by Kim Gatlin
“Has anybody else been Ball Chair two years in a row?” Amanda asked diplomatically.
“No,” Susie said, “of course not. But I figure there’s a first time for everything. Although, now I wouldn’t touch the Longhorn Ball with a ten-foot pole. Officers, can we just get this over with?”
“Honestly, ma’am,” one of the police officers began, his tone respectful and reproachful at the same time, “we were actually waiting for you ladies to finish your conversation so we could, um, take you to jail.”
Suddenly Susie gave Amanda a look that was both troubled and threatening. “You’re not gonna tell anybody they took me out of the Longhorn Ball office in handcuffs, are you?” she asked plaintively. “I’d be embarrassed to death if anybody knew this happened to me.”
Amanda thought about the exercise in gossip that she had just experienced in the Bible study.
“Cross my heart,” she said.
Susie relaxed. “I knew I could count on you,” she said. Then she furrowed her brow. “You back in town?” She tried to sneak a surreptitious glance at Amanda’s left hand. “Where’s your wedding ring? You and Bill are done, huh?”
“You could say so,” Amanda admitted. “The children and I just moved back to Dallas.”
“Well, I’m sorry for your pain,” Susie said sincerely. “But I guess I can tell you now.”
“Tell me what?”
“Your husband,” Susie said. “Okay, your ex-husband. He made a pass at me.”
“What?! When?” Amanda asked, surprised. Then she instantly asked herself why she was surprised.
“The day of your wedding.”
“At my wedding?”
Amanda’s ex had always said that he never understood what Edward saw in Susie. Bill said he thought she looked like a monkey. He didn’t even find her attractive, Amanda thought, shaking her head. Good riddance, she said to herself, totally disgusted.
One of the police officers gave Susie a look.
“All right, officers,” Susie said, in a voice that expressed her weariness. “I guess my work for the Longhorn Ball falls into the ‘no good deed goes unpunished’ category. You might as well go ahead and shoot me now, if that’s what you’ve got in mind.”
“We were just going to take you down to the station,” one of the police officers said. “We won’t be shooting anybody today.”
“That’s unless you try to mace us in the cruiser,” the other one said, only half in jest. The police officers gently guided Susie down the path toward their black-and-white.
“Would you be a dear and call my husband at the office?” Susie called to Amanda over her shoulder. “Let him know I might need to be bailed out.”
“Um, sure,” Amanda said, thinking surely Susie knew she wouldn’t know how to begin to try and reach Ed, but if it made her feel better to think so . . .
“I’m glad you’re back,” Susie added. “Let’s have lunch and catch up.”
“I’d love to,” Amanda said. She watched as Susie chewed out the officers as they placed her into the backseat of the police car.
Welcome to Dallas, Amanda thought, shaking her head again. Welcome home.
Chapter 3
Amanda watched the cruiser fade into the distance, in shock at what she’d just witnessed, trying to process the arrest of a sorority sister. She checked her watch. A quarter after three. She had to be at the Realtor’s at three thirty to sign the papers and pick up the keys to her new home. There was something unsettling about the idea of renting in a community where you grew up and the only people who rented were executives doing two- or three-year stints with multinational companies, social climbers, and divorcées. So often, people would move to Dallas, discover Hillside Park, and if they didn’t like their past, create a new one, or at least a more respectable one. In Hillside Park, renting implied a lack of seriousness of purpose about life. If you were renting, could you really be trusted? People would even sometimes say, “Well, she’s renting,” as if to summarize in a single word the lack of financial stability of the individual under discussion.
Nevertheless, it made no sense for Amanda to buy right away, and she knew it. She had plenty of money, thanks to her late father; that wasn’t an issue. She had her own family money from oil, gas, and banking interests, and would have whatever the lawyers worked out for her with Bill (and that would be substantial). But she wanted to get reacquainted with the neighborhood before she made a purchase of any kind, since she’d been away for so long. She couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Dallas, and within Dallas anywhere but Hillside Park, so it wasn’t a question of whether or not the neighborhood appealed to her. Of course it did. It was still Mayberry—okay, Mayberry with a lot of zeroes after it. It was a place where kids rode their bikes to public school, and public schools were so well-funded that the Texas legislature, led by that socialist Ann Richards after she talked her way into the Texas governor’s mansion—God rest her soul—had actually passed a Robin Hood–style luxury tax on the community, forcing it to share its wealth with impoverished school districts throughout the state. Indeed, Texas was dotted with small towns where the public schools, paid for with hard-earned (or easily clipped, it didn’t matter) Hillside Park dollars, were frequently much newer and nicer than the homes that surrounded them.
It was actually hard to figure out a good reason to leave Hillside Park. At any time, for any purpose. The community certainly had all the churches anybody could ask for, as well as three country clubs—the second and third of which had been founded by individuals blackballed at the first and then the second—three shopping areas with all the high-end stores to which anyone could aspire, office buildings (so that the professionals in its midst could have commutes only as long as it took them to jog to their offices), a movie theater, and one of the finest universities in the Southwest, all within its fabled borders. It was said that the two most popular sports in Hillside Park were golf and illegally subsidizing the university football team.
