Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes (11 page)

Trevor saw her transformation and he stopped laughing. Eadie’s eyes looked past him, fixed on some future that didn’t include him, and it was so quiet and unexpected, this withdrawal from him, that it left him stunned. He had not expected her to give up so easily.

All around them the crowd, loosed from their enchantment, began to chatter and move around. Lavonne put her arm around Eadie and began to propel her gently but firmly toward the scuppernong arbor. Nita joined them on the other side putting her arm around Eadie. Little Moses passed carrying two water pitchers on a tray and Lavonne took the pitchers and dashed the water on the ground. “Do me a favor,” she said, handing the empty containers back to him. “Fill these up with frozen margaritas and bring them to us in the arbor. Then unplug the machine and put an ‘out of order’ sign on it. This party’s over.”

Trevor and Tonya left, the gate banging shut behind them.

L
AVONNE AND
N
ITA
sat out on the patio drinking coffee and watching Eadie and Little Moses dance slowly around the pool to the mournful crooning of Tony Bennett. The guests had left hours ago. Charles had long ago stumbled upstairs to bed. Leonard had gone to drive his unconscious secretary home. The Burning Bush boys had finished most of the cleanup and Little Moses had driven them and Mona home, and had come back to give Eadie a ride. Eadie had been drinking tequila shooters and he figured she might need a designated driver.

Nita watched Eadie and Little Moses dance slowly around the pool. He reminded her so much of Jimmy Lee Motes, with his dark hair and tall slender body.
That’s what Jimmy Lee’s arms would feel like,
she thought, seeing how tightly he embraced Eadie.
That’s how gracefully Jimmy Lee would dance.

Beside her Lavonne flipped absentmindedly through a photo album that Charles and Leonard and Trevor had compiled over the years of their trips to Montana. “See, here’s Leonard when he had hair,” she said, jabbing the page with her finger. “Look how young they were in this picture.” She shoved the book at Nita, but Nita was watching Eadie and Little Moses with a strange expression on her face. Lavonne looked again at the photo. They did look young. And hopeful, with their unlined faces and bright smiles. But Lavonne could see a change in each succeeding photograph. With the passing of the years their faces became less hopeful and more secretive, hardened into lines of resignation and distrust. Lavonne flipped to a photo taken on last year’s trip. It was a close-up shot of all of them standing with their arms around one another’s shoulders out in a field somewhere. Something about the picture was wrong, something flickered for a moment in her brain, an uneasiness, a warning, but she was tired and she could not focus on what it was that bothered her. She turned the page.

“Where’s that tequila bottle?” Eadie said, letting go of Little Moses to look for it.

Lavonne watched her warily. “You might want to drink some coffee instead. I believe you’ve had enough tequila for one evening.”

Eadie, looking more and more like the old Eadie and less like the dazed wounded woman at the party, grinned and lifted her glass. “One more shot,” she said. “And it’s all over.”

Lavonne went back to the photo album. “This one is a little out of focus,” she said.

“Let me see,” Little Moses said. He sat down beside her and leaned in close. The candlelight flickered over his face. He squinted his eyes and pointed. “What’s this?” he asked.

“What?” Lavonne leaned in closer.

“This.” He tapped the photo with his finger.

Lavonne stared at the photograph. “Oh my God,” she said. She flipped back to the picture that had bothered her. She pushed the album closer to the lantern, and leaned in close and looked down into the sly smiling faces of her husband and his partners.

“What’s the matter?” Nita said.

Lavonne sat back in her chair. “Look at this picture,” she said in an odd voice. Nita sighed. She leaned over the album. “What do you see?” Lavonne asked.

“I see . . . I don’t know,” Nita said. “It looks like a hand.” It was a bit blurry, resting there on Leonard’s shoulder like a furry animal.

“What kind of hand?”

“A hand with red fingernails,” Nita said, still not comprehending.

“And here.” Lavonne flipped through to the last photo and jabbed it with her finger. “What does this look like?”

