Magnolia Wednesdays Part 5

A very tall, broad-shouldered person walked into the kitchen and reached for a piece of the bread in the basket. Melanie gave his hand a halfhearted slap.

Vivien craned her neck upward to look at the young man who used to be her nephew. "What did you do, put him on the rack and stretch him?"

"If only," Shelby said.

"Is that really you, Trip?" Vivien ignored Trip's grimace. Going up on her toes to reach it, she gave his downy cheek a quick peck. "You must have grown a whole foot in the last year. I didn't think that was possible."

"Only for mutants," Shelby, an apparently equal-opportunity offender, pointed out from behind her.

Melanie ignored her daughter's comment. "He did grow almost eight inches last year. He's already taller than J.J. was and the doctor claims he's still growing. Too bad his game isn't basketball instead of baseball."

"Like he even plays baseball anymore." Shelby was like a rain cloud intent on sprinkling her displeasure all over everybody's parade.

Trip flushed but didn't speak. Munching on a second piece of garlic bread, he turned and went into the family room. The TV flared to life. A moment later a cartoon character began to shout at the top of his lungs.

Melanie gave her daughter an irritated look and pushed the salad bowl and the basket of bread toward Shelby. "Since you've gotten rid of your brother, you can finish setting the table."

Shelby's sigh was drawn out and put-upon. Vivien thanked G.o.d that setting her straight wasn't her responsibility. She was preparing to hurry everybody to the table while she could still keep herself from falling on the food and wolfing it down with her hands when the doorbell rang. She was the only one who registered surprise.

"Trip?" Melanie called. "Turn off the TV and get the door, please!"

Trip didn't answer, but the TV snapped off and her nephew brushed by on his way to the front door.

"Hey, man." The voice in the foyer was male and upbeat. It sounded familiar, but Vivien couldn't quite place it. "How're you doing?"

If Trip responded, he did so too quietly to reach them, though she saw Melanie straining, just as she was, to hear. The front door closed and two sets of footsteps sounded on the wood floor of the foyer.

Vivien froze when she recognized the man whose arm was slung so casually across Trip's shoulders and who sauntered into the kitchen as if it were his own. It was Clay Alexander, J.J.'s longtime friend and campaign manager; the only other person at the hunting lodge where Jordan Jackson Jr. had died.

Their gazes locked as he removed his arm from Trip's shoulder and accepted a kiss on the cheek from Melanie. "Welcome, Vivi," he said. "It's good to have you back in town. I know Mel's been looking forward to spending time with you."

Clay Alexander was tall, though not quite so tall as Trip, with the lean build of a long-distance runner. His hair was a dark brown bordering on black and his gray eyes were wide set under well-arched brows. He'd obviously come straight from work and wore a European-cut black suit with a white-on-white striped shirt and a red tie with a bold diagonal stripe. The words *male model' flitted through Vivi's brain. He could have stepped off the cover or out of the pages of a glossy men's magazine, but his gray eyes were far from vacuous; they gleamed with intelligence and other things she couldn't quite identify.

Vivien hadn't seen him since J.J.'s funeral, but it was clear the same could not be said for the Jackson family. Even the up-to-now-surly Shelby allowed him to ruffle her hair in greeting as if she were a child.

Clearly at home, he removed his jacket and slung it over the back of the nearest barstool then pinched a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the counter.

"Mel told me you were coming to . . . recuperate." He neatly sidestepped the details of her injury and his tone was casually friendly, matter-of-fact. But there was something about the way he used her sister's nickname that made Vivi think of a dog who'd already marked his territory and wanted to make sure the other dogs knew it.

"What a pleasant surprise to see you," Vivi said and saw a blush bloom on Melanie's cheeks.

"Clay took us out for dinner last week and I figured since I was cooking in your honor it would be a good time to reciprocate," Melanie said.

Clay reached for the open bottle of wine. "Vivi?"

"No, thanks." She watched him pour a gla.s.s for himself, then top off Melanie's without asking.

During dinner Clayton Alexander presided over his former best friend's table like it was his, asking the kids about school, trying to draw Trip out, for which Melanie kept shooting him grateful looks. He did this from J.J.'s former seat at the end opposite Melanie, which no one but Vivien seemed to find significant.

It all looked very Oedipal to Vivien, but then she made her living tapping into undercurrents beneath the surface, examining relationships and words for hidden meanings and unspoken intentions.

