“That is fascinating,” Stephanie agreed.
“And each one has to be cut to a very exact, specific standard,” Will continued. “With a garment as small as a bra, anything that is off by even the smallest measurement will drastically alter the quality of the finished product.”
“Wow!” It came out sounding pretty sarcastic. Will frowned and took my glass away. “These drinks are pretty strong, you know,” he said. “Absolut ain’t no Kool-Aid. I wouldn’t want you to get pulled over for driving under the influence.”
“I am not under the influence,” I said, trying to act dignified.
“Maybe a little tiddly,” Stephanie suggested. “Leave her alone, Will. I think she’s cute. Now, tell us some more about bras.”
“Yes, Will,” I said, mimicking her wide-eyed breathlessness. “Please do.”
He shot me a look. “I’d better get the coals going if we’re going to eat these steaks before midnight.”
Stephanie blanched. “Steaks?”
“Filet mignon,” Will said proudly. “How do you like yours?”
She chewed her fingernail. “Will,” she said quietly. “I don’t eat red meat. Don’t you remember, last week at dinner, I told you, I haven’t eaten red meat since 1996.”
“Oh,” he said. “Not at all?”
She shook her head. Not a hair on it moved. I wondered how she did that. My grout-cleaner stiffened hair was already starting to come undone.
“Do you have any salmon?” she asked. “Or maybe Chilean sea bass?”
His face fell. “I had my assistant drive to Athens to pick up these steaks.”
“I know I told you about the red meat thing,” Stephanie said. “Do you have any idea at all about the kind of chemicals they feed cattle these days? Or how cows are slaughtered?” She shuddered.
“I’ve got a nice Caesar salad prepared,” Will said hopefully. “Chilled, poached asparagus. You can eat that, right?”
“Absolutely,” Stephanie said, brightening. “I love asparagus. And I can eat the salad, if you’ll leave the dressing off.”
“And baked potatoes,” he added. “With sour cream and chives.”
“Baked potatoes?” She looked at him as though he’d just offered her a choice oozing slice of beef heart. “Do you know how many grams of carbohydrates are in a baked potato?”
“I never thought of that,” Will said. “Just the salad and asparagus then.”
Stephanie gave his arm a loving pat. “Sounds lovely. These cosmopolitans have got me so thirsty. Could I get some water?”
“Sure,” Will said. “That’s one thing about this old place that you’re going to love. The original well is still going strong. We’ve got the sweetest, purest well water you’ve ever tasted.”
“Well water?” Stephanie’s upper lip quivered just the tiniest amount. I’m sure Will didn’t even notice. “You mean, like, right out of the ground? Is that safe? Is it even legal? I saw a documentary once, where they showed a droplet of tap water under a microscope. Protozoa! Swarming all over the place! And trace chemicals.” She shuddered once again. “I usually drink bottled water. Perrier if you have it.”
“Perrier,” Will repeated dumbly. “I’m not sure. My assistant did the shopping…”
“I think I saw some bottled water in the house,” I volunteered. “I’ll just run in and get it for Steffie before I take off.”
“You’re leaving?” Will asked, his voice sounding hopeful. Maybe the evening could still be salvaged, he probably thought. Right after his bride-to-be polished off a big plate of chives and romaine lettuce leaves.
“Big plans for the night,” I assured him.
In the kitchen, I opened up the pantry and found the bottled water I’d left for him on Monday, right beside the Scotch bottle. It was just Poland Spring, the cheapest they’d had at the store that day. I took the bottle, and a plastic bag I found under the sink, and went into the bathroom, closing the door carefully behind me. I unscrewed the cap on the Poland Spring bottle and listened while the water gurgled happily down the sink drain. Then I knelt down beside the commode and submerged the water bottle in the bowl. It glugged and glugged until it was full.
I washed my hands in the sink, retrieved my bra from the trash basket, and placed it in the plastic bag. Then I thoughtfully straightened the bathroom, putting out fresh towels and guest soaps. I did want Will to impress his new love.
