Son of Destruction

26




Jessie


Out of nowhere, Sallie Bellinger says, ‘If you want to know the truth, I always thought it was a gang bang.’

Oh shit, Jessie thinks. Just when she was getting comfortable, chattering over coffee with the Lunch Bunch. Let’s don’t go there. ‘I thought we were talking about . . .’

Sallie’s voice drops. ‘Shhh! Here she comes.’

Rounding up the usual suspects at the club’s beachfront annex, they’d agreed to skip Nenna this time because she, and not Brad Kalen, was topic A. That dress! The way she ricocheted from man to man, making all those desperate ex-wife moves, they should warn her, but her best friends can’t say anything or ask her about it because she hasn’t told them. And here she is, coming in all la-la-la, like Davis isn’t a philanderer and everything’s just fine. Like every woman at this table but Jessie, she’s practiced at glossing over life’s dirty parts.

Entitled insider that she is, Nenna nudges Kara aside and slides into the banquette. Jessie’s pleased to be included, but, wow. Last night’s party lies like a patient etherized upon a table, but this patient is kicking and screaming because the anesthetist didn’t show up and the dissection is well under way. The sunlight is dazzling even through layers of tinted glass. The water glistens and from here swimmers bob like lazy ants in the gentle swells. Dolphins and egrets and gulls wheel against the cloudless backdrop, but given all they have to talk about, nobody but Jessie sees.

‘Jessie?’ Sallie Bellinger elbows her. You’re on. ‘You were saying what he’s like.’

‘Who?’

Betsy does that thing with her eyebrows. ‘You know. Lucy’s son.’

Sallie serves a hard ball. ‘If he really is her son.’

Cathy Rhue enters the game. ‘Is Carteret really his name, or is it some kind of scam?’

‘It was on his credit card, Cathy.’

‘Not to put too fine a point on it, but. Does he look like her?’

‘Yes.’ Jessie’s uncomfortable with this, but if she wants to stay, she has to play. ‘Same hair, just a little darker. Green eyes.’

Sallie serves. ‘Wonder who that comes from.’

‘Oh, the father, I suppose.’

Betsy hits it over the net. ‘Whoever that is.’

‘As a matter of fact, he looks a lot like Lucy. I should know.’ Heads whip around. Nenna! Jessie has to admire the woman; she knows she was topic A. before she walked in, but she volleys like a pro. ‘He was at my house!’

Score! New to the game, Jessie slips. ‘No shit!’

Nenna grins. ‘We were having iced tea.’

‘Get out!’

‘And my oatmeal cookies. That’s why I’m late.’

‘You’re not late, you’re . . .’

Cathy says kindly, ‘Just in time. We were just starting.’ Never mind the empty coffee cups and pastry crumbs and ruined paper napkins; they’ve been at it since ten.

‘Good thing I baked last week.’ Nenna glows – not like she’s lost her man, more like she just scored a shiny new one. ‘He ate about a dozen.’

‘What’s he doing in Fort Jude?’

‘He’s here on some big story.’ In training since nursery school, Nenna waits a beat before she adds, ‘For the Los Angeles Times.’

‘Is he really Lucy’s son?’

‘He says he is.’

‘I could say I’m the queen of France, but would you believe it?’

‘Where else would he get The Swordfish from our year?’

‘He had The Swordfish?’

Topic A. when she came in. Now look at her, with yellow feathers in her teeth. ‘Bobby’s, actually,’ she tells Betsy and Jessie relaxes, but only a little bit.

‘He knows Bobby?’

‘I saw what you wrote to him in The Swordfish, Betsy. And I thought you were my friend.’

‘Houseparties. It was a crazy time,’ Betsy says, propelling Jessie into a bad place.

Kara’s from Chicago, but that doesn’t stop her. ‘I hear they were pretty wild.’

Sallie says, too fast, ‘Don’t believe everything you hear.’

‘You’re the ones who laid it all on me, how crazy it got, especially the last night when your friend Lucy showed up . . .’

‘We were never really friends.

‘Lucy kept to herself until that night.’

‘White bikini, see-through shirt, you might call it her coming out party.’

Resentment crackles in the room. ‘Like she was asking for it.’

And Jessie’s automatic censor breaks down. ‘Nobody asks for a rape.’

‘A rape! At houseparties? Don’t even think it.’

‘Puh-leeze.’ Sallie’s smile scrapes Jessie raw. ‘People like us don’t do things like that.’

