Agnes and the Hitman Read online

  “There you are!” Brenda called through the screens as she came up the walk, Evie following with Maria behind her, looking cautious. “Evie and I had lunch and talked over things, and then we called Maria and came back out to see you all for a moment.” She came up the steps and caught sight of Lisa Livia. “And there you are, honey,” she said, smiling. “I was wondering when you’d get here.” She bent to kiss Lisa Livia on the cheek, but LL stiffened away so that it turned into an air kiss. When Brenda straightened, her smile was still in place, but it was tight and fixed.

  Ouch, Agnes thought. Would it kill you to let her kiss you, LL?

  “So, Ma,” Lisa Livia said. “How’s the country club? Tell you what, I’ll create a disturbance, and you grab the flowers.”

  “Hello, Lisa Livia,” Evie said, with no warmth. “Welcome home.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Keyes,” Lisa Livia said. “Always a pleasure to be here.”

  Brenda smiled at Maria. “We brought Maria because we wanted to talk about the wedding. About her theme.”

  “Theme?” Lisa Livia said dangerously. “What theme?”

  “We feel strongly,” Evie said to Lisa Livia, “that a flamingo theme, while adventurous and young and… uh, funky, might be something Palmer and, of course, Maria might regret in years to come when they look back at their wedding pictures.”

  “A flamingo theme?” Lisa Livia said, looking staggered.

  “Forgot to mention that,” Agnes said to her. “There was a lot to catch you up on.”

  Evie nodded. “And that, in fact, this entire wedding has gotten out of hand. So Brenda and I have decided that something more classic-”

  “At the country club,” Brenda said, patting Maria’s arm.

  “-would be more appropriate,” Evie said. “Wait a minute,” Agnes said, rising from her chair as fast as her temper.

  “And since I am not without influence in the community and over my son,” Evie was saying, intent clear in her voice, “I am in a position to insist. I’m sorry, Maria, but there will be no flamingo theme, and the wedding will be at the country club.”

  The hell it will. Agnes opened her mouth, but Lisa Livia got there first.

  “My daughter wants a flamingo theme here,” Lisa Livia said quietly. “And I believe it’s her wedding.”

  “Ma,” Maria said, warning in her voice.

  Agnes shook her head slightly at Lisa Livia. Fight for the location not the theme. The theme’s a joke. “So we’ll compromise,” she began, and Maria nodded, but Evie overrode them.

  “Maria is very young,” Evie said, smiling at Lisa Livia with the kind of smile that came on crocodiles. “She needs guidance. No flamingos.”

  Maria opened her mouth, looking eager to agree, but Lisa Livia missed it, crossing her arms under her red tube top. “Guidance, you say,” LL said softly.

  “We need to talk about this,” Agnes whispered to Lisa Livia, trying to signal her off.

  “Oh, no, it’s decided,” Brenda said, happily. “And really, darlings-”

  “The hell it’s decided,” Agnes snapped at her, and Brenda blinked at her, shocked.

  “Maria wants flamingos.” Lisa Livia smiled at Evie, the Fortunato smile that had launched a thousand cement overshoes.

  Maria evidently saw the same thing, because she said, “No, Ma, it’s okay, I-” just as Agnes said, “LL, you-”

  Lisa Livia jerked her head up toward the second floor of the house. “You know that second window from the right up there?” she said to Evie in a conversational tone that fooled no one. “That was my bedroom window when I was a kid. I got stuck up there a lot when Ma had her parties. You wouldn’t believe what I saw.” She tilted her head, looking Evie right in the eye. “Like Simon Xavier feeling you up underneath our big oak tree. And that wasn’t all…”

  Brenda said, “Lisa Livia!” Evie stiffened, and Agnes sat down and poured herself another glass of wine.

  “I’m trying to remember if you were married then or not,” Lisa Livia was saying to Evie, sounding genuinely puzzled. “I’d have to ask around. You know. For guidance. To get my dates straight.”

  “Wine?” Agnes said to Maria, who nodded and sat down next to her, equally resigned, picking up her mother’s wineglass.

  Evie pressed her lips together so tight, they made a white line in her face.

  “It’s not the kind of thing I’d ever do,” Lisa Livia went on. “I mean, ever do, talk like that, I mean, unless somebody, you know, tried to fuck my daughter over on something she wanted, because in that case, if that happened, I would pour lye over every single fuckin’ inch of this town. You think Sherman did some damage on his march through here? I’d make him look like fucking Merry Maids, what I’d do to you and everybody in this godforsaken hole if you or anybody else fucks with my kid, or her happiness, so if she says she wants fuckin’ flamingos, she gets fuckin’ flamingos right here at Two Rivers. The wedding will not be at the country club, it will be here and it will have flamingos and anything else my kid wants, do you understand?”

  Agnes drank some more wine and so did Maria. She was pretty sure Evie understood. The First Lady of Keyes might not be Caesar’s wife, but she was Jefferson Keyes’s wife, and Jefferson Keyes’s wife did not get felt up under an oak tree by a cop or, God forbid, laid, not even twenty-five years ago.

  A quiet fell over the group.

  Then Evie stood up. “Very well.” She nodded to Maria. “I think this is a terrible mistake, but your mother is correct, it is your wedding. You may have your flamingos here at Two Rivers.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Brenda said, but Evie turned and walked down the steps and around the corner of the house to her Lexus, her dignity unspoiled even if her reputation had a dent in it.

  Brenda turned to Lisa Livia. “Well, that was certainly a disgusting display worthy of your father’s family.”

  “Shut up, Ma,” Lisa Livia said, her hands on her hips. “Like you weren’t born in the Bronx, and the Fortunatos weren’t a big step up for you. Now you listen to me. You try to move this wedding away from Two Rivers again, I’m gonna clean every skeleton out of every closet you got and make them dance, you hear me? I’ll dig up everything you ever buried, including my daddy, and then I’ll sink that beat-up rowboat you’re living on so you’ll be out in the street with nothing. Do not fuck with my kid and do not fuck with my friend, they are all the family I got, and they are off-limits to you. Understand?”

  Brenda drew back as if she’d been slapped, and then she glared at LL, and for a moment they were mirror images, two curly-haired mini-furies, one blonde and one dark, little but lethal. Then Brenda said, “I’m not going to listen to that kind of talk from my daughter,” and turned to Agnes. “I’d like to speak with you before I go,” she said coldly, and went into the house.

  “I thought she’d never leave.” Lisa Livia turned to Maria, who was sitting on the porch swing beside Agnes, her arms crossed in mirror image of her mother, the third fury in the triumvirate, although she looked more exasperated than enraged. “You got your flamingos, baby,” Lisa Livia said, her voice doting.

  “I don’t want flamingos, Ma,” Maria said. “I was just trying to make them crazy so they’d give me the wedding I really do want. I’d have talked them back to Two Rivers with the butterflies and the daisies and everything I wanted, but now thanks to you, I got flamingos.”

  Lisa Livia stared at her daughter for a long moment, and then she said, “I hope someday you have a daughter, and when you do, I hope she breaks your heart the way you just broke mine.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Maria said, and went into the kitchen.

  Agnes held out the wine bottle to Lisa Livia. “We tried to head you off. Wine?”

  “Fuck that,” Lisa Livia said. “Get me a bourbon.”

  “Kitchen,” Agnes said, and they both went in.

  Brenda was just inside the door, staring openmouthed at the kitchen wall, where the outline of the basement door could be seen easily now since