Southern Fried Blues (The Officers' Ex-Wives Club) Read online

  Good thing they were in the restroom, because Anna wanted to wash her hands again. Maybe a few other parts too. Moving on was one thing. A pity screw with Rodney—no. Just no.

  “Or not.” Jules shrugged. “Your call. Thought you should know he’d be up for that.” She tilted her head. “So to speak.”

  The restroom door opened, and two drunk coeds staggered in. Jules’s eyebrows went wonky. “But then, that might be more his speed. God, I am the best sister-in-law ever.”

  If she said so. They left the restroom. “You gonna sing tonight?” Anna asked. Brad and Rodney had fresh drinks at the table.

  “There isn’t enough alcohol on the planet,” Jules replied.

  She slid into the seat beside Brad, who put his arm around her shoulders and tipped a bottle into her mouth.

  Anna took her own seat and averted her gaze.

  “Disgusting, isn’t it?” Rodney said. He dropped his arm over the back of her chair. A familiar scent overcame the lingering Sprite on her clothes.

  Rodney used the same body wash Neil had. Anna crossed her legs. She leaned left, far enough to get the odor out of her nose, which, unfortunately, put her closer to Brad and Jules, who were now rubbing noses and doing something borderline obscene with their tongues. She tried to smile at Rodney. “Like watching my parents make out.”

  Rodney guffawed. His eyes dropped to her chest. His tongue darted out of his mouth. “I like funny girls.”

  Anna caught sight of the two coeds. She nodded toward them. “The redhead over there was in the bathroom telling blonde jokes.”

  His eyebrows looked like two fuzzy caterpillars hooding his eyes. He contorted one in his giggidy pose, but never once looked toward the redhead. “You’re a funny girl.”

  Anna instinctively reached for her ring. Long gone, but she could still feel it there. Rodney, apparently, couldn’t. “I’m technically still married,” she said.

  The other eyebrow went all giggidy too. “Got an idea to help with that.”

  He leaned in closer. Anna lunged for her iced tea. “So. Another song?”

  “I got a song for you, baby.” His lids were half-lowered. “Wanna see the eighth wonder of the world? Give you a hint. It put the Rod in Rodney.”

  Anna’s facial muscles contorted. She took a big gulp of tea to hide the worst of the twitches, but the tea hit her stomach like a one-two punch of reality.

  Men actually said things like that to single women.

  Rodney slipped the tea out of her grasp and put it back on the table. No more shield. Lots more body wash odor. “I’m trying not to think about it, but I’m headed off to war next week. Never know if you’re coming back or not. Got to take every last opportunity to live to the fullest, you know? Do things I’ve never done before, with people I’ve never done them with.”

  “Technically still married,” Anna squeaked again.

  That only upped the giggidy in his eyebrows. “Never done that before. Come on, baby. Grease my lightning.”

  He was so close she could see every blond follicle on his chin and cheeks.

  “Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what you can do to service your country’s servicemen.” His tongue rolled over his bottom lip. “Us Marines are better at everything than those Air Force weenies. Ooh-rah, baby.”

  His lips loomed in her face like two gigantic garden slugs. There was definite movement in the Rodney, Jr. area.

  Her heart triple-timed it. Adrenaline pinged through her veins. Her thighs clamped shut on their own, and her lungs felt as if they were filled with cement.

  Sex was totally out of the question. As for the garden slugs, she hadn’t kissed anyone but Neil in over eight years. It was inevitable she’d kiss someone eventually, but she didn’t know where Rodney’s lips had been.

  An involuntary whimper slipped out of her frozen mouth. She lunged for her drink. Her clumsy fingers connected with the glass. Tea went everywhere. All over the table, all over Anna’s jeans, all over her broken life. She jumped to her feet with a shriek.

  Rodney jumped up too. “Dude. Really?”

  She opened her mouth to apologize, but her throat was thick with tears.

  Rodney got the panicked expression of a guy who’d rather park his car over fire ants than deal with a soggy female. He gestured helplessly at Brad, who was probably only acting stoic for Jules’s sake.

  Jules heaved a sigh and disentangled herself from her husband. “More napkins?”

