The Homewreckers(51)

The paint was a soft, grayed-down blue-green.

“I like it,” Hattie said, taking a step backward, then tilting her head.

“I was down by that shed near the beach and I noticed this old wooden boat with the most gorgeous faded, salt-glazed blue-green. It reminds me of a piece of beach glass. I scraped a bit of the paint off it and had it color matched at the paint store this morning.”

“Perfect!” she beamed. “Tybee Beach Glass it is.”

“White trim? Doors painted orange-pink?”

Hattie looked dubious. “Orange-pink?”

He picked up a smaller can of paint and popped the lid, holding it up for her to see, then brushed a small square of coral paint onto the siding. “This reminds me of a hibiscus blossom.”

“I never would have picked that color for the door, but actually, I’m kind of loving it,” she said.

“Wait!” Trae said, feigning shock. “Are we actually agreeing on a design decision?”

“I’m as surprised as you,” Hattie said. She took the brush and painted a narrow coral stripe down the bridge of his nose.



* * *



“Cute,” Trae said, after the cameras stopped rolling. He rubbed at his nose with a towel.

“That was great, y’all,” Leetha said. “Finally I’m seeing some chemistry between you two. Don’t you agree, Mo?”

The producer was sitting on the sidelines, watching the video from earlier in the day on his laptop. He didn’t look up. “Yeah. Big improvement. Seemed more natural, less contrived. Hattie, we need to reshoot some of your stuff with Cass from this morning. The lighting was shit, and you seemed to be mumbling half your lines.”

Hattie bristled. “I was not mumbling.”

“Okay, so maybe you had a mouth full of grits or something. Whatever. We still have to reshoot. Lisa needs you and Cass so she can touch up your faces. I’ve got the guys setting up in there, and we’ll be ready for you in twenty minutes.”

Mo walked back inside the house.

“So,” Trae said. “It isn’t just me he hates. It’s me, and you.”

“Don’t take it personally,” Leetha advised. “Mo don’t like nobody during a shoot.”



* * *



Cass was already sitting in one of the makeup chairs when Hattie arrived in the trailer. Lisa was brushing powder across her cheeks, immune to Cass’s complaints.

“I don’t look like myself with all this war paint.”

“On camera, it looks completely natural,” Lisa assured her. “And you have amazing skin. What kind of moisturizer do you use?”

“Bacon grease!” Cass said. “And I throw in some cornmeal to exfoliate.”

Lisa recoiled in horror.

“Not really,” Cass said, laughing. “I use what my mom and grandma use. Pond’s.” She stood up and swapped chairs with Hattie.

“Hey, did you see there’s another story about us in today’s paper?” Cass asked, picking up an old issue of People magazine. “Must be a slow news day.”

“When we talked the other day, that reporter, Molly Fowlkes, told me she’s obsessed with Lanier Ragan. But here’s a new wrinkle. She asked if I’d ever heard rumors back then that Lanier was having an affair with one of her husband’s football players.”

“Huh?” Cass stopped leafing through the magazine.

“Crazy, right? But Molly said that a few years ago, after she wrote a column about the ten-year anniversary of the disappearance, she got an anonymous phone call from a woman who claimed that her boyfriend at the time, who was a Cardinal Mooney football player, was sleeping with Lanier. She said she wanted Molly to know that Lanier wasn’t a saint.”

“And she had no idea who the woman was?” Cass asked.

“No. They didn’t have caller ID on their phones. She said she never wrote about it for the paper because she could never confirm the woman’s story. I told her I’d never heard anything like that. Have you?”

Cass was studying a magazine photo of Jennifer Lopez in a tight-fitting satin dress and held it up for Hattie to see. “You believe this chick is in her fifties? Wonder how much time she spends in the gym?”

“No telling. But it’s her job. She gets paid a bajillion dollars a year to look like that. You haven’t answered my question. Did you ever hear any rumors about Lanier Ragan sleeping with a high school kid?”

“Don’t think so,” Cass said. She picked up a pen and began working on the celebrity crossword puzzle at the back of the magazine.

“Look this way, Hattie,” Lisa said. “I need to re-glue those eyelashes.”



* * *



At the end of the afternoon, Hattie was slumped in a folding chair on the front porch of the house, guzzling from a cold bottle of water. A late afternoon rainstorm had set in, and thunder boomed ominously off to the east. Trae collapsed on a chair next to her.

“Damn,” he said, pulling his damp shirt away from his chest. “How do you people live in this climate? I feel like I’m living in the rinse cycle of a dishwasher.”

“Welcome to Savannah,” Hattie told him. “But wait until October. The humidity lifts, and it’s still plenty warm enough to hit the beach. Christmas is chilly, but the skies—oh God, they’re so blue, and the air is crisp, and the camellias are amazing. I bet they don’t have camellias like ours in L.A. And then in February, right around Valentine’s Day, the azaleas start to bloom. Every downtown square looks like something out of a postcard. I’ve got this one azalea in my yard—actually, the color is really close to that coral you want to paint the front door here.…”