Out on the patio, the happy couple was just sitting down to their salads. The steaks had magically disappeared. I noticed that the grill had been covered too. Will had apparently decided to forgo his own dinner in order not to offend her. I felt a tiny, grudging sliver of admiration for my clueless, redheaded client, but nothing whatsoever for his date.
I placed the bottled water at Stephanie’s place and blew them both a big kiss. “Bon appetit, y ’all.”
36
On Saturday morning I watched as a steady stream of customers went in and out of Fleur. It was June, after all, still bridal season. When I saw Austin’s green delivery van pull up to the curb at two that afternoon, I locked up the studio and strolled over to the florist’s shop.
He was wearing navy cargo shorts and a green and white Fleur Flower Arts logo shirt, and he was picking up the phone when I walked in.
Austin glanced up, blew me a kiss, then started writing things down on an order pad. The shop was a mess, the concrete floor littered with bits of white satin ribbon, lace, leaves, stems, and fallen petals, and the aisles were jammed with flowers; buckets of freesias, orange blossoms, stocks, hydrangeas, lilies, roses, daisies, and exotics whose names I didn’t know. Their perfume swirled around me. It was a happy, busy, exciting place, and a sharp aching wave of sorrow hit me so hard it almost knocked me back out the door.
He hung up the phone. “What?” he asked, a look of concern on his face. “What’s the matter, Keeley?”
No good trying to make a happy face. “All this wedding shit. It’s silly, I know, but it makes me feel so sad. I keep thinking about how my wedding day should have been…”
Austin took me by the shoulders and marched me over to the wooden bench behind the counter. “You sit here, little missy,” he ordered.
He reached around to the walk-in cooler behind him and fumbled around in one of the tall galvanized buckets until he came up with two cans of Diet Coke. He popped one and handed it to me.
He popped his own, took a drink, and let out a satisfied sigh.
“Do you want to talk wedding shit?” he asked. “Let me tell you about Betsey Forst’s wedding. That’s where I’ve been all morning, over at the rectory at First Presbyterian. I finally just told her mama to give me a call when the child’s medication kicks in. I had to get out of there before I threw my own hissy fit.”
“That bad?”
He shuddered. “Tell me something, Keeley Rae. What is it about a wedding that makes a perfectly agreeable girl turn into a raving, shrieking, lunatic bitch?”
“Betsey Forst was shrieking? That little mouse? I’ve never even heard her talk above a whisper.”
“She was Bridezilla,” Austin said. “I kept expecting her head to swivel all the way around on her neck. You know, she actually pelted me with her bouquet? Said the color of the Tineke roses I had shipped in from Ecuador made her physically ill. Do you know I had to get up at five this morning and drive to the Atlanta airport to pick the things up and bring them back here and get them conditioned in time to make up that bouquet?”
“The little ingrate,” I said. “So you just had one wedding today?”
“Three! Three nightmare weddings,” Austin said, swigging more Diet Coke. “The second one wasn’t so bad. Lindsey Winzeler is a doll. But Carolyn Shoemaker. I swear, you don’t want to get me started on that one. I told her a bouquet made entirely of fruit was a bad idea. But she absolutely insisted. So it’s her own damn fault she sprained her ankle. Where do they get these ideas?”
“Martha Stewart,” I said helpfully. “It’s all Martha�
�s fault. That damn magazine ought to be outlawed. My clients read it too. And they clip out the pictures and want me to find them a chair just like the one in Martha’s house in Connecticut. Which is always some one-of-a-kind eighteenth-century hand-carved Jacobean job that costs more than my parents’ first house.”
Austin nodded agreement.
“You never mentioned how Carolyn Shoemaker sprained her ankle,” I pointed out.
