Hissy Fit

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “Don’t you dare bring God into this,” I said angrily. “The last time I saw you, you were talking about forgiveness, and turning to God for the answers. When you had the answers all along.” I took a deep breath. “I grew up thinking my mother had abandoned me. Thinking she was still alive, and didn’t care enough about me to get in touch. You could have prevented that. You could have changed it with one phone call. But you and the others were more worried about saving your own sorry asses. So don’t you dare talk to me about forgiveness. And don’t you dare say you’re flesh and blood to me. Or my mother.”

  Sonya blinked, and then burst into tears. Her chest heaved with sobs. Rivulets of mascara dripped down her cheeks. The people sitting at the counter turned around to stare, and then turned back to their waffles and eggs. I watched the show impassively, sipping my coffee, waiting for intermission.

  Finally I’d had enough. I got the waitress to bring her a glass of cold water. I handed her a wad of paper napkins. She drank the water and blew her nose on the napkins, and managed to mop up some of the mascara on her face.

  “I know you don’t want to hear it,” she whispered. “But I am sorry. I don’t have a right to ask you to forgive me, and I won’t. You know, I’m glad you came here today, and made me tell the truth. I been hiding from it a long time. You’re right. I was just as much a part of it as they were. I been a coward. I been lying to myself, telling myself that because I’m a Christian, I’m forgiven. But you can’t get forgiven until you take it all to Jesus. I took the rest of it to him years ago, the drinkin’ and running around, the lying and hurtful things I done to my children and my friends. But that’s the last thing I was holdin’ on to. My one last, awful secret. And you made me face up to it. You helped me to lay that burden down. Now your daddy can call the law if he wants to. I’ll stand up and tell the truth, and I won’t care what happens on this earth. Because this is not my home.”

  She reached over and squeezed my hand so tightly, I thought I would scream with the pain.

  “Thank you, Keeley Rae. For bringing me some peace. I thank you.” She leaned across the table and planted a kiss on my cheek.

  And I walked out.

  I had to check myself in the sun visor mirror to see if I recognized myself. I’d gone into the Waffle House determined to confront Sonya and force her to tell me the truth. And I’d done that. I’d walked out of there with the one last missing piece to the puzzle. I knew now where my mother was. She was at the bottom of an abandoned well. And I was still no closer to feeling whole. Where was the closure you always hear people talking about? Where was the healing?

  I thought about it the whole two hours between Kannapolis and High Point. And then I checked into my room at the motel next to the Atrium Furniture Mall. I was at ground zero for the furniture capital of the world. The twice yearly international market week had just closed, and now most of the showroom samples were on sale. The hell with closure, I told myself. The hell with healing. The hell with the Jernigans and the Plummers, and Stephanie Scofield and all of it. What I needed right now was some good old-fashioned retail therapy. But at wholesale prices.

  Armed only with my checkbook and shopping list, I hit the streets. First I went over to Rose Furniture Company. The very sight of the building made me start feeling better. I’d done my research—one hundred eighty thousand square feet and more than six hundred different manufacturers.

  I signed in and got myself assigned a salesman named Tim who was some kind of kin to the Rose family who’d opened the showroom in 1925. Six hours later I kicked my shoes off my swollen feet and fell onto the bed in my motel room.

  The van was full to overflowing, and I’d paid for the rest of my finds to be shipped down to Madison the following week. For the den, I’d bought a pair of luscious leather club chairs, similar to the antique ones I’d put in the pump house, two overstuffed sofas, a heart-pine armoire for the entertainment center, and assorted side tables, along with a massive wrought-iron and glass-topped coffee table. I’d bought a pair of Ralph Lauren four-poster beds for one of the guest rooms, and, God help me, a Martha Stewart bed for another room. I bought a long oval table for the family dining room, and eight reproduction Hitchcock chairs to go with it. After leaving Rose Furniture I’d gone to my favorite big antiques showroom, then hit Butler’s Electric for lighting fixtures, and finally back to the Atrium, to About Last Night, a linen showroom where I let myself go nuts buying the creamiest, most exquisite towels and bed linens I could find—aside from the monogrammed Pratesi sheets I’d already ordered for the master bedroom.