Nita peered intently at something lying on the ground beside Leonard’s hunting locker. “A shoe,” she said.

“What kind of shoe?”

“A high-heeled shoe. A leopard-print high-heeled shoe.”

Lavonne flipped back to a photograph taken fifteen years ago. There at the edge of a field sat a folding camp chair and draped across that chair, unmistakably, was a pair of lace panties.

“Leonard’s hunting locker smells like cheap perfume,” Lavonne said, remembering the day she came home to find him cleaning it out.

Nita stared at her, hard, for ten seconds. She blinked. “Charles has condoms in the pocket of his hunting jacket,” she said.

Little Moses ducked his head and checked his fingernails for dirt.

“Either our husbands are transvestites, or they’ve been bringing women with them,” Lavonne said.

Eadie quit looking for the tequila and lurched over to the table. “Let me see that book,” she said. “Let me see that damn book.”

“Maybe they found the shoe,” Little Moses suggested. Being the only male present, he felt a certain obligation to play devil’s advocate. “Maybe they picked it up in the woods.”

“They picked up something in the woods,” Eadie said darkly, looking at the photos.

“What about the panties?” Lavonne asked Little Moses. “What about the cheap perfume and the condoms?”

Little Moses was a musician in a Jewish reggae band. He had long ago learned to recognize futility. He shrugged and put his head back, and looked at the stars.

“I can’t believe it,” Lavonne said, trying desperately to believe it wasn’t true even though, somewhere deep in the pit of her stomach, she knew it was. “Maybe there’s some explanation.” But she knew there wasn’t. Not one she’d be willing to settle for, anyway.

Eadie set her shot glass down on the table and flipped slowly through the book. Coming so soon after the realization that her husband had walked out of her life forever, this revelation settled over Eadie like a blow to the head. “How could we be so stupid,” she wheezed. “How could we be so blind?”

Tony Bennett sang of love and heartbreak. Japanese lanterns flickered in the treetops like fallen stars. Lavonne had a sudden memory of her mother lying in an opened coffin, her face oddly pleasant, the sickly sweet odor of flowers and embalming fluid filling the room.

“All these years we’ve been sitting home worrying they’d catch pneumonia or accidentally shoot each other or die in a plane crash,” Lavonne said. “And they’ve been bringing women along.”

Eadie struggled to draw breath. “Well, this has been an evening we’ll never forget,” she said flatly.

“I wish I’d had more to drink,” Lavonne said. “I wish I wasn’t stone cold sober.”

“It’s not too late to fix that.”

“I need to keep my wits about me while I figure out what in the hell I’m going to do.”

Nita stirred and shook herself like a woman waking from a deep and implacable slumber. “Those bastards,” she said. “Those lousy, cheating bastards.”

CHAPTER

SIX

T
HE NEXT MORNING
they met at Eadie Boone’s house to plan revenge.

“The thing that gets me,” Eadie said, setting a bottle of tequila and three glasses down on the table between them, “is that they got away with it for so long.” She cut up some limes and poured salt on a plate in the middle of the table. “How stupid can we be?” she said. Eadie’s eyes had a feverish quality. Her hair was unwashed and uncombed. She looked like a woman on the edge of something dangerous. Some women had a knack for decorating and some had a knack for picking wardrobes and some were real good with arts and crafts or gourmet cooking. Eadie Boone had a knack for revenge. She’d been practicing it, in one form or another, all her life.

“Why are we drinking tequila at nine-thirty in the morning?” Lavonne said. She still felt hung over from the night before. A plate of brownies rested on the table in front of her and, looking at it, Lavonne realized she didn’t want one. She knew she would never again gorge herself on brownies or Rocky Road ice cream or Peach Paradise; that part of her life was over forever.

“We’re drinking tequila because it feels like the right thing to do,” Eadie said. If Eadie was hung over, she hid it well. “Tequila gets me in my revenge-planning mood.”

Nita sat there with her hands clasped on the table. There was a stillness about her, a composure that seemed artificial and slightly sinister.

