by Sofia Grant
“I could try . . .” Katie tapped her mother’s full name in: Georgina Dial Hunt. Images of her—at the Pecan Ridge Estates clubhouse, with her girlfriends, in a golf cart, on a safari bus—flooded the screen, but no phone numbers. “I guess I could Facebook message her. Could I . . .”
“Be my guest.”
In moments her mother’s profile picture popped up. Dan, watching over her shoulder, cleared his throat.
“Maybe your mother would give me her number,” he said. “Since she must have given birth to you when she was nine. And she’s almost as, um, attractive as you are.”
“Oh God, don’t ever let Georgina hear that,” Katie said. If this man found her attractive in her current state—slept-in clothes, unwashed body, wrecked hair and smudged makeup—then he was more pathetic than he appeared. “She’d suck the blood right out of you. And besides, this photo is, let’s say, heavily staged.”
Her mother had been posing on a bouldered trail at Canyon Ranch at sunset, a filmy scarf drifting on the breeze and concealing the faint suggestion of neck wrinkles that her plastic surgeon had been unable to completely erase. Her smile was predatory, though people often mistook it for simply carefree. Only Katie knew that Georgina had had her fangs filed down to conceal her true nature . . .
“Not really,” she mumbled to herself, tapping out a message.
“Excuse me?”
“Oh, nothing . . .”
DM me! ASAP—got mugged, no phone, no $$$. Pick me up at airport?
It was nearly noon on a Tuesday morning, a time when her mother was usually shopping or golfing or meeting girlfriends for lunch, but almost immediately, the dots appeared on the screen indicating that her mother was messaging back.
Oh no!!!!!
Katie so sorry I can’t
Long story
Not in Dallas not back until tomorrow night
Katie stared at the series of messages, an uneasy numbness settling in. Where could her mother have gone, the day after her own mother died?
“No luck?” Dan asked gently. He was probably beginning to piece together a narrative that was unflattering, to say the least—in which Katie figured as unbalanced or perhaps on the run.
No worries
Katie typed quickly. She gazed at her mother’s brittle smile, then tapped “21 Mutual Friends” out of curiosity. Up popped the list, a veritable ghoul register of their shared past: several of the men Georgina had dated and discarded, including Katie’s orthodontist and the man whose wife had taught her piano lessons before their divorce. A few friends from their old neighborhood in Dallas.
And Scarlett Jesse Ragsdale.
Katie’s fingertip hovered over her cousin’s name. She didn’t remember ever accepting her friend request, but there she was—a photo taken in a restaurant, with an absurdly large margarita in front of her and her long, dark hair piled messily on top of her head. The photo was blurry, and the light wasn’t good, but even so Katie could see that her cousin had a pleasantly heart-shaped face with long dark eyelashes and a shy smile.
On impulse Katie Google-searched Scarlett. Up popped a white-pages listing on Canterbury Court in Archer, Texas. Before she could change her mind, Katie tapped “Call.”
The phone rang twice before it was answered. There was a clatter, someone yelped shit, and a male voice shouted, “Digger, you can just fuck off if you can’t come up with that ham or ten bucks by suppertime!”
And then someone hung up on her.
Chapter Eight
June 1954
Margaret felt Ernest Drake’s hand slip a little lower on her back and knew it was time to do something drastic. He and his friends had been into the punch, which had been liberally spiked at some point in the evening and tasted a little like Lavoris. She waited until Ernest had waltzed her into the corner of the dance floor, where they were semi-hidden by the edge of the small stage, and ground the heel of her satin pump into his instep.
“Ow ow ow!” Ernest yelped, releasing her. Margaret smiled.
“Oh, how terribly clumsy of me,” she said. “I’m so sorry. Let me get you some more punch.”
She didn’t wait for Ernest’s answer but hurried off toward the coatroom that had been carved out of one of the salons on the mansion’s sprawling first floor. She needed a moment of privacy to gather herself. It was nearly nine-thirty, and the rumor was that the happy couple was going to slip away for their wedding trip at ten o’clock. Which meant that she didn’t have much time.
