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  Granny was always beautiful on account of the fact that she owned the Cut ’n Curl. Haley had heard folks saying that Granny was the best beauty consultant in all of Last Chance, and maybe even Allenberg County.

  Granny held the phone a few inches away from her ear as Miz Bray talked back. Haley heard Miz Bray’s voice hollering on the phone, but she couldn’t really make out the words.

  Granny took a deep breath and then spoke into the phone again. “Don’t you start on Stone. He has nothing to do with whatever you think Clay did last night. You know that as well as I do. And do not lecture me on Stony’s absence from church on Sundays. The boy is troubled, and we both know it.”

  As soon as Granny said Haley’s daddy’s name, “Stone,” the angel took a step forward, like she was really, really interested. Haley was, too, on account of the fact that Miz Bray scared her and also because everyone knew Miz Bray didn’t like Daddy much.

  Granny said Miz Bray didn’t like it that Daddy never went to church like other folks. Granny said Daddy was sad about Momma, and that’s why he didn’t go to church. Granny said Daddy was mad at God. Haley thought maybe Daddy was mad at God because Momma went to live with Jesus, and that’s what made the angel sorrowful.

  Haley didn’t remember her momma any. But she sure wished she had a momma like all the rest of the kids in second grade. Maybe that’s why Daddy was sad, too.

  “Lillian, why don’t I just go on down to the hardware store and take a look at this so-called floozy and talk with Clay.” Granny stared out the kitchen window as she listened. “I promise you I will give you a full report. I’m sure there is a reasonable explanation. Clay is a good Christian man, Lillian. He wouldn’t do anything to embarrass the church.” Granny paused again as she listened to Miz Bray. “Uh huh, I’ll call you right back. Bye now.”

  Granny slammed the phone down on the hook. “I swear I will tan Clay’s backside if what she says is true,” Granny muttered. Thank goodness, Granny wasn’t smashing any dishes. It was a sign of real trouble when Granny started breaking things.

  The phone rang again, and Granny said a word Haley knew good girls weren’t ever supposed to say.

  Granny picked up the phone. “Oh, hello, Miriam. I’ve already heard from Lillian.”

  Haley knew that was Miz Miriam Randall on the phone. Miz Randall was really, really old, and she walked with a cane, but she wasn’t as scary as Miz Bray.

  “What?” Granny said, like Miz Randall had surprised her.

  The angel nodded and almost smiled for a minute, which made Haley stop petting Prissy. The angel never smiled, ever.

  “Well, that changes everything, doesn’t it?” Granny paused and listened for a moment. She looked a little happier when she spoke again. “Miriam, I am much obliged. I’m going to ride on down to the hardware store and check things out for myself. I’ll call you back when I’m done.”

  Granny hung up the phone much more gently this time. That’s when Granny remembered Haley was still in the room. She smiled down at Haley with one of those grown-up looks that meant Haley had been caught listening to something she wasn’t supposed to hear.

  “Honey, how would you like to go over to play with Betsy Maxwell?” Granny asked.

  Haley sighed. Granny wasn’t ever going to let Haley see Uncle Clay get his backside tanned. And she wasn’t ever going to let Haley meet anyone who had seen the insides of the Peach Blossom Motor Court, neither. And Granny, for sure, wasn’t ever going to tell her what the word “floozy” meant.

  Haley was stuck. She was going to have to spend a rainy day playing Barbie with dumb old Betsy Maxwell and listening to the endless caterwaulin’ of the Sorrowful Angel.

  Clay sat on a stool behind the counter at Lovett’s Hardware and stared out at the torrent through the crosshairs of the duct tape that crisscrossed the store’s plate-glass windows. Palmetto Avenue, Last Chance’s main street, looked like a river. The town’s single traffic light danced in the wind like a kite. So far, though, they hadn’t lost power, and the roof in the one-hundred-year-old building hadn’t sprung any leaks.

  Ray Betts pushed a broom across the oak floor for the one-hundredth time that morning. Clay and Ray were the only employees who had shown up for work this morning.

