The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club: A Debutante Dropout Mystery

by McBride, Susan

  “Don’t ever burn your bridges, darlin’,” she whispered in my ear. “You never know when you’re gonna need to get over the water.”

  “If that should ever come up, I’m counting on you to pull some strings so I can walk across,” I whispered back.

  Mother gave me one of those “what am I going to do with you?” looks that felt strangely reassuring.

  I needed no such encouragement to exchange warm hellos with a pal of mine, Janet Graham, society columnist for the Park Cities Press, the colorful rag that covered posh Highland Park and neighboring University Park, mostly boasting stories about the designer duds Mrs. Hoity-Toity wore at this gala or that, whose pedigreed daughter was marrying which pedigreed son, and other such vital tidbits.

  “Would chat, but can’t,” Janet confessed, as she was on the clock for the paper and had to skedaddle. She had her bright orange-red hair trapped beneath a black cloche hat, and her olive-green pantsuit was vintage 1940s. It was almost shocking to see her looking so subdued, when she usually wore clothes bright enough to glow in the dark.

  Janet also had on a pair of black-framed glasses—nearly identical to those Katie Couric sported during her more serious morning show interviews. Out of sheer quirkiness, Janet had adopted that particular affectation and donned hers when she wrote her more serious features. So I’d venture to guess her ode to Bebe would be far more solemn than her last column, “The ABCs of Dallas Society,” starting with “A is for Ashton Bradford, the most eligible bachelor in Big D!”

  When there appeared to be no one left that Cissy and I hadn’t addressed, including the minister, the choir director, and the coat-check girl, we were finally able to pull an Elvis and leave the building.

  Normally, I would have slipped out as soon as the fat lady warbled—or, in this case, a very thin, dark woman with a Met-worthy contralto—but I didn’t want to desert my mother until she was ready. Sitting beside her, passing back and forth her increasingly soggy linen kerchief, had been the closest to a bonding moment that we’d shared since Daddy had passed away. The child in me wanted to milk it for as long as it would last.

  I was hoping for another five minutes.

  As we descended the steps toward the sidewalk, a blast of a car horn drew my attention to the street.

  The mass exodus of mourners had turned into a bottleneck on University Boulevard, horns honking as waiting limos held up traffic. I recognized the Bentley that had once belonged to my Paw Paw double-parked, smack in the midst of the congestion. Though I couldn’t see his face beyond the tinted glass, I knew Fredrik sat behind the wheel. He was Mother’s part-time driver, a young married man whose wife had a high-powered PR job in the city. He played Mr. Mom when he wasn’t hauling Cissy around on days when she didn’t feel like handling her champagne-hued Lexus or my father’s boat-sized, perfectly preserved Cadillac Brougham that rarely left the garage.

  Cissy waved at Fred, giving him a finger—not the finger—and letting him know she’d be another minute.

  “Well, I guess this is where I exit stage left,” I said and summoned a smile, squeezing her hand, proud of her for having made no cracks whatsoever about my unfashionable dress, lack of pantyhose, missing slip, or bad hair.

  I was proud of myself, too, for surviving the long morning and all the memories it had dredged up, for lending my mother support when she’d needed it, and for avoiding any public arguments. It was definitely one for the books.

  “I’m parked in the lot off Vassar,” I told her, as I untangled our fingers, though she seemed reluctant to let go. “I think I’ll grab a bite somewhere and then head home.”

  I’d promised myself a stop at Bubba’s at Snider Plaza before I drove back to North Dallas. I had my mind set on slipping into one of their old-fashioned booths and clogging my arteries with their legendary fried chicken and mashed potatoes. I might’ve invited Cissy along, but I knew how much she liked getting her fingers greasy. (About as much as she liked watching NASCAR or shopping at the Dollar Tree. Ha!)

  “I’m really sorry about Bebe.” I breathed the words against her hair as I leaned in for a hug, inhaling the cloud of Joy that always clung to her. Then I pulled away. “I’ll see you later, okay? You call if you need me.”

  She caught my wrist, something close to panic in her eyes. “But, sweetie, you’re coming along, aren’t you? They’ll have something for you to nibble on there, and I really don’t want to go alone.”

