Three Times a Lady

Chapter 23

Wheeling her silver BMW out of the parking lot of Johnny’s Hideaway, Dinah Leach leaned forward in her seat and squinted ahead into the darkness.

The night was as pitch-black as a funeral veil, matching her foul mood perfectly. According to the weather reports, Hurricane Allison was headed directly toward them now, and Dinah knew that she never should have been out in this kind of weather in the first place. Not only was it unsafe, it was absolutely pointless.

Dinah flipped open her cellphone and hit the voice-activation feature. If she needed to be miserable out here, she’d have some company for the ride. And she knew exactly who to call. ‘Call Derrick Coleman,’ she said.

The Motorola Droid went to work dialing the number of her agent, a smooth-talking, almost heartbreakingly handsome man she’d first met while they’d both been studying drama at Spellman College back in the late-1980s.

Derrick answered his phone after five rings. His deep voice boomed over the car speakers via Dinah’s BlueTooth setup. ‘Dinah, baby! What’s the good word, sweetheart? What’s new and exciting in the life of my favourite reality-television star? Tell me something good, girl.’

Dinah rolled her eyes but couldn’t fight back a smile despite her dark mood. Derrick Chad been her agent for the past five years now and her friend for even longer – going on almost twenty years now, hard as that was to believe. When they’d first met, both she and Derrick had been fresh-faced teenagers hell-bent on taking the world by storm – or at least taking it and fashioning it to suit their needs as well as they possibly could. Sometimes it seemed to Dinah as though she’d blinked and half her life had passed her by. ‘Can it, Derrick,’ Dinah said, still smiling. ‘I don’t have time for any of your silver-tongued charm right now, playboy. I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’

‘How big of a bone?’

‘Ever heard of a Tyrannosaurus Rex?’

Derrick laughed. ‘Sounds like a pretty big bone. What’s the problem, babe?’

Dinah let out a frustrated breath. ‘The problem is that I don’t like going out every night like this, Derrick. I don’t care if it’s good for my career or not. It’s not natural. I’m a housewife, for God’s sake. It even says so right there in the name of my show: “The Real Housewives of Atlanta”. But I’m never home long enough any more to actually be a housewife. You’ve always got me running around like a chicken with its damn neck cut off. I need a break.’

Dinah heard Derrick scribbling notes on his end of the line, no doubt finalising the details on yet another public appearance for her to make. ‘I hear ya, babe,’ he said after a moment. ‘But you know we’ve got to keep you in the public eye, don’t you? It’s just the way these things work. Out of sight, out of mind and all that.’

Dinah smirked. She and Derrick had played this game ever since college and she always won. Ever since they’d first met at Spellman, they’d tired to one-up each other with competing clichés that possessed exactly opposite meanings. ‘How about absence makes the heart grow fonder?’ she asked.

‘She who hesitates is lost.’

‘Look before you leap.’

‘Strike while the iron is hot.’

‘A stitch in time saves nine.’

Derrick paused. ‘Dead men don’t wear plaid?’

Dinah burst out laughing. ‘I win,’ she said. ‘Again. I’d say that puts the all-time record at somewhere around a billion to one, wouldn’t you? Anyway, what’s my schedule look like this week? I haven’t seen Tyler in for ever now and I need some time with my man.’

‘Let me take a look here.’

While Derrick shuffled through some more papers, Dinah stretched her neck and thought of her husband. Between Tyler’s job as the starting power forward for the Atlanta Hawks basketball team and Dinah’s own job on the reality television show, spending any quality time together these days sometimes seemed a virtual impossibility. Dinah knew other couples had it worse than them and that she and Tyler needed to count their blessings, but she still couldn’t help resenting their busy schedules. After all, what was the point of working so hard all the time if they couldn’t enjoy the fruits of their labour together every once in a while?

Derrick finally stopped shuffling papers on his end of the connection. ‘You’ve got a book signing at Borders Tuesday, a speech to the rotary club in Roswell on Thursday and that cancer benefit thing at the children’s hospital on Friday.’

