House of Hair

On the second Thursday of every month, Darlene Haney took her mother and brother to the Woodburn Medical Center to see their doctors. She did this out of the goodness of her heart and because she was a dutiful daughter and sister, even though it meant that she must take unpaid time off from work and make other arrangements for day care for the boys. Which was not easy to arrange these days, as the boys had been slandered at school, no doubt by other mothers who were jealous of the Haney boys’ physical prowess, and most of the paid babysitters in town now refused to sit for them. They were not, of course, bad boys; they were just high-spirited. They were just in need of a daddy with a firm hand, and Will Fraser fit that description to a tee as far as Darlene was concerned.

Not that it would be easy, of course. First she must get rid of the Yankee girl. She anticipated no problems in that direction. So far everything was working like clockwork. (Ava was not as dumb as a stump but she was as clueless as one.) Once Darlene and Will were married, they would send the boys to that fancy boarding school he and Jake Woodburn had attended. Darlene imagined herself on Parents Day, floating through the school grounds in a flowered Versace, a large Kentucky Derby hat perched rakishly on top of her expensively styled hair. No more House of Hair dye jobs for her. Once she married Will Fraser, only the most expensive Nashville hair salons would do. And clothes! As Mrs. Will Fraser, she would wear only the best designers. And wouldn’t the girls down at the Debs and Brides Shoppe be green with envy when she waltzed in wearing Dolce & Gabbana or Marc Jacobs! (Serve them right, too, the stuck-up old cows.)

Darlene’s pleasant imaginings were interrupted by the sight of her mother and brother waiting on the porch of the small, dilapidated house. She tooted the horn impatiently, looking on in annoyance as they rose and began their slow, plodding progress. Snowda was wearing a prosthesis she hadn’t even tried to disguise with panty hose. She pushed a wheeled walker in front of her, like a geriatric lion tamer, only without the whip. Beside her, Richard waddled along dressed in a pair of tightly fitting black slacks that ended just above his ankles, a white shirt, a pair of white socks, and black orthopedic shoes clamped on his feet. Darlene sighed, wondering how in the world she could be related to these people.

It would be different, of course, once she was married to Will Fraser. Then she could afford to send her mother and brother away to some private and expensive nursing home. Some place a couple of counties over. It was not hard to imagine herself as Mrs. Will Fraser. Darlene had been a dreamer all her life, and she had been dreaming about Will ever since high school. He’d gone to private schools, of course, so she hadn’t run into him until the summer after ninth grade, when he’d come home from boarding school with his cousin Jake. The two of them had been inseparable in those days; they’d spent the summer driving around town picking up girls in a 1967 Chevrolet Corvette they’d bought at an auction. Jake was the worst. You didn’t dare get into the back with him unless you wanted to come out with bruises and whisker burns all over your face and other places too embarrassing to mention. Darlene had made that mistake just once. Jake was the older of the two, taller and more filled out, and he was a lot more confident with girls, so you noticed him first. But later, Darlene had noticed Will. He was kind of quiet, not really shy but more reserved than Jake and better mannered, too. When you told him “no” he seemed to respect that. He didn’t push it like Jake did.

But damn, they were fine, the two of them. Like rock stars, driving around town in that flashy green car and flirting with all the girls at the Sonic Drive-In. Of course, Will was dating Hadley Marsh by then. She wasn’t from Woodburn—they’d met at boarding school—but she came to visit that summer, and Darlene met her for the first time outside the movie theater. Well, she hadn’t actually met her because Will didn’t introduce the two of them. He didn’t seem to notice Darlene or her friends at all. He was standing there with Jake and Hadley, and they had their heads together, laughing at something private. Like they knew they were too good to be here with all these small-town rednecks and had just come out to give the locals a show. As if Jake Woodburn, who was nothing more than trailer trash, had a right to be stuck-up. Hadley was dressed in a pair of jeans, a white cotton blouse, and a pair of jeweled sandals, and she looked like Michelle Pfeiffer standing there under the lights of the marquee. Watching the way the lights caught in her dazzling hair, Darlene had known she’d never be able to take Will away from Hadley no matter how hard she tried.

