When I’d gathered my wits enough to stand, I made my way on wobbly, grateful, hopeful legs to the closet, with a whopping fifteen minutes to get changed and go blonde. The Bellissimo-sponsored fashion show to benefit puppies, or wild boars, or guinea pigs, that Bianca had signed herself (me) up to chair needed to be planned by committee over cocktails. The committee had been appointed in descending order of the area’s largest snobs starting with the Mayor’s wife, number-one snob, the President of the Junior League, number one-and-a-half snob, and the Lieutenant Governor’s wife, who was actually kind of nice after a few drinks. I saw my outfit and wondered how in the world I was going to plan anything wearing the nightmare in front of me. There was more hanger than there was dress. It was made up entirely of electric blue silk crepe ruffles. It was as thin as air. It plunged and twisted and wrapped, and when I touched it, it fell to the floor in a puddle.
* * *
With each passing day, I felt sorrier and sorrier for the oil guy who’d lost the condo we—we!—now call home. Other than the parade of uninvited guests and the fact that the man who owned it with me was noticeably absent, I fell more in love with my new living space every time I found a new nicety. I couldn’t wait to show Bradley Cole what all I’d stumbled on.
Dark and early on Tuesday morning, I stumbled into the shower. I loved the shower anyway because it was so large, you could park a motorcycle in it. (But I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t ride a motorcycle through the rest of the condo to get it to the shower.) What I discovered was if you bolted straight up at three in the morning feeling absolutely whack, you could race in there dragging a pillow and blanket and stretch out on the cold tile mumbling, “mind over matter mind over matter mind over matter” to yourself.
Which I did.
I woke up hours later, feeling like I’d slept on ice cold tile. (I had.) I threw the pillow and blanket out, turned the water on, which is when I found the blue button on the control panel. Ice Shower. Pressing the small blue recessed circle instantly turned the shower water from 105°F to 70°F.
Which I did. Several times.
“Buck up, girl.” I could see my teeth chattering in the mirror.
When I could brave the world outside the bathroom, I saw I’d missed eight calls, six with accompanying messages. The calls had come in on top of each other for eleven minutes beginning at seven-ten. No Hair and Fantasy hadn’t left messages. Bianca left five I deleted without listening to. Bradley Cole left one. I pushed the button.
“Davis.” I heard him inhale sharply. “You’re on Page Six again.”
I pushed a third button, this one bringing my laptop to life, then went straight to The Sun Herald.
I’d worn the blue dress backwards. The X was supposed to be in the front, to cover the girls, and the horizontal ruffles were intended to be in the back, to cover one’s ass. The caption read, “We can’t wait to see this fashion show!”
It took me a minute to brave the world past the bedroom door, and when I did, my first instinct was to get back in the bedroom, stack the furniture against the door, and never come out again.
Baylor the Security guy was duct taped to a ladder-back kitchen chair. My spent taser gun was on the floor several feet away. Peyton had chewed through her leash. It was eight o’clock in the morning.
SIXTEEN
“Look it, Bea.” I blew across the top of my six-dollar caramel macchiato. “You don’t need to know any details.”
We were at Regis Beauty Salon in the Edgewater Mall at noon on Wednesday, where three stylists, plus the salon manager, were giving Bea their all. They’d turned off the Walk Ins Welcome sign, because they had plenty on their hands. The one trying to saw through my ex-ex-mother-in-law’s inch-thick toenails was sweating. Bea, also sweating and wearing a plastic tarp and a mint julep pore-minimizing mask, was being nosy. One of her specialties.
“You look it, Davis. If I’m going to walk around with gray hair,” Bea licked at the mint julep in the corners of her mouth, “I believe you can at least tell my why.”
“It’s not gray,” the salon manager said. “It’s called Pure Diamond, and the color will come out silver.” She cautiously prodded Bea’s head with a small wooden stick. “Very classy. You’ll love it.”
“It itches.” Bea made a move toward her chemically-soaked scalp and about ten hands came out of nowhere to slap hers down.
