The Reluctant Prophet Page 4

  “What about this one?”

  Out of the crowd of chrome, a red bike with a glint of gold beckoned to me. It was the only one that didn’t look like it was going to turn on me. It had a simple grace to it, from its gleaming chrome shafts all the way back to the leather bags hanging on either side of the back wheel like classy purses.

  “The Heritage Softail Classic,” Stan said. “Well, now, that could be a good choice for you. Nice lines, a little feminine but not too girly. Not that you aren’t—”

  “Shut up, Stan,” I said.

  “Right.”

  I ran my hand along what had to be the red gas tank just in front of the seat, almost as if I expected to feel a heartbeat.

  “You want to sit on her?” Stan said.

  Want was probably not the right word. Have to came closer.

  “Sure,” I said—and then stood there stupidly.

  Stan cleared his throat. “This your first time on the driver’s seat?”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Just a few pointers, then—”

  “I need more than a few pointers, Stan. I need you to tell me exactly what to do so I don’t fall on my butt.”

  “Got it. All right, just hold onto the handlebars—there you go—and then swing that left leg over—that’s it. Now turn the wheel and stand her up.”

  I did, until I was straddling a machine that, from that angle, was as daunting as Bernard himself.

  “What do I do now?” I said.

  “I’ll brace you so you can sit,” Stan said, and put both hands on the handlebars and his feet on either side of the front wheel.

  “You’re not serious,” I said.

  “Trust me.”

  “Try again.”

  “I never lost anybody in the showroom yet,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, just don’t let me be first.”

  Gingerly I lowered myself to the seat.

  “Put your feet right on the pegs there,” Stan said. “And just relax.”

  I didn’t take my eyes off of him as I placed one foot and then the other on the narrow foot rests on either side of the wheel. The position slanted me back, arms extended straight from the handlebars.

  “Dang, girl,” Stan said. “You make this thing look good.”

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “Hey, like I said, it’s all about the way the bike fits. You can sit on it flat-footed and reach the handlebars. You can balance it and accept the weight of it. Handle the engine size—you’ve got 69 bhp, so you’re good there. If your bike fits your skill level, you gon’ be one with it, and that is pure beauty.”

  “What skill level, Stan?” I said.

  “No worries. We’ve got the Rider’s Edge class. In a weekend we’ll have you out there drivin’ it like you stole it.”

  I nodded, not because I believed a word of it, but because as I sat astride the Classic Softail Whatever It Was, I had the uncanny sense that I was supposed to be there. That in spite of my lack of any skill level whatsoever, this bike wanted to take me somewhere.

  And right now I didn’t have anyplace else to go.

  “How much?” I said.

  Stan, who was still holding me up by the handlebars, nodded at the tag. I flipped it over and tried not to gasp. I wasn’t as successful at keeping the words, “Are you serious?” from escaping my lips.

  “Eighteen thousand is actually a great price with all it’s got on it,” Stan said. “Our finance people can help you. We’ll get you on the road.” He nodded for me to stand up, and he let me turn the wheel and lean the bike back on its stand. “Let me introduce you to Kim in the loan office. I’ve seen her work magic.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll be back with the money.”

  “I can’t promise this one will still be here. You want to put down a deposit?”

  God hadn’t said anything about a deposit. He hadn’t, in fact, said anything at all about how I was going to pay for this command of his. Clearly I was either going to have to wait for another Nudge or find the money myself. If neither came to be, I’d know it was time for the psychiatrist.

  “Thanks for your time, Stan,” I said and extended my hand.

  “It’s been my pleasure. You take care now.”

  As I once again picked my way among Road Kings and Fat Boys, I imagined him chalking the last fifteen minutes up as time he could have better spent playing solitaire on his computer. We’ll see, Stan. We’ll just see.

