Hissy Fit (35 page)

“So far, so good,”
I told myself as I drove through the unlocked gates at Mulberry Hill late that evening. I’d driven straight through from High Point, arriving around ten
P.M.

It wasn’t until I approached the meadow area that I had an inkling about the disaster Gloria had hinted at over the phone. For the first time I noticed that the drive was suddenly lit by more than moonlight. Uplights sent eerie shadows through the leathery leaves of the huge old magnolias, and there were downlights mounted high in the tops of some of the pecans and oaks. As I got to the area where the driveway bisected the meadow, I had to pull off the drive.

It was lined with heavy machinery; a backhoe, bushhog, and other pieces of industrial yellow equipment whose names I didn’t know. And right in the middle of the left side of the meadow, right where bales of hay and a tent should have been erected, there was now a gaping hole in the landscape.

A pond, I guess you’d call it. A huge pond had sprung up where none had been on Monday. The treetop lights glanced off the surface of the water, and now I could see that there was a fountain in the middle of the pond with a pair of creatures—seahorses? centaurs?—spurting water from their gaping mouths.

It was…amazing. It was spectacular. It was perfect—for Vegas. And it was, as Gloria had so aptly described, a disaster for Mulberry Hill.

I pulled the Volvo up beside the largest piece of equipment and hiked over to the pond. “Crap,” I said, moaning. The meadow had been mowed—no, obliterated. In its place was a thick carpet of emerald green sod. I trudged on toward the pond, to get a better look. A pair of ornate wrought-iron benches had been thoughtfully arranged
at the water’s edge, and as I approached, I heard a loud honking, and flapping wings, and suddenly, some large black creature was rushing toward me, flapping its wings, and hissing and braying. It nipped at my ankles, and I turned tail and ran like hell for the safety of the Volvo, where I rolled up the windows, locked the doors, and proceeded to bang my head repeatedly on the dashboard.

When I woke up the next morning, I tried to convince myself that it had all been a bad dream. I’d been overtired. It had been dark. Maybe I’d taken the wrong turn off and ended up at another Greek Revival plantation house on the outskirts of Madison.

I drove straight out to the house, without even stopping for coffee. In the daylight the massive iron gates looked the same. The drive looked the same, and as I approached the meadow, I could see the same hulking yellow heavy machinery.

Only now the pieces were in motion, being loaded onto two long flatbed trailers. I pulled off the road, got out of the Volvo, and went over to the man driving the first of the trailers.

“What the hell are you doing?” I demanded.

“Loading up,” he said. “Y’all only rented this stuff for three days.”

“Y’all? Who is y’all? I certainly did not order any of this stuff. And I sure as hell didn’t order anybody to dig any pond, or to knock down any trees out here.”

“Hey. I just pick up and deliver.” He picked up a clipboard with a sheet of yellow paper on it. “Mulberry Hill. This is it. Right?”

I nodded, but pointed at the signature at the bottom of the sheet. “Who signed for it? Who authorized the work?”

He picked up the clipboard and handed it to me, but the handwriting was an indecipherable scrawl.

“It’s a mistake,” I told him. “A horrible mistake. The owner didn’t order any pond. He doesn’t want a pond. He wants a field for dove hunting.”

The driver laughed. “Dove, huh? He might want to change his mind about that. Once he gets some brush growing at the edge he
might eventually attract some ducks, or something like that. But lady—no respectable dove is coming near that place now.”

I glanced over at the meadow. Or the lawn, as it could more correctly be called now. In the daylight I could see that some sort of rose garden had been planted near the seating area.

And the fountain. The fountain was even more hideous in the light of day. It appeared to be a pair of unicorns, spouting water from their horns.

“Put it back,” I said.

“Huh?”

“I want you to put it back. Fill in the pond. Scrape up that sod. And that fountain.” I shuddered. “Take that godawful fountain back from wherever it came from.”

He scratched his head and smiled. “You’re pulling my leg—right?” And then he turned around and went back to loading up the heavy equipment.

I sighed heavily and drove on to the house. Adam, the project foreman, was out on the veranda, looking at a section of railing one of his painters had just primed.

“Hey, Keeley,” he greeted me.

