Chapter 1

 

It was high summer, the peak of tourist season in Gatlinburg, Tennessee where I should’ve been. But instead, I was on my way to Tara to kick Scarlett O’Hara’s butt.

My mother wasn’t actually Scarlett O’Hara, but this wasn’t news I wanted to break to her. Deep in her heart and much to her dismay, Evelyn Claxton Claypoole knew that she wasn’t the star of Gone with the Wind. This was kind of a shame because my mother did Vivien Leigh better than Vivien Leigh. And, at least for the time being, she had the house to back up her act. My mother’s version of Scarlett’s Tara looked like a scaled-down model of the plantation as architecturally conceived by The Beverly Hillbillies. Suitcase in hand, I knocked on the massive front door.

“Hey, Mom, it’s me.”

I figured she’d never hear me over the blaring TV, so I went on in. Bunky, my mother’s aging Pekingese, jumped off the sofa where he’d been relaxing and watching the five o’clock news with my mother. Evelyn had an ice pack parked on her head. Headaches were no strangers to her. They were often brought on by her consumption of too many Manhattans.

Yammering his head off, Bunky charged for me, but, because he’s about a hundred and fifty years old, he only got about a foot in my general direction.

“Bunky, hush your mush,” Evelyn said, showing her Dixie roots. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you recognize Kimberly? Well, I’m not surprised. It has been forever.”

“Hello, Mother,” I said, dumping my bags in the Rhett Butler foyer. I hated it when she called me Kimberly.

I headed over to where she rather dramatically reclined on the couch and hugged her. At five feet ten inches, I had almost a foot on my mother as she is a Pygmy. Much easier to hug her when she is horizontal.

“I see we’re in blonde mode again.”

“Clairol’s Sahara Blonde.”

“You’re starting to look like Ellen DeGeneres minus the piercing blue eyes.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.”

“But why so short?”

“You don’t like my utilitarian hair by Super Cuts?”

“Too short.”

“Sharon Stone’s is shorter.”

Evelyn snorted. “Yeah, and she’s weirder than skvitch.”

I ignored that remark and Evelyn went on to her next random thought.

“Maybe I should get a box of that. What would you think of me as a blonde?”

“I’m sure you’d look stunning.”

“Bet I would. Anyway, I thought you’d fallen off the face of the earth,” my mother said. “How about a cookie?” She offered me the box of SnackWells.

I passed on the cookies. I’d just enjoyed a high fat lunch with Colonel Sanders down the road and didn’t want to confuse my body chemistry. I was one of those lucky people who, no matter what they shoveled into their mouths, never gained an ounce. I remained lanky, even athletic looking, long after college.

“Your mother is not gonna to be around forever, you know. You oughta get home more often.”

“You are absolutely right, Mother. I’ll make a point of it.”

I wasn’t up for an altercation over this much-aired complaint, so I went along with it. My mother sat up suddenly and set her ice pack aside. “Did you hear about the murder we had right here in Fogerty?”

“Get out of here.” Murder in Fogerty?

“Yep. Remember Jimmy Jacobs who owned that topless joint? Got his throat slit. Didn’t you go to school with him?”

“Sure did. A real loser.”

“Well, he’s a dead loser now. Say, I’ll bet you could use a little drink. I know I sure could.”

“Not a bad idea,” I said, and it wasn’t.

 

I headed downstairs to the bar where I freshened Evelyn’s ice pack and made us both Manhattans, mine with an extra cherry. I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that there had been a murder in Fogerty and then I got lost in the ambience of the basement bar still had A.C. written all over it. Cheap booze, a neat line of Cincinnati Reds bar glasses, novelty ashtrays and a shrunken head that probably belonged in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

My uncle A.C. was my mother’s late second husband who also happened to be my deceased father’s brother. Evelyn claimed that A.C. was the only Claypoole who knew how to have a good time, and she and A.C. had spent their marriage proving it. They’d built Tara II, a huge, pillared monstrosity on a man-made lake so large A.C. had had to call in practically every piece of heavy equipment in town to dig it out. Then, it took water trucks from four counties to fill it. On its completion, A.C. christened Lake Evelyn and tossed my mother off the dock. By all reports, this was a very romantic moment.

Over time, A.C. and my mother had sold off my father’s businesses to support themselves in the style to which they had grown accustomed. They’d been to Disneyworld about a zillion times. They’d vacationed in countries they couldn’t even spell. They made numerous trips to the South Pacific to visit my brother Clint and his wife Sugar where they were serving the Lord as Baptist missionaries.

But fate hadn’t been kind to A.C. One afternoon he was fishing on Lake Evelyn in his new 22-foot aluminum bass boat when a storm blew up out of nowhere. A.C. had never been one to let the weather ruin his day. But this time it definitely did when a big, ugly lightning bolt struck him, and he tumbled dead into the lake.

Sometimes I missed A.C., but not usually.

“To you and you.” I toasted A.C.‘s memory and the shriveled head dangling over the bar. What a terrific couple of guys.