Divas Are Forever

by Virginia Brown

  A sudden thud on the passenger-side door interrupted my waspish whine, accompanied by a shrill bark from Chen Ling, still sitting in my lap like a furry Buddha. It scared me, and I let out a high-pitched, “Eek!”

  Bitty braked sharply, and I lurched forward, squashing the pug as the seatbelt cut into my stomach and shoulder. I threw my hands up to brace myself against the dash. If we’d been going at a normal speed, the dog and I both would be tasting airbag. My heart raced as I looked out the window. I caught a glimpse of blond hair and relaxed slightly. It had to be Brandon.

  Bitty hit the electric locks, and Brandon jerked open the back door. He flung himself inside, breathing heavily. “Go!” he shouted to Bitty, and she hit the gas.

  There was a powerful engine under the hood of that Benz. We hurtled down Van Dorn toward Craft at a speed far too fast for my tastes. Bitty didn’t slow up until we passed the dollar store. I had no idea if she ran the light at Memphis Street.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Brandon as Bitty braked at the stop sign. If it hadn’t been a dead end, I’m not sure she would have slowed down at all. We turned left on two wheels.

  “Didn’t you see him?” Brandon asked, still breathing heavily. “Some idiot chased me all the way to the library and back.”

  “Who was it? And why?”

  Brandon leaned forward, gripping the back of the front seat with both hands. “I have no idea. I was minding my own business, although I was still pretty pissed about whoever sabotaged my car, and—”

  “Wait a minute,” Bitty interrupted. “Someone did something to your car?”

  “Yeah. It wouldn’t start. It looked like they took the coil wire. I would have left it there, but the top was down, and I didn’t want whoever messed with it to come back to finish the job. So I had it towed.”

  “Is that why you wanted a ride home?” I asked, half-turning to look at him. Chitling took exception to being disturbed and growled, but I ignored her. “You didn’t want to risk walking?”

  “Kinda. Whoever did it spray-painted a few rude suggestions, and I figured they’d stick around to watch my reaction.”

  “You should have called the police,” said Bitty, and a glance at her showed her lips set in a taut line. “This town has gone nuts. First Walter, now this. Do you think they were trying to do something bad to you?”

  “Truthfully, I thought it was one of the guys messing with me at first. It looked like just whipped cream all over the car. Clayton had already gone, and the other guys offered me a ride home, but I wanted to stay for the tow truck. I thought the driver would give me a lift, but he had two guys with him and no room.”

  Brandon paused. “I think he thought it was funny. Turned out it was paint and not whipped cream, too. Anyway, he hadn’t been gone but a minute when someone came up behind me and smacked me in the back. I turned around, but it was some guy in a mask, one of those Halloween rubber ones. When he went to hit me again, I grabbed the bat out of his hands, and he took off so I chased him. Then he took out a big knife and chased me until I got back up here and saw your car.”

  “No idea who it was?” I asked, and Brandon shook his head.

  “No. He wasn’t a big guy, though. At first, I thought it might be someone I’d had a fight with a while back, but he’s a lot bigger.”

  “It could have been a friend of his, or a brother,” I suggested, and Brandon nodded.

  “Could have been. Hey, hold on—I think that’s him!”

  Bitty had turned down a side street to come around and back up to Van Dorn, and a man dressed in dark clothes and a hoodie walked down the street toward the cemetery. When she sped up, he took off running through some yards. Brandon opened the back door, and Bitty shrieked at him not to get out. He fussed a little but closed the door, opening the window to lean out and search the dark, empty yards and streets.

  We circled the block twice, but whoever it was had gone into the night. Or into one of the houses.

  “I guess we lost him,” said Bitty, and I had to admit, I was pretty relieved.

  “He could be in the cemetery,” said Brandon, and I shook my head.

  “No way. I’m not riding through the cemetery at three in the morning, I don’t care who chased you.”

  “Trinket’s right,” said Bitty after a moment, and I was pleased until she added, “The gates are locked at night.”