  The next day, Thursday, I allowed myself one last binge. I started at the Boyles gallery, but by three o’clock I’d run out of steam. I was easing myself back into my room when my cell phone began ringing.

  “Keeley?” Gloria was out of breath. “I think you better get back here in a hurry.”

  “Right now? I was going to take a hot bath and order some dinner from room service. I thought I’d head back first thing in the morning. You won’t believe all the great stuff I’ve found.”

  “Now,” Gloria said. “You better get back here right now. There’s trouble out at Mulberry Hill.”

  63

  “So far, so good,” I told myself as I drove through the unlocked gates at Mulberry Hill late that evening. I’d driven straight through from High Point, arriving around ten P.M.

  It wasn’t until I approached the meadow area that I had an inkling about the disaster Gloria had hinted at over the phone. For the first time I noticed that the drive was suddenly lit by more than moonlight. Uplights sent eerie shadows through the leathery leaves of the huge old magnolias, and there were downlights mounted high in the tops of some of the pecans and oaks. As I got to the area where the driveway bisected the meadow, I had to pull off the drive.

  It was lined with heavy machinery; a backhoe, bushhog, and other pieces of industrial yellow equipment whose names I didn’t know. And right in the middle of the left side of the meadow, right where bales of hay and a tent should have been erected, there was now a gaping hole in the landscape.

  A pond, I guess you’d call it. A huge pond had sprung up where none had been on Monday. The treetop lights glanced off the surface of the water, and now I could see that there was a fountain in the middle of the pond with a pair of creatures—seahorses? centaurs?—spurting water from their gaping mouths.

  It was…amazing. It was spectacular. It was perfect—for Vegas. And it was, as Gloria had so aptly described, a disaster for Mulberry Hill.

  I pulled the Volvo up beside the largest piece of equipment and hiked over to the pond. “Crap,” I said, moaning. The meadow had been mowed—no, obliterated. In its place was a thick carpet of emerald green sod. I trudged on toward the pond, to get a better look. A pair of ornate wrought-iron benches had been thoughtfully arranged at the water’s edge, and as I approached, I heard a loud honking, and flapping wings, and suddenly, some large black creature was rushing toward me, flapping its wings, and hissing and braying. It nipped at my ankles, and I turned tail and ran like hell for the safety of the Volvo, where I rolled up the windows, locked the doors, and proceeded to bang my head repeatedly on the dashboard.

  When I woke up the next morning, I tried to convince myself that it had all been a bad dream. I’d been overtired. It had been dark. Maybe I’d taken the wrong turn off and ended up at another Greek Revival plantation house on the outskirts of Madison.

  I drove straight out to the house, without even stopping for coffee. In the daylight the massive iron gates looked the same. The drive looked the same, and as I approached the meadow, I could see the same hulking yellow heavy machinery.

  Only now the pieces were in motion, being loaded onto two long flatbed trailers. I pulled off the road, got out of the Volvo, and went over to the man driving the first of the trailers.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I demanded.

  “Loading up,” he said. “Y’all only rented this stuff for three days.”
<
br />   “Y’all? Who is y’all? I certainly did not order any of this stuff. And I sure as hell didn’t order anybody to dig any pond, or to knock down any trees out here.”

  “Hey. I just pick up and deliver.” He picked up a clipboard with a sheet of yellow paper on it. “Mulberry Hill. This is it. Right?”

  I nodded, but pointed at the signature at the bottom of the sheet. “Who signed for it? Who authorized the work?”

  He picked up the clipboard and handed it to me, but the handwriting was an indecipherable scrawl.

