Hissy Fit (12 page)

“Jeez-o Pete!”
I cried, letting my weapon drop to the floor with a clatter. “You scared the living crap out of me. You’ve gotta stop sneaking up on me like this, Austin.”

He picked up the tongs and gave me a questioning look. “Or what? You’ll tong me to death?”

“It was the first thing I grabbed,” I said. “You’re lucky my granddaddy’s butcher knife was at the back of the bottom drawer.”

He followed me back into my living room and dropped down into an overstuffed armchair covered in my favorite blue and white Pierre Frey toile, while I chose the matching chair opposite him.

“So?” he said, raising an eyebrow.

“So. What?”

“I was back in your stockroom when A.J. came in,” Austin said, not bothering to apologize. “I heard the whole sad drama. So my question is, do you believe him?”

I picked at a piece of blue braid trim on the arm of the chair. “Doesn’t matter.”

“Sure it does,” he said, his voice cheerful. “If it was just that one time, and they were both drunk, well, maybe it’s not that big a deal.”

“It’s a big deal no matter what,” I said. “I can never trust him again.”

“Never is a mighty long time,” Austin observed.

“Since when did you switch over to A. J. Jernigan’s side?” I asked.

“I’m not on anybody’s side,” he said. “I’m Switzerland.”

“You’re gay, so you have to be on my side.”

He rolled his eyes. “Honey, no offense, but if I had to choose a side to sleep with, it’d be A.J.’s. He may be a liar and a cheat, but honestly,
with those blue-green eyes and those shoulders? I could eat him up with a spoon.”

“Don’t be nasty,” I said.

He stuck out his tongue at me, and we both laughed.

“How was Atlanta?”

“I’ll never make it as a secret agent,” I said. “I got caught spying red-handed.”

“She threw you out? Called the cops?” He was loving the intrigue.

“Nope. Actually, she invited me in. I met her dog and cased the joint. So, mission accomplished. Now all I have to do is design a home around a woman who likes dog art, Prada, and shoes.”

“You can do it,” Austin said, patting my shoulder. “If anybody can do it, it’d be Keeley Rae Murdock. You want some pizza?”

I opened the box and wrinkled my nose. The anchovies and pepperoni and a half-dozen other toppings had congealed into a single unappetizing layer of gunk.

“No thanks,” I said, dropping the box on the counter. Instead I opened the refrigerator door and scanned its contents. There was still one foil-wrapped tray of potstickers left over from my canceled wedding reception. I shuddered, took it out, and dropped it in the trash.

“Scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast,” I said finally, grabbing a carton of eggs. “I love breakfast for supper, don’t you?”

“If you’re fixing it, I’ll eat it,” Austin said. “Just don’t take after me with those tongs of yours.”

I cracked the eggs into a bowl, added sour cream, some grated cheddar cheese, and some bacon bits, along with salt and pepper. In a minute or two, the smell of bacon frying permeated the small kitchen. Austin popped the bread in the toaster, and five minutes later, we were back in the living room with our supper on a pair of television trays I’d brought with me from Daddy’s house when I moved into the apartment.

We ate breakfast and watched
Jeopardy!
, and drank Diet Coke from
some crystal wineglasses that had been a gift from one of my daddy’s cousins. I’d already started sending back gifts from A.J.’s family, but most of my relatives had been calling to tell me just to keep theirs.

It turns out I was the one doing most of the
Jeopardy!
watching. Austin was mostly just watching me, I finally figured out.

“What? Do I have something stuck in my teeth? It’s my hair, isn’t it? You know what this rain and humidity does to me. I look like Michael Jackson, don’t I?”

He shook his head. “You look fine.”

“Then why are you gawking at me? Come on, you’re making me nervous.”

“I want to ask you something, but I don’t know if it’s too personal.”

“Just ask, then.”

“You won’t get mad? Never speak to me again?”

“Don’t be stupid. What do you want to know? I mean, it’s not like the whole town doesn’t already know all my business.”

“This isn’t about A.J. or Paige.”

“What’s it about then? Come on, now you’ve got me curious.”

He got up and walked to the window, pulling the drapes aside. Rain slashed down. The sky was plum-colored, with streaks from the last light of the day. From across the square, I heard a car backfire.

“I’ve been wondering…” He half turned. “Whatever happened to your mama?”

“My mama?” I looked down at my hands. I always did that when I thought about her. It was one of the things people said I’d inherited from her. Hands. Long, thin fingers.

She could reach a finger down into the olive jar and spear out the last olive, her fingers were so long. She could French-braid my hair in a matter of seconds, taming my long curls into a flat plait down my back. She knew a dozen variations on cat-in-the-cradle, and taught them all to me one time in first grade when I had strep throat and couldn’t go to school for a week.

“Never mind,” Austin said, his face coloring. “It’s none of my business. Forget I asked.”

“It’s okay,” I said, exhaling slowly. “No big deal. She left when I was seven. Ran off with one of Daddy’s salesmen.”