  We ended up going home, and of course Chitling had piddled in my lap, so I took a shower and put on a dry muumuu. When I went downstairs, Bitty and Brandon were talking.

  “We think it was just a practical joke,” said Bitty and took a sip of her wine. Some of the pink stuff she wears on her face at night had worn off, so she looked like a deranged harlequin.

  I took the glass of wine she offered me. “Some joke. Chasing a person with a knife can be dangerous.”

  Brandon nodded. “Maybe they were just trying to scare me. Otherwise, why hit me with the bat first? I’m going to find out who’s behind it and teach them a lesson.”

  “Let it go,” said Bitty, and I looked at her over the rim of my wine glass. She was serious. “It will only end up worse, I’m afraid. Promise me you’ll just put this behind you. No harm was done to anything but your car, and I’ll pay for that. I don’t want to risk someone getting really mad and doing something worse.”

  She had a point. Brandon finally agreed, and we all went to bed. I lay in the guest room gazing up at the canopy over my bed, thinking it’d been a pretty long day. And after all that had happened, it was disconcerting for someone to think it amusing to threaten anyone with a knife. It could be just a college-boy prank, but I didn’t like it. It seemed to me that Brandon had made an enemy of someone.

  Chapter 3

  “WELL, IN THE FIRST place,” I said to my mama at our kitchen table a couple days later, “anytime someone you haven’t seen in decades comes up to you and knows who you are immediately, it’s a bit of an insult. Especially when they say you haven’t changed a bit.”

  Mama nodded understanding. “It implies that either you looked twenty years older when you were in school, or that they’re lying their socks off.”

  “I always lean toward the latter explanation.” I was a bit grumpy. “Of course, in Bitty’s case, she still looks like she did in school because cosmetic surgery is a wonderful thing, and she has too much money and time on her hands.”

  After a moment Mama said, “Bless her heart.”

  “Bitty said I’m too sensitive. She said I’ve been away too long and have forgotten what people really mean when they say things like that.”

  “It’s possible, sugar.”

  I sighed. “I know. But I’ve been back home for over a year. You’d think I would have relearned the translations from Belle to English by now.”

  “That’s okay, hon.” Mama patted the back of my hand. “It’ll all come back to you soon.”

  “I’m not so sure. I never get the implications of what’s said until later, when it’s far too late to say something snarky back to them.”

  “If it’s any consolation,” Mama said after a moment, “Darlene Landers’ great-great-grandmother was a Yankee carpetbagger from Ohio. A very nice lady, according to what I’ve heard, but that whole side of the family came down here from up north after The War.”

  “Thank you, Mama,” I said, knowing that she had done her best to console me. It just doesn’t mean as much to me as it does to my parents or to the generations before them. A lot of us have moved on from old resentments.

  Walter Simpson was not one of them, however. His bitter resentment of the family’s ill fortunes during the nineteenth century was legendary in Holly Springs. I could imagine how difficult it must have been for him to play the part of a Yankee, even in a reenactment.

  “I tried to be fair,” I said aloud. “But Royal Stewart got into a
bar fight and was taken off to jail, so there wasn’t anyone who fit into his uniform. What else was I to do?”

  Mama blinked at me in confusion, and I realized she’d not followed my internal switch of conversational topic.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about Mr. Simpson.”

  Mama sighed. “Honestly, Trinket, your thought processes are too quick for me to follow. Don’t you worry about Walter Simpson being angry with you at the reenactment. He was more than capable of leaving if he didn’t want to stay. He had his own reasons for agreeing. What happened to him is terrible, but you aren’t responsible in any way. Now, I need to go check on your father. He’s out riding that blamed tractor around the fields. He’s probably scaring the neighbors.”

