The party is held at the Tutweiler, an old hotel in Birmingham that Bea has always loved. Blanche had her wedding here just six months ago, and Bea had known then that she’d have to host some kind of event here herself.
The launch of the latest Southern Manors line plus the celebration of the company going public seems like the perfect occasion, and Bea spends months planning every detail. When the time finally arrives, the reception is even better than she’d hoped for.
The ballroom is decorated with Southern Manors items, each table holding a sterling silver apple, or a crystal pig, or a blown glass vase decorated with a gingham ribbon. It’s classy and elegant, but warm and friendly, the exact brand Bea has worked to cultivate over the past few years.
She tries to be the embodiment of that brand herself, her dress beautifully made and outrageously expensive, but not overly dressy, her jewelry understated.
Blanche looks overdressed in a long black dress, her diamonds on display, and Bea enjoys that more than she should, enjoys Blanche seeming out of place in this space that was originally hers.
It’s a perfect night, and Bea is the perfect hostess even though, as she looks at all the couples around the room, it occurs to her that she should probably pair herself up at some point. It’s the one thing missing in her life, a partner, and as she watches Blanche slip her arm through Tripp’s, she wonders why she hasn’t given any thought to her romantic life before now.
She knows it’s mostly because she had more important things to do, that Southern Manors has been her entire world since she graduated from college, but she suddenly feels the lack keenly and resolves to do something about it.
But not tonight.
Tonight is for her, for her success. For what she’s made from nothing.
Her mother is there, wearing a mint-green dress that Bea picked out for her because she thought it would look pretty with the soft red of her mother’s hair. But she sees now she chose wrong—it only brings out the yellow, jaundiced look of her skin, makes her seem tired and faded.
“Mama, do you want to go up to your room?” she asks quietly, leaning close as her mother sits at a table, a bottle of sparkling water by her elbow. Bea has given all the waitstaff strict instructions not to give her mother a drink, and so far, they seem to have been complying.
“No,” Mama says softly, reaching up with a trembling hand to push her hair back. She’s wearing her diamonds tonight, too. Not as ostentatious as Blanche’s, and in dire need of a cleaning given how dully they attempt to glitter, and Bea can’t believe she forgot to get Mama new accessories, something from Southern Manors.
“So proud of you, Bertha-Bear,” Mama says, smiling, and Bea doesn’t even correct the name. Tonight, she’s finally put that past behind her, emerged shiny and new.
She circulates the rest of the night, and that was the mistake. She should’ve kept an eye on her mother, should’ve insisted she go on up to her room.
And, of course, she doesn’t realize that mistake until she’s on the dais, giving a speech, thanking everyone for coming, for making Southern Manors a success. For making her a success.
“Southern Manors is a family,” she says, her voice ringing over the sound system. “And the seed for this company started with my own family. With my mother’s antiques. My grandmother’s quilts. My father’s love of a weighty bourbon glass.”
The crowd laughs politely, and Bea clutches the edge of the podium, thinking that her father never gave a shit what he was drinking out of so long as the alcohol kept flowing. That she’d never met her grandmother, that anything of any value in her mother’s home had been sold off before she’d even been born.
She knows these things are lies, but they’re lies she’s been telling for so long, it doesn’t even occur to her Mama won’t go along with the act. Why wouldn’t she when it’s these very lies that keep her in booze and Neiman Marcus?
Bea can see it playing out before it even happens, which is what makes it even worse when there’s nothing she can do to stop it. She sees her mother rise from her seat, the stagger in her step, the way she sways even when she’s standing still. Bea’s throat clenches and her heart sinks somewhere near her knees.
“Bertha, what in god’s name are you talking about?” Mama calls, her voice ringing out over the crowd even though the words are slurred.
A few heads turn her way, and Bea remembers that no one here, no one but Blanche knows it’s her real name.
“Her daddy didn’t know a bourbon glass from a beer bottle,” Mama goes on cheerfully, like this is all some funny anecdote, like she’s not punching holes in everything Bea has built.
Authenticity. It’s one of the fucking buzzwords on all their marketing materials, and here her mother is, blowing it all to shit.
“And her Nana Frances died before—”
It seems to happen in slow motion. Mama turning to regale her tablemates, the waiter moving forward at the same time, tray of champagne glasses lifted high. Not just any glasses, of course, but Southern Manors’ glasses, little champagne coupes shaped like peach halves, complete with glass leaves.