It wasn't as easy as usual to do this what with the hunger that she couldn't seem to satisfy no matter how many helpings of lasagna she consumed. She caught the others watching her surrept.i.tiously, but was far too busy eating to try to make excuses. In truth, it was hard to actually lift one's head from one's plate to a.s.sess anything when one was completely preoccupied with the act of eating.

Still, there was something about the careful way Clay watched her that made Vivien's investigative antennae jangle. Once when she reached for the basket of garlic bread she accidentally caught his eye and thought she saw a flash of guilt in them. But guilt about what?

Vivi thought back to the first news reports about J.J.'s death. The press had raced to the hunting lodge in the north Georgia Mountains hot on the heels of the local sheriff and the team he'd called in from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The death had been ruled accidental and no one but the seediest tabloids had claimed that the investigation was anything but thorough. At the time it hadn't occurred to Vivi to question the findings. She'd been in the middle of an investigative report of her own, one that had consumed her for close to six months, and everything had seemed clear-cut.

But Clay Alexander had been the only one there with J.J. He'd found the body and called the sheriff. And now he seemed an integral part of his dead friend's family.

Vivien thought about the guilty look she'd intercepted. And felt like a bull who'd just had a red flag waved in its face.

8.

ANGELA RICHMAN STARED into the lens of the camera, trying to feel bridal.

"Do you think you could work up a smile, luv?" Brian Jennings, her partner in Photo Ops, stepped out from behind the camera, big and rangy and relentlessly upbeat. "You are getting married to a perfectly lovely chap who seems to worship the ground you tread on. And the gown's not bad, either." He stepped closer to pull the white satin train of the Norma Kamali strapless gown into a semicircle at her feet, then rearranged the veil behind her shoulder.

"Sorry." Angela willed her shoulders to relax and tried to resist licking her overly made-up lips. "I just can't get used to being on this end. It's way too weird. Can't you just squeeze off a couple shots so we can go have a gla.s.s of wine?"

He didn't dignify the suggestion with a response, but he did bring a gla.s.s of water from a nearby table, held it up for her, and positioned the straw between her lips.

Angela had been photographing others since high school when the Nikon she received for her fifteenth birthday had become her entree to the things that other students seemed to do so easily: the football and basketball games, cheerleading tryouts, student council elections, prom. No one but her parents had ever thought to photograph her; perhaps they didn't have lenses that were wide enough. More likely they figured, quite rightly, that she wouldn't want a reminder of how overweight she was, how completely outside the realm of attractiveness she had fallen with her carrot red hair and her full moon of a freckled face.

"Come on," he said, setting the water back on the table. "You're going to be a Wesley," he reminded her. "We want a photo that screams, *I'm all that.' "

Angela straightened, turning her body so that she could throw out her chest and angle her shoulders, creating a more flattering line, just as she had instructed so many of her subjects. But the dress felt too fitted, too close to her body; there was not enough material to hide anything. And she was certain her bare arms were jiggling. "You're going to have to shave some off my upper arms when you do the touch-up," she said. "I don't know why I ever chose a strapless dress."

It didn't matter that the scale now read one-thirty instead of two hundred five; that she'd actually managed to shed seventy-five unwanted pounds and keep them off for more than three years. That she'd had a breast lift and a tummy tuck and all kinds of other procedures to help clean up the unsightly result. That she exercised like a fiend six days a week and knew she could never stop. None of those things, not even the reality of the reflection that now stared back at her from a mirror, could banish the fat person, the one her cla.s.smates had called "Fangie," short for "Fat Angie," who still lived inside.

"You chose it because it's perfect on you and because you have fantastic shoulders," he said as he repositioned the tripod, studied her through the viewfinder, then stepped from behind the camera to adjust her key light. "Because all of you is now completely gorgeous-SI swimsuit edition gorgeous."

"And you are completely full of s.h.i.t, Brian," she said, wishing she could believe him, that for just a few minutes she could be thin on the inside, too. "But don't stop telling me, okay?"

"Never, luv." He'd known her at her heaviest. Only he and her childhood friend, Susan, continued to treat her as they always had. Behind the camera he crouched down and considered her through the viewfinder again. "Now tilt your chin just a bit to the left and give me that smile James Wesley fell in love with."

Angela curved her lips upward and widened her eyes intriguingly. She even managed to add a semblance of a happy twinkle into their green depths.

But she felt like a complete and utter fraud.

They said that you should be careful what you wished for because you might get it. And they were right.

Angela Richman had spent more than half her life wishing to be thin, wanting to be someone different, hoping to one day find a special man who would love her. Somehow, against all odds, all of these things had happened.

