“She gone?” Kate asked.

“Yep,” I answered, pulling a bottle of cheap white wine out of the fridge feeling this was the time that cheap white wine was created for.

“What’d she want?” Keira asked.

“Joe,” I answered.

“And?” Keira prompted.

I found the corkscrew and looked at Keira through the bar opening. “Joe doesn’t want her.”

“Killer!” Keira hissed, pumping her fisted hand in the kind of gesture you’d use on a trucker to get him to honk his horn.

I looked at Kate. “You think it’s something in the water or is she just touched?”

“She’s just touched,” Kate said, Dane laughed and they hit the play button to restart the movie.

I poured myself a glass of wine and went back out to my deck with my phone in my hand.

I barely had my ass to the seat when it rang, I looked at the display and it was Joe.

I slid it open and put it to my ear. “Hi.”

“She gone?”

“Yeah, drama over.” He didn’t reply so I asked, “Who’s Marco?”

“Her manager,” Joe answered.

“She seems pretty scared of him,” I remarked.

“Reason to be.”

“What reason?”

“She’s where she is ‘cause of him. Her problem is, she made a deal with the devil.”

“A deal with the devil?”

“Marco’s bad news,” Joe told me.

“Bad news how?” I asked.

“Bad news, she steps outta line, he yanks her back and he isn’t nice about it.”

That didn’t sound good, that sounded face pale, lips parted, eyes wide not good.

“What?” I whispered.

“He can get physical, buddy.”

“Physical, as in, he beats her?”

“Yeah,” Joe answered. “She’s his cash cow. He skims off the top of everything she does, lives a good life. She does shit that might rock that boat, he doesn’t like it and makes that known however he has to.”

“That’s awful.”

“Yeah, but it isn’t your problem and it isn’t mine. It’s the deal she made.”

A thought occurred to me so I asked, “Why didn’t you call Marco before when you were having problems with her?”

“It was just me, I could deal with it and I didn’t want to be responsible for him gettin’ in her face. Fuckin’ with you and the girls, she wasn’t makin’ it about me, she was draggin’ you into it. I thought I could make my point, f**k, I thought I did. But I didn’t. She f**ks with you and the girls, she needs to know I’m serious. Now she knows.”

I took a sip of my wine thinking that my world, not too long ago, even when Tim would come home and talk about some of the shit he’d seen, was a little bubble of goodness. Now the stuff that kept pricking it without Tim to keep that bubble strong and resilient was scary crazy.

“Buddy?”

“Yeah?”

“You all right? She say anything else to you?”

Yes, she did. She told me Joe belonged to me.

But I wasn’t going to tell him that.

“No, just flicked her cigarette butt in my yard and left.”

“Fuck, what a bitch,” he muttered.

“That’s okay, Colt got it.”

He sighed then said, “Good man.”

“Joe?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“Would you have called Marco?”

He didn’t hesitate before he answered, “Yeah.”

This shocked me and it also disappointed me. “Really?”

“Really.”

“But –”

“Baby, she was callin’ you and the girls were pickin’ up, gettin’ freaked out. It had to be stopped, that was my last option. She forced my hand.”

“Joe –”

“She forced my hand, Vi. She did it to herself with this crazy shit. You back a man in a corner, you gotta bear the consequences when he does what he has to do to fight his way out.”

He was being a sage again.

And it hit me then that she didn’t back Joe into a corner. She tossed the girls and me there. Joe hadn’t threatened that Marco business when she was doing her thing to catch his attention. He thought he could deal with it and he didn’t want to scare her like he just did. But he pulled out the big guns for me and the girls.

I didn’t want to make this into a big thing, I didn’t want to make the same mistake and start to believe but he was giving me no choice.

I took another sip of my wine then changed the subject because this kind of subject you didn’t talk about over the phone.

“Well, thanks for dealing with it all the way from LA.”

“Don’t thank me, I’m the reason she was there.”

“She was here because she has the hots for you. It isn’t your fault you’re hot.”

I heard his soft laughter again, I decided I liked it again then he said, “Baby, you’re killin’ me.”

“How am I killin’ you?”

“You can be sweet and hilarious when I’m close enough to give payback.”

My stomach dipped and I pulled in breath to control my fluttering heart.

“What’s payback?” I whispered.

“Be sweet and hilarious in my bed, I’ll show you.”

“Joe –”

He cut me off. “What’re you doin’ now?”

“Drinking cheap white wine on my deck. What are you doing?”

“I gotta go get food.”

“Oh, okay, I’ll let you go.”

“All right, buddy.”

“You’re back on Saturday?”

“Yeah.”

“See you then.”

“Absolutely.”

I sighed and it was a happy sigh because I would see him, he wanted me to and Saturday was only one-ish day away.

“Bye, Joe,” I said softly.

“Later, buddy,” he replied back softly.

I slid my phone closed and then tapped my forehead with it.

I had, of course, called him to end things but instead we talked, we had phone sex and he gave me about a dozen reasons to believe in him. Then, through various other phone calls, he gave me more reasons to believe.

I put the phone on the table and took another sip of wine.

I needed to call Cheryl or I needed to talk to Feb or I needed to call one of my friends in Chicago.

But it was late and it was rude to call late, especially when the conversation I needed to have would likely take hours.