LITMIR.BIZ

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      The house we lived in was a big, low, metal-roofed home Joe’s uncle had built years before. Then, like many contractors, Uncle Bob let it slide into passive neglect while he stayed busy improving other people’s homes. When Joe and I had bought it, we’d replaced the leaky tin roof with a steel one, painted the exterior, gutted the kitchen and sacrificed the tiny formal dining room to make a huge, modern master bath next to our downstairs bedroom.

      The big things got done quickly, and I enjoyed my gleaming maple cabinets and the soapstone countertops, as well as the elbow room in the master bath.

      Other parts of the house told a different story, though. The carpet in the living room and throughout the tiny upstairs was the same awful shag Uncle Bob had picked up at a close-out sale. The upstairs bathroom looked straight out of the seventies and the yards were still in the throes of an evolution from looking thrown-away to well-tended. Joe’s honey-do jar was overflowing all the time.

      “Well, maybe outside would be a good thing.” Joe stood now and stretched, his lean frame reaching up to the ceiling. He yawned.

      Maybe he didn’t get any more sleep than I did. My heart thawed a bit. Obviously, his volunteering to work outside and do some of the heavy work was his quiet way of apologizing.

      “What are you thinking of doing? I have some day-lilies that need dividing—”

      Joe’s frown stopped me. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t really feel like working with the flowers today.”

      “Oh. I noticed some of the spindles were loose on the bedroom side of the porch. Maybe you could look at that?”

      “Maybe.” The way he dragged out the word so grudgingly made it apparent Joe didn’t feel like home repairs, either. “If I have time.”

      Suddenly the man who didn’t have any plans was so pressed for hours in the day that he couldn’t check out wobbly porch spindles? A suspicion grew in my head, bloomed and spread.

      “So what exactly will you be doing outside?”

      “I think…” he stretched again, popped his knuckles over his head “…think it’s a good day to work on the boat.”

      Not an apology after all. Just the boat.

      I hated that boat. It was an old rickety wooden boat Uncle Bob had left in the workshop when he and Joe’s aunt had sold the house to us. Uncle Bob had sprung for a fancy aluminum bass boat, so he didn’t have anymore need of something so labor intensive.

      The problem with the boat was that a guy couldn’t ever do any work on it by himself. He had to have a buddy for moral support, and Joe’s boat buddy was his best friend, Rick. If they’d actually done anything on the boat, it might be different. But a day spent working on that boat got sucked down into a black hole that devoured any real signs of productivity.

      Oh, they sanded the blasted thing and varnished it and patched it and painted it. My credit card bills told me Joe and Rick had bought tons of supplies. But mostly the guys just talked about the boat. To my knowledge, that boat had never been tested for seaworthiness—or lake-worthiness, if that was the proper term—and probably never would. That boat was an excuse for two guys to huddle up and dream up reasons to dash off to buy some tool or gadget or supplies that Joe probably already had.

      My tongue very nearly spewed out hot words. It was just the spark I needed to let loose the keg of dynamite I felt I was sitting on.

      I didn’t have the chance. Joe knew me well enough, and knew well enough my feelings about the boat, to make a hasty escape out the back door, Cocoa dogging his heels. He pulled out his cell phone and stuck it to his ear on the way to his backyard workshop. I knew without a doubt that Rick’s wife was about to get boat-attacked herself.

      Maggie found me still blowing steam an hour later. She cocked an attentive ear sideways. “Man, am I glad to hear you’re still fluent in good ol’ South Georgia cussin’. I was beginning to think you’d been cured.”

      Maggie’s empty vehicle awaited us in the drive. “Where’s LaTisha?”

      “She’s at her friend’s house, supposed to be studying, but I know better than that. Still, I know her friend’s mama, and she’s a worse tyrant than me. She’ll keep ’em straight.”

      I thought about all the times Maggie and I had giggled over our books as we lay on her powder-blue chenille bedspread, our feet crossed at the ankles. If we got too loud, Mr. or Mrs. Boatwright would poke a head in and yank us back in line. Nothing like having a best friend to make tough times easier to bear.

      Maggie backed her gas-guzzling SUV carefully around my pine trees and the azaleas that still had a fuchsia-colored flower or two clinging to them. “So spill it, girl. What did bad ol’ Joe say about the adoption?”

      “He wants us to pull our dossier.” Just saying it to a real, live person and seeing her astonished reaction served as validation for me.

      “He what?”

      The story gushed out of me in all its gritty, painful details as Maggie made her way up Bellevue Avenue, past Dublin’s pretty historic homes. She took a quick left, not bothering to use a signal, so she could scoot up Academy by Cordell Lumber Company.

      “You mean, after you guys have come through this much hell and you’re this close, he wants to yank the plug?”

      “Something like that.” I nodded my head in agreement.

      “That boy beats all I ever saw. What was it like this morning? Don’t reckon he was man enough to apologize?”

      “Oh, no. He’s too busy.”

      “With what?” Maggie lowered her brows in suspicion.

      “The boat.”

      Maggie closed her eyes, shook her head and said, “Thank you, Lord, for seeing fit not to burden me with a husband. That boat.”

      Her mention of being single pulled me away from my own miseries. “I was too busy last night crying on your shoulder to ask you about whether your new fellow had called back.”

      “No…but his girlfriend did.”

      A pang shot through me at her words. I took in the grim set of her face and knew the discovery had stung her worse than her casual tone let on.

      “Oh, Maggie.” Not sure exactly what to say, I patted her arm. “That’s awful.”

      “Worse than awful. It was his live-in girlfriend.”

      I cringed. “Mags, he ought to be hung from his thumbnails.”

      “I heartily agree. As bad as Shelton was—both times—at least he never cheated on me. He may have stolen my money and had a gambling habit so bad he would have bet on how long a stinkbug would smell, but I never had to call up an unsuspecting woman and ask if she’d been with my man.”

      “What did you say to her?” I looked up to see we were racing toward a yellow light. “Uh, Maggie, that’s Kellam up there and there’s a traffic light and it’s red.”

      She stood on the brakes, squealing to a stop at the intersection. “Thank you. Didn’t see it. I told that fool girl, yes, indeedy, I had been with him. That he’d failed to mention pertinent details like he was supposed to be collared and leashed, and that even before I knew he was a yellow-bellied cheater, I hadn’t been too impressed with him.”

      Even though Maggie was in obvious pain, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the way she recapped the conversation. “You didn’t! You didn’t call him a yellow-bellied cheater.”

      “I sure did.” She let off the brake and headed through the intersection at a more sedate pace. “I wanted to call him worse, but LaTisha was standing right there. It’s true, you know. I think the reason men wind up running around on you is they can’t scrounge up enough courage to just be honest and tell you, ‘Hey, babe, lately somebody else has been moving

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