Hissy Fit (3 page)

Gloria had a key
to my apartment, and she never hesitated to use it. After all, she was technically the owner of the building. And my employer. Technically. That morning was no exception. She didn’t even bother to knock on my bedroom door before busting in on me. “Keeley?”

I pulled the coverlet over my head. “Keeley doesn’t live here anymore.”

“Lucky you,” Gloria said tartly. She leaned down and kissed the coverlet approximately in the area of my forehead.

“It’s nearly noon, you know. Come on, punkin, I’ve got hot coffee and two chocolate éclairs. One is supposed to be for you, but if you don’t get out of this bed right now, I’ll be happy to eat yours and mine.”

“I’m not hungry,” I said, turning over and managing to wrap myself, mummy-style, in the process. I was amazed that this was the truth. Last night I’d sat and stared at a bag of Hershey’s Kisses left over from Christmas and I hadn’t been able to eat a single one. I had, however, polished off a bottle of tequila and a pint of Harveys Bristol Cream that I’d found downstairs in the studio.

“Suit yourself,” Gloria said. I heard the rustling of a paper bag and peeped out from under the coverlet.

“You look like death,” Gloria said, nibbling at the edge of an éclair. “Did you finish off all the liquor in the joint before or after you created that fetching window display?”

Good question. I had to think about that one.

Oh yes. I’d found the tequila in my own liquor cabinet, and being a liquor wussy, I’d mixed it with a quart of orange juice. Sometime after midnight, I’d gotten enough of a buzz off the tequila to go
downstairs and rearrange the shop’s window display. But the buzz wore off, so I’d rummaged around in the studio’s little kitchenette until I found the Harveys Bristol Cream that had probably been in there since my granddaddy’s days.

“Both,” I said, grimacing at the memory. My head was pounding and my mouth tasted like the inside of a litter box.

“Interesting use of symbolism and metaphor, that window,” Gloria said, sipping her coffee. “I thought the wedding gown in the trash can was an effective juxtaposition of the industrial with the sentimental. But I’m afraid some of our older, more conservative clients might be offended by the slashed photos of A.J., not to mention the inherent symbolism in the douche bag you left hanging in that particular vignette.”

I felt a stabbing pain in my left eye then. “I’d forgotten about the douche bag.”

Gloria nodded thoughtfully. “Where in God’s name did you find that thing? I didn’t even know they made them anymore.”

“It was in the storeroom. I found it a long time ago under some old boxes of Butterick dress patterns and stuff Granddaddy must have packed away after Nanna died.”

“Well,” Gloria said briskly. “I don’t even want to
contemplate
what my papa thought that thing was. If he put it with all the outdated dress patterns he probably thought it was some kind of sewing machine attachment.”

“Did you take the window down?’ I asked meekly.

“Oh yes,” my aunt said. “I got the first phone call about it at eight o’clock this morning. And before I could get my teeth brushed and my hair combed there were three more outraged messages on my answering machine. Two of them were from GiGi.”

“Oh.”

“She’s called your daddy too. Twice.”

“Oh. How is Daddy?”

“Considering the circumstances, I think Wade is holding up as
best as can be expected. He went out to get the paper this morning and instead he found a registered letter from the board of directors at the country club informing him that his membership has been revoked.”

“Oh.”

“There was an itemized bill too. Apparently you put a nasty dent in the Chub Jernigan trophy. Not to mention all the china and crystal you smashed.”

“Excuse me,” I said, bolting from the bed. I barely made it into the bathroom before I blew chow. It took me ten more minutes to get the rest of the tequila and cream sherry out of my traumatized gastric system.

Eventually, while I was making a feeble attempt to mop up the bathroom floor with one of my new monogrammed KMJ towels, Gloria came in and wordlessly shoved me in the direction of the bathtub.

“Hot water,” she said, turning on the shower. “Lots of it. Come and talk to me when you’re ready. I’ll be in the studio.”

I ran the shower until the hot water gave out. When my skin was shriveled and scorched pink, I got out and dressed in my rattiest blue jeans and a John Mayer band T-shirt and wound a towel around my wet hair.

