I Was His Wife, She Was His Everything novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Full Names

Libba offers Rue two million dollars to sign and leave town, and Rue and Sallie throw her out in front of the lunch crowd, just before Lawton walks in holding a signature that isn't Rue's.

Sallie pulled the tape off the door with one fingernail.

"Thirty-eight thousand six hundred," she read. "With penalties."

"How far behind are you?"

"Three payments. The county sends a letter. I put it in the drawer with the other letters."

She folded the notice in half, then in quarters.

"Never heard of a hotel company buying a tax lien on a fish shack."

"They want the lot," I said.

"Everybody wants the lot. It's the last one on the creek nobody's built a condo on."

I looked at the gravel where Lawton's truck had been.

"He didn't know about this. I'd bet my tips on it."

"Sugar, you don't have tips yet. Open the register."

At noon the lunch crowd came in off the shrimp boats.

Old men in white rubber boots, two contractors, a table of nurses on their day off.

I was cutting lemons when the door opened and the room got quieter.

Libba Haddrell stood just inside in a cream cardigan and pearls.

She looked like a woman going to church in a place she'd never go to church.

She saw me and smiled with her whole face.

"Rue. Oh, I'm so glad you're all right."

She came straight down the bar and took the stool in front of me.

She set a leather folder on the wood.

"Can we talk somewhere quiet?"

"This is quiet for Sallie's."

Her smile didn't move.

"All right."

She opened the folder and turned it toward me.

A settlement agreement, already flagged in yellow where I was supposed to sign.

"Two million dollars," she said softly. "Wired today."

She tapped the yellow flags.

"You leave Charleston by the end of the month, you sign the divorce, and you don't speak to the press."

"I didn't file for divorce."

"Someone did, honey, with your name on it. Let's not make it ugly."

The nurses had stopped eating.

The old men in boots had stopped pretending not to listen.

"And the baby will want for nothing," Libba said. "As long as it's raised somewhere else."

My knife stopped in the lemon.

I'd told exactly one person in that family I was pregnant.

That was last night, in the back room, and his name was Lawton.

"How do you know about the baby?"

"Lawton must have told me."

"He hasn't called you since last night. I was standing there."

Something moved behind her gray eyes.

Then it was gone, and she was patient again.

"Rue. You're tired and you're on your feet all day in your condition. Two million is generous. Lawton would say so."

"Then let Lawton say it."

"He's grieving. Again. Seeing Mariel's name on that account broke his heart. You want to put him through a fight on top of that?"

I put the knife down.

I wiped my hands on the bar towel.

"I want to know who's been spending three million dollars a month while I bought store-brand vitamins."

"A card thief. I told him last night."

"And I want to know how a card thief got me a divorce lawyer."

One of the old shrimpers laughed out loud and turned it into a cough.

Libba closed the folder.

She leaned closer and lowered her voice so only I could hear.

"You were a bartender at our hotel. You're a bartender now. Nobody in this town will believe you were anything else in between."

"Say that again louder," I said. "For the nurses."

She sat back.

The nurses were staring at her.

So was Sallie, from the kitchen door, with a tray of fried shrimp in her hands.

Sallie set the tray down in front of the contractors.

Then she walked the length of the bar and stopped next to Libba's stool.

"Libba Haddrell," Sallie said.

Libba turned her pretty face up.

"Mrs. Gresham. I don't think we've met."

"Your company just bought the paper on my building. So I'd say we've met."

Libba's smile slipped a quarter inch.

"That's a separate matter. I'd be happy to talk about it another time."

"Libba Haddrell, you came in my bar and offered my bartender money to leave town with her baby."

"I offered a settlement to my employer's wife."

"Libba Haddrell." Sallie said it slower. "Get up off my stool."

The whole room heard it.

One of the contractors put down his beer.

Libba gathered her folder against her chest.

She stood up carefully, smoothing her cardigan.

"I hope you'll think about it, Rue. The offer won't get better."

"Neither will I," I said.

Sallie held the door open for her.

The bell over it jangled.

Libba walked out into the hot gravel lot in her cream flats, and Sallie let the door swing shut behind her.

For one beat, nobody said anything.

Then the oldest shrimper started clapping.

The nurses joined in.

I turned around and cut lemons so nobody would see my face.

"Who was that?" one of the contractors asked.

"The dead woman's little sister," Sallie said. "Eat your shrimp."

"She called you Mrs. Gresham."

"She can keep calling me that from the parking lot." Sallie picked up the tray.

At one-fifteen the door banged open again.

I braced myself for Libba with a lawyer.

It was Lawton.

He hadn't shaved, and he was wearing yesterday's shirt.

He had a paper in his hand with a court stamp on the corner.

He walked straight to the bar and put it down in front of me.

"I went to the courthouse when it opened," he said. "Is this your signature?"

I looked at the last page.

Rue Dabny Kershaw.

Somebody had left the e out of my own name.

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