A Perfect Romance

  A Perfect Romance

  by

  Layce Gardner

  This is a work of fiction; names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Square Pegs Ink

  Text copyright © Layce Gardner

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without the author's permission.

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  One

  "My girlfriend is a slut," Dana Dooley said, gripping the steering wheel with two hands. It was the first time she'd put that thought into words and it felt good and weird at the same time—like she'd let the air out of a balloon and the balloon was her stomach and her stomach was whipping around the car as it deflated. "The thing is," she continued, "even though Kimmy's the one screwing around on me, I still feel guilty. Like I should apologize to her for making her have to cheat on me. Does that make any sense?"

  "That's your low self-esteem talking, Double D," Trudy said from the passenger seat. Trudy had a way of putting things into perspective in the simplest way possible. "People, women especially, will take advantage of the fact that you want to please other people. I don't see why you think your girlfriend would be any different. Some people—you, for instance—have a tendency to attract other people—Kimmy, for instance—who will take advantage of the fact that you'll do anything to avoid confrontation."

  "Have you been watching Dr. Phil again?"

  Trudy rolled her eyes, but since it was dark inside the car the gesture was wasted on Dana. "Who is it who keeps picking up strays and bringing them home? Then expecting them to love you back?"

  "Me," Dana sighed.

  Trudy nodded. "And who is it who drops everything they're doing to go rescue their Neanderthal brother out of his messes all the time?"

  "That would be me."

  "And who is it that still lives with her grandmother because she can't tell her she wants to move out?"

  "That's not true," Dana objected. "Maw Maw needs me to help out. Plus, the rent is free. And someday that house will be all mine. I'm insuring my inheritance."

  "Mmhmm," Trudy said like she didn't believe her. "Maybe you should consider telling people ‘no’ once in awhile."

  Dana shook her head. "I can't, Trudy, you know that. It's scary."

  "It's easy," Trudy said, "I'll show you. Ask me some questions."

  "C'mon…."

  "I'm serious. Ask."

  "Okay." Dana caved in. "Will you help me move this..."

  Dana didn't even get to finish the questions, before Trudy blurted, "No."

  She asked another. "Can you loan me..."

  "No."

  "Can I have..."

  "No."

  Dana laughed. "Okay, okay, I get the point."

  "Good girl. Now try repeating after me: No, Kimmy, it is not all right to cheat on me with everything in town that has a pulse."

  "No, Kimmy, it's not all right to cheat on me with everything that has a pulse."

  "Now pack your bags and don't let the door hit you in the ass."

  "I can't say that," Dana said.

  "Why not?"

  "What if she's not sleeping with somebody else?"

  "You just said you knew she was."

  "I think she is. I'm pretty sure, she is. But I don't have concrete proof," Dana said. "All I have is a gut feeling and I don't want to convict somebody of adultery on a gut feeling."

  "You're nuts, you know that?"

  "I come by it naturally," Dana said. Truer words were never spoken. All the Dooleys in Dana's family tree were a little nutty. In fact, one could say her tree was chock full of nuts and squirrels. Dana Dooley and five generations of her ancestors had lived in the little town of Dooley Springs, Oklahoma. The town was named after her five times great grandfather, Donald Dooley. Donald was already middle-aged when he took off from Tennessee to cash in on the California gold rush. He only made it as far as Oklahoma (then it was called Indian Territory) before he decided that going clear to California to get rich quick was a fool's errand. He found a natural hot springs nestled in the Cookson Hills of northeastern Oklahoma and put the word out that he'd found the real fountain of youth with super-dooper healing powers. People came from all over to bathe their crippled and aging bodies in the springs and give Donald Dooley all their money for letting them sit in a muddy creek. It took about a year before they realized he was a charlatan. Once their pockets were empty, they filled up with self-righteous loathing and lynched him from the highest tree. He left behind his wife and two sons. All the cripples and looneys who came to bathe and got suckered didn't have the money or the wherewithal to leave Dooley Springs and that's how the town got started. The entire town descended from a lineage of fools and crazies and charlatans. That made for some very interesting Saturday nights and full moons.

