Love, Lies and Texas Dips (21 page)

Mac rapped on the doorframe, and Mrs. Bishop looked up and waved as she walked over.

“Well, hey, Mac,” she said, drying her hands on a dish towel, which she causally flipped over her shoulder. She had on a yellow T-shirt stained with what looked like spaghetti sauce, and her brown hair was tied up in a messy ponytail. “What brings you over?” she asked, a genuinely pleased smile on her bare face. She had fine lines that crinkled at her eyes and the corners of her mouth, which Mac found reassuring. So many mothers in the Memorial Villages looked like they’d smoothed their faces with steam irons. “I assume you’re looking for Alex?”

Mac patted the yearbook. “Yeah, I need to return this.”

“Be my guest.” Mrs. Bishop pulled the door open wide. “Last I saw him he was playing games with Elliott upstairs. Oh, and will you tell them dinner will be ready in ten? Actually, tell El to put down the joystick and come on down.” She set an unmanicured hand on Mac’s shoulder as she walked in. “You want to stay and eat with us?”

“Thanks, but we already ate,” Mac answered, pausing in the breakfast nook, which was cluttered with discarded jackets, shoes, and knapsacks. “Besides, I’ve got to get back to the house and help Honey set up for curtsy practice tonight.”

“Sounds like fun,” Mrs. Bishop said, and ruffled Mac’s hair. “Don’t be a stranger, okay? We miss you around here,”
she said before starting back toward the stove top to monitor a pot spewing steam below its rattling lid.

Mac ducked through the doorway and toward the front hall, then climbed the stairs, which were littered with socks, coloring books, and even a Nerf gun.
Elliott’s stuff
, she thought. Sometimes it looked like the house had exploded and no one had noticed. But she knew Alex’s mom liked to do everything herself. It was no wonder she couldn’t seem to keep up.

Elliott and Alex shared the beat-up leather love seat in front of the TV in Alex’s room, laughing as they held their Wii wheels in the air, steering the race cars that careened around the giant TV screen hanging from the wall.

“Ah, for the good old days of Doom,” she said as she came to stand behind them. “I hate to break up this speed-fest, but your mom said to get downstairs, El.” She patted Elliott’s head, a riot of blond hair sticking up in every direction. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

“Okay, okay, just let me blast this last one—yay!” He looked positively gleeful as he smashed his race car into the side of Alex’s before dropping his wheel onto the couch and scurrying out the door.

“I tell you, the Idiot’s gonna be an expert at Wii before he turns ten,” Alex teased as he shut down the game and turned to face her. “So what’s up?”

Mac plunked down where Elliott had been sitting. The cushion was still warm. “Just making a return,” she said, and set Alex’s old yearbook on the space in between them. “Ginger said thanks again.”

“Did she find what she needed?”

Mac nodded. “Unfortunately, yes.”

“That’s good, I guess.” He swiped errant strands of dark blond hair off his brow, then removed his preppy glasses to wipe the lenses on his T-shirt before sticking them down on his slim nose again. “I heard you got a surprise at your deb meeting last night. Cindy told me that she’s a Rosebud now, just like you. She’s really psyched.”

“Yeah, it was a surprise, all right,” Mac agreed, wishing the idea of being thrown together with Cindy, not only in school, but for the next eight months of the debutante season, didn’t bother her so much. But it did. She glanced down at the palm of her hand and started picking at a callus. “Seems like this whole year’s going to be a bumpy ride.”

“Bumpy sounds about right, especially for your friend Laura right now, huh?” Alex volunteered, and Mac’s head came up.

“Why’d you say that?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just that Cindy mentioned someone spread a rumor on MySpace that Laura’s, um, knocked up.” He hesitated and squinted at Mac. “I mean, it
is
a rumor, right?”

“Of course it’s a rumor! God!” Mac jumped down his throat, more upset by the fact that Cindy had mentioned it than by his uncertainty about whether the gossip was true.

He quickly moved to appease her. “I’m sorry, okay? I wish there was an easy way to hack MySpace and lay waste to that page, but if there’s anything else I can do—”

Mac had another guilt attack, listening to Alex stumble all over himself, scrambling to apologize when he hadn’t done anything wrong. It wasn’t him at all. She took a deep breath, telling herself to chill. It didn’t do any good to take her frustrations out on Alex.

