by Viqui Litman
Rita frowned a little, and her forehead furrowed. “I do believe that Dave and I were divorced by the time Larry came back around.” Dave was Rita’s husband between her two marriages to Larry. He often told Della that he persisted in his pursuit of Rita now because she had married Larry twice, a sure indication she would do the same with Dave.
“I think I was dating that boy from Dallas,” Rita continued, “the one with the car lot.” She looked to Della again. “You remember him?”
“The art lover who used to come get you in an Eldorado with longhorns mounted on the hood?”
Rita nodded solemnly. This past spring she had abandoned her Texas Big Hair for punk. She had dyed her yellow hair jet black, sheared it down to a spiky cap, and highlighted it with a changing rainbow of iridescents (this weekend’s was teal) that blended oddly with her loopy earrings and mostly denim and rhinestone wardrobe. Della thought Rita’s bizarre fashion sense succeeded only because, even surrounded by morning puffiness, the depth of Rita’s blue eyes overwhelmed whatever ludicrous hair color or plastic bauble she sported.
Rita shook her head again, as if to clear it, then fixed those eyes on Della. “So who is she? The guest?”
Della shrugged. “Just a friend of ours from Fort Worth.”
“A widow,” Pauline said. “Her husband died last year.”
“Last February,” Della amplified before she could think. “A year and three months.”
“She have a name?”
“Barbara Morrison,” said Kat. “Mrs. Richard Morrison.”
“Is that someone I should know?” Rita, in her years in Fort Worth, had developed a clientele that included well-known names, some of whom still drove out to Sydonia on a regular basis for her ministrations.
“Richard had a medical supply business,” Della said.
“Until he saw the impact of computers on practice management,” Kat hurried to add. “He started repping software along with his cotton swabs and syringes and parlayed his nice little business into the biggest practice management program in the Midwest.”
“And his wife—Barbara—worked with him in the office for a while,” Pauline said. “They have one kid, in medical school in Dallas; Barbara lives in Fort Worth.”
“I don’t recall Barbara working in the business,” Kat said.
“Early on,” Della replied. “Probably before you knew them.” She grinned. “Boy were we young then! I still remember her driving car pool with that van full of medical supplies. The kids just piled in the back. No seatbelt laws, I guess.”
“Who got the business?” Rita asked. She had begun to glance around in a distracted way that signaled her interest in grazing.
“We’re about to fix lunch,” Della said quickly. They had baked yesterday for the purpose of filling the freezer with breakfast muffins, and Della dreaded another Kat-versus-Rita shoot-out over Rita’s raiding.
Kat, however, was occupied with other matters. “They cashed out, sold it to a software house in Boston. So all they had to split was piles of cash.”
“Nice life,” Rita said. “What’s her hair like?” She brushed a hand over the top of her own hair.
Della watched the black spikes spring back into place while Kat described Barbara’s appearance. I never told Rita about Richard, she thought, watching Rita’s eyes go wide at Kat’s narrative. Week after week, year after year, she was cutting and combing and styling for Richard’s pleasure, and she didn’t even know he existed.
Della hadn’t told anyone except Pauline, and that wasn’t until Richard’s death, when she couldn’t control her grief. Pauline had listened and clucked and sighed and patted, pronouncing no judgment, shooing guests away as they sat at the table by the river and watched the turtles in the unexpected warmth of a February sun. Della supposed Pauline feared that the Ladies Farm wasn’t big enough for Barbara and Della together, but Della would assure Pauline that there would be no scenes.
It’s a good thing Rita doesn’t know, Della thought. When she was done being pissed at me for not telling her, she’d be disappointed that there aren’t any fireworks.
“What are you smiling at?” Rita asked her as they all rose to clear the table and get the late lunch ready.
“I’m imagining Barbara with your haircut,” Della said, stepping aside to let Pauline scoop the piles of buttons into little Baggies.