  Anna waved a hand to the door, but then tucked it into her soggy pocket when she remembered what that hand was capable of. “Paper towels. In my car. I’ll be okay. Thanks. Fun times.”

  Jules cut her eyes to Rodney, then back at Anna. “Need a ride?”

  “No!” Anna fumbled with her purse, also dripping. She’d had a tea and fries. Easy math. “No. Thanks. I’m okay.”

  Brad gave her foot a nudge. “We got you, Anna.”

  “No, really, I can pay for myself.” She slipped a ten out of her wallet and set it on the table. She could barely make eye contact with Jules. “See you Monday. I need to go. Get cleaned up. You know.”

  But as soon as she was out the door, safely headed to her car, she dug into her purse for a phone number.

  And two minutes later, she headed to her first officers’ ex-wives club meeting.

  “SUGAR, WHOSE ASS do I have to kick?” Kaci asked as soon as she opened the door.

  She lived in a neighborhood like Anna used to. Oversize cookie-cutter houses, high ceilings, bedrooms as big as Anna’s whole apartment, twenty-five minute commute to base, ten-minute ride to James Robert, five to Taps.

  Anna had wanted to go home, but she was soaked, her hands shook so bad she could hardly steer, and she was so, so tired of feeling lonely.

  The ominous sounds of quiet from inside the house didn’t bode well for her choice in how to deal with her humdinger of a mess of life. “Did I miss the party?”

  Kaci’s nose twitched. “Oh, no, sugar, it’s a small one tonight.” Her smile was part hesitant, part hopeful. “Really, it’s just me. Sarah’s kids got sick, so her new friend cancelled too. But I got what it takes to be a club all by myself. You get on in here and relax. I’ll go open up a bottle.”

  Anna hesitated. She wasn’t good at this. Neil had always made her friends for her. He’d take her to Company Grade Officers Association functions, introduce her to a few guys who’d introduce her to their wives or girlfriends, then they’d invite her over to their houses for candle and basket and kitchen gadget parties. They’d ask her to join the officers’ wives club, which she’d politely decline since they held all their meetings during school or working hours, and Anna would be that wife that showed up at picnics and cookouts and sort of knew people, but didn’t really.

  She’d gotten good at only sort-of knowing people.

  That’s why she’d liked Jules so much. Jules seemed good with the sort-of knowing people thing too.

  But Kaci didn’t strike her as the sort-of type.

  “First step’s remembering who you are without him, sugar,” Kaci said. “It’s a doozy, but it gets better after that.”

  That explained why Anna’s knees didn’t want to move. But her brain and her heart and her soul did, so she picked up her feet and crossed into the cool foyer.

  Kaci’s baby cheeks split into a grin. “You up for some peach cobbler, or is chocolate more your speed tonight? Got a big old box of Godiva in here too.”

  Godiva. Probably from the BX with the BX discount.

  Anna needed to stock up before she turned in her dependent ID and lost base shopping privileges. They weren’t in her budget right now, but a chocolate emergency was a chocolate emergency.

  Tonight was bigger than a chocolate emergency.

  “Tequila shots?” Kaci said.

  “God, yes.”

  “You and me, sugar, we’re gonna be good friends.”

  The living room was tiled in oversize beige porcelain tile and furnished in warm browns. O
le Miss memorabilia hung on one side, while Bama souvenirs dominated the other. In between, on a mantel of a fireplace that was probably used only a half-dozen times a year, was a picture of Kaci and her tall, dark, handsome fiancé. Tall, dark, and handsome was in a flight suit.

  Good for Kaci, but Anna wasn’t ever doing a military guy again.

  She looked away from the picture and found herself staring out the back door to twinkling pool lights.

  This was what she thought she’d have the rest of her life.

  Instead, she had an apartment in a lower tax bracket, and she was standing in the middle of a one-woman party.

  Her legs threatened to do their freeze-dried Twinkie impression again.

  Kaci trotted in from the semi-open kitchen and handed her a shot glass. “Lime?”

  “Ketchup.”

  “Ketchup?”

  “I’m a lightweight.” Anna’s nose gave a telltale crinkle. Her eyes followed. The lake was building in her sinuses again, her eyelids preparing to be dams. Her voice cracked. “And ketchup makes me think of home.”