The collision is almost balletic, almost. Mama stepping on the hem of her dress, the waiter attempting to both catch her and somehow hang on to his tray.
Mama hits the ground to the sound of shattering glass, the waiter awkwardly crouched next to her, finally abandoning his tray to grip Mama’s elbow.
And Mama is laughing.
There’s a bloom of bright red blood on the heel of her hand, and she wipes it absentmindedly on her dress as Bea looks on, frozen.
“Whoopsy-daisy!” Mama calls out, laughing again, her face red, and still, Bea can’t move, can’t make herself cross the ballroom to see if she’s okay or to help her to her feet.
It’s Blanche who does that.
Years later, Bea will remember that so vividly, the way Blanche had helped Mama to her feet, babbling about these old carpets, about new shoes, giving Mama all the excuses she could want for what’s just happened as if it isn’t painfully clear just how drunk she is.
Only when Blanche glances over at her does Bea feel her limbs start to work again, and she makes her way over to the two of them, a rictus smile on her face as she takes her mother’s other arm.
“Let’s get you upstairs,” she says, and her mother, still smiling and floating happily on her cloud of booze and god knows what else, lets herself be led from the room like a child.
Later, Bea and Blanche sit in the living room of Bea’s suite. Blanche has a glass of wine, but Bea is drinking bottled water, unable to even stand the smell of alcohol right now.
“Why didn’t you tell me it was this bad?” Blanche asks, and what can Bea say? That she didn’t know it was this bad? That’s a lie. That she didn’t want anyone else to know how bad it really was?
That’s closer to the truth, but it feels too hard to admit, too shameful and big. Instead, she shrugs and says, “I’ve been so busy, I haven’t spent much time with her lately. I always knew she liked her evening cocktail, but this…”
She lets her gaze go slightly vague as though she’s never contemplated a world in which her mother gets drunk and embarrasses her, as if that hadn’t been a regular part of her childhood.
“Maybe she needs some help,” Blanche suggests. She tilts her wineglass up to drink more, then pauses, looks at the glass, and seems to realize that discussing rehab while guzzling pinot grigio might send a mixed message.
“I’ll go back down to Calera,” Bea finally says, setting her water bottle down on the bar with a thump. “Look after her a bit, get her back on the right path.”
Blanche’s brow wrinkles. “Are you sure—” she starts, but Bea cuts her off with a wave of her hand.
“I know what she needs.” No one knew her mother like Bea.
JANUARY, SIX MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE
Eddie didn’t come back for nearly a week after we slept together.
I’d expected it, in a way. I knew I’d fucked up, hinting about how he could trust me, but as the days slid by, I’d started to wonder if maybe this was finally it. Maybe he was just going to let my supplies run out, let me starve to death up here.
I couldn’t stop picturing it, my skeleton on this comfy bed with its white sheets, some new family moving in one day, finding me there. Maybe I’d become a ghost. Maybe I’d haunt this house forever, wailing away upstairs.
When I’d sold my mother’s house, the one she died in, I’d wondered whether her spirit was still there, wandering the halls.
But then, today, Eddie came back.
He had supplies this time and more books, like he’d felt guilty. I tried to decide whether it was for the sex or for staying away, but I couldn’t read him.
He just stood there for the longest time, looking at me as I sat on the bed, and I held my breath, waiting.
And then he crossed the room, scooping me up in his arms with this hungry sound, kissing me so hard I felt my teeth press against my lips, drawing the littlest bit of blood.
It had worked. Reminding him of what we were to each other. What we could be again. Even with my fuckup, he’d come back, and he still wanted me.
And I wanted him. Just as much, just as badly.
In spite of everything.
What the fuck am I going to do with that?
FEBRUARY, SEVEN MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE
Eddie was different today.
I couldn’t tell you why or how, just that something seemed off. He was rumpled again, like he hadn’t been sleeping well, and for the first time in weeks, we didn’t have sex. He just dropped off the water and food, and said he had to go.
There was a drop of blood on his shirt. Just on the cuff. A scrape, too, there on his wrist.
I asked him what happened, but he said it was nothing.
He didn’t look me in the eyes, though.
I hate this, feeling like I’m tracking his moods like the weather. Things were good, things were working, he had started to trust me. And now he’s distant again, dropping off food, barely stopping to talk.
