A story tidbit and a new publication

 After a hiatus, another of my short stories, “Falling Gods,” has found a publisher at The Lorelei Signal, also returning after a break. And because many of my earlier published stories are now out of print, I’m moving them – and some unpublished ones – to a more permanent home at
Wattpad. Here’s a preview – a previously unpublished short story, “Sapphires,” which was the basis for my novel, WILD HORSES, also now available at Wattpad. 

SAPPHIRES

I parked behind the jeweler’s shop as the receptionist directed and took the elevator to the second floor. For all the times I had sat on the Louis the Something sofa facing the glass front of the shop’s first floor, to show everyone in Dallas how much money could be hung around a trophy wife’s neck, I’d never been to the upstairs office, the private meeting place for clients who came not to buy, but to sell.

The elevator doors opened and George led me to a chair in the windowless office, nudging a box of tissues my way. The place had as many boxes of Kleenex as a shrink’s office. A shiver of unease ran down my spine.

Image: Security from Pixabay

“Can I get you something to drink, Emma?” George asked. “A glass of wine?”

“Just water.”

George had never called me by my first name before. It was always “Mrs. McMillan this” and “Mrs. McMillan that.” This time my shiver must have been visible.

“Something warm?” he asked.

“I’m fine.” I sipped the water. Maybe he was wary of addressing a newly divorced woman by the name of her former husband.

George sat across from me and opened the case I’d sent by messenger. The deep blue of the sapphires and the yellow gold of their settings made such a heap of sumptuous color against the case’s velvet lining, it hurt to part with them. But I would have done a lot more than that, so much more than that, for Suzy’s sake.

George said something, looking at me over the jewels. His mouth moved but the words made no more sense than glossolalia at a Pentecostal meeting.

“Emma?” he asked at last, leaning toward me.

He’d said “color-enhanced,” “injections,” “dye.”

“They’re—fake?” I got the word out at last.

“Not fake. They’re real sapphires. They’ve just been—processed.”

He nudged the tissues a millimeter closer. I swallowed hard, clicking my purse open. My phone had the number of my AA sponsor programmed into it, but I fumbled.

“I’d like that wine now.” I sipped at first through numb lips, then tossed the glass back in a gulp. Then another. And another. George owed it to me. 

“Emma?” he said again. “Let me drive you home.

A chime rang on his desk, a note too musical to be a telephone, and he shook his shirt cuff back with studied casualness, the face of his Rolex gleaming. Then he closed the case, sealing my hopes of protecting my daughter inside that velvet-lined coffin.

“I need the money.” I pushed the case back. “Sell them for scrap, whatever you can get.”

“You’ll feel differently tomorrow. These are still beautiful gems. Give yourself the pleasure of wearing them.”

“I want another drink.”

“Emma.” Very gently. If he said my name again, I’d scream.

“Did Richard know?”

“He never consulted me,” George said.

I groped through my purse again and found my keys. George tucked the jewel case under his arm and, grasping my elbow, walked me to the elevator. We rode down together. The doors swooshed open and the light outside dazzled me. It was still day, maybe only an hour later than when I’d entered, in spite of the lifetime that had passed in the dimly lit office.

I pushed George aside and bolted, blinded by light and rage and tears, straight into Jim Farouk. And then I dropped my keys and slid to the ground, sobbing, and he caught me and gave me a handkerchief in place of my wad of soggy Kleenex.

“Mrs. McMillan,” he said, in the Okie drawl that sounded odd for someone with his name, “I’ve been hoping to talk to you, about that thing with my dog, you remember?”

George stooped to pick up my keys. Even in my fury, I could see the relief on his face.

“Do you mind?” Jim helped me into the passenger seat of my car. “We can talk on the way.”

I knew Jim from AA, which I couldn’t mention in front of George. I’d never talked to him about a dog, and doubted he had one, but I could only seize the handy lie he threw me like a life preserver. “Of course, I don’t mind, Dr. Farouk. I’ve been meaning to ask about your dog.”

He shut my door, got behind the wheel, and backed out of the private parking lot onto the street. It was a week after Thanksgiving, but the weather was Texas-fine, the sky as blue as my lying sapphires.

“So, you’re selling something, too?” I asked. “Sorry to mess up your appointment.”

Jim didn’t bother acting like he didn’t know what I meant. “A Christmas present for Phaedra. Guess I won’t need it now. But I can reschedule with George.”