Gloria was sitting at her rolltop desk in the tiny alcove we use as an office. We keep a handsome heart-pine farmhouse table in the showroom that we call a desk. That’s where we make presentations to clients, show them the fabric swatches and carpet samples and furniture catalogs, but the office is where all the real work at Glorious Interiors gets done.

It seems to me my Aunt Gloria has been sitting at that big golden oak rolltop desk as long as I can remember. It once belonged to the first owner of Merchant’s Mercantile, but when Granddaddy bought the place, they discovered it was too big to move without dismantling the whole front door, so it got sold along with the rest of the fixtures.

All the desk’s little pigeonholes and drawers are neatly arranged with the business stationery, correspondence, and paid and unpaid bills. Gloria uses a Haviland china teacup as a pencil holder, and ever since I can remember, she’s worn those same, simple tortoiseshell reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. She’s had the same hairdo too, come to think of it; a sleek auburn pageboy, the ends tucked behind her left ear only, exposing the chunky diamond stud earrings I’ve never seen her without.

“Who else called this morning?” I asked, settling in at my own desk.

She rolled her eyes. “Paige’s mama.”

“Shit.”

“She claims she’s hired a lawyer and is going to sue you for character assassination, not to mention file criminal charges against you for assault and battery.”

I laid my head down on the desk and groaned. The cool wood felt good against my cheek, which was burning up.

“I wouldn’t give Lorna Plummer or her slutty daughter Paige another thought if I were you,” Gloria said. “First off, I happen to know that Lorna still owes Graham Anthony three thousand dollars for the last time he handled a divorce for her. He wouldn’t sell her icewater if she was burning in hell. And secondly, I seriously doubt that the sheriff would give those two the time of day.”

I managed a smile then. The sheriff of Morgan County, Howard Banks, had been happily married for thirty years, but it was a well-known fact that he’d never gotten over his high school crush on Gloria Murdock.

Gloria kissed her fingertip and planted it on my cheek. “That’s it, honey. Smile. See? It doesn’t hurt that bad. Try again, okay?”

“I can’t.”

She sighed. “Well, it’s early yet. Do you want to talk about it at all?”

I clamped my lips together and shook my head no. “I’m sorry,” I croaked.

“Shhh!” Gloria said fiercely. “Don’t you dare apologize. You did what needed doing. I shudder to think what might have happened to you if you’d gone ahead and married into that loathsome Jernigan bunch.”

“But you loved A.J…. “I started. “Daddy adores him.”

“No!” she said, slapping her desktop for emphasis. “We put up with him. For you, Keeley. Wade and I had serious reservations about A.J. from the get-go. I mean, he was just too good to be true. He seemed so charming and sweet, always kissing up to me and calling your daddy SIR, with capital letters.”

“You saw through him?” I asked, bewildered. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“You wouldn’t have listened,” Gloria said. “You were tee-totally in love. And we didn’t know anything bad about him. Not really. Just that there was something…down beneath the surface…”

“Slimy,” I said, filling in the blank for her. “And I never saw it. I never even had a hint that he was cheating on me. Not until last night. Not until I caught him and saw the two of them with my own eyes. How could I have been so stupid?”

The tears were coming fast and furious now. I was sobbing so hard I couldn’t catch my breath. Gloria stood over me, stroking my hair, shushing me like a baby.

“How could he?” I cried. “How could he do that to me?”

“Oh honey,” Gloria said, her voice low and sad. “He’s a man, that’s all. They’re all the same, you know. Every sorry last damn one of ’em. They’ve got different names and different addresses, but it’s all just the same damn sorry man.”

Eventually I stopped crying
and went back upstairs and tried to make myself look human. The mirror was not my friend that morning. I dabbed concealer over the dark circles under my eyes, but there wasn’t much I could do about their bloodshot condition. I added some eyeshadow and mascara, brushed on some blusher, and dabbed on lip gloss. My long brown hair needed more work than I had patience with this morning. I pulled it back into a ponytail high on top of my head and winced with pain when the rubber band was too tight.

