“Squat!” Lynda said. “Ta-da!”
“Hmmph,” Ella Kate said.
“Well, it’s a word,” Lynda insisted.
“Not a very nice one, though,” Ella Kate opined. “Anyway, it’s only fourteen points. I’m still winning.”
“Don’t care,” Lynda said, picking up a pencil to record her score. “Besides, maybe you didn’t notice, but my Q is sitting on a double-letter spot. So, actually, that’s twenty-four points for me.”
“This is getting pretty vicious,” I said, looking down at the board. “How long have you two been playing?”
“Since lunch,” Ella Kate said. “Your mama—”
“Don’t call her—” I started to say, but Lynda gave me the nod, so I shut up.
“Fixed me homemade tomato soup with buttermilk in it. Best thing I ever put in my mouth,” Ella Kate said. “Gimme some wheatgrass juice too, but I spit that stuff out. Tastes like mud, if you ask me.”
“The secret for the soup is using fire-roasted San Marzano tomatoes,” Lynda offered. “I saved you some soup. I even went out to the kitchen after you got back from your meeting to see if you wanted some, but you were so fixated on your tiling, I decided not to bother you.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I have a hard time stopping once I get started.”
“Oh!” Lynda said, clapping her hands over her mouth. “I almost forgot. Dempsey, you were in such a hurry to get to your meeting this morning that you left your cell phone.”
“You didn’t answer it, did you?” I asked, horrified at the idea of her having had a conversation with Alex Hodder.
“Well, of course I did,” Lynda said. “But don’t worry. It was just a nice young man named Tee Berryhill.”
“Her boyfriend,” Ella Kate said knowingly.
“How nice.” Lynda beamed. “Then I’m glad I accepted his invitation for tonight.”
“What invitation?”
“To dinner,” she said. “He and his father are taking us to the country club tonight. There’s even a dance! Doesn’t that sound divine?”
I hesitated. My relationship with Tee was teetering on the brink of something, but I wasn’t sure what yet. A night out with him—dinner and a dance—did, in fact, sound good, if not “divine,” but did I want to expose Tee and Carter to my flamboyant mother this early in the game?
“I can’t wait,” Lynda said enthusiastically. “A real country-club dance. It sounds so quaint. Your father and I used to go to lots of dances when we first started dating.”
“You and Mitch?” I’d never seen my father dance. It was hard enough imagining him married to someone as outrageous as Lynda, harder still imagining him doing anything as adventurous as the frug or the boogaloo, or whatever the dances were that they did in their youth.
“Oh yes,” Lynda said dreamily. “Mitch was a great dancer back then.”
“He was a little pissant when I knew him,” Ella Kate volunteered.
“I think he reverted back to his pissant ways after Dempsey was born,” Lynda told her. “But believe me, he wasn’t like that when we first met. He was funny and sweet, and so thoughtful! A real Southern gentleman. And sexy!” She grinned and fanned herself vigorously. “I have never had so much fun in bed in my life,” she declared.
“But you got yourself a divorce from him anyways,” Ella Kate pointed out.
“Well, you can’t stay in bed all the time,” Lynda said sadly. “We never should have gotten married. Although it was worth every minute of it, considering I got a beautiful daughter out of the deal.”
She stood up and kissed the top of my head. “Our fellas are picking us up at six. Don’t you think you’d better start getting ready?”
I showered first, and while Lynda was still in the bathroom, I stood in front of my tiny closet, surveying the possibilities. I’d packed away most of my business suits and dressy clothes from my lobbyist life—no need for them now that my working days were spent painting and scraping. That didn’t leave a lot of possibilities for a dance. I’d already worn my long skirt and top to the country club on my last “date,” with Jimmy Maynard, and, as it turned out, Tee. There was a long-sleeved charcoal gray knit sweater dress, but it looked more suited to a funeral than a dance. As I rummaged through the clothes, I came across my old reliable, a navy blue matte jersey Marc Jacobs cocktail dress.
It was sleeveless, with a deep V-neck, pin-tuck details at the shoulders and the set-in waist, and a flirty little ruffle at the hem.
