He’d up and left her in Redneckville.
“I hate him,” she blurted.
Kaci looked up from a drawer. “Got every right.”
“Nothate-hate,” she said, and she felt another case of the sniffles coming on. “I mean, Ilovedhim. It was what I did. And I was good at it. I really was.”
Kaci came up with a pair of sweatpants. “Here. See if these fit.”
Anna shot her tequila and killed the fire-throat with a squirt of ketchup straight from the bottle. She slammed both the glass and the ketchup down on the nightstand. “All I ever did was love him.”
“How long?”
“Long enough to think we’d have forever.” She kicked off her shoes, dropped her pants, and pulled on the sweatpants. They were too long, obviously Kaci’s fiancè’s, but she only had to tighten the string in the waist a little. “One of my sorority sisters introduced us. She was dating one of his friends, and they were all older so they graduated first. Then they got sent to Oklahoma together, and Neil kept calling and saying heneededme. So we got married and I transferred schools, and I needed more classes because not everything transferred. But the four of us were together, except then Neil’s program moved a year later, then our friends got divorced, and then the only thing I had going for me was being a military wife.”
“Not easy to resist a man in uniform. Look at me, going after my second one. And my daddy was Air Force too. Gets in your blood.”
“No. Not me. I’m noteverdating a military man again. Hell, I’m not everdatingagain.” Because the thought of dating made her stomach dip as it did on a roller coaster, and her heart felt as if it were stabbing itself with one of her ribs.
“I swore off academics after ol’ grandpappy,” Kaci said with a knowing nod. “Wouldn’t have given my Lance another look if he’d been any brighter than a dumb cargo jock.”
Anna reached for the ketchup bottle again.
“Gets easier, but it’s okay to take your time. Went two years myself without dating anybody after I welded ol’ grandpappy’s car doors shut and hid his uniforms on Air Force Academy graduation day.”
Anna choked on the ketchup, but it felt good to laugh at something again.
“Tell you what,” Kaci said with a nod, “that man realizedwhoheneeded that day.”
“I don’t think anybody’s ever going to need me again.”
“Aw, sugar,somebody’sgonna need you. Bet you got a lot of somebodies who already do.”
“No, they really don’t.” Anna swiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Beth’s boys are too old for babysitters. Gram has all the help she needs rolling pie crusts at the shop. Dad hires high schoolers to reorganize the bookstore. I thought they needed me, but they replaced me as soon as I left for college. So when Neil needed me, I thought he was the only one. And I needed him to need me, so it was perfect.”
“Sounds like how I felt the first time I saw ol’ grandpappy’s potato gun. Didn’t know why, but I knew I had to have him.”
“Hispotato gun?” Anna lunged for the ketchup and took another hit straight out of the bottle.
“It was a beaut,” Kaci said on a sigh. “Shot potatoes three miles if they went an inch. But that man knew as much about being a husband as a crocodile knows about knitting a sweater. Nothing worth keeping there. I didn’t need to be anybody’s trophy wife. Especially not after he kept all the trophies. Iearnedhim those trophies.”
“Jerk.”
“Well, trust me on this one, if he doesn’t want you, he doesn’t deserve you. Marriage is give and take. If he can’t give you whatyouneed—and he has to give you more than needing you—then good riddance.”
Anna took another gulp of ketchup. “You know what heneededme for? Sex. Just sex. And now my friends are trying to set me up with guys who want me for sex.” Her eyes were leaking, but for the first time since Neil had said the D-word, they weren’t sad tears.
They were freakingfurioustears.
She yanked off her shirt and took the Ole Miss T-shirt Kaci handed her, then pointed to the firecrackers. “You know what I think about being used for sex? I think I’d like to straptheirpotato guns to those firecrackers.That’swhat I’d like to do formy country.”
Kaci tilted her head, a thoughtful gleam in her eye. “We could do the next best thing.”
She stopped mid-ketchup shot. She gulped the Hunts down in a painful lump that settled right over her heart. “What’s that?”
“You still got any of his stuff?”
The ketchup bottle wobbled in her hand.
