CHAPTER ELEVEN
Fee
Thursday
Fee and Ruby were in the kitchen rolling silverware into napkins for the evening’s event—a dead-lady party, as Ruby called it—when the phone rang.
Fee stood and answered it. “Hello.”
“Is that you, Fee? It’s Mrs. Miller. Is your mom home?”
Crap. Marjory’s mom. “No. She’s out.” She wasn’t. She was upstairs.
“Who is it?” Ruby asked.
“Who was that?” Mrs. Miller asked.
“My grandma.”
“Can I talk to her?” Mrs. Miller asked.
“What?”
“Can I talk to Ruby?”
“Oh. Sure.” Fee passed the suddenly-leaden handset to Booboo. “It’s my friend Marjory’s mom. I’m not sure what she wants.”
“Hello,” Booboo said. Booboo was silent for a long time, listening.
A jagged edge of Fee’s thumb’s cuticle had been bothering her all day. She dug at it with the nail of her middle finger.
“A Turkish exchange student,” Ruby said.
Shit. Fee scraped her thumb against the rough denim of her cutoffs.
“Could you repeat that?” Ruby asked, after which she was, again, quiet for a long time.
Fee brought her thumb to her mouth and bit down along the side, removing both nail and skin.
“Drug smugglers!” Ruby said. Her voice was high and thin.
Acid began trickling through Fee’s veins. Everything hurt: her head, her stomach, and the darn gash she’d ripped in the side of her thumb.
“I can’t tell you how distressing this is,” Ruby finally said.
Fee pressed her eyes shut. She was about to be outed to Marjory. An outing she deserved, but would still hurt like a friggin’ cannonball to the head. And what would Cass say? She hadn’t called or texted her like she meant to. She’d been too chicken.
“None of this should have been revealed to her friends,” Ruby said.
Huh? Fee opened her eyes.
“My daughter has never chosen to go public with this story. I’m sure you can appreciate her concerns and, therefore, respect her privacy.”
There was another long pause.
“I’ll tell her you called,” Ruby said, setting the phone on the table.
“Thank you,” Fee said in a small voice.
“For what?”
“For covering for me with Mrs. Miller.”
“Who’s Mrs. Miller?” Ruby’s mouth was set in a pucker and her brows lifted with mischief.
Fee could think of only one reason for such a conspiratorial look. “Booboo, did we just make some kind of deal? You know, because of the wine thing yesterday?”
“What wine? I don’t know anything about any wine.”
Fee sat staring at Booboo. She honestly didn’t know if she was negotiating with a shark or a flounder. Once again, she wondered if she should talk to her mom, but really didn’t want the conversation with Mrs. Miller divulged as a consequence. Not like her mom would have time today, anyway. She was a wheels-up, burning-rubber taskmaster, one Fee knew to get out of the way of.
Later that day, Fee stood in a corner balancing a tray of hors d’oeuvres on her flattened palm. She felt like an idiot. She was supposed to be circulating and passing the Gorgonzola puffs. To hell with that, she thought as she popped one into her mouth, and then made a face of disgust. Blech. She scanned the room for her mom and saw her talking to Aunt Jocelyn and that Keith guy. Her mom had the day off; she hadn’t been forced to act like some hired hand at one of the biggest turnouts this town had seen since they’d thrown a parade in honor of Joe Hodder’s state wrestling title. Two old guys passed behind Fee. One of them said, “Must be the sister from California.”
Fee looked again at the trio. A shaft of light streamed through the floor-to-ceiling floral drapery panel, spilling a wash of pastels over the three of them. Aunt Jocelyn threw her head back and laughed. At least someone is having a good time.
Fee’s breath caught in a tangle when she observed Mrs. Miller come into view and pass uncomfortably close to where her mother stood chatting. Mrs. Miller even seemed to pause, contemplating a break into the conversation, but then was called over by another group of women. Fee exhaled an anxious breath. She set the tray down on the sideboard, untied her white apron, and stuffed it into one of the drawers. She straightened the skirt of the dress Aunt Jocelyn had lent her. Leave it to Jocelyn to bring no less than three black dresses. Jocelyn was wearing the killer halter, but she’d let Fee have her pick of the other two. She’d chosen the nubby silk one with a satin off-the-shoulder band. Though it was loose through the butt and hips, Fee felt great in it, incredibly grown up.
Two antiques approached the tray she’d just set down. Fee didn’t recognize them, but there were a lot of people she didn’t know. She shook her long brown hair into her face. Hopefully, they wouldn’t remember her as staff and ask her for a fresh drink or clean towels for the toilet. Fee backed toward the window, pretending to need its small shaft of the clammy afternoon’s pitiful breeze. The fat one reached out with thick fingers and popped a roll into her mouth. She chewed with her eyes shut and there were tiny flakes of crust stuck to the waxy lumps of her burnt-orange lipstick. She reopened her eyes, which were bright with piggishness. “Well, now, isn’t that a cozy trio.” The woman tilted her head toward the far corner of the room, where Fee’s mom was still talking with Aunt Jocelyn and Keith. “What do you think will come out of it this time? Another mystery child?” She shook with a low, conspiring chuckle.
The other one, with blue cotton-candy hair, shooshed her. “Really, Maude. Behave. I hear she’s a nice girl, and pretty by all accounts.”
“It’s a wonder he dares show his face around here,” Maude said. “Poor Hester, having to endure the gossip and innuendo he left in his wake.”
“I don’t know, I’d put my money on her running him off. Any whiff of a mess and Hester cleaned house. Her brother, for instance.”
“Like father like son,” Maude said.
“I always liked William,” Blue Hair said. “I had a thing for him myself, once upon a time.”
Maude snorted. “Ruby ruined him. It wasn’t enough to have Daniel, she had to have William, too.”
“Now stop it. Who knows what really happened there?”
“A lot of good it did her, anyway,” Maude said. “Just look at her.”
Fee snuck a glance backward. Her grandmother was posed provocatively on the rolled arm of a sofa. She had a glass of red wine in one hand and the other on the arm of an old man.
“I need to find the ladies’,” Blue Hair said. “Too much decaf.”
“I’ll come with you,” Maude said. “I want to see what they’ve done with the rest of the place. I hear it’s not bad.”
Fee watched the two old ladies walk away, and then she glared at the threesome of her mom, Aunt Jocelyn, and Keith. Her mother’s he-had-every-right-to-leave denial had seemed pretty rock-solid. But what did that really mean? And if she couldn’t trust her mom, then who could she trust? In frustration, she groaned Marge Simpson style and then headed for her room. As she passed Ruby, she overheard her say to her gentleman friend, “Once upon a time I might have.”