“Now, why do I doubt that?” Madison said, leaning back and looking him up and down.
Frank was looking out the windshield of the truck, but he was smiling and his face was warm from the pleasure of flirting with a pretty girl. “No, I mean ‘tough’ as in what you can take in the way of jealousy.”
“Jealousy?”
“I think I better prepare you. In college my son and Roger had quite a few girlfriends.” He gave her a glance out of the corner of his eye to see how she would take this.
“I’ve known Roger for years. You’re not going to tell me anything about him that I don’t know. I used to be the one who did his homework for him.”
“I have a daughter a year younger than Roger and Scotty, and she brought a distant cousin and a girlfriend with her. The three of them will be staying at the cabin with us.”
Madison waited for him to go on but he didn’t, so she looked out the window and thought about what he’d told her. After a while, she smiled, then turned to him. “I see. They don’t know that Roger has a girlfriend much less a wife, and they certainly didn’t know that she was arriving with him, so there might be a little . . . What should we say? Cat hair flying?”
Turning, Frank grinned at her. “You’re smart, aren’t you?”
“I thought you were a college professor. Don’t you know that it’s a law of physics that a beautiful woman can’t be smart?”
“You’ll do all right,” he said, looking out the window again, his hands on the steering wheel.
“How much time before we get there?” Madison asked.
“About fifteen minutes,” he answered.
“Could you make it twenty?” she asked as she picked up her tote bag from the floor and began to rummage in it.
When she withdrew a tube of lipstick, Frank said, “There’s a diner on the way. How’d you like a rest stop?”
“Thank you,” she said, and five minutes later, Frank pulled off the highway into the gravel parking lot of an old-fashioned diner. He waited outside, standing beside Roger and vaguely listening to his complaints, while Madison went inside.
Inside the diner, Madison asked where the rest room was. The woman behind the counter frowned. She didn’t like tourists to stop and use her rest room without ordering anything. Grudgingly, she nodded her head toward a small door to the left.
Once inside the tiny rest room, Madison put her tote bag on the toilet seat and unzipped it. Maybe it was Frank’s flirting, maybe it was the idea of facing three young women who had the hots for her husband, but Madison wanted to do what she could to look her best when she walked into that assembly.
As she looked into the tiny mirror with the single bulb over it, Madison wasn’t sure she remembered how to apply makeup. For years now her only concern had been Roger and his recovery; she hadn’t had time to think about making herself look like a woman.
But when she touched an eye pencil to her lid, her memory returned. Not too much, she thought, just enough to emphasize and enhance. Quickly, she applied pencil, mascara, a bit of base, lined her lips, then filled in the color. She bent over, which, for someone who was almost six feet tall, was nearly impossible in the tiny room, but Madison managed to hang her head down enough that her hair, unleashed from the elastic band, nearly touched the floor. She sprayed her roots, then swung her hair to dry it, then flipped her head back and voilá!—lion’s mane.
She unbuttoned her blouse enough that the tiny bow on her bra was exposed, then lifted the back of her collar. She let her denim jacket fall back on her shoulders just a bit, then straightened her shoulders, stiffened her spine, and left the rest room. As she walked through the diner, she kept her eyes straight ahead, but she knew that she had the attention of every person in the small restaurant.
When she opened the door to the outside, both Frank and Roger looked up. Frank’s mouth dropped open and Roger frowned. As though Roger weren’t there, Madison walked toward Frank.
“Am I ready to meet them?” she asked softly.
For a moment all Frank could do was stare at her; then he threw back his head and laughed. “My wife is going to enjoy this immensely. And to think, just last week she suggested that we go to Paris this summer instead of to the cabin. She said the cabin was too much of the same thing, year in, year out.”
In answer, Madison just smiled at him, then started to open the door to the passenger side of the truck, but Frank beat her to it. When he had closed her door, he walked around the front of the truck.
Roger, who was still in the back of the truck, as it was too much trouble to get in and out, leaned over the side toward Madison’s open window. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re not going to some sleazy bar, you know. These people are—”
Smiling, she looked at her husband. “You know something, Roger? Educated men like pretty girls too.” With that she rolled up the window, then turned and smiled at Frank as he got into the truck and shut the door.
Six
The “cabin” was just as Madison had imagined it would be. It looked like something the Roosevelt clan had owned. It was one story, made out of logs that had aged a deep brown. On the front was a porch that had to be twenty feet deep and at least sixty feet long. Lots of old log chairs and benches were scattered about, each one covered with fat chintz-covered cushions that were fashionably weathered.
“Not even their upholstery looks new,” Madison said under her breath; then Roger glared at her as though to remind her not to betray her origins. For a moment, Madison halted and she thought about asking Frank to take her back to the airport so she could go home. But then she thought, Where is home? With her mother gone her only home was with Roger.
Frank’s arm under her elbow made her come back to the present.