“Well, I’m going to sharpen my scissors,” Rita retorted. “And change my shmate.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Kat and Della grumbled in unison. One of Rita’s favorite customers was the Jewish wife of a man who owned a sportswear factory. While their guests were either puzzled or tickled to hear Rita drawl Yiddish expressions, her housemates had grown so used to them that they barely noticed her language. What they did notice was that she was carrying off two frozen muffins and that, once again, she was avoiding kitchen duty.
“We have got to talk to her,” Kat muttered, yanking soup bowls from the cabinet.
“Oh, why start trouble?” Pauline said. “She does her share.”
“Just not on schedule,” Della added. They worked without speaking for a while. Della imagined the others were reliving the part Richard and Barbara had played in their lives. Because their sons had been the same age, the six of them—Richard and Barbara, Pauline and Hugh, and Della and her then-husband Tony—had acted as one extended family from Cub Scouts through high school. Kat and, for a while, her husband Grant, had joined them later, right after Richard practically set Kat up in the consulting business.
He was in all our lives, Della reflected. Kat could barely spell practice management before Richard started referring clients to her. And Pauline had long ago confided that it had been Richard’s and Barbara’s money that had kept Sydon House going after the oil bust.
A serving spoon clattered to the floor. “Dammit,” swore Kat, stooping down to retrieve it.
“We need some music,” Pauline said.
“I’ll do it.” Kat was out of the kitchen before either Della or Pauline could suggest a CD.
“Do we trust her with this choice?” Della asked.
Pauline shrugged. Della braced herself for the onslaught, but instead of the screaming rock which Kat usually favored, Dolly Parton filled the kitchen.
Pauline inclined her head a little, then returned to shredding lettuce. “Maybe aliens,” Della said, then giggled a little.
If it was revenge, it was an odd revenge. Neither Della nor Pauline minded country music. When Kat failed to reappear, Della decided her disappearance was the revenge.
“I guess she’s pulled a Rita,” Pauline murmured, but Della could tell that it was Barbara she was thinking about.
“Look,” Della sought to reassure her friend, “if she were going to shoot me, she would have taken her shot on the porch. I don’t think there’ll be violence.”
“You don’t think there’ll be bloodshed,” Pauline corrected. She frowned down at the lettuce she was shredding. “Violence is another matter.”
“As mad as she’d be, I’ll settle for a little violence, especially the metaphysical variety, to the soul. Besides,” Della loaded rolls into a bread basket, “she doesn’t know unless you or I told her. And you or I didn’t.” She looked at Pauline, who shook her head in response.
“You or I or her husband,” Pauline murmured.
Della jerked the last roll out of the sack, placed the roll in the basket, and crumpled the brown bag. “Dead men tell no tales. And I was the last one of us to see him alive. So we’ve got no worries.”
Della knew her glibness neither shocked nor convinced Pauline, who continued to frown. How much lettuce do we need? Della wondered as she watched the huge bowl fill beneath Pauline’s jerking fingers.
First, there had been the hysterical phone call from Barbara. As if Della were her closest friend and she had no one else to turn to. Then the whole maddening mess at the house, while she helped Barbara track her son Dickie down at the hospital where he was a resident and then, as Barbara sobb
ed wrenchingly, taking the phone and telling poor Dickie that his mother couldn’t talk because his father had had a stroke on his way to meet her plane and had run the car into a ditch.
It had been hours before Dickie had appeared and she could escape to Sydonia to confess it all to Pauline. And what was there to do, then, but wail her regrets that she had let him leave early that morning because Barbara was expected back from Chicago? Della didn’t want to relive it now. Stay buried! she ordered the resentment she had felt as she had comforted Barbara. Stay buried with the guilt that her final night with Richard had not been particularly meaningful, that she had been just a little short with him that morning because she knew he was anxious about picking up Barbara. And stay buried, Della demanded of the teeth-gnashing frustration that when she had returned to Fort Worth, she had had no role at the funeral other than that of sympathetic friend to Richard’s grieving widow.
The present needs your attention now, Della scolded herself. Worry about what’s gnawing at Pauline.
