My full name is Lillian Belle Rosemary Cleary, named after both grandmothers and a maiden aunt, and I haven’t answered to Lilly Belle Rose since I was six and got expelled for hitting a boy who kept calling me that. In even the most modest shoe heel, I’m six feet tall. When I need to project power or instill fear, a black suit and a pair of three-inch heels pretty much do the job. I’m gaining on thirty-five at a rate that has exorbitantly sped up since I turned thirty, and I’m not really that pretty, though often people think I am.
It’s my hair, my half a yard of thick, black shiny hair that I can use as a veil in the dance of the seven veils and that stays just the right shade of black, with painfully maintained highlights of burnt sienna to belie the hair dye, courtesy of Brock, my hair-dresser and therapist. Except in bouts of high humidity, which in Sarasota is more often than not, my hair keeps just the right pageboy wave. That’s why people think I’m pretty. That, and being thin, tall, and having blue eyes. What they call Black Irish, that dark hair, pale skin, and blue eyes. My two brothers are what I guess you’d call Red Irish, big red faces and big heads of red hair, and big, big hearts.
Though my brothers stayed home in south Georgia, I moved to Sarasota straight out of law school because once when we were children we’d vacationed here with our father. My brothers and I had discovered that if you dug any kind of hole, it would fill up with water from the ground, and there were medieval statues of women and bulls and goddesses in the median of the Tamiami Trail near the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, and the beaches went on forever with white sand washed by the turquoise Gulf of Mexico, and elegantly thin royal palms lined the city streets, and, in the bay-front curve of the Tamiami Trail, majestic homes built in the 1920s boom stood in rows of grandeur not contemplated in my native south Georgia town.
All that Sarasota grandeur was gone now. Overdevelopment and progress and retirees seeking highrise condos and not giving a rat’s ass about history or architectural integrity, plus the passage of time itself, had conspired to render it all asunder. Even the high water table was gone, sucked out of the ground by greedy use and years of prolonged drought. But when I was six, I saw the city in the waning days of its glory, and I loved it. I kept that image in my mind, and I wanted out of all that Georgia red dirt anyway, and so I came here to make my way in the world.
And now, eight years later, I stared at my face in the lighted mirror of my own bathroom, and I wondered if the Retin-A was really making any difference. I mean, I still saw those lines around my eyes. And the ones around my mouth.
Sun. The number one cause of wrinkles. Should have stayed out of the sun, the dermatologist had told me. Oh, thanks, that’s worth that ninety-five-dollar bill. As if I’d had a choice, growing up in the Deep South. The only people who didn’t have sun-damaged skin in my Georgia town were either invalids, rich white ladies, or night-shift workers at the pickle factory who slept days.
Sun. Yeah. To avoid it in Georgia, you have to stay indoors.
And my mother’s principal child-raising technique when my brothers and I were children was to open the kitchen door while clutching her first Coca-Cola of the morning and say, “Shoo.” In the summer, that meant we played outside in the hot, bright sun until we saw my dad’s car come up the driveway at dusk and we went in for supper. My brothers and I stayed sunburned. We’d eat lunch from our weekly allowance, Fudgesicles, Dr Pepper, cheese crackers, and banana Popsicles being the staples of our summer diet. During the school year, we ate the school lunches, the house specialty being lime Jell-O with green peas in it. My mother’s idea of cooking dinner was to open cans—canned hash, canned chili, canned pears, canned beans. My father ate his noon meal at the Woolworth lunch counter, and my mother drank Coca-Cola and took pills from a bottle she hid under her mattress. I took one of those pills once when I was nine, and when it hit me I couldn’t get up off the floor for over an hour. My brother Delvon took one and smashed his bike into a slash pine. Our middle brother had no imagination and never stole from our mother’s stash.
When we got older and the school nurse sent home a note saying our mother should fix us breakfast, she’d put a raw egg in a bottle of Yoo-hoo for us. By the time we were teenagers, she didn’t even bother with the cans or the egg in the Yoo-hoo. It’s a wonder we didn’t all get scurvy.
In that ill-nourished family, I was the baby, and when I graduated from law school, my father, who was himself a lawyer, retired and moved to a fishing camp on a TVA lake, where he sits most of the daylight hours at the end of a dock, wearing a broad-brimmed Tilly hat I gave him and watching the life on the lake play itself out against the sun and the day. He sits so still that once a butterfly landed on his arm. My mother stayed in the house in town, where she never gets out of her pajamas except to go to the occasional funeral.
That’s who I am, and that’s what I was thinking about when Newly called me up to say that he’d just heard on the police monitor that Dr. Trusdale had some kind of seizure and died, and the police were called to the house to investigate because it could be poison, and wasn’t I defending him? And could he come over?