“It’s the straightener and the stripper that itches,” the manager said. “Your hair is the color of Cheetos, ma’am; we have to get that off first. And I’m trying my best to unfurl it.”
After that, it was an Edward Scissorhands Revival. Seven wispy inches of hair hit the floor. Pure Diamond was slapped on with paint brushes, seared in, then shampooed down the drain. Hair dryers blew, the mask came off, and the wax went on. In the end, Bea liked herself without a moustache—she couldn’t stop tapping her fingertips across her smooth upper lip—and by all accounts, it was a marked improvement. But when that first strip of wax came off, Bea let out a war cry, then drop-kicked the poor girl trying to hack through the callouses on her heels. That chick flew across the room. It took two and a half hours, four hundred dollars (big tips), and a squadron of professionals to run Bea Crawford through the clean-up shop.
Next, it was the Lancôme counter at Dillard’s. I slipped the girl a fifty. “We need spackling compound for the skin, grout-type stuff,” I whispered, “and she has to leave here knowing how to use it.” No way was I helping Bea put her face on. “Idiot proof,” I said. “And give her paint-by-number instructions.”
“I prefer cake mascara.” Bea spilled all over, under, and out of the director’s chair.
The terrified girl cut her eyes at me. “What happened to her eyebrows?”
“It was a fryer mishap.” Bea fluffed her silver hair.
Thirty minutes and another two hundred dollars later, I swear, Bea Crawford looked half human. From the neck rolls up, anyway. She was still wearing a sweatshirt featuring a glittery cat over salmon-pink stretch pants with lavender Crocs on her feet. But we were making progress.
We found one clothing store that could accommodate all of my ex-ex-mother-in-law. One of the Chico’s salesgirls asked me what I wanted to do with the clothes Bea wore in, and I told her to burn them. We left there with a new twelve-hundred-dollar wardrobe that fit, camouflaged, and for the most part, consisted of endangered-animal prints.
You can’t win ’em all.
Last stop, the Naturalizer shoe store. I didn’t even know they made women’s shoes in double-digit sizes.
Leona Powell, I must say, looked like an over-the-hill well-to-do plus-sized model. I, on the other hand, looked like a pack mule trailing behind her with the day’s loot. To look at Bea—posture, grin, twinkle—was to see how good she felt about herself, maybe for the first time in her life. I couldn’t help but snap a picture in front of the mall fountain, and Bea was more than happy to pose. I zipped it to my sister, and texted, “Guess who this is?” under the photo.
“This is a miracle,” Meredith texted back.
* * *
“You have to come let me in.”
“Davis,” Fantasy said. “Where’s your card key? First your gun, now your card key.”
Fantasy and I used the only entrance in 3.2 million square feet that didn’t have a camera watching. Of course, a swipe card was involved, issued by Mr. Richard Sanders and Mr. Richard Sanders only, and of course I occasionally misplaced mine.
On the way to our office, Fantasy opened her mouth to lecture me, and I said, “Please, don’t. I’ve been with Bea for hours.”
“You’ve been with Leona,” she corrected me. “Where is Leona? You didn’t kill her, did you?”
“She’s at the dentist getting five decades of plaque jackhammered off her teeth,” I said. “Her sorry-dog son will be taking her to my place after, so she can sleep
it off. And there’s plenty of room now that Peyton’s jumped ship.”
“That Peyton is nuts,” Fantasy said.
“Amen.”
“Not that Bea and Eddie aren’t,” she added.
“Amen again.”
Bea and Eddie would be at my place without supervision, and it wasn’t sitting too well with me, but nothing was sitting too well with me these days. At the moment, food-court lunch from the mall. Baylor was still in sick bay recovering from the ass kicking he’d received from my last house guest, and I set about drumming up a big thug substitute to keep an eye on my current house guests until Baylor was back on his feet. The worst of it, Baylor told us, was the duct tape. (No Hair: “Why do you have so much duct tape, Davis?” I didn’t know I had any. At all. Of course, I didn’t know I had a tea kettle or a potato smasher, either.) No Hair found the Happy Pills Peyton had stopped taking between the keys of the antique typewriter in the guest room. He’d made the executive decision that we would not attempt to chase Peyton down a second time—our plates were full—but he did put extra security on my neighbor, Matthew Thatcher.