Amanda crossed the street, got back in her car, and headed for the real estate office of Ann Anderson, located across from the Starbucks in Hillside Park Village. Ann Anderson’s grandfather had started the agency in the early 1920s, when Hillside Park was little more than lot lines and a huckster’s dream. The original Anderson, Dan, had settled in Dallas after having been railroaded out of half a dozen towns from Indiana to Kansas, where his rampant real estate speculation had ended up taking serious money out of the pockets of the locals while leaving nothing but plot lines and sticks in the ground. Dan Anderson was planning on the same activity in Hillside Park, but then he realized that in a city like Dallas, in the midst of its oil boom, there was more money to be made legitimately in real estate than fraudulently. So Dan actually stuck around long enough not only to create a consortium to develop Hillside Park, but also to reap the financial and social rewards that came to those in Dallas, or those anywhere, who somehow managed to turn a little bit of money into a whole lot of it. Dan Anderson married a daughter of one of his first home buyers, a roughneck-turned-oil-gazillionaire also named Anderson. The “double Andersons” and their progeny had dominated the Hillside Park social hierarchy ever since, to the point where the daughters of the family kept their own names when they married, long before movie stars and television anchorwomen adopted the same habit. It was a short drive from Hillside Park Presbyterian to Anderson Realty in Hillside Park Village; it was a short drive from anywhere to anywhere else in the neighborhood, which was one of its charms.
Amanda glimpsed herself in the rearview mirror. I must look horrific, she told herself, running a hand through her humidity-dampened hair. Again she found herself missing the cool ocean breezes of Newport Beach.
To Amanda’s surprise, the office was practically empty. Real estate was hitting a slow spot, which meant that a whole bunch of people in the community who had been flipping properties for fun and profit were now stuck with unoccupied rental houses, underoccupied apartment buildings, and even a few office b
uildings. Nobody was going to go belly-up, though. It wasn’t that kind of place.
“Hello,” Amanda said to the receptionist. “I’m looking for Ann Anderson.” The receptionist smiled, clearly agreeing this was the only place to buy a house in Hillside Park.
Certainly, there were plenty of other agencies from which to choose, but it seemed unpatriotic to go anywhere else. And besides, if you didn’t list your house with Ann, or if you didn’t buy from her when you were upgrading, you and your spouse would pay such a high social price that it didn’t make sense trying to save the one or two percent discount other brokers offered. Not buying or selling with Ann Anderson was like not responding to a chain e-mail and sending it on to six more people. A husband’s business would dry up, his tee times at the club would mysteriously vanish, and restaurants would somehow lose his reservations. Not to mention their names disappearing from every social mailing list on the planet.
As for the wife, it was even worse. Ann’s mother, Catherine, even in her eighties, was still the grande dame of Hillside Park social matters, and she was still the ultimate arbiter of those who were “good people” and those who were not. You didn’t get anywhere in life, or in Hillside Park, by crossing the Andersons. And since the firm was so well-connected, the Andersons always did a great job of representing their clients, because they had more buyers and sellers than the rest of the agencies in the neighborhood put together. Put that all together and it would never have occurred to Amanda to go elsewhere.
Ann had helped Amanda, by long-distance phone and e-mail, in locating an appropriate four-bedroom home to rent for a year or two while Amanda figured out what the next direction of her life would be. To her credit, Ann had been extremely discreet with regard to information about the collapse of Amanda’s marriage and her return with her children to Dallas—she hadn’t told more than a dozen people, which, in Hillside Park terms, is about as close as a person can come to depositing a secret in Fort Knox. That’s probably how they made the connection in the Bible study, Amanda realized. One of Ann’s dozen divas she’d confided in had not kept her confidence. They say a woman’s loyalty only lasts as long as it takes her to hang up and dial again.
“I’m sorry,” the receptionist, a plain-looking woman in her early twenties, said over her dark-rimmed glasses. Ann had a thing about not hiring attractive young women. They kept getting snatched up by the male home buyers, single or otherwise. It just took too long to train new ones. “She’s out with a client.”
Amanda checked her watch. They were supposed to meet at three thirty, and it was three thirty. “I was supposed to meet her right about now,” Amanda said, surprised and slightly miffed. The receptionist gave her a conspiratorial grin.
“It’s some guy from Kentucky,” she confided. “They’re looking at ranches.”
“Oh,” Amanda said, nodding, as if she was supposed to take some sort of comfort from the fact that Ann was out with a heavy hitter and not with some Regular Joe just looking for a house.
Anybody who was wealthy enough to buy a ranch could afford to command Ann’s time anytime.
“When’s she getting back?” Amanda asked.
The receptionist shrugged. “I don’t know if she’s getting back today,” she admitted. “They’re halfway to Plano.”
“I’m supposed to pick up some keys from her,” Amanda said, her sense of amusement about the whole thing, such as it was, rapidly fading. “Didn’t she say anything about me?”
