Welcome to Last Chance (Last Chance #1)(8)
Author: Hope Ramsay

Seventeen years ago, Ray had been a serious math genius with a full scholarship to Rice University. The accident during his senior year in high school had scrambled Ray’s amazing brain. It had messed up his common sense, his ability to stay on track, and his emotional control, but it had left him with this uncanny ability to memorize useless numbers and do complex computations in his head.

“I wonder how many of them are unmarried,” Clay said.

“Well, I don’t know, but I’d guess there are about twenty-eight hundred women over the age of eighteen and under the age of forty.”

Clay shook his head. “I’m not going to ask you how you arrived at that number. I’m going to take it on faith. That is a whole passel of girls, Ray.”

“Yeah, but most of them are married.”

“So how many of those do you figure are available?”

“Less than twenty percent. But that’s a guess.” Ray leaned on his broom and looked as thoughtful as it was possible for him to look. “I just thought of something,” he said. “Are you interested in white women or all women?”

“Good question.” Clay watched the rain falling and thought about Sharie in Nashville. Man-oh-man, he had had a thing for that woman when he was twenty-five. He would marry a woman like Sharie in a heartbeat, even if Momma and Daddy disowned him for it. Sharie had been mature and self-contained and funny and smart and… in love with someone else. Story of his life.

“If we were talking only white women, how many do you figure?”

“Two hundred and ninety four—assuming 20 percent of the females in the county are unmarried.”

“You think 20 percent are unmarried?”

Ray shrugged. “I don’t know how many are unmarried. The census doesn’t publish that.”

“Shoot, you’d think with more than two hundred single white females in this county, I could maybe find me one and settle down.”

Ray bobbed his head and gave Clay his goofy grin. “You looking for a girl, Clay?”

Clay grunted. “No, I’m looking for a wife.”

Ray pushed his broom. “Well, if you want a wife you ought to talk to Miz Miriam Randall. She probably knows all the single ladies in the county.”

Clay laughed aloud at that one. Miriam Randall, Dash’s aunt, was reputedly the best matchmaker in Allenberg County. “I’m not that desperate,” he said. A fairly ironic statement given what had happened last night. But then, his need to find a wife had nothing to do with being horny. It was about being lonely. There was a huge difference.

Ray leaned the broom against the counter. “Well, you ought to make a list, then.”

“A list?”

“Yeah, you know, a list.”

“What kind of list?”

“Hand me that pad.” Ray nodded toward a pad of lined paper sitting beside the cash register. Clay handed it over along with a square carpenter’s pencil. Ray took the pencil and started drawing lines on the paper. The accident had affected Ray’s fine motor skills, and he held the pencil like a first grader, with a tight grip. His lines were kind of uneven, and his face scrunched up with concentration as he worked.

Watching his best friend struggle with something as simple as using a pencil always did something to Clay’s insides. He had to look away or get caught up in emotions that knew no limits.

Ray had shared every single milestone in Clay’s life. He and Ray had played Hot Wheels on his back porch when they were eight. They had built a tree house in the live oak back of Momma’s house when they were ten—the same tree house that Clay’s brother Tulane had fallen out of and nearly died.

They had shared their first beers and tried cigarettes down on the Edisto River when they were thirteen. They had drooled over a contraband copy of Playboy when they were fourteen. They had gone in together for their first box of condoms the summer they were sixteen.

“Okay,” Ray said. “Now let’s list all the women we can think of.” He paused a moment. “Okay, I’ve got one. Dottie Cox.”

“Oh, c’mon, Ray, she’s a little old, don’t you think?”

Ray didn’t listen. He wrote Dottie’s name in the first column of his list. “Okay,” he said aloud. “Now we have to list the things that are good about Dottie.”

“Uh-huh. Well, she has a heart of gold. I’ll give her that.”

Ray scrawled the words “heart of gold” into the second column of his list, followed by the words “great tits.”

“Oh, for goodness’ sake.”

“What? She has seriously nice knockers. Besides, haven’t you ever heard that poem?”

“What poem?”

“The one on the Internet about the perfect woman.”

“No, I can’t say as I have. And, Ray, you spend way too much time surfing the Web.”

“Yeah, well, according to the poem, the perfect woman is deaf, mute, loves to have sex, has great tits, and owns a bar. She also likes to send her man hunting and fishing.”

“That’s not a poem.”

“Yeah, I know, but it doesn’t matter. You gotta admit it sounds like the perfect woman. And if you think about it, Dottie’s got several of those traits. I mean she’s got a rack on her, and a bar, and Bubba Lockheart says she’s one hell of a bass fisher.”

Ray wrote a few notes in Dottie’s column.