But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't really believe it. Or figure out how to enjoy it.

VIVIEN WOKE IN the predawn darkness to a silence that simply didn't exist in New York City. There were no cars, no horns, no footsteps on the street below. Coc.o.o.ned in her blankets, cushioned in quiet, she lay there listening intently. But the only sounds that emerged were the occasional snore from Trip's nearby bedroom and the steady tick of the grandfather clock in the foyer.

After a quick bathroom run, she scurried back to bed. Her bladder was now blissfully empty, but her mind was too full for sleep. It called up Melanie's determined optimism, Shelby's belligerence, Trip's stinginess with words. The way J.J.'s absence felt so . . . present. How strange it had felt to see Clay Alexander sitting in J.J.'s seat at the table, presiding over J.J.'s family.

Though she spent much of her waking hours trying not to dwell on her pregnancy, it was always at the core of her thoughts. She'd believed she knew her mind and her body. But now both had become alien and unfathomable. Her body taunted her with each change it went through; it seemed that as soon as she got used to some new indignity another took its place. Worse, her mind seemed stripped of its free will. Not to mention the ability to think.

In a few hours the household would be awake. The kids would head off to school. Melanie would-she realized with some surprise that although she knew Melanie owned and ran a ballroom dance studio, she actually had no idea what Melanie did all day and hadn't thought to ask.

But it was part of her job as a suburban columnist to find out. Which meant she'd have to get up and dress in the morning so that she could accompany Melanie wherever it was that she went. Vivi set the alarm clock beside the bed for six thirty, just in case she lucked out and fell back asleep. But although she closed her eyes again and tried to concentrate on nothingness for a good thirty minutes, she finally gave up and flipped on the bedside light.

There was a novel in her carry-on, but she'd barely finished a page on the plane and she didn't feel like reading it now. What Vivi really wanted to do was talk to Stone, but she was afraid that if she actually reached him and heard his voice, she'd immediately spill all. Clamping down on her neediness, she booted up her laptop and brought up a blank page on the screen. After a few moments of thought, she typed the opening line that had come to her the day before.

I have been observing the denizens of this pocket of suburbia in which I find myself for less than twenty-four hours and have already learned one important thing: here people don't wear their hearts on their sleeves; they put them on the backs of their minivans.

For a few minutes she just sat and thought about what she'd seen on the drive from the airport to Melanie's, replaying her sister's comments in her mind.

As they pa.s.s you, and believe me they will, you'll know everything there is to know about them. Because who they are, what they care about, and where they "belong" has been reduced to decorative magnets that have been stuck all over the backs of their SUVs.

These magnetized spheres and shapes will also tell you where they worship and where they vacation, what illnesses they've dealt with or would like to see eradicated, who they voted for in the last election and who they plan to vote for in the next.

She was careful not to quote Melanie too closely in case her sister, who had never been a major newspaper devotee, ever happened across the column. But as Vivien typed, the words began to flow from her mind and through her fingertips in that wonderful way that she didn't understand and tried not to question. Slowly, she began to relax, her body unclenching bit by bit as the words formed in her mind, then found their way onto the page.

All of the schools their children attend from preschool to college are there like some public sc.r.a.pbook. There are magnets and b.u.mper stickers that inform you if their child made the honor roll or was once named the student of the month. Bottom line, if they or one of their children has ever done it or even thought about it, they've got the magnet to prove it. And every magnet deserves to be displayed on the back of the family chariot.

She added a few jabs about what might drive people to reveal so much, then did some cutting and pasting until she had her observations in an order that belied the amount of editing she'd done and, instead, felt like a natural progression. And then she concluded, As it turns out, these clues aren't even necessary because your entire personality is revealed by your choice of vehicle. Apparently you are not only your magnets; you are also what you drive. Just a quick look at the color, make, and model you're driving and your fellow suburbanites will know everything about you from how much money you make to how often you have s.e.x.

She played with the car thing for a while, paraphrasing Melanie's comments in a shocked, yet slightly snide tone that gave it an edge.

She did feel a tiny fissure of guilt for putting her sister's world under such a judgmental microscope, but she pushed it aside; like the pseudonym she'd borrowed for her byline, she'd think about that "tomorrow."

After getting in as many zingers as she could under the guise of "reporting," she closed with a breezy, I feel like a scientist transported to a newly charted planet that is absolutely teeming with alien life-forms. So stay tuned. I'll have more observations for you next week! She signed it, Your stranger in an even stranger land, Scarlett Leigh.

