Free The Last Girls by Lee Smith Page B

Baron?” Didn’t you bring Baron?” Their old chocolate lab, Hawk’s pride and joy, Baron had been dead for fifteen years.
    A ND NOW, IN SPITE of all these tests they’re doing on Hawk, Gene Minor has picked this
very week
to issue his ultimatum. It’s all the fault of that life coach, he got her off the Internet, everything was going along perfectly well until she entered the picture. Courtneyfound the brochure two weeks ago, lying by the phone. “Rosalie Hungerheart,” it read. “You can live your dreams! Like an Olympic coach, Rosalie guides her clients to the top levels of performance in their personal and professional lives. Discover what you want and
get it!
Life won’t wait!” The back of the brochure had been torn off and sent in, Courtney presumed, to Rosalie Hungerheart, probably along with a check. Gene is so gullible.
    But Courtney and Gene have a perfectly satisfactory relationship already. Courtney spends every Wednesday afternoon with Gene, plus the occasional overnight when Hawk is out of town or when she manufactures a shopping trip to Atlanta. Several times they’ve met at one of those cheap motels up in north Raleigh, though Gene finds this depressing. “I’m a big quality-of-life guy,” he told her the first time, turning a terrible print of an Indian brave to the wall.
    It was his idea to drive down I-95 to Pedro’s South of the Border for an overnight. “It’ll be a hoot,” he promised. Courtney had seen those tacky Pedro’s signs lining the highway for years, but of course she’d never thought of stopping. “This is a stolen weekend!” Gene had announced to the startled waiter, wearing that silk kimono. He cast a little flurry of dollar bills at him before slamming the door in his face, bearing the tray of margaritas and enchiladas over to the giant bed where Courtney waited, naked, in hysterics. Before Gene she hadn’t laughed, really laughed, in years.
    The best thing about Pedro’s was that they did not have to hide out. Courtney was absolutely sure that she would never, ever, meet anybody she knew there. Not in the giant gift shop where Gene bought her a ring that said BABE in fake pink diamonds, not by the gaudy tiled pool, not in the dark Sombrero Lounge where she let him run his hand all the way up her leg under the table. It was so dark in there, nobody could see a thing. They’ve never gone back. It was just too far, too risky. But Courtney has often thought about it. Thatovernight at Pedro’s existed outside of time and space, like their whole relationship, which is why it’s so perfect. Courtney can’t believe Gene Minor wants to wreck it now. It has been just perfect since the very beginning.
Look.
    â€œM Y GOODNESS !” Harriet Holding says politely when Courtney pulls out the aqua blue vinyl scrapbook with MY PROM on the cover in gold script—Gene found it in a thrift shop someplace. Suddenly Courtney can’t wait to open it, to see him again, her darling, her love. She can’t wait until the end of this trip when he is going to meet her in New Orleans for a stolen weekend at the Royal Orleans Hotel. “Don’t you
dare
bring that kimono!” she has already told him. But secretly, she hopes he will.
    Harriet Holding would not look so sleepy and bored if she knew the truth about these pictures. She’d be astonished. Courtney is astonished, too. She still considers herself the last person in the world who’d ever have an affair, the very last. She’d never have done it at all if it had been anybody real, anybody that people knew.
    This is how we met, she does not say, opening the scrapbook. Gene Minor materialized in her life under the most improbable circumstances, really, circumstances as improbable as he was. It was eight years ago. Courtney was forty-four, over the hill by anybody’s standards. And a little blue, to tell the truth. It