“I’ve got a few ideas for the revenge part, but before we talk about that, there’s something else we need to talk about first,” Lavonne said.

Eadie dipped the glasses in salt, poured out three shots of tequila, and pushed them around the table. Lavonne stared at hers. Nita picked hers up but didn’t put it to her lips. Eadie swallowed her shot, and set the empty glass down on the table. She picked up a lime slice and sucked it, hard.

“I’ve got my own idea for the revenge part,” Eadie said, grimacing. “I say we have them killed. I say we take out a contract on them or, hell, even do it ourselves.”

“Let’s be serious,” Lavonne said.

Eadie stared at her steadily and Lavonne could see she was serious. “Forensic technology makes it real hard to get away with murder these days,” she reminded Eadie.

“So you have thought about it,” Eadie said.

“I’ve thought about murdering my own husband, but I’ve never considered murdering yours.”

Eadie nodded as if she understood perfectly the logic of this statement. Nita said in a quiet voice, “You have to make it look like an accident.”

No one said anything. After a moment, Lavonne patted Nita’s hand nervously and said, “Yes, Nita, of course you’re right. We could make it look like an accident if we murdered
one
of them, but not all
three.
” Lavonne lifted the glass to her lips and sipped her drink. It tasted worse than anything she’d ever drunk. It was one thing to drink frozen margaritas; it was something else entirely to toss back straight shots of tequila.

Eadie, the tequila connoisseur, said, “Lavonne, you don’t sip it. You down it in one gulp.”

“You drink it your way, I’ll drink it mine,” Lavonne said stubbornly. She didn’t want to drink it at all, but she felt it signified something meaningful, some important ritual blood sisters might do on a moonlit night in front of an open fire. Only instead of cutting themselves and sharing their blood, they were sharing tequila. It was the same concept. Beside her, Nita lifted the glass to her lips and put her head back. She slowly set the empty glass on the table. Her face was expressionless. Eadie offered her a lime slice but she shook her head, no.

“Nita, what do you think?” Lavonne said, noticing Nita’s blank look. She hoped Nita wasn’t getting ready to go postal on them. Wasn’t it always the quiet ones who were the most dangerous?

“I think they should be punished,” Nita said quietly.

“Well, all right then.” Eadie poured herself and Nita another glass. “Maybe we could hire the Burning Bush boys to kill them. Hell, if we’d known last night we could have paid the boys to poison them.”

“The Burning Bush boys are a Jewish reggae band,” Lavonne reminded her. “They’re not contract killers.”

“That Johnny would do it,” Eadie said, lifting her glass. “Or Little Moses. I could talk him into it. I could talk Little Moses into just about anything.”

Lavonne lifted the shot glass to her lips and swallowed. The tequila ran down the back of her throat like battery acid. She could feel it burning a hole in the bottom of her stomach. “Good God,” she choked. “That’s nasty.”

Eadie grinned and poured her another shot. “After awhile you get used to it,” she promised. “After awhile, you don’t feel a thing.”

“Look,” Lavonne said, suddenly all business. “We have to plan this revenge right. We have to plan this so those sons of bitches don’t know what hit them. Murder is easy. Anyone can do it. We’re intelligent women and we can plan something better than murder. Something creative and truly humiliating.”

Far away, in the deepest recesses of the big house, a radio played. Eadie listened to the faint music. She stared despondently at her shot glass. She was a woman, now, without any illusions. It had felt courageous and noble to accept the fact her marriage was over in front of Trevor and the assembled elite of Ithaca. It had felt a little like the Christians facing the lions in the Coliseum. But realizing Trevor had been secretly cheating on her for years felt less like martyrdom and more like defeat. It felt . . . pathetic. “What do you have in mind?” she said to Lavonne, after a few minutes. She tapped her glass along the edge of the table. Nita stared out the bay window, watching a squirrel raid the bird feeder.

“We need to be organized about this,” Lavonne said. “But before we talk about the revenge plan, we need to be clear on something else.”