Then she attached the doc.u.ment to an email to John Harcourt and sent her first postcard from suburbia on its way to New York.

Before she could talk herself out of it, Vivi dialed Stone's cell phone and was both equally relieved and nervous when he picked up.

"Hi there," he said. "You're up early."

"It's so quiet," she said, cautioning herself to keep it light. "I'd forgotten the sound of gra.s.s growing."

He laughed and she smiled in return. Stone had always been her best audience.

"So what do you have planned today?" he asked. If she closed her eyes, she could pretend he was here in the room with her and not on the other side of the world. "I'm just going to hang around with Mel, see how she spends her days."

"That's good," he said and she let his voice wash over her. "How are she and the kids doing?"

Vivien felt a familiar flush of guilt at how little she'd done for Melanie, Shelby, and Trip over the last two years. Was that why she'd found Clay Alexander's role in her sister's life so jarring?

"They're okay," she said. "Well, not really okay. They're all going through the motions, but I don't know if any of them have really moved on. And . . ." She paused, not sure how to put her reaction to Clay Alexander into words. "His best friend and campaign manger-the one he was with when he died-seems to be very involved in Mel and the kids' lives."

"That's a good thing, isn't it?"

"I guess so." She hesitated. "It's just that now that I'm really thinking about it, the whole idea of J.J. shooting himself while cleaning his hunting rifle seems so absurd. I mean he'd been hunting since he was a child. It's not like he was some novice who'd never used a gun."

Stone sighed, a sound she knew well. "Vivi, you covered the police beat starting out just like I did. I don't remember the statistics, but those kinds of accidents aren't at all unusual." She could practically hear him thinking; she just wished he were doing that thinking here. So that she could tell him about the baby, read his true reaction in his face.

"I mean there was a full investigation, wasn't there?" Stone asked. "Do you have any reason to believe anything was overlooked?"

She flushed again as she acknowledged she was a bit late in worrying about this now. She knew people at the GBI; a couple of phone calls two years ago wouldn't have been out of line.

"Vivi," Stone asked. "Are you still there?"

"Yes," she said, although the truth was at the moment her thoughts were in a north Georgia mountain cabin two years ago. "I was just thinking that maybe I should call my contact at the bureau and see if I can have a look at the file."

"I know that tone, Vivi. If it weren't so early you'd probably already be dialing the number." She could practically hear him shaking his head and picture the smile tugging at his lips.

"Just take it slow," Stone said as they prepared to hang up. "And remember, this is your family you're talking about. Sometimes even when things seem open and shut, it's possible to find out things that no one really wants to know."

9.

MELANIE FINISHED PACKING Trip's lunch, tucking the frozen water bottle into its own plastic bag to prevent leakage while keeping things "refrigerated," then pulled a carton of eggs and a gallon of milk from the refrigerator. Coffee dripped into the carafe of the coffeemaker, the smell of the warm brew almost, but not quite, as potent as that first gulp of caffeine.

Upstairs Trip's alarm buzzed and was followed by the sound of her son clomping to the bathroom. A few moments later water ran in his shower. Trip was like clockwork physically-he got up, showered, and dressed each school morning without prodding, but his brain didn't really kick in until much later. This could not be said of Shelby, who would stay in bed until the last possible moment and then require both prodding and ejecting to remove her from it. When she did get out of bed, she was in a foul mood, which she liked to share with those around her.

Melanie was on her second cup of coffee and had Trip's bacon and eggs plated and on the table when her son thudded down the stairs.

"Morning, sweetie," she said, wondering as she always did how he managed to shower and dress without actually opening his eyes.

His greeting was garbled and his eyes mere slits as she pulled out the kitchen chair and guided him into it. Without further comment he lifted the gla.s.s of orange juice and drained it. In a matter of minutes his plate was empty.

"Morning, Mel."

Melanie looked up in surprise at Vivien's greeting. She was even more surprised to see that her sister was fully dressed.

"Oh, my G.o.d," Vivi said. "Is that bacon and eggs I smell?"

Melanie hesitated, unable to believe her sister could have an ounce of vacant s.p.a.ce inside her, given the amount of lasagna she'd consumed the night before. "Yes. Do you want some?"

"That would be great." Vivien mussed the top of Trip's head as she pa.s.sed. "I'm completely ravenous."

Melanie lit the burner under the frying pan without comment. "You want some coffee?"