7. Sold to the Table in the Back
Chapter seven
Sold to the Table in the Back
NELLIE
Nobody warned me about the roof.
I've been in this barn for ten minutes, and I keep tipping my head back like a tourist, because somebody cranked the whole top of the building open and the dance floor is sitting under actual stars.
Real ones. Texas-sized, show-off stars, hanging over the fairy lights and the band and two hundred people in their Saturday best.
"Who builds a barn a sunroof," I say.
"Rue." Debbie Sue hands me a plastic cup of wine like it's a work assignment. "Her gran and grandpa Henry built the barn way back. Rue put the roof in when she came home and fixed the whole place up. So people can see the stars while they dance."
I take the wine. In my defense, I tried to stay home. I had a plan involving a couch, a frozen pizza, and a documentary about a cult, which is my idea of romance. Debbie showed up at my cottage at six with a dress over one arm and no intention of leaving without me.
She holds the dress up against me and sighs.
"What?"
"Nothing. Some of us just pray for a shape like that, is all." She tugs the zipper down. "I nursed twins and got a pancake situation. You got that."
"You can have it. It never buttons."
"Buttons are for women God didn't bless." She pushes the dress at me. "Put it on before I cry about it."
The dress and I had words in my bathroom. It has opinions about my hips. I have hips. We went two rounds with the zipper and reached a settlement, and the dress got the better lawyer.
So now I'm at a bachelor auction. In the dress. Which fits, which is suspicious, because I never gave anybody my size.
The Hall is packed wall to wall, and half the crowd doesn't match the other half. Linen suits. Real jewelry. The kind of tan you buy.
"Debbie." I lean in. "Who are all these people?"
"No idea." She goes up on her toes and hollers across three tables. "TATER. Who are all these people?"
A big man peels away from the stage and comes at us grinning. I'd know him anywhere from Debbie's phone background, which is him asleep in a kiddie pool. He is wearing a bolo tie. On purpose.
"You must be the famous Nellie." He shakes my whole arm, elbow included. "Tater Monroe. My wife talks about you more than she talks about me."
"He's not wrong," Debbie says. "The people, Tate."
"Grant Walker's doing. Invited half of Dallas down, and half of Dallas showed up.
" He rubs his hands together. "And get this.
Grant's matching whatever we raise tonight.
Dollar. For. Dollar." He looks over at the Dallas tables the way a man watches a brisket come up to temp.
"I gotta go emcee. Don't bid on anything you can't afford, ladies. "
And he's gone, bolo tie swinging.
I recognize maybe a third of the locals, which after six weeks is a personal record and a violation of every rule I have. There's the couple from the catfish ranch. There's the tech guy who's somehow dating the woman from the cooking channel my mother watches.
And there, at a corner table, is a tiny woman in her sixties waving me over like we're old army buddies.
"That's Millie," Debbie says, following my eyes. "Do not make eye contact unless you have an hour."
Too late.
"You're the nurse," Millie announces, patting the chair beside her. "Sit. I've been hearing things."
"Ma'am?"
"Don't ma'am me, I'm sixty, not the governor. You and that Peterson boy." She leans in. "Mabel says you two had a fight at the nurses' station that drew a standing crowd. Hank at the barbershop says it's the third one. June at the bakery says he asks what you order."
"He does not—"
"Sweetheart." Millie holds up a hand like a crossing guard. "I run the quilting circle. I had this information before you did."
I look at Debbie for help. Debbie is examining the rafters.
"Anyway." Millie sits back, pleased with herself, and drops her voice to a whisper you could hear in the parking lot. "I took care of it. I spread the word. Nobody in this town is to bid on that man tonight. Nobody." She winks at me, slow and criminal. "You can thank me later."
"Bid on— I'm not bidding on anybody."
"Course you're not, honey." She pats my hand.
I'm rescued by feedback from the stage mic, which is the first and last time in my life I will be grateful for Tater Monroe holding a microphone.
"LADIES AND ALSO GENTLEMEN." Tater is in full rodeo-announcer mode, gavel and all. "Welcome to the First Annual Starlight Hall Bachelor Lunch-Date Auction, benefiting Engine One, which is older than my marriage and in worse shape."
"You want to bet?" Debbie hollers.
The crowd roars. This town heckles as a team sport.
"And REMEMBER," Tater goes on, pointing his gavel at a table of linen suits, "our friend Grant Walker is matching every dollar raised tonight, dollar for dollar.
Which means when you bid a hundred, you're really bidding two hundred, and when you sit on your hands, you're stealing from a fire truck. "
The rules, as Tater explains them, are simple and lawless. You bid, you win, you get a lunch date with the bachelor, all proceeds go to the new engine. What he does not explain, and what becomes clear immediately, is that this auction is rigged like a carnival game.
The first "bachelor" is a married man named Cole, auctioned off while his wife bids against three of her own friends who are clearly running up the price for fun. She wins him for two hundred dollars and kisses him in front of God and the fire marshal.
The second is a rancher bought by his own fiancée with a check she makes him hold while she takes a picture.
"This is a scam," I tell Debbie, delighted despite myself. "This is a money-laundering operation with string lights."
"It's a fundraiser, honey. Drink your wine."
