Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes (2 page)

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“I'm working. Or at least I'm getting ready to work. I'm sitting in the back room drinking a cup of coffee and reading the morning newspaper.”

“I've been thinking about the way Myra Redmon kicked the bucket,” Eadie said.

“Look, Eadie, if you're going to call me every day we need to get on one of those shared-minute plans. You're eating up my minutes.”

“I mean, considering Myra was such a pain in the ass, how ironic was the way she died? And can you believe Virginia actually married Redmon?”

“Yeah, I know. How desperate did she have to be.”

“Pretty damn desperate. Myra must be spinning in her grave.”

“Now there's a happy thought.” Lavonne took a sip, opened the paper, and snorted suddenly, spewing coffee.

“What's so funny?”

“Speak of the devil. I'm sitting here looking at a photo of Virginia in the wedding section of the newspaper. Just so you know, it was the Social Event of the Season.”

“Did the bride wear chain mail and carry a battleax?”

“No, interestingly enough, she appears to be unarmed. She's described as being ‘graceful as a swan’ and ‘slender as a willow.’”

“I'll bet Virginia wrote that herself.”

“Actually, they've got Lumineria writing the wedding and engagement section these days, in addition to the ‘Town Tattler.’”

“Oh shit,” Eadie said.

“Town Tattler” was the gossip column of the Ithaca Daily News written by Lumineria Crabb. Lumineria had taught Sunday school for thirty years and she could never bring herself to say anything ugly about anyone, so most of the gossip was pretty tame. Guess which former Cotillion Queen is celebrating another birthday? And she doesn't look a day over twenty! I heard it from a little bird one husband, J.T., bought his lovely wife, L.T., an
anniversary ring and a trip to Paris. Isn't he the sweetest? That kind of thing. When Eadie announced she and Trevor were moving to New Orleans, a photo of her taken the day after her Let's Get the Hell Out of Ithaca Party appeared in the “Town Tattler” with the caption, “Guess which little love birds are flying the coop?” The photo, showing a very disheveled and obviously intoxicated Eadie, was probably the only bad picture she had ever taken. Lavonne referred to it as Eadie's Meth Bust Photo and gave her shit every chance she got.

“Well, at least it's not as bad as your Meth Bust Photo.”

“Very funny,” Eadie said.

“Actually Virginia looks really good. Amazingly good.”

“Yeah, well, that's what happens when you bathe in the blood of virgins.”

“I'll have to try that.”

“Speaking of looks, there's something I've been meaning to ask you.” Eadie put her hand behind her shoulders and probed with her fingers. “There might be something wrong with my back. It feels like I have a lump there, where my neck comes in.”

“A Dowager's Hump,” Lavonne said. “We all get them. It's part of aging.”

“Remind me not to call you when I'm depressed.”

“Are you depressed?”

“I wasn't until you mentioned the Meth Bust Photo and the Dowager's Hump.” Eadie slumped down in the pillows. She raised her legs into the air, admiring their long lean shapes, pointing with her toes toward the ceiling. Except for the slight paunch around her midsection, her figure was still good, which was amazing considering her recent inactivity and constant candy cravings. “And speaking of depression, I'm out of Mondo Logs. I need you to order me a case and I'll pick them up when I get to town.”

A Mondo Log was a pecan log covered in chocolate with a marshmallow center. It had been known to cause Type II diabetes after just one slice. The logs were made by the Mondo Candy Company out of Stations-ofthe-Cross, Georgia, and were rumored to have a special secret ingredient known only to the Mondo family. Eadie suspected heroin. She had been addicted since childhood but she had held her addiction at bay for nearly twenty years. Since she moved to New Orleans, however, her Mondo Log habit had returned with a vengeance and now she ordered cases of the stuff.

Lavonne, who'd grown up in Cleveland, and even after twenty years in
the South, had yet to assimilate Southern culture said, “I'm not going down to the Mondo Candy Factory to buy you a case of Mondo Logs. I'm not enabling you to continue this disgusting and unhealthy habit.”

“You know, Lavonne, now that you've lost seventy-five pounds, you're not near as much fun as you used to be.”

“You'll be down for Nita's wedding in a few days. Just pick up a box when you get here.”

“They'll be sold out by then! You know they only turn out a limited number of logs and then they close down till September.”