  Ray had come because it was a Thursday, and he knew he had to work on Thursdays. Clay was there because Ray would come to work, regardless of the weather.

  Uncle Pete was in Minnesota at the Mayo Clinic with Aunt Arlene. Cousin Alex, Arlene’s boy by her first marriage, had not deigned to appear. But that was a blessing, because Alex was a jerk.

  Alex had returned to Last Chance in August, just after Pete Whitaker had been diagnosed with cancer. Alex figured Pete was going to leave the store to his momma, Arlene, when he died. And since Alex was actually a Lovett—his granddaddy had sold the store to Pete thirty years ago—Alex reckoned on taking over once the cancer had run its likely course.

  Alex Lovett had been strutting around Lovett’s Hardware like a peacock, acting like he was the designated new boss man. He was getting on everyone’s nerves. He’d let it be known that when Pete was gone, he’d make sure Ray was the first person he let go.

  So any day Alex stayed home was one more day Clay could avoid losing his temper and knocking Alex into next week. Clay hated fighting. But a fight with Alex was going to happen—sooner or later.

  “I checked in on April. She’s still asleep on the couch,” Ray said, pulling Clay from his sour thoughts.

  Clay shifted his weight on the stool by the main checkout. “I told you, Ray, her name’s Jane, not April.”

  “No, Clay, she is April.”

  Clay stared out at the storm and tried not to think about the woman sleeping on Pete’s old couch, or the trouble that could easily arise if Ray kept thinking she was April.

  He intended to get that woman out of town on the next bus if it was the last thing he did. Then he would move on with his life. He needed a little bit of maturity and balance. He turned toward his oldest friend and asked, “How many women you reckon there are in Allenberg County?”

  “A little more than eight thousand.”

  Clay grunted. “How you figure that?”

  “Because there were 16,658 people living in the county as of the 2000 census, and a little over half of them are female,” Ray said, nodding like a bobble-head doll.

  Clay laughed out loud. Leave it to Ray to know about the census and be able to extrapolate it into a hard estimate of the number of women in the county.

  Seventeen years ago, Ray had been a serious math genius with a full scholarship to Rice University. The accident during his senior year in high school had scrambled Ray’s amazing brain. It had messed up his common sense, his ability to stay on track, and his emotional control, but it had left him with this uncanny ability to memorize useless numbers and do complex computations in his head.

  “I wonder how many of them are unmarried,” Clay said.

  “Well, I don’t know, but I’d guess there are about twenty-eight hundred women over the age of eighteen and under the age of forty.”

  Clay shook his head. “I’m not going to ask you how you arrived at that number. I’m going to take it on faith. That is a whole passel of girls, Ray.”

  “Yeah, but most of them are married.”

  “So how many of those do you figure are available?”

  “Less than twenty percent. But that’s a guess.” Ray leaned on his broom and looked as thoughtful as it was possible for him to look. “I just thought of something,” he said. “Are you interested in white women or all women?”

  “Good question.” Clay watched the rain falling and thought about Sharie in Nashville. Man-oh-man, he had had a thing for that woman when he was twenty-five. He would marry a woman like Sharie in a heartbeat, even if Momma and Daddy disowned him for it. Sharie had been mature and self-contained and funny and smart and… in love with someone else. Story of his life.

  “If we were talking only white women, how m
any do you figure?”

  “Two hundred and ninety four—assuming 20 percent of the females in the county are unmarried.”

  “You think 20 percent are unmarried?”

  Ray shrugged. “I don’t know how many are unmarried. The census doesn’t publish that.”

  “Shoot, you’d think with more than two hundred single white females in this county, I could maybe find me one and settle down.”

  Ray bobbed his head and gave Clay his goofy grin. “You looking for a girl, Clay?”

  Clay grunted. “No, I’m looking for a wife.”

  Ray pushed his broom. “Well, if you want a wife you ought to talk to Miz Miriam Randall. She probably knows all the single ladies in the county.”

