Chapter 6
“But you should have seen Henry stare when he saw what Jess was holding!”
—Gertrude Chandler Warner, The Boxcar Children
Dancy surveyed the mess she’d made of his small front lawn. “An unfortunate set of circumstances.”
The solid jaw in his big, square face was so much sterner than it had been in his teenage years. “Very unfortunate.”
She began gathering everything up. “Some asshole abandoned him on the road. I hate people.” Bucket in hand, she stalked across
the lawn toward the drive where Clint’s pickup truck was parked. “He’s all yours.”
“Hell no,” Clint called after her. “You saved him. You keep him.”
“I’m not an animal person.”
“Tell him that.”
She looked down, and there the dog was, pitifully limping after her. She glared at the dog and pointed toward Clint. “Go! He’s a better person.”
The dog, however, stayed where he was. She stomped her foot. “I mean it. I don’t like dogs, and I don’t like you. Go away!”
The dog cocked his head, one tan ear pointed up, the white one lolling down.
Clint sauntered toward her. “It looks like you have a friend.”
“He’s not my friend,” she said, as Clint came to her side.
He took a few steps back. “Man, you stink. I mean that literally and not metaphorically.”
“I’m well aware. Someone needs to take him to an animal shelter, and I choose you.”
Ignoring that, he gestured toward her filthy Packers T-shirt and shorts. “Once you clean up, leave those clothes by the front
door. I’ll wash them for you.”
“Like hell you will. You’ll throw them out.”
He didn’t deny it. “I’ll get you new ones.”
“I like these just fine.” Dancy stalked across the drive and past the metallic blue truck. The dog limped after her, moving
so painfully that she couldn’t stand it. She hauled the horrible animal into her arms and stomped toward the woods, blasting
out the F-word with every step while Clint’s bark of a laugh rang in her ears.
She didn’t want the creature in the caboose, so she set out another small portion of stew and a bowl of fresh water in a patch of moss a safe distance from the vodka bottle.
The dog made fast work of the stew, lapped up some water, and lay down in the moss.
With that accomplished, she climbed back onto the rear platform to go inside.
The dog whimpered and stared up at her. His big, brown, needy eyes and bony, protruding ribs chastised her.
Dancy stared down at him. “I’m not a dog person,” she explained. “What part of that can’t you understand?”
He cocked his head, as if he wanted to debate the point.
“Shit.” She jumped to the ground, picked up the dog that wasn’t hers, and hauled him back onto the platform.
He licked her cheek.
“Bleck.” She hunched her shoulder and wiped off his slobber with her T-shirt sleeve only to receive another affectionate lick. Giving
up, she wedged the door open and carried him inside. “I swear to God, if you have fleas, you’re going back in that ditch.”
He didn’t seem worried.
She made a bed for him with a couple of towels. She’d yearned for a baby, and this wretched creature was what the universe
had sent her.
The dog was now cleaner than her. Dancy couldn’t face a second frigid lake bath, so she decided to swallow her pride and take
Clint up on his offer to use the shower in his gym. After fetching the white terry robe, she set out a water bowl and left
the dog with a dire warning about what would happen if he peed inside the caboose.
A flagstone path led around the side of the square, glass-walled gym, which reminded her of an ice cube. As she stepped inside,
she was enveloped by its cool, Zen-like spareness along with the scent of eucalyptus. Everything was perfectly organized:
a neat row of cardio equipment, a squat rack, free weights, kettlebells, all of it.
She passed a wood-lined sauna on her way to the bathroom, where she took a long shower and treated her snarled hair to decent shampoo and conditioner.
Afterward, she slipped into the robe and caught sight of herself in the mirror.
Roth had been obsessed with her looks. She’d given in to him when it came to Botox and painful lip fillers, but she’d refused a brow lift and butt implants.
Claiming the right to her own body had driven one more wedge between them, adding to the exhaustion of their marriage.
When Roth had told her he wanted a divorce, he’d said he needed to “grow as a person.” What he refused to admit was that, as he approached his mid-forties, he was afraid that being married to a woman in her mid-thirties would make him look old.
Now he’d found Bisa, a shiny young thing he could wear like a medal.
Ignoring the hair dryer, Dancy finger-combed the hair that had become her trademark, beginning with all those shampoo commercials
she’d made in her early twenties. Until recently, expert colorists and a raft of special treatments had kept it in excellent
condition. Roth had loved her hair, and any time she’d talked about cutting it, he’d told her she wouldn’t be herself without
it.
