“Laugh now, funny girl,” Shane said. “That’s gonna be a bridge in about a minute.”

“And that bridge can hold over sixty tons,” Carpenter said.

“So it’s a strong erection,” Lisa Livia said, looking at Carpenter.

“Oh, yes,” Carpenter said, standing more erect himself.

“Do you mind?” Agnes said, watching the miracle of her bridge literally unfold. “I’m having a moment here.”

The road sections reached their apex and began to go down, the hydraulic arm in the center scissoring them apart. Within a couple of minutes, the near end touched down and the far end was in place; then the tank driver disconnected the bridge from the body of the tank and drove back onto the transporter, and the transporter drove off into the gathering darkness.

Rhett settled down, secure in the knowledge that he’d driven off the invaders.

“Wow,” Agnes said, looking at her bridge.

“Was it good for you?” Lisa Livia said. “It was good for me.”

“That bridge was built for tanks,” Shane told Agnes proudly. “It’ll take your wedding traffic and then some. It’s even better than what you had.”

“Thank you,” Agnes said to him, trying not to sound hero-worship-y.

“But it’s temporary,” Lisa Livia said, warning in her voice. “It’s a bridge,” Agnes said. “It’s right here. And it’s even better than what I had.”

“Good point,” Lisa Livia said, leaning on Carpenter a little. Carpenter put his arm around her.

“And I’m thinking the price is right,” Agnes said, and sipped her coffee as Shane settled his arm around her.

“And my mother is going to have a stroke,” Lisa Livia said.

“It’s a beautiful bridge,” Agnes said, and tried to forget all the hell swirling around her and the need to be practical and not get hurt.

She could be smart tomorrow. Tonight she had a bridge and she was holding on to him.


Three hours later, Agnes heard laughter from Lisa Livia’s room next door, rolled over, put her chin on Shane’s chest, and said, “It really is a beautiful bridge.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, in postcoital stupor.

“It’s nice about Lisa Livia and Carpenter, too. I mean, it’s a little bit Bobbsey Twins-you and me, her and Carpenter-but then neither one of you is sticking around after the wedding anyway, so it’s not as tidy as it seems, right?”

“Mmmhm.”

“I mean, basically, Lisa Livia and I are just extended one-night stands, it’s not like we’re anything special. I’ve known that from the beginning, that’s why I kept making those pathetic attempts to end this before you ended it and left me. Which I’m giving up, by the way. You got me a bridge, you got me. My God.”

Shane lifted his head, waking up more, and frowned at her. “What?”

Agnes gave up. “Thank you for my bridge.”

“Yeah. Before that.”

She sighed. “Nothing.”

Shane put his hand on the back of her head, pulled her to him, and kissed her, fighting his way to full consciousness, “You’re welcome. Can we talk about whatever that was in the morning?”

“No,” Agnes said. “Forget it, it was dumb. Four Wheels didn’t send those guys to kill me, did he?”

“No,” Shane said, letting his head fall back on the pillow.

Agnes moved back to her own pillow. “Then it’s Brenda.”

Shane yawned. “Or somebody else who thinks you’re sitting on five million and killing you is the way to get it, but since everybody knows we opened the shelter and there was no five mil, yeah, I think it’s Brenda.”

“I’m going to sink her yacht.”

“She can probably swim.”

“I don’t care. She’s gone crazy. It was selfish and horrible to try to swindle me out of the house, but what she did today to Four Wheels, that was just insane. So I believe she’s trying to have me killed. And I’m glad you’re here to stop her. And I’m going to sink her yacht.”

“You’re not a one-night stand.”

Agnes caught her breath. “Just ignore that I said that.”

“I don’t know what you are, but you are not a one-night stand.”

His voice was so insistent that she went still, as if everything would go wrong if she moved.

“I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” Shane said, sounding tired. “Four days ago, I knew exactly who I was and what I was doing. Tonight, all I know is that I want you.”

“You’ve got me.” The words were out without her thinking, and she wouldn’t have taken them back if she could.

“Not just tonight.”

“I know,” Agnes said. “You’ve got me. I know you’re going to leave. Just come back when you can. Make Two Rivers home base. Don’t get killed. Come back to me.” She heard the need in her voice and felt ashamed for a minute. “If you can’t, just say so, don’t lie about it, but-”

“I wouldn’t lie,” he said.

“Of course you would,” Agnes said, annoyed. “You work for the government. You’d have to lie. Just tell me you can’t tell me or something. Don’t lie

He rolled over on his side and slid his arm around her waist, and the weight of him there felt good, secure, pulling her in. “Agnes, I don’t know who lied to you in the past-”

“Taylor, my two fiancés before Taylor-”

“-but it wasn’t me.”

“-and my father,” Agnes finished.

“Your father,” Shane said. “That one’s new. Tell me you didn’t hit him with a frying pan.”

“I was ten,” Agnes said. “He told me he and my mom were going to work for the Peace Corps for a couple of weeks, and then he dropped me off at boarding school.”

“The Peace Corps for a couple of weeks?”

“I was ten,” Agnes said. “He was my dad. I believed him. Sue me.”

“And then he didn’t come back for a year?” Shane said.