Ah yes. Marc had seen me through half a dozen weddings and cocktail receptions in the past couple of years, and he’d never let me down.
I took it off the hanger and held it up to my shoulders while I checked myself out in the mirror, turning to and fro to get the full effect.
Just then, Lynda walked in. She was in her bathrobe, and her damp hair hung in ringlets to her shoulders. “Oh, sweetheart,” she exclaimed, catching the fabric of the hem between her fingertips. “No, no, no. This isn’t right for you at all. Wait! I’ve got just the thing in my suitcase.”
I walked over to her suitcase, which was open, and closed it.
“Mom,” I said firmly. “We have to talk.”
She sank down on the bed. “About what?”
“About you. And me. And your effort to make me into you.”
“What? No, that’s not true at all,” Lynda protested. “I just think—”
“You think I’m ugly, and my clothes are ugly, and that basically I’m wasting my time down here.”
“I never said that,” Lynda protested, grabbing my hand. “I think you’re the most beautiful girl in the entire world. You know that, don’t you?”
“I’m not a girl,” I said gently. “I’m a woman. I’m nearly thirty. I’ve been dressing myself for quite some time now, and although not all the choices I’ve made in my life have been the right ones, they’ve been mine. I love you, Lynda, but you have got to give me some space.”
Her periwinkle blue eyes filled with tears. She stood up and reopened the suitcase. “I knew it! You don’t want me here. You resent me. You’ve resented me ever since you were a teenager. I told myself you were feeling abandoned, and I wrote it off to your father’s influence over you. No matter how hard I try, you’ll never let me make it up to you. So I’ll go.”
“No, wait,” I said, flipping the lid of the suitcase shut again. “I’m not telling you to leave. I don’t feel abandoned. It took me a while, but I finally realized years ago that you were doing what you thought was best for me when you sent me to live with Mitch.”
I took a deep breath. “Maybe it was the best thing for me. I don’t know. My childhood is in the past. Parts of it were good and parts of it sucked, but I got through it. That’s all that matters.”
She sniffed and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “You haven’t said a word about all my hard work in the house today. You hate it, don’t you?”
I bit my lip and decided to be honest. “Lynda, I love the way the parlor looks. I never would have thought to use the bedspreads as slipcovers, or to take down the drapes. And I can’t figure out how the hell you got all that furniture downstairs. But the thing is…I’m feeling kind of territorial here. Birdsong is my project. The house is Dad’s, I know, but the work, it’s mine. I’m sorry to be so selfish about it, but right now, this run-down, crappy house is all I’ve got. So, yeah, I was kind of bent out of shape when I saw what you’d done.”
“That sweet contractor of yours, Bobby? He dropped by and I roped him into helping me. We can put it back the way it was,” Lynda said tearfully. “I had no right.”
“Don’t you dare,” I told her. “It’s gorgeous. Fabulous. I can’t believe how much you accomplished in a few short hours.”
She smiled tentatively. “I’ve had the most amazing surge of creative energy since I got here. I don’t know what it is. After you left this morning, I decided it wouldn’t be any fun to shop without you. I took another walk, and then I poked around in the basement, and I came up
with just the coolest stuff—pecans, sweet-gum balls, arrowheads, old marbles and Coke bottle caps, and bits of broken china. I got so stoked, I made three necklaces in less than an hour. Wait until you see! I think they’re the best work I’ve ever done.”
“I can’t wait to see them,” I said.
“I made one just for you,” she said shyly. “Now, you don’t have to wear it. You’re right, I have no business telling you how to dress or act, or any of that. I’ll try to do better, okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “Can I see the necklace?”
“Sure you want to?” Lynda asked. “It’s kind of a departure for me.”
I held out my hand. “Give.”
She went to the dresser, opened the top drawer, and brought out a little gold silk pouch. Lynda sat down on the bed beside me and, after a moment’s hesitation, dropped the necklace into my open palm.