Darlene stared irritably at her mother and brother and then gave the horn another light toot. At the speed they were moving they would never get to the appointment in time. She slammed the car in park and climbed out, going to move them along. Snowda was halfway down the front ramp when she remembered that she’d left the television on.

“Oh, for crying out loud, get in the car,” Darlene snapped. “I’ll turn it off.”

She opened the door and stepped into the sweltering front room, lit only by the flickering television screen. The room smelled of socks and old cheese. Darlene held her breath and went quickly to turn off the set. Through the dining room window she could see the neighbor, old Mrs. Caslin, hanging clothes on her clothesline.

She had spent her entire freshman year of high school dreaming about how to catch Will Fraser but it was no use; he was head over heels for Hadley Marsh, and when Darlene found out years later that they were engaged, she had not been surprised. Still, she often reminded herself, you never know how things might turn out. She herself had married a hometown boy who might have played professional football had it not been for one bad knee. And look how tragically Will Fraser and Hadley Marsh had ended.

Over in the corner, Fred the parrot eyed her despondently and began to screech, “You want a piece of me? You want a piece of me?” hopping from foot to foot and jutting his tattered feathers like a deranged hunchback.

Fate was unpredictable. Anything could happen, which made Darlene all the more hopeful that she’d be able to separate Will from his Yankee girlfriend—a woman who rarely wore makeup, never fixed her hair, and went around in cut-off shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops. A woman who didn’t know enough to recognize an enemy when she saw one.

Darlene smiled a sly little smile, squared her shoulders, and walked confidently across the crowded room. She paused at the front door, leaving it open a crack. With any luck, a gust of wind would blow it open and the wretched parrot would make his final and irrevocable escape.

Returning later from the medical center, Darlene let Snowda and Richard off at the curb. She’d run an hour over the time she’d said she’d be back at work, and SuSu Dilworth, the owner of the Debs and Brides Shoppe, was sure to make her pay by working inventory. Snowda and Richard clung to the curb like a couple of giant fungi, watching as Darlene’s car pulled away, tires squealing, and disappeared in the distance.

The day, which had dawned sunny and hot, had begun to cloud, and a sudden burst of wind caused the front door to bang on its hinges and then swing open all the way. Mother and son swiveled their heads and looked at the house.

“I know I done closed that door,” Snowda said.

“Well, I sure as hell didn’t leave it open,” Richard said.

He pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and punched 911 to report a robbery in progress. The dispatcher told them to stay in the yard until an officer came on the scene.

He arrived five minutes later in a flurry of sirens and flashing lights.

“Stand back,” he shouted at Snowda and Richard, pulling his pistol and advancing slowly on the house. Officer Posey was young. He’d graduated from the academy less than three weeks before, and with any luck he’d collar the perpetrator before either of his two older colleagues on the force answered the call. He’d grown up watching Cops and Robocop, which is why he’d decided to go into the exciting field of law enforcement, but so far the only excitement he’d had was breaking up a party of surly, underage drinkers and capturing Old Mrs. Vandergriff, who’d wandered away from her daughter’s house wearing nothing but a pair of faded pink slippers. The vision of the naked, shriveled old woman in the back of his squad car had haunted his dreams for weeks.

“Any firearms in the house, sir?” he said over his shoulder to Richard. Officer Posey held his pistol in front of him and noted with dismay that his hands were shaking.

“Well, now, no, not to speak of,” Richard said. He scratched his head and appeared to be giving this question serious thought. “There’s my daddy’s old huntin’ rifle. And of course the double-barrel twelve gauge. And then there’s Uncle Rafe’s German Luger, the one he took off a dead Hun in a ditch at Roncheres Wood. It’s up in a shoe box in the hall closet but it ain’t loaded, and even if it was, there’s something wrong with the firing mechanism, it has a tendency to misfire, which might explain the dead Hun in the ditch at Roncheres Wood.”

Officer Posey tiptoed across the sparse lawn, leaping onto the porch and flattening his back against the house, his pistol held against his chest just under his nose. He stuck one foot out gingerly and cocked it under the edge of the swinging door, giving it a sudden furious kick. At the same time he swung around into a ready stance in front of the opened doorway shouting, “Freeze!”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Richard said. “Look at that boy go.”