That's when I notice her table. Or rather, the center of her table, where the nurses of Willowbend General, my coworkers, women I trusted, have stacked a pile of cash and are counting it. Out loud. In tens.
My stomach drops.
"Deborah Sue Monroe."
"Hm?" She doesn't look up from the count.
"What is the money for."
"The engine, sugar. It's a fundraiser."
"Debbie."
"Four-twenty, four-forty..." She licks her thumb. Keeps counting.
I lean in and hiss it. "If that pile has anything to do with me, I want you to know I have access to needles and a long memory."
"That's nice." She pats my knee. "Four-sixty."
And then the room changes.
I feel it before I see it, which annoys me, because I am a woman of science. The crowd noise dips and rolls toward the stage, and half the female population of Willowbend sits up straighter, and I turn around, and there is Owen Peterson under the lights.
Somebody made him wear the shirt.
I know it was Tater. I know because Owen is standing there like a man facing a firing squad, jaw set, ears red, in a dark T-shirt that fits like it lost a bet, and Tater is grinning at him like a proud arsonist.
The stars are open above him. The fairy lights are doing their thing. And my pulse, my traitor pulse, the one I have trained for thirty years to stay professional, forgets every rule I own.
Airway clear, I tell myself. Breathing elevated. Circulation compromised. Patient is an idiot.
"Next up," Tater booms, "you know him, you fear him, the nurses have a folder on him. Owen Peterson. Chicago trained, Willowbend raised, currently single-handedly keeping the butterscotch industry afloat. Gals, this man once carried Amos Kessler AND Amos Kessler's dog down a—"
"The dog walked," Owen says into the crowd. First words. Flat as a pancake.
The room loses it. Somewhere behind me a woman whistles with two fingers.
"Bidding opens at fifty dollars," Tater says.
Silence. Total, coordinated, small-town silence. Locals studying their drinks. Millie beaming like a woman watching her plan work.
Then a Dallas voice cuts through it.
"One hundred." A gorgeous woman in white linen with a blowout you could land a plane on, raising a champagne flute like a paddle.
Millie's head whips around so fast her earrings keep going.
"Two hundred," calls a second Dallas table, where three women in real diamonds have put their heads together and come up dangerous.
"NOBODY TOLD THEM," Millie hisses at me, scandalized, like Dallas broke a law.
"Two-fifty," says White Linen.
"THREE HUNDRED!" And that is my table. That is my table, that is Marisol from day shift with her hand in the air and my dignity in the other.
I grab Debbie's arm. "Call it off."
"Three-fifty," says White Linen, cool as an alcohol swab.
"Debbie. Deborah. I will quit. I will transfer to Alaska. They have signing bonuses."
"That's seven hundred in engine money, folks," Tater croons into the mic. "God bless Grant Walker."
"Three-seventy-five," say the diamonds, conferring.
On stage, Owen has located our table. I watch it happen. I watch his eyes find the cash pile, then Debbie, then me, and I watch one corner of his mouth do a thing it has no legal right to do.
"Four hundred!" White Linen is standing now.
The diamond table confers again. Heads shake. They're out.
White Linen looks around, triumphant.
And Debbie Sue Monroe stands up on her chair.
On her chair. In heels. Holding the entire cash pile over her head like a championship belt.
"FOUR HUNDRED AND EIGHTEEN DOLLARS," she bellows, "AND A BOOK OF CAR-WASH COUPONS."
Silence. Then the loudest sound I have ever heard a barn make.
Tater is pounding the podium. The band hits a rimshot. Millie is on her feet screaming like her horse came in. White Linen throws up her hands, laughing, done.
"Going once," Tater hollers. "Going twice."
I am hissing threats with no air behind them. I am medically unable to feel my face.
"SOLD! To the Willowbend General nursing staff, for four hundred and eighteen dollars and a book of car-wash coupons!" Tater leans into the mic, savoring it, the absolute ham. "And the table loses its mind. Somebody's shaking a pom-pom that came from God knows where.
Debbie leans into my ear over the noise, counting what's left of the cash fan.
"Good news. We came in under budget." She tucks the bills into her bra. "There's enough left over for a nice lunch. Or a cheap motel. Whichever you prefer."
"Debbie."
She winks at me and starts clapping.
able designates their lunch date as... NURSE NELLIE GREER!"
The spotlight swings.
It finds me the way a code alarm finds you at the end of a double shift. Two hundred faces turn at once. Millie's flash goes off. Debbie is back on the chair, arms up, taking her ovation like she won a title fight, and somewhere in the noise I hear the word "Alaska" leave my own mouth to no one.
I should be planning her death. I should be calculating how far four hundred eighteen dollars goes at fifty cents a car wash. I should be doing anything but what I'm doing, which is looking at the stage.
Because here's the thing about a spotlight. It works both ways.
Somewhere to my left, the syndicate is counting four hundred and eighteen dollars into a basket, tens and coupons and all. During the bidding, Owen's eyes did one lap of our table. Cash, Debbie, me.
They're not doing laps anymore.
He's looking straight down the beam of that spotlight at me. The whole barn is roaring around him, and Tater's smacking his shoulder, and the stars are wide open overhead, and his face.
His face is not horror.
That's the entire problem.