My hair. Good Lord. I had a noon appointment with Mozella at La Place. We’d been working for weeks on an upswept do that was supposed to have emphasized my long neck and the daring back plunge of my wedding gown.

The same twelve-thousand-dollar cream silk satin Vera Wang dress that I’d draped over the shop’s garbage can in our window last night.

I’d have to call Mozella right away to cancel. At the thought of it, I bit my lip until I drew blood. Mozella wasn’t some backwater spitcurl and Aqua Net artist. She’d moved to Madison from Atlanta a year earlier, after one of her clients at her chic Buckhead salon fixed her up with her newest ex-husband.

Now Mozella was married to a retired anesthesiologist who’d built her a brand-new shop in Madison, and the ex-wife was happily making the fifty-mile drive all the way from Atlanta every month to get her hair highlighted. Nobody does foil like Mozella. And nobody, I mean, nobody, cancels on Mozella without twenty-four hours’ notice.

My hands were shaking as I dialed the number at La Place.

Oscar, the receptionist, answered as he always does. “Chess?”

Oscar is Cuban, originally from Tampa, and he’s spoken English his whole life, so I think he just does the Ricky Ricardo accent because it makes him feel glamorous.

“Oscar, this is Keeley,” I said, taking a deep breath. “I, uh, I am afraid I’m going to have to cancel my appointment today.”

“No,” he said flatly. “Is not possible.”

“I’ll pay, of course,” I said quickly. “But I really do have to cancel.”

“Chust a minute,” Oscar said, his voice cold.

“Mozella,” I heard him call. “Mozella, somebody is on the phone pretending to be Miss Keeley Murdock, wanting to cancel her appointment. I tole her no. Better you talk to her.”

“Give me that, you idiot,” I heard Mozella say.

“Keeley? Sugar, are you all right?”

“You heard.”

“Well…yes.”

“Who told you?” I asked.

“Who told me first? You mean last night or this morning?”

“You heard last night?” I don’t know why I was so surprised that Madison’s kudzu telegraph was already humming with the news of my broken engagement.

“I was comin’ in early to do GiGi,” Mozella said. “I was gonna open up at eight, just for her. She called around eleven, last night.”

“She gave you an earful, right?”

Mozella’s laugh was a dry rattle. She was in her early fifties, and she had no intention of giving up her pack-a-day cigarette habit. Not even for her rich new doctor husband.

“You could say that.”

“And everybody else in town has given you their version too, right?”

“It’s been pretty colorful,” Mozella admitted. “But I don’t pay much attention to gossip. You know that.”

I gasped. Mozella was a world-class gossiper. She knew everybody in town’s dirt, and she knew it first.

“So I guess you know I won’t be needing that upsweep today,” I said finally. “Or the manicure and pedicure.”

“Yeah, I know,” Mozella said. “The rest of your wedding party already called in and canceled too.”

“Even Paige?” I almost choked on her name.

“Oh nooo,” Mozella said. “I’m looking out the front window and that’s her car pulling up front right now. Her and her mama both.”

“Do me a favor, will you?” I asked.

“Try to.”

“Snatch ’em bald.”

“I wish I could, honey,” Mozella said. “But that’s kind of bad for business. I’ll tell you what. How ’bout if I experiment with Paige’s color? Maybe give her a rinse just a little on the orange side?”

“I’ll pay double if you do,” I said.

“This one’s on me,” Mozella said. “I never did like the little hussy. Always whining about her sensitive scalp. And she doesn’t tip for shit either. And don’t get me started on that mother of hers.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Thanks, Mozella. Send me the bill, okay?”

“No bill,” Mozella said. “I’ll be doing that upsweep on you sooner or later, and when I do, it’s gonna be so fabulous we’re both gonna make hairdo history.”

I blinked back tears as I hung up the phone. Gloria was sitting on the sofa in my tiny living room, clutching a yellow legal pad. It was one of her famous “things to do” lists, I knew.