There was a slithering sound inside the house, like something crawling around on all fours, and then quiet.

“I said freeze!” Officer Posey shouted again, his voice edging toward hysteria. He shook like a Parkinson’s patient trying to hold the gun steady.

“I hope the durn fool don’t shoot hisself on my property,” Snowda said. “What’s the rules on something like that?”

Officer Posey took small mincing steps in front of the opened doorway, then stepped across the threshold and disappeared inside. There was a sudden flurry of movement inside the house and a wild cry of “You want a piece of me?” followed by an oath and the sharp retort of a pistol.

Snowda slowly swiveled her head and looked at her son.

“We might oughta told him about the parrot,” Richard said.

News of the apprehension of Fred spread through the town like a brushfire.

“Did he shoot the poor bird?”

“No. It appears that Officer Posey couldn’t hit the side of a barn with a scattergun, much less a parrot in full flight. The bird was so scared it hasn’t said a thing since then, just sits with its head under its wing. The animal rescue says it’s suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.”

This was at a meeting of the Ladies of the Evening Investment Club, an assorted group of Southern matrons who met once a month to drink blush wine, gossip, and pick stocks. Josephine, Fanny, Alice, and Clara were all members.

“Birds can suffer from post-traumatic stress?” Fanny said, looking around in wide-eyed astonishment at the other members, who had suspended their usual business to gossip about the Smolletts. “I did not know that.”

“Hell, honey, birds are as smart as little kids,” Maitland said, serving glasses of wine on a silver tray. “I had a friend once with a cockatiel that used to cuddle up and watch TV with him. It could whistle the entire theme song from The Love Boat.

“You’re just here to serve the drinks,” Fanny reminded him primly. A big yellow cat had wandered in and sat perched on her lap. “You’re not supposed to join in the conversation.”

“Sorry, dear,” Maitland said, rolling his eyes comically. “Sorry, ladies.”

They all laughed quietly. There were about twelve members present, including the aunts, Clara, and Alice. They were assembled in the front parlor and Ava wandered in to say hello, then followed Maitland across the hall into the library. She stood watching him work his magic at the bar.

“What do you say I mix us up a little something special?” he said in a low voice, giving her a wink. Across the hall the conversation had drifted from the Smolletts to the advisability of buying shares in the maker of the Medtronic pacemaker. (Sally Kirkman’s husband had just had one installed.)

Maitland opened the top of a silver shaker engraved with his initials. “Where’s Will tonight?”

“He’s coming by for a drink before he heads off to Poker Night.”

“Ah, a gentlemen’s evening.” He filled the shaker with ice cubes, then poured in gin, followed by lemon juice, sugar syrup, and a pinch of powdered sugar. He shook it vigorously for a couple of minutes, strained the liquid into two icy highball glasses, topped it with club soda, then floated a splash of cherry brandy on top by pouring it over the back of a bar spoon.

“Mud in your eye,” he said, lifting his glass.

“Na zdorovie,” Ava said.

He sipped and closed his eyes. “Now, that’s good stuff,” he said, grinning at his own boastfulness. “We used to drink these at fraternity parties back in the twenties.”

“What do you call it?”

“Singapore Sling.”

Ava sipped quietly. The drink was sweet enough to disguise the sharp taste of the gin. She didn’t normally like gin, but this cocktail was good. Quite good. “What was it like back then?” she asked Maitland. “I’ve seen the gangster movies, Jimmy Cagney and Edward G. Robinson and all that, but was it really that wild?”

“It was pretty wild. Looking back now it seems rather uncivilized. Bathtub gin, which by the way is vile, that’s why we created cocktails, to mask the taste, and speakeasies and flapper girls. I remember how shocked my mother was when Alice bobbed her hair. She was up at Vanderbilt when she did it; she would never have dared do it at home. She’d been such a good sober girl up until that time, no trouble at all except for that summer when she went with Fanny down to Mobile and fell in with Zelda Sayre and Tallulah Bankhead. There was some trouble there, just girlish high jinks, and Judge Sayre got it all hushed up so that Mother never heard about it.” He sipped his drink and looked fondly across the hallway at Alice, as if remembering his sister as a girl. “Still,” he said, looking down at his glass. “No worse than some of the things others were doing.”