“Adam,” I said sternly. “Did I tell you to have a pond dug out in the meadow?”

“No ma’am,” he said.

“Does the landscape plan call for a pond?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did Will order a pond?”

He laughed. “Nah. What would he want with a pond?”

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “Then who in the hell had a pond dug and a hideous fountain, and grass and rose bushes installed out there? How can this have happened? We’ve got a couple dozen men coming over here tomorrow for a dove hunt. This cannot be happening.”

He stuck his hands in his back pockets. “It was Miss Stephanie.”

“Stephanie?”

He nodded, abashed. “I come out here Monday morning, and the earthmover was already there, doing its thing. The next thing I know, there’s a backhoe, and a bushhog, ripping up all of Will’s dove habitat. I tried calling him on his mobile phone to check on it, but I didn’t get an answer. Pretty soon Miss Stephanie drove up. She was pretty excited about the whole thing, I can tell you. She said it was a surprise for the boss.”

“She ordered a pond? And the fountain? And rose bushes? As a surprise?”

“And the swans. A pair of ’em. I never seen black swans before. I think they must be some kind of special item. If I was you, I’d stay clear of ’em. They’re mean as a couple of snakes.”

“Swans.” I moaned. “Special-order swans.”

“Mean-as-hell black swans,” Adam volunteered. “Worse than Rottweilers, if you ask me.”

As we were standing there, Nancy Rockmore came walking slowly toward us, leaning heavily on her canes and shaking her head. “I still can’t believe it. The caterer called me yesterday and asked me if I wanted the tent beside the pond, and I said, ‘Pond? What pond?’ There ain’t no pond at Mulberry Hill.’ And he said, ‘Check again.’ That’s when I called your aunt.”

“We’re screwed,” I said. “Completely screwed.”

“This is her,” Miss Nancy said. “That goddamn Stephanie.”

“It sure wasn’t me,” I said. “According to Adam, she planned it as a surprise for Will.”

“Surprise my ass. Now what are we gonna do?” she demanded.

“I asked the heavy equipment guy if he could just fill it back up and rip up the sod. He laughed like crazy. And he kept on loading the stuff on the trailer.”

“We can’t have a dove hunt out in that meadow,” Miss Nancy said. “It ain’t even a meadow anymore. We’ll just have to cancel, that’s all.” She grimaced. “The boss’s been talking this thing up for weeks. He’s
got guys coming in from all over the country, including some of the big honchos from Victoria’s Secret, coming in from New Jersey. We gotta think of something else.”

We both leaned on the railing and looked out over the landscape. We’d been so close. And now this. I’d thrown myself into my work, hoping to forget all the crap going on in my personal life. And now I’d run up against another brick wall. I felt like crying.

I wanted my daddy. But that gave me an idea.

“I’ll call Daddy,” I told Miss Nancy. “He knows every hunter in three counties. Maybe we can lease a field or something. And we’ll just have to call everybody on the invitation list and tell them the plan has changed a little bit.”

“I’ll head back to the plant,” she said. “The invitation list is on my computer. We’ll have to split it up, to get all the phone calls made in time. Call me there when you know something.”

I sat out on the front porch of Mulberry Hill to make my phone calls. But I couldn’t look at the pond. I turned my back to it and called Daddy at the car lot. He’d been invited to the dove hunt too, and he was clearly disappointed that it wasn’t going to happen as planned.

“Damn,” he said. “I been waiting for years to get invited out there for that hunt. I even bought a new shotgun for the occasion.”

“Can you do it?” I asked. “Can you help me find another field to lease?”

“Pretty short notice,” he said. “Most folks who have a field have already made arrangements to either hunt it themselves or lease it out. Lemme make some phone calls, shug.”

An hour later he called back. “The news ain’t good,” he said. “Sorry, shug.”

I was just getting ready to call Miss Nancy to deliver the bad news when I saw the yellow Caddy come rolling slowly down the driveway. I saw it stop at the edge of the meadow. I saw Will get out, run over to the edge of the pond, and look wildly around, as though he wanted to
make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. And then I saw one of the swans go on the attack, darting at him, beak open, ready for the kill. To his credit, Will was a lot braver than I’d been. He kicked at the thing, driving it back to the pond. And when the other swan came flapping over to rescue its mate, that’s when Will made a run for the Caddy.