He looks better each time he comes in, too. More like himself.
Like the monster I witnessed on Smith Lake is slowly re-forming into the Eddie I fell for, the Eddie I married.
He’s more confident in his skin now, and I wonder what has changed.
A girl.
Of course, there’s a girl.
Eddie didn’t tell me. I just know.
Today, when he came in, he was the closest to the Eddie I met in Hawaii that I’ve seen since that terrible night. Handsome. Competent. In control.
He couldn’t pull off that kind of turnaround by himself. I know Eddie. He is at his best when he has someone to reflect off of, someone to be someone for.
I wondered who she was. Some woman from the neighborhood? Someone I knew? I try to imagine him with Emily or Campbell, with Landry Cole, but it’s almost impossible. Eddie didn’t like those women, always said they were boring compared to me.
At night, I lie on the bed, and I try to picture her, this new woman I know Eddie has in his thrall.
Is she younger than me? Prettier?
Does she know what he is?
When Eddie came up tonight, he was a little drunk.
That was a first.
He brought me a bottle of wine, too.
Okay, a small box of wine, the type that holds three glasses. No corkscrews or glass for me, I guess, but still, I hadn’t had wine in so long, and the first sip went straight to my head.
Eddie sat on the bed next to me, his hand on my thigh, but he didn’t make any move to take it further than that, even though I wanted him to.
I hated myself for it, but I still wanted him to.
“You’re seeing someone, aren’t you?” I asked.
I was drunk enough to say it.
He was drunk enough to answer.
“I am.”
I’d been expecting that, but it still slammed into me, the words causing physical pain.
I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
“Who?” I asked, and his eyes clouded over a little as he looked away, his hand sliding from my leg.
“No one you know.”
That was all he would say.
He left right after that, brushing a kiss against my temple, and now I’m lying here, tears soaking my pillow.
They should be tears of fear. If Eddie has met someone, how much longer is he going to keep me in here? Surely, I’m a huge liability to him now.
But I’m not afraid.
I’m … angry.
Hurt.
Jealous.
Her name is Jane.
I got Eddie to tell me that much.
Today when he came in, I had just gotten out of the shower. That wasn’t intentional—I never know when he’ll show up, after all—but it still worked in my favor.
As soon as he saw me, standing there in a towel, his eyes went dark, hungry, and it was the easiest thing in the world to let the towel drop to the floor, to open my arms to him.
Afterward, he was like he always is after sex—looser, more vulnerable.
Easier.
“What she’s like?” I asked, and almost without thinking, he replied, “Jane?”
Jane.
Her name is Jane. A simple one. A plain one. Is she a simple, plain girl?
“She’s…” He trailed off, and I saw the guilt flicker across his face as he summoned her up in his mind even as he lay here in my bed.
“She’s nothing like you,” he finally said, and I wondered how he meant that.
But mostly, I wondered about her.
Was she downstairs in my house even now? Did she think about me, Eddie’s poor dead wife?
Did she hate me?
I would hate me if I were someone else.
APRIL, NINE MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE
It was stupid, the thing with the bed. I just wondered if she’d be able to hear it, Jane, somewhere below. I needed her to know that all of this—the house, the husband—are still mine.
Eddie asked me about it when he came up later. “Were you making noise up here?”
I spread my hands wide, inviting him to take in the room, to take in me. “How could I?” I asked, and he shook his head.
“Right,” he said, and turned to go.
I took his hand.
He didn’t leave.
MAY, TEN MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE
The days are relentlessly ticking by and I feel sanity slipping from me again. How has it been so many months since Blanche and I disappeared? And why am I still up here?
Sometimes it feels like I have my husband back. Some mornings I wake up convinced that this is the day that he’s going to tell me it’s all over, that I can come out of hiding now—until I remember her.
I know a lot about Jane now. She was a foster kid, she lived in Arizona. Eddie met her because she was walking dogs in the neighborhood, but she lived in Center Point with some creep. She has brown hair, like me, but a few shades lighter. Apparently, she’s funny.
And she’s twenty-three.
Twenty-three.
There was a softness in Eddie’s face when he talked about her. It wasn’t a look I was familiar with. Eddie had looked at me with hunger, with anger, with admiration, but never softness.
What does that mean? Does he love her?