It was too much to ask, I should never have confided in her, Della thought, but she knew it was bogus. She could not imagine keeping it all to herself; she would have died of grief.
No one dies of grief, she lectured herself. That’s the hell of it.
Della dumped the rolls into the warming drawer. “I’m checking on Kat,” she announced, and headed out to the living room.
It was actually their lobby, with the desk at one end in front of a pegboard with room keys. Kat stood in front of the bookcase where they kept the CD player. She was holding the plastic case bearing the close-up of Dolly Parton and she was staring at it and, without making any sound at all, she was sobbing.
“Kat?” Della hurried across the room and put a hand around her shoulder. “Katherine? What’s the matter?”
The hand holding the CD case rose and fell with the futility of the effort, and Kat let herself be led to the sofa where they sank down together. “He loved Dolly Parton,” she whispered, her voice shaking with her sharp intake of breath. “It was his secret, he said. He loved her for those big tits of hers and he loved to listen to her.” Kat wiped at her cheeks with the palm of her free hand and shook her head. “I was so stupid,” she whispered. “I thought if we played it while we were in bed then he’d think of me whenever he heard Dolly Parton. But all he ever thought about were those big tits.”
Della closed her eyes a second as she pulled Kat close to her. A mild, citrus scent rose from Kat’s hair, and Della inhaled deeply as she felt Kat’s shoulders shaking. You must not be angry at Kat, she lectured herself. You must not be ugly to Kat. And you must not tell Kat.
But Kat, of course, could not wait to tell Della. She choked out the whole predictable tale in a few minutes. How she met Richard at a Texas Medical Association meeting. How he convinced her to move her office from Dallas to Fort Worth because Fort Worth was ripe for practice management consultants. How she recommended his software and he recommended her services. “It was just business, and then it wasn’t. I was so young then. It was before I got married.”
“And it didn’t start again?” Della fought the anxiety in her voice. “After you and Grant split up?”
“No.” Kat shook her head, puzzling at what seemed to be a fresh question. “I don’t know why, neither one of us seemed interested.”
Della tried hard not to sound relieved. “It must have been hard to keep secret all this time.”
“Oh, yes,” Kat resumed.
This is how you comfort a friend, Della thought as Kat poured out the irony of Richard introducing her to Grant and then the disappointment that Richard wasn’t even jealous when she and Grant got married. You don’t even have to listen, Della realized, you just make these nonjudgmental observations every time she pauses and she picks right up. “You and Grant saw them a lot—Richard and Barbara—didn’t you? I mean, without the kids. Not like the rest of us.” You can watch the sunbeams on the oak floor and listen to the tinny rattle in the sound system as it vibrates along with Dolly.
“Oh, God! It was torture, seeing the way he let her baby him, practically spoon-feeding him dinner. ‘Oooh, Richie, try this veal, here baby, just a wittle bite for Mama.’ It made me sick. And he was so patient with her! Grant couldn’t stand her, he only put up with it because he thought Richard helped my business.”
“She called him Richie?” Della couldn’t help herself; she knew there were lots of things she didn’t know about Richard, things she would never know, but she hated the idea that some of them were things Kat knew. All those years when she had thought of him as just another Cub Scout dad, Kat already knew the sound of his voice in her ear, the taste of his skin. Della took a deep breath.
“The rest of the time she called him sweetie pie.” The memory seemed to have vanquished Kat’s tears, and Della felt her pulling away a little, straightening up. “Anyway, Grant never guessed, Barbara never guessed, and I guess Richard never told anyone. And I never did either, except my sister Joyce, because she lives in L. A. and whom could she tell?”
“Yeah.” Della gave her a last squeeze. “Nothing beats an out-of-town confessor.” As Kat started rubbing at her eyes, Della stood up and walked behind the counter, where they kept a box of tissues. “Here,” she said as she returned, holding the box out to Kat. “I won’t tell anyone either,” she promised.
Kat took the tissue, and Della sat quietly for a few minutes while Kat sniffled and dabbed her leaky eyes. “I don’t know why it hit me like this,” Kat said. “I never cried like this when we split up.”