The reason for Eadie's repeated phone calls became suddenly, glaringly apparent to Lavonne. She grinned, leaning back in her chair. “Oh my God,” she said, “you're homesick. You're homesick for Ithaca, Georgia.”

“Don't be ridiculous,” Eadie said, a little too forcefully. “I live in the greatest city in the world. I can get any alcoholic drink imaginable at three in the morning, read the New York Times in the Quarter over café au lait and beignets, eat in a different restaurant every night and not hit the same one twice.”

“But you can't get a Mondo Log.”

“Are you going to order it or not.”

Lavonne folded the newspaper and used it to blot up the spilled coffee on her desk. “How does Trevor feel about this latest addiction of yours?”

“Who?”

“Trevor. Your husband. The man you left town with a little over a year ago.”

“Oh him,” Eadie said.

Lavonne crumpled the wet paper and threw it into the trash can. “Trouble in paradise?” she said.

Eadie yawned and stared at the inkblot water stain. It reminded her now of a witch riding on a broomstick. “You'd have to be here to understand what's going on. It's hard being married to a celebrity.”

“You sound jealous.”

“Not jealous. Just bored.”

“Oh shit. That can't be good.”

Eadie frowned and put her hand over her eyes so she wouldn't have to look at the inkblot water stain. “He signed that two-book deal with Random House and now he's up in New York meeting with the publicity boys to plan his book tour.”

“So let me see if I've got this right,” Lavonne said. She tapped her com
puter screen and waited while it booted up. “You spend twenty years hounding Trevor to quit practicing law and finish his novel, and now that he's done it, and managed to sell it to one of the biggest publishing houses in the world, you're depressed? You're married to a smart, good-looking man who adores you, and you're not happy?”

“Well, you know what they say,” Eadie said, yawning. “Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it.”

“Remind me to smack you the next time I see you.” Lavonne went online to check the e-mails on her Shofar So Good Deli website. She scrolled down the list, holding her cell phone against her ear with one shoulder.

“About the wedding,” Eadie said, dropping her legs and rolling over on her stomach. “Are you sure it's okay if I stay with you? Are you sure Ashley won't mind?”

“Ashley's on winter break and Louise doesn't go back to Tulane until next week. They're down in Florida with Leonard and his trophy wife.”

“Funny, you don't sound bitter. Why don't you sound bitter?”

Lavonne grinned. “Because now the trophy wife's stuck with Leonard. And I'm not.”

From deep within the house, Eadie could hear whispering. In French. She turned her head to listen, and after a minute, it stopped. “I think my house is haunted,” she said. She was pretty sure it was a child. She had, several times, caught something small and fleeting out of the corner of her eye. “Lights go on and off. I hear whispering all the time, like someone is standing behind me and when I turn around, there's no one there. Sometimes I hear footsteps on the stairs.”

“What does Trevor say?”

“He says I'm crazy. He says I spend too much time shut up in the house, alone.”

On the other side of the wall, the old mixer made a wump, wump sound as it mixed the dough. Lavonne could hear Little Moses Shapiro, her partner's son, moving around the kitchen, taking bread loaves out of the ovens and sliding them onto the cooling trays. “Look, Eadie, I've got to go. We're catering Nita's wedding and I've got a lot to do before next Saturday. E-mail me your flight plan and I'll pick you up at the airport on Wednesday.”

“Is Nita having a bachelorette party?”

“She says she doesn't want one. She's acting kind of weird about the whole thing. I'm starting to think she might be getting cold feet.”

“What do you mean? Is something wrong with her and Jimmy Lee?”

“Oh no, they're as happy as ever. I just get the feeling she doesn't want to get married. I don't know, I could be wrong.”

“Well, let's you and me take her out to Bad Bob's and see if we can ply her with tequila and find out what's going on.”

Lavonne said, “Well, that might be a problem since Bad Bob's is no more. Two guys named Thom and Petor moved down from Atlanta and bought the place. They decorated it to look like a New York loft, put up a screen of trellises to hide the concrete plant, and built a deck overlooking the river. Now it's a wine bar called Malveux Robert.”

“Shit, what's happening to that town?”

“You'll see when you get here,” Lavonne said, and hung up.