  What was this “alone” business again? As if that had ever bothered her before. I’d always thought of my mother rather like Amelia Earhart, never afraid to fly solo. Clinging just wasn’t her style. So what was with the death grip she had on me? Her fingers wrapped around my wrist like a manacle.

  Obviously, I wasn’t going to Bubba’s, not unless I aimed to drag her. “All right. I give. Go with you where?”

  She sighed. “I explained it on the phone.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Don’t be obstinate, Andrea.”

  Obstinate?

  The “bonding moment” I’d alluded to earlier? Scratch that.

  “What are you talking about, Mother?” My eyelid twitched. “I’m completely clueless.”

  As I was so often when it came to our relationship.

  “Let’s not discuss it here.” She glanced at the street, where Fredrik continued to hold up traffic. He gestured to her through the opened window, begging her to hurry. “We can talk in the car, on the way.”

  “On the way to where?”

  Embrace your high anxiety moments with a wide grin or belly laugh, I reminded myself, before I thought, “Screw that.”

  Why did she always do this? Rope me into things without explaining them, so that I was too befuddled to protest?

  Wherever it was she meant to take me, it wasn’t to Bebe’s interment. I knew the burial had been private, for family only (meaning, the pair of English cousins) and longtime staff, held the previous morning at the Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park where Bebe would slumber forever beside her beloved Homer and at least several generations of Kents before them. That’s where my daddy had been buried, along with most of Dallas’s favorite sons and daughters: Greer Garson, Mary Kay Ash, Mo Connolly, Mickey Mantle, and, may he rest in peace, Tom Landry (who, it was rumored, went to heaven with his hat on).

  “Mother, spill,” I begged, putting my foot down, literally, and nearly stepped on her Chanel-shod toes. “Or I’m catching the van to my Jeep right this minute.”

  “There’s a special reception, and the Wednesday bridge girls will be there. I’m sure I mentioned it.” She frowned, and I noticed her brow didn’t crease. Not a single tiny wrinkle. “Didn’t I?”

  “Um, no.”

  I would’ve made a crack about Old Timer’s Disease, but après Bebe’s service didn’t seem an appropriate moment.

  On any other day, I would’ve assumed Cissy was playing innocent; but she did appear genuinely baffled, which raised my guilt to another level entirely (sort of like the terror alert going from orange to red—or was it red to orange?). One of her best friends had just gone boots up, and she probably felt as though the Grim Reaper was stalking her like the paparazzi after J-Lo. She had every excuse to be absentminded.

  Geez, Louise, I chastised, giving myself twenty lashes. When had I become so cynical? Where was my compassion?

  I reached deep down to unearth the kinder, gentler me. It had to be there, somewhere, lodged between my usual extremes of “I’m a happy camper” to “you’re on my last nerve, jerk!”

  “Er, you know, maybe I did forget,” I volunteered, and her face softened, looking almost grateful. “Can you tell me the plans again?”

  “There’s a small reception at Belle Meade immediately following the memorial at the church,” she said, as if that would clear things up. “I promised to be there, and I hoped you’d come, too.”

  I had never even heard of Belle Meade, but then I was constantly out of the social loop. It sounded like a swanky country club
where four hundred mourners could comfortably mingle, eating cucumber sandwiches and drinking sweet tea while everyone chatted about how beautiful the service had been and how much they’d miss Bebe.

  My nose felt raw from blowing it into Cissy’s linen kerchief, and my stomach cried for Bubba’s. My feet barked, and I wanted out of this dress (it was starting to itch).

  As hard as it was to say no to Mother sometimes, I’d done my duty. It was time for an honorable discharge. I didn’t want to go anywhere but home.

  “I wish I could, really,” I lied and wrenched my arm free of hers so I could dig for my keys in my purse. “But I’ve got, er, plans.”

  Before she asked why—and because my only excuse was a yen for a deep-fried lunch and a yearning to put on Malone’s much-washed St. Louis Cardinals T-shirt and while away the afternoon, working on an abstract painting I’d started a few days before—I flashed a tired smile, said, “Okay, love you, bye-bye,” and started walking.

  I’d taken no more than two steps before she tossed out a verbal lasso that roped me faster than a three-legged calf.

