After dinner, Jack offered to wash the dishes. Bud dried. Fran and Olli sat in rocking chairs on the back porch and watched fireflies wink on and off, while the bug zapper sucked mosquitoes out of the air. Fran took another beer bottle.
Joey, the white peacock, came around and rubbed Fran’s leg. His tail dusted the floorboards as he walked. She reached down and scratched his head. “He’s like a dog,” she said. Her fingers went down into the feathers to his neck. “I didn’t realize how small they were.”
“Peacocks are the great illusionists. You think they’re one thing, but they’re something completely else. Especially when his tail is out. Just a tiny thing acting all big.”
“Just like a man,” said Fran. She laughed and raised her bottle to click it with her new friend, but Olli was just looking out into the night, smiling.
“Bud was my second husband. My Charles, he was my first. First everything. But he hit me. Bud came to my counter to purchase rouge for a girl he was seeing. Alice. She told him what kind to get and he’d fetch it for her on his day off. He had a list. Can you imagine this man, Bud? At the makeup counters in Dillard’s?
“He’d come around every two or three weeks. I could only imagine how much she must’ve slathered on. Stuff should last you two, three months at least. One time I didn’t put enough cover on a purple mark Charles gave me, here.” She touched her collarbone. “Bud saw it. He said it was like a stain on the Mona Lisa.
“We got coffee a few times in the mall on my break. We’d get lunch at Mr. Pao’s. Back then I was eating two combos. Bud bought them both. I’d always been a big girl, but I got really big with Charles. Eating my feelings, as we say in Rebooters. I knew I was a married woman, but I fell, Fran, I fell so hard for him. Bud.
“Two months later, after Charles bruised a rib and I couldn’t breathe right, Bud picked up my bags from our house. I found out he and Alice had been broken up for six months and he had a stockpile of her makeup.”
Bud and Jack came outside and sat down on a bench. “What are you ladies gabbing about?”
“Bud, you old romantic!” said Fran. Joey had climbed onto Fran’s lap and laid his head on her shoulder.
“Olli,” Bud said, “you didn’t tell her the story.”
“You bet I did, Bud.”
“What story is that,” said Jack.
“Just how they met,” Fran said. “I’ll tell you in the car.”
Fran told how she and Jack had been set up on a blind date by a mutual friend. Diane. How Diane had shown up at the table during their date and Fran had waived her off.
“I guess I was all right,” Jack said.
“You still are,” Fran said.”Mostly.” She finished her beer.
They sat on the porch listening to the bug zapper for a while, and then it was time to go
David Hendler's Writing 