Derrick paused and cleared his throat. ‘Speaking of that,’ he said, ‘are you sure you won’t let me alert the press to the fact that you’ll be appearing at the hospital, Dinah? It would look really great to the public and up your rep with the bleeding-heart liberals. Probably score you a few more fans for your Facebook page, too.’

Dinah shook her head and pulled the BMW onto the freeway just north of Buckhead as the skies opened up and rain began to pound against her windshield. Flicking on the wipers to the most powerful setting made hardly any difference at all. ‘No, Derrick,’ Dinah said, raising her voice now to be heard above the incessant whine of the wipers. ‘I’m not trying to benefit from my charity work; you know that. This is personal to me.’

Dinah’s eyes misted up. Ever since her and Tyler’s only child had died of leukemia three years earlier, she’d worked tirelessly to help find a cure. Still, she never quite felt like she did enough. There was always more she could do. More money she could give. More charity events she could attend.

Derrick shifted back into friend-mode, putting aside his agent role for the moment. ‘We all miss, Marilyn, Dinah,’ he said softly. ‘She was an angel.’

Dinah wiped at her eyes with the back of her left hand. Between the tears in her eyes and the waterworks coming from the heavens it was almost impossible to see anything on the road in front of her.

‘Yes, she was an angel, Derrick,’ Dinah said, sighing softly. ‘She was an absolute angel sent from God. And I know she’s watching over me. As a matter of fact, she’s watching over me right now. I swear to God, sometimes I can feel her.’

Dinah paused and swallowed away the lump that had formed in her throat. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s a crazy goddamn mess out here so I need to let you go. I need to concentrate on driving.’

‘How far away from home are you?’ Derrick asked.

Dinah squinted again through the windshield. Almost as if on cue, a flash of lighting exploded overhead, allowing her to catch a quick glimpse of a green exit sign on the side of the highway. Maverick Road. ‘About five miles now,’ Dinah said. ‘Should only take me about twenty more years to get home at this rate.’

Derrick clucked his tongue. ‘That sucks, girl. Anyway, be careful out there. I’d hate for anything to happen to my favourite client.’

‘Don’t you mean your only client?

Derrick laughed. ‘Yeah, that’s what I said. Anyway, I’ll call you in the morning. I’ve got some ideas I want to run by you. Some really big stuff in the works.’

Dinah switched off with Derrick and sighed. No doubt he was cooking up even more crazy schemes designed to get her even more publicity – as if publicity was something she needed any more of. She already had more publicity now than she knew what to do with. Enough to choke a horse.

Dinah shook her head in exasperation. When she’d agreed to do the reality television show six months earlier she’d known that the media scrutiny would be intense, but she’d had no idea just how intense it would be. Last week, she’d actually caught a photographer snooping through her garbage. Lord only knew what he’d been looking for – or what he’d found.

Chasing away the unpleasant thought with another quick shake of her head, Dinah’s heart nearly stopped dead in her chest when her tires suddenly hydroplaned on the slick pavement of the highway. She sucked in a sharp breath over her teeth that sent a sharp stab of pain shooting through her lungs and slammed down her foot on the brake pedal – the exact opposite of what all the experts told you to do in situations like this.

The car fishtailed wildly out of control, then took a sharp left-hand turn and headed directly toward the concrete divider in the middle of the highway. Dinah squeezed shut her eyes and gripped the steering wheel with all her might, bracing for bone-crushing impact.

But it never came.

Opening up her eyes again when the car finally came to a gentle stop five seconds later, Dinah gasped. The concrete divider was staring her dead in the face from no more than three feet away.

Before she knew it, she was laughing and crying at the same time. Against all odds, she was still alive.

And she knew exactly who to thank for that.

Lifting her stare to the heavens, Dinah breathed out a grateful sigh of relief. ‘Thank you, Marilyn,’ she said. You’ve always been mama’s little angel, haven’t you?’