“Ah . . . I beg your pardon, sir, but Mr. Townsend said if you called, I was to put you through—”
“On Monday, Harold. Have a good weekend,” he said, and clicked off before Harold could say more. Ben would be mad as hell come Monday, but at the moment, Matt couldn’t care less. He was too busy falling in love, man.
The next order of business was clothes. He did maintain the one-shirt rule, as in always have an extra shirt in the car. But he did not, however, maintain the extra pair of boxers rule, and donning his polo, Matt hopped into his car and drove to Ruby Falls, where he found Sam’s General Store. Among various pottery and dolls and frilly little things that he assumed old ladies bought, Matt found a rack of men’s golf clothes, picked up some pants, shorts, a couple of shirts, and a pair of sandals. The only thing he couldn’t find at the general store was underwear. The high school kid at the checkout told him he could get some undies at Sam’s Corner Grocery. Why was he not surprised?
He found them there, all right. On the “other” aisle.
Dinah was at the same register when he came through with a pack of gum, another huge bouquet of roses, and a package of three boxer briefs. She glanced at him from the corner of her eye as she rang them up. “I guess you found Ms. Lear’s house all right,” she drawled.
With his underwear and flowers, Matt flew down the two-lane to Rebecca’s, through the gate with the flying pig, up to the lake house with the flowering pots and charming crankcase windows and rustic planters and big wraparound porch and thought, for the first time in his life, that it would be nice to come home to this. He loved the smell and sound and feel of this house.
Rebecca never asked him when or if he was leaving; he figured if she wanted him to go, she’d say so, but he had the definite sense that she was just as entranced with the little world they had stumbled into as he was.
In truth, she even seemed a slightly different person after their earth-shattering lovemaking. Even as early as this morning, he noticed dog food pellets on the floor, unswept. When she cheerfully offered to make breakfast, she dropped a clean dish towel to the floor and stuffed it back onto a stack of them, without regard to color or texture or shape. And as that magical weekend wore on, the various facets of her perfection began to slip away, like so many pieces of leaves scattered to the wind.
Matt made good on his promise to take Grayson out on the boat, and in the end, all four dogs and Rebecca went along. She packed a lunch, said she knew a little place upriver, which turned out to be a small island where someone had gone to great pains to make a grassy picnic area under the boughs of old pecan trees. It was perfect for a lazy afternoon like this.
While Grayson threw sticks in the water for the dogs to fetch—those that would, anyway, as Bean never saw the stick, Tot was afraid of the water, and Tater was disinclined—Matt and Rebecca lay on a quilt beneath a pecan tree and talked. About everything. Stuff he hadn’t thought about or mentioned in years. Like they had been stranded on a deserted island, had come into human contact after a long absence, which, in a metaphorical sense, Matt figured was right on target.
Rebecca told him about Bud, how she had fallen in love with the high school football star and had followed him to college, then given up her dreams of an art degree because he wanted a wife and a beauty queen. And how Bud had grown disenchanted with her when she became pregnant, even found her changing shape off-putting. It was then, Rebecca casually reported, that the affairs began, one after another, and that even some of her so-called friends thought nothing of screwing her scum of a husband in the garage while Rebecca was inside nursing their son. She said it so matter-of-factly, so numbly, that it sent a cold shiver down Matt’s spine. He was beginning to understand how a woman like Rebecca could be so stiff, so afraid of life and of love.
She was much more animated when she talked about her sisters. She laughed as she told him about Robin, headstrong and ambitious and finally out from “under her father’s thumb.” Rachel, the baby, who was still in school studying ancient British literature and battling a weight problem, brought on after years, Rebecca said, of her father’s criticism.