The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club (2 page)

Then I’d come to my senses.

I hesitated but briefly before I plucked out a hanger with the only suitable funereal garment I possessed. The curved arms held a lightweight black knit that had served me well since the first time I’d worn it, at my graduation from art school in Chicago. I’d barely had cause to don it since.

I expected my mother to wince when she saw it, but she wouldn’t dare criticize, not at the memorial service of a dear friend and certainly not inside the walls of Highland Park Presbyterian where God could hear her. Besides, she was profoundly brokenhearted. As good as she was at maintaining an air of decorum, no matter how rough a situation, the loss of her old chum had her seriously choked up.

“I can’t
believe
she’s gone, Andrea.” Her ever-charming drawl had bordered on a broken-up wail when she’d phoned with the news the previous day. “Bebe was
only
seventy-three, and she was healthy as a horse except for the usual things . . . a touch of high blood pressure, seasonal allergies, certainly nothing fatal. I can hardly think of a day when she was sick. Good heavens, she got her flu shots every year like clockwork, and I’ve never seen anyone take so much vitamin C. It’s a wonder she wasn’t orange.”

Cissy had recently turned sixty, so Bebe had but a slim decade on her. No wonder she was so shaken, and her audible grief had me so tonguetied I hadn’t known what to say beyond the pathetic and inept, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“I just
don’t
understand. She did yoga and water aerobics three days a week and used her treadmill during
Oprah
. She finished the Susan Komen Walk in June in a hundred-degree heat and didn’t stop
once
. No,” my mother had protested, and I’d imagined the perfect oval of her face crumpled with desolation. “It doesn’t make sense.”

But people died all the time, right? Dropped dead for no apparent reason other than a heart that stopped ticking. And once you crossed seventy, you were fair game, I supposed. Heck, every time you stepped off the curb, you were taking your chances.

“You’ll go with me to her service, won’t you, sweetie? I don’t think I could
bear
to do this alone.”

Alone?

Unless the fire code prevented it, she’d be surrounded by four or five hundred of her and Bebe’s closest comrades.

“What about Sandy?” I piped up timidly, because Sandy Beck had been with my family for ages and still lived in the house on Beverly Drive, taking care of Mother and the mansion with the efficiency of Martha Stewart and the demeanor of Gandhi. She was, beyond all else, a calming force, and that’s what Cissy needed most.

Until I remembered that Sandy didn’t “do” funerals, neither did she read the obits in the
Dallas Morning News
. Unlike most of us, Sandy Beck didn’t like to dwell on negatives.

Damn her.

I wish I’d adopted the “no-funerals” policy myself right after Daddy died. Could be that I didn’t appreciate the closure offered by the tradition and ceremony, but sad hymns and eulogies twisted my guts like a pretzel. I wondered if there was such a thing as funeral phobia. If so, I had it in spades.

“Andrea, please, won’t you go?”

Mother’s honey-smooth drawl could sound so tragic when it suited her. If SMU had offered a course in Emotional Blackmail, my mother would’ve aced it. (Heck, she could
teach
it.)

Despite how thoroughly I wanted to decline this particular invitation, my heart wasn’t nearly black enough to refuse Mother’s plea. Before I could stop the words from flowing off my tongue, I’d told her, “All right. You can count on me.”

Well, she didn’t ask for my shoulder to lean on very often. Okay, almost never.

And, much as I hated to admit it, it felt pretty good to be needed. I tried to dwell on that instead of the knot of anxiety curled in my belly like the world’s largest ball of twine.

“
Poor, poor Bebe
,” she’d said and sighed the most doleful sigh. “I’ll miss her terribly. She was the best bridge partner I ever had.”

Beatrice “Bebe” Kent wasn’t anyone I’d known well, beyond polite “hellos” every so often when I was growing up on Beverly Drive in “the bubble” of Highland Park. She’d been a high-ranking member of Cissy’s expansive circle of blue blood friends who’d never met a fundraiser or civic organization they didn’t like. Her obit in the
Dallas Morning News
merited nearly half a page and read like a “what’s what” of A-list clubs and philanthropies: past president of the Junior League of Dallas; board member of the Dallas Art Museum; chairwoman of the Crystal Charity Ball; life member of the Brook Hollow Golf Club, Dallas Country Club, the Dallas Woman’s Club, the Dallas Garden Club, the Park Cities Historical Society, and on and on, ad infinitum. She’d been the
trés
wealthy widow of Homer Kent, a much-adored oil magnate after whom a rather large wing of Presbyterian Hospital had been named. But, most importantly, Bebe had been a graduate of Southern Methodist University and an active alumna of Pi Beta Phi.