“You were up at Sewanee in the twenties? Did you know Allen Tate and the other Fugitive Poets?”

“They were at Vanderbilt, not Sewanee. They were a little before my time but yes, I knew Tate. And Robert Penn Warren, of course. They were too studious for me, those Fugitives, with their New Criticism and constant harping on the classical forms of poetry.” He grinned, his red face shining. He reminded her a little of W. C. Fields when he drank. She smiled, remembering how much trouble she’d had understanding him when she first came to Woodburn. Now she found his manner of speaking genteel and soothing. “A poet, I was not,” he said. “I preferred more leisurely pursuits.”

“Josephine told me the girls at Vanderbilt used to go around carrying teddy bears with hollow metal stomachs filled with gin.”

“Vanderbilt was quite the Babylon in those days. A hotbed of radical thought, illegal booze, and jazz.”

“Yes, but do you think it was worse than the nineteen-sixties, with the draft marches and the Summer of Love and LSD?”

Maitland’s eyes sparkled mischievously. “Child’s play,” he said, raising his glass.

Ava laughed. Across the hall, Clara stood and gave a report on last month’s meeting. They listened for a few minutes, then Maitland said, “Are you Russian or Polish or both?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Your toast. Na zdorovie.

“Oh. I don’t know where I got that,” Ava said. “The movies probably. Or maybe Russian literature. I read a lot of Russian literature.”

“Fanny and I always wanted to see St. Petersburg. Such a beautiful city. The architecture is fantastic. We always wanted to go but it was impossible to visit once the communists took over.”

“It’s never too late. Why don’t you go now?”

He shook his head, staring thoughtfully at the liquor in his glass. “We’re too old for travel. We like our comforts, our soft bed, our American food.”

“But you traveled during your younger years?”

“Oh, yes, everywhere except Russia. Egypt, Europe, Japan. Africa was my favorite.” Ava thought of the Ernest Hemingway photograph in the breakfast room, the three of them behind a downed water buffalo, Maitland looking every inch the brawny, big-game hunter. “We were always hurrying off to some exotic place or another in those days. Always stepping onto a train, or a motorcar, or a camel. Hurrying, hurrying.”

“Making up for lost time,” Ava said and instantly regretted it. Maitland looked past her at the crowd of women in the parlor, who all seemed to be talking at once. She could hear distant music playing, Ravel’s “Boléro.” Someone had left the radio on in the kitchen. Standing beside Maitland, Ava was suddenly aware of the size and strength of the man, of his wide shoulders and well-muscled arms, gone to fat now, but in his youth thick and sturdy as an Olympian wrestler. He was tall, and would have been an imposing figure back then, although it was easy to forget that now, looking at his wide, cheerful face and portly physique.

As if to remind her of this harmless geniality, he grinned suddenly and said, “Another dividend?” It was his way of asking if she wanted another drink.

“Yes, thank you.” She sipped her cocktail, then added, “And by the way, I’m not Russian. I’m Irish on my mother’s side and Polish on my father’s. He died in an ice-fishing accident on the Detroit River when I was ten.” There. She’d done it again. Told the same old lie. Only now she knew it was a lie.

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

She hesitated, then said, “Not really. My mother told me he died, and it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I found out he hadn’t but had simply remarried and started another family. They live in Garden City. My father and his new family. It’s a little blue-collar suburb of Detroit.” She couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth about Frank Dabrowski, the fact that she had no idea who her real father was. She couldn’t bring herself to tell anyone about that.

Maitland was obviously at a loss as to what to say. He busied himself mixing another shaker, then topped off Ava’s glass and poured himself another one. “We used to drink these on hunting trips. My father owned a plantation in the Delta, and we used to go down there to hunt and play cards with some of his Mississippi friends.”

Ava gave him a cynical look. “Mississippi friends? Let me guess. Faulkner?”

Maitland sipped his drink and made a wry face.

She’d said it as a joke but the truth gradually dawned on her. “Oh, my God!” she said. “You drank Singapore Slings with William Faulkner?”