  “Well, sugar, you named your poison. Sit on down. I’ll bring you the whole bottle.”

  “But—” Anna gestured to her clothes. They were half-dry, and her top had developed a few weird wrinkles.

  Kaci sprinted to the kitchen, then huffed back with a ketchup bottle. She snagged Anna’s elbow and pulled her into the master bedroom.

  The walls were a lovely mocha, the crown molding blinding white beneath a tray ceiling. Clothes and books and fireworks were strewn across the four-poster king-size bed.

  Fireworks?

  Oh, God. Neil really had stranded her in the South. The deep South, all pretty on the outside, all backwoods on the inside, without the buffer of the base.

  He’d up and left her in Redneckville.

  “I hate him,” Anna blurted.

  Kaci looked up from a drawer. “Got every right, sugar.”

  “Not hate-hate,” Anna said, and she felt another case of the sniffles coming on. “I mean, I loved him. It was what I did. And I was good at it. I really was.”

  Kaci came up with a pair of sweatpants. “I know you were, sugar. Here. See if these fit.”

  Anna shot her tequila and killed the fire-throat with a squirt of ketchup straight from the bottle. She slammed both the glass and the ketchup down on the nightstand. “All I ever did was love him.”

  “How long?”

  “Long enough to think we’d have forever.” She kicked off her shoes, dropped her pants, and pulled on the sweatpants. They were too long, obviously Kaci’s fiancè’s, but Anna only had to tighten the string in the waist a little. “One of my sorority sisters introduced us. She was dating one of his friends, and they were all older so they graduated first. Then they got sent to Oklahoma together, and Neil kept calling and saying he needed me. So we got married and I transferred schools, and I needed more classes because not everything transferred. But the four of us were together, except then Neil’s program moved a year later, then our friends got divorced, and then the only thing I had going for me was being a military wife.”

  “Aw, sugar, it ain’t easy to resist a man in uniform. Look at me, going after my second one. And my daddy was Air Force too. Gets in your blood.”

  “No. Not me. I’m not ever dating a military man again. Hell, I’m not ever dating again.” Because the thought of dating made her stomach dip as it did on a roller coaster, and her heart felt as if it were stabbing itself with one of her ribs.

  “I swore off academics after ol’ grandpappy,” Kaci said with a knowing nod. “Wouldn’t have given my Lance another look if he’d been any brighter than a dumb cargo jock.”

  Anna reached for the ketchup bottle again.

  “Gets easier, sugar, but it’s okay to take your time. Went three years myself without dating anybody after I welded ol’ grandpappy’s car doors shut and hid his uniforms on Air Force Academy graduation day.”

  Anna choked on the ketchup, but it felt good to laugh at something again.

  “Tell you what,” Kaci said with a nod, “that man realized who he needed that day.”

  “I don’t think anybody’s ever going to need me again.”

  “Aw, sugar, somebody’s gonna need you. Bet you got a lot of somebodies who already do.”

  “No, they really don’t.” Anna swiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Beth’s boys are too old for babysitters. Gram has all the help she needs rolling pie crusts at the shop. Dad hires high schoolers to reorganize the bookstore. I thought they needed me, but they replaced me as soon as I left for college. So when Neil needed me, I thought he was the only one. And I needed him to need me, so it was perfect.”

  “Sounds like how I felt the first time I saw ol’ grandpappy’s potato gun. Didn’t know why, but I knew I had to have him.”

  “His potato gun?” Anna lunged for the ketchup and took another hit straight out of the bottle.

  “It was a beaut,” Kaci said on a sigh. “Shot potatoes three miles if they went an inch. But that man knew as much about being a husband as a crocodile knows about knitting a sweater. Nothing worth keeping there. I didn’t need to be anybody’s trophy wife. Especially not after he kept all the trophies. I earned him those trophies.”

  “Jerk.”

  “Well, trust me on this one, if he doesn’t want you, he doesn’t deserve you. Marriage is give and take. If he can’t give you what you need, and sugar, he has to give you more than needing you, then good riddance.”