I’d been expecting one of my mother’s usual bizarre combinations of broken glass, twisted metal, maybe even a fossilized bird’s egg or raccoon tooth. But what she’d made for me was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
A long, slender golden chain, maybe twenty-four-inches, held half a dozen charmlike tokens. Some were gold, others were silver. The center pendant on the chain held a tiny diamond-studded platinum woman’s watch face, suspended from a bit of platinum chain. Beside it was a pale green cat’s-eye marble. There was a small, scrolly, golden, heartshaped locket, and an intricately worked brooch that seemed to represent some sort of fraternal symbol with a small red stone in the middle. Another charm was a stud of some sort, with a pearl in the center, and the last one was a simple, worn gold band.
“Oh, Lynda,” I whispered. “It’s…exquisite.”
She smiled. “Well, it’s much more sentimental than anything I’ve ever done before, but then, I don’t think it’s too terribly self-indulgent, considering who I made it for, and what it represents.”
“Represents?”
“This,” she said, pointing to the watch face, “was your great-grandmother’s watch.”
“Olivia?” I asked.
“No, it was Olivia’s mother’s watch,” Lynda said. “This little marble belonged to your grandfather Dempsey, when he was a little boy. Now, the locket, that was Olivia’s. Open it up, why don’t you?”
With a fingernail, I pried open the locket. Only one side of the locket held a photograph, the other held a lock of pale gold hair. I looked closely, then up at Lynda. She nodded.
“Your father’s baby picture,” she said. “And that’s Mitch’s first curl.”
She touched the brooch. “This was your great-uncle Norbert’s Masonic stickpin. I hope you don’t mind that I cut off the pin part. And the ruby’s real, by the way.”
“It’s, just…stunning,” I said.
“The pearl was your great-great-grandfather’s shirt stud. Again, real,” she said. “At one time, honey, the Dempseys were totally loaded.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
The gold ring was so small, I could only slip my pinkie halfway through it. “And this?” I asked, knowing the answer already.
She sighed. “Olivia’s wedding ring.”
I stood up and put the necklace around my neck. Lynda took me by the shoulders and turned me around, to fasten the catch.
“I love it,” I declared. “I may never take it off.”
“I’m so glad,” Lynda said softly.
“But, Mom, where did you get all these things? I’ve gone through just about every closet, drawer, and cupboard, and I’ve never found anything remotely like these things.”
“Ella Kate gave them to me,” she said simply. “But you can’t say anything to her about it. She made me swear not to tell.”
“Ella Kate! But she hates my guts. Most of the time she won’t even speak to me. Did she know you were going to give this to me?”
“It was her idea,” Lynda said. “She’s not such a bad old girl. She told me about how you saved her life. Hers and Shorty’s. I think this is her way of thanking you.” She laughed. “In case you haven’t noticed, Ella Kate’s sort of short on sweet words. But don’t let her fool you. She’s very fond of you, Dempsey Jo. She’s been saving these things, bits and bobs, she calls them, all these years, for somebody special. As far as she’s concerned, you’re the last of the line.”
I turned and gave her a hug. “Lynda? Will you do one more thing for me?”
“Anything,” she said.
“Drop the Dempsey Jo, will you?”
58
When the doorbell rang, I licked my lips nervously. Stop it! I told myself. It’s just Tee and Carter. So what if they are about to meet your mother for the first time? This is just a little dinner and dance at the country club. And even if they all hate each other, Carter and Tee are far too genteel to do anything except feign their absolute delight. I ran into the downstairs bathroom and checked my makeup. It was fine, although my cheeks were a little too pink from excitement. I pulled the hem of my dress down and the neckline up. Was Marc too risqué for the conservative crowd at the Pine Blossom Country Club? I glanced down at my watch. Too late to change now.
I forced myself to walk slowly to the front door. I could see Tee standing there, through the sidelight. He wore a dark suit, white dress shirt, and a wine red silk tie. He was dressed more formally than I’d ever seen him before, and it made him look blonder and taller and grown up. And handsome. Oh, God, how had I never noticed how fine looking a man was T. Carter Berryhill? My stomach did an un-grownup flutter, and I silently cursed myself for being such a giddy little mall girl. He caught sight of me peeking at him through the glass, and gave me a flirtatious wink.