Maitland grinned and shook his head. “Count Faulkner was a whiskey man,” he said, tilting his glass. “I never knew him to drink gin.”

Later, Ava helped Maitland serve finger sandwiches and appetizers to the club members while they talked business.

The investment club had been started ten years earlier by a schoolteacher named Mary Beckham, who’d moved south from Philadelphia and married a local attorney. The members contributed $90 a month in dues, and stocks were picked by unanimous approval. Their unorthodox method of picking stocks based on “gut feelings” and gossip had given them a respectable 15.6% return rating. They were an odd assortment of professional women and old-money dowagers, newcomers and descendants of founding fathers.

Mary Beckham started the new business with a joke.

“What do you call a Yankee water-skiing behind an Alabama fishing boat?” She rolled her eyes and looked around the room. “Bait.” She waited until the giggling had died down. “And I can say that,” she said, grinning at Ava. “Because I’m a Yankee.”

“We try not to hold that against you,” Josephine said. She was drinking a Gin Rickey, as were Alice and Fanny. They left the blush wine to the Presbyterians.

Louise Singleton stood up first and gave her report on The Gap. “Y’all, retail is down,” she said. “The Gap lost forty percent in one month, and Skechers wasn’t much better. It went from $21.85 to $18.50.”

“Well, no wonder. Have you been in The Gap and seen the clothes?”

“The colors are terrible! Tell me who can wear lime green and get away with it?”

“Or sherbet.”

“You mean orange?”

“Do you know what orange does to my face? It makes me look all puffy and pasty.”

“Well, those clothes aren’t really for women like us,” Josephine reminded them. “They aren’t really geared for the mature crowd.”

“Who’re you calling mature?” Fanny said and everyone laughed.

“I tell you, the designs this year are just terrible. I took my girls in there and they didn’t buy a thing. Not one single thing. And anytime the Truett girls go into a Gap store and don’t buy a thing, you know it’s not good.”

“Lord, that is a bad sign.”

“Armageddon,” Josephine said mildly.

Mary leaned to touch Susan Truett lightly on the arm. “I’m so glad Mattie decided to go ahead and be presented at the Gardenia Ball.”

“What a fight that was,” Susan said, rolling her eyes. She sipped her wine, then set it down on the coffee table. “It almost killed her daddy when she said she didn’t want any part of that old pagan ritual, that throwback to virgin sacrifice.” Susan shrugged and settled her plate on her lap, glancing around the room. “You know how it is. They’re so sweet as girls and then you send them off to college and they come back all educated and too cynical to participate in the old traditions.”

Mary said, “That’s funny, because in my house, I was the one pushing Katie to be presented. Evan, who was born and raised here, didn’t want her to have anything to do with it.”

“His mama must be rolling over in her grave,” Weesie Hartman said. “Because she was the Gardenia Queen back in nineteen fifty-two or fifty-three, I think it was.”

“Back in our day it really wasn’t an option,” Alice said, swirling the remnants of her cocktail in her rocks glass. “You just did it because it was expected of you. You didn’t have a choice, and even if you did, you wouldn’t have wanted to disappoint your mama and papa. I don’t think young girls today know anything of self-sacrifice.”

The room got quiet. Ava had the uncomfortable feeling they were all thinking about her. She was obviously the youngest woman in the room.

“What exactly are the criteria for being a debutante?” she asked politely.

“Well,” Alice answered promptly, as if she found this a valid question. “In the old days, of course, you wouldn’t have been invited to attend the Gardenia Ball unless your mother or grandmother had been presented. But things have changed now. They’ve become more—democratic. Girls are selected by committee vote.”

“Was Darlene Haney presented?” Ava asked. She smiled as Maitland took the empty tray from her and hurried off to the kitchen.

The two women nearest Ava turned their heads to look at her.

“No,” Alice murmured quietly, touching her mouth daintily with her napkin. “No, I don’t believe she was.”

Ava imagined that that must have been devastating for someone like Darlene. She felt a sudden twinge of pity for her. Ava hadn’t spoken to her since the party at Longford—she’d been ignoring her calls—but she remembered Darlene’s face that day in the Debs and Brides Shoppe as she helped young debutantes choose ball gowns. She remembered Darlene’s grimace of cheerful and hopeless resignation.

