1. Maggie #2
Shuttering her eyes, Maggie lifted the phone and skimmed the words. “He wants me to know there’s a hurricane coming. Apparently, he thinks I live under a rock.”
“I think he’s so sweet!”
“Sweet?” Maggie launched a brow north. “He’s a Harley-riding, beard-wearing, tattoo-covered widower who has never really said how his wife passed away. For all I know, he offed her.”
“Maggie!”
The phone buzzed again. Maggie didn’t even have to look. The man always texted in clusters, especially when she refused to respond. Which was pretty much always, until he wore her down and she had to make it stop.
She looked again. “He wants to make sure I have a plan to stay safe.”
“Mags.”
“Don’t.”
“That is extremely dear.”
“It’s unnecessary,” Maggie replied. “I have a son and a grandson, a daughter and her boyfriend, who happens to be a sheriff. And I have you up in my business. I do not need Easy Rider checking on my storm plans.”
The phone buzzed again.
Jo Ellen shrieked with delight. “The man is a machine.”
“He is a man with no boundaries.”
“Read it. Read it, read it, read it.”
Maggie read it. She closed her eyes. She opened them and read it again.
“He thinks,” she said, with as much dignity as a woman in a bathrobe could summon, “that we should discuss it over dinner.”
Jo Ellen practically leapt to her feet, despite her arthritic hips. “Dinner? Oh, Mags, he’s asking you out.”
“Thank you, Princess Obvious. It’s about the sixth time he’s tried in the last two months.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
Maggie huffed out a breath as she put the phone down. “Because you’d have me in a cocktail dress and heels with an appointment to have my hair done in the blink of an eye.”
“For Brick?” she scoffed. “You’d wear jeans and a leather vest with extra eyeliner. Please say yes, Maggie.”
“No. And I don’t wear eyeliner.”
“You danced with him when we had to spend the night at Gator Jack’s.”
“That was under duress.”
“That was under the influence.” Jo Ellen cracked up. “And then he bailed you out of jail, Maggie! With homemade cheesecake.”
Maggie inhaled sharply, loathing the thought of her cell with a toilet in the corner. “Can
we forget that particular humiliation?”
“And he’s still texting you. That’s called true love, baby.”
“That’s called bad judgment.”
Maggie stood, because she could not sit still another minute, and walked to the kitchen to refill her coffee, mostly so she would have something to do with her hands.
“I can tell you like him,” Jo Ellen called from the couch, infuriating Maggie because…because…oh, darn it all. She did like him. And she’d take that secret to the grave.
“Jo.” Maggie set her mug down on the counter hard enough that it sloshed. “I am seventy-eight. He is in a motorcycle gang.”
“They’re not a gang!” Jo Ellen insisted. “They’re a riding group of veterans who help stranded ladies on the highway and bail them out of jail.”
“And I find the idea of being with a man—kind or bearded or otherwise—unseemly.” She stepped toward the open door of the balcony to look down on the side yard.
From here, they had a glimpse of the Gulf, which was remarkably still, with no sign of the hurricane hundreds of miles to the south. The sky above it was cloudless, the color of a robin’s egg…the color of Brick Collins’s eyes.
She tried to bury the thought, listening to…a click. Instantly, she whipped around and marched back into the kitchen to see Jo Ellen on the sofa, Maggie’s phone in her hand.
“Jo Ellen Wylie!”
She tossed it on the coffee table and gave the guiltiest smile Maggie had ever seen. “What?”
“What? What did you do?”
She shrugged. “I answered him.”
“You did not.”
“Mags. Honey.” Jo Ellen stood slowly. “We’re roommates. We’re best friends. We are—what is that phrase the young people use? Ride or die.”
“I don’t want to ride or die. Which is exactly why I am not getting back on that motorcycle ever again.”
“The phrase means I have your back. Which…” She glanced at the phone. “I just demonstrated.”
“You are unwell,” Maggie snapped.
“I am thriving.”
Pinching the bridge of her nose, Maggie felt, very distinctly, her old self rising up—the Maggie from before Jo Ellen had come back into her life, the one with the set jaw and the short answers, the one who had clung to control tighter than ever after Roger was arrested.
“Jo,” she said evenly. “I love you. I am glad you live here. I am glad we are roommates and best friends and whatever other greeting-card nonsense you want to call it. But I am not going on a date with a motorcycle gang.”
“Double date,” she corrected. “And it’s a riding group.”
“Double…” She marched to the phone and picked it up, reading what Jo Ellen had written—had forged, more like.
Maggie: Yes! Bring Randy and I’ll bring Jo and we’ll make it a double. Date, that is! Ha!
“Oh, my…you…I…you…a heart?”
“A little one.”
Maggie sat down on the couch because her knees had stopped working. She looked at the phone. She looked at Jo Ellen. She looked at the phone again. On the screen, in real time, three little dots appeared under her last message.
“Oh, no,” Maggie said. “He’s writing back. Maybe I should block him.”
“You will not block him.”
The dots kept going. Maggie could feel her pulse in her throat, which was a new and unwelcome development. Then the message came through.
Brick: How about Tuesday night? Ladies drink free at Crabby’s in Fort Walton. They got a band.
Maggie read it twice.
“Crabby’s,” she said.
“It sounds charming and seafood-ish,” Jo Ellen cooed.
“It sounds like a venereal disease.” The whole thing was absurd, and unserious, and entirely beneath the dignity of Magnolia Fredericks Lawson. “I can’t believe you did this,” she finally said.
“Just type three little letters, Mags. Y-E-S. And we’re good to roll. And by roll, I mean—”
“Stop!” Maggie exclaimed.
“Type,” Jo Ellen insisted. “We could die in a hurricane a week later. You’ll be sorry if you didn’t let that beard tickle your…chin.”
Heat burned her cheeks, but a laugh bubbled up and came out strong enough that she hit the screen and just happened to land on the Y. So, she finished the word and closed her eyes, the traitorous phone hot in her hand.
“Oh, Mags.” Jo Ellen sat down and put her arm around Maggie’s shoulders. “Remember the motto.”
“You only live once?” Maggie guessed.
“In Destin, we drink.”
“Well,” she whispered as she set the phone down and leaned into her friend. “I’ll have to in order to get through Crabby’s in Fort Walton Beach.”
“Oh, yes! Let’s go get new dresses and dancing shoes.” Jo was up and pulling Maggie with her. “Life is just beginning, Mags! And we are living it!”