  Trudy continued, "People commonly mistake niceness for a weakness."

  "Mmhmm, so true," Dana said. And what she thought but didn't say was "That's why I am driving you to an AA meeting on a Thursday night when all I really want to do is sit on my couch with a pint of Bluebell Birthday Cake ice cream, nursing my toothache and watching a woman-in-jeopardy TV movie on Lifetime. Then maybe I could lay in bed with a Karin Kallmaker lesbian romance novel and pretend my girlfriend isn't out screwing somebody else behind my back."

  Dana wadded up her fist and pounded the steering wheel (but not hard enough to hurt). "I'm tired of being the nice person. I'm tired of always being the one who gets run over, pushed down and screwed around on. For once I'd like to do the running, pushing and screwing."

  "Puddle!" Trudy yelled.

  Dana saw the puddle from last night's storm glistening in the middle of her lane and reflexively swerved into the left lane in order to avoid it. Dana's car was an old VW Bug. She named her Betty Boop because she squeaked a lot. Betty also used to be bright cherry red before the rust took over and became the predominant color. Dana didn't want to complain too much because she was pretty sure it was the rust that held Betty together. Betty had a big hole in the middle of her passenger-side floorboard. Whoever was riding shotgun had to sit with their legs spread and could watch the highway pass only six inches beneath their feet. The hole came in handy on long road trips because you didn't even have to pull over to go to the bathroom. That was the good part. The bad part was that hitting a puddle in the middle of the road going fifty miles an hour wasn't as fun as you'd think it would be.

  Hooooonnnnkkkk blared an approaching semi-truck. Headlights momentarily blinded Dana and she swerved back to the right, barely making it back into her own lane in time to miss the oncoming semi.

  "Whew…That was a close call," Dana said, stretching a smile over her fear.

  To look at Trudy you wouldn't know she had had a near-death experience that lasted exactly 3.7 pants-peeing seconds. The only hint she gave that she was even remotely scared was that she took an extra hard puff off her unlit Marlboro.

  Carrying on as if she didn't almost get smashed by six tons of metal rolling ninety miles an hour on eighteen wheels, Dana said, "I wish I could be as self-assured as you. I've always thought if they wrote a book or a movie about my life, I wouldn't even be the main character. At best, I would be the overweight best friend or the whacko neighbor who makes everyone else seem normal by comparison."

  "Well, I know I'm not a lesbo," Trudy said, "but I still think if I found my girlfriend cheating on me, I wou
ld toss her out on her ass." She pretended to take another long drag off the cigarette. Both of them quit smoking together almost three months ago, but Trudy liked to pretend puff. She could give up the nicotine, but she couldn't quite kick the image of smoking. She liked the way she looked holding a cigarette. Like all those women in the Virginia Slims ads she had admired growing up. Those women were in control of their lives and happy. As long as they had a cigarette in their mouths, they didn't need a man.

  "That's the problem," Dana said snatching the cig from Trudy's lips and taking her own pretend puff. "I can't prove she's cheating on me. I know she is," she blew the fake smoke out the closed window, "but until I catch her actually doing it, I don't know she is for sure."

  Trudy took her cigarette back and ashed on the floor. "You need to hire yourself one of those private investigators to tail her and get some pictures in the act. You could get that Kinsey Milhone woman to do it."

  "Kinsey Milhone is a fictional character," Dana said.

  "I bet Stephanie Plum would do it."

  "Another fictional character."

  "I know that. I meant somebody like them." Trudy took another drag.

  "Or I could save the money and do it myself. I could tail her until I catch her red-handed."

  Trudy exhaled out the side of her mouth, making a noise that sounded like a dog farting. She said, "Good luck with that. I've seen your stealth mode. And it isn't, what's the right word, ‘stealthy.’"

  Dana shot her a withering look and made the dog-farting noise back at her.

  "Oh, don't get all up on your hind legs, Double D. You know you're the biggest klutz in the tri-county area."