Debutante balls, sororities, and Junior League meetings had never appealed to Ava. She had always avoided large groups of women who had the power to blackball her.

The room was quiet except for the dull hum of the air-conditioning system. Fanny smiled and raised her chin. “Well, I’m glad the world has become more democratic than it used to be. The old ways weren’t always best, you know.”

“History is all about perspective,” Josephine agreed.

“You got that right,” Clara said.

Ava smiled at her.

Boofie Crenshaw cleared her throat. “I say we sell the Gap stock and buy Harley Davidson,” she said, trying to get them back on track.

Josephine cocked one eyebrow. “You mean the motorcycle company?”

Ava began to wander about the room, quietly replenishing everyone’s wine.

“I think we should buy Harley Davidson and I’ll tell you why,” Boofie said, lifting her chin defiantly. She looked around the room then ducked her head and said in a more confidential tone, “You know Baxter Bell left his wife for a younger woman.” Everyone stared at her, trying to make the connection. Boofie held her glass up to Ava. “I saw Celeste Bell in the grocery store last week, and she told me Baxter came to her last Christmas saying he wanted a Harley Davidson. I guess all the other anesthesiologists in town had one and he had to have one, too, and she said, ‘No, you’ll kill yourself on one of those things.’ Next thing she knows, she goes to Destin with her tennis team and when she comes home he’s moved out of the house and in with his twenty-six-year-old medical assistant. Celeste thinks now that it was one of those midlife crisis things men go through, and if she’d just said yes to the Harley Davidson, he’d still be sleeping in his own bed at night. Now I ask you,” she said, looking boldly around the room. “How many men do we know on the verge of a midlife crisis?”

Her logic was irrefutable. Josephine asked for a show of hands of all in favor of dumping the Gap stock in order to purchase Harley Davidson. The vote was unanimous.

Karen Ashton stood up next, holding a small clipping from The Wall Street Journal in her hand. “It says here that AOL Time Warner is looking to buy out AT&T’s cable unit. That would make AOL the largest cable Internet provider, so even though the stock has dropped from $30.55 to $24.19, I say we hold on to it and see if the merger happens.”

“I second that,” Boofie said, and Josephine asked for a show of hands.

Cheryl Ponsler said, “I know we talked last time about keeping Wachovia but I have to tell you, Mother has been dumping every bit of her Wachovia stock.”

This got everyone’s attention. Cheryl’s mother, Lucille, lived out at the Suck Creek Retirement Village. She was hard of hearing and forgetful when it came to names and car keys, but she had an uncanny ability to pick stocks. “Mother was getting her hair done down at the House of Hair and she ran into Milly Stokes. Y’all remember Milly, her son, Buddy, was in my class at school. Anyway, Buddy works for Citigroup now—he’s some kind of bigwig—and Milly told Mother that the bonuses were so big this year that Buddy is putting in a pool and taking the family to Europe for Christmas. So Mother is buying up every share of Citigroup she can get her hands on, and y’all know she usually does better than the brokers at picking winning stocks.” She looked around the room as if challenging anyone to refute this, but no one did. It was Lucille who had urged them to buy Krispy Kreme two years earlier but they had instead heeded the advice of a broker friend who had advised them to buy tech stocks. When Krispy Kreme went public, it doubled within a few weeks and shortly thereafter issued a two-for-one split. No one liked to be reminded of the money they’d lost on that deal.

“If Lucille recommends Citigroup that’s good enough for me,” Susan said.

“Always listen to your mother,” Boofie said. “I say we dump Wachovia in favor of Citigroup.”

They all voted in favor. Ava finished pouring wine, then sat down next to Clara on the sofa.

“Now isn’t this a pretty sight?”

At the sound of a deep masculine voice they all turned to find Will standing in the doorway. He grinned, his eyes seeking Ava in the crowded room.

“Oh, Will, do come and join us,” Fanny said, rising and hurrying across the room to take his arm.

“Yes, we need a male perspective,” Josephine said.

“You ladies seem to do just fine on your own,” he said, smiling in that charming manner he had so that all the women in the room brightened instinctively and leaned toward him. He seemed so tall and straight standing there, the lamplight catching in his hair. “I just came to ask Ava if she minded me playing poker tonight.”

