He just sounded sosweetwas the thing.
Here he was, a big-deal lawyer, his daddy running the whole state of Alabama, his boat in the St. Medard’s Bay harbor bigger than my whole damn house. Bigger thantwoof my whole damn house, seemed like. And thereIwas, a waitress at a bar with a high school diploma and not much else, but you would’ve thought I was a goddess from the way he was practically begging me just to acknowledge him.
I’ve kept that letter for the past forty years, the paper so soft it almost feels like fabric from how many times I’ve folded it and refolded it. I won’t quote it, and I’m damn sure not putting it in the book because some things have to stay private, but I will tell you that he told me I looked like I “swallowed starlight,” and oh myGod, that was it for me.
Now, of course, the whole thing seems insane. Writing something like that on his fancy paper with his full fuckin’ name on it, walking into The Line in broad daylight to handthat note to Roy the bartender himself, saying out loud that he was leaving it for the barely legal waitress who’d served him and his buddies the night before.
At the time, it was romantic as all get-out, how little he cared about what people might say, how bold he was, how he wanted me so much that he’d risk his whole reputation. All that, combined with how open his letter was, how vulnerable and uncertain he sounded?
Oh, honey.
Show me the teenage girl—shit, show me thegrown-ass woman—who can resist that, and I’ll show you a liar.
Of course, once Iwasa grown-ass woman, all this looked a little less dreamy and a little more reckless, almost purposefully so. I wonder now if he wastryingto blow it all up, if he wanted to force his father’s hand. If the only way Landon could think of to escape the destiny that was waiting for him was to obliterate it as thoroughly as possible.
We had that in common. Not the destiny part, but that need to push, push, push—to see how far we could take something, see how long it took before someone finally said no.
Anyway, he’d scrawled a number on the bottom of that letter, and I called it right then and there from The Line. Do you know tothis dayI still don’t know exactly where the phone that number reached was? It wasn’t Landon’s office, and itdamnsure wasn’t his house. This was before cell phones, but it could’ve been a car phone, I guess, although it never sounded like one.
He picked up just after the first ring, and baby, we were off to the races.
After Landon was gone, the tabloids made our romance out to be either this epic star-crossed thing or this really tawdry affair where we… I don’t know, fucked on piles of mink coats and I greeted him at the door wearing nothing but diamonds.
(Okay, actually, I did do that once. The diamonds, not the mink coats. It was just after he bought the little house on the beach in St. Medard’s in April of 1984. The papers called it our “hidden love nest,” but it was literally like half a mile from Ellen’s family’s inn, so how “hidden” is that?)
But the truth was, those early days were almost sickeningly normal. We talked on the phone every night during the week, and every weekend, he’d be in St. Medard’s with me. At first, our affair was under the radar. People were used to seeing him around town and knew his family had a house nearby, and we were discreet.
For a little while, at least.
Mostly we spent time on his boat, sometimes just anchored at the marina, but we’d also take her out on occasion. Those were my favorite times, the two of us alone surrounded by sea and sky.
“Sometimes when we’re like this, I feel like we’re the only two people on the planet,” Landon said to me one evening as we watched the sun put on a brilliant orange, pink, and purple show as it sunk into the water.
I nodded, wrapped my arms tighter around him, and said, “Me, too,” even though I could never feel that way, not on that boat with his wife’s name curving along the side in gold paint.
The Miss Alison.
You’re gonna wonder if I felt bad about her. Alison. Being “the Other Woman.”
I do now. I never met her, never even saw her in person, but if I had, I would’ve apologized, and if she spat in my face, well, I’d say she fuckin’ earned that right.
But at the time, it was more like I just triednotto think about her. And because Landon and I had our own little world down there in St. Medard’s, and she had her ownbigworld of social events and shopping and who knows what else in Mobile,that was kind of easy to do, except for the times when my eyes would drift to the side of the boat, to that swooping “A.”
So yeah, at first, it was practically wholesome—other than the whole adultery part.
Then Landon’s daddy crashed the party.
Has the governor ofyourhome state seen your tits? Because mine has, and I really do not recommend it.
We were on the boat, in the part of the cabin I always thought of as the living room but Landon told me was called thesalon.It was February, and it was freezing outside, the day damp and gray, the marina practically deserted.
I still had my jeans on when the governor of the Great State of Alabama suddenly appeared on the teak steps that led down from the deck, but my sweater and my bra were long gone, and in the frantic scramble that followed, I ended up clutching a throw pillow that saidAHOY!to my chest.
Funny, the things you remember.
Beau Fitzroy had his son’s black eyes, and if the way Landon first looked at me had made me feel precious and seen, then Beau’s dark gaze made me feel like I was shit he’d just scraped off his shoe.
No one had ever looked at me like that before.