She’d planned for this moment all week, writing out her plan in her diary, complete with sample dialogue; how she would gaze adoringly at Hank Dial’s bride, and tell her how beautiful she looked—and then she would turn to Hank and allow her gaze to flutter down. It was a trick she had perfected over the last year as part of the repertoire that went with her newly lush figure and the startling revelation that, at sixteen, strangers judged her a fully grown woman. Not Hank, though; she was counting on Hank to hook his arm around her neck the way he’d done to her and Helene for years, gruff and good-natured hugs for his “best girls.”
But this time would be different. This time, in that exquisite space of a second or two when her cheek was pressed up against his, she meant to show him her heart. “You’re too good for her,” she would whisper, and she was counting on it to be true, so that in the years ahead, when his wife disappointed him, when she turned into a nag and a bore and a fat nursing cow, he would remember how pretty she looked tonight, in the petal-pink peau de soie gown that she’d begged her mother for.
Margaret ducked between the rows of coats, damp from the earlier rain and lending a musty, woolly scent to the cramped room, and took her lipstick and her mother’s silver compact from her little evening bag. She dabbed on a bit of lipstick and checked her teeth, pinched her cheeks to make them rosy, and touched the waves in her hair that she had worked so hard over, which were beginning to wilt from the dancing and humidity in the air from the recent rains.
Satisfied that—wilting or no—she was still one of the prettiest girls at the wedding (some might say the prettiest, but Margaret prided herself on being realistic about herself), she adjusted her bodice so that the swell of her bosom showed above the ruched sweetheart neckline and glided out into the ballroom with her head held high. As she was scouring the room for the bridal couple, her mother appeared at her elbow, her brittle “public” smile fixed on her face. Caroline Pierson took her daughter’s arm in a grip that was stronger than one might have imagined: Margaret was trapped.
“Margaret, darling, come and meet your cousins.”
“Levander and Audrey are here?” Margaret asked, surprised. Her father’s sister Ruth had married a preacher who did not allow his wife or children to attend any events where there would be dancing or alcohol. Besides, they lived almost six hours away, in Oklahoma. And, of course, there was the fact that Aunt Ruth would have barely known the bridegroom, who had been just a child when she’d met her husband and moved away.
“No. Not them. Your cousins on the Wooley side.”
Margaret’s eyes widened with surprise; she knew these cousins existed the way she was aware that they had recently added two new elements to the periodic table: they were exotic, but unlikely to have any impact on her life, and never discussed in her house. According to Caroline, on the few occasions when Margaret had been curious enough to ask her mother about her family, her sister, Euda, had squandered every opportunity and advantage God had visited on her to marry a heathen criminal and give birth to a squalling horde of brats, one after another. Euda apparently had failed out of school and took AFDC money from the government and had called Caroline something so egregious and unforgivable that the sisters had vowed never to speak to each other again. So complete was their estrangement that Margaret didn’t even know how many children there were, and whether they were boys or girls, and how old they were. In Margaret’s mind, they were all toddlers, dressed in dirty diapers with knotted and tangled hair, sitting in a dirt yard wit
h a mangy dog to watch over them.
But as her mother fussed with an invisible speck on her gloves and avoided her gaze, Margaret did a quick calculation and realized that her cousins would be in their twenties now—just like the bridal couple.
As if reading her mind, Caroline said, “Tansy knew the girls from the WAVES.”
Ah, yes, perfect Tansy Monroe, youngest child and only daughter of the Tyler Monroes, whose wedding she was here to celebrate. Tansy had spent the war years volunteering with the Red Cross, and famously missed only one day, when her brother was killed in the Pacific. Tansy was known to be beautiful and kind and generous, which made her marriage to Hank all the more galling.
Her mother was tugging Margaret toward the wide French doors leading out to a veranda onto which the guests repaired when they grew overheated from the dancing. “Let’s just get this over with,” Caroline muttered, giving her wrist a pinch.
