Say You're Sorry Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Say You’re Sorry

  All You Need Is Love

  Some You Win

  Just in Case

  Say You’re Sorry

  Wish You Were Here

  Naked to the World

  No Neutral Ground

  You Run

  If You Can’t Take the Heat

  Real Life

  Love Thy Neighbor

  Crossing Elysian Fields on a Hot, Hot Day

  Say You’re Sorry: 12 Stories of Bad Manners & Criminal Consequences

  By Sarah Shankman

  Copyright 2014 by Sarah Shankman

  Cover Copyright 2014 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Stories previously published in print.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Sarah Shankman and Untreed Reads Publishing

  First Kill All the Lawyers

  He Was Her Man

  Impersonal Attractions

  Keeping Secrets

  She Walks in Beauty

  www.untreedreads.com

  Say You’re Sorry

  12 Stories of Bad Manners & Criminal Consequences

  Sarah Shankman

  All You Need Is Love

  The whole thing was my mother’s fault.

  If she’d said it once, she’d said it a million times: Georgie Ann, you’re thirty-five years old. If you don’t get out and find someone soon, no one’s going to have you.

  I tried not to snap back at her, to remind her that she’d been married plenty enough for the both of us. Most of the time I succeeded. Not always. Everyone has their limits, beyond which they ought not to be pushed.

  Look, it’s not as if I didn’t have good reason for being love-shy. Why, I’d been nearly destroyed by the flames of passion. But Mother has a convenient memory, the ability to forget that awful day at St. Philip’s when William detonated my heart. Tiny bits of it stuck to the front of my wedding dress like scarlet polka dots.

  Doomsday. That’s what I called it, that gorgeous full-throated spring day five years earlier, when I was left at the altar. You think it never really happens, that old cliché. Well, I’m here to tell you, it does.

  I had met William in the most romantic way possible. It was a rainy October afternoon here in Nashville, my thirtieth year, the day after Falstaff, my sweet old pussycat, had passed over to his reward. I’d taken my grief out for a walk, was blindly weeping through neighborhood lanes. I’d missed a curb and had fallen, therefore was both damp and lame.

  William came motoring along and spotted me snuffling and shuffling, rather like a character in a country song. He leapt from his car and unfurled his handkerchief, pressing it into my hand. “How can I help?” he asked. “I can’t stand seeing a beautiful woman cry. It breaks my heart.”

  Any beautiful woman? All beautiful women? I should have asked. But who thinks beyond the end of one’s nose when the compliments are falling like a fine warm rain?

  Besides, William was quite dazzling. Wonderfully charming. Incredibly intelligent. Not to mention sweet. And a good deal more handsome than a man has a right to be. Did I say he was tall? I’m only a hair short of six feet in my stocking feet. You might have mistaken us for brother and sister, with our long limbs, blue eyes, and honey-colored ringlets.

  The main thing about William, the architect, was that he made me feel safe. From the moment we met, he felt like home. Not the houses I had skimmed through as a child, barely getting my toys put away before my hummingbird of a mother was packing us up for the next perch, the next husband. William was the home I had always dreamt of. A home whose windows at twilight framed golden Norman Rockwell scenes. A cozy kitchen with soup on the stove. An open book resting on a hassock before an easy chair. A man and woman chatting across a table, the tips of their fingers touching.

  I should have noted that William designed mostly high rises. You can see his work in major American cities, sleek and phallic and filled with men in suits massaging cash.

  On our aborted wedding day, when William finally called—two hours after the guests had gone, stuffed with crab sandwiches, lubricated with champagne, Mother having seen no reason to waste a perfectly good party—William said that he was sorry, very very sorry, horribly sorry, but, did I remember the Atlanta insurance mogul whose offices he’d been designing? Well, it seems as though the man had suddenly dropped dead, and his really-quite-lovely, much-younger widow was terribly distraught. “You know I can’t stand seeing a beautiful woman cry,” William had said. “It breaks my heart. So I offered her my handkerchief, and then….”

  I hadn’t thought that a person could endure such pain. Every cell of my body cried out. My lungs grieved, my skin, my cuticles. Sorrow filled my nights as well as my days, jumped at me from photographs, from letters. A single golden hair of William’s ambushed me from a sweater.

  The hands of every clock in my apartment stopped at the hour of my abandonment. If they ever moved after that, I never caught them at it. Each hour was one hundred slow murderous years on the rack. Yet rising from my bed of nails was impossible. Diversion, Mother said. I needed diversion. I needed to get out. But how could I?

  I was blind with weeping, but I could still hear the whispers: Georgie Ann, the poor thing. Deserted. Altar. Pitiful. Would die myself.

  I resigned my job by telephone. “Dr. Wilson,” I croaked at the head of the English department, “the worms are at me. I won’t be back again.”

  He protested, of course, but to no avail. How could I stand before a classroom of sweaty undergraduates to explain the sexual imagery of Love’s Labour’s Lost? Navigate the crannies of the heart with Byron, Shelley, Keats, the Three Musketeers of Romanticism?

