Hissy Fit (19 page)

On Saturday morning
I watched as a steady stream of customers went in and out of Fleur. It was June, after all, still bridal season. When I saw Austin’s green delivery van pull up to the curb at two that afternoon, I locked up the studio and strolled over to the florist’s shop.

He was wearing navy cargo shorts and a green and white Fleur Flower Arts logo shirt, and he was picking up the phone when I walked in.

Austin glanced up, blew me a kiss, then started writing things down on an order pad. The shop was a mess, the concrete floor littered with bits of white satin ribbon, lace, leaves, stems, and fallen petals, and the aisles were jammed with flowers; buckets of freesias, orange blossoms, stocks, hydrangeas, lilies, roses, daisies, and exotics whose names I didn’t know. Their perfume swirled around me. It was a happy, busy, exciting place, and a sharp aching wave of sorrow hit me so hard it almost knocked me back out the door.

He hung up the phone. “What?” he asked, a look of concern on his face. “What’s the matter, Keeley?”

No good trying to make a happy face. “All this wedding shit. It’s silly, I know, but it makes me feel so sad. I keep thinking about how my wedding day should have been…”

Austin took me by the shoulders and marched me over to the wooden bench behind the counter. “You sit here, little missy,” he ordered.

He reached around to the walk-in cooler behind him and fumbled around in one of the tall galvanized buckets until he came up with two cans of Diet Coke. He popped one and handed it to me.

He popped his own, took a drink, and let out a satisfied sigh.

“Do you want to talk wedding shit?” he asked. “Let me tell you
about Betsey Forst’s wedding. That’s where I’ve been all morning, over at the rectory at First Presbyterian. I finally just told her mama to give me a call when the child’s medication kicks in. I had to get out of there before I threw my own hissy fit.”

“That bad?”

He shuddered. “Tell me something, Keeley Rae. What is it about a wedding that makes a perfectly agreeable girl turn into a raving, shrieking, lunatic bitch?”

“Betsey Forst was shrieking? That little mouse? I’ve never even heard her talk above a whisper.”

“She was Bridezilla,” Austin said. “I kept expecting her head to swivel all the way around on her neck. You know, she actually pelted me with her bouquet? Said the color of the Tineke roses I had shipped in from Ecuador made her physically ill. Do you know I had to get up at five this morning and drive to the Atlanta airport to pick the things up and bring them back here and get them conditioned in time to make up that bouquet?”

“The little ingrate,” I said. “So you just had one wedding today?”

“Three! Three nightmare weddings,” Austin said, swigging more Diet Coke. “The second one wasn’t so bad. Lindsey Winzeler is a doll. But Carolyn Shoemaker. I swear, you don’t want to get me started on that one. I
told
her a bouquet made entirely of fruit was a bad idea. But she absolutely insisted. So it’s her own damn fault she sprained her ankle. Where do they get these ideas?”

“Martha Stewart,” I said helpfully. “It’s all Martha’s fault. That damn magazine ought to be outlawed. My clients read it too. And they clip out the pictures and want me to find them a chair just like the one in Martha’s house in Connecticut. Which is always some one-of-a-kind eighteenth-century hand-carved Jacobean job that costs more than my parents’ first house.”

Austin nodded agreement.

“You never mentioned how Carolyn Shoemaker sprained her ankle,” I pointed out.

He rolled his eyes. “
Champagne
grapes. They were supposed to be little tiny champagne grapes in the bridesmaid’s bouquets. Those are the ones the size of English peas. So what does the mama bring in for me to work with? Big old hulking green grapes. And they weren’t the freshest. That’s what happens when you try to do something on the cheap. But they insisted it would be fine, so I wired them up. What do I know? I’m just a professional floral artist. Anyway, the six bridesmaids go floating down the aisle with their rooty-tooty fresh and frooty bouquets. And invariably some of the grapes fall off. And get mashed on that slippery hardwood floor. The next thing you know, little Miss Shoemaker’s pump hits one of the suckers, and she goes flying ass over teakettle.”

