Chapter 2

Bottom line: I liked her a little too much to cut the string of friendship. To be Faye Vesda, you had to be frazzled, unorganized, and not always on your game.

After my whining about feeling like her paid help, she yanked a bottle of Foxe Zinfandel from her oversized purse and placed it on the counter. “This is for your trouble.”

Fair enough. The errands would get done because I personally felt that the wine just happened to be a reasonable payment. Foxe wine had a reputation of being one of the best in the Pittsburgh area. The winery was privately owned and operated by two of the six Foxe brothers and sat twenty miles north of the city, near Butler. The white Zinfandel had a crisp and clean taste to it with a hint of strawberry, which soothed my tongue while I checked essays after dark. The stuff went for almost fifty bucks a bottle, worth my time and taste. Good for me.

I told Faye, “This is the last time I’m being your secretary. You’re going to have to hire someone from a temp agency to give you a hand.”

“Tsk.” She waved a hand at me and rolled her eyes.

I looked down at the pile of debris on the counter and asked, “What’s in the cardboard tube?”

“That happens to be blueprints for my new greenhouse. You can have those dropped off at my architect’s. The address is on the tube.”

I looked at the tube. Stone & Brae Incorporated had an address across town, next to the Ohio River, a good twenty-minute drive through traffic. The building they were in just happened to be shaped like a diamond and occupied eight floors. Tourists, when visiting the city, loved to take pictures of the structure. As for locals, we used the building as a landmark, detailing directions in the city, calling it the Diamond.

“Last time for errands,” I reminded her.

“Whatever.” 2: Faye’s Field

Faye. Faye. Faye. Every time I thought about her, I ended up shaking my head, mostly becoming irritated. No, I really couldn’t be at all surprised to learn that she invested her money to build a greenhouse on her ninety-two acres since she had already had seven. They housed a variety of herbs, African violets, different types of swamp grasses that she had fallen in love with, and her all-time favorite, orchids.

Faye could afford eight greenhouses. She loved being filthy rich and the daughter of a cigarette-making mogul named Bernard Vesda. Everyone who thought they were anyone smoked Vesda Slims, Regulars, Lites, Menthols, Cordoba, and Filter-Free. To my knowledge, Faye had never worked a day in her life. Spending her daddy’s money became her gig, which mostly included shopping for shoes, traveling around the world, and paying young and attractive men to spend quality time building her a variety of greenhouses.

Greenhouses became Faye’s obsession as a child, I guessed. She loved to visit her father’s tobacco fields in North Carolina, mesmerized by their strong aromas. As she grew older, caring for her own small patch of growing tobacco, which her father labeled Faye’s Field, she not only had fallen in love with her crop, but became smitten for the young Mexicans who worked her father’s land

Faye had often told me in our adult lives, “The sweatier the man’s skin, the better.”

To her father’s delight, Faye had never fallen in love with one of her daddy’s sweaty worker bees, although each could have treated her like the lady she so often wanted to be desired. I couldn’t recall a marriage between the Southern Baptist girl with the ginger curls and a dark-skinned Mexican. Rather, Faye knew about her daddy’s rules and how not to break them. One of which particularly stood out in her mind as she grew up: You will not diddle the help.And she didn’t.

Diddling the help in her adulthood wasn’t an everyday occurrence, in fact, not at all. Because she just happened to be loaded, having an estimated six hundred million dollars in assets, she pretty much could buy any man she wanted. Some of those men worked for her: the pool boy, the butler, the tennis instructor, the plumber; all purchased by word-of-mouth. Others came into her life as lovers. And most left because she came across as being too much to handle.

Currently, Faye was “seeing” a dentist, a young man by the name of Harold Reisner. Harold played in Faye’s field more than I wanted to hear about. Whenever Faye had something to say, she ran to me, spilling her guts. Sometimes I wanted to listen to her filthy dramas concerning Harold, but other times I found her tales a little over the top and too sharp for my ears. No matter what, we were friends, with or without her tales and men. Lifelines for each other. True friends all the way. Besties since we were children in North Carolina. 3: Children Everywhere

Pittsburgh offered a beautiful day comprised of blue skies, summertime wind, and a heat index of seventy-nine. May just happened to be one of my favorite months of the year because of yard sales, fruit stands, and the many flowers in bloom. Bicyclers were in full motion, as well as city runners, and there were dozens of dog walkers, power-walking with their leashed pooches. I didn’t mind making the drive for Faye from the south side of the city to the north, crossing the Monongahela River. Traffic zigzagged slowly through the downtown area, which I avoided, going around the skyscrapers and inner city bridges. Instead, I took Route 5 out of the city and drove north. The warm air felt soothing against my face because the front windows on my 2016 Nissan Quest were all the way down.