  “Oh, but, sugar, Annabelle’s expectin’ you. She’s excited as could be about seeing you again. How long’s it been? Since before you deserted your mother and ran off to that art school in the Midwest?” My back turned, I froze, waiting for her to finish. “It’d be a real shame if you didn’t reconnect. Friendships are so very precious. A girl never knows when a day could be her last,” she added, laying it on thicker than her Laura Mercier mascara.

  Good grief, I thought, before the realization of what she’d said truly hit me, smack in the solar plexus.

  Annabelle?

  I only knew one girl with that name: a chubby brunette with freckles who seemed forever on the verge of tears. We’d both been shipped off to Camp Longhorn for four straight summers, during those awkward years leading up to puberty. She was always screwing up, crapping out on activities and forgetting to say “please, sir” and “thank you, ma’am,” which left her with few of the precious merits we accumulated as chips on our shower rods and used to buy goodies from the camp store, like silver James Avery charms and nylon backpacks. Needless to say, I’d slipped her a few of mine to keep her from bawling.

  She endlessly complained, about the heat, the bugs, the competitions. She’d earned a host of nicknames for her actions—or, rather, inaction—like “Dumb Belle” and “Ding Dong Belle.” Those were the kinder ones. The rest, uttered behind her back, ridiculed her weight, not her tendency to flake out. It wasn’t part of the Camp Longhorn spirit to belittle a camper, but that didn’t stop it from happening.

  We’d both played wallflowers at the Thursday night dances—I was gawky and thin, and she was bigger than most of the boys—so neither of us was very popular with the opposite sex. When we got a little older—say, closing in on twelve—she used to fake menstrual cramps so often to get out of activities that someone had once filled her bunk with Midol.

  Naw, it couldn’t be her. Could it?

  “Annabelle Meade from Camp Longhorn?” I voiced the name aloud, sure I was mistaken.

  “That’s right, sugar. She’s done so well for herself, despite everything. Just wait till you see her. She looks fabulous for a girl of her proportions.”

  That coming from a woman who thought a size eight was tipping the scales.

  “You won’t recognize her. She’s come a long way from the child who used to throw a tantrum when her au pair picked her up from boarding school and plunked her on the charter bus for Austin.”

  So it was that Annabelle Meade.

  Wow. It had been ages.

  I turned around, sure that I was making a mistake by not flying like a bat out of hell toward the shuttle. But, Mother had piqued my curiosity, just as she’d intended. Much as I liked to believe she didn’t understand me, she knew me too damned well.

  “So, this place holding the reception belongs to Annabelle? Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

  “If you’d only read the paper once in a while, sugar, you’d know all about it. Janet Graham did a huge feature on it for the PCP.”

  By “PCP,” she didn’t mean angel dust. She meant the Park Cities Press, where Janet Graham helmed the prominent “Society” section. The Wall Street Journal, it wasn’t, but it didn’t pretend to be.

  “Your old camp friend swooped in from the Hill Country and purchased a piece of prime real estate on Forest Lane a while back. That’s where she built Belle Meade. She opened its doors six months ago, and already has a full house and a waiting list a mile long.”

  Opened its doors? Full house? Waiting list?

  Did Annabelle operate an orphanage? A homeless shelter? Was she the new Mayflower Madam?

  Why hadn’t I heard a peep about this before?

  “What is it, exactly?”

  “Belle Meade’s a very lovely retirement community,” Mother said in a hushed voice and smoothed her skirt.

  Ah. I squinted. “An old folks’ home?”

  “My word, Andrea, get with the program. No one calls them that!” She sniffed, defensive, looking at me like she wanted to wash my mouth out with soap. “It’s for mature adults who don’t want the trouble of maintaining their own property, and it’s beautifully done. Annabelle modeled this one after the first Belle Meade, which she debuted in Austin a few years back. She told me she flew down Jimmy Miller from Chicago to do the interior design for both.” She sucked in her cheeks and added, “He did Oprah’s penthouse, you know, and her farm in Indiana.”

  Call me slow, but I was getting the picture.