  Wednesday was one of those days we have often in North Florida, where heavy black clouds threaten to break open from nine a.m. on, but never give up a drop. The tourists eyed the skies and headed for the museums, and Lonnie called me on my cell and cut me loose at ten thirty. I gave Bernard a cursory brushing, pretended not to hear Lonnie’s hint that I could do a little touch-up painting on the carriage, and headed for home.

  I needed to hack at something while I thought through this money thing, and the shrubs in my front yard were in dire need of hacking. I’d seen both of my neighbors take disapproving pauses as they passed. I could almost hear Owen Schatz preparing his lecture: “We run a tight ship here on Palm Row, Ally. Nobody expects you to keep your place manicured like Sylvia did, but you know, it’s like polishing your silver. If you don’t keep up with it, you have to use twice the elbow grease when you do get to it.” Owen, a bachelor in his early seventies, had three hobbies: playing golf, keeping Palm Row pristine, and mixing his metaphors.

  I sat on the front steps and slathered on sunscreen. Forty-plus years of Florida tans had left my skin just short of an Aigner handbag, but better late than never to give it some attention. I wasn’t sure I could say the same about the azalea bushes that were now half covering the windows.

  As I went after them with the clippers, I admitted that Owen had a point. Palm Row only ran for one block between lower St. George and Cordova Streets, with just the four houses on one side of the narrow road and their respective garages on the other. It was little more than a lovely alley, really, bordered with tall coconut palms—hence the name. If one of us let our yard go to seed, the whole street seemed shabby.

  “One of us” was always me. Next door on the St. George side, my other neighbor, eighty-year-old Miz Vernell, made the White House Rose Garden look like a vacant lot. Although the empty house at the opposite end had been on the market for six months, a landscaper showed up weekly, effectively putting me to shame.

  It was okay, because as I uncovered the bottom row of window-panes and started a pile of chopped-off twigs by the screen porch, I had a chance to think about where in the Sam Hill I was going to get $18,000.

  It wasn’t like I could get a loan. Banks—and finance magicians—didn’t lend money to people with my career history. Last time I counted while trying to fall asleep, I’d gotten to ten jobs before I dozed off.

  My only asset was the house, and trying to get a mortgage on it was pointless for the same reason. Besides, that would have Sylvia rising from her grave to pinch my head off. She’d made me promise to keep what she left me, and that included the bank account for paying the taxes, insurance, and upkeep. A white wooden house in this climate meant painting every other year, and even now the gray shutters were peeling like a Yankee with a sunburn. Food and utilities were up to me, and what I made driving a carriage barely covered that.

  I snipped a handful of gone-wild branches and added them to the pile. There was my van, the ’01 Chevy Astro given to me by Scott, who’d owned the all-things-datil-pepper shop at the beach where I used to work. He signed the Astro over to me as the back pay he owed me when the business became a casualty of the economic downturn in ’08. The Astro’s starter was almost gone, and if I didn’t replace the exhaust system soon, the EPA was going to be on my back. And then of course there was the fact that “You’re Not Hot Till Y
ou See Scott” was still painted on the side. The datil pepper, he informed me more than once, scored one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand units on the Scoville scale; Tabasco sauce, he’d say proudly, was a mere twenty-five hundred. So, no, I wouldn’t get enough for the van to buy myself a helmet.

  I sat back on my heels and shoved my hair off of my seeping forehead so I could look across the lane at my garage. My only option was to sell the Jaguar—the one indulgence Sylvia allowed herself when she inherited her mini-fortune.

  “I always wanted an XK,” she told me. “I wanted to drive around Manhattan and show all them”—which came out “dem” off Sylvia’s New York tongue—“people.”

  “What people?” I asked her.

  “Just ‘dem,’” she said. “We all got a ‘dem.’”

  Frankly, growing up with her nannying, I never saw her care what any of ‘dem’ said or did, including my parents who employed her. By the time she got her British-racing green Jaguar XK at age eighty-two, she apparently realized that too. I never saw her drive it more than a few times, even after she was too sick to get behind the wheel and had me drive her to doctors’ appointments in it. To tell you the truth, I think she got more joy from beating me at gin rummy.