He started to laugh in spite of himself. And then I started to laugh. And pretty soon streams of Diet Coke were shooting out my nostrils. Not so pretty. He had me crying. Only this was good crying.

“I’d love to have seen that,” I said, wiping the tears with my shirt-sleeve.

“Call up Billy Howard,” Austin said. “He was videotaping the whole thing. I hope he didn’t miss the part where the groom reached down to try to help her up and slipped his ownself and screamed FUCK! Right there in front of the entire St. Anne’s congregation.”

After that I had to get up and get some paper towels to mop the tears off my face. I was already feeling better.

“So, what’s up, toots?” Austin asked, sweeping some of the clutter on his workbench into a big trash can.

“I’ve been playing Nancy Drew,” I started.

“No,” Austin said. “This was all my idea. I get to be Nancy. You have to be Bess or George. Take your pick.”

“Bess was plump and George was probably lesbian,” I said. “Not much of a choice, when it comes down to it. Anyway, I talked to Daddy. You know, about Mama.”

He patted my shoulder. “Good for you! What did you find out?”

“He hired a private detective, after she left, but all he managed to
come up with was the fact that she’d sold her car in Birmingham, for eight hundred dollars.”

Austin’s face fell. “That’s all? He has no idea where she went, or whether she went off with that man?”

“No. But he did tell me I could look in the old employee files to see if I can find Darvis Kane’s date of birth and Social Security number.”

“It’s a start,” Austin said. “How was he about the whole thing? Was he angry about you stirring all this up?”

“No,” I said. “He says he made peace with the whole thing a long time ago, but he understands why I need answers. But he won’t talk about Darvis Kane. He made that real clear.”

Austin put down his Diet Coke can. “What are we waiting for? Let’s get cracking on those old files.”

“They’re in the basement at Daddy’s house,” I said. “And now would be a good time, since he’s at the lot all day. I was thinking, I could give you the key, and you could look through the files.”

“And what, may I ask, are you going to be doing while I’m knee-deep in silverfish and mildew down in that basement?”

I looked out the plate-glass window of Fleur, toward the square. The big old red brick county courthouse blocked the view, but on the other side of it was another shop, about the same size as this one. The name on the forest green awning said Kathleen’s Antiques now, but if you looked closely, you could see where Charm Shop had been painted out all those years ago.

All week long, I’d been thinking about going in to Kathleen’s, to see Chrys Graham. Now, it seemed, would be a good time to visit my mother’s old friend.

Kathleen’s wasn’t one
of those snooty antiques shops where you hold your breath—and your elbows at your side.

The aisles were cluttered with shelves of crystal, china, and silver, and different areas in the middle of the shop had been set up as room vignettes; this one a Victorian parlor, that one a dining room, another a bedroom with an iron bedstead, mahogany dresser, and stacks of vintage bed linens. A huge old window air conditioner hummed noisily from a window in the back, and the room smelled faintly of mildew and lemon-scented furniture wax.

In my granddaddy’s time, this had been a drugstore, and it still had the old pressed tin ceiling tiles, beadboard walls, and floor made of tiny black and white hexagonal tiles. The drugstore counter was long gone, of course, but the brass cash register was the original, as was Chrys Graham.

A doorbell buzzed somewhere from the back of the store when I walked in, and through the dim light I spied a petite woman sitting on an overstuffed sofa, looking startled, before she hastily stubbed out a cigarette.

“Hey,” she called in her familiar raspy voice. “I’ll be right with you, unless you just want to poke around and not be bothered.”

I walked toward the back of the store so she could get a better look at me.

She was waving the smoke-filled air around her with heavily be-jeweled hands. Chrys Graham had to be in her early sixties, but she was still cute, in a pixieish way, with straight brown bangs that nearly reached the tips of her tortoiseshell glasses, behind which shone a pair of impish brown eyes.

“You caught me!” she rasped. “Promise you won’t tell my niece I was smoking in here. Kathleen says I’m a fire hazard.”

Silently I held up my right hand in the Girl Scout pledge.

Miss Graham tilted her head and peered at me over the bridge of the glasses, like she thought maybe she could remember who I was.