  In the interest of preserving their twenty-some-odd-year friendship, Dana chose to ignore that last remark. "If she's cheating on me, I'll find her out. She'll wish she'd never done me wrong," she said. "Hey, that sounded like the lyrics to a country song."

  "Beats the stuffin' outta me what you ever saw in her in the first place," Trudy said.

  "Two things." Dana waggled her eyebrows up and down like a demented Groucho Marx.

  "Well, anybody with four grand in their pocket can buy big boobs. Maybe next time you shop for a girlfriend, you'll look deeper."

  "Maybe," Dana said. But even to herself she didn't sound too sure.

  "Puddle!" Trudy yelled.

  Dana swerved, this time checking the left lane first, but instead of missing the puddle, she plowed straight through it.

  Dana guided Betty back into the right lane and looked over at Trudy who had her feet planted on the dashboard like she was in a gyno's stirrups. She held her skirt out like a sail over the current of air flowing up from the floorboard hole. She wore a silly grin on her face.

  "You got a floorboard douche and you're smiling?" Dana asked.

  "It tickled my woo-hoo," Trudy said, all giggly.

  Dana laughed despite her foul mood.

  Trudy pulled a bottle of peppermint schnapps out of her purse, pooched her lips out real big and used the inside of them to suck from the bottle so she wouldn't smear her lipstick. She looked like a fish drinking from a bottle. Trudy didn't like the taste of peppermint schnapps but she figured if she was going to drink she may as well have minty fresh breath.

  "Do you really think you should be drinking right before we go into an AA meeting?" Dana asked.

  "When should I do it? During the meeting?"

  "No. The other alcoholics might think it's rude." Dana mocked a grade school teacher's voice, "If you didn't bring enough to share with everyone, then you can't have any."

  Trudy laughed even though it wasn't all that funny. That was the good thing about Trudy—she laughed easily and never ceased to find Dana entertaining. Dana and Trudy had been best friends since second grade when Dana tried to kiss Trudy in the girl's restroom and Trudy socked her in the mouth.

  "Are you sure you want to go to this meeting?" Dana asked.

  "I fished the pond dry in all the bars," Trudy replied. She took another drink, swished the schnapps around in her mouth and swallowed. "I need to cast my net further. There's gotta be some decent men out there. I've married enough drunks. I want a sober man, so where better to find a sober man than an AA meeting?"

  Trudy had been married three times. Twice to the same man. Dana didn't know if that counted as once or twice, but she had been maid of honor for all three weddings and that was what she was counting.

  Truth be told, Dana hoped Trudy did find a sober man. Maybe the sobriety thing would rub off on her a little. She was starting to worry about the shape of Trudy's liver. She was looking a little yellowish around the gills. Or maybe she had put on too much foundation. Trudy had a notorious heavy hand with the Merle Norman. You could see where the makeup ended and her real color began halfway down her neck. It made her look like she was wearing a turtleneck. It was probably one of the side effects of her job as the hair and makeup lady over at the funeral home. It was Trudy's dream job. She got to make over people and they never complained. Plus, her parents owned the funeral home so she couldn't get fired if she drank on the job.

  "How do I look?" Trudy asked, turning sideways in the car seat and striking a ridiculous pose that involved elbows sticking out and showing lots of thigh.

  "That wig's my favorite," said Dana.

  "You told me the one I was wearing yesterday was your favorite."

  Dana sidestepped, "That was yesterday. Today, this one's my new favorite. What color is that anyhow?"

  "Champagne. It's real hair too. Ordered it special from China. You know how many Asian women had to die to make this wig?" Trudy machine-gun laughed for the next quarter of a mile.

  When she was laughed out, Trudy flipped down the visor and looked at herself in the mirror she'd duct-taped there. She scooched the wig forward on her head and made kissy noises at herself. Dana didn't understand how she did it, but Trudy was a regular man magnet. It might've been Trudy's boobs, but Dana's boobs were much larger and the only thing she ever attracted were chiggers.