The Caddy sped the rest of the way down the driveway, around to the back of the house. I sighed and went inside to face the music.

“What the
fuck?”
Will’s face was contorted with anger. “What the hell went on around here while I was gone? I’m away five days, and you manage to turn my dove field into a fucking golf course?”

“No,” I started to say. “I mean, I didn’t do it. I think it was a misunderstanding.”

“You bet your fucking life there’s been a misunderstanding,” he shouted. We were standing in the library. The rugs were down, the bookshelves had been installed, and some of the furniture was in place. The only piece of furniture Will had chosen, a huge nineteenth-century planter’s desk, sat in the middle of the room, and he stood with his hands clamped on the back of the leather chair behind the desk, glaring at me. This library was the closest thing in the house to being finished. Will’s voice echoed throughout the empty house.

I walked over and closed the door to the library so that Adam and his workers wouldn’t witness my humiliation.

“I can’t believe this,” Will said, lowering his voice. “I know you’ve had your own ideas about this project all along, but I can’t believe you would deliberately sabotage the one thing I planned for myself.”

“I didn’t sabotage anything. I was as surprised as you were when I got here last night and I saw that pond.”

“And where the hell were you?” he demanded. “You were supposed to be right here at Mulberry Hill, supervising this project. I’m paying you thousands and thousands of dollars, and you go running off on another project?”

“I wasn’t running off on another project,” I said, getting hot now. “I was making one last buying trip for this house. To High Point. So
I could save you some money and make this fucking ridiculous deadline of yours. Which I told you in the beginning was impossible.”

“But you agreed,” he insisted. His face was flushed with streaks of red, and each freckle stood out like an angry exclamation point. “You agreed that you would do it. And I’ve paid you a shitload of money for what? That
disaster
out there in my dove field?”

I leaned across the desk so that my face was only inches from his. All the frustrations of the week came flooding back. All the disappointments, the shock, the sorrow. My work had been my last retreat from all of it, and now that had turned to shit too. And he was blaming me. Me.

“I had nothing to do with that disaster out in your dove field,” I said, enunciating each word slowly and clearly. “You wanted to keep your dove hunt a secret from your little girlfriend? Well, apparently she was planning a surprise of her own. Adam said she came out here yesterday to personally supervise the installation.”

“Stephanie?” Will shook his head. “She wouldn’t do something like that.”

“It’s all Stephanie,” I said. “And if you weren’t so fucking blind, you’d see that.”

“No,” Will said. “I can’t believe—”

“Are you that pussy-whipped?” I cried. “She’s turning this place into her own personal Versailles. The woman is a fraud. You think you’re building this place so she’ll settle down here and raise a family? Have you got your head totally up your own ass? You haven’t even popped the question yet and she’s already shopping for a house in Buckhead. With a swimming pool and tennis courts. How long do you think she’s going to live in podunk Madison? She might stay out here at first, maybe on weekends. Then every other weekend. Then maybe just for parties. You won’t even have Erwin around to pee on your shoes. The only company you’ll have is those damn black designer swans.”

“Stephanie isn’t like that. She loves Mulberry Hill,” Will
protested. “We’re going to build Loving Cup together, right here in Madison. You’re wrong. Dead wrong.”

“No, you’re wrong,” I said. “She’s already looking for office space for Loving Cup in her building in Atlanta. You don’t believe me? Ask her yourself.”

“You’re jealous of her,” Will said, his voice going suddenly icy. “Of her taste. Her success.”

“Jealous?” Now it was my voice that was echoing throughout the room. “Of that money-grubbing social climber? Of her taste? My God, what a joke. Did you see that monstrosity of a fountain she installed out there? It looks like a reject from a New Orleans bordello. But that’s perfect. I can see now that you are a perfect match for her. Because you are both just as shallow as that fucking pond.”

“You’re fired,” Will said. He swiveled his chair around to show me his back.

“No sir,” I told him. “I quit.” I reached into my briefcase and brought out the thick file folder of invoices for all the furniture I’d just bought in High Point. I opened it and let the pages and pages go floating down over his head.