  “It’s a mistake,” I told him. “A horrible mistake. The owner didn’t order any pond. He doesn’t want a pond. He wants a field for dove hunting.”

  The driver laughed. “Dove, huh? He might want to change his mind about that. Once he gets some brush growing at the edge he might eventually attract some ducks, or something like that. But lady—no respectable dove is coming near that place now.”

  I glanced over at the meadow. Or the lawn, as it could more correctly be called now. In the daylight I could see that some sort of rose garden had been planted near the seating area.

  And the fountain. The fountain was even more hideous in the light of day. It appeared to be a pair of unicorns, spouting water from their horns.

  “Put it back,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “I want you to put it back. Fill in the pond. Scrape up that sod. And that fountain.” I shuddered. “Take that godawful fountain back from wherever it came from.”

  He scratched his head and smiled. “You’re pulling my leg—right?” And then he turned around and went back to loading up the heavy equipment.

  I sighed heavily and drove on to the house. Adam, the project foreman, was out on the veranda, looking at a section of railing one of his painters had just primed.

  “Hey, Keeley,” he greeted me.

  “Adam,” I said sternly. “Did I tell you to have a pond dug out in the meadow?”

  “No ma’am,” he said.

  “Does the landscape plan call for a pond?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Did Will order a pond?”

  He laughed. “Nah. What would he want with a pond?”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Then who in the hell had a pond dug and a hideous fountain, and grass and rose bushes installed out there? How can this have happened? We’ve got a couple dozen men coming over here tomorrow for a dove hunt. This cannot be happening.”

  He stuck his hands in his back pockets. “It was Miss Stephanie.”

  “Stephanie?”

  He nodded, abashed. “I come out here Monday morning, and the earthmover was already there, doing its thing. The next thing I know, there’s a backhoe, and a bushhog, ripping up all of Will’s dove habitat. I tried calling him on his mobile phone to check on it, but I didn’t get an answer. Pretty soon Miss Stephanie drove up. She was pretty excited about the whole thing, I can tell you. She said it was a surprise for the boss.”

  “She ordered a pond? And the fountain? And rose bushes? As a surprise?”

  “And the swans. A pair of ’em. I never seen black swans before. I think they must be some kind of special item. If I was you, I’d stay clear of ’em. They’re mean as a couple of snakes.”

  “Swans.” I moaned. “Special-order swans.”

  “Mean-as-hell black swans,” Adam volunteered. “Worse than Rottweilers, if you ask me.”

  As we were standing there, Nancy Rockmore came walking slowly toward us, leaning heavily on her canes and shaking her head. “I still can’t believe it. The caterer called me yesterday and asked me if I wanted the tent beside the pond, and I said, ‘Pond? What pond?’ There ain’t no pond at Mulberry Hill.’ And he said, ‘Check again.’ That’s when I called your aunt.”

  “We’re screwed,” I said. “Completely screwed.”

  “This is her,” Miss Nancy said. “That goddamn Stephanie.”

  “It sure wasn’t me,” I said. “According to Adam, she planned it as a surprise for Will.”

  “Surprise my ass. Now what are we gonna do?” she demanded.

  “I asked the heavy equipment guy if he could just fill it back up and rip up the sod. He laughed like crazy. And he kept on loading the stuff on the trailer.”

  “We can’t have a dove hunt out in that meadow,” Miss Nancy said. “It ain’t even a meadow anymore. We’ll just have to cancel, that’s all.” She grimaced. “The boss’s been talking this thing up for weeks. He’s got guys coming in from all over the country, including some of the big honchos from Victoria’s Secret, coming in from New Jersey. We gotta think of something else.”

  We both leaned on the railing and looked out over the landscape. We’d been so close. And now this. I’d thrown myself into my work, hoping to forget all the crap going on in my personal life. And now I’d run up against another brick wall. I felt like crying.

  I wanted my daddy. But that gave me an idea.