  Dana turned on the left blinker when she spotted the neon VFW sign blipping on and off alongside the dark highway. She counted the blinks and the intermittent dark pulses: long blink, pulse, pulse, blink, pulse, long blink, long pulse. She wished she knew Morse code so she could figure out the secret message the sign was sending her.

  "Let's discuss signals," Dana said. "You want to use the ones we always use?"

  "Sure," Trudy said. "If I find a guy I want to go home with, I'll pull on my right earlobe. If I want you to come rescue me from a creepy guy, I'll scratch my ass."

  "Okay, but what if you want to go home with a creepy guy? Are you going to pull on your ear and scratch your ass at the same time?"

  Trudy laughed. "You're the one that hooks up with creeps, not me."

  "Right. You just marry them," Dana said, adding under her breath, "three times."

  "You better not be picking up anybody," Trudy said. "I'm counting on you to be my designated driver."

  "But what if I get an itch for some strange?" Dana asked.

  Trudy socked Dana in the arm hard enough to make her swerve into the other lane. "You already have a girlfriend."

  "Yeah," Dana admitted, aiming the car back into the right lane. "Only problem is she's off scratching somebody else's strange."

  "Ewww," Trudy said, "that's not a good visual."

  Dana pulled into the VFW parking lot, downshifting into first. The gears ground together louder than her teeth at night. She said a quick silent prayer that Betty didn't drop her transmission at this godforsaken place.

  The Veteran of Foreign Wars building was made out of native stone and was long and narrow. They called it a shotgun building—because you could stand at the front door, fire a shotgun and shoot a coon standing in your backyard. Neon beer signs lit up the blacked-out windows. A handwritten sign in black magic marker was taped to the door: “AA Meeting in Back. 7:30.” Only in Oklahoma would they think holding an AA meeting in the back of a bar was normal. Of co
urse, this was the same state that thought it was fine to name the Will Rogers International Airport after a man who died in a plane crash.

  There was another homemade sign on the door that proclaimed “No Firearms.” Dana wondered if the pistol range next door had a sign on its door that read “No Drunks.”

  Trudy finished off the schnapps, swishing it around in her mouth, tilting her head back, gargling for exactly nine seconds (Dana counted) and finally swallowing. She tossed the empty bottle into the back seat floorboard and was out of the car and strutting for the front door before Dana even had the key out of the ignition.

  Trudy was anxious to get inside and have first dibs on all the available men before some other hussy showed up and gave her competition. Dana got out of the car a lot slower because she wasn't looking forward to spending prime time Thursday watching Trudy weave the web to catch her next male victim.

  Dana slouched through the front door and followed in Trudy's wake. She tried to hold her breath all the way through the bar and into the back room. She could easily hold her breath for over a minute and closer to a minute and a half (now that she didn't smoke), but she neglected to take a deep breath first and only made it halfway through the room before she had to let go and suck in some air. As soon as she inhaled, she knew it was a mistake. Smells of the stinky variety accosted her—cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, whiskey, body odor and more cigarette smoke. The fumes burned her nose and the back of her throat. She wished for the umpteenth time that day that she still smoked. Her sense of smell was duller when she smoked and, as it turned out, that was usually a good thing.

  Dana walked by two old men sitting at the end of the bar like antique bookends. They wore faded overalls and straw cowboy hats and had wrinkled walnut-colored skin and gray stubble on their chins. One of the men had a cigarette perched on his bottom lip and, miraculously, it didn't move when he talked. Dana overheard part of his conversation as she walked by: "I'm just saying that coloreds don't know their rightful place nowadays. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a racist or nothing. I fought in Nam elbow-to-elbow with a colored boy from Alabama that we called High Pockets on account of him being so tall. He carried me over his shoulder and toted me all the way back to our platoon the day I took that shrapnel in my right buttock and as much as I 'preciated that, I still wouldn't have voted on him to be president." He stopped and sucked hard on his cigarette for a second, then almost as an afterthought, he said with smoke streaming out of his nostrils, "They call it the White House, you know, not the Black House."