Does he still love me?
Because I think I still love him. In spite of it all.
JUNE, ELEVEN MONTHS AFTER BLANCHE
I fucked up again.
Eddie came in today. He kissed me, he took me to the bed, he fucked me, and after it was over, I thought about him going back downstairs, back to Jane, and I said the thing that has been sitting inside me for weeks now.
“So is it hard, having a new girlfriend when you have a wife upstairs?”
He’d been getting dressed, and I saw the muscles in his back tense.
I shouldn’t have said it.
I’d had to say it.
And then he looked at me and said, “Is that really a problem you want me to focus on, Bea? Do you really want me to think about how I might solve it?”
He left right after that.
FUCK.
Still no sign of him. It’s been days. Is he just leaving me to die? That would certainly be an easy solution to his “problem.”
For him.
Not so easy for me.
I’ve got my little hoard of food and water, some of it hidden under the bed, and I’ve started counting it obsessively, even though I know the counting is bad, and I shouldn’t.
But I don’t know what else to do. It’s the only thing I feel in control of right now.
He came back today. Four days he left me on my own. I was so grateful to see him that I threw myself into his arms, breathing him in, and I felt his arms tighten around me, heard him murmur my name against my hair.
He’d missed me, too. But will it be enough?
JULY, A YEAR AFTER BLANCHE
This is my last entry. Eddie is in the shower, and I have to hurry.
Jane, I know you’ll find this. Eddie cares about you, respects you, and that means you’re smart. I’m putting this book in the pocket of his blazer. It’s too warm for him to put it back on when he goes downstairs, so I’m hoping he won’t even feel that it’s there.
Regardless, I have to risk it. For myself, and for you, Jane. Please. Please find this. Please find me. I can’t survive here any longer.
I’m upstairs. You have to walk to the end of the hall and go through a closet. I don’t know the code to the door, but I think it might be the same as the code to the lake house, my birthday. Eddie isn’t good with numbers.
Jane, I am begging you.
Save me. Save yourself.
Please.
Her childhood was so absurdly Southern gothic she sometimes thinks she must’ve made it up.
But no, she actually made her past blander and more boring, a pastel replica of Blanche’s childhood. That was really for the best, though. No one wanted to know about the Too Big House in the middle of West Alabama. The dad who drank too much, whose fists were fast even when he was drunk. The mom who’d checked out on vodka and Klonopin so early in Bea’s childhood that she couldn’t remember her mother ever playing with or reading to her.
She hadn’t been Bea then, of course. Back then, she was still Bertha. Bertha Lydia Mason. Bertha had been her dad’s mother, Lydia her mother’s, and she’d always thought they could’ve at least done her the courtesy of reversing the names. Being a Lydia would not have been as bad as being a Bertha.
But that was hardly the worst thing her parents did.
She doesn’t remember the first time her father hit her. It’s as ingrained a part of her childhood as the canopy bed in her room, the place in her bathroom where the wallpaper never laid flat. Just there, like background noise. When he was drunk, when he was angry, sometimes, she thought, just when he was bored.
There had been money in her family at some point, close enough that her father remembered growing up with it and keenly felt the lack of it. It was money that had built the house, sometime in the twenties, but by Blanche’s childhood, the house was practically sinking into the red Alabama dirt around it. There was no money for things like repairing the roof, and when a leak started, when the ceiling literally began to rot away in an upstairs bedroom, Bertha’s parents just closed that door and pretended it wasn’t happening.
Bertha learns to do that, too. It’s easier, closing a door, creating a new reality.
She goes to the local public school because there isn’t anything else in her tiny town. Not just a public school, a county school, which, for a reason she never really understands, bothers her father more than a city school would.
Her mother had gone to boarding school near Birmingham. Ivy Ridge. She talks about it a lot, makes it seem like a paradise on earth, full of pretty girls in plaid skirts, redbrick buildings, tall, old trees.
Bertha looks it up on the computers at school, and it is even more beautiful than her mother had made it seem.
It is the easiest thing in the world to fill out an application.
Harder to get financial aid since her parents are supposed to apply for that, and they need tax returns and all sorts of other adult things Bertha doesn’t really know anything about. But she’s smart and resourceful, and one night after her father is passed out in what her mother still insists on calling the parlor, Bertha sneaks into his desk.
His papers are a mess but she