“You never talk about her,” Austin said. “Are you in touch?”

“No,” I said flatly. “She just left. No note. Nothing.”

“For real?” Austin said, crossing back to his armchair. “No warning? She just up and vanished?”

“I guess,” I said. “If she was unhappy, I never knew it. They never fought. Not in front of me, anyway. One night she fixed corndogs and coleslaw for supper. The next day, when I got home from school, she was gone. I still can’t look a corndog in the face,” I said, laughing at the absurdity of that last statement.

“What did Wade do?” Austin’s eyes were sparkling and alive, his voice a melodramatic whisper. He seemed enthralled with what he regarded as an up-close-and-personal installment of
Unsolved Mysteries
.

“He called all her friends, but nobody knew where she’d gone. Then he got worried that maybe she’d had an accident or something. He called all the hospitals all around, talked to the sheriff. They put out a missing persons bulletin, dragged some farm ponds, but nothing came of it.”

“What about the man? When did your daddy figure out she’d gone off with this salesman?”

“His name was Darvis Kane. He was Daddy’s sales manager. He was supposed to be on vacation in Panama City Beach the week Mama left. He called Daddy’s secretary the day Mama left and said something had come up, and he was resigning. He had her forward his last commission check to a post office box in Wedowee, Alabama.”

“Wedowee!” Austin rolled his eyes. “Forgive me, sweetie, but
quel scandale! Quel
tacky! They eloped to Wedowee, Alabama?”

“As far as I know. Daddy never told me any of this, of course. He didn’t want to upset me. When it was clear Mama wasn’t coming back, he took me to a shrink in Atlanta. Poor Daddy. I was like a
zombie. I wouldn’t cry, wouldn’t talk, wouldn’t hardly eat. I think he thought he’d have to put me down in Milledgeville, in the junior nut farm.”

“What happened next?” Austin asked.

“Time. Gloria moved in with us for a while. That helped a lot. We’d go to movies together, she’d paint my nails and take me shopping. She talked to me about Mama when Daddy couldn’t.”

“How did they know she ran off with that man?” Austin demanded. “Did she file for divorce?”

“I guess,” I said. “Daddy never talked about her, after he figured out what had happened. So eventually I quit talking about her too.”

He sighed. “And you’ve never heard from her? Not in all these years?”

“No,” I said.

“And you’re not the least bit curious about her? Where she is, what she’s doing?”

I laced my fingers together. “I didn’t say that. Of course I’m curious. She was my mother, for God’s sake. Don’t you think I’ve wondered where she is?”

“GAAAWD,” Austin drawled. “I wish I did have to wonder where my mama is. Unfortunately, I know right where she is, just about every minute of every day. Sitting right in front of the twenty-eight-inch Motorola I gave her for Christmas, clipping coupons and watching daytime TV, right down there in Perry, Florida.”

“At least you know,” I said.

“She calls me every day at four o’clock, to give me the blow-by-blow of who did what to who on Court TV,” Austin said. “And to complain about my brother’s trashy wife.”

“Count your blessings,” I said, standing up to look out at the rain. “I couldn’t even send my mama a wedding announcement.”

Austin followed me to the window. He wrapped his arms around me and hugged me tight. “You think she would have liked A.J.?”

I swallowed hard. “Maybe. Or maybe she could have seen right
through him. The way I couldn’t. She was quiet, but she was a good judge of character. She used to tell Daddy who he shouldn’t give credit to. And nine times out of ten she was right.”

“She sounds nice,” Austin said. “What was her name?”

“Jeanine,” I said, letting it out in a soft stream. “My mama’s name was Jeanine.”

I was in
a funny mood after Austin went home around nine—emotionally exhausted, but too keyed up for sleep. I tried watching television, reading, I even took a long hot bath, but nothing worked.

At midnight I went downstairs to the studio and sat at my drawing board for a long time, playing with my box of colored pencils. I switched on the CD player, which was loaded with Gloria’s idea of good listening. My aunt has wildly eclectic musical taste—everything from show tunes to sixties rock to old school rap to country.

Lately she’d been on a Sinatra kick. With the rain still beating down on the sidewalk outside, I discovered I was in a Sinatra mood my ownself.

With Old Blue Eyes crooning to Nelson Riddle’s lush orchestrations, I picked up a pencil and started sketching. At first I was just doing stream-of-consciousness doodles around the edges of my sketch pad. Gothic armchairs, fragments of window treatments, even a small still life of Gloria’s coffee mug and a peach she’d left sitting on a paper towel beside it.

Without really thinking about it, I started sketching the front of a house. It was a grand Greek Revival house with seven two-story-tall Corinthian columns, and a pair of rounded porches extending off to each side of the house. I did a thumbnail sketch of a carved pilaster and pediment doorway and a richly detailed front door. I cocked my head and gave the drawing a critical look. No. The house was too grand. It needed a human touch. I sketched a pair of muddy boots hastily discarded by the door, and a battered little teddy bear propped up in a rocking chair. At one corner of the porch, I drew in the tail fins of an old Caddy. Better. But it needed something more. First a head—big, with a muzzle propped on its feet, and ears flopped back.
This dog wasn’t any specific breed. It was just a dog. A dog waiting patiently to be fed and petted and loved.

