A dented and dinged white Subaru wagon parked at the curb. The governing board of the Widows Club looked at her with interest. Lola sank deeper into the creaky webbing of her folding chair.
Yesterday, she’d been thinking that joining the Widows Club and remaining single until her dying day would be the crowning achievement of her bereavement. Today, she was thinking twenty-nine was too young to join a group of widows.
The first widow to the sidewalk was Clarice Rogers. She wielded her hickory walking stick as if it were a gentleman’s cane. Trend-wise, Clarice had never moved beyond the 1970s—not in hairstyle, not in fashion, not in the use of sunscreen. Her long gray braids made her thin, sun-damaged face look even longer. Her lime-green geometric blouse had been in and out of style at least five times in the past five decades.
Bitsy Whitlock’s black patent loafers gracefully touched the pavement next. If Clarice was clinging to the seventies, Bitsy was an eighties girl. Her dyed blond hair was held back neatly with a big black velvet bow. Pearls adorned her ears and rimmed the crew neck of her turquoise sweater, which was held up by linebacker shoulder pads.
Rounding out the Widows Club board was Mims Turner, the driver of the Subaru and their president. She wasn’t stuck in any specific era. She looked like everyone’s grandmother with her short gray curls and navy I ♥ My Grandkids T-shirt. It was the neon-orange hunting vest with utility pockets that gave away the fact that she packed heat in her pink pleather purse.
The three conferred before walking to the edge of Lola’s driveway, stopping a safe distance from the cinders of her life.
“Lola, dear.” Mims straightened her orange hunting vest and waved a hand toward Randy’s smoldering underpants. “What’s this all about?”
Was it too much to hope that building a fire in her driveway made Lola a poor candidate for the Widows Club? “I found condoms in Randy’s dresser. The receipt for them was dated two weeks before he died.”
“Lola, dear.” Mims made sympathetic noises. “Don’t throw them out. I believe condoms have a three-year shelf life.”
The horror of that statement coming out of grandmotherly Mims’s mouth temporarily silenced Lola.
She reached for another pair of Hanes, wishing she hadn’t waited a year to clean out Randy’s side of the closet. She was such a romantic fool. And she’d been one since she was nine.
Back then, at the urging of her grandmother, Lola had started a scrapbook of dreams—a flowered and rainbowed blueprint of how her life should be. Land a job doing hair and makeup on Broadway by age twenty-seven (she’d done it by twenty-five), fall in love with her one true love by age twenty-eight (she’d met Randy on her twenty-seventh birthday), have a whirlwind romance and fairy-tale wedding by age twenty-nine (she’d been ahead of the game, marrying Randy mere weeks after they met), and have babies by age thirty (her only failure).
Who was she kidding? It was all a failure. Lola should have brought the scrapbook out to burn.
“You don’t understand. We’d been trying to get pregnant for six months before Randy’s accident,” Lola said in a voice as hard as the metal coffin Judge Harper had special ordered last week. She didn’t use that tone because she was annoyed at being misunderstood by the widows (well, maybe a little), but because she’d cut off her dreams of being a makeup artist / hair stylist to the stars to be with Randy, and because she’d cut back on caffeine and wine to increase her odds of having his baby. And all the while, Randy hadn’t been cutting back on anything! “It was a large box of condoms, and it was nearly empty.” Thirty used from a box of forty. In two weeks!
Lola felt sucker punched.
“You think he was…” Clutching her pearls, Bitsy drew a dramatic breath. “Cheating?”
The word cut through the white smoke in the air and the ashes in Lola’s stomach. It cut and cut and cut until Lola thought she might flutter like ribbons into the flames.
Was she really so gullible? Was she really the woman who’d had no clue her husband was unfaithful?
Lola blew out a breath and admitted the truth. She was.
A mournful, wounded sound collected in Lola’s throat. She swallowed it back and gripped the fake-wood chair handles.
Just then the sheriff’s car pulled to the curb, lights flashing.
“Thank heavens,” Bitsy murmured.
Wearing his crisp brown-and-tan uniform and a stern expression, Sheriff Drew Taylor arrived with a fire extinguisher. He rented the run-down farmhouse Randy had inherited from his grandmother and was everything Lola’s husband hadn’t been—terse, tall, and trustworthy. Sure, he didn’t have Randy’s blond-haired, blue-eyed, all-American good looks. Drew had short walnut-brown hair, a bump on the bridge of his nose, and a small nick above his right cheekbone. But he had the steady eyes and reserved smile you appreciated in an officer of the law.
Drew planted his boots on the pavement. “Ladies.”
That one word. It said, Peace will ensue.
Lola shifted in her chair, not ready to be peaceful.
Now Drew…Drew would never cheat on his wife (for the record, she’d left him and their daughter). He’d probably never cheated on anything in his entire life.
“I’ll give you thirty seconds to explain why there’s a fire here, or I’m going to have to take somebody in.” His gaze bypassed the Widows Club and landed on Lola.
It landed with a brown-eyed howdy-do that rocked Lola against her chair. It landed and made her think about empty seats across the dining room table, of shared laughter, shared pillows, and shared nachos. All the things she missed about marriage.
When Lola didn’t explain herself, the sheriff quirked a dark eyebrow. “Twenty-five seconds.”
Mrs. Everly’s mauve curtains twitched again.
Howdy-do aside, Lola didn’t want to take a ride with the sheriff. “My husband did his own laundry,” Lola said, as if Drew should understand what that meant. “He bleached all the evidence out of his shorts.”
Without so much as a Come again? the sheriff flipped the safety tab on the fire extinguisher.
And yet he didn’t immediately put out the fire. His gaze connected squarely with Lola’s.
For the second time that day, Lola felt sucker punched.
Drew knew.
He knew Randy was a cheater. And if the sheriff knew, everyone in town knew.
Well…Her gaze drifted to the governing board of the Widows Club.
Maybe not everyone.
Lola tossed the last pair of briefs on the flames and went inside.
If Drew wanted to arrest her, he’d have to come and get her.
And give her some answers while he was at it.
* * *
Females plus fire often equaled trouble.
When Sheriff Drew Taylor arrived on the scene, he’d done a three-point inspection of the female with the fire—no weapons, no tears, nothing out of the ordinary in Lola Williams’s appearance. In short, this wasn’t shaping up to be trouble.
Drew knew all about women and trouble. He was a single dad to a precocious six-year-old girl and the big brother to four younger sisters. When Drew was ten, his dad had seen the pink writing on the wall and hit the road, sentencing his son to a life of hair bows, chatterboxes, and long bathroom queues.
Granted, that made Drew qualified to raise a little girl alone but experience told him a woman’s appearance was sometimes more important than her outward expressions of emotion. When his sisters had sunk into Woe-Is-Me mode, they’d called for pizza and raided Drew’s dresser for his old sweatpants. The healing power of an elastic waistband and a pepperoni pie was amazing. When his sisters had reached Watch-Out-World mode, they’d donned their female battle gear (tight-fitting clothes, man-hunter makeup) and cut down anything in their path, including cheating boyfriends, backstabbing girlfriends, and well-meaning brothers.