Peyton. Pfffft.
* * *
Instant Wealth 101.
First, change the date on your computer. (Bottom right, right click.) Back it up a few decades. Begin concocting data, financial and personal. Fast-forward date, enter more data. Google, then Photoshop a few life events: graduation, engagement, bank error in your favor. Hack, then plant life events in newspapers archives. Zip date up. More financial information. Society page, only daughter marries Kooter Kasden. Change son-in-law’s name to Philippe. (Why be married to a guy named Kooter?) When subject’s at the gates of the big five-oh, begin sprinkling in pesky medical stuff—flu every other year, a three-day hospital stay for bronchitis, broken wrist, hemorrhoid surgery. (Ha ha.) Keep up with the medical stuff, increasingly dire, toss the word “obesity” around. Work your way to the mother lode—the inheritance.
Leon Larose, former Studebaker dealership mogul, dies peacefully in his sleep.
Leaves it all to his favorite granddaughter, Leona.
She’s sixty-six years old, and she’s worth a mint.
* * *
Finally, he answered.
“Bradley.” It came out on a whoosh of air.
“Let me put you on hold a minute, Davis.”
He put me on hold for nine minutes.
“Sorry.”
“Me, too,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
“I meant I was sorry I left you on hold so long.”
“I’m sorry for everything, Bradley.”
It was Wednesday evening, and I was Laura Kasden (Philippe’s former wife) again. I had checked myself into a Bellissimo double-suite: two luxury guest rooms connected by a giant living room. Ocean view. Two full baths and a powder room. Wet bar. Laura’s mother, Leona Powell, was supposed to be behind door number two, but she was at my condo, and she’d better not be snooping around. I left her with a big security guard whose name I didn’t catch. I looked up, way up, at him.
“I’m just going to call you Baylor if that’s okay with you.”
He shrugged.
“Her son?” I pointed to Extreme Makeover on my sofa. “Is not allowed through that door.” I pointed at the door.
Baylor II nodded.
Extreme Makeover piped up, “You can call me the Silver-Haired Fox, young man.”
He shrugged again.
She patted my marshmallow sofa. “Come on over here, boy, take a load off.”
I got out of there as fast as I could, locked myself up in my Bellissimo suite, showered, wrapped myself in a Bellissimo robe and my red hair in a Bellissimo towel, dialed Bradley, and now I’d been staring into the starry Gulf night for nine minutes while he had me on hold.
“I don’t think I overreacted, Davis,” Bradley said. “The man was standing in front of you naked.”
“You moved out.”
“No, I didn’t. I put some space between us. I didn’t move out.”
“I’m there, and you’re not there, Bradley. It feels a lot like you don’t live there.”
“Why are you saying ‘there’? Are you not ‘there’?”
I sighed. “I’m at the Bellissimo tonight. Long work story.”
“I have a long work story of my own,” he said.
“We need to talk, Bradley. I need to talk to you.”
“Is it about Eddie?”
“No. No, Bradley. It’s about us.”
“Eddie is us, Davis. There are three of us.”
“Exactly what I need to talk to you about.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Because,” I said, “three of us.” A soft bell chimed. “I need to talk about three of us.” I made my way across the room to the door.
“Davis, have you slept with Eddie?”
I threw open the door and shouted, “NO!” at the same time.
Matthew Thatcher google-eyed me wearing a bathrobe, yanked the long-stemmed rose he’d been biting from between his teeth, then asked, “Are you naked?”
“What?” Bradley yelled.
Oh, dear Lord.
“Is that Eddie? Are you kidding me, Davis? You have Eddie in your hotel room?”