Like the house. Without thinking, I’d sketched Mulberry Hill. Not as it was—battered and abandoned—but as it should be one day. With a family to love it and pet it.

I put my pencil down and went to the bookshelves on the far wall of the studio. We keep fabric samples in woven rush baskets on the shelves, all colorized and sorted by manufacturer and type—florals here, plaids there, solids, wovens, stripes, heavyweight upholstery separated from lightweight drapery sheers.

I pulled out one basket after another, extracting any sample that caught my eye and lit my imagination. When I had three swatches, I knew I’d found my theme color. Yellow. Not gold, not saffron. A clear, sunny yellow. It was a happy, canary color, just what Mulberry Hill needed to make it cheerful and timeless, but contemporary enough to please someone like Stephanie. I took a couple of baskets of yellow fabrics over to the worktable and plunged my hands in—like lowering a dipper into a bucket of sunshine.

With the yellows selected, I branched out into other colors, lots of bright, willow blues—to go with a fabulous Peking blue Oriental rug, which would then cry out for Chinese red accents. I’d seen a photo of just the right rug in the catalog for the upcoming Southgate gallery auction. I found the catalog in the in basket on my desk and quickly leafed through it. Good, it was a huge rug and would work perfectly in the dining room. Nothing looks worse than a dinky rug in a grand room. If I got the rug, I decided, the dining room could go red—Benjamin Moore has a great red called Chili Pepper. And maybe we’d do a glaze finish, if Will was as adventurous as I hoped. And mirrors. I smiled. Stephanie would want mirrors everywhere.

The twin parlors and the dining rooms could go fairly formal—but in an overstuffed, friendly kind of way—nothing that wouldn’t stand up to that big dog I’d sketched on the front porch. The memory of that dog made me frown. How would such a beast get along
with neurotic little Erwin? Wait. In reality, there was no big dog. My job was to design a house, I reminded myself—not a life.

Back to the dining room. I tapped my pencil against my teeth. A big oval or rectangular table would be de rigueur. But what if we did something different—something unexpected? Maybe two round tables, with leaves to seat twelve apiece? But no. There was only one Waterford chandelier, and clearly the dining room cried out for it. I would just have to find a wonderful table and maybe get more creative with the seating.

I found my mind wandering back to Stephanie’s closet. I’d seen a suit jacket there, beautifully tailored in a taupe-colored linen, with black topstitching, cut close and long, with unusual tortoiseshell buttons and self-covered buttonholes. It had that expensive couture look.

What if I turned the look of that jacket around? I doodled around with chair backs, finally settling on a square-backed chair with satiny ebony legs with X-shaped stretchers. The chairs could be custom built, then slipcovered in a variety of fabrics, maybe a Schumacher chintz in deep reds and blues, and for a more casual feeling, something close to that linen, with the black topstitching and tortoiseshell buttons down the back of the chair.

Which gave me another idea. I hunted through a stack of copies of
Veranda
magazines until I found the issue I wanted. The cover shot was of a dining room—with chair backs like the ones I was envisioning. But these had been slipcovered with exquisite heirloom French damask banquet napkins, each embroidered with elaborate monograms centered on the chair front. Unlike the designer who’d done that dining room, I didn’t have a stack of a dozen such antique napkins at hand. But there was an antiques dealer in Madison who always had vintage damask linens, and my upholstery woman, Vinh, had a cousin who did amazing hand—not machine—embroidery and monogramming.

Oh yes. Monograms would be just the ticket for Miss Stephanie Scofield.

I was off to the races. Sinatra crooned, and I sketched like a fiend, ripping illustrations from magazines and catalogs, clipping fabric and carpet samples, holding paint swatches up to the light, then up against the fabrics.

For once I didn’t bother to consider costs. Time was the only enemy on this job—and I knew that if I had to budget extra for express shipping or custom orders with drop-dead deadlines, Will Mahoney would be more than happy to pay the freight.

I was just sketching the window treatment for the den—a handsome glen plaid in deep golds and greens, when the front door opened.

I yawned and looked up. It was light outside. Gloria stood inside the doorway with a white bakery bag in one hand and her briefcase in the other.

“Good Lord,” she said, glancing around at the avalanche of fabrics and wallpaper samples littering the tabletops and floor. “What happened in here?”

I stood up and stretched and caught sight of the clock on my desk. It was eight o’clock. I’d sketched and worked through the night, and never once given a thought to A. J. Jernigan. I’d gotten totally lost in the work. I was exhausted, starved, gritty-eyed, and dry-mouthed. I felt fabulous.

“I’m healed,” I told my aunt.

She smiled and handed me the bakery bag. “Praise the Lord and pass the decaf.”