“Will you stop that? Dottie is old enough to be my momma. I’m looking for a woman I can have a family with. And besides, didn’t anyone ever tell you it’s not nice to objectify women like that?” Although, truth to tell, he and Ray had spent countless hours objectifying women when they were sixteen, and he had certainly objectified Jane last night when she blew into Dottie’s wearing that skimpy tank top. In fact, on a scale of one to ten, Wanda Jane Coblentz’s br**sts rated an eleven.

“Objectify?” Ray looked up, confusion on his face.

“Never mind.” Clay looked out at the rain and tried to put the memory of Jane’s br**sts out of his mind. He failed. “Let’s not make a list, okay?”

“No, this is good, but I might need to expand the matrix to account for all the variables. What’s bad about Dottie?”

“She’s too old.”

“Good point.” Ray wrote that down, then sucked on the end of the pencil for a moment. “I got another one. How about Betty Wilkins?”

“C’mon, Ray. She’s…” He didn’t finish the sentence. What he had been about to say would have offended Ray. Betty was sweet, if you went for girls whose entire life revolved around soap operas and People magazine.

“Yeah, but Clay, she’s got a rack on her. She doesn’t own a bar, but she can cook. I mean have you ever tasted her pies?”

“No. And she doesn’t bake the pies down at the Kountry Kitchen. She just serves ’em.”

“Well, I’ve tasted her pies at the church social. I think Betty is the best-looking girl in Last Chance.”

“Betty is not a girl. Do not put Betty down on that list. Besides, Momma keeps thinking Betty might be right for Stone.” Momma was delusional, of course, because Stone thought Betty was dumb as a post.

Ray looked up at him kind of soberly. “You think he’s interested?”

“Hell no. But do not put her name on that list.”

Ray ignored Clay and wrote Betty’s name down. In the good column, he wrote the words “best-looking girl in LC” followed by the words “great tits,” and then “great pies.” In the bad column, he wrote the words “Stony’s girlfriend,” followed by the notation that she didn’t own a bar and wasn’t deaf and dumb.

Well, the dumb part was debatable.

“She is not Stony’s girlfriend,” Clay said. “I only said Momma and the rest of the church ladies are constantly trying to match them up. But they will fail. In case you missed something, my brother has not yet gotten over the death of his wife. He isn’t interested in Betty.” Like he would ever be interested in a woman like that. Like he would ever be interested in any woman ever again.

“That’s too bad. She’s a really nice person, Clay. You should definitely consider her. That’s why I put her name down.”

“Okay, Ray, let’s stop making this list now.”

Ray remained undeterred. “I got it, Clay, the perfect female.” He bent over his list and scrawled the name April into the first column.

“Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ray, April is not a real person.”

“She is, too. She’s perfect, and the best part is she’s sleeping up on the couch in Pete’s office.” He said this like Wanda Jane was Snow White or Sleeping Beauty or something. Like she was waiting there for her prince to come and kiss her awake.

“How many times do I have to tell you, the woman sleeping on the couch is Jane. She’s way too young and way too needy to be anyone’s wife, and besides, she’s just passing through. She’ll be gone by Sunday.”

Ray shook his head as he wrote. In the “good” column he wrote the words “perfect woman” followed by the words “great tits.” In the “bad” column he wrote nothing at all. He looked up. “You know, I’m going to have to ask her a few questions before I can fill this out completely. You think she owns a bar, Clay?”

Clay hauled in a big breath and blew it out, then he snagged the legal pad, tore off the top sheet, and crumpled it up. “Look, my perfect woman is not deaf and dumb, and she doesn’t own a bar. It might be nice if she liked to fish, but I could live with a woman who didn’t. There are more important things in a woman, you know?”

He dropped the paper into the wastebasket. “Why don’t you go dust aisle three, huh?”

Ray bobbed his head. “Okay, Clay. But if you don’t want Betty or April, you are stupid. If it weren’t for”—he hesitated for a moment, his lips pressing together—“you know… things… I would go for those women myself.”

Clay’s chest tightened, and he had trouble swallowing for a moment. The accident had robbed Ray of his future and left him just enough so that he knew the difference between what he had been at seventeen and what he was now at thirty-four. Ray still had all the longings of a normal man, and that was a problem. Pete and Clay had impressed upon Ray that he needed to be careful around women.

Ray tried his best, but Clay lived in fear that one day Ray would walk right into trouble that could land him in jail, or worse yet, in some state institution. Ray didn’t understand the games women could play, and last night Jane had looked like she might have been a predator.

Of course, Clay’s first impression of Jane had been wrong. But there was still a lot about that woman he didn’t know. She was running scared, and she was desperate. There was no telling what trouble that could lead to.

He needed to get Jane out of town before the Ray situation exploded into something ugly. That woman was a dead ringer for April, and Ray was likely to forget that April was just a fantasy. Reality and fantasy got mixed up in Ray’s head all the time.