  When she left everything to me in her will, I drove the Jag in her honor until I (a) decided I couldn’t afford to pay the insurance and eat, and (b) discovered that a car like that required more attention than a high-maintenance boyfriend. I couldn’t afford that, either. It had been parked in the garage ever since, with only two hundred miles on it. It was so not me.

  But neither was a Harley. Until now.

  I took another swab at my dripping forehead with the back of my hand and closed my eyes. I could hear the guide on the Orange and Green out on St. George, announcing the same history into his microphone that he did probably twenty times a day. Above it, the bells on Trinity Episcopal chimed the hour into the heavy air.

  What’s it going to be, Allison? Find a way and see where it leads you? Or mark your own hours tour by tour until you get ‘terminated’?

  “It isn’t going to get done that way, Ally.”

  I jumped, nearly stabbing myself with the business end of the clippers. I hadn’t heard Owen ease his black Lexus SUV in from St. George Street, the only end you could drive in from.

  “You caught me daydreaming, Owen,” I said.

  He grinned, and I once again marveled at what a great job that dentist had done with his dentures. Although Owen had foregone the sunscreen altogether for his seven decades, so the new teeth were a little incongruent with his leathered face. And scalp.

  “Owen, we’ve talked about you wearing a hat when you’re out on the golf course,” I said. “We don’t want you getting skin cancer.”

  “You think you’d miss me?” He grinned even wider. Man, those teeth were great, all the way back to the molars.

  “Who would guilt me into cleaning up my yard?” I said.

  “Yeah, there’s that. Listen, I heard we might be getting a new neighbor.”

  “They finally sell that house?”

  “That’s what Bonner Bailey told me. We played nine holes today.”

  “Ah—well, Bonner’ll make a nice commission on that.”

  Owen winked. “That could be good news for you, yeah?”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Your name comes up every once in a while. I’ve seen him here a couple of times. Thought maybe you and him …” He winked again. “You two could do wonders with this place. You seen what he’s done with his? Oh—of course you have.”

  He winked yet again.

  “Did you get contact lenses too?” I said.

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to put my spoon into your stew and start stirring. I just like to keep my ducks in a row, y’know?”

  “Yeah, Owen,” I said. “I know.”

  When he finally pulled the Lexus on into his garage, I left the clippers on the porch steps and crossed the brick road to my own. Inside, the Jag slumbered under its cover.

  “Get ready to show your stuff, girlfriend,” I said. “You’re going on the auction block.”

  I wasn’t quite sure where to start advertising, but I knew some of my Watchdogs would have ideas, especially Bonner, and Frank, an accountant, and India, who owned a clothing boutique on Aviles Street and was in the know about handling big-ticket items. The only articles I owned from “Secrets of India” were the scarves she gave me every year for Christmas. I wore a teal one, woven with silver threads, to the meeting that night, just to make her happy.

  The instant I appeared in the doorway of the bride’s lounge, she said, “You see? That color is so good on you.”

  “I knew you’d squeal over it,” I said.

  I sank onto the blue and cream brocade couch next to her, where I always sat on Wednesday nights so I could smell her signature Giorgio Armani, and thought my usual prayer: Thank you, God, that we meet in here instead of one of those classrooms with the metal chairs that give everybody hemorrhoids. Frank had claimed the lounge for us five years ago when small groups were first formed. He said ladies should have a comfortable place to sit, and probably would have pulled our chairs out for us when we arrived if they hadn’t been constructed from solid oak and contained twenty pounds of upholstery. As it was, he stood up when any of us entered the room.

  He was still standing now, looking awkward in his short-sleeved sport shirt, rubbing his age-spotted hands together. Frank always reminded me of a wrinkled thirteen-year-old boy when he wore anything but a suit. “Frank, I’m sorry about Bernard on Sunday,” I said.