He rolled his eyes. “Champagne grapes. They were supposed to be little tiny champagne grapes in the bridesmaid’s bouquets. Those are the ones the size of English peas. So what does the mama bring in for me to work with? Big old hulking green grapes. And they weren’t the freshest. That’s what happens when you try to do something on the cheap. But they insisted it would be fine, so I wired them up. What do I know? I’m just a professional floral artist. Anyway, the six bridesmaids go floating down the aisle with their rooty-tooty fresh and frooty bouquets. And invariably some of the grapes fall off. And get mashed on that slippery hardwood floor. The next thing you know, little Miss Shoemaker’s pump hits one of the suckers, and she goes flying ass over teakettle.”
He started to laugh in spite of himself. And then I started to laugh. And pretty soon streams of Diet Coke were shooting out my nostrils. Not so pretty. He had me crying. Only this was good crying.
“I’d love to have seen that,” I said, wiping the tears with my shirt-sleeve.
“Call up Billy Howard,” Austin said. “He was videotaping the whole thing. I hope he didn’t miss the part where the groom reached down to try to help her up and slipped his ownself and screamed FUCK! Right there in front of the entire St. Anne’s congregation.”
After that I had to get up and get some paper towels to mop the tears off my face. I was already feeling better.
“So, what’s up, toots?” Austin asked, sweeping some of the clutter on his workbench into a big trash can.
“I’ve been playing Nancy Drew,” I started.
“No,” Austin said. “This was all my idea. I get to be Nancy. You have to be Bess or George. Take your pick.”
“Bess was plump and George was probably lesbian,” I said. “Not much of a choice, when it comes down to it. Anyway, I talked to Daddy. You know, about Mama.”
He patted my shoulder. “Good for you! What did you find out?”
“He hired a private detective, after she left, but all he managed to come up with was the fact that she’d sold her car in Birmingham, for eight hundred dollars.”
Austin’s face fell. “That’s all? He has no idea where she went, or whether she went off with that man?”
“No. But he did tell me I could look in the old employee files to see if I can find Darvis Kane’s date of birth and Social Security number.”
“It’s a start,” Austin said. “How was he about the whole thing? Was he angry about you stirring all this up?”
“No,” I said. “He says he made peace with the whole thing a long time ago, but he understands why I need answers. But he won’t talk about Darvis Kane. He made that real clear.”
Austin put down his Diet Coke can. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get cracking on those old files.”
“They’re in the basement at Daddy’s house,” I said. “And now would be a good time, since he’s at the lot all day. I was thinking, I could give you the key, and you could look through the files.”
“And what, may I ask, are you going to be doing while I’m knee-deep in silverfish and mildew down in that basement?”
I looked out the plate-glass window of Fleur, toward the square. The big old red brick county courthouse blocked the view, but on the other side of it was another shop, about the same size as this one. The name on the forest green awning said Kathleen’s Antiques now, but if you looked closely, you could see where Charm Shop had been painted out all those years ago.
All week long, I’d been thinking about going in to Kathleen’s, to see Chrys Graham. Now, it seemed, would be a good time to visit my mother’s old friend.
37
Kathleen’s wasn’t one of those snooty antiques shops where you hold your breath—and your elbows at your side.
The aisles were cluttered with shelves of crystal, china, and silver, and different areas in the middle of the shop had been set up as room vignettes; this one a Victorian parlor, that one a dining room, another a bedroom with an iron bedstead, mahogany dresser, and stacks of vintage bed linens. A huge old window air conditioner hummed noisily from a window in the back, and the room smelled faintly of mildew and lemon-scented furniture wax.
In my granddaddy’s time, this had been a drugstore, and it still had the old pressed tin ceiling tiles, beadboard walls, and floor made of tiny black and white hexagonal tiles. The drugstore counter was long gone, of course, but the brass cash register was the original, as was Chrys Graham.
A doorbell buzzed somewhere from the back of the store when I walked in, and through the dim light I spied a petite woman sitting on an overstuffed sofa, looking startled, before she hastily stubbed out a cigarette.
“Hey,” she called in her familiar raspy voice. “I’ll be right with you, unless you just want to poke around and not be bothered.”
