some. Why, then, would he want to waste his life away, saddled with a wife and kids, on a ranch in the middle of nowhere?
He stood up to leave, smiling broadly at the waitresses behind the counter. He added a quick wink, then listened to them chatter like a bunch of chipmunks as he walked out the door. He decided he would head over to the Lone Wolf Saloon on Highway 81. The place would fill up in an hour or so, providing him with the biggest assortment of women he was likely to find under one roof on short notice. He’d get a booth in the corner, order up a long neck, then sit back and do some serious shopping.
He had until tomorrow at midnight to find himself a wife.
VIRGINIA WHITE turned her 1993 Celica off the two-lane highway into a gas station, swung around the pumps and parked near the bathrooms on the west side. She grabbed the big shopping sack from the passenger seat beside her, hopped out of her car and got the bathroom key from the attendant.
She unlocked the bathroom door, hoping to find it clean, at least, only to see a stopped-up toilet, a wall of graffiti and half a dozen dead crickets on the floor. For a moment she wished she’d gone home to change clothes, but it was twenty-one miles from the outlet mall back to Coldwater. If she’d done that she would have lost her nerve altogether and ended up staying home.
She locked the door and nudged the crickets behind the toilet with the toe of her canvas shoe. She shimmied out of the dumpy flowered dress her mother had bought her at a garage sale last summer and stuffed it into the trash can. She removed her white cotton bra and disposed of it, too, then pulled out of the sack the one part of her purchase that she’d barely had the nerve to buy—a black lace push-up bra with a front clasp, dainty satin straps and enough padding to stuff a mattress.
Cheap women wear bras like that, her mother had always said. Cheap little hussies who are looking for trouble.
Virginia put it on, then turned to the mirror and froze.
Cleavage. For the first time in her life, she actually had cleavage.
She stared at the cheap little hussy in the mirror and held her breath, her heart beating double time, waiting, waiting…
Finally she slumped with relief. Okay. God hadn’t struck her dead. That was a good sign. Maybe her mother didn’t have half the pull with the Almighty that she’d always led Virginia to believe, even though she’d been up there with Him now for over three months, consulting with Him in person.
Virginia pulled a pair of jeans from the sack and wiggled into them, thinking maybe they looked pretty good for her first pair. At $12.99 they hadn’t eaten her whole paycheck, and they had a little strip of elastic in the back so, even though they were sort of tight, she’d still be able to breathe.
Next she pulled out a brown short-sleeved cotton shirt with little horseshoes on it. Very Western. She put it on, leaving the top two buttons undone. On second thought, she unbuttoned a third one, then spread the edges of the shirt apart to reveal a hint of her newly enhanced bustline. She froze again, holding her breath, waiting for the inevitable. But it never came.
Maybe God was fresh out of thunderbolts.
She pulled a pair of plain brown cowboy boots from the sack and tugged them on, knowing they couldn’t possibly be leather for $17.99, but figuring they looked the part, anyway. Turning to the mirror, she ran a brush through her hair, wishing for the umpteenth time in her life that she’d been blessed with wavy blond tresses instead of the limp brown mop she’d gotten stuck with. Then she pulled a tube of lipstick from the sack. It wasn’t the cherry red she’d planned on getting, but it wasn’t baby pink, either. She spent a good five minutes nose-to-nose with her reflection in the mirror, dabbing at her lips, telling herself it was just like kindergarten and all she had to do was color inside the lines.
She smacked her lips together, then backed off from the mirror for an arm’s-length exam. Okay. Not bad. Truth be told, though, she didn’t much care what she looked like.
As long as she didn’t look like Virginia White.
A few minutes later she was back on the blacktop, moving down the road. She rolled down the windows and jacked up the radio, singing along with Shania Twain. The crisp breeze lifted her hair off the back of her neck. The sun had just set, filling the countryside with the muted shades of twilight. It would be dark by the time she reached her destination.
Happy birthday, Virginia, she told herself. It’s time to go live it up.
Tonight she was giving herself a long overdue gift. She was going someplace where there were hundreds of people she didn’t know. People to whom her name meant nothing. People who wouldn’t automatically dismiss her because she was the daughter of the town recluse, or because she didn’t dress right, or because she was just a painfully shy nobody who’d never learned how to be anything else.
While she’d been working at the library after school to help support her and her mother, other girls were chatting on the phone, painting each other’s nails and talking about boys. While she was paying bills and balancing the checkbook, other girls were making out in the back seats of cars. While she was living with her mother, taking care of her various ailments and catering to her whims, other women were getting married, making love and having children.
Sooner or later she would save enough money for college, and then she’d start a whole new life. But bank tellers didn’t make much, particularly when they worked at the First State Bank of Coldwater, Texas, where raises came around about as often as Halley’s Comet. So it could take a while, maybe even a couple of years, and she couldn’t wait that long to start grabbing some of the fun and excitement the rest of the world took for granted.
She kept singing along with Shania, letting her foot get heavy on the gas pedal until she teetered on the edge of the forty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. Then, just as she was starting to feel pretty cool, she topped a hill and her destination came into sight, and she felt self-conscious all over again.
The Lone Wolf Saloon was nothing more than a gigantic, flat-sided metal building with its name on the side in red-and-blue neon. But looks were deceiving. From what Virginia had heard, it was sitting smack-dab in the middle of the fast lane of life, offering a wild, rowdy evening of decadence to every fun-loving person within a thirty-mile radius.
The gravel parking lot was nearly full. Virginia found a space between a pair of spit-polished, fresh-off-the-lot pickup trucks. She turned off the engine and sat in silence for a moment, hearing her mother’s voice reverberating inside her head.
Places like that ought to be outlawed. They’re sinful, that’s what they are. Sinful.
She took a few deep, calming breaths, telling herself that if going out and having a good time was a sin, hell would be so full by now that there wouldn’t be any room for her, anyway.
She grabbed her purse, eased out of her car and locked it behind her. She toddled across the gravel parking lot as best she could in her new footwear and made it to the front door. She squared her shoulders, bracing herself against the unknown, but still she was unprepared for the sensory overload that assaulted her the moment she opened the door.
The music, played by a country-western band gyrating with wild enthusiasm on a rainbow-lit stage, hit her eardrums at approximately a hundred decibels above the supersonic range. Every chord, every drumbeat, every twang of the lead singer’s voice hummed through her body like an electrical circuit gone haywire. A beer. That’s what she needed.
She headed toward the bar, passing table after table crowded with people