She fingered the wet strands hanging down the front of the terry cloth robe. Instead of an asset, her hair felt like a burden.
She began looking through drawers and soon found what she wanted. With only a moment’s hesitation, she raised the small pair
of scissors and made the first cut at her collarbone.
She worked away at her hair, taking out its weight, evening it at the bottom.
She hadn’t cut her own hair since she was nineteen, when the money she’d been receiving from her parents abruptly disappeared because they’d spent too much time traveling and not enough time selling what they’d bought, leaving Dancy on her own.
Fortunately, she hadn’t forgotten how to cut her hair, and as each lock fell, she told herself she was leaving behind a piece of her past.
When she was done, she shook it out, cleaned up the mess, and examined the overall result. Without that mass of hair, her
face, scrubbed free of makeup, seemed to have more character. Her cheekbones were too sharp, and faint lines traced the corners
of her eyes. Her wide mouth—the mouth that had distinguished her from so many other Hollywood blondes—still threatened to
take over her face, but in an interesting way. Despite its pallor, she appreciated her face like this—straightforward and
mature. It might now be mature enough to convince a casting director to give her a shot at one of the interesting kinds of
parts she longed for—if it weren’t for what had just happened in Chicago.
Dancy left the gym with her dirty clothes and a lightness around her head that, in better times, might have spoken of freedom
and possibility. As she reached the shrubbery that formed a partial boundary between the house and the gym, she heard a voice.
Clint had a visitor.
“We had fun that night? I know I did? Like . . . we both did?” The woman’s uptalk turned every statement into a question.
That, combined with her exaggerated vocal fry, suggested she was young. Dancy stopped to eavesdrop.
“It was a nice evening,” Clint said unenthusiastically.
“We had, like, a connection?” the woman went on. “You had to feel it?”
“I’m not sure . . . ‘connection’ is the right word.” Clint’s carefully polite response made Dancy roll her eyes. He clearly
wasn’t into his visitor and didn’t want her here, so why not be honest about it?
“Then what word would you use?” she asked.
Dancy waited to see how Mr. Nice Guy was going to get out of this one.
“I meet a lot of people,” he hedged.
“You told me I had, like, an interesting perspective, so why didn’t you call me?”
Dancy was all in favor of women going after what they wanted, but not like this. Clint needed to level with the child.
“I have a lot going on.”
Dancy shook her head in disbelief. He was pathetic.
“But we owe it to ourselves to, like, give this a chance.” She pressed on. “See where it will go.”
“I’m pretty busy right now.”
Idiot. The fact that he wasn’t being up front with her made this the perfect time for Dancy to focus on someone other than herself.
In this case, her spineless, too courteous, ex–high school boyfriend and the deluded moppet who’d managed to penetrate his
precious privacy to confront him.
She walked around the shrubbery until she was in full view of the patio—one section covered, the other open—that spread across
the back of the house and offered breathtaking views of the lake. A cantilevered outcrop of the home’s second story made up
the roof of the covered patio, which held a luxurious outdoor kitchen. Comfortable couches and chairs in the open section
surrounded a hot tub spa and a big stone firepit.
Clint and the woman stood by the spa. She was predictably pretty, with center-parted dark hair, a smooth complexion, and pouty
lips. She’d dressed for the occasion in strappy heels and a too-obvious side-knotted halter dress that barely covered her
butt. As Dancy had suspected, she was young.
“You didn’t tell me we had company.” Dancy sauntered to Clint’s side, abandoning her dirty clothes on a chair along the way. Even with shorter hair and a makeup-free face, she still stood a chance of being recognized, but so be it.
Clint stared at her hair as Dancy greeted the girl. “Hi, I’m Jess.” She pulled the name from The Boxcar Children. “And you’re . . .”
Dismay replaced the woman’s belligerence as she took in Dancy’s damp hair, her bare feet, and the visible swell of her breasts
in the robe’s open V, suggesting her nakedness underneath. “I’m . . . Jordan.”
Dancy smiled at the girl. “Do you live around here?”
“I— No. I, uh, live in Chicago.”
“Cool. Are you going to school?”
“Roosevelt.”
“That’s great. I wish I’d gone to college. What year?”
“I’m a junior.”
Clint moved to Dancy’s side like the coward he was. Still, she had to give him credit as she thought of all the celebrities—actors,
athletes, industry power brokers—who, unlike him, preyed on young girls.