The Liar

“I love doing it, and you gave me a chance. I guess it’s worked out pretty damn perfect for both of us.” She stepped off the little stage. “How’re you feeling?”

“Just a little queasy first thing in the morning still, but Derrick brings me saltines and ginger ale, and that usually settles it down. And look!” She turned to the side, cupped her hands on her belly. “I’m showing!”

“My goodness.” Shelby widened her eyes at the tiny, tiny bulge. “You’re enormous.”

“Maybe not yet,” Tansy said with a laugh, “but”—she lifted her shirt—“I had to jury-rig my pants with a carabiner. Can’t button them anymore. I’m going to move into yoga pants, and buy myself some maternity clothes first chance I get.”

Shelby remembered well that feeling, that glow. “They make such cute ones, so you don’t feel like you’re wearing a tent or your granny’s tablecloth.”

“I’ve already got some in a shopping basket online. I just want to make one more pass before I order. Now I know you want to get back to rehearsing, but I want to know how you’re doing.”

It couldn’t be avoided, Shelby thought. The past dogged her like a shadow at high noon. “I’m so sorry you had to talk to those agents.”

“Derrick and I were fine with that, don’t you worry.”

“Forrest said they’ve gone back to Atlanta. There wasn’t much I could do to help them find all Richard stole. I know it’s silly, but I feel like if I could remember something, or tell them something that leads them to finding even one more thing, I’d be better about it all. When it comes down to it, they told me more than I could tell them.”

“It’s hard, what they told you.”

“It taught me something. If I want Callie to grow up to be a smart, strong woman, someone who values family and friends, and respects herself, I have to show her. If I want her to know the satisfaction of making something of herself with effort and work, I have to show her. That’s what I’m trying to do.”

“It’s what you are doing.”

“I feel like I have to counterbalance—you know what I mean—all she’s going to hear one day about her father.”

“When she does, she’ll have you, and your family. She’ll have us, your friends.”

“Seems like Richard never learned, never understood that’s more than all the jewels he stole, all the money he swindled. If the years with him had any good to them, it was putting that bone deep in me. I took too much for granted before that.”

•   •   •

SHE TOOK NOTHING for granted now, not the laughter inside the salon or the sighs of pleasure in the Relaxation Room.

She gave her grandmother a quick, impulsive hug after she set more towels at the shampoo stations.

“What’s that one for?”

“Just for you. I’m happy being here with you. I’m just happy.”

“I’d be happy, too, if I had a man like Griffin Lott looking at me like I was the Venus de Milo, Charlize Theron and Taylor Swift all at once.” Crystal paused in her work, snapped her scissors. “I swear, I want a man for sex, but if Charlize Theron walked in and said, ‘Hey there, Crystal, how about we go on over to your place and roll around in the sheets?’ I believe I’d take her straight home and give that a go.”

Amused, Viola rinsed off her customer’s hair. “Charlize Theron. Is she the only one who’d tempt you to switch over from a man?”

“I believe she is. Now, that Jennifer Lawrence. She’s as pretty as they come, and I do believe she’d be nothing but fun to sit around and have a drink with. But she’s no Charlize Theron. Who’d you switch with, Shelby?”

“What?”

“Who’s your fantasy lesbian lover?”

“I never thought about it.”

Crystal just circled a finger in the air. “Give it a minute.”

No, Shelby thought again, she’d never take these crazy fun conversations for granted.

“I’d try Mystique,” she decided, and had Crystal frowning at her.

“Who?”

“She’s a super villain—from the X-Men. Forrest and Clay were just crazy for the X-Men, remember, Granny? Jennifer Lawrence, the one you’d like to have a drink with, plays her in the movies now. Mystique can change into anybody, any shape, anything. So it seems to me a roll in the sheets with her would cover about anything you were after.”

“I believe we have a winner,” Viola decreed, and sat her client down in the chair.

A couple of hours later, she cuddled baby Beau and watched Callie and Jackson play on the swing set. She thought it would rain by nightfall, she could scent it, see it. But for this moment, it was about as perfect a late spring evening as she could ask for.

Her father was delayed at the clinic, so Clay saw to a few little gardening chores, and Gilly sat in the porch rocker, banished from the kitchen by her mother-in-law.

“It ought to be illegal to feel this happy,” Gilly said.

“I’m awful glad it’s not. Today, I’d be sharing a cell with you.”

“I saw Griff today.”

She’d have to get used to people equating her happiness with Griff. And they weren’t altogether wrong. “You did?”

“I took the boys for a walk this morning, before the heat set in, and he was down the road a bit, fixing Miz Hardigan’s gate—the sheriff’s mama.”

“She was in the salon today.”