however, and once Jack retired, he and Irene had discovered that they had nothing in common. Not only had they fallen out of love, they had fallen out of like as well.

For Abby and Jack Tennant, love really was lovelier the second time around. When they were out in public and holding hands, people sometimes said they were cute. That didn’t bother Jack, either. He still felt like a damned newlywed, and he didn’t care who knew it.