Eadie poured three more drinks. She raised her glass and Lavonne and Nita raised their glasses automatically. “Here’s to revenge,” Eadie said. They all clinked their glasses, downed their drinks, and set the empty glasses back down on the table. The tequila roared through Lavonne’s brain like a monsoon. It was true what Eadie had said. After awhile she couldn’t feel a thing. She couldn’t even feel her feet.

Lavonne shook herself. “Okay, then,” she said. Finding out her husband was a lying cheating bastard took a lot of the pressure off. It absolved her of any of the guilt she had felt over not being able to save her marriage.
My sins have been washed clean,
she thought. Only instead of sacrificial wine, it was tequila doing the washing. “The thing that occurred to me last night, was that our husbands have been cheating on us for fifteen years but no one’s filed for divorce yet.” She colored slightly and glanced at Eadie, but she seemed fine with this, so Lavonne went on. “I think they probably see their party in the woods as an annual transgression. They get to be bad boys once a year and the rest of the time they’re good, hard-working lawyers. At least, I think that’s how they see the whole hunting trip.”

Eadie looked at her. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about divorce. I’m talking about the fact that this cheating has been going on for fifteen years and not one of our husbands has seen fit to divorce us over it.”

“What do
we
have to do with it?” Eadie was getting irritated trying to follow her convoluted logic.

“What I’m saying is, our revenge doesn’t have to end in divorce. Whatever we decide to do to punish them doesn’t have to include divorce, unless we feel our marriages are over, of course. Each one of us has to decide that for herself.”

Eadie swirled her shot glass, spilling tequila on the table. It was bad enough Trevor had cheated on her openly twice, but to have cheated behind her back for fifteen years was more than Eadie could ever understand or forgive. “I think it was real apparent to ya’ll last night that my marriage is over,” Eadie said. “My marriage is so over I’m fantasizing how to have the cheating bastard killed.”

“I thought about it all last night,” Lavonne said. “And I’ve come to the conclusion my marriage was over years ago.” She had slept like a baby and awakened refreshed, transformed by dreamless sleep and the knowledge she had stayed in her marriage because of boredom and fear, and for the sake of the children. She had, in effect, become her mother. “The only thing that’s kept Leonard and me together is the girls, and they’re nearly grown. I realize that now, and I’m guessing Leonard realizes it, too, or he wouldn’t spend so much time away from home. He wouldn’t be looking forward to this damn hunting trip so much when he hasn’t been on a family vacation in five years.”

They both looked at Nita. She sat staring out the window, watching the squirrel splash at the birdbath. Nita thought about the years she had spent trying to make Charles Broadwell happy. She thought about her children who headed for their rooms the minute they heard their father’s footsteps in the hall, and she thought about the big house and the private school and the beach house and all the things her children were accustomed to having. She thought of those sad single women she had watched on afternoon TV talk shows, the ones who struggled to raise children on a secretary’s salary or worked two jobs to pay the bills. She tried to remember if anyone in her family had been through a divorce and the only one she could think of was her Aunt Effie, the black sheep of the family who had run off to Daytona Beach with a dog track gambler. Nita shook her head and looked down at her little glass, watching the way the light caught in the clear-colored liquor. “I don’t know about divorce,” she said. “I just want him punished is all.”

“We understand, Nita,” Lavonne said, drawing little Mandela symbols in her Daytimer. “You’ve got more vested in your marriage than either of us, and your children are young.” She beat the table with her pencil, flipping it between her fingers like a drumstick. “Okay, so it’s decided. Eadie and I leave our marriages—Nita, you stay.” She tapped out a sharp staccato beat on the table. “First thing is, we all have to agree to complete secrecy. We can’t let the husbands know we found out about the women. I know Little Moses won’t say anything if I ask him not to, and none of us can say a word to anyone either. We have to keep our plans for divorce and revenge secret until they leave for their hunting trip, because it won’t work if they get wind of what’s coming. I know it’s hard, but we have to go on with our lives and act like nothing’s happened. Act like we don’t know a thing. We’ve only got four weeks until they leave for Montana; whatever we decide to do, has to be done within that time frame.”

