Floyd shook his head. “He’ll never do it. You got to find a new lawyer for him. And you got to hire Cambrick MacAvoy yourself, before that little girl gets her.”
“You said having Cambrick on a case is like having flesh-eating strep.”
“Get her on your side, it’s the other guy watching his ass melt. You want Cambrick, and you can’t have her if she’s against you on the Hall case. Get rid of the nut and latch on to that woman. Best advice I can give. Or you’ll be paying off your ex for the next twenty years. She’s got her hooks into your future income and don’t you forget it.”
“She’s not my ex.”
“It’s all over but the shouting.”
“Coffee!” Sammie called from the kitchen.
Floyd leaned forward to pat Eric’s shoulder. Eric shut his eyes, half a second too late. “You’ll be good,” Floyd said. “It’s only the first divorce that hurts.”
Floyd and Sammie passed in the doorway. Sammie slithered up against him and shimmied in a way that made Eric close his eyes again, his body impaled on a pulse of emotion either lust or envy, he couldn’t tell which, but definitely sin. Gluttony, the tiger-cat, patted his arm, and he fed it another piece of waffle dripping with butter. Sammie took Floyd’s place on the bed.
“It’s not necessarily over,” she said. “Half the people who come through Moranis Miszlak, if I could give them a cup of coffee”—she handed him his coffee—“and a piece of lemon chess pie, or a pile of cookies, I could talk sense into them. Go home.”
“Try talking sense into Lacey. She’s trying to exorcise my house. Her mother dug up some shaggy old bum with trash in his hair. You have no idea.”
“You are not ready to walk away from her. You’re all up in each other’s mess.”
Donnie Osmond took advantage of Eric’s distraction to slide his head under the coffee cup and seize the waffle. The cat whirled, kicked off with both his hind legs against Eric’s arm, and shot from the room, leaving a trail of melted butter. The coffee fountained from his cup, scalding the fresh cuts. “Oh, grow up,” Sammie snapped, and Eric bit back his moan of pain. “Grow up and go home.”
“I can’t.” The phone rang in the other room. She kept her eyes on Eric, and he kept talking. “I can’t go back to that. It’s crazy. It’s messy. It’s wrong.” It’s low-class; but he wouldn’t say that about Lacey to anyone.
Sammie heard it. “So she didn’t come up like you. Why did you marry her?”
“Because she ate three doughnuts without even worrying about it.”
Sammie handed him tissues to clean the blood and coffee off his arm, and he thought about Lacey and the doughnuts. It was their third date and he had reservations at Amaranth, Columbia’s most expensive low-country restaurant, a test for Lacey: Did she have the clothes, the shoes, the manners? She wore a dress obviously bought for the occasion, white eyelet lace, light blue low-heeled shoes, and a necklace of blue glass beads, summery and modest. She smiled too much but didn’t say, This looks real fancy, as he had feared. The evening was perfect, until the maître d’ said, “Miszlak? I think not.”
“I called yesterday. We have reservations.” The man was immovable. All the tables were booked and there were no cancellations; Eric, feeling the evening slip away, said, “Can we wait?”
“There will be no cancellations,” the maître d’ said.
Lacey waited in her bright new dress and perfectly appropriate shoes. He’d meant to test her, and now she would test him, find out if he was the man he meant to be, or only a kid with his daddy’s credit card. She touched his arm and said, “Let’s go somewhere else.” A moment of pure grace and he loved her. She didn’t test him; she didn’t even know there were tests. They went to Krispy Kreme and bought half a dozen doughnuts, fresh hot now, and she ate three and never said a word about the fat and the sugar, nor a syllable of regret for the elegant dinner they were not having.
The third date, and he was hers. That moment at Amaranth when she touched his arm, and the second moment, when she took the third doughnut.
She was still that same Lacey. When the money disappeared, she planned for how they would live now. Crazy and messy she might well be. But she was true. He needed her, or he’d look in the mirror in thirty years and see Uncle Floyd.
“I’d better get home,” he said.
“Did I tell you what happened the last time I went to the Halliday house?”
“You threw eggs.”