Phaedra Khoury was his girlfriend—a voluptuous brunette with green contact-lensed eyes, the Bollywood starlet type. I hoped she’d walked out on him, hoped he was hurt about it. I wanted somebody else to hurt as much as I did.

He turned the wrong way on Preston Road, toward my old place. For a minute, I was tempted to let him—I’d rather walk all the way back to the other side of town in my Jimmy Choos than swallow my pride again. But Richard had a restraining order against me and, damn, my shoes had four-inch heels.

“I’ve moved out. I’m not living with Richard.”

“Oh,” was all Jim said, until he pulled through the Village Apartments’ entrance.

***

Jim did have a dog, after all. I wasn’t surprised to see him on the park trail at Arbor Hills one Saturday a week or so later. We were running into each other everywhere, it seemed. I saw him from a distance, over the grass and brush on the trail, wearing a flannel shirt that looked like he and it had grown up together. Probably the one Phaedra had slept in when he worked late at the hospital. I wondered if he’d found a replacement for her.

He wasn’t a surprise but the dog was—big, black, hairy. It spotted us before we, Suzy and I, saw it. It galloped toward us, off-leash. We were at the lookout point, with nowhere to get away, unless you counted the drop over the railing. I didn’t.

Suzy’s small for an eight-year-old. She screamed and grabbed me, hiding her face against my jeans. I turned so I was between the dog and Suzy and yelled at it, and the dog threw itself at my feet, waving its paws.

At Jim’s whistle, the dog leaped up and loped back to him. He waved a hand and it lay with its tongue hanging out the side of its muzzle as he clipped on a leash.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “Wookie loves kids. He just doesn’t know how big he looks to them.”

He smiled into Suzy’s narrow eyes, one of the visible signs of her fetal alcohol syndrome. “Your niece?” he asked, turning from her to me.

I’d never appeared in public with Suzy during my marriage, my second one that is, to Richard.

“My daughter. Suzy, say hi to Dr. Farouk like a good girl.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Jim said, offering his hand. 

“Scary.” Suzy backed away, but not screaming at least. She didn’t mean the dog. She pointed to Jim’s hand, the one with only three fingers.

It had spooked me too when I first met him in AA. It’s not every day a man missing a couple of fingers offers you a cigarette. I’d told him I was trying to quit.

“Did Wookie bite your fingers off?” Suzy asked.

“A bull yanked them off when I was a cowboy in a rodeo,” he said.

Suzy pondered that all the way home, long after the melted ice cream dried on her face and hands. Even for December, it wasn’t too cold for ice cream. Jim had crated the dog in his battered SUV and followed us to a shop where we found a sunny spot on the patio and ordered four cones—one empty, for the dog to crunch.

And I thought about my necklace, and if there was a way it could still pay enough to buy off Suzy’s father, enough to keep her safe with me, walking in the park and eating ice cream, forever.

***

That New Year’s Eve, I’d barely got my dress zipped when a car honked and I rushed out on the balcony to see Jim’s Porsche—two seats, none for the dog—in the parking lot. He stood beside it, his overcoat hanging loose, his breath making white puffs in the air.

“Rapunzel,” he called, “let down your golden hair. I can’t figure out how to get to your door.”

When he’d brought me home from George’s shop that day, we’d come up the inside stair from the garage, but the garage door was closed now.

I leaned over the railing, laughing at him. “The stair’s around the corner, you idiot.”

He wasn’t bad looking in his crisp black and white, still broad-shouldered from his days on a college rodeo scholarship, only a few white hairs flecking his black mane. He was upstairs in a minute and I was at the door waiting in my pleated blue silk.

“Give me a hand, will you?” I held the sapphire necklace against the décolletage of my gown and turned, bending my Chanel-dabbed neck demurely. “The clasp is kind of stiff.”

He managed at last, stroking my hair, pretending he was only pulling it free of the necklace. He hadn’t seen the sapphires that day at George’s. He helped me into my mink and pulled a toy—a plush dog with a red bow—out of his overcoat pocket.

“I brought a present for Suzy.”

I wasn’t expecting that. It wasn’t fair. “Suzy is with her father,” I said.