Margaret, long accustomed to these corrective pinches, reflexively straightened her spine and fixed a pleasant smile on her face as she followed her mother to a small, round table at the far end of the veranda at which four women were seated: two elderly dowagers who were shouting into each other’s ears, and two skinny girls with owlish eyes and weak chins who were pushing bits of cake around on their plates. The girls’ gowns—one pale blue and the other leaf green—had obviously been sewn by someone unfamiliar with the art of tailoring, and the shoulders gapped and the hems buckled with uneven stitches.
“Girls,” Caroline said stiffly. “Allow me to present my daughter Margaret.”
“It’s very nice to meet you,” Margaret said with the slight curtsy that she’d learned at the age of seven so she could properly greet the Daisy mothers in the parlor, and which she supposed she would never be able to shake. And then, when it seemed neither girl was going to do more than smile shyly, she added, “Isn’t it a lovely wedding?”
“Oh yes,” said the one in the blue, staring down at the table.
“I like your dress,” the other said. “Did you make it?”
Margaret blinked: the dress had cost nearly seventy dollars at Neiman Marcus in Dallas, and had been worked on by not one but two separate tailors, one of them French. “No—I don’t have that talent, unfortunately.”
“Please give your mother my best,” Caroline said, her fingernails—she was still clutching Margaret’s wrist—digging deeper. Margaret wondered if she realized that she had forgotten to introduce the cousins by name—or if she perhaps didn’t know their names.
“Oh, we will, ma’am. She’s doing a bit better lately.”
“Was she ailing?” Margaret asked politely. The girls looked at each other, turning an identical shade of pink that unfortunately did nothing for their complexions. Some girls were improved by a bit of a blush, and some weren’t, and Margaret was finding it surprising that she was even distantly related to these two.
“She, um . . .” said the one in blue.
“Female troubles,” the other mumbled. “She took to her bed near upon a month ago. But just yesterday she ate a bowl of stew and walked to the mailbox and back. Lassiter’s rigged her up a rail so she can get in and out of her chair.”
“She been living with Lassiter and Bess since she took ill,” Blue Dress piped up, encouraged by her sister’s loquacity. “They got the spare room.”
“Yes,” Caroline said briskly. “Well, we all have our burdens, don’t we? Now we must let you two get back to enjoying the party.”
Margaret was practically spun around and dragged away, released the moment they entered the ballroom and the crowd swallowed them. Her mother sagged against the wall, closing her eyes and pressing the back of her hand to her forehead as though she’d just fought her way through a horde.
“Mother,” Margaret said, piqued. “What was the purpose of that? Since we’ve been acting like we don’t know them for my whole life?”
“Because apparently Joan Dial failed to explain the situation to the bride’s mother.” She shrugged. “And someone let it slip that Tansy used to play with those two dimwits, and since she was already throwing this gauche circus, she just added them to the list. And now everyone knows that we are related.”
Margaret allowed herself a small smile: now it was all clear. Joan Dial had played second fiddle to her mother for years, but the marriage of her son to a girl from a family that was even more well-to-do and socially prominent than the Piersons had given her an unexpected opportunity for comeuppance. It would take a bold woman to go up against Caroline Pierson in public, but in private, Mrs. Dial must have been relishing her role as mother of the groom at the wedding that would overshadow every other social event that year. She could just imagine Mrs. Dial explaining to the bride’s mother that yes, the Piersons were blood kin of those poor, unfortunate Wooley girls to whom Tansy had shown such kindness.
Still, the distance between the Piersons and even the next-most-wealthy family in New London was so vast that her mother rarely gave such rebellions any notice. The fact that she was visibly unsettled was surprising and intriguing.
“What exactly is wrong with my cousins?” Margaret asked, reaching for a flute of champagne from a passing waiter’s tray. “I mean, other than those dresses.”
Her mother gave her an automatic frown of disapproval, then sighed. “Everything, frankly. First of all, there are so many of them that one can’t possibly remember them all.”