“He never came back. Fortunately, I had a court-appointed psychiatrist to explain the significance of that to me later.” She refused to meet his eyes. “Do not feel sorry for me. My dad loved me. He called me his baby girl. And then he took me to boarding school and that was the last time I trusted a man. Until Paul. Paul asked me to marry him in college. I was crazy in love with him. Lisa Livia didn’t like him, Maria cried whenever he came over to the apartment, but I was sure he was the one. Then I stopped by his apartment and caught him doing some other woman against the kitchen wall. So I picked up the frying pan on the stove and hit him with it. Broke his nose. You’d have thought that would have cured me, but no, I met Rick. Rick was terrific, smart as hell, an investigative reporter at the paper where I was doing lifestyles. He’s the one who talked the editor into giving me a column, and when some guy wrote in and said, ‘I like that cranky Agnes woman,’ he’s the one who told the editor to call the column ‘Cranky Agnes.’ He’s also the one who found out that my dad went to prison for securities fraud and died of a heart attack six months later. Well, he’d always been a fool for high-fat food, and the prison cooking wasn’t healthy, plus the stress, you know. It was inevitable.”

Shane put his hand on her waist and she talked faster. “That was a bad day, the day Rick told me that. Then I came home a week later and found him doing my student intern on my kitchen table. So I picked up my cast-iron skillet and hit him on the back of the head. I don’t think I hit him because of my dad; I’m pretty sure it was for the bimbo intern.” She looked at Shane finally. “It’s like I’m standing to one side watching myself. The world goes red and there’s this screaming and I have to kill them. You wouldn’t know about that. You’re always calm when you kill them.”

She rolled over away from him, feeling stupid. They’d had perfectly great bridge sex and then she’d gotten weird about the one-night-stand thing and now there Dr. Garvin was, in bed with them, along with her entire life’s history. Nicegoing, Agnes.

She looked back. “I’m fine, really. But I should probably live alone.”

Shane pulled her back, close against him.

“What happened to your mother?” he said in her ear.

“Oh, she kept writing me.” Agnes sighed and let herself relax against his warmth. “Telling me how wonderful the Peace Corps was and signing my dad’s name. Then six years later she showed up at school, telling me my dad had been killed by the native tribes, offering to take me home to mix her martinis for her. But by then, I was sixteen and I liked school and I was spending summers here with LL and Brenda, and I just wasn’t interested. And neither was she, really. She married again, to somebody with money. She’s where she should be; I’m where I should be.” Here, with you.

Shane was quiet behind her, so quiet that she thought he’d gone back to sleep, and then he said, “I won’t lie. I won’t leave you. I don’t know what’s happening in the future. There’s a chance my job will change some, that I’ll have more of a desk job. Maybe more of a life.”

A desk job. Agnes swallowed and rolled back over so she could look at him. “I could move.”

“What?”

“I could move. To wherever you have the desk job. I could “You’d leave Two Rivers?”

“It’s just a house,” Agnes said. “I love it, it’s great, but it’s not Tara, for God’s sake, it’s just a house.” Home is with you. It was a terrible thought, the final betrayal, betraying herself.

“No,” he said, and she flinched and thought, You moron, why did you leave yourself open like that?

“Right, sorry,” she said. “That was-”

“I’ll come here,” he said. “I’ll come back.”

The whole world went still, and then she realized she wasn’t breathing and took a deep breath, tears stinging behind her eyes-Do not cry-and she said, “Oh,” and tried not to clutch at him. “That would be good. This would be a good place to come back to. A place to come home to. Whenever you could.” The tears were coming and she couldn’t stop them, so she tried not to breathe so he wouldn’t hear her crying in the dark.

He nodded. “Can we have pancakes for breakfast tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said on a sob, and then she did wrap her arms around him and held on to him, tighter than she’d ever held on to anybody as he pulled the blanket up over them and smoothed back her hair and rocked her as she cried, and she thought, He’s coming back to me, he’s coming back, and gave up being smart and just loved him.

friday

cranky agnes column #12


“Coke Would Like to Teach the World to Cook”


Some people are critical of Coke, pointing out that when you drop a nail into a Coke, and leave it there for four days, the nail dissolves completely; imagine, they say, what that same Coke does to your stomach. Those who are fans of Coke Ham point out that when you pour Coke over a ham and bake it in a 300-degree oven for two and a half hours, the ham tastes delicious. But anybody who has put a nail in a can of Coke and waited four days knows that it doesn’t dissolve at all. Why do people believe everything they hear? On the other hand, Coke Ham really is good. Better than that, it’s criminally easy.


The next morning felt eerily calm to Shane, sitting at Agnes’s kitchen table in the sunshine with Rhett underneath it draped over his feet and Garth across from him, resplendent in a brand-new shirt and jeans, which he was endeavoring not to get maple syrup on. Shane’s life was crumbling at the edges, but in the middle was Agnes, making love and breakfast, wanting him to come home to her, and a big old dog, keeping his toes warm. Screw the edges, he thought, and poured himself a mug of coffee brewed from fresh ground beans as Agnes put his plate of pecan pancakes in front of him. Still he knew that it wouldn’t work in the long run. Casey Dean was out there, determined to kill somebody after the wedding, and somebody else was out there, determined to kill Agnes. Agnes’s coffee and pancakes were good, but they could only hold off reality for so long.

“I have to go to work today,” he said, trying to prolong the illusion that it was a normal breakfast between two normal people who had just made love until they’d both collapsed and were now smiling at each other in a sunlit kitchen, giddy with mutual approval.

Garth nodded, his mouth full of pancake.

“Selling insurance,” Agnes said, going back to the grill for the bacon she had crisping there.

The pancakes were golden, the butter he slathered on slid off the tops in fragrant melting rivers, and then Agnes reached across the counter and handed him the syrup pitcher Garth had left up there, and he absentmindedly watched her breasts move under her T-shirt as he took it.