“I look really good this way.” Casey’s voice was suffused with stifled hysterical laughter. “You’re really talented.”
Britt started to laugh, then moaned. “Don’t. Don’t laugh. Don’t make me laugh. I can’t laugh. My head hurts.”
“Shit shit shit. I have to go to workright now. And do hair. As a BUNNY FACE.”
“Can’t your assistant take your clients today? Or at least until you get the ink off?”
“She’s is home with the baby. She’s taking her to the doc because she was running a little temp. I told her yesterday I’d takeherclients. All the waxing and stuff.”
Britt started laughing again and stopped when she was reminded of how much that hurt. “Good luck, Bunny Face.” She hung up the phone.
CHAPTER22
“Gosh, how many T-shirts do you own, now, Johnny?I think you might be working on a fetish.”
“Sixteen.”
“Does this country remind you of the Tennessee backwoods? Doesn’t it seem sort of inevitable that you’d wind up with simple folk again?”
“Nope.”
The relatively short ride back from Napa with Rebecca wasdeeplyuncomfortable.
He was purposely giving Rebecca deadpan one-word answers to these barbs, which he knew was simply making her crazier.
They were both pissy, for entirely different reasons. Rebecca had kissed him, and he’d rebuffed her, and she was seething. Their peers at the wedding had congratulated him over and over on the profundity of a beautiful wedding toast that Rebecca knew had nothing to do with her. And the whole world had seen pictures of the two of them that made their relationship look like the opposite of the icy, tense atmosphere inside the cab of his truck.
The two of them were old hands at being awkwardly photographed. And they ought to have been reading lines or discussing theLast Call in Purgatoryscript.
Instead, the silence between them was practically louder than the radio.
Which he kept turning up and Rebecca kept turning down.
Relief swept through him when the familiar exit signs began appearing.
Rebecca had decided she was going to get a blow-out before they visited the children’s hospital to film the spot. He could get rid of her for at least an hour, maybe more.
And then her giant head began to swell into view on the billboard on the highway.
And suddenly she shot to an erect position like a prairie dog popping out of its burrow.
“Johnny. Oh, no. Oh, Jesus. There’s... something wrong. ” Her voice was urgent and dumbstruck
His head jerked toward her. “What’s going on? You okay?”
“No,” she said, her voice strange, and about to escalate into hysteria. “No I am not okay at all. Look at my billboard. LOOK AT IT. My billboard! Pull over!”
He slowed down.
He slowed down a little more.
And then he pulled over to the side of the road.
They both stared, utterly arrested.
For different reasons.
There was Rebecca, all right, the way Rebecca always wanted to be: larger than life, high above everyone else, isolated in all that white space like a work of art on a museum wall. Her giant sparkly raspberry lips were still pursed, blowing her dandelion.
