Ralphie's Wives

Back when Phoebe and Ralphie were married, both Tiff and Rose had been in love with him, too. Though she knew her friends would never betray her, Phoebe had resented them for not being able to keep themselves from wanting her husband. Secretly, she’d feared that the day would come when Ralphie started falling out of love with her, the way he had with all the others before her. She’d dreaded that the unthinkable just might happen: she’d find him doing the wild thing with Rose or Tiff.

As it turned out, Ralphie did fall out of love with her. And into bed with someone else. Not Rose or Tiff, though. Thank God. In her pain and rage at his doing her that way, she’d divorced him and taken her half of the bar in the settlement. She’d dropped out of the band, and Rose and Tiff hadn’t had the heart to carry on without her.

For a while, Phoebe had hated Ralphie Styles with a passion as powerful as her love had been. But her hatred didn’t last. She just couldn’t stay mad at him forever. He’d give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. Only later would you find out it was a shirt he’d borrowed from someone else.

You just had to love him, even when you weren’t in love with him anymore. Besides, once a couple of years had gone by, Phoebe really was over him in the romantic sense and truly immune to the passionate insanity he could inspire.

Rose and Tiff weren’t immune to him, though. They’d each married him—Rose first, Tiff later; short marriages that ended the same way his marriage to Phoebe had: in heartbreak and divorce. Eventually, both Rose and Tiff had forgiven him. And in time, each found herself calling him a friend.

Down the bar, the big biker caught Phoebe’s eye and raised his empty shot glass. She went on over there and served him up another round, her throat kind of tight suddenly with all the memories swirling around in her brain. That time, when she set the beer in front of him, she gave the guy a longer look. He looked back. Another shiver went through her—one that crackled with heat all the way down to where it went liquid and spread out into a warm pool low in her belly.

No, she thought.

But deep inside someone was sighing out an endless string of yesses—yesses, she reminded herself, she would do nothing about.

It was a bad day, that was all. A day that had her polishing every glass in the place and imagining what it might be like to celebrate turning thirty by doing something dangerous with a guy she’d just met—a guy who’d spoken exactly six words to her so far: Shot of Cuervo. Beer back. Thanks.

No doubt about it. Soulful eyes. Lots of muscles. Coal-black hair and a couple of shots. These were the beginnings of a truly deep and meaningful relationship.

When she returned to the Queens, they’d moved on to the subject of Ralphie’s suspicious demise.

“I’m sorry,” said Rose. “But I do believe we are dealing with foul play here.” Whoever had run Ralphie over and then fled the scene had yet to be apprehended.

“Well, duh,” said Tiff. “A hit-and-run is foul play by definition.” She sipped her margarita, frowning. “Isn’t it?”

“A hit-and-run is foul play by accident,” Rose clarified. “And I don’t believe Ralphie’s death was any accident. I am talking about someone finally getting fed up with Ralphie in a murderous way. I am talking premeditation. You hear what I’m saying? And it’s not like it’s never been done before. Remember that woman up in Tulsa last year? Got into her SUV, drove to where her husband was doing the nasty with his girlfriend, and ran the bastard down when he and the other woman came out of their favorite motel. Ran him down and then backed up over him, slammed it into drive and ran over him again.”

“I don’t think that was in Tulsa,” said Tiff. “It was on Law and Order, wasn’t it?”

Rose gave her a look. “Not the point—and think about it. As long as nobody sees you and you don’t blow it and leave the guy alive to identify you, a hit-and-run would be better than a bullet or rat poison or a stabbing to the heart.” She paused to gaze deeply into her jumbo margarita glass. Glancing up again, she added, “Yeah, you’d need a way to get rid of the car….”

“Well,” said Tiff. “Somebody did find a way to get rid of the car. Or to hide it. Or somethin’. They got rid of it after the fact. They don’t want to face the consequences of their actions. That doesn’t mean it was preplanned or anything.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Rose. “I think it was.”

Phoebe, who’d heard all this before, just wished they would stop. But they didn’t.

Tiffany insisted, “Some drunk, that’s all. Or some soccer mom on her cell phone.”