“Thanks, Alex, for wanting to help. I didn’t mean to yell, but it’s been a rough day, and it’s not over yet. I still have to go back and help the step-Barbie arrange the living room for curtsy class.” She gave him a feeble smile. “As you can guess, I’m not exactly looking forward to it. Maybe it’d be different if my mom was—”

Oh, man, why’d I even go there?

Mac clamped her mouth together, lips trembling, unable to finish.

“If she was here, right?” Alex said for her, and Mac nodded, hating how her eyes started to well. When would she ever get over it?
Maybe when two years stops feeling like yesterday
, she thought with a sniff and swiped her hand beneath her nose.

“I’ve got just the thing to make you feel better.” Alex sprang up from the couch and started rummaging through his desk.

Mac half expected the table to crash to the floor one of these days. It held three desktop computers, one with a flat screen and two with “alien-head” monitors (her name for them). It was cluttered high with papers, DVDs, books, and extraneous computer parts whose names Mac couldn’t even begin to guess. Coming from a household where everything had its place, Mac had never quite grasped the “save everything” ideology of the Bishops. But if it was part of what had made Alex who he was, then it couldn’t be all bad.

“Aha!” he said, raising his arm in victory and returning to the sofa to deposit an oversized coin in her hand. “It’s my Kirk-Spock bronze medallion. I used to take it to every Math Olympiad in my back pocket.” His face lit up. “I never lost a round.”

“You want me to have it?” Mac palmed the coin, the little butterflies in her stomach lifting off and flitting around again.

“Maybe it’ll bring you some luck,” he said, “like it did for me.”

She hardly knew what to say. For the most fleeting moment, it felt like her relationship with Alex had fallen back into place again.

“Alexander Evan Bishop! Time for dinner!”

Mac jumped as Mrs. Bishop screamed up from the bottom of the stairs.

Alex laughed at her wide-eyed expression. “You get used to it,” he said, and brushed off his jeans, rising to his feet. “Can I walk you out?”

“Sure.” Mac got up, preceding him from the room, careful to watch where she stepped on her way back down.

She said her goodbyes and slipped out the French doors as the Bishops settled around the breakfast room table to eat. For some reason, she paused outside and looked in at them for a minute, a wistfulness passing through her, remembering dinners like that with her parents before her mom had gotten sick and everything had changed.

Mac held the coin tightly as she walked home, afraid to stick it in her pocket for fear of losing it somewhere between the Bishops’ house and her own. In fact, she didn’t let it out of her sight until she’d reached the privacy of her bedroom and dug her wallet from her purse. She kept one of her favorite letters from Jeanie there, folded up in her coin purse.
I’ll be watching you
, it said,
feeling my heart swell, and wishing I could be there beside you to tell you how proud I am of you
.

Mac was about to stick Alex’s bronze
Star Trek
medallion
inside the billfold with the note and zip it up when she reconsidered and shoved both in her back pocket.

Who knows? Maybe they’ll change my luck. I could use a little help in that department
.

“Mah-chelle! Where are you, sugar pie? We could use an extra hand right about now!”

Well, maybe the luck takes a while to start, huh?
Mac thought as she trudged back down the stairs and into the living room where Honey stood with her dad. Until Alex’s good-luck charm kicked in, Mac figured she’d have to endure being bossed around by the overly made-up blonde busting out of the top of her lacy red Catherine Malandrino camisole. And curtsy practice hadn’t even started yet.

Oh, boy
.

“C’mon, sweet pea, we need everything pushed to the edges.” Honey pointed at the far wall, where a couple of Barcelona chairs and a glass-and-chrome coffee table already rested smack in front of a shabby-chic French armoire. “Just make sure to leave places to sit. Whichever girls aren’t practicing need to be watching.”

Mac rolled her eyes, earning her a frown from her dad. She couldn’t even believe Honey had finagled his help schlepping furniture around. Since Mac’s mom had died, he seemed to prefer making himself scarce whenever he was home. Yet here he was with his work clothes still on—blue oxford-cloth shirt, pleated gray pants, and old-fashioned-looking black wingtips—though his cuffs were rolled up and his collar loosened.

Losing Jeanie had given him shadows beneath his eyes that never seemed to go away, but whenever Honey was around, he lit up like a frat boy on a first date. Except for the
gray in his hair and the creases that time had worn into his face, Mac thought he looked much the same as he did in the twenty-year-old wedding photograph that she kept in her top dresser drawer. Instead of pleasing her, it made Mac prickle with resentment.