  Clay laughed aloud at that one. Miriam Randall, Dash’s aunt, was reputedly the best matchmaker in Allenberg County. “I’m not that desperate,” he said. A fairly ironic statement given what had happened last night. But then, his need to find a wife had nothing to do with being horny. It was about being lonely. There was a huge difference.

  Ray leaned the broom against the counter. “Well, you ought to make a list, then.”

  “A list?”

  “Yeah, you know, a list.”

  “What kind of list?”

  “Hand me that pad.” Ray nodded toward a pad of lined paper sitting beside the cash register. Clay handed it over along with a square carpenter’s pencil. Ray took the pencil and started drawing lines on the paper. The accident had affected Ray’s fine motor skills, and he held the pencil like a first grader, with a tight grip. His lines were kind of uneven, and his face scrunched up with concentration as he worked.

  Watching his best friend struggle with something as simple as using a pencil always did something to Clay’s insides. He had to look away or get caught up in emotions that knew no limits.

  Ray had shared every single milestone in Clay’s life. He and Ray had played Hot Wheels on his back porch when they were eight. They had built a tree house in the live oak back of Momma’s house when they were ten—the same tree house that Clay’s brother Tulane had fallen out of and nearly died.

  They had shared their first beers and tried cigarettes down on the Edisto River when they were thirteen. They had drooled over a contraband copy of Playboy when they were fourteen. They had gone in together for their first box of condoms the summer they were sixteen.

  “Okay,” Ray said. “Now let’s list all the women we can think of.” He paused a moment. “Okay, I’ve got one. Dottie Cox.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Ray, she’s a little old, don’t you think?”

  Ray didn’t listen. He wrote Dottie’s name in the first column of his list. “Okay,” he said aloud. “Now we have to list the things that are good about Dottie.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, she has a heart of gold. I’ll give her that.”

  Ray scrawled the words “heart of gold” into the second column of his list, followed by the words “great tits.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake.”

  “What? She has seriously nice knockers. Besides, haven’t you ever heard that poem?”

  “What poem?”

  “The one on the Internet about the perfect woman.”

  “No, I can’t say as I have. And, Ray, you spend way too much time surfing the Web.”

  “Yeah, well, according to the poem, the perfect woman is deaf, mute, loves to have sex, has great tits, and owns a bar. She also likes to send her man hunting and fishing.”

  “That’s not a poem.”

  “Yeah, I know, but it doesn’t matter. You gotta admit it sounds like the perfect woman. And if you think about it, Dottie’s got several of those traits. I mean she’s got a rack on her, and a bar, and Bubba Lockheart says she’s one hell of a bass fisher.”

  Ray wrote a few notes in Dottie’s column.

  “Will you stop that? Dottie is old enough to be my momma. I’m looking for a woman I can have a family with. And besides, didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s not nice to objectify women like that?” Although, truth to tell, he and Ray had spent countless hours objectifying women when they were sixteen, and he had certainly objectified Jane last night when she blew into Dottie’s wearing that skimpy tank top. In fact, on a scale of one to ten, Wanda Jane Coblentz’s breasts rated an eleven.

  “Objectify?” Ray looked up, confusion on his face.

  “Never mind.” Clay looked out at the rain and tried to put the memory of Jane’s breasts out of his mind. He failed. “Let’s not make a list, okay?”

  “No, this is good, but I might need to expand the matrix to account for all the variables. What’s bad about Dottie?”

  “She’s too old.”

  “Good point.” Ray wrote that down, then sucked on the end of the pencil for a moment. “I got another one. How about Betty Wilkins?”

  “C’mon, Ray. She’s…” He didn’t finish the sentence. What he had been about to say would have offended Ray. Betty was sweet, if you went for girls whose entire life revolved around soap operas and People magazine.

  “Yeah, but Clay, she’s got a rack on her. She doesn’t own a bar, but she can cook. I mean have you ever tasted her pies?”

  “No. And she doesn’t bake the pies down at the Kountry Kitchen. She just serves ’em.”

  “Well, I’ve tasted her pies at the church social. I think Betty is the best-looking girl in Last Chance.”