“I’ve called the caterer and the club and the florist already,” she said, running her finger down the list. “And I’m gonna post a tasteful little note on the church door for anybody who hasn’t already heard that the wedding is off.” Her voice was as businesslike as if she were discussing a drapery installation.

“You canceled the hair and nails?” she asked, her pen poised above that item.

“Yeah. Mozella already knew, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Everybody else canceled too, except for Paige and Lorna.”

“You think she has a big date planned for tonight?” Gloria asked.

“I don’t want to think anything about her,” I said. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s dead. She does not exist.”

“Tell me something, will you?” Gloria said, cocking her head. “How on earth did the two of you ever get to be friends? I mean, I hate to be a snob, but I just never could figure out what you two had in common.”

I twisted a strand of my hair around my finger and thought about that.

“We started first grade together,” I said. “But we never really bonded until, like, fourth grade, I guess. I remember, she was the first girl in class to get a bra. First to have a period, first to shave her legs. I thought she was so cool.”

“I bet she was first in a lot of other ways too,” Gloria said tartly.

“Yeah.” I laughed, remembering some of Paige’s more notorious junior high exploits. “She could get any guy she wanted. And eventually I think she had ’em all.”

“Like her mama,” Gloria said. “Tramps, both of ’em.”

“Lorna didn’t seem trampy to me when I was a kid,” I said, thinking back on it. “She was so nice to me, you know? After Mama left?”

Gloria nodded, tapping her pencil on the notepad.

We didn’t talk a lot about my mother. I’d been seven when she left us. Old enough to remember the usual stuff, how she drank a Pepsi every morning, first thing, how she swept the kitchen floor every night before she went to bed, the sound of her voice, soft and low in nonstop phone conversations with dozens of “girlfriends,” and the scent of her perfume, which was Joy. I still have the bottle she left on her dressing table. Only a few drops of the perfume remained in the bottom of the frosted glass bottle, but every now and then, I unstop the bottle and inhale, and think about her.

“You know me, Keeley,” Gloria said. “It’s no secret that I can think
of a lot of bad things to say about Jeanine Murry Murdock. But let’s give her credit. Your mama was nothing like Lorna.”

“Probably not,” I agreed. “But to a kid, Lorna was a mom when I didn’t have a mom. She treated us like grown-ups, you know? Let us use her makeup, showed us how to fix our hair. I remember, the first time I ever had shrimp cocktail was when she fixed it for us one night when she had a boyfriend coming over.”

“Probably some other woman’s husband,” Gloria said, pursing her lips. “No telling how many men passed through that house of hers. Your daddy was worried to death you’d see something you shouldn’t over there. But he couldn’t keep you two apart. You were thick as thieves.”

“I know,” I said. “And even in high school, when she got really wild, and I was too chicken to do the stuff she was doing, we stayed friends. Even during college, when I went away and she stayed home and went to junior college, we stayed friends.”

“Force of habit,” Gloria said, arching her eyebrows. “Not always a good thing.”

“Hindsight,” I retorted, “unfortunately, not always twenty-twenty.”

“All right,” Gloria said, tapping her list again. “Let’s get to work. Who’s canceling the party tent and the ice sculpture? Me or you?”

A bell tinkled just then. When we converted Granddaddy’s second-floor storeroom into an apartment for me, Gloria had our electrician rig up a system to alert me when somebody opened the door downstairs.

“I left the door unlocked when I came in, but the sign says we’re closed,” Gloria reassured me. “Why don’t you just run down there and get rid of whoever it is?”

“What if it’s A.J.?” I asked, starting to panic.

“Don’t be silly,” Gloria said. “He knows better to come around here. After you took off last night we had words.”

“Hello?” a man’s voice called up the stairs. “Anybody here?”

“Just a minute,” Gloria called back. “Go,” she said, nodding at me.

I took the stairs slowly and peeped around the corner into the studio. What if it really was A.J.?

“Hey there,” the redheaded stranger said, looking up. He was staring down at my wedding gown, which Gloria had temporarily draped over my drafting table. “Will Mahoney. Remember? Your chauffeur?”

“I remember,” I said dully. “Go away. Okay?”