  “It was fine, Missy. I got it taken care of.”

  “Still—I felt bad.”

  India snickered. “What happened? Did your horse poop in front of the church again?”

  “Honestly!”

  That came from Mary Alice, who was arranging coffee cups on a tray at the buffet. She put her hand, white and plump as a biscuit, over her little bow of a mouth, which made India snicker again.

  “You’re lucky, Mary Alice,” she said. “I would have called it something worse before I was a believer.”

  India was forever reminding us what a heinous person she was in her pre-Christian days. The woman was fifty-two and had been baptized at age twenty-one, but she still seemed to feel the need to recall her dark youth. Frankly I hadn’t heard anything half as bad as some of the stuff I pulled in my own personal history, but if it reassured her that she was now safe from her former self, so be it.

  Mary Alice let her hand slide down to her stack of chins, which she always seemed to be checking as if she were worried they’d somehow slipped away. She was only sixty, but she’d been protecting those chins ever since I’d known her, which was ten years now. She came to see Sylvia twice a week for the three years she was sick, every day toward the end. When I was catatonic with grief after Sylvia died and I couldn’t leave the screen porch, Mary Alice came and sat and crocheted and murmured that this too would pass. But it was the checking of the chins that soothed both Sylvia and me as we groped to find our own handle-holds in the abyss of loss. Every time Mary Alice tucked her ivory fingers into those silken folds, I was reassured that at least some things remained the same. Mary Alice had subsequently shown me that God was one of those things. She and the rest of the Watchdogs.

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  Bonner breezed in, still pulling the Croakies over his head to remove his sunglasses, which had left fresh sunburn lines across his temples. Probably from his afternoon on the golf course with Owen.

  “Hey, big deals take time,” I said. “Heard you signed one today.”

  “Well, do tell,” India said.

  She patted the couch on her other side, but Bonner took the gold chair opposite us and gave me the eyebrow.

  I gave him one ba
ck. That’s what he got for dropping my name like we were—what did Owen call it? An item?

  “House on Palm Row and Cordova,” he said. “It’s a decent deal, yes.”

  “Thanks be to God, son,” Frank said, hand out for the shake. The Reverend Howard’s influence on Frank hadn’t quite stretched to hugging men yet.

  “I’m glad I brought this pie, then,” Mary Alice said. “We need to celebrate.”

  India gave a ladylike groan. “Tell me it’s not pecan.”

  “It is.”

  “So much for Jenny Craig.”

  “You’re not serious, India,” I said. “You’re a stick. Eat two pieces. Three.”

  She waved me off with a set of white-tipped nails, which reminded me that mine were still grimy from my attack on the killer azaleas. Oh well.

  Bonner took the cup and saucer Mary Alice handed him—who else served coffee with a saucer anymore?—and said to me, “So—we ready to get started?”

  India leaned into me. “I think ‘we’ means ‘you.’”

  I gave Bonner a look. He looked back.

  “All right, so we all heard Pastor Garry’s sermon Sunday,” he said, eyes still on me.

  You are dog chow, I said to him with mine.

  Mary Alice, God love her, gave her nervous bubble-laugh and said, “I didn’t really understand it. I mean, no offense to Pastor, but I was confused.”

  “Give us a review, if you don’t mind, Bonner,” Frank said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Lay it on us, Bonner.”

  The eyebrow said that I, too, was dog chow.

  “Okay, Pastor has read, I don’t know, several studies that say Buddhist books are more popular than Christian books with the general public—”

  “We’re talking the unsaved, then,” India said.

  I felt my teeth grit. Loved India, hated that word. And it was one of her favorites. That and nonbeliever and unchurched. For me they brought up visions of the fat girls with pimples longing to be at the popular table in the cafeteria.

  “He just said the general population,” Bonner said. “He didn’t specify.”