  I couldn’t. For quite a long time, I could do nothing but contemplate my own demise.

  I lay upon my bed and considered my father’s old hunting rifle. I pulled it from the back of my closet, loaded it, racked it back and forth. I became enchanted with that racking. It called to me like a siren. But, my mother’s daughter in that regard, I couldn’t bear the thought of blood and brains and teeth and bone splattered across my snowy ceramic tiles.

  I dreamed of Virginia Woolf, and one gray afternoon found myself swaying for hours at the edge of Percy Priest Lake, my pockets filled with stones. But my imagination showed me my pale bloated face, nibbled by perch, and I had too much pride to ever let anyone see me like that. So I trudged back home to pore over the labels of antkiller, rosedust, ammonia, to count the sleeping pills my family doctor had scrawled a prescription for, pressed into my hand on the steps of St. Philip’s on Doomsday. He’d had a crumb of crab sandwich on his lip.

  Then, of course, there were the days when my agony would flip-flop and point itself
outward, full speed ahead, like a divining rod, toward William. And I would recite a rosary of palliatives: guns, knives, ropes, bombs. But those thoughts passed, and in the end I opted for seclusion, solitude, retreat.

  I took a very early retirement from the world.

  Rilke said it best: “…your solitude will be a hold and home for you…and there you will find all your ways.”

  I withdrew into my home. I lived quite comfortably in a rambling top-floor apartment in one of Nashville’s oldest apartment complexes, a gray elephant of a place shingled in softly silvered wood. I had two huge bedrooms, an L-shaped living room with French doors opening into a high-ceilinged dining room, closets galore. I’d moved in when I’d returned to Nashville right after graduate school and had never had any reason to leave.

  Now, I thought, I never would. I had a little money from my father. Invested wisely, it would see me through to the grave. I would never have to leave my apartment again. Not alive, anyway.

  Five years passed, and I didn’t set foot across my threshold with the sole exception of annual visits to the dentist and doctor. The pansies and petunias in my windowboxes came and went. I cooked. I read. I cut my own hair. Catalogues, mail order, groceries by phone, books, magazines, newspapers, everything I needed came to me. I didn’t desire the world. I didn’t miss it. I was perfectly content.

  Mother, of course, wasn’t. She called me noon and night. “Georgie Ann, this isn’t natural. You must go out. You must have a life.”

  “I do, Mother. My life.”

  She tried every subterfuge known to woman. She said she was dying. I waited, and she didn’t. She proffered a first-class trip around the world. I demurred. The President of the United States was in town. He was coming for dinner. “Really, Mother,” I said.

  The next day, there it was in the Nashville Banner. The President and First Lady and the President’s most attractive, not to mention single, campaign advisor, had indeed dined with my mother and stepfather Jack, a major fundraiser here in Tennessee.

  “I am sorry I missed that,” I allowed. And I was. I would have horsed myself out for the First Couple.

  I shouldn’t have admitted it. Mother saw a chink in my defenses, and she went hog wild.

  What she did, precisely, was she burned me out.

  She would never admit it, of course, but the very next night after the President’s visit, someone started a fire on my service porch. It gobbled the whole apartment—filled with over-stuffed furniture, old lace, gauzy curtains—in twenty minutes flat. Thank goodness it didn’t spread to other units. I had time to grab only a few clothes, the sterling flatware handed down from Gram, and Wabash, my cat.

  Now where was I to go? To Mother’s, it seemed, as she and Jack showed up so conveniently, Stepdad Number Five wheeling his big old Mercedes through the fire trucks. My neighbors had called, Mother said.

  “Bullshit,” I spat. “You torched my home.”

  “Oh, Georgie Ann,” she said. “Don’t be ridiculous. Come stay with us in Belle Meade. You can have the whole guest wing. You’ll never even see us.”

  Having no other choice, I took her up on it. I’d squat in their red brick mansion on the very best street of Nashville’s very best neighborhood, but only for a bit. Seeing that she had to work fast, Mother was parading prospects past my door before I’d washed the smoke from my hair.

  “Mr. James here is just stopping by to talk about our portfolio.”

  “Mr. Jones is helping Jack with his will.”

  “I don’t believe you’ve met Mr. Smythe. He’s down from New York developing that new shopping center.”

  There was nothing palpably wrong with any of these men. No two-headed monsters. No machetes secreted behind their backs. Not even a single pot belly.

  But I wasn’t interested. I would never be interested. “Look, Mother,” I said, “all I want is to collect my fire insurance and get myself relocated.”

  “And lock yourself up again?”

  “I can’t see why not.”

  It was then that Mother actually rolled on the floor. It was a scene from a bad novel. She screamed and, furthermore, rent her clothing, a perfectly lovely rose-sprigged afternoon dress.

  I was impressed.

  “Oh, all right, Mother,” I relented. “I’ll go outside, occasionally, if you will promise never ever to try and fix me up again.”

  Mother clapped her hands like a little girl. “I’m so delighted, Georgie Ann!”

  “Are you delighted enough to call Jack off the insurance agent so I can collect my money and set about finding another place to live?”