***

We ate at the Old Warsaw. I inched through the tiny foyer with its undersea lighting, its aquarium where an enormous eel brooded, watching me as if wary of my intent. I suspected this was Jim’s restaurant of choice for what he’d think of as a serious occasion—the first real date with someone interviewing for girlfriend status. The lighting was dim, the interior draped in red velvet and starched linen, the set for a multi-star restaurant in a Mafia movie. It looked like somewhere dons with good taste, finding themselves in Dallas and near death, would go to eat a staid, exquisite last supper. It wasn’t the packed, freewheeling place my plan required. But the evening was still early.

The maître d’ and waiters knew Jim. They paused courteously in case he wanted anything but water to drink. He didn’t.

“Wine for the lady?” the sommelier asked.

I wondered if Phaedra drank. Decided not to care.

“Just water,” I said, considering the menu, deciding against anything drippy, anything that would look inelegant to eat.

After giving the waiter my order, Jim chose a steak, rare, with garlicky potatoes. When our meals arrived, my braised pheasant and pears looked a bit precious beside his platter. He saw me eye the red juice oozing as he cut into the beef.

“Want some?” he asked.

“Thanks, but I’m not much of a fan of blood sports.”

“And you found out you’re eating with a carnivore?” He grinned. “I have to be nice to you now that you know my secrets.”

“And you know mine,” I said, “so I’ll have to be very nice to you. Speaking of secrets, I’ll admit I’m thinking of dropping ‘McMillan’. But I can’t decide whether to go back to my maiden name or the name of Suzy’s father.”

“Or you could pick something completely different.” But Jim gave me a look that made that sound not quite as promising as what he must have thought I was fishing for.

I was glad he’d failed the test. I couldn’t afford to get soft. There’s no mother of the year award waiting for a woman who’s maimed her child for life, no spotlight on me, wearing a tiara and wiping away tears of joy. But I could hope to scrape up enough cash to buy off Suzy’s father and convince a judge I was the better of two bad choices.

Dessert. Coffee. I made a trip to the ladies’ room and popped a breath mint, from habit.

“What’s the last place you’d think of going on New Year’s Eve?” he asked as we waited for the parking valet to bring his Porsche.

“Please, I prayed, as I had learned in AA, though never with a wish like this, make it someplace loud and rowdy, with everybody drunk.

***

I didn’t understand at first what Jim intended when he pulled off the interstate into the southwest edge of town. A stadium-sized building topped a hill, blazoned with banners that said, “Watch Night Service.”

“You’re taking me to church? Why, Dr. Farouk, this seems so sudden.”

He laughed. “There’s great music. You’ll love it.”

Inside the atmosphere was a cross between a religious crusade and a rock concert. I tiptoed down the aisle, afraid of attracting censure for coming in halfway through a service wearing a dress that started late and stopped early. Jim told me we were fine, the service would be going on for at least another hour.

“Till midnight,” he said, almost shouting to make himself heard over the music.

I glanced around, alarmed by the stacked boxes of tissue at the end of the pews. In the sea of black and brown faces, Jim looked at home. He led me to a seat near the back, out of range of cameras flashing images of the congregation onto Jumbotron screens. On stage, the preacher paced, his adoring wife at his side. She held a cloth, toweling first her husband’s shaved head, then her own tear-dewed face. People stood at their seats and in the aisles, swaying, arms raised, eyes closed, tears making mirror tracks down dark cheeks.

A terrible uneasiness grew on me. The crowd sang and sobbed, uttering pleas to God, to Jesus. Jim rose and lifted his face to the ceiling, murmuring words in an unknown tongue.

Lurching to my feet, I brushed his cheek with my lips—he was still garlicky from supper—and pushed my way through the throng. They were all intoxicated, but not with alcohol. The answer to my prayer terrified me. I found the restroom and huddled in a stall until a knock on the door drove me out.

Mirrors covered the walls in the ladies’ lounge, reflecting women passing Kleenex and makeup as they repaired their ecstasy-ravished faces. I joined the sisterhood, trying to fit in, longing for something to share. But the contents of my compact were too pale to be of use.

“Here, honey.” The girl next to me offered a tissue. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

She cocked her head upward to indicate the speakers, piping the sounds from the sanctuary into the restroom.

“I’ve never heard anything like it,” I said truthfully.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” she said, “where did you get that necklace? It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Would you like to try it on?”

