GABE
She led me to a storefront with sparkling plate-glass windows that said SAVANNAH DRY GOODS AND GROCERY, EST. 1817 on the door in gold leaf. Underneath that was a handwritten sign on a piece of cardboard. The handwriting was an old-fashioned cursive, written in a spidery, shaky hand, that said CLOSED. NO POWER. With a frowny face.
Lily rapped on the window and glanced up at me mischievously. “Just as a warning, she swears. A lot. Brace yourself. Also, she has no filter whatsoever.”
Within a few seconds, a face appeared on the other side of the door. It belonged to a friendly-looking older woman with white hair, rosy cheeks, and kind eyes. When she saw me, she scowled and pointed at the sign. But when she saw Lily, her face lit up with a huge, welcoming smile. “My darling girl!” said the woman as she flung open the door.
She wrapped her arms around Lily, kissing her twice on each cheek. A smell of old-fashioned perfume filled the air. The older lady bellowed, “The goddamned power grid, honey! It’s gonna be the death of me! Such bullshit!”
Lily laughed into the old woman’s shoulder as she hugged her. When she let her go, she said, “Auntie Jennifer, I’d like you to meet Gabe. Gabe, this is Great-Aunt Jennifer.”
The old lady looked me up and down with a serious face. Almost a sassy pout. “Aren’t you a dashing young buck!”
Lily snickered. “Jennifer.”
“Well, he is, honey! You get to my age and there’s no point in beating round the bush!” She reached up and gave my cheek a pinch with her cool hand. Suddenly, I felt like I was a kid again. I hadn’t had my cheek pinched in more than thirty years. And now here I was, in a two-hundred-year-old grocery, on a cobblestone street, with a lady who swore like a sailor and looked like everybody’s ideal grandma. Next to me was a gorgeous woman whom I’d kissed once already today, and I was making plans to do a hell of a lot more than that.
I wasn’t sure whose life this was, but I sure wasn’t complaining.
Auntie Jennifer shuffled around to the other side of the polished wood counter. Behind her were rows of old-fashioned jars with equally old-fashioned candies. Colorful lollipops. Caramels in wax paper. Enormous gumdrops. Off to the right there was what looked to me like a nice selection of wine. A bottle of wine by candlelight during a thunderstorm? First-date win.
Auntie Jennifer struck a match and lit a brass oil lamp on one end of the register. She adjusted the knob, and the shop was bathed in warm light. She clasped her hands together. “What brings you by?”
“Well, we were just about to sit down to eat when the lights went out.” Lily reached over the counter to grab a few paper bags. “I know how you hate for things to go to waste. We have to run to do some work, so I thought we could put together a little picnic.”
“Thank heavens for you, my dear. Got all sorts of stuff that won’t survive the night without power.” Jennifer looked up toward the ceiling like she was scrolling through a grocery list; it was exactly the same thing Lily had done when she’d been trying to think of the right words to use when asking me about my show. Aunt Jennifer said, “I’m up to my neck in homemade peach ice cream, coconut Popsicles, and herbed rotisserie chickens. Got a nice Greek pasta salad that’s going to need eating too. Darling little tortellini stuffed with pesto and feta.” She kissed her fingers. “How’ll that suit you?”
Lily glanced at me for approval. So did Aunt Jennifer.
I ran my hand down my jaw. “So this is it, right? This is heaven?”
Both of them erupted in laughter that filled up the shop from floor to ceiling.
“A face like that and he’s a good eater!” cooed Aunt Jennifer. “You got yourself a keeper, hon! A real keeper!”
For one fantastic instant, I caught Lily’s eye. Before she looked away.
We took her van back to the Willows on Abercorn, and I carried the groceries in behind her. It was the mother of all picnics. We had a roasted chicken, a nice pinot gris, pasta salad, fresh figs, three different kinds of ice cream, and a wax-paper bag full of pear candies. We arranged the spread on the big old wooden kitchen table. She found a few candles in a drawer, and she stuck them into a houseplant as a centerpiece.
“But no matches.” She riffled through the drawers again. She bent down to check in the bottom drawer, accentuating the curve of her hips, her ass, and the soft creaminess of her inner thighs.
“It’s a good thing I’m your date then, isn’t it?” I said, and she whirled around. “I might not be able to make roast chickens materialize in a power outage, but I can definitely promise that no matter what, no matter when, I can get a fire started.” I grabbed my bag and pulled out my trusty pack of waterproof strike-anywhere matches. I slid one out and lit it on the edge of the box and then lit the candles. Light spread out from the houseplant and revealed a smiling Lily.
Together we got all the dishes and glasses we needed from the cupboards. I set to work carving the chicken, and she arranged the other takeout containers. In the reflection of the window over the sink, I watched her secretly spear a few tortellini with a fork and pop them into her mouth. I loved watching her get so much pleasure from something so small. When I was in Serbia, I’d learned a word that I’d never been able to use for anybody before. Merak. Bliss from the simplest of pleasures. She was full of that. It radiated from her like light.
There we sat, across from one another in the candlelight, eating and talking. She told me all about her business and how much she liked her job. She told me about her sister’s work at the Living History Museum. She glowed when she talked about her nephew. She also told me about her parents, who were retired—like mine—and who were right then traveling on a cruise through Alaska. “They own the grocery along with Auntie Jennifer. It gives them all something to do. And I get to be the sampler for the new cheeses.”
“It must be nice to live in a place where everybody knows you. Where you’ve got such deep roots.”