  “We don’t have any neighbors,” I argued needlessly. Cherryhill sits on ten acres, all that’s left of the once expansive farm. Over the years, chunks of land had been sold to housing developers and a few individuals, so ten acres was all that’s left of the original tract of land my Truevine ancestors had farmed for decades. There’s no one to leave it to but me. Emerald, my twin sister, lives out in the Northwest and doesn’t plan to ever come home to live. Getting her to come home to visit is a major coup. My only child, Michelle, lives down in Georgia and may one day want to come back to live, but I rather doubted it. I’m sure that eventually it will be sold, and I can only hope it will be to someone who appreciates a dying cherry orchard, creaky old house, and a barn full of stray cats. I’ve heard there are crazy people who can be bamboozled into taking a chance on someone else’s heritage. Maybe they’d come in and make their own heritage after I’m gone. That’d be a nice thing to have happen.

  So while my mother went outside to check on Daddy, who had recently taken to riding the John Deere over rutted fields that had once been home to cows, I got up from the table and got myself a glass of sweet tea. Mama and Daddy lived in the downstairs, having turned the parlor into their main bedroom so they don’t have to climb the stairs, and I have the entire upstairs to myself. It’s rather nice.

  I didn’t have to work at my part-time job for a few days since Carolann’s niece was in town and wanted to work with her aunt, so I had some unexpected free time. I had anticipated a lovely interlude of lazy days catching up on my reading, drinking sweet tea, and swinging in the new hammock Daddy had strung between two of the old cherry trees. Now that the pilgrimage was behind us, Bitty had plans with Jackson Lee Brunetti, her significant other. They planned to go on a trip to Europe. I was sure Bitty would come back with new clothes from all the Paris designers she could find. Lord knows, she has enough money.

  Jackson Lee is an expert lawyer with an almost mythical reputation; he’s been known to get his clients unbelievable deals in lawsuits, get the guilty acquitted or the best possible sentences, and just his name had been known to prompt opposing lawyers to advise their clients to take a deal instead of going to trial.

  He’d been in love with Bitty for quite a while. She finally took notice of him the year before, and since then, they’ve been a couple with a proclivity to nauseatingly sweet pet names. I didn’t even want to think about what they called each other in private.

  My relationship with our local vet, Dr. Kit Coltrane, was much less sugary. Neither of us was prone to syrupy sweet murmurings. Thank heavens. We had a friendship as well as a closer relationship. No, I’m not going into any details. I’m sure there’s a rule against that in the Top Twenty Things Southern Girls Learn.

  After I went upstairs and picked out a book I hadn’t had time to read, I went back into the kitchen for my sweet tea. Daddy had come in while I was upstairs deciding on which book to read first. He had snippets of cut grass on his cheek as well as his flannel shirt. I brushed off a rather large piece of nutgrass and asked if he’d had any trouble with the tractor.

  “Nope, she runs like new,” he said. “Spike did a bang-up job on her, I have to say that.”

  Since it was my clueless cousin’s fault the John Deere had stopped running, I said, “Bitty will be thrilled to hear it.” I drank some of my tea, refilled it from the pitcher, and held up my book. “I’m going out to swing in the hammock and read. I intend to be a lady of leisure for the next few days.”

  “But I’m mowing the grass,” Daddy protested.

  “It can’t be that high. It’s only April.”

  “We’ve had warm weather, and weeds get started early.”

  I put my hands on my hips. “You just want to play on your tractor, don’t you?”

  “Well, I needed to find out if it’s in good working order before the grass gets too high. It took quite a beating, you know.”

  He was right, but I didn’t want a replay of how Bitty had abused his tractor in one of her manic schemes, so I just said, “It’s fine now. Can’t you mow later?”

  “I’ll just mow the orchard first. I can trim the grass later, I suppose.”

  I kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you, Daddy.”

  My father and I are a lot alike in some ways. I got my height from him, since he’s still over six feet despite age robbing him of an inch or so; my mother is very petite, and her silver hair was once blond. My sister Emerald got Mama’s height, small bone structure, and lovely blond hair. I got Daddy’s height and the Truevine tendency to collect annoying fat cells in random parts of my anatomy. I also got the darker hair, although it’s always had streaks of red that’s called dark auburn on the boxes of color I buy at Walmart. I had to start coloring my hair after Mama’s crazy dog decided all the gray on my head was his enemy, the squirrel. He’d look at me and bark ferociously. It was rather unpleasant.

