This seemed to push Sugar within about two high-heeled paces of the edge of sanity. She forced a little hyperventilated laugh, shook her head, and blinked.
“You know, Kit, Miz Fowler said the silliest thing after all this happened. She said to me, ‘Sugar, it would be within your rights to press charges against the Walkers.’” She eyed Kit for a reaction. “Can you believe that? And I just said, ‘Kit is a personal friend of mine, and I’m not gonna do any such thing when we can handle things civilly. Between us.’”
Kit wasn’t going to beg her off, but she had no power, no money. She had to find a way to blow the smoke off Sugar without directly admitting blame. She crossed her bare arms and pinned her hands tight beneath them.
“I was thinking I could come by, do some work for you maybe. I noticed you had a bunch of brush out by your gate. I could clear it.” It was as close to sorry as she was gonna get.
Sugar looked at her in a tired-of-caring sort of way.
“Aren’t you sweet,” she said, like she was pondering stronger words. “You know? I got my four boys, and Rob, too. I’m positively drowning in helping hands. We are all set,” she said and wheeled around on one tiny, pointed heel, and as she did her blond curls swung away from a mottled brown stain on her shoulder where she’d held her bleeding, sobbing girl.
Kit felt sorry for the first time since she’d gotten the call this morning. Sugar wasn’t all bad. She was vain and selfish, but she had a good heart. She was good to her kids, helped people out. There was an elderly woman in town named Nell Clover who had outlived her husband and both her grown children. Nell had devoted herself to taking care of them through their various illnesses, and by the time the last one died, there was no money left for her. Sugar had been the first one to start a fundraiser in church, and before long she had extended Nell an open invitation to stay in her decked-out garage. Over the years, Kit had even wondered about being friends with Sugar, like those unlikely pairings of species, a golden retriever and a bobcat. It wouldn’t have taken much effort on Kit’s part. But Sugar’s eagerness, her chattiness, her beauty, even her generosity, had all been too much. Trying to be friends with her was like driving a Mack truck through a pinhole.
She willed herself to apologize, to throw Sugar a rope.
“Hey, Sugar?” she said and heard the strain, like even her vocal cords weren’t used to making nice. Sugar broke stride ever so slightly, just enough that Kit knew she’d heard her. Then she loaded Leigh into their massive Suburban and drove away.
Chapter Four
Fort Bend County Correctional
Manny sat quietly as he waited for the call. His bedsheets were folded square, the toilet buffed to a brilliant shine. He looked around the chilly cell with appreciation, holding only the borrowed Bible—he would take nothing with him but the clothes he’d worn when he arrived. Narrow, efficient, hard. This place had been a crucible for his transformation. Once, he had been lazy, indulgent, distractible. Gone now were his vanity and pride, the rage, the bluster. He had given in too easily to the whims of his loins, that barking urge that compelled him to plow the nearest piece of flesh. He had even done men, in the early days of his term. Terrific come, he remembered with a hot shudder, then clocked his head on the cinder block behind him. Steady. Though it had taken many years, he was now well liked by the inmates. As hardened as everyone tried to be, he had learned their needs—for friendship, for touch, for someone to hold their secrets.
Perhaps he had not given Kit credit for keeping him company. He had never done well on his own, and yet he was bored by others, repulsed. How the loneliness had crept in and reached down his throat and gagged him. He’d known this feeling before, it was the oldest one. The sound of no one there. The cool of no one’s touch. He’d felt it in the corner of his treeless yard, where his mother would send him for being too loud, or for creeping around. He’d sit in the scant shade of a ragged bird of paradise until he blistered, wishing her dead. He’d felt it in the room he shared with his brother, he alone in his bed while his mother, smelling of rum, would slip in next to Leo and make the covers move. To his face she called Manny an angel, her Baby Blue, but in the night she passed him over. He had used his eyes as a weapon against the loneliness, tricked the teachers into loving him, made fake friends, but the feeling followed him still. From the tennis clubs to strip clubs, it crept along, cautious and hungry at his heels, as he held hearts and broke them, as women woke up from a dream to find that he, and their money, had disappeared.
As he got older and more skilled at outwitting the loneliness, he’d enjoy long stretches of snag-free cons. He’d start to have kinder opinions of people; even as he was slipping the diamond from a woman’s finger, he’d wish her well. They’re only things, he’d tell himself. But the lonesome feeling gained on him, gulping and smacking, and the longer he’d enjoy some peace, the more brutal the blow when the feeling returned.
And then came Kit.
Like him, she was angry and lonesome, misunderstood. And she scared him, that fiercest glint when her eyes narrowed and stared straight through him. Still, he knew she loved him. Sweet words were not her way. Her staying with him, watching all he did, that’s how he knew.
I trust you was what he’d understood when she stopped sleeping with a shiv. And when he finally took her in his bed, her teeth in his flesh had done the talking for her. You’re all I need, she had said without saying a word.
He supposed part of what he loved about her was that she was capable of leaving, hurting him, that wildness he had seen so early on, had felt under his skin like the itch of a poisonous plant. Something pitiless and feral. It thrilled him, stirred up a feeling in him he had never felt for anyone: respect. Having Kit in his life all those years, someone to look after and think about, someone he wanted to please, had warmed him over. Because of her, the heart he’d left for dead had stirred and coughed back to life. Even the sex was secondary; it was that this creature was the one person on the planet he understood. He had finally found his kind.
And she had just driven away. All that time, he just hadn’t thought about it ending. Certainly not like that. Not with her leaving him. In his fucking Mustang.