“NO!”
“Are you not happy to see me?” Matthew Thatcher’s heart was breaking. “You invited me!”
I invited you to call me, stupid. Not show up.
“Davis,” Bradley said in my ear. “Maybe we should talk later when you’re not entertaining.”
* * *
“Let me get dressed. Then we’ll meet somewhere.” I had a death grip on the phone that no longer connected me to Bradley Cole. “My mother’s asleep.” I gave a nod to door number two, that thank goodness, wasn’t full of my sleeping mother. Or Eddie Crawford’s. Or Kooter Kasden’s. Or anyone else’s.
“Oh?” He craned and peered. “I saw you had someone with you.”
Someone needed to block this guy from access to guest information.
“This is just a guess, Laura, but are you upset about something?”
I was shaking from head to toe, fighting the fit I was this close to. Bradley Cole and I couldn’t get it together to save our lives, and I needed a moment alone to suck it up.
“It’s my mother.” I clapped my hand over my mouth, and let out the sob I’d been holding.
“Oh, you poor thing!” He was on his way into my hotel room, arms wide open. I knocked him back into the hall.
“I don’t want to wake her up!”
“The piano bar downstairs.” He pointed gun fingers at me and winked. “I love jazz. And if you’re nice, I’ll take you for a ride in my new car. That will make you feel better.”
I closed the door, fell against it, then slid down to the carpet.
* * *
The piano bar, Ivories, was packed, dark, smoky, loud, and gave Matthew Thatcher maximum exposure. Every three seconds someone new stopped by to goo at him, and while he schmoozed, I tossed more of my drink, literally, on the floor. I doused the carpet with a whole glass of wine. Matthew Thatcher noticed I was empty, waved, snapped, and pointed for another.
“So what’s the problem?” His eyes were all over the room. I don’t think he’d looked at me once. I probably could have worn the bathrobe and skipped the two hundred dollars of medium-spice brown.
“Have you ever known a lottery winner?” I raised my voice to clear the amplified saxophone, and with that, he was all mine—heart, body, and soul.
“Did your mother win the lottery?”
“She might as well have.” I looked away. Sighed, Scarlett-style.
“Tell.” He turned his back to his adoring fans. “Tell me all about it.”
He
was a dog on a bone.
“We had no idea my great-grandfather had that kind of money.”
He lapped up every word.
“And my mother’s gone crazy with it.”
His tail was wagging.
I put my wine glass to my lips, tipped, then lowered it. “She bought too much house, for one thing,” I said. “She has a twelve-bedroom pillared mansion in the middle of corn field. She probably couldn’t give it away,” I said, “much less sell it.”
He placed a comforting paw on my thigh. There, there.
“And she stays confused.”
“How do you mean?” he asked.
“Her health is failing.”
“Ooooh,” he howled.
“She’s at a different doctor’s office three or four times a week.”
He was slobbering.
“And half the time, she shows up at the wrong doctor’s office.”
He kept inching in. I feared for my leg. He looked like he wanted to wrap himself around it.
“I don’t want to move back home,” I said. “When I left Alabama, I said no more,” I sliced through the air with both hands, “and I meant it.”
He mouthed the word Alabama. “Is she on GOBAHIP?” He wiped his brow and snapped his fingers in the air for another drink.
I nodded.
“Does she have any other close family?”
“Distant,” I scrambled. “Estranged.”
“I can’t wait to meet her, Laura. She’s going to love the slot tournament.”
She did.
She won.
Silver-haired Leona Powell, jangling a ton of gaudy costume jewelry in a zebra-print jacket over black palazzo pants, left the old folk’s slot tournament the next day with a thousand dollars in cash and a new best friend, a very large-eared man named McKinley, who’d introduced himself the second we cleared the door, practically sat in Bea’s lap the whole time she banged away on the slot machine, and who would be picking us up at ten the next morning to give us a guided tour through old folk’s paradise, the So Help Me God Senior Living Center, where he lived.
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