Don’t, Jessie thinks. Just don’t, but she’s sliding into the zone. Everybody who was anybody was at the beach the week before graduation, running around crazy, like it was the night before the Battle of Waterloo, and this was the Last Good Time. She hadn’t exactly been invited to camp out in one of the beach houses because she had, OK, she had a reputation, so she crashed at home and slipped into the parties in all those houses after it got dark, stayed up all night when the parties spilled out on the beach and never left until the last dog was hung and the last of them staggered off to bed and, man! It was almost like she belonged.

So she was at the bonfire on the famous last night when Lucy showed up for the first time ever, all gorgeous and sexy and brash. She sneaked out. That grandmother kept her on a short leash.

Jessie knows how her own night ended – Don’t go there – but Lucy? The girl was everywhere, she danced with everybody, all these aging girls’ boyfriends, captains of this and that and a bunch of guys that nobody knew. They rolled in from Broward and Sarasota and as far away as Tarpon Springs. Fort Jude houseparties were that famous. By the time the night ended Jessie knew why Sallie and Betsy and all were so pissed off at her, she just didn’t know who Lucy left with or what happened after that, and the rest? She jerks herself back into the present, where it’s safe.

F*cking Sallie is going, ‘These things do happen. Just not to people you know.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’

And as if she knows what Jessie’s thinking, Betsy scowls. ‘Probably one of the Pierce Point boys, you know, like the Horshams or the Ackleys, Lanny Rucker or the Pikes.’ Take that.

And Sallie drives in the stake. ‘People like that don’t get invited to our things, they just don’t.’ She covers her mouth like a priest crossing himself after the stake goes in. ‘Oh! Sorry, Jessie. Wade is soooo not the same person now. He was much, much different back then.’

‘So was I.’

‘No offense!’

Jessie does not back off with the traditional, ‘None taken.’ She won’t. But leaving is out of the question. All she can do is sit, waiting for this to end.

As if to make up for what she just did, Sallie Bellinger diverts the pack. ‘I wonder if Brad’s OK. Brought down in front of all of us, and by . . .’ It’s a close thing. She almost says, ‘Pierce Point trash,’ but substitutes, ‘Walker Pike.’

‘Poor Brad!’

‘We ought to go check on him. He could be a danger to himself.’

‘Brad hates these things, now tell me he didn’t get belching, puking drunk so he wouldn’t have to come.’

‘And he wouldn’t, if Walker hadn’t dragged him kicking and screaming. We should be over at Patsy’s, apologizing.’

‘Frankly, I don’t think she wants to hear from us. We talked her into that humongous party, and now look.’

‘Cecilia would have died.’

‘I bet Brad’s ashamed.’

‘Humiliated, I hope.’

‘He ought to check himself into rehab.’

‘Or do us all a favor and hang himself.’

‘Oh, he’s much too self-centered to do that. Like, what would Fort Jude do without studly, stupid old Brad?’

‘Who would we have to talk about?’

It’s interesting, watching Nenna writhe, Jessie thinks, but after a lifetime with these women, she’s expert at the quick save. ‘But if he did do anything drastic . . .’

Sallie twists her beads in a show of remorse. ‘It would be on our heads. We made him give that party, after all.’

‘For Cecilia. She’d want us to make sure he’s OK.’

‘After the way he did her?’

‘Because he did.’ Nenna is all wronged wife today, rehearsing for the divorce.

‘Did you see how he threw himself on her coffin down at St Timothy’s? He loved that girl in spite of everything.’

‘If Brad wants to kill himself, let him! It’s not our fault.’

Betsy sighs. ‘Unless it is.’

‘It isn’t safe. You know what he’s like when he gets mad. Let one of the guys check on him. Buck, maybe, or Stitch. They’re still friends.’

Kara says, ‘Not after last night. They’re over him.’

Betsy turns to Sallie. ‘Chape can do it. After all, they’re best friends.’

‘They weren’t that close,’ Sallie says. ‘Besides, Chape’s at the Florida Bar Association in Deland, and he won’t be back until tonight.’

‘By then it might be too late.’

Oh, Betsy, head cheerleader. ‘OK, then. It’s up to us.’

‘We can’t all go.’

‘You brought it up, Nenna. Maybe you should . . .’

‘Can’t.’ Their old friend’s mouth narrows. Her eyes are gun slits with a massed army behind them, glaring out. ‘I have a lot on my plate right now.’

‘It’s our duty.’

‘I would, but this is my acupuncture day.’

‘I promised to take Gramma Bellinger shopping after lunch.’

Betsy sets her cup down hard, like a gavel. ‘After all, we started it.’

Somebody ought to do it but nobody really wants to do it. Nobody present really likes Brad. Jessie gets up, broadcasting contempt. ‘When the check comes, my number is V48. Since you’re all too chicken, I’ll go.’