“Ha,” said Rose. “That’s a stretch. A soccer mom driving around in the Paseo in the middle of the night, calling…who?”

“I’m only trying to get you to see,” said Tiff in her most patient and reasonable tone, “that we basically know nothing beyond the fact that someone hit him and then drove away.”

“Huh. Pardon me. We know he was in the Paseo, on foot, after midnight.” The Paseo, the old Spanish district, with its stucco buildings and clay-tile roofs, was best known for its thriving artists’ community. Ralphie was no artist. He didn’t live in the Paseo, have friends there or do business there that the Queens knew of. “I ask you,” said Rose. “What was he doing there?”

Tiffany blew out a hard breath. “I’m only saying, why assume it had to be murder?”

Rose had her margarita glass in her hand again. She took a big gulp and set it down hard. “Because it was Ralphie who got killed, that’s why. We all know how he was. Everybody loved him—except for when they hated him.”

Phoebe had heard enough. More than enough. She grabbed the cast-aluminum ice scooper from the top of the ice machine, pulled open the slanted steel ice machine door, braced her free arm on the rim and stuck the scooper in there. Taking a wide stance for balance on her pointy little heels, she used the scooper to beat at the ice. It had been clumping for a few days now, which meant the machine was leaking. She’d need to call a repairman.

Haven’t done that in a while, she thought as she pounded away. Not since Ralphie came back to the city—to stay, this time, he’d told her—and started in with Darla Jo.

“Tiff, you are in denial,” she heard Rose insist.

“I’m in denial….?”

Phoebe pounded harder, glaring into the globs and clumps of ice as she attacked them with the scooper, every blow beating back the voices behind her.

She pulverized that ice and in her mind’s eye, he took form.

Ralphie…

She could just see him, see that road map of a face with the laugh lines etched deep as craters on either side of his fleshy mouth, see the wild hair he dyed a reddish-black not found in nature, which in the past few years was thinning so high at the temples, the bare spots threatened to meet at the top of his head.

He’d always been handy with machines. “Step aside,” he would say when the equipment started acting up. “Let Ralphie work his magic—and hand me that wrench over there, will you, babe?”

Phoebe beat the ice harder. She wanted to smash every clump to a sliver, crush it all into powder.

“Phoebe, hon.” It was Rose. Phoebe slammed the scoop into the ice one more time. Rose shouted, “Hey!”

Squinting hard to hold back the gathering tears, Phoebe pulled her head out of the ice machine and sent a glare over her shoulder at the Queens.

Rose told her tenderly, “Honey, put that scoop down.”

Phoebe tossed the scoop into the machine, slammed the door and whirled to face her friends. “I am sick of hearin’ about it.”

“Sorry,” said Rose.

“Not another word,” vowed Tiffany.

Phoebe wrapped her arms around herself and looked down at her high-heeled sandals. They were red as the roses on her dress. Red was a power color—she’d heard that somewhere. Lately, since Ralphie’s death, Phoebe felt like she needed all the power she could get.

Tiff said weakly, “Aw, Pheeb. Come on.”

Phoebe squeezed her arms tighter around her middle, lifted her head and jerked her sagging shoulders back. “I miss that sorry sleazeball, I truly do.” Her throat locked up. She had to whisper the rest. “I just can’t believe he went and got himself killed.”

There was a silence, except for Gwen Stefani bopping on the jukebox, singing that “Hollaback Girl” song.

Rose got that soft-eyed, mother-hen look. “Oh, honey…”

Phoebe pressed her lips together and tightly shook her head. “Uh-uh.” She put out a hand. “I am not going to lose it. I am going to be fine.” There’d been enough crying. Darla Jo had done plenty of that for all of them.

“It’s okay,” Tiffany said in a careful voice. “Sometimes a girl can’t help herself. She just needs a good cry.”

But Phoebe wasn’t going to cry. Not now. Not today. She gulped to clear the tightness from her throat, pressed her fingers under her eyes to ease the burning ache of tears unshed and drew herself up tall again. “So. ’Nother round?”

But the fun was over and they all knew it. Phoebe looked from Tiff to Rose and back to Tiff. They both wore that shiny-eyed, tears-on-the-way look. One more drink and things would get seriously weepy.