“You’re rambling,” Eadie said, pouring another round of drinks. “What has to be kept secret: the fact that we’re leaving them, or the revenge?”

“Both,” Lavonne said. “The first thing you and I have to do, Eadie, is figure out what assets we can get our hands on. Anything that doesn’t have our husbands’ name on it, bank accounts, stock certificates, you get the picture.”

“Well, there won’t be much of that,” Eadie said. “Besides, Trevor’s always been fair with me from a monetary standpoint.”

“Look, Eadie, just because Trevor’s been fair with you in the past, doesn’t mean he’ll continue to be fair. Remember, they’re good lawyers and they’ll fight us tooth and nail over any divorce settlement. I mean, eventually we’ll prevail, but they’ll tie the cases up in court so long we won’t see a penny for years. And that’s only
if
we can find an attorney in this town who’ll agree to represent us.”

“Rosebud Smoot will represent us,” Eadie said.

“Well, she’s the only one I know who will. You know how lawyers all stick together in times of trouble and divorce.”

“Trust me, Rosebud’s the only lawyer we’ll need.”

Rosebud Smoot was the first female attorney to practice in Ithaca. She had graduated number one in her class at Georgia forty years ago, and when she returned to town, had been offered a job as a legal secretary. Now she made a good living representing the ex-wives of corporate executives and lawyers who had a hard time finding legal representation among the closed, good ole’ boy network that was Ithaca, Georgia. If it weren’t for Rosebud, these women would have had to go all the way to Atlanta to find a lawyer.

“That’s all very well and good, Eadie, but remember, a court case could take years to settle. Meanwhile, I want to get on with my life. And I need money to do that.”

“Okay, so what are you saying?”

“I’m saying, make a list of assets. Start thinking of ways to get your hands on some quick cash.” She remembered the pretty young financial adviser she’d watched on
Oprah.
Lavonne wished now she’d paid more attention that day to what the woman was saying. She looked at Nita. “I know you’re not planning on divorcing Charles, but it’s probably a good idea for you to start figuring out where the marital assets are, Nita, and maybe try to move a few into your name. Just in case. Just to be on the safe side.”

Nita looked at her hands. She knew she wouldn’t find any assets with her name on them. She had to beg Charles for money if she went twenty dollars over on the weekly grocery bill. She had to grovel and then she had to sit and listen while he lectured her on the importance of sticking to a household budget.

“We’ve got less than four weeks until our husbands leave for Montana; all this has to come together by then. If we can’t figure out how to come up with cash, if we can’t figure out how to punish them by the time they leave for Montana, then we might as well forget it. We might as well plan on staying married until we can get it all figured out, and that could take months.”

“Obviously you aren’t including me,” Eadie said. “Trevor made it pretty clear he was going to marry that idiot Tonya, which means he needs to divorce me quick.”

“Let him file the papers, Eadie. Don’t you do it. Not yet, anyway. Maybe he’ll be so busy trying to get ready for his hunting trip, he won’t have time to file. Time is on our side—up to a point.”

“I don’t like all this secretive shit,” Eadie said. “I like doing things out in the open. I like letting other people know where I stand.”

“I know,” Lavonne said. “I can barely stomach the idea of staying in the same house with Leonard for one day, much less weeks.” The difficulty of this plan was beginning to dawn on her; she’d never been one to keep her mouth shut. She’d never been one to keep her feelings hidden. How in the world was she going to live with Leonard for four weeks trying to pretend nothing was wrong? “But we have to do this if we want everything to work out.” She looked at Eadie to see if she understood. Eadie frowned and shrugged and Lavonne went on. “Okay, now that that’s settled, let’s move on to the next order of business, which is the revenge planning session.” Lavonne raised her little glass in a toast and Nita and Eadie did, too.