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Just when you think you have it under control, life has a way of throwing major curveballs. Angelica thought about the turn her life had taken in just a few hours and blinked back the tears that obscured her vision. She was racing along Interstate 10 toward home. The last exit sign she remembered was for Orange, Texas. Two days. A lifetime. So much had changed. A few days ago, when she left Baton Rouge to visit her friend in Bessemer, Alabama, Pop-pop was just fine, doing what he did every day. He was in the office at the funeral parlor, preparing to embalm his latest newly deceased client. Angelica had been there with him.
"This is an art, baby girl, you know that?"
"Ugh. You've told me before, Pop-pop, I know." She had crinkled up her nose at the thought and smell of the embalming fluid.
"It's a special time. Folks should look their best so they can go on properly."
"Whatever, Pop-pop." She'd waved her hand in the air in a gesture of dismissal. He always seemed sentimental when he talked about his job. It was kind of morbid to Angelica.
"Where did you get that haircut, girl? Think it would look good on this old gal here?" Angelica remembered him grinning as he referred to the body he was preparing. She looked at the woman on the dressing table. The woman had not had a haircut in years. She tried to imagine her with hair stylishly coiffured, one side longer than the other, short in the back, her neck cleanly shaved with a razor.
"Pop, she's seventy! I don't think so." Angelica had laughed, fondly kissing him on the cheek. She had run her fingers through her own hair and Pop-pop laughed with her.
At eighty-plus miles per hour, the flat Texas landscape zoomed by in a blur, dotted with the occasional roadkill. Even at that speed, there was no missing the cop standing in the center median, waving her to the side. Without checking the speedometer, she knew there was no denying how much over the speed limit she was.
Angelica slowed her car and pulled over to wait for the cop to catch up to her. She rolled down her window and waited, searching for tissues in her car to wipe back the tears that had flowed down her face for most of the two hours she had been driving.
"You okay, ma'am?"
The tears continued to roll down Angelica's face, even into her mouth. It was just her luck to be pulled over by a rocket scientist. Didn't the makeup streaming down her face make it obvious she wasn't okay?
"Everything is fine, Officer. Just peachy." Her words popped because of the salty moisture running across her lips.
The cop shifted his weight from one foot to the other, wetting his lips. One hand was on his gun holster.
"I have you at eighty-eight miles an hour in a sixty-five-mile-an-hour zone, ma'am."
She sniffed. The cop paused, obviously waiting for her to answer. Unmoved by her tears, he took out his ticket book.
"Can I have your license, registration, and proof of insurance, please?"
Angelica handed the information out the window to the waiting policeman and watched him in her sideview mirror as he walked back to his car. She couldn't speak. She knew she would sob uncontrollably if she opened her mouth again. Her Pop-pop would have been mad with her for speeding. He always reminded her to be safe, to do the responsible thing. More tears sprang to her eyes. Everything made her think of him. He was always there for her, wasn't he?
He'd taught her to drive not too long ago. Smiling through her tears, Angelica pictured him trying to give her instructions on the rules of the road, talking about female drivers the whole time as if she were exempt from the remarks he made. He was quite the joker. Now there would be no more sexist or off-color jokes from her Pop-pop. Ben Chappee III was gone.
The cop returned, handing Angelica the ticket for her signature.
"Slow down, ma'am. You sure you gonna be all right?" Another rocket-scientist-type question. There was a hole left in her heart by her grandfather's death. She wouldn't be all right for a long time. Her grandfather had raised her. He was quite strict. No dates, no nonsense, church twice a week, but they always had fun together. It was like he was protecting her from something, but he had a hell of a sense of humor. She vividly remembered the time he had tied her uncle's feet together with stockings while he was sleeping, drunk from too much vodka. He took him to the embalming room at the funeral parlor and then woke him up. Her uncle was still drunk and he thought he was paralyzed when he couldn't move his legs. Then he thought he was dead and maybe watching himself in the funeral parlor. The whole neighborhood heard him scream for Jesus! They'd laughed for weeks about that one.
The cop looked at Angelica with a peculiar expression on his otherwise nondescript face, his mouth tilted to one side as if he were preparing to spit at any moment.
"How far you going?"
"Baton Rouge." She didn't want him to think she was drunk. She wasn't even twenty-one, not yet, not for a week or so.
"Well, that's another two hours from here. Calm down and be careful. You have a nice day. Okay, ma'am?"
Angelica wiped her eyes with her disintegrated tissue and nodded. She doubted that it would be possible to have a nice day ...
Get Some Love. Copyright © by Nina Foxx. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
Excerpted from Get Some Love by Nina Foxx
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