“What’s the problem, kiddo?” he asked her, and she realized she’d been staring at him. “You need more muscle?”

“I’m good,” she said quickly, and grabbed a teak side table to carry across the room. She even made several more trips with other pieces before a large area in the middle of the floor had been cleared.

“Well, doesn’t that look nice?” Honey declared, and hustled over to where Daniel Mackenzie stood beside his daughter. “Good job,” she said, and gave Mac a pat on the back. “And here’s some sugar for you, my darlin’,” she added, and inserted herself between father and daughter, standing on the tiptoes of her red Theory wedges, planting a wet one on Dan’s lips.

Ugh!
Mac watched in disgust. “Get a room, okay?” Mac finally said so they’d separate without her having to wedge a crowbar between them. “Are we done yet?” Her cheeks heated. Because she’d had enough—in more ways than one.

“Watch your tone, young lady,” Daniel started up, but Honey shushed him by patting his chest.

“She’s right, honey bun. I’ve got a million things to do before the girls get here, and it’s nearly seven o’clock! So the hanky-panky’s gotta wait. Now, let’s get that rug out of here,” she instructed with a clap, causing Mac to groan since it meant rolling up the large Aubusson rug that was one of the few pieces of decor remaining that Jeanie Mackenzie had picked out.

“What’s wrong with practicing curtsies on a rug?” she asked, hearing the whine in her voice and not caring a bit.

“Oh, sweet pea, y’all girls need a smooth surface so you don’t trip over anything,” Honey told her. “It’s gonna take everything you’ve got just to keep from fallin’ down.”

“Everyone’s going to fall down anyway,” Mac muttered, only to get another reprimand from her father.

“If you’d stop grumbling and move it, we’d be done a lot faster,” he said, not sounding amused in the least.

Mac stared at him, biting down hard on her bottom lip. She hated when he took Honey’s side, which seemed like all the time.

She didn’t say another word as they pushed and tugged, rolling up the rug until the crimson and navy pattern could be seen from the inside out, looking a lot like a faded version of itself. Then the three of them threw their arms around it and hauled it through the house and into the garage.

Once they’d finished, Mac’s dad bugged out, pleading paperwork he needed to tend to. Mac figured it was more like he didn’t want to be anywhere in sight when nine teenage debutantes showed up on his doorstep.

Mac returned to the living room with Honey, hoping to God they were done. She wiped dust from her hands onto her Levi’s, which already bore plenty of blue and black ink marks.

“Um, can I be excused now?” Mac asked. “I’d like to be alone for a while before World War Three starts.”

Honey’s spider-lashed eyes blinked. “World War Three? What’re you talkin’ about, sweet pea? Ah.” A knowing look dawned on her china-doll face. “Laura’s not still having problems with Jo Lynn Bidwell, is she?”

Mac thought of what had happened to Laura, and she gritted her teeth. But all she’d say was “Have you ever watched that Animal Planet program on honeybees? How there can’t be two queens in a colony, or else they’ll fight to the death?”

Honey smiled. “Well, whatever’s goin’ on between Jo Lynn and Laura, they’ll sort it out one of these days. Or else, they won’t.” She shrugged. “Sometimes you’ve got to leave it to fate. I had a girl from Atlanta, Teena Stern, who was always doggin’ me at pageants. She once put superglue in my tube of eyelash glue, and it’s a good thing I loaned that stuff to Miss Louisiana before I used it. Took that girl a week to get her eyes wide open. Instead of setting fire to her hair extensions, I told myself, ‘What goes around, comes around, and Teena’ll get hers.’ Just like that”—Honey snapped her fingers—“Miss Teena developed the worst case of cystic acne I’ve ever seen. She dropped out of the pageant scene, and I never heard from her since.”

Dear God
, Mac thought,
help me
.

Another of Honey’s beauty pageant tales, and her brain would explode. “Whatever,” she said, and headed for the stairs, not even trying to be polite anymore.

“Wait a sec!” Honey called after her. “You’re not plannin’ on wearing those jeans, are you? And your flip-flops?”

Hello!
Mac might have helped the stepmonster move a rug, but she wasn’t about to let Honey dress her.

“Mah-chelle?”

Mac didn’t turn around. She held tight to the banister and kept going up. If she didn’t, she might say something she’d regret—well, something she’d regret once Honey ratted her out to her father. She didn’t even breathe until she was safely in her room with the door shut.