  Anna took another hit of ketchup. “You know what he needed me for? Sex. Just sex. And now my friends are trying to set me up with guys who want me for sex.” Her eyes were leaking, but for the first time since Neil had said the D-word, they weren’t sad tears.

  They were freaking furious tears.

  She yanked off her shirt and took the Ole Miss t-shirt Kaci handed her, then pointed to the firecrackers. “You know what I think about being used for sex? I think I’d like to strap their potato guns to those firecrackers. That’s what I’d like to do for my country.”

  Kaci tilted her head, a thoughtful gleam in her eye. “We could do the next best thing.”

  Anna stopped mid-ketchup shot. She gulped the Hunts down in a painful lump that settled right over her heart. “What’s that?”

  “You still got any of his stuff?”

  The ketchup bottle wobbled in Anna’s hand.

  She had a whole boxful in the trunk, neatly labeled Jerkface’s Stuff, that she was planning on delivering to her attorney next week.

  And Neil could pay for shipping, since he was covering her attorney’s fees as part of the settlement.

  The fireworks on the bed whispered sweet nothings. Do it for your country, baby. We might not live to see tomorrow.

  They were technically illegal in Georgia.

  But when was the next time she’d get a chance to blow Neil the hell out of her life?

  “Damn straight I’ve got something.”

  It didn’t take much more than an encouraging grin from Kaci to propel Anna out to her car. Moments later, they were sprawled out in front of the pool, strapping Neil’s belongings to firecrackers, and moments after that, Kaci handed Anna a lighter.

  “Which one you gonna do first, sugar?”

  Anna took another hit from the ketchup bottle. “His favorite boxers.”

  They positioned the firecracker in the middle of the yard. Anna lit the fuse, and the two of them stepped back. The rocket shot into the air with a squeal.

  Ka-BOOM!

  A shower of red and yellow sparks exploded in the night sky. Kaci let out a whoop.

  Anna saluted the sky with her ketchup bottle. “I’ll miss that dust rag.”

  She positioned the next firework, then lit it and darted back to Kaci’s side. When that one exploded, goo splattered down on them. “What is that smell?” Kaci asked.

  “His favorite body wash.”

  “It smells worse than a wet hog in a trough of rotten peaches.�
��

  “Smells worse on.” On all of them.

  Two weeks ago, she wouldn’t have believed she could send the ashes of her marriage up on firecrackers.

  But it felt good.

  Necessary.

  Freeing.

  Anna laughed. She scampered forward and lit another firecracker.

  “Which one?” Kaci asked.

  “His iPod. I never have to listen to the very best of the Neils again.” She’d spent so many hours listening to Neil Young and Neil Diamond on car trips, she’d taken to offering to drive so her Neil could use his iPod's earbuds.

  In retrospect, Diamond’s Red Red Wine and Young’s Birds on repeat were more prophetic than annoying.

  A rainbow-colored burst of sparks spread out in a sphere over the sound of the firecracker’s boom. Something whistled then splashed into the pool with a heavy kerplunk!

  Bye-bye, Neils.

  “Don’t ever doubt terminal velocity,” Kaci said. Anna turned to the pool, but Kaci stopped her. “Lance’ll get it, sugar. He’s used to this. What’s next?”

  The pièce de résistance. “His retainer.”

  “His what?” Kaci said. “Like for his teeth?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Sugar, tell me he didn’t kiss you with that thing in.”

  Anna snuck forward and bent to light it.

  “Anna, sugar?” Kaci said. “You didn’t let him do that, did you?”

  “We were married. You do a lot of weird stuff when you’re married.”

  “Don’t light it!” Kaci suddenly shrieked.

  “What? Why? What’s wrong?” Anna blew on the fuse, but it only sped the fire.

  “That there’s date repellant, and you’re blowing it up.” Kaci dropped next to Anna, then blew out a breath. “Hoo boy.” She grabbed Anna’s arm and dragged her back. The fuse stopped. A second later, the firecracker and the retainer shot into the sky.

  “Now look what you gone and did. Ain’t no reason for any girls not to be dating him now,” Kaci said.

  Sparks showered down. “Well, damn,” Anna said. “I didn’t think about that.”