The women seemed amused by this. Ava felt a creeping warmth in her face, wondering why he’d thought it necessary to ask her. Their evenings together had tapered off considerably since the party at Longford.

“I’m sure Ava wouldn’t mind!” Fanny said, rising on her toes to kiss his cheek.

“I can’t believe you would ask her! My husband would never ask me. He would just go.”

“Young women don’t know how lucky they are nowadays. Young men are so—accommodating. Why, I don’t think Edgar has ever so much as made his own sandwich!”

Will continued to stare at Ava, a playful expression on his face. It was obvious that he was enjoying putting her on the spot. “So,” he said. “Do you mind?”

“Hell, no. Not as long as you win. Not as long as you bring home a big pot of money.”

He laughed, although the other women in the room seemed less certain of her answer. “It’ll be late when I finish. Sometimes we play until the wee hours.” Ava was afraid he would cross the room to kiss her but instead he winked and said, “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Ava said. “You do that.”

Fanny walked with him to the kitchen. A moment later she returned, rubbing her hands together briskly, and resumed her seat. The conversation in the room, which had fallen to a dull hum, rose now to a low roar.

The blush wine was having its effect. Looking around the room, Ava noted several red noses and glowing complexions. Some of the women who had seemed staid and conservative when she first met them were now giggling like schoolgirls.

Ava remembered how, when she first came to Woodburn, she’d been intimidated by these women. And now, oddly, she felt at ease among them. Maybe it was the cozy, lamp-lit room or the Singapore Slings. Whatever the reason, Ava felt a sense of fellowship here that she would not have imagined possible. It was pleasant to envision herself years from now, sitting in a room like this, drinking blush wine and gossiping about husbands and investments, a confident, mature woman with a settled life and a large group of female friends. Maybe even children. And a handsome, accommodating husband who saw to it that she was not disturbed by the unpleasantness of life but instead kept cloistered like a princess in an ivory tower.

Ava had a sudden dazzling vision of this other self, the Ava she might become.

And then it was gone.

The investment club members were growing raucous. They had moved on, embarrassingly, from talk of accommodating younger men to talk of sex.

“That’s right,” Weesie Hartman shouted. “I know when I hear Edgar doing his impression of Maurice Chevalier singing ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls,’ I’m in for it whether I want it or not.”

The others hooted and covered their mouths with their hands.

“Look at Ava. She’s blushing,” Fanny said.

“More wine, anybody?” Ava said.

“Young folks don’t like to think about old folks getting frisky, but we do!”

“Some of us are widows,” Alice said. “Some of us have been widows so long we don’t remember what frisky means.”

“You’re never too old for frisky!”

“What’s your definition of frisky?”

“What’s your definition of old?”

“Born ten years before Moses,” Alice said.

“Getting long in the tooth,” Josephine said.

“I don’t know why y’all are talking about being old,” Fanny said, giving her head a little shake. “I don’t feel any different now than I did when I was sixteen years old.” Josephine snorted and Fanny exclaimed, “Well, I don’t.”

“Do you want to know what old feels like?” Clara said, looking around the room. “Old is going to get your annual mammogram and discovering that the X-ray tech is someone you taught in school—fifty years ago.”

“Don’t you just love those annual mammograms?” Cheryl said.

“My husband said, ‘What does it feel like?’ and I said, ‘It feels like laying your boob on a cold garage floor and having someone back over it with the car.’ ”

“I’m just standing there with my arm over my head,” Clara continued. “Squashed between two plates, and the lady looks at me and says, ‘Miss McGann, is that you?’ And I said, ‘Mary Montgomery, is that you?’ And she said, ‘Yes’m, you taught me world history back in high school.’ And I’m trying to remember if I’d given her an A or an F because suddenly it seemed real important.”

The room exploded in laughter and Ava rose and took a stack of plates into the kitchen. Maitland was standing at the counter mixing up a batch of his homemade mayonnaise. He was wearing his Kitchen Bitch apron.

“What’s going on?” he said. “Do y’all need me to make up some more of those little sandwiches?” Above the bib of his apron, his red face shone happily.