“Don’t tell me,” she said slowly. “I know that face, but I just need a little bit of time to put a name with it.”

I sat down on the sofa beside her.

She cupped my chin gently between her hands and looked directly into my eyes.

“You’re Jeanine’s little girl,” she said finally. “Keeley Murdock, that’s it, isn’t it? I’m trying to decide who you look more like—Jeanine or your daddy.”

“I think it’s the eyes,” I told her. “Everybody says I’ve got the Murdock nose.”

“You’re your mama, made over,” she declared, as though that settled it. “How long has it been since she ran off with Darvis Kane?”

Her directness took me by surprise.

“Ma’am?”

“You did know she ran off with one of the salesmen at your daddy’s car lot, didn’t you?”

I nodded. At least we had that out of the way.

“It was 1979,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said, nodding in agreement. “The same year they flooded the lake. I remember it, because Georgia Power bought our old family place out there, and I took a two-month-long trip to San Francisco with the money they paid me. When I got back, I heard the news that your mama had taken off.”

I looked around the antiques shop. “She used to bring me here with her, you know, when she was fixing the windows. You had a kitten I liked to play with.”

“Junior,” Miss Graham said. “A calico. I was always partial to calicos. Where have you been all these years? Why haven’t you been in to visit with me?”

“Maybe I wasn’t ready.”

“But you’re ready now. I heard you got your heart broken. The Jernigan boy. Which one was it?”

“A.J.,” I said.

“Never could keep those boys straight,” Miss Graham muttered. “GiGi bought all her clothes here, you know, back in the day. Your Aunt Gloria bought a lot of stuff from me too. When I ran the place, the Charm Shop had all the latest fashions. Everybody who was anybody bought from me.”

“I remember,” I said. “One time you gave us matching mother-daughter outfits. Red plaid jumpers and black blouses.”

“That’s right,” she said, pleased that I remembered. “Your mama was a walking advertisement for the shop. Everything she put on looked like it had been made specially for her. She could have been a runway model, with her looks and style.”

She carefully considered my own outfit. I was wearing a sleeveless turquoise blouse, a turquoise and silver bead necklace, and white capris, with a pair of turquoise beaded sandals I’d bought at the Apparel Mart on my last trip to Atlanta. She rubbed the fabric of my top between her fingertips and nodded her approval.

“Silk. Good. I can’t abide these synthetics. I wouldn’t say you had her same sense of style. But you’ll do.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I’m trying to find out what happened to my mother. Where she went.”

She shrugged her bony shoulders. “Ask your daddy.”

“I have. Right after she left, he hired a private detective to try and find out, but they never really got any answers. With computers and everything now, I thought maybe I could find something out. A friend is helping me.”

“Boyfriend?” She grinned slyly.

“Just a friend,” I said. “Austin LeFleur. Do you know him? He runs the florist’s shop across the square.”

“Bouquets by Betty Ann,” Miss Graham said. “I know the place.”

“Austin did a computer search. He didn’t find any record of a divorce. My father says he never filed because he didn’t know where she’d gone. And there’s no death record that we can find, so I was hoping…”

“What? What were you hoping? What kind of mother goes off and leaves a child without so much as a word?”

“I don’t know,” I whispered. “Was my mama that kind of person?”

“Not when I knew her,” Miss Graham said. “She was maybe a little flighty, but she was young yet. Not even thirty.”

“Did she talk to you about her marriage? Did you know she was unhappy?”

“Unhappy? Who told you that?”

“Nobody, really,” I said. “But I know there were rumors. Before she left. That she was running with a wild crowd. My aunt admitted as much to Daddy, after Mama left.”

Miss Graham reached for her cigarette pack. She shook one out and lit it. She inhaled and closed her eyes.

For a minute I thought maybe she’d fallen asleep. Finally she opened her eyes and exhaled loudly.

“I never judged Jeanine,” she said. “She didn’t ask my advice, and I didn’t offer any. I wasn’t her mama, and I wasn’t any saint. Never said I was. That said, I knew she was up to something she didn’t want your daddy to know about. The last three or four months, before she left town, she asked me to pay her in cash, instead of the usual check, which I was glad to do.”

