Home At Last Chance (Last Chance #2)(7)
Author: Hope Ramsay

Granny was working in the kitchen, draining butter beans into the sink, but she paused and frowned down at Haley. “Haley Ann Rhodes, how many times have I told you that it’s impolite to eavesdrop on folks?”

“Yes’m, I know, but I wasn’t eavesdropping, ’xactly. I was just playing in the living room, and Uncle Tulane and Miss Sarah were on the porch, and I just happened to hear them talking. And she told Uncle Tulane that she was a librarian.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound right. She works for the company that sponsors your uncle’s car.”

“I know that. She was talking about how she worked in the library and did research on ladies with babies who buy diapers and other stuff like cribs and cradles and car seats.”

“Did she now.” Granny opened the oven and pulled out her pot roast. The smell was mouthwatering.

“Yeah. And she said pink was a good color because the diaper bunny is colored pink. I reckon Uncle Tulane shouldn’t feel so bad about the color of his car. After all, Barbie has a pink car. And doesn’t Mrs. Henrietta Charles over in Allenberg have a pink car that she got selling Mary Kay?”

“Yes, but Mrs. Charles doesn’t have any babies, and your uncle is a man, Haley.”

“Well, Sarah also said Uncle Tulane could help people with their car seats.”

Granny frowned down. “Help them with car seats?”

“Yes’m. She said that people would be interested in the fact that my momma was with Jesus, but that I was saved by a car seat. Uncle Tulane said he wasn’t ever going to talk about how a car seat saved my life, but after Miss Sarah talked for a while, he finally agreed that doing car seat safety checks would be better than having a race to see how fast diapers could be changed.”

“Well that is an interesting idea, but I don’t think you can help.”

“But, Granny, Miss Sarah talked really, really fast and she talked Uncle Tulane right into it. I know that on account of the fact that he used his phone to call someone in New York about it—someone she called the Dragon Lady.”

Granny squatted down to be on Haley’s level. “Dragon Lady?”

“That’s what Miss Sarah called her. But she’s not a real dragon, Granny. I heard Miss Sarah call her by another name I can’t remember.”

“Are you sure you heard that?”

“Yes’m. But Uncle Tulane said I was off-limits on account of the fact I can see the Sorrowful Angel. What did that mean?”

“It means, young lady, that you should mind your own business.” Granny stood up. “Now go tell your daddy and sister that supper’s nearly ready.”

Haley took one step toward the door and then turned. “But Granny, what if I want to help Uncle Tulane teach people about car seats?”

Haley glanced toward the corner of the kitchen near the broom closet. The Sorrowful Angel was there, only she wasn’t very sad right now. The angel never spoke, but Haley had gotten the knack of figuring out what the angel was thinking. The angel had listened to the conversation between Uncle Tulane and the lady from New York just as hard as Haley had. The angel had dried her tears and nodded her head, as if she thought the idea was a real good one.

That had to be a sign.

“Haley, now is not the time to discuss this,” Granny said. “I think it might be a very nice thing for Uncle Tulane to use his position to promote the use of car seats, but I don’t think it would be right for you to be involved. And I know your daddy wouldn’t like the idea. Not one bit. Now you go outside and tell your daddy and your sister that supper will be ready in about ten minutes.”

Haley turned and headed out to the backyard, pretending to mind Granny. The angel followed with a gleam in her sorrowful eyes.

Granny prob’ly thought Haley was going to forget about the car seats. But Granny was wrong.

Deidre Montgomery pressed her fingers against her temples. Tulane Rhodes could be impressively articulate for a redneck. And he’d just handed her an answer to two questions that had been plaguing her for some time.

The first question was prosaic: What to do about Steve Phelps? The man was a huge problem. He was stupid, but the Board thought he walked on water. How he had ever managed to come up with the Cuppa Java campaign was a mystery. Deidre was sure he didn’t dream up that campaign all by himself. But she didn’t yet know who had helped him.

The pink car memo was a different situation. That idiot idea had Steve’s name written all over it. Deidre had allowed the repainting of the No. 57 Sprint Cup Ford to go forward, with the conviction that the Board would soon discover the truth about Steve Phelps.

Unfortunately, the pink car was selling diapers like mad.

Deidre was going to have to take the program away from Steve, or her own position at National Brands would be jeopardized.

Tulane Rhodes had just given her the means to regain control.

The second question—well, it was one of those existential questions that she had been asking herself for more than a decade.

She pushed herself up from her chair and walked across the deep carpet toward her credenza. She had purchased the cabinet when she made vice president and was given this corner office on the thirtieth floor of the National Brands Madison Avenue headquarters. It had been handcrafted by a cabinetmaker. She had waited almost a year for him to finish it.

That thought always gave her a modicum of inner pleasure. For an impatient woman, she could be patient when she wanted to. Andrew had known this about her. Andrew had known all her secrets and all her weaknesses, and he had loved her anyway.

