Hissy Fit (28 page)

Austin sipped his wine and nibbled on a piece of French bread. I couldn’t understand why he was being so rude to our host. Robert was witty, attractive, and obviously well-off—in short, a great catch.

“I’ll definitely be back on my next buying trip,” I said. “But I think you owe me a story. Remember? Right before Austin called? You were saying something about having a shop on Magazine.”

“Had,” Robert said. “No more. I closed it down two years ago. Now I just sell out at the flea market, or by word of mouth. It keeps me off the streets, for now. Eventually I’ll sell down the rest of the inventory, and when I do, I’ll be out of the business once and for all.”

“Why?” I blurted.

“It’s just not fun anymore. We had the shop for fifteen years, traveled all over, met lots of nice people, and a few not-so-nice people, and now that’s in the past.”

“We?” Austin leaned forward.

“My partner and I. Actually, my former partner,” Robert said.

“AIDS?” Austin said, sounding sympathetic.

“I wish,” Robert said, laughing. “No, he left me for someone younger, cuter, richer. You know how it goes. It’s not really a very interesting or original story.”

“What will you do when the antiques are gone?” I asked, kicking Austin under the table.

“Who knows? Maybe I’ll retire for real this time.”

“What did you retire from last time?” I asked.

“I was a dentist,” Robert said. “Can you believe that? Seems like a lifetime ago. But I retired at forty. My mother was already dead or it would have killed her.”

“Austin is a floral designer,” I volunteered. “Amazingly talented. He’s going to do all the flowers for this plantation house I’m decorating. And he owns his own business.”

I felt a sharp pain in my left shin. Austin looked away.

Austin and I
were still arguing as we drove back across Lake Ponchartrain the next morning. “I do not need to be fixed up,” he said, sipping from the go-cup of coffee we’d picked up at the Morning Call. “And certainly not by a woman whose own judgment in men, is, I regret to say, deeply flawed.”

“Deeply flawed.” I pondered the phrase as I threaded the van through the early morning traffic. “And what, exactly, is that supposed to mean?”

He reached across and dusted the powdered sugar from my face and shirtfront. “Just what it sounds like. You picked A. J. Jernigan, right?”

“I suppose.”

He tsk-tsked. I had never heard anybody younger than seventy tsk-tsk before, but Austin did it very believeably. “Strike one,” he said. “And now when there is a perfectly
adorable
man right there, ripe for the picking, you completely ignore him. Worse, you conspire to marry him off to some trashy little money-grubber who thinks
mochachino
is a color. Strike two.”

“I assume you refer to my client Will Mahoney?”

“I do.”

“First of all, I do not find men with red hair and freckles adorable. You may, but I do not. And secondly, the man is totally ga-ga over that trashy little money-grubber. And he has hired me to see that she reciprocates that affection,” I said. “And may I remind you that he is paying me quite nicely for my efforts?”

“Pish-posh,” Austin said.

I did a double-take. “Pish-posh? What kind of a word is that?”

“It’s a word,” he said airily, gazing out the window. “My granny
said it all the time. Anyway, don’t try to change the subject. Two strikes against you already. And then you have the massively stupid idea that I should be paired up with the first aging drama queen you meet up with in New Orleans. Strike three. You’re as out as I am. Really, Keeley Rae, do I look that desperate?”

“Listen,” I said hotly. “Robert would be perfect for you. He’s smart and funny. He’s educated. He’s been all over the world. He likes a lot of the same things as you. How can you not be interested?”

“I’m just not,” Austin said. “And now the subject is officially closed.”

“Right,” I said under my breath. “Because you say so.”

“Listen, little missy,” Austin said. “Don’t make me come over there. I’ll turn this car right around and we’ll all go home. Is that what you want?”

What I wanted to do was turn the van back toward Madison. But Austin was emphatic. We had the van, we had the time, and he was dying to hear what my long-lost cousin Sonya had to say about my mama.

We took turns driving, spent the night at a hotel in Charlotte, and the next morning I found myself dreading every mile that brought us closer to Kannapolis.

“Have you even talked to Sonya?” I asked Austin. “Does she know I’m coming to see her?”

“She knows,” he said airily. “Take the next exit, turn left, then right. We’re meeting her at a Waffle House.”

“Why?”

“That’s what she wanted. I didn’t ask why.”

It was midmorning, but the Waffle House parking lot was still full.

As we walked to the restaurant entrance, Austin kept his hand on the small of my back, exerting just the slightest pressure to keep me moving forward.

“Mornin’!” called a waitress who was wiping a tabletop near the door. “Mornin’!” called the skinny kid who was ringing up a check at
the cash register. All the seats at the counter were full. I looked from one side of the room to the other, wondering if I would recognize Sonya after all these years.

In a booth at the far left corner of the room, an older woman with bouffant gray hair and dark sunglasses was sitting alone, a coffee cup in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other. She looked up, took off her sunglasses to get a better look, and then gave us a tentative wave. “Keeley?” she mouthed the word. I nodded, and Austin gave me a little shove in her direction.