“How much money would that have been?”

Her laugh rasped like a wood file. “Not that much. I probably only paid her twenty dollars a window, something like that. And most of the time she took it out in clothes. But those last months, she wanted cash money.”

“This wild crowd she was running with,” I said. “Who all were they?”

She raised one thinly arched eyebrow. “That was a long time ago, honey. People change.”

“But who were they? If I could find out, maybe I could talk to them. Somebody has to know something.”

She shook her head slowly. “See, these were people who were sliding around, messing around on the side. Churchgoing, respectable people. It wasn’t like they advertised what they were up to. It was all rumors, that’s all.”

“What kind of rumors? Come on, Miss Graham, it’s been more than twenty years. Nobody cares about this stuff but me.”

“That’s what you think,” she retorted. “Anyway, some of ’em are dead. Some of ’em moved on.”

“And some of them are still living right here in Madison. Tell me their names. Please?”

She reached for the coffee cup where she’d stubbed out her last cigarette, and flicked a half inch of ash into it.

“Do you remember your mama’s cousin Sonya?”

“Sonya Wyrick. But she moved away years ago.”

“To Kannapolis, North Carolina,” Miss Graham said. “Sonya and Jeanine were thick as thieves back then. Sonya’s marriage had just broken up, and she was wild as a hare. Dated every married man in town.”

“That’s why Daddy didn’t like her,” I said.

“He was about the only man in town who didn’t like her!” Miss Graham said. “I never could understand what they saw in her either. She was a hard-bitten thing, with bleached hair and little skinny legs. Talk was that she left those kids of hers alone at night, while she went tramping around till all hours.”

“Shawn and Tanya,” I said, suddenly remembering my cousin’s names. “One time they spent the weekend at our house. Shawn could spit through his front teeth. And Tanya wore a bra. Daddy was
gone to a convention when they came, I think. It was like a big party. We stayed up late and had frozen pizza. And watched scary movies on TV.”

“I just bet,” Miss Graham said dryly.

“That’s all I remember about them,” I said. “I think that’s the only time they were ever at our house. And I’m pretty sure I never spent the night over there.”

“Your daddy wouldn’t have allowed it,” Miss Graham agreed. “Sonya Wyrick’s reputation was not very good around here.”

“Who else?” I asked. “You said there was a whole crowd she was running with. But that’s the only name I’ve heard. What about Darvis Kane? Did anybody ever hear from him after they left?”

She stubbed out her cigarette in the coffee cup and stood up suddenly. “I gotta open the door and air this place out. If Kathleen comes back in here and smells this smoke, she’ll have my hide.”

I followed her to the front of the shop. She picked up a heavy black flatiron and used it as a wedge to prop the door open. Warm air flowed in. She went behind a glass display case filled with old jewelry and bits and pieces of silver, and brought out a can of Glade air freshener, with which she proceeded to mist the entire store.

“That’s better,” she said, discarding the can in the trash.

“Now it smells like rose-scented cigarette smoke,” I said. “What about it? Darvis Kane had a wife and kids. Somebody must know something about him. The two of them didn’t just fall off the face of the earth. Just tell me a name, Miss Graham. Please? One name. Somebody who can tell me about my mother and Darvis Kane. I’ll be discreet. Nobody else has to know.”

“In Madison? Who are you kidding? If a mouse farts in this town, you know it before the smoke clears. Anyway, it’s all old history. What if you did find your mama? What would you do? What would you say after all this time? And how does your daddy feel about all this?”

“Daddy understands,” I said, putting some steel in my voice.
“And I’ll figure out the rest when I figure out what happened to her. Which I fully intend to do.”

She sighed loudly. “I have to live in this town, you know. Talk to Sonya. Last I heard, she was still in Kannapolis. Shouldn’t be too hard to find, with a last name like that.”

“Thanks,” I told her.

“You might not thank me, after you hear what she has to say,” Miss Graham said, her voice sounding suddenly old and morbid. “Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.”