Thinking about Andrew always made her feel hollow inside, like she might be on the verge of tears. But she never cried.

She unlocked the top drawer and drew out a photograph in a sterling silver frame. If she were a braver woman, or one not so given to self-indulgent guilt, she might have allowed this photo to sit on her desk, along with the photo of Andrew. But she was not brave or guilt-free.

Deidre studied Kelly’s smiling face: just two years old, the image of her father, with her curly blonde hair and cornflower blue eyes. If she had lived, she would be seventeen now, and planning for college.

Deidre could rationally explain that Kelly’s and Andrew’s deaths had been caused by a drunk who had already paid the ultimate price for his mistake. Guilt would not bring them back. There was no revenge to be had.

But for years, no one could solve the riddle as to why Deidre had walked away with only a couple of broken ribs. As a supremely rational woman, she had spent the last fifteen years searching for an answer to that question.

Her current high-powered corporate life would not have been possible without the central tragedy of Kelly’s and Andrew’s deaths. It was normal to ask why. But the answer to that question had always worried her, as if their deaths had somehow cleared the path for what she had become.

She would gladly trade her current life if she could go back in time and make sure Kelly’s car seat was compatible with the station wagon’s seatbelt system.

She couldn’t go back. But suddenly, from out of the blue, Tulane Rhodes had handed her one answer to the impossible questions she asked every day. He had given her a way to go forward and make sense of something that would never be sensible.

She put Kelly’s photo back in the credenza and locked it. She took three or four deep breaths, composing herself.

When she was ready, she drew herself up, straightened the seams in her Armani skirt like a knight checking his armor, and headed out in the direction of the CEO’s office. She had a few corporate dragons to slay, a car seat program to launch, and, after that, she needed to rescue the young market researcher Steve Phelps had insisted on sending down to South Carolina.

What was Steve up to? Sarah Murray had no business advancing any National Brands spokesperson, least of all the difficult but oddly articulate Tulane Rhodes. Sarah belonged in the research department, and Deidre aimed to put her back where she belonged.

Chapter 4

Ruby and Elbert’s dining room was large, with a blue floral wallpaper pattern set off by white crown and chair moldings. The room was on the formal side, but the people in it—especially Elbert Rhodes—were not.

Tulane’s father, dressed in black with a gray goatee and a long braid, would have fit right in with a pack of biker boys. He stared at Sarah with a pair of pale wolf eyes, and she had the uncanny feeling he could see right through her.

Ruby sat at the other end of the table, looking like a Southern Living fashion plate. To say that Ruby and Elbert were a pair of odd bookends was to understate things by a mile.

Sarah was directed to a seat sandwiched between Stone’s older daughter, Lizzy, on her right, and Tulane on her left. Stone and Haley sat across the table.

Spread before them on an everyday tablecloth was a cornucopia of food in steaming platters: pot roast, black-eyed peas and rice, lima beans, and something green and gooey that had to be okra.

Elbert said grace, and then Ruby started passing around bowls so the family could help themselves. Tulane tucked right into the peas and rice and pot roast.

When he handed the okra off to Sarah, everyone at the table paused and glanced up at her as if waiting to see what the woman from up north might do.

“Okra is one of Uncle Tulane’s favorites,” Lizzy said with a teenage sneer. “Isn’t it, Uncle Tulane?”

“Uh-huh,” Tulane said mechanically as he conveyed a big forkful of the stuff from his plate to his mouth.

Sarah stared down at the disgusting vegetable, gritted her teeth, and spooned out a little serving onto the pretty blue willowware. It immediately left a trail of slime on her plate.

An uneasy silence settled over the table, punctuated only by the sounds of silverware scraping on china. The Rhodes family was single-minded about their eating.

Sarah stared at the food on her plate and wished she were somewhere else, like at the hotel in Florence, South Carolina, where she was supposed to have spent the night. Why oh why had she chosen to wear the black suit? And why had she mouthed off about the stupid car seat idea? And why had she written that stupid pink car memo? All her problems traced back to that one single decision—where she had broken all the rules.

She was so going to lose her job when she got back to New York. Unless, of course, she could score some points with Tulane Rhodes, who, let’s face it, was never really going to be fired no matter how badly he behaved, because he was a talented stock car driver.

She stared down at the okra in its puddle of ooze. Here was the acid test, like some challenge on Fear Factor. If she ate this awful stuff, it might win her a few points with the man sitting to her left.

So she snapped her spine straight, braced herself, and daintily conveyed a little bit of the okra from her plate to her mouth. She managed to choke it down and had to admit that while its texture was an odd combination of fuzzy and slimy, it had an interesting taste.

Tulane chuckled from his place to her left. “Honey, you don’t have to eat the okra if you don’t want to.”

Sarah looked up. The spark of humor in his verdigris eyes made something hot and wicked ignite in her midsection.

Elbert took that moment to clear his throat. “So, Sarah,” he said. “I need to clear something up with you.”