Page 20 of Just What She Needed

The back yard was enclosed by chain-link when they bought the house and changing it out had been the furthest thing from their minds. Until the Saturday morning vicious growls and ferocious barking sent Rhett rushing through the house from the living room where she was folding clothes. Their German Shepherd mix, Landry, had always been more of a doof than a menace, and in the two years since they brought him home from the local animal shelter Rhett never heard a full-throated bark come from the dog. But the sounds he made that Saturday morning sent painful pricks of fear over Rhett's skin as she ran through the kitchen and out on the patio.

Lilith had been standing in the middle of the backyard, a blue plastic jump rope dangling from one hand as she stared at Landry, her big brown eyes full of confusion and the beginning of fear. The dog was planted in front of the little girl, body low and ears pinned back, the hair at the back of his neck bristled. He faced away from Lilith, his fury directed toward the street where a man stood at the chain-link fence beckoning Lilith forward with one hand.

Rhett never remembered moving, but the next thing she knew she was standing at the fence, the shovel Todd had left leaning against the house next to the door clutched in her hands as she watched the man flee down the street. At the brush of fur against her leg, she looked down to see Landry at her side, his body still tight with tension and a low growl emanating from his throat, topaz eyes fixed in the direction the man had run.

That was eighteen years ago, but Rhett's knees still went weak at how close they had come to...well, she couldn't even think of what might have been if it hadn't been for Landry. Rhett shook off the memory of her terror that day, stepped out into the heat again, and walked across the lawn to the far back corner of the yard where a small mesquite tree grew. She knelt down, breathing in the strong honey fragrance of its white flowers, and put her hand on the grass in front of it.

"Good Landry," she murmured. "Good dog." It had been seven years since Landry passed peacefully in his sleep, but Rhett was suddenly as desolate as if the dog had died that very morning. Hot tears burned her eyes, and she stroked the grass over where Landry was buried, the same way she once stroked his fur.

How could she just go off and leave such a loyal friend behind? The new owners would have no idea he was buried here. If she signed those papers, Landry's grave would be forgotten and abandoned, almost as if the faithful dog never existed. With a sob, Rhett lowered herself full-length on the grass, unmindful of the heat, the thorns on the mesquite, or anything else.

Rhett erected a brick wall of protection around her heart the day Todd died. It had been the only way for her to remain strong in the days and weeks that followed, the only way she could keep it together enough to deal with the aftermath. As the months went by, the wall had been fortified with extra mortar and even coils of razor wire across the top to keep the pesky feelings of confusion at bay, and to repel thoughts that maybe she didn't have any idea what she was doing. The earth-shattering news about Todd and Elaine created a substantial crack in the wall, but the move to Dallas slapped a layer of Quikrete over it, and it had held. Until now.

Now a flood of memories crashed against that wall and brought it tumbling down, the bricks and razor wire slicing and bruising her heart. For the first time since she found out about Todd's betrayal, she thought about the good times. Behind her closed eyes she saw the way the hot Texas sun played across the muscles of Todd's bare back as he wrestled with the post hole digger while putting up the privacy fence. That same sun darkened his skin to bronze during the week it took to finish the job, and he had looked so sexy, so hot. Hard on the heels of those memories came thoughts of the fun they had as a family, the quiet times together, all their triumphs and celebrations. Why had Todd thrown all that away for a roll in the hay with another woman?

No! Grass scratched against Rhett's cheek as she shook her head. She couldn't forget what he did, but she refused to let it color the rest of her memories any longer. Tired of the constant sense of irritation and anger she lived with, she resolved to let the happy memories help dull the bad stuff. After all, she'd loved the man. Maybe not in the breathless, heart-pounding way she once hoped for, but she'd loved him. That was what she'd try to remember most.

Rhett blew out a gust of breath and pushed herself upright. Brow puckered in a thoughtful frown, she gazed down at the resting place of her good dog for a few moments before she got to her feet.

In the stifling hot garage she found several wooden paint stirrers that had been used to mix the big five-gallon buckets when the walls were painted. Back in the now unfamiliar kitchen, she dug a hair elastic from her purse and used it to bind two of the stirrers together into a cross. Another search through her handbag turned up a black Sharpie.