  She was. She did. And, miracle of miracles, not only did I collect from my renter’s policy, but the owner of the building had coverage also, and I ended up with a quite tidy little sum.

  Why, I thought, I could buy a place. I could become, within my modest means, a homeowner.

  Mother wasn’t crazy about the idea, but she did suggest a Realtor for me to call, one C. Burton Wylie. I was certain that Mr. Wylie would be single or about-to-be-single, so I phoned Charlotte Dillon.

  I’d known her since grammar school. “Charlotte,” I said, “it’s Georgie Ann Bailey. I’m looking for a little house, nothing fancy, close into town. Something with some privacy.”

  Charlotte didn’t skip a beat. She didn’t say, “Where the hell have you been the past five years?” but rather, “Give me a couple of days.”

  And she was as good as her word. “Meet me at my office at ten,” she said two days later. “I have four or five things I think you might like.”

  I was as excited as a new pup. Got all dressed up, the way I used to for men. Well, after all, I told myself, this was a first date. Between me and my new home.

  Imagine my dismay when I walked into Charlotte’s office to be greeted by one Alexander Persoff. Tall. Lean. Dark. Black eyes flashing with fire. Ruby-lipped. The man was something one of those romance writers would have dreamed up. In any case, Alexander Persoff was far too handsome to be taking my hand and telling me that Charlotte had fallen down her stairs this morning and would be out of commission for at least a week.

  “But I’ll be delighted to help you,” he said. He was a tenor, surprising in a man his size, but the voice was hardly unpleasant.

  “No,” I said, back-pedaling, putting one black pump neatly behind the other. “I don’t think so. No. Not.”

  “But, Ms. Bailey, I’m sure….”

  I didn’t wait to hear what he was sure of, for I was certain that Mother had had a hand in this. Charlotte had no more somersaulted down her stairs than she’d grown two extra toes. Well, good luck to them and hallelujah. Charlotte Dillon and Alexander Persoff were not the only two Realtors in Nashville.

  Five minutes later I was stopped at a traffic light, muttering to myself. Granted, some of my decisions might seem eccentric to other folks. But so what? It’s none of their beeswax. Just then, a long black car pulled up beside me, with Alexander Persoff behind the wheel. The next thing I knew, he was leaning into my window.

  “Ms. Bailey,” he began, “you must tell me how I’ve offended you.”

  “Mr. Persoff, you are going to get run over.”

  “No, please, I insist. I must know.” Then the light changed. Horns bleated behind us. Alexander Persoff, down on one knee on the pavement, ignored them. “You must give me another chance.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sakes. Get up and pull over there.” I pointed to a parking lot.

  Watching Alexander disembark from his car was like witnessing a mighty oak growing in fast-forward. Do you know the tree I mean, the kind that grows down in Louisiana, a noble king of a tree, but a kindly king you’re just dying to climb, with cozy places you’d love to snuggle into?

  If you were interested in trees or men that is.

  I was only interested in the former.

  Alexander, fully unfolded, stood, the toes of his soft brown loafers edging on the white line between our cars, close but not too close. He must have sens
ed that if he crowded me, I would jump back into my car and be gone.

  I stared up at him. But it was my nose that took him in, for suddenly there was something citrusy in the morning air. Lemons, fresh lemons, heated by the sun. I blinked, and I was standing on a high and rocky coast. The dark sea crashed into the pebbly beach below. Back from the lacy edge of the water, a man and a woman lay on a straw mat, their bronze arms entwined. Their legs. Unfamiliar desire tugged between my own. I willed it to be gone.

  Meanwhile, Alexander waited silently for me to speak. He would stand there for eons, I could feel that. He had the tenacity of Penelope, warding off suitors while Ulysses wandered the earth. Patience was not one of my strong suits, though I admired it in others.

  “You don’t look like a Realtor,” I said finally.

  “I’m not, really.”

  I stepped back. I didn’t want to get entangled in his smile, bright with invitation and promise.

  “Then why are you posing as a Realtor?” I demanded. “My mother called you, didn’t she?”

  Alexander frowned, and I heard the crash of boulders rolling down a steep peak, somewhere in the Caucasus. If he were truly angry, I thought, the avalanche of his unhappiness would burst my eardrums.

  “Your mother?” he said. “I don’t know your mother. What I meant was, I sell real estate to keep body and soul together, but my passion is my painting. Portraiture is my true love.”

  “Ah.” I felt more than a little foolish.

  “So. Will you let me show you some houses? Charlotte said that you were very much in need of a home.”

  Yes. Yes, I was. And before I knew what was happening, I had allowed Alexander to seat me in his black chariot, and he was driving me to a house he was certain I would love.

  On the way, he told me that his father had been a portrait painter, as had his grandfather who’d escaped from St. Petersburg with a greatcoat, its lining stuffed with the family silver. We Southerners are pushovers for stories that involve sterling flatware. Many of us eat off forks our great-great-grandmothers had hidden from the Yankees.

  I sallied forth. I told him about the fire in my apartment, how I’d grabbed my own Grand Imperial along with the cat.