I unfastened the clasp and held it to her. In an instant, she was the center of an admiring circle. There was laughter and chatting, everyone coming and going. As I backed away, the reflection of a newcomer in the mirrored wall caught my eye—Phaedra, too intent on herself to notice anyone else. Her eyes, seen in reflection, were no longer green but blue, sapphire blue. Hands passed the necklace to her and she held it against her gown.

I turned up the collar of my mink and fled back to Jim. He glanced at the fur wrapped tight over my dress.

“Cold?”

“Feeling a little low-cut for this crowd.” I slipped into the curve of his arm, hiding my face against his shoulder.

“You okay?”

“Tired,” I said. “Got a headache.”

“We can go.”

He waited for me to say no, I’m having a great time, please don’t make me leave, but I didn’t.

“Thanks,” I said, wondering how soon I could file an insurance claim for the sapphires. I glanced around as we left. Phaedra was nowhere in sight.

***

As we pulled away from the church, a man in evening clothes rushed out and pounded after us, waving his arms, probably yelling, but the Porsche’s soundproofing, the darkness, his black and white clothes, made a silent movie out of the story unreeling in the mirror. I chanced a look at Jim. He was too busy watching for an opening in the stream of east-bound traffic to notice.

We had reached an exit toward downtown’s snarl of highways when Jim uttered an uncharacteristic “damn.”

“What?”

“Jerk flashed his lights at me.” Jim angled the mirror up and pressed the accelerator.

“Police?” I checked my mirror again, telling myself there was no way I could recognize a car from its headlights. But as I stared at the lights close behind us, a bead of sweat slipped down my back, under the silk and mink. The tootle of my phone made me jump. I tore open my evening bag and stared at the text on the phone’s screen.

“Problem with Suzy?” Jim asked.

I silenced the phone, shoving it into my coat pocket. “She’s fine. Everything’s fine.”

The lights behind us flashed again.

“That does it.” Jim put on his blinker and slowed onto the shoulder.

“Don’t stop,” I said. “It might be a carjacker.”

“If it is, he’ll get a piece of my mind.”

I clutched his arm. “Jim, don’t. Let’s get out of here. Please.”

“Emma, it’s okay.” He patted my shoulder. “Back in a minute.”

I threw my door open and raced to the other car. Jim yelled. I heard his steps running after me, but I reached the car first and bent to tap on the tinted glass of the driver’s window.

The window slid down. “Hello, Richard,” I said.

Phaedra leaned against his shoulder, smiling. She closed her phone.

Jim pressed between me and the car. “What’s the problem, McMillan?”

“No problem.” Richard opened his door and swung a leg out. “Just wanted to return something.”

The car’s interior light made stars glitter in the sapphires around Phaedra’s neck.

“Emma left this in the ladies’ room at the church,” Richard said, fingering the gems. “Guess she got confused. You know how it is.”

Jim put an arm around my shoulder. “The only one who’s drunk, McMillan, is you.”

“Miss Khoury here,” Richard said with a smirk, “showed me the necklace. You’re lucky she found your jewelry, Emma. Not many women would go to so much trouble for a stranger.”

He snapped his fingers and Phaedra reached behind her nape to unclasp the necklace, the suggestion of a pout on her pretty mouth.

I straightened, shaking back my hair, showing my bare neck. “You’re right, Richard,” I said. “She’s one in a million.”

Phaedra looked at me, frozen in the act of handing over the necklace.

“And that blue looks great on her.” I reached across Richard to take Phaedra’s hand, folding it around the sapphires. “I’d be thrilled if she’d accept it from me.”

Phaedra’s face changed, delighted as a child with an unexpected gift.

Richard’s eyes narrowed. He thought he’d caught me and now, well, someday Phaedra would probably learn what I knew. About him. About the necklace.

“Emma doesn’t mean it, I’m sure,” he said. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

He knew about the sapphires. He’d known all along. I wanted to tell Phaedra, but she wouldn’t believe, not yet.

Richard’s window slid up. The glow dimmed from the car’s overhead light, from Phaedra’s luminous face. Jim and I watched, hand in hand, as Richard fishtailed onto the highway.

“Care to tell me what that was about?” Jim asked on the way to my place.

So, I told him, about the necklace, about Suzy. About the end of all my hopes and plans but how at least why I wouldn’t be spending the new year in prison for insurance fraud. The sun shone through the blinds before I finished. By then, the taste of garlic had faded from his mouth. 

The End