“Let me get someone who can help you.”
I’m being treated like an outsider, Amanda thought, and she definitely didn’t like it.
“Yes, yes, I’ll help her,” a voice familiar to Amanda called out from a cubicle halfway to the back of the agency. “I know all about it.”
I know that voice, Amanda told herself. I just can’t place it. I’ve just been away too long.
Suddenly Heather Sappington emerged from the cubicle and slithered down the hall. Once again, Amanda thought she was imagining things. The last time she had seen Heather had been fifteen years earlier, at a Longhorn Ball where Heather had gotten famously drunk and had danced solo with a cowboy hat, doing something that resembled a dirty-cowgirl stripper routine. She was last seen that night kicking and screaming, being literally carried off by a security guard who, by day, was a lineman for the SMU football team. Rumor had it, and a highly accurate rumor it was, that once he had carried her off to her car, she returned the favor by bringing him back to her place, a somewhat dingy two-story apartment she shared with her ninety-four-year-old grandfather on the other side of the acceptable boundary line of Hillside Park.
Certainly, neither Heather nor the security guard was seen again at the event, even though their departure took place around ten p.m. and he and the rest of the SMU football team—along with off-duty Dallas cops patrolling the perimeter of the event on horseback—had been hired to be there until two a.m. A neighbor of Heather’s said that he was awakened by a large man barely fitting into a sport coat carrying a bag of clinking empties past his home; his first thought was that the guy had murdered Heather’s grandfather and stolen his beloved coin collection. When the police stopped him a few blocks away, it turned out that all he had in the bag were empty vodka bottles that Heather had asked him to remove on his way out.
The next morning, Heather, looking only slightly worse for wear, appeared in her usual pew at Hillside Park Presbyterian, praying earnestly for salvation—or maybe praying that the football player would keep his promise to call her again sometime. The only clue to the fact that she might have had a longer or more tiring night than the rest of the congregation was the fact that she was the only one out of the 1,100 penitents present wearing sunglasses indoors. But that was Heather, Amanda realized. A bottle of vodka in one hand and a Bible in the other; there wasn’t a single Bible study or party she had ever been known to miss. She was just as famous for passing out the Rabbit, a battery-operated sex toy, her personal favorite made famous on Sex and the City, to her single girlfriends as she was for giving sets of coffee mugs bearing different Bible verses on each to her married friends.
“Oh my gosh,” Amanda said, trying to look happy to see Heather, whom she had never really liked. That night fifteen years ago was only the first episode that came to mind, but there were many others. Amanda felt that if you were going to be a party girl, be a party girl. If you were going to hold yourself up as a fine Christian woman, be more mindful of the behavior you demonstrate—but how you could serve two such radically different masters never made sense to Amanda.
Heather came rushing over to Amanda, gave her a hug and a few air kisses, and studied her from top to bottom.
“My, my. So you’re back in Dallas!” Heather exclaimed, and Amanda sensed that Heather was trying to restrain her sense of glee that yet another marriage had bitten the dust.
“I guess I am,” Amanda said, with an aw-shucks tone of voice, as if to say, that’s life—not all marriages last forever.
“You poor, poor dear,” Heather said, with an uncontrollably insincere tone. Amanda tried to remember what that German word she had heard in college was, the one that meant taking pleasure in the pain of others. Schadenfreude, that was it. If you looked it up in the dictionary, you would see Heather’s face right next to it.
“Ann told me all about it,” Heather said, and then she backtracked. “I mean, about you coming by to pick up keys,” she added quickly. “That’s really all I know.”
Amanda nodded wearily. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I just got back from Bible study at Hillside Park Presbyterian, and they’re already praying for me.”
“And your darling kids,” Heather added, and then she winced. “Children,” she corrected herself. “I just can never remember to say children instead of kids. I’m never gonna get this.” Amanda knew exactly what she was talking about. There were certain conversational rules that applied in Hillside Park, and if you didn’t follow them, people would question whether you really
even belonged in the neighborhood. One of the conversational giveaways to a non–Hillside Park childhood was the use of the word kids instead of the proper word children. Among the mothers of Hillside Park, children were children, kids were goats, and people who didn’t know the difference didn’t belong.
“You can’t worry about things like that,” Amanda assured Heather, and suddenly she found herself asking why she was so interested in the feelings of a woman who was perhaps the ultimate gossip machine in the community. Amanda found herself surreptitiously glancing at the ring finger on Heather’s left hand, which sported a remarkably large engagement ring. Heather, embarrassed, caught her looking.
“It didn’t work out,” she said sadly. “He’s a good man and all, but we just weren’t right for each other.”
“Was this something just recent?” Amanda asked sympathetically.
“Oh, no, no,” Heather said dismissively. “Norm and I broke it off, like, more than two years ago.”
“Norm?” Amanda asked. “Norm who?”
“Norm Hunter,” Heather said, surprised that Norm needed a last name to be identified. He was only one of the leading cosmetic surgeons in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.