E
ADIE HUNG UP THE PHONE, YAWNED, AND ROLLED OVER IN BED
. The house was quiet again. The ghost had gone. The rain had stopped and the sun now peeked from behind a bank of low clouds, slanting through the long windows. A patch of blue sky appeared above the neighbor's roofline. They had bought the house on Prytania Street soon after they sold Trevor's ancestral home in Ithaca and moved to New Orleans. Most of their furniture was still in storage back in Georgia, and except for the bedroom, the kitchen, and the library, the mansion was empty. They had gambled that everything would work out over their first year there. That was all the time Trevor had given himself to finish his novel.

“If it doesn't work out, we can always go back to Georgia,” he said. “I can always go back to practicing law. And you can work anywhere. It doesn't matter where we live.”

But, apparently, it did. There were art galleries all along Magazine Street and Eadie told herself that she would work again, but instead she fussed over Trevor like an overbearing mother. She would wake him every morning and bring him café au lait in the garden, watching anxiously from the French doors until he began, tentatively at first, and then with a steady tapping of his fingers over the keyboard, to write. He would break for lunch and then go back to the garden. Eadie would allow no one to visit until four o'clock in the afternoon, cocktail hour in New Orleans, and then the garden would be crowded with neighbors and college professors and lawyers who had graduated from Tulane but never practiced law a day in their lives. Gradually, Eadie succumbed to the easy charm of the place, the dusty bookstores along Carrollton Avenue, the cafés of Maple
Street, the bon vivant attitude and wit of the people she met at cocktail parties and art galleries and book signings. A general feeling of sloth and lassitude overtook her. She set up her studio in the dining room but kept the door closed and locked. Instead, she began to take long naps in the afternoon.

Trevor, on the other hand, seemed energized by the place. He worked feverishly, and after two months had a rough draft of the novel, a legal thriller, completed. By then he had landed an agent, based on his outline and the first three chapters. Four months later he had signed a two-book contract with Random House. It had all gone as perfectly and predictably as a Hollywood movie plot. The novel was due out in May and Eadie had no doubt it would become an overnight bestseller. That was the way her luck was running these days.

In a little over a year, Trevor had become a local Literary Figure. He had succumbed completely to the siren's song of adulation and praise. Eadie was consumed by jealousy, not of the women who threw themselves at her husband at cocktail parties and gallery openings, but of the fact that Trevor could work and she could not.

And now, lying in the house on Prytania Street and yawning in her antique bed, Eadie was overcome by a numbing sense of boredom.

Jealousy and boredom. Always a dangerous combination for Eadie Boone.

N
OW THAT HER WEDDING WAS LESS THAN A WEEK AWAY
, N
ITA
was not even sure she wanted to get married again. She sat out on the screened porch drinking coffee in the mornings after Jimmy Lee had gone to work and the children had left for school, wondering if she was doing the right thing. Steam rose off the surface of the Black Warrior River and catfish the size of terriers splashed in the dark pools between the cypress trunks. Nita loved the quiet isolation of the place, their little cabin in the woods. Jimmy Lee had bought it soon after she left Charles Broadwell for good and moved in with him. She brought her two children with her, Whitney and Logan. They liked to take the boat out on the river or feed the catfish from its pine-strewn banks. In the summer, they swam in the dark water, cavorting like otters, enjoying themselves in a way they had never done when they lived in the big house in River Oaks with its kidney-shaped swimming pool. Jimmy Lee hung a rope swing from the top of a tall tree
and watching the three of them swing out over the water, laughing and twirling and kicking their feet, Nita realized she had what she had always wanted—a happy family.

They lived simply and frugally on the money Jimmy Lee made as a self-employed carpenter. The children went to public school now and seemed much happier than they ever were attending the prestigious Barron Hall School. Nita herself had gone back to school, taking classes at the small college in town where she was trying to decide whether to major in elementary education or women's studies. The money she had taken from Charles Broadwell sat untouched in her bank account, insurance against Charles ever filing a custody suit to take the children away from her. Her love life with Jimmy Lee, thirteen years her junior, was passionate and intensely satisfying. All in all, Nita's life was turning out to be everything she had ever dreamed it could be, and she was hesitant to upset that delicate, happy balance by marrying Jimmy Lee.