“Are those our dates?” Lynda called. I turned around to see her floating down the stairs. No need for me to have worried about my own appearance. There was almost no chance anybody would notice me tonight—not with Lynda in the same room.
She was wearing a tangerine silk sheath halter dress with a plunging V-neck. Its hem fell demurely at midcalf, but it was slit up both sides to midthigh. Her tanned legs were bare, and she wore impossibly high-heeled gold lamé sandals with skinny straps that crisscrossed her ankles. She’d twisted her hair up in a messy topknot skewered with a jeweled butterfly clip. Gold-beaded chandelier earrings brushed her bare shoulder tops. My mother looked like an exotic bird that had just flown in from some unnamed tropical rain forest.
Tee rang the doorbell again, and I jerked the door open. “Wow!” he said, looking straight past me, and directly at Lynda, who had paused halfway down the staircase, as though for a photo op.
“Well, Dempsey,” Carter said. He stepped around his starstruck son, took both my hands in his, and kissed them. “My dear, don’t you look lovely tonight?” He nudged Tee in the rib cage. “Don’t you think so, son?”
Tee managed to drag his eyes off Lynda and focus on me. He elbowed Carter aside, and brushed his lips across my cheek. “Hey, old man.” He laughed. “Don’t be trying to hit on my woman.”
“You look amazing,” he whispered in my ear.
“Hello,” Lynda said. She’d finally managed to make it down the stairs. We all turned.
“Carter, Tee,” I said dutifully. “I’d like you to meet my mom, Lynda, uh…” For a split second, I couldn’t remember my own mother’s last name. She’d dropped Killebrew right after she and my dad split up, and had gone back to using her maiden name, but then had taken her second husband’s last name, but only for the duration of their three-year marriage. For a brief time, in my teens, she’d even eschewed a last name altogether, insisting on being called only Lynda.
“Lynda Hayes,” she said, smoothly stepping into the void. Oh yeah. Hayes. She’d gone back to using her maiden name again. Duh.
My mother had all the social graces I’d momentarily lost. “So nice to meet you,” she said, shaking Carter’s, and then Tee’s hand. “Dempsey has told me how much you’ve helped her with the house, and of course, with this whole distressing FBI situation. I ca
n’t thank you enough for coming to the rescue of our girl.”
Rescue? I could feel myself bristling, but as always, Carter said just the right thing. “It’s been our privilege to represent Dempsey,” he told my mother. “And of course, to establish a friendship with such a charming young woman.” His eyes twinkled as he looked from Lynda to me. “And now I can see, as Dempsey assured me when we first met, that she does indeed look just as much like her mother as she does her Dempsey relatives. It seems to me that she’s had the good fortune of inheriting the best of both sides.”
Lynda’s laugh tinkled girlishly, and after a few more minutes of small talk, we all trooped out to Carter’s Mercedes. I’d grabbed a pashmina shawl from the coat closet before leaving the house, but Lynda merely shrugged off the subfifties chill of the early spring night.
“I’m not cold at all,” she insisted when Carter offered to go back to the house for a wrap for her. “This is so refreshing after all that boring heat out in California.”
I climbed into the backseat, and Tee went around and slid in beside me, casually throwing his arm across my shoulders, and pulling me closer. I could hear the murmur of Carter’s voice coming from the front seat, giving my mother the condensed history and guided tour of Guthrie, Georgia.
“Your mom is really something, huh?” Tee said, his lips barely touching my ear. “How come you didn’t mention she was coming to town?”
“I didn’t know myself until she showed up,” I whispered. “After Camerin Allgood took it upon herself to visit my mother to let her know about my noncooperation, Lynda decided to fly out here from California to see what kind of mess I’d gotten myself into.”
Tee nodded thoughtfully. “Something tells me there’re some, uh, unresolved issues between the two of you. Is that an accurate assumption?”
I sighed. “It’s complicated. I love her, but she’s just so…overpowering. So larger than life. I haven’t even seen her in a couple of years. I mean, we talk on the phone. Sometimes. Then, all of a sudden, she sweeps into town and thinks she can fix me. With a new hairdo and a new wardrobe.”
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