4
I can't tell you what I had for breakfast, but I can sing every word of rock 'n roll.—Patty Duke
Cardboard boxes of every age and condition crowded the living room.
Few of them were labeled, and the ones that were bore cryptic words like “Keep” or “Things, Lilith.” It was anyone’s guess as to what the boxes might actually contain.
At least the attic was now empty. Faced with the monumental job of clearing out the house, Rhett decided to start at the top and work her way down.
“Okay.” She heaved a sigh as Lilith and her husband Brendan plunked the last two boxes on the floor. “I guess we should each pick a box and dig in.”
“Please don’t let there be any spiders in here.” Lilith used the tips of her thumb and forefinger to lift a flap on the box closest to her. A frown of confusion creased her forehead before she snorted out a laugh at what she found. “Oh, good lord, Mother. Rubber pants?”
“Hey, you’re the one who was allergic to disposable diapers.”
“You were allergic to disposable diapers?” Brendan ran a hand through his spiky black hair and grinned. “I never knew that.”
Lilith shrugged. “It’s not something that comes up in everyday conversation.” She pulled out a stack of yellowed rubber. “Seriously, Mom. What the hell?”
“When I put those away, we thought there might be more babies one day. And if there were, they might have been allergic, too.” Rhett looked at the items in her daughter’s hand with a wistful smile.
When she packed Lilith’s baby things, there was no reason to doubt that one day there would be a houseful of Davis children.
But an ectopic pregnancy and emergency hysterectomy left Lilith an only child at age three.
Broken-hearted at the loss of the baby, and desolate because there would never be another one, Rhett refused to deal with the boxes full of baby things.
A few months later Todd hauled them up to the attic where they'd remained ever since.
“Well, unless you’re planning to adopt allergic children now, these need to be thrown out.” Lilith tossed the handful into a large empty box on which Brendan had written “Trash” in his neat, organized hand. “Two points. And the crowd goes wild.”
Rhett smiled at her daughter's antics and dragged a box closer to where she sat. It had been a relief when Lilith hadn’t been upset at her plans to sell the house and move to Dallas.
In fact, Lilith wanted to know why she waited so long and wondered aloud how her mother could bear to stay in a place with so many memories.
Rhett had bitten her tongue at that. The memories that caused her to get rid of the house weren’t the kind Lilith referred to, but Rhett would set herself on fire before she ever let her daughter know what she found out about Todd.
Unable to stand the sight of his rings on her finger, she gave the set to Lilith who was touched to receive them.
Good thing, too, because Rhett had seriously considered doing a Julia Roberts from Sleeping With the Enemy and flushing them down the toilet.
“I swear, Mom.” Lilith spoke up from behind the worn plaid couch where she'd migrated after she finished the baby clothes box. “You’re almost qualified to be on an episode of Hoarders. I’ve opened five boxes in a row that contain records.”
Rhett peered into the box nearest her. “Make it six."
“If you want to make some money, put these things on e-Bay. I’ll bet you could clean up.
” Lilith stood with several albums in her hands.
“What’ve we got here? Journey, Def Leppard, AC/DC, and ...
Oh! Illicit.” She flipped the album around so that the front faced out.
“Brendan, did I tell you we saw this guy in Dallas?”
Brendan pushed his gold-framed glasses up his nose and squinted at the cover. “Which one? There are five guys there.”
“Rhys James. The hot one,” Lilith clarified. “He was at the nightclub that night, just hanging out. I thought Mom was gonna die.”
“I was not,” Rhett protested. “And put those albums back. I’ll never sell any of them, even if I can’t listen to them anymore.”
Lilith replaced the records in the box, giggling. “You were gonna die, too. You should’ve seen yourself. Your eyes turned into little hearts and everything.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Rhett muttered, and turned to another box.
“Rhett, you can buy a stereo system online, you know,” Brendan said. “You can even get one with a receiver that has an mp3 player. That way you can listen to your records on the turntable, and CDs and downloads, too.”
“I don’t have any CDs or mp-whatevers.” Rhett held up an ancient, olive-green hand mixer. “Why did I save this? I distinctly remember the motor going out one night right in the middle of mixing a batch of chocolate chip cookies.”