“Sonya?” I said, standing over her at the booth. Even with the sunglasses off, I did not recognize my cousin. How could this blowsy woman, her eyes sunken into fleshy folds of pale skin, and the only makeup a slash of carelessly applied pink lipstick, be the skinny little blond home-wrecker who’d cut such a swathe through Madison? She would be in her late fifties, I thought, but she looked at least seventy. A hard seventy.

“Keeley Rae,” she wheezed. “I woulda known you anywhere. You are your mama made over. Excuse me for not gettin’ up, honey, but my legs are giving me a lot of trouble these days.”

I bent over and gave her a peck on the cheek, which was surprisingly smooth and wrinkle-free. “Don’t get up,” I said, and slid into the booth opposite her. I gestured toward Austin, who stood a discreet distance away. “This is Austin, my friend who tracked you down. Do you mind if he joins us?”

“Come ahead on,” Sonya said, giving him a curious look.

While the waitress poured us coffee and took our orders, Sonya filled us in on the gaps in her life. My cousins were grown up with children of their own. “Kimmy, that’s my oldest granddaughter, she’s expectin’ her first child in a couple months,” Sonya said. “I can’t hardly believe I’m a grandma, let alone soon to be a great-grandma.” She shot another look at Austin, and then at me. “How ’bout you, honey? I don’t see a wedding ring on your hand.”

“No,” I said quickly. “I was engaged, but called it off. Austin is a
friend and business associate. I’m in business with my Aunt Gloria, you know. An interior designer.”

“Gloria,” Sonya said. “How is she? And your daddy? Is he doin’ okay? All of y’all still living in Madison, is that right?”

“Gloria’s fine,” I said. “She helped Daddy raise me, you know, after Mama left. And Daddy’s the same as ever. Still running the car lot. He plays a lot of golf with his buddies and that keeps him busy. And the thing is, he’s just finally started dating again.”

“Is that right?” Sonya said warily. “Good for him.”

“That’s sort of why I’m here,” I said, taking a sip of coffee. “Daddy never really did get over Mama’s leaving like she did. He even hired a private detective, just so we could have some answers, but we never did find out where she went. Technically, Mama and Daddy are still married. He feels funny about that, dating now, when she could still be alive.”

“Hmm,” Sonya said. She held up her coffee cup, and the waitress came back over to refill it.

“The thing is,” I said, putting my own coffee cup down, “It’s not just Daddy who needs to know. I need to know too. It’s been almost twenty-five years. I want to know why. I want to know where she went, and what happened that she never called, never wrote, never came back to see us.”

“I see. And why do you think I can help you with that?”

“You were her best friend,” I said. “Her only close relative in town. I asked around a little bit. People said you two sort of ran around together.”

“Ran around?” She raised one graying eyebrow.

“I know about Darvis Kane,” I said defiantly. “I know Mama was seeing him. They left town together. He left his wife and kids; Mama left us. Lisa Kane was lucky. She managed to track Darvis down and get a divorce. At least she has some answers to her questions.”

“Darvis Kane,” Sonya said, rolling the words on the tip of her tongue. She lit another cigarette. “I told Jeanine he was no good for
her. Of course, why would she listen to me? I didn’t have a great track record of my own. And your daddy knew it too. He knew I was bad news back then.”

She closed her eyes, inhaled deeply, and let a thin plume of smoke waft toward the restaurant’s ceiling. “There’s something I want you to know right now, Keeley Murdock.”

I clenched my hands in my lap. “Yes?”

“I am a saved woman,” Sonya said. “Born again in the blood of Jesus, as of eight
P.M.
on July 11, 1986. I took all my troubles to the Lord that night, right here in Kannapolis, North Carolina. And I was born again.” Her red-rimmed eyes bored into mine. “I will not claim to be perfect. No ma’am. Not Sonya Wyrick. Not perfect, but I am forgiven. Can you say as much?”

“Not perfect,” I agreed. “I don’t know about the forgiven part. Not yet.”

She reached over and clutched at my hand. “That will come, honey. Just let the Lord into your heart. If he came into mine, he can come into yours.”

I bit my lip. This was not going as I’d planned.

Austin must have sensed how close I was to losing it.

“Miz Wyrick,” he said now, slipping his arm around my shoulders, “Keeley is at a place where she wants to forgive her mama. She’s been bitter all these years, but now she’s an adult, and she understands that everything isn’t always black and white. But she needs some answers.”

“Look in the Bible,” Sonya said. “All the answers you need are written right down in there. Start with Revelations.”

“We thought maybe we could start with the winter of 1979,” Austin said smoothly. “Back when you and Jeanine Murdock were so close. When she was seeing Darvis Kane on the sly and you weren’t exactly an angel.”