  Since Daddy and I had struck a truce, I didn’t want to be too greedy. I took my sweet tea and book up to my room to wait for him to finish mowing the orchard. There’s a long enclosed porch across the entire back of the room. At one time before air conditioning, it’d been used as a sleeping porch. Now it has windows that lift and screens to keep out mosquitos or other parasites. I raised the windows to let in a cooling breeze and chose a big, overstuffed chair to curl up in with my book and tea. I’d gotten behind on my reading. I’ve always loved to read, especially as a child.

  When I had graduated from Dick and Jane and Spot, I gravitated toward stories with horses, like Black Beauty, My Friend Flicka, and an old book titled Ticktock and Jim. Jim is the boy in the story, and he and his pony had some grand adventures. I’d always begged for a pony. Daddy always replied that we had cows, but he wouldn’t let me ride them. Bitty had a pony, and at the tender age of six, she’d ridden over to my house, and we’d gone off on some grand adventures of our own. It was an activity we enthusiastically pursued for the rest of our childhood. Very few of our adventures had parental approval. We also spent a great deal of our youth grounded to our homes, where we did numerous chores to atone for our sins. The upside of being grounded was that we watched a lot of TV and became acquainted with characters like Samantha and Darrin, Lucy and Ethel, Rob and Laura, Andy and Barney, and Scooby-Doo and Shaggy. I still remember 77 Sunset Strip reruns with great fondness. My oldest brother emulated the character Kookie by combing his hair all the time. We just loved to tease him about it.

  To this day, Bitty and I enjoy reliving our childhoods. My mother often remarks that we never left our childhoods. She may be right.

  The smell of freshly cut grass drifted through the window screens and into the room as I curled up to read, the drone of the mower familiar and soothing. Before I knew it, I was waking up and it was afternoon. I’m not a person who naps often or well. One of the reasons for that is my state of confusion upon waking, as if I’ve just arrived in a time machine and can’t figure out where I am or why I’m there. My tongue is usually thick and I’ve drooled on myself, and any attempt at conversation is marred by the fact I can’t properly form words.

  I had a crick in my neck from having fallen asleep with my head bent over,
my book had fallen to the floor, and all the ice in my sweet tea had melted. Watered down tea is not on the list of my favorite things. So I stumbled downstairs with my head bent in what I feared would be a permanent and unattractive position. I had my tea glass in one hand and a Kleenex to wipe the drool off my chin in my other. I’m sure I walked like Quasimodo, from The Hunchback of Notre Dame fame.

  Of course, the very first person I saw upon staggering into the kitchen was Kit Coltrane. Just his voice can make my heart go pitty-pat, as if I were sixteen again. The actual sight of him can skyrocket my blood pressure. Not just because he’s quite handsome, which he is, but because he has a warm, wonderful smile and he really likes me. I’m always a little awed by the last. I’m also puzzled by it, but I figure What the heck? If he’s attracted to tall, eccentric women with an extra fifteen pounds cleverly hidden in sweatpants or Lee jeans, who am I to argue?

  “Hey, gorgeous,” he said with a grin, and I said something back in a jumble of syllables that passed for the English language.

  “Whd dun hm do how her.”

  Kit is very polite. His mama raised him right, and he didn’t say anything at all tacky. He just nodded as if he understood. “I came out to check on one of your mama’s sick cats.”

  My parents had decided to be caretakers of a vast legion of stray cats that congregate in the barn quite punctually twice a day. They don’t have to be summoned, but my father likes to yodel for them, just in case one has missed its internal dietary clock. It’s rather like hog calling but without the suu-eee. When one of the furry stomachs on feet comes down with an ailment, the vet is immediately contacted. Kit makes house calls.

  Since I wasn’t at my best and hoped he hadn’t noticed, I smiled and headed for the tea. By the time I reached the refrigerator, I was coherent enough to ask if he’d like a glass. He gave me another one of his devastating smiles.

  “I have to give a round of injections, but as soon as I get back in, I would love a glass of sweet tea. No lemon.”