  “So it’s not like the depressing place where we visited Meemaw?” I asked, conjuring up the medicinal smell, the fluorescent-lit hallways and frowning nursing staff, every one of whom I’d nicknamed Nurse Ratched. Though, admittedly, toward the end, Meemaw was rather wretched herself.

  “Oh, heavens, not even close.” Mother tugged at a gray-pearl earring. “Your Meemaw needed constant nursing supervision before she passed on, and that was eons ago, practically the dark ages. Belle Meade doesn’t have a skilled nursing unit. It’s for independent and assisted living only.”

  “So, if you get really sick, they ship you off to somewhere like Meemaw’s Hellhole of Jell-O?” Well, that’s what I’d used to call it.

  “Really, Andrea, you’re impossible.” Cissy stared down her nose at me. An astonishing feat, considering we were at eye-level. “Living at Belle Meade is rather like staying at the Four Seasons, with three squares a day and a doctor on-call.”

  Hush my mouth.

  That was lavish praise indeed, coming from Her Highness of Highland Park, Queen of Good Taste, and Staunch Defender of the Uppity.

  “Sounds nice,” I offered, sensing a trap being set, and I was the hapless mouse.

  “Well, you’ll see for yourself,” she drawled, toying with the rings on her fingers, paying particular attention to her wedding band. “Annabelle claims to have spared no expense, and I believe her, though they’re still working out some kinks. Dallasites are so particular, you know. We’re used to being spoiled.” She shrugged dismissively. “But the dining hall is scrumptious, and Annabelle hired away a chef from the Mansion so it’s as good as eating out anywhere in town.”

  Uh-huh, sure it was.

  I eyed her skeptically, and a crow cawed from a tree nearby, seeming to echo my cynicism. This Xanadu for the Medicare crowd sounded too good to be true, and Mother was talking like its marketing director.

  “There’s also a full-service spa that does divine seaweed wraps. And, of course, there’s a crack medical staff on the premises, and they have nearly as many yoga and Pilates classes as the Cooper Clinic.”

  “Sounds très posh,” I remarked, figuring it must’ve cost a bundle to build, and not a small price to live there. If such a place had existed when my Meemaw was still around, she would’ve signed up faster than you could say “Geritol.”

  “It’s very comfortable, indeed,” Mother concurred and smiled primly.

&nb
sp; Holy cow.

  A bell went off in my head.

  How come Cissy knew so much about this place? Was it just because Annabelle ran it, or because she’d been doing some research for herself?

  Was this something my mother had been considering? Selling her and Daddy’s house and moving into a luxury resort for the senior set? How else could she speak so fondly of the seaweed wraps and the dining room décor?

  Oh, fudge.

  My stomach pitched.

  I imagined the elegant 1920s stucco on Beverly where I’d grown up with a “For Sale” sign posted on the front lawn. I tried to picture losing it and all the memories it held of my daddy and my childhood, and I swayed, the warm air suddenly seeming exceedingly hard to breathe. “You’re not thinking of moving?”

  “No, Andrea, I’ve no plans to live there,” she pooh-poohed, and I gulped with relief, my heart returning to its rightful spot in my chest. “But I have several friends who do. Mostly widows who’re tired of the responsibility of a big house and grounds, what’s left of their families all grown up or gone.” She ticked off a name on her finger. “Sarah Lee Sewell got herself a townhouse like Bebe’s a few months back, and she’s joined our weekly bridge group, though”—her voice trailed off, and she sucked in her cheeks.

  “Though what?” I prodded.

  She shook her head. “I didn’t see her at the church this morning, and I’d expected her. Hmm, perhaps she had a migraine and stayed in bed.” She cocked her head. “Oh, well, that’s why Annabelle is having the reception. It’ll give everyone who knew Bea a chance to say goodbye, particularly those who didn’t get to the memorial service, and I’m sure there were plenty.”

  There was something more to this, I could tell. The way she fiddled with the clasp on her pocketbook and didn’t meet my eyes.

  But I didn’t push. Whatever it was, I was sure I’d find out when she was ready to confess.

  “Oh, dear, there’s a policeman headin’ toward the Bentley. If we don’t go now, he’ll give Fredrik a ticket. So are you comin’ with your mother or running off on me again?”