Sonya gave that some thought. She nodded slowly. “I was a wild one back then, and I won’t deny that. I knew Jeanine was carrying
on, but I didn’t know who he was, not at first. I sure didn’t know the boy worked for Wade. The thing was, I had a boyfriend of my own at the time.” She smiled ruefully. “You wouldn’t know it to see me now, but back in those days, I was something. I always had a boyfriend. Married, usually.” She grimaced.

“A lady Mama worked for in Madison, at the dress shop, she sorta hinted that there were quite a few people back then who were running around on the sly,” I said. “She wouldn’t name any names. She just said they were ‘prominent’ citizens, and all of y’all were slipping around cheating on husbands and wives.”

“That’s true enough,” Sonya said. “If I told you the names, you wouldn’t believe it anyway. My boyfriend at the time, now, he was from an old Madison family. So we had to be careful. He had a wife and children and a reputation to protect.” She laughed bitterly. “Never mind about my reputation, right? Anyway, he had a little hunting cabin, out there at Ridgeland Creek, and that’s where we had our ‘dates,’ if you can call them that. Later on I found out that there were quite a few couples having ‘dates’ out there.”

“Mama?”

She nodded. “I let it slip that I had the key to my friend’s cabin, and she pestered and pestered, until I let her have it for a weekend, when I knew he and his family were down at the beach. I feel right ashamed of that, Keeley. I was older than your mama, and I didn’t set no kind of example for her.”

“Did she talk about Darvis to you? Did she love him?” I asked, clenching and unclenching my fists.

“Remember now, I didn’t know who he was for a while. I only found out one day by accident, when me and Vince went out there to the cabin on the spur of the moment one afternoon, and here comes Jeanine and this man in that red car of hers, flying down the driveway.”

“Vince?”

Sonya pressed her lips together and looked out the window.

“Vince Bascomb? He was your boyfriend?”

Tears glittered in her eyes. She nodded and wiped at them with a paper napkin.

“I am so ashamed of that,” she said, still looking out the window. “To this day, that is a shame that haunts me. I knew Lorraine Bascomb. She was a nice lady, and I liked her. But I didn’t have no problem taking up with her husband. None at all.”

Austin was looking perplexed. “Why do I know that name?”

“Vince Bascomb is one of Drew Jernigan’s oldest buddies,” I explained. “They were partners in lots of business deals. And they had lake houses right next to each other on one of the coves out at Lake Oconee. I was just out there not long ago.”

“Drew Jernigan,” Sonya spat the words. “He was another one that liked to slip around on the sly.”

“Runs in the family,” I said.

She tapped some ash into the saucer of her coffee cup. “Only thing was, he didn’t even bother to try to hide it from his wife. He used to claim he and GiGi had what they called an ‘open marriage.’ ”

“He told you that? Did he know you were seeing Vince?”

She blushed. “There were a whole group of us, used to go out to that cabin that last winter. Me and Vince, Drew and his date, and some other people too. It was cold and rainy a lot that year. Vince had fixed up a little kerosene heater inside, and we had us campfires outside. We’d drink and carry on. It was our hideout, you know? That’s what we called it, the hideout. And we were the outlaws.”

“Were Mama and Darvis ever there with you?”

She shook her head. “Not with me personally. I don’t know about the others. I know your mama loved going out there. She thought it was exciting, you know? Having secrets from everybody? She didn’t dare call Darvis, at home or at the car lot. And he sure couldn’t call her. They used to leave notes for each other, setting up their rendezvous. That’s what Jeanine called it, ‘our rendezvous.’ ” Her lips
twisted. “Fancy name for rutting in a drafty old trailer ’cuz the man is too cheap to rent a motel room.”

I got a sudden mental picture, and my stomach twisted.

“I’m sorry, honey,” Sonya said. “I keep forgetting she was your mama.”

I shook my head in a vain attempt to dislodge that vision. “Did Jeanine talk to you about divorcing my father?”

“No,” she said emphatically. “Not to me, and like you said, I was her best friend. She was just young, honey. I think she got caught up in the excitement and the intrigue. You know, of being part of something forbidden.”

“She didn’t tell you she was leaving?”

Sonya twisted her paper napkin into a tight corkscrew. “That was when, February, March? I was just as surprised about it as everybody else when your daddy called to ask if I knew where she’d gone. See, Vince and Lorraine had had a big fight. She found out he was catting around on her. I didn’t dare go near him. I couldn’t call. And we stopped seeing each other not too long after that.”

“Can you remember when the last time was that you saw Jeanine?” Austin asked. “Did you ever see her after Darvis Kane left town?”

“I always thought they left together,” Sonya said.

“We did too,” Austin said. “But we talked to his sister, over in Alabama. She says Darvis came to Wedowee, driving Jeanine’s car, but without Jeanine. He sold the car in Birmingham, and she dropped him at a bus station, and that’s the last time anybody saw him after he left Madison.”