She delicately wiped her lips off on the back of her hand, somehow elegant even without a napkin. “It is, yes. Absolutely. Sometimes it’s a little . . .” She shifted her lips off to one side and wrinkled up her nose as she chewed. “Cozy, maybe?”
I was betting everybody knew her business, whether she wanted them to or not. But with the way I’d been living for the last however many years, cozy sounded pretty damned good. “I don’t even have a houseplant back in LA.”
She nibbled on her chicken leg, getting the last bite of meat off the bone. “Your life must be so exciting, though.” She dropped it into the paper bag we were using for the trash. “Seeing so many new places. Having so many adventures. I’ll bet you travel a heck of a lot!”
A heck of a lot was an understatement. I was always on the move; one way or another, that had always been part of my life. “I’m only in LA about four months of the year, tops. And never for more than a few weeks at a stretch. I’m used to that, though. We bounced from Fort Belvoir to Fort Bliss to Fort Carson. And that was just in grade school. I got used to not having one single place to call home.”
She frowned. “That must have been hard,” she said, watching me closely, wrinkling up her eyebrows a little bit. “I don’t know who I’d be if I didn’t live here. Savannah is such a part of who I am. I’d be lost without it.”
“It was tough. But I suppose I never knew any different. Maybe that’s why I don’t mind traveling so much for my job.”
She nodded and took a fig from the box and bit into it, letting her eyes flutter shut. She made this little moan that fucking killed me. If she moaned like that over a fig, I couldn’t wait to find out what she sounded like when I . . .
I forced myself back to reality. “So tell me about the General.”
Lily laughed softly. “His full name, if you want to know, is General Fuss and Feathers.”
I actually snorted. There was a first time for everything. “No way.”
“Yeah!” She laughed. “If you’d like a little history nugget, that was a real person! Winfield Scott. The longest-serving active-duty general in the US military, ever. Grandma started calling the General Fuss and Feathers because,” she snickered, “if the shoe fits! One thing I can tell you is that I can’t have rotisserie chicken in the house. You’d think I was some kind of cannibal. Once I tried to make a chicken pot pie and it was like the world was ending. Murderer!” she squawked in the General’s voice. “How dare you!”
I dug into the pasta salad. “Where did he learn all of it?”
“I don’t know,” she said, blinking thoughtfully. “Some of it he’s learned from me, I guess.” She leaned in and cupped her hand to her mouth to say, “I swear a lot when I knit! But occasionally he’ll come out with something brand new. Like Jaws? We’ve never seen Jaws. But all of a sudden, daaaa-dun!” She sniffed and shook her head, laughing. “He’s lovely, though. He’s very good company. Mostly.” She took a tiny sip of the wine I poured her and eyed me over the lip of the delicate antique glass. “OK. My turn to ask a question. How is it possible that a man with a Facebook fan group doesn’t have a girlfriend?”
“I do like a woman who cuts to the chase,” I said. But I didn’t want her to think I was some sort of insufferable Hollywood manwhore. I hated those dudes. Yeah, I’d dated, but never seriously and never for very long. “I’m married to my job. That’s what Markowitz says.”
She tsked me, same as the General had when I was snooping around the gratitude jar. “Don’t tell me you’re too busy for love.”
It sounded like a lame-ass excuse, because that’s exactly what it was. I wasn’t too busy. The truth was that just like I’d been hunting for urban legends all these years, I’d also been trying to find the one. And Christ almighty, I’d looked for her. I’d become a serial first-dater of the first order. I believed, in my gut, that there was one woman out there for me. The one who would make me crazy with need. The one who made the world make sense. The one who would make me whole. Finding that woman, if she existed at all, was proving harder than tracking down all the urban legends put together. “I could ask you the same, you know. I’ll bet they’re after you like a pack of hounds.”
She drew back from the table slightly. She nibbled on her top lip; when she let it go, it caught the light with a shimmer. “I’ve never been that girl.”
You’re about to be, beautiful. Just you wait.
The tension between us was heavy; I loved coming up against the edges of what made her comfortable. But even though I wanted to push her and see her laid bare, I’d be an idiot to push too hard, too fast. Everything in its own time. I finished off the last of the pasta salad and asked, “You think we’re going to be able to pick up any audio tonight? Without power?”
Lily nodded. “Oh yes, for sure. I have a whole handful of handheld recorders in my van. There’s no need for power at all. But let me ask you . . .” She put her elbows on the table and nestled her chin between her hands. “Do you really think we’re going to find any ghosts in here?”
“Nah. I go into all these things a skeptic. As far as I’m concerned, the abominable snowman is some dude in a snowsuit, the chupacabra is a coyote with mange, and ghosts are nothing but faulty wires and bad plumbing. But at the same time, who the hell am I to say?” I looked her up and down, zeroing in on the milky edge of a tan line peeking out from her cleavage. “Sometimes the thing you’ve been looking for shows up when you least expect it.”
She flipped the up-and-down around on me, nodding and nibbling her lip. She didn’t actually say anything, but she didn’t have to. I felt it like I was touching an ungrounded wire.
I slid one of the pints of ice cream over to her and opened one of my own. “So I say we finish this up and then roll tape. Then see where the night takes us.”
She took a big scoop of ice cream on her spoon and paused with it almost to her lips. Keeping her eyes on me all the time, she turned the spoon over and slowly, sensuously, took a lick of her peach ice cream. The cream on her tongue made me think of some dirty fucking things. I could see it—she knew it too. She had me right where she wanted me. And finally she hit me with a knockout triple combination—one more lick, one more twirl of her spoon, and finally, “You got it, boss.”
Christ almighty.