“I don’t think so. I think the meeting is winding down.” Ava put her hands behind her and pulled herself up on the counter, her feet dangling, looking around the cheery room. There was something soothing and intimate about a kitchen, the heart of the house, the place where families gather around a table to break bread and forget their differences, if only for a short while.

The last time she’d seen Jake Woodburn he’d been standing in his mother’s kitchen. She had not run into him since that day, and it seemed odd to the point where she had begun to wonder if he was avoiding her. And then she decided that he was avoiding her, and although she mentally shrugged her shoulders and washed her hands of him, she could not help but feel a vague sense of disappointment, too.

Maitland held the bowl of mayonnaise up for her to taste.

“Now that is good,” Ava said. “You could bottle it.”

He seemed pleased. “Do you think so?” he said.

“I do.”

“I put a little stone-ground mustard in this batch, and I think it kicks up the taste a notch.”

“Definitely.”

He spooned the mayonnaise into a mason jar and carefully labeled it. Watching his meticulous preparations, Ava said, “Uncle Mait, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“You can ask me anything, Sugar. I’m pretty much an open book.”

Ava looked at her dangling feet. She traced the outline of the tiles in the air with her toes. “Why did it take you and Fanny so long to marry?”

He continued to smile, but his hands, she noted, shook with a delicate agitation as he put the mason jar down. Something dark, an expression of fear or remorse, passed quickly across his face, and was gone. He chuckled and shook his head, his florid face shining.

“Penance,” he said.

She couldn’t stop thinking of the words. Sometimes late at night when the work was slow, when she reached an impasse and the story felt heavy and cumbersome, she lay down on the bed and traced her fingers over the delicate carving. Help me.

Who had carved those words?

She felt certain it was Charlie Woodburn.

When she showed Will, he remarked scornfully, “That bed was built at Longford around the time of Napoleon. Do you know how many people have slept there? How many could have scrawled that?” His late-afternoon good cheer had evaporated the minute she mentioned Charlie. He strode angrily around the room, picking up items on the tables and setting them down abruptly. It was so unusual, this outburst, that at first Ava could do nothing but watch in astonishment.

“Why are you so angry?” she said.

“Because you make something out of nothing. You imagine things.” He put his hands on the foot of the bed, leaning over so she couldn’t see his face. Distantly they could hear the tinkling of barware as Toddy Time began. When he looked up again his face was calm, impassive. “Even if it was Charlie,” he said evenly. “How do you know it wasn’t the ravings of a man sunk in alcohol and depression?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know that.”

“Then why are you implying that it’s something more sinister?”

“I’m not implying anything. I’m just curious as to who carved it. And if it was Charlie, why did he carve it?”

“Someone’s been filling your head with rubbish.”

They were coming dangerously close to something. They stared at each other. Ava sat against the headboard, her feet curled under her. He stood, leaning his shoulder against the bedpost.

She said, “I had lunch with Jake Woodburn.”

“So I heard.”

“Is that what this is about?”

He pushed himself off the bed and went over to the window, staring out at the garden.

She said in a reasonable voice, “Jake didn’t tell me anything. In fact, he didn’t want to talk about Charlie at all. He has a rather misplaced sense of loyalty when it comes to your family.”

“I don’t want to talk about Jake,” he said.

“Look, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

A hummingbird hung suspended outside the window. From the library came the muffled sounds of conversation and laughter.

She had always been attracted to men who held a certain command over her, a stern masculine authority that made her willingly abdicate her own power. Anyone who knew her, besides Michael and Jacob, would have been surprised by this. People invariably described her as “strong-willed” and “self-sufficient,” but it was an act on her part. A certain masculine tone of voice, a flicker of disdain, and she would go as limp and docile as a child. Michael and Jacob had had this manner of indifferent authority, and Will, she realized now, watching him turn and walk to the door, had it, too.

“They’re waiting for us,” he said.

“I was just curious about the carving,” she said, trying to make him see her point. “I just wondered who might have done it.”

He mumbled something she couldn’t understand and went out, and it wasn’t until later, as she drifted off to sleep, that she realized he had said, “For all I know, it could have been you.”