  “Betty is not a girl. Do not put Betty down on that list. Besides, Momma keeps thinking Betty might be right for Stone.” Momma was delusional, of course, because Stone thought Betty was dumb as a post.

  Ray looked up at him kind of soberly. “You think he’s interested?”

  “Hell no. But do not put her name on that list.”

  Ray ignored Clay and wrote Betty’s name down. In the good column, he wrote the words “best-looking girl in LC” followed by the words “great tits,” and then “great pies.” In the bad column, he wrote the words “Stony’s girlfriend,” followed by the notation that she didn’t own a bar and wasn’t deaf and dumb.

  Well, the dumb part was debatable.

  “She is not Stony’s girlfriend,” Clay said. “I only said Momma and the rest of the church ladies are constantly trying to match them up. But they will fail. In case you missed something, my brother has not yet gotten over the death of his wife. He isn’t interested in Betty.” Like he would ever be interested in a woman like that. Like he would ever be interested in any woman ever again.

  “That’s too bad. She’s a really nice person, Clay. You should definitely consider her. That’s why I put her name down.”

  “Okay, Ray, let’s stop making this list now.”

  Ray remained undeterred. “I got it, Clay, the perfect female.” He bent over his list and scrawled the name April into the first column.

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ray, April is not a real person.”

  “She is, too. She’s perfect, and the best part is she’s sleeping up on the couch in Pete’s office.” He said this like Wanda Jane was Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or something. Like she was waiting there for her prince to come and kiss her awake.

  “How many times do I have to tell you, the woman sleeping on the couch is Jane. She’s way too young and way too needy to be anyone’s wife, and besides, she’s just passing through. She’ll be gone by Sunday.”

  Ray shook his head as he wrote. In the “good” column he wrote the words “perfect woman” followed by the words “great tits.” In the “bad” column he wrote nothing at all. He looked up. “You know, I’m going to have to ask her a few questions before I can fill this out completely. You think she owns a bar, Clay?”

  Clay hauled in a big breath and blew it out, then he snagged the legal pad, tore off the top sheet, and crumpled it up. “Look, my perfect woman is not deaf and dumb, and she doesn’t own a bar. It might be nice if she liked to fish, but I could live with a woman who didn’t. There are more important things in a woman, you know?”

  He dropped the paper into the wastebask
et. “Why don’t you go dust aisle three, huh?”

  Ray bobbed his head. “Okay, Clay. But if you don’t want Betty or April, you are stupid. If it weren’t for”—he hesitated for a moment, his lips pressing together—“you know… things… I would go for those women myself.”

  Clay’s chest tightened, and he had trouble swallowing for a moment. The accident had robbed Ray of his future and left him just enough so that he knew the difference between what he had been at seventeen and what he was now at thirty-four. Ray still had all the longings of a normal man, and that was a problem. Pete and Clay had impressed upon Ray that he needed to be careful around women.

  Ray tried his best, but Clay lived in fear that one day Ray would walk right into trouble that could land him in jail, or worse yet, in some state institution. Ray didn’t understand the games women could play, and last night Jane had looked like she might have been a predator.

  Of course, Clay’s first impression of Jane had been wrong. But there was still a lot about that woman he didn’t know. She was running scared, and she was desperate. There was no telling what trouble that could lead to.

  He needed to get Jane out of town before the Ray situation exploded into something ugly. That woman was a dead ringer for April, and Ray was likely to forget that April was just a fantasy. Reality and fantasy got mixed up in Ray’s head all the time.

  “Ray, listen to me. That woman is not April. You stay away from her, you hear?”

  Jane curled up on an ancient leather sofa with a Coleman sleeping bag. She was snuggled into a pair of size-thirty-four-waist camouflage pants and an extra-large sweatshirt that said “Get Reel—Go Bass Fishing” across its front.

  Clay Rhodes sure did know how to provide for a girl whose clothes had gotten soaked in a hurricane. The man had even provided a supply of double-A batteries for her cassette player, so she could listen to her self-help tapes and try to ignore the little guy named Ray who kept poking his head into the office every twenty minutes.