“Wait a minute.” Lilith picked her way around the boxes, her arms full of Rhett's maternity clothes. “You don’t have any of Illicit’s music after they ditched the vinyl?”
“No.” Rhett chunked the mixer into the Trash box. “I’ve heard them on the radio, but that’s it.”
“Blasphemy.” Brendan grinned at her. “If you have a favorite band, you’re required by law to own all their music. Here.” He dug his cell phone from his pocket and began scrolling through it. “I got their last album from iTunes, and ...”
“How is it an album if it’s just a bunch of digital whatsits?” Rhett interrupted.
“Because technically an album is a collection of things. In this case, songs. It doesn’t have to be a big-ass vinyl record.
Here it is.” Brendan took the decorative glass bowl from the coffee table and turned it upside down over the trash box, emptying it of the dusty potpourri that lost its scent years ago.
After righting the bowl on the table again, he put his phone in it and touched the screen.
“Makes a great speaker,” he explained to a confused Rhett.
Before she could reply, the first cut of the latest Illicit album began to play, and she shut her mouth. Brendan was right. The empty bowl did make a great speaker. It amplified the smoky voice of Rhys James almost as well as the monster stereo speakers Todd owned when they got married.
God, that Rhys could sing. Not only was his voice smoky, it was insinuating, teasing, smooth, sexy and soulful, all at the same time.
As she listened to the hard rocking strains of “Another Lonely Heartbreak,” the band’s latest single—if they did, indeed, have something called singles anymore—Rhett recalled the way he looked standing on that balcony at that nightclub.
He’d been wearing some band’s T-shirt, the kind Lilith called “vintage,” and his honey-streaked blond hair flowed down over his shoulders in that messy but sexy way it had since he joined Illicit when he was twenty.
It should have looked ridiculous on a man his age, but it only looked smoking hot. Just like the rest of him.
“Look, Brendan,” Lilith crowed. “Her eyes are little hearts again.”
Brought out of her lust-fueled daydream, Rhett narrowed her eyes at her daughter. “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out of it.” She pointed at a box. “Now sit down there and get busy, and enjoy the music.”
“Don’t worry, Mom.” Lilith folded her legs under her and sat on the floor.
“I know good music. You raised me right.” Before she opened the next box, she looked at her mother with a sly grin.
“Your eyes are little hearts, though.” Then she ducked and giggled as Rhett flung a throw pillow at her head.
It didn’t take long for Rhett to discover that selling a house was not for the faint of heart.
First came clearing out eighteen years of a family’s accumulation, and that took longer than she ever could have imagined.
Next came the garage sale, two exhausting days of haggling with people who expected to buy a rocker-recliner for fifty cents.
After the garage sale came donating the decent leftovers to charity and hiring a truck to take the pure junk to the landfill.
It was only then that she was able to think about listing the house.
It didn’t help that the majority of realtors in Claiborne were people with whom she’d gone to school.
As she ran her finger down the listing of real estate agents in the phone book, she noticed that almost everyone from the group of popular kids had decided to sell property for a living.
This had been Todd’s crowd, and even though she dated him they kept her at the periphery of the group.
Not only was she a poor kid from a single-parent household, she was the sister of Mel Vandergriff who was still notorious in Claiborne High School lore.
It also didn’t help that Rhett seemed poised to follow in her sister’s footsteps by sleeping with three football players before Todd.
Elaine had been right about one thing. The only reason Rhett wore the crown of homecoming queen was because she was dating Todd Davis.
And because no one knew she was two months pregnant with Todd's child.
When the news of Rhett’s pregnancy leaked out, this group of Golden Ones reacted just like everyone else in town.
Everyone was convinced Rhett single-handedly ruined the promising career of a future NFL Hall of Famer, conveniently overlooking the fact that Todd had been with Rhett on that blanket by Claiborne Lake, and that he didn't have the forethought to put a rubber in his wallet.
As the names leapt up at her from the phone book, Rhett heard again the snide remarks as she walked down the hall at school, her belly preceding her by a good margin.
She recalled the ugly, tittering laughter from behind manicured hands as she and Todd danced at prom, the bulk of Lilith between them.
And she remembered the way they cut Todd from the herd the moment high school was over and he was just a husband and father, no longer a football star.