  “I’ll call Daddy,” I told Miss Nancy. “He knows every hunter in three counties. Maybe we can lease a field or something. And we’ll just have to call everybody on the invitation list and tell them the plan has changed a little bit.”

  “I’ll head back to the plant,” she said. “The invitation list is on my computer. We’ll have to split it up, to get all the phone calls made in time. Call me there when you know something.”

  I sat out on the front porch of Mulberry Hill to make my phone calls. But I couldn’t look at the pond. I turned my back to it and called Daddy at the car lot. He’d been invited to the dove hunt too, and he was clearly disappointed that it wasn’t going to happen as planned.

  “Damn,” he said. “I been waiting for years to get invited out there for that hunt. I even bought a new shotgun for the occasion.”

  “Can you do it?” I asked. “Can you help me find another field to lease?”

  “Pretty short notice,” he said. “Most folks who have a field have already made arrangements to either hunt it themselves or lease it out. Lemme make some phone calls, shug.”

  An hour later he called back. “The news ain’t good,” he said. “Sorry, shug.”

  I was just getting ready to call Miss Nancy to deliver the bad news when I saw the yellow Caddy come rolling slowly down the driveway. I saw it stop at the edge of the meadow. I saw Will get out, run over to the edge of the pond, and look wildly around, as though he wanted to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. And then I saw one of the swans go on the attack, darting at him, beak open, ready for the kill. To his credit, Will was a lot braver than I’d been. He kicked at the thing, driving it back to the pond. And when the other swan came flapping over to rescue its mate, that’s when Will made a run for the Caddy.

  The Caddy sped the rest of the way down the driveway, around to the back of the house. I sighed and went inside to face the music.

  “What the fuck?” Will’s face was contorted with anger. “What the hell went on around here while I was gone? I’m away five days, and you manage to turn my dove field into a fucking golf course?”

  “No,” I started to say. “I mean, I didn’t do it. I think it was a misunderstanding.”

  “You bet your fucking life there’s been a misunderstanding,” he shouted. We were standing in the library. The rugs were down, the bookshelves had been installed, and some of the furniture was in place. The only piece of furniture Will had chosen, a huge nineteenth-century planter’s desk, sat in the middle of the room, and he stood with his hands clamped on the back of the leather chair behind the desk, glaring at me. This library was the closest thing in the house to being finished. Will’s voice echoed throughout the empty house.

  I walked over and closed the door to the library so that Adam and his workers wouldn’t witness my humiliation.

  “I can’t believe this,” Will said, lowering his voice. “I know you’ve had your own ideas about this project all along, but I can’t believe you would deliberately sabotage the one thing I planned for myself.”

  “I didn
’t sabotage anything. I was as surprised as you were when I got here last night and I saw that pond.”

  “And where the hell were you?” he demanded. “You were supposed to be right here at Mulberry Hill, supervising this project. I’m paying you thousands and thousands of dollars, and you go running off on another project?”

  “I wasn’t running off on another project,” I said, getting hot now. “I was making one last buying trip for this house. To High Point. So I could save you some money and make this fucking ridiculous deadline of yours. Which I told you in the beginning was impossible.”

  “But you agreed,” he insisted. His face was flushed with streaks of red, and each freckle stood out like an angry exclamation point. “You agreed that you would do it. And I’ve paid you a shitload of money for what? That disaster out there in my dove field?”

  I leaned across the desk so that my face was only inches from his. All the frustrations of the week came flooding back. All the disappointments, the shock, the sorrow. My work had been my last retreat from all of it, and now that had turned to shit too. And he was blaming me. Me.

  “I had nothing to do with that disaster out in your dove field,” I said, enunciating each word slowly and clearly. “You wanted to keep your dove hunt a secret from your little girlfriend? Well, apparently she was planning a surprise of her own. Adam said she came out here yesterday to personally supervise the installation.”

  “Stephanie?” Will shook his head. “She wouldn’t do something like that.”