I walked toward the back of the store so she could get a better look at me.
She was waving the smoke-filled air around her with heavily be-jeweled hands. Chrys Graham had to be in her early sixties, but she was still cute, in a pixieish way, with straight brown bangs that nearly reached the tips of her tortoiseshell glasses, behind which shone a pair of impish brown eyes.
“You caught me!” she rasped. “Promise you won’t tell my niece I was smoking in here. Kathleen says I’m a fire hazard.”
Silently I held up my right hand in the Girl Scout pledge.
Miss Graham tilted her head and peered at me over the bridge of the glasses, like she thought maybe she could remember who I was.
“Don’t tell me,” she said slowly. “I know that face, but I just need a little bit of time to put a name with it.”
I sat down on the sofa beside her.
She cupped my chin gently between her hands and looked directly into my eyes.
“You’re Jeanine’s little girl,” she said finally. “Keeley Murdock, that’s it, isn’t it? I’m trying to decide who you look more like—Jeanine or your daddy.”
“I think it’s the eyes,” I told her. “Everybody says I’ve got the Murdock nose.”
“You’re your mama, made over,” she declared, as though that settled it. “How long has it been since she ran off with Darvis Kane?”
Her directness took me by surprise.
“Ma’am?”
“You did know she ran off with one of the salesmen at your daddy’s car lot, didn’t you?”
I nodded. At least we had that out of the way.
“It was 1979,” I said.
“That’s right,” she said, nodding in agreement. “The same year they flooded the lake. I remember it, because Georgia Power bought our old family place out there, and I took a two-month-long trip to San Francisco with the money they paid me. When I got back, I heard the news that your mama had taken off.”
I looked around the antiques shop. “She used to bring me here with her, you know, when she was fixing the windows. You had a kitten I liked to play with.”
“Junior,” Miss Graham said. “A calico. I was always partial to calicos. Where have you been all these years? Why haven’t you been in to visit with me?”
“Maybe I wasn’t ready.”
“But you’re ready now. I heard you got your heart broken. The Jernigan boy. Which one was it?”
“A.J.,” I said.
“Never could keep those boys straight,” Miss Graham muttered. “GiGi bought all her clothes here, you know, back in the day. Your Aunt Gloria bought a lot of stuff from me too. When I ran the place, the Charm Shop had all the latest fashions. Everybody who was anybody bought from me.”
“I remember,” I said. “One time you gave us matching
mother-daughter outfits. Red plaid jumpers and black blouses.”
“That’s right,” she said, pleased that I remembered. “Your mama was a walking advertisement for the shop. Everything she put on looked like it had been made specially for her. She could have been a runway model, with her looks and style.”
She carefully considered my own outfit. I was wearing a sleeveless turquoise blouse, a turquoise and silver bead necklace, and white capris, with a pair of turquoise beaded sandals I’d bought at the Apparel Mart on my last trip to Atlanta. She rubbed the fabric of my top between her fingertips and nodded her approval.
“Silk. Good. I can’t abide these synthetics. I wouldn’t say you had her same sense of style. But you’ll do.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’m trying to find out what happened to my mother. Where she went.”
She shrugged her bony shoulders. “Ask your daddy.”
“I have. Right after she left, he hired a private detective to try and find out, but they never really got any answers. With computers and everything now, I thought maybe I could find something out. A friend is helping me.”
“Boyfriend?” She grinned slyly.
“Just a friend,” I said. “Austin LeFleur. Do you know him? He runs the florist’s shop across the square.”
“Bouquets by Betty Ann,” Miss Graham said. “I know the place.”
“Austin did a computer search. He didn’t find any record of a divorce. My father says he never filed because he didn’t know where she’d gone. And there’s no death record that we can find, so I was hoping…”
“What? What were you hoping? What kind of mother goes off and leaves a child without so much as a word?”
“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Was my mama that kind of person?”
“Not when I knew her,” Miss Graham said. “She was maybe a little flighty, but she was young yet. Not even thirty.”
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