“Well,” Della advised, “you have to cry sooner or later. Maybe that’s why you’re crying now.”
Kat shook her head. “Having her show up … here … all these years, Grant and everything … I think it just made me sad, thinking that’s the happiest I’ll ever be with a man. A sneaky little affair with someone else’s husband.”
Della did her best to sound like Rita. “Sometimes sneaky little affairs are the best times of our lives. We just don’t always know it right then.”
Kat fixed her with a skeptical gaze. “That’s my point. It’s pathetic.”
Chapter 3
It was all smaller than Barbara remembered. Driving back into Sydonia after tooling over the back roads, the courthouse she had recalled as a limestone castle loomed as just a moderately pleasing two-story landmark with turrets on two corners. The turrets were all that distinguished the courthouse from the county jail, which shared the town square.
“You’re comparing it to Chicago,” Richie would have said, but Barbara knew that even by Fort Worth standards, Sydonia was shabby. The boom in antiques on which Pauline and Hugh had banked was only a jumble of dusty shops on two sides of the square. Coupled with the usual assemblage of title company, lunch counter, hardware store, and law firm consistent with a county seat, the retail establishments presented an image of 1950s prosperity: commerce undisturbed by any aesthetic ambition.
Cars backing from the angled parking spaces around the square forced Barbara to a crawl. She knew the red T-bird drew stares, but she ignored them with a toss of her head. Never mind, thought Barbara. You don’t need a thriving metropolis.
It was five blocks from the square to the Ladies Farm, which sat at the end of a narrow residential lane. The house sat close to the road, almost hulking. The two-story addition of which Hugh had been so proud jutted at right angles to the original frame house and towered over the landscape like a monolith erected by some brick-worshiping clan. Barbara knew that Hugh had been concentrating on the inside when he built it, hoping that the river views from the spacious rooms would enchant visitors into returning. “Quaint only brings them in,” he had told them when she and Richard visited. “Comfort and convenience get them to come back.”
She could picture him here, in stained work clothes, taking a break to show them the latest improvements while Pauline hovered anxiously behind, worried, Barbara supposed, that Hugh would somehow offend them with his starry-eyed dreams. Barba
ra thought Pauline never understood that it was Hugh’s passion that won people over, his dreams that made him so charming.
Barbara blinked and shook her head a little. Now Hugh and Richard were both dead, and she was going to have to find a way to win over Pauline. Nothing would work without Pauline.
She could hear them all in the kitchen when she entered. “It’s just me,” she called out to forestall their having to stop what they were doing to check the front. “I’m just going up to change.”
Even Della’s commanding appearance had shrunk, Barbara thought as she labored up the stairs. Della had never been a beauty, but there had been some allure in the glow of her eyes and the perfection of her skin. Plus, even as she gained weight with age, Della somehow had maintained her shape, still nipping in at the waist, still overflowing top and bottom. But despite the dark hair and the green eyes (Did she wear contacts? She hadn’t even put on glasses to read the computer when Barbara registered!), Della had faded.
Barbara pulled clothing from her suitcase, one garment after another, convinced that with all she had dragged to Sydonia with her, she had not brought the proper attire. She pulled on a pair of elastic-waist pants and buttoned her silk tunic. After all this planning, she still needed to prepare herself. It took twenty minutes to perfect her makeup. If Della had faded, Barbara knew, then she herself must be diminished in exact inverse proportion to her gain in weight. It doesn’t matter, she told herself, trying to blot the curious eyes and knowing smirks from her imagination. They don’t care if you’re fat, and you don’t care if they do care. Just go downstairs.
Which was how she found herself in the dining room, being examined by Rita, the hairdresser. “Honey, we’ve got to get that color out of there,” Rita said, circling around to view the back of her head. “Strip off that color and get that hair conditioned. Then we can work with it.”
Barbara stood still as Rita fingered her hair. “You won’t leave it gray?” Barbara asked, trying, and failing, to keep the alarm out of her voice.