“Wait,” Margaret said. “How many, exactly? And are they boys or girls? And how old are they?”
“Three of them. Boy, girl, girl.”
“Three is hardly a lot. The Temples have four, and the Kelleys have five, and the—”
“Well, perhaps, but Euda was always so dramatic about it. Every time she was expecting, we all had to hear about it, as if she’d invented the entire process.”
“Hmmm,” Margaret said, realizing that she’d unintentionally hit upon one of her mother’s sore spots. Depending on Caroline’s mood, she sometimes seemed regretful about not having more children—which would be understandable, considering that she’d lost her first child in the school disaster. But at other times she could be downright cold toward women with large families, criticizing everything from their squandered figures (“if her bosom falls any further, she’ll have to pick it up off the floor”) to their fortunes (“three daughters, three weddings, there goes any hope she’s got of a vacation in the next decade”).
In Caroline’s sister Euda’s case, however, there had been no fortune to squander. Caroline and Euda had been raised in tiny Archer, where Euda still lived. Their parents had eked out a spare existence and died penniless. Caroline did not like to talk about how she’d gone from the edge of ruin to the height of New London society, but Margaret had managed to fill in the details missing from her mother’s account by listening closely when the ladies gossiped: at sixteen, Caroline hitched a ride to Henderson, where she lied about her age and got a job tutoring the children of a wealthy family that had made its fortune in timber. When the ungainly young nephew of her employer came for a visit, Caroline had turned on the charm, and the young man had been dazzled—dazzled enough to overlook her poverty and family history. Within a matter of months they were married, and Caroline was pregnant when her homely groom announced that his father and uncles were sending him thirty miles east to the tiny town of New London to invest in drilling rights for the newly discovered East Texas oil field.
Back in Archer, Euda did not fare nearly so well. Caroline had been sharp-witted enough to win academic prizes at school, and that in turn caught the attention of her teachers, who gave her extra guidance, so that by the time she graduated from the eighth grade she was at the top of her class. Euda was plain in both looks and spirit, so her intelligence was overlooked, and she managed to escape the attention of nearly everyone. She dropped out of sixth grade to take a job in a laundry, and when the boy who delivered the cleaned and pressed bundles asked her to marry him, she said yes.
Caroline had
little patience for Euda’s misfortune: “poor as church mice and dumb as dirt,” she’d said of her sister and brother-in-law. Any charity she might have felt for her sister had been, Margaret suspected, scoured away by Caroline’s social aspirations. Margaret was insightful enough to realize that her mother’s ambitions were probably fueled by insecurity and a fear of being found out—but poor Euda had paid the price, cut off from her only family.
“Well,” she said drily, as she sipped the last of her champagne, “not everyone has your thirst for success, Mother.”
Caroline sniffed. “Those girls may seem harmless now, but they were dreadful when they were little—colicky, and they caught every little illness that came along, because Euda couldn’t keep them fed or washed. She and her husband wouldn’t let the boy go to school after third grade, either. They’re unmanageable.”
“Where is the boy now?” Margaret asked.
Caroline sniffed and shrugged her shoulders. “Prison? An early grave? Really, Margaret, had I known you were so curious about your extended family, I would have invited Audrey to spend the summer with us. I’m sure you would enjoy sharing your bed with her and joining her for morning prayers on your knees. Now if you’ll excuse me, I see Martha Briggs over there, and I really must talk to her about the garden club luncheon.”
She hurried off, stepping impatiently around the guests who were in her way. Margaret waited until her mother was out of sight to take a half-full glass of champagne that had been left on the long table nearby, and drank it in a single swallow. She dabbed daintily at her lips, wondered where she could get another, spied the bride and groom descending the curved staircase, and promptly forgot all about her cousins.
The bride looked fresh and pretty in a trim little yellow traveling suit, and the groom was carrying her train case and holding her elbow. Margaret’s heart was in her throat as she tried to fight her way through the crowd gathering to say goodbye, and she didn’t even stop to apologize when she jostled an elderly man and nearly knocked him down.