Landry, she wrote on one wooden stick. World's Best Dog. After a minute of mental subtraction, she added the years of his birth and death and then carried the makeshift grave marker out to the back yard.

The ground was, as usual, hard as a rock. But with the help of a jagged piece of stone, a leftover from the surround of a failed flower garden Lilith tried to plant one year, Rhett dug deep enough to bury one end of the cross at the head of the dog's grave. She patted it into place and put the piece of stone behind it for good measure.

"I'll never forget you, Landry," she whispered. "And now the new people won't forget you, either. Thank you for helping me remember that it was mostly good."

That light feeling Rhett got from jettisoning the painful memories was intensified a half-hour later when the last of the papers were signed and she was no longer a homeowner. She left the real estate office on feet that seemed to hover a foot off the ground, and unable to wipe the smile from her face. Claiborne was over for her, and good riddance.

But as she sat fanning herself in the car while waiting for the air conditioner to make the interior a little more bearable, she realized there was still a steel cord tying her to the town, a steel cord named Mama. Despite their complicated relationship, Bettina Vandergriff was still her mother, and since Mel's visits to Claiborne were few and far between, Rhett felt it was her responsibility to check in on her.

As soon as the steering wheel cooled off enough not to leave third degree burns on her palms, Rhett drove to the asbestos-sided house she'd grown up in on the east side of town. As she pulled into the driveway and parked behind her mother's aging Ford Escort, she couldn't help but notice a new coat of white paint on the wood trim of the house. And when she knocked on the storm door, it wasn't the old rusted one that had been there since Rhett was a baby. She was still inspecting the new fancier door with its brass handle when her mother answered her knock.

"Well, hey there, stranger," Bettina said, and swung the door open. "Get in here before you melt."

"The house looks nice, Mama." As she glanced around the living room, Rhett's brain added, outside, that is. The dark fake-wood paneling on the wall cast the same dreary pall over the room that it always had, and conjured memories Rhett would rather forget. Among these shadows she learned her father wasn't coming back home, ever. In the yellowish light cast by the cheap porcelain lamp, she endured lectures about her behavior that left her feeling wrong, dirty, bad. And in this gloomy room she stood huddled with Todd as he informed Bettina she was going to be a very young grandmother. Assaulted by the past that seemed to ooze from the walls, Rhett hurried into the kitchen. As old and outdated as it was, at least it was bright from the bank of windows over the sink and didn't have the funeral home feel of the front room.

"Well, thanks." Bettina followed her daughter into the kitchen and went straight to the refrigerator where she pulled out a plastic pitcher of sweet tea. "Grab some glasses, will you, sweetie? Yeah, that old storm door finally rusted off its hinges last month, and when we got the new one on, it made the paint around the windows look even worse."

Rhett placed two mismatched glasses on the yellow-checkered oilcloth that covered the table. "Who did it for you?" It wasn't that she cared much, but she knew her mother would want to get the whole story out. Questions phrased at the right time might hurry it along.

Tea gurgled out of the pitcher as Bettina poured. "Terrell Quinn and his boys. You remember them from church?"

After a moment of racking her brain, Rhett nodded. "Oh, yeah. They lived over on Pendleton, didn't they?" She had a dim memory of two adolescent boys quite a few years younger than she was running around in camo ball caps and raising hell when they weren't constrained by services at the First Baptist Church. It didn't seem possible they were now old enough to work in their father's house painting business.

"Mm-hm." After placing the pitcher back in the fridge, Bettina sat down across from Rhett. "That's them. They cost a little more, but I knew they'd do the job right. And they did. Scraped every bit of the old paint off and everything."

"That's good." Rhett took a sip of tea and repressed a shudder at the amount of sugar that had been added. She could almost feel her teeth start to rot. "Speaking of houses, I sold mine today."

"I figured that's why you were in town."

Braced for the inevitable I know it wasn't to see me, Rhett was surprised when the stinging jab didn't come. "A young family bought it," she added to keep the conversation on a neutral plane.

"Good. It's a family house. Needs a family in it. How much did you get for it?"

No sense in keeping it to herself. In such a small town her mother was bound to find out sooner or later anyway so she told her.

"Not bad at all."