My mother’s sorority.

In Cissy’s eyes, Bebe was a shining example of Texas womanhood, of living one’s life right. Or, rather,
properly
.

Part of me wondered if one of the reasons Mother had asked me to accompany her to Bebe’s memorial had less to do with needing my support than Bebe’s legacy serving as an example that it wasn’t too late for me to change my tune and embrace my trust fund with open arms.

I had no such delusions.

Seeing the hordes of Bebe’s nearest and dearest fill the pews, all garbed in the latest somber hues from New York or Paris, would only serve to remind me that Mother’s world wasn’t one I wished to inhabit, not in this lifetime. She had a galaxy of upper crust chums always flitting around her, like stars bright with bling surrounding the sun.

So it seemed only right that I be the Black Hole in her solar system.

Someone had to do it.

Particularly since she was like the Hubble telescope in my Milky Way: not always functioning the way I wished she would and constantly keeping an eye on me, despite a view that was so often distorted.

Cissy had an opinion on everything, from my hair—“sweetie, if you’d just let Roberto give it some shape, you wouldn’t have to wear it in a ponytail everyday”—to my car—“Jeeps are for teenaged boys, darling, so don’t you think it’s time to get something with four doors and a trunk?”—to my love life—“I do like Mr. Malone, very much, I’m just worried he’s takin’ advantage of you. Don’t you know that men won’t buy the cow when they can get the milk for free?”

To misquote that famous Valley Girl, Moon Unit Zappa, “Gag me with a silver spoon.”

Scowling, I tugged the dress over my head, getting caught inside the stretchy fabric and batting at it, feeling trapped in more ways than one.

Though fighting was useless.

It was
so
true that you could pick your nose, but not your family. I was living proof.

Didn’t matter from which angle I viewed it. Plain and simple, I was stuck.

With a grunt, I finally pushed my head through the neckline, feeling like a diver coming up for air.

The static electricity set my hair to standing on end, and I cursed in a very unladylike fashion as I put a little spit in my palms and tried to smooth it down.

Hopeless, I tell you.

I looked like Alfalfa in drag.

Though it could’ve been worse. On rainy days, my hair leaned toward the finger-in-socket ’do made famous by the brilliant but aesthetically disinclined Al Einstein. I could forget ever being a Breck girl.

Ah, to heck with it
, I thought and grabbed a clip from my bureau, pulling the rat’s nest of brown into a ponytail.

I realized I was grinding my teeth and forcibly relaxed my jaw, letting out a slow breath. My dentist had threatened me with a plastic mouthpiece if I didn’t shake the bad habit, as I was apparently making mincemeat of my molars and bicuspids. But it was my instinctive response to anxiety. That and a stiff neck.

Which is why Malone had bought me a book called
Stress and the Single Girl
. It had plenty of chapters on dealing with a controlling mother, among other nerve-wracking scenarios like being held hostage or getting caught in traffic.

“You’re going to have to cope with Cissy for the rest of your life . . . or hers, anyway,” he’d said, as if I needed reminding. “So, unless you want to end up a toothless middle-aged woman with high blood pressure, you’d better learn how to shrug her off.”

Shrug off Mother?

That was rather like asking someone infected to “shrug off” malaria.

The book had gone untouched for weeks. But I’d reluctantly begun to thumb through it the night before and had gotten so far as attempting the first of the “Six Simple Ways to Lower Your Stress Quotient,” which advised that I “embrace high anxiety moments with a wide grin or belly laugh.”

Though I wasn’t sure if any semisane person would ever “embrace high anxiety,” I figured there was no time like the present. So I let loose a loud, “
ha ha ha
!” before I turned away from my reflection in the mirror.

Geez, I felt better already.

Not
.

On my hands and knees, I located my black slides beneath the unmade bed and slipped them on to my bare feet. Mother might have a cow that I wasn’t wearing pantyhose, but early September in Dallas generally meant temperatures in the low nineties. Not even threats at gunpoint would get me to put on a pair of L’eggs when it was that warm. Heat and nylons were completely incompatible.

Retrieving my purse and car keys, I gave my place a quick once-over on my way toward the door, checking the kitchen to make sure I hadn’t left the stove on and seeing if the red light was blinking on my CallerID, in case I’d missed someone while I was in the shower, like a client or a road-tripping boyfriend (I hadn’t).

It wasn’t yet nine o’clock, though the air outside already felt like a sauna set on well done. The sky stretched blue as far as the eye could see, not a single smear of white to soften the pervasive yellow sunbeams. Even as I headed toward my Jeep, I felt a trickle of sweat wend its way down my back, and my armpits grew sticky.

One thing was for sure, I thought, as I climbed into the Wrangler and started the car with one hand while rolling down a window with the other, Dallas was no place for sissies.

Nope, the sissies moved to the Hill Country.

Driving south on Hillcrest, I left the radio off, staring at the cars on the street ahead of me, wondering if any of them were headed to a funeral on this cloudless Saturday morning and wishing I weren’t. Malone had gone out of town to do more prep work for a case—all the way to Galveston for an entire weekend—and I suddenly regretted my decision not to go with him. Just the thought of a choir singing “Amazing Grace” (which, of course, they would) tied a knot in my belly. Not that I didn’t find the hymn quite touching, but its touch felt more like a punch in the belly. It brought back such vivid memories of the day we buried my daddy. The darkest day I’ve ever had, so far, and it pained me, in any small way, to repeat it.

Didn’t seem to matter that it had happened a dozen years before. Moments like that stayed fresh in a person’s mind. It still made my heart ache to think of it.

I wondered if Cissy felt the same, every time she heard “Amazing Grace” or “Jesus Loves Me” or the oft-repeated psalm about “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Did she mourn my father all over again?

Sometimes I forgot the fact that I wasn’t the only one who’d lost a best friend, a cheerleader and moral compass. I’d never discussed with Cissy how she felt, if she still suffered much. My mother wasn’t keen on opening up, at least not to me. Was it because she chose not to, or because I hadn’t given her the opportunity?

Oh, boy
.

I was waxing philosophical, a sure sign that this was all too much. I felt positively maudlin. Death wasn’t a comfortable subject for anyone, was it? Except, perhaps, for casket salesmen and morticians.

I sniffled and wiped a sleeve beneath my eyes, decidedly blue despite the sunshine around me.

How I hated funerals.

I had the strongest urge to turn around, go back home, and crawl under the covers.

But bailing on Mother wasn’t an option. I couldn’t let her down, not in this type of situation and certainly not on this particular morning.

So I gripped the steering wheel tighter, catching a glimpse of my eyes in the rearview mirror. My squint rumpled my forehead into deep lines of worry, and, out of nowhere, I heard the whisper of Cissy’s voice, admonishing, “
Don’t frown, Andrea darlin’, or you’ll cause wrinkles. Then it’s Botox for the rest of your life, and I know how you hate needles
.”

Nothing like my mother’s beauty tips to cheer me up.

I switched on the radio, hitting buttons until I stumbled upon the guitar-driven chorus of “Jump,” one of my favorite Van Halen oldies. I turned it up as loud as I could stand it, leaving no room for the emotions that threatened to climb from my chest into my throat or out my tear ducts.

Another fifteen minutes of retro rock and roll, and my spirits felt mildly buoyed as I descended into University Park, home to my parents’ alma mater, SMU. The church sat just west of the campus on University Boulevard, wedged between that street, Park Lane, and McFarlin. As I circled the block, hitting a gridlock of limos and Mercedes sedans, I felt my gaze drawn to the place where I’d been baptized, where Mother and Daddy had married: an imposing structure of red brick and stone with a steeple that pointed the way to Kingdom Come through a sky bluer than the Danube.

I remembered coming to Sunday school when I was a kid, learning the Lord’s Prayer and finding it pretty cool that God had “art in heaven.” I imagined that He colored the sunsets with finger paint. A rather clever theory for a five-year-old, I figured.

After a pass around the block and no sign of an empty spot on the streets, I left my Jeep in the spare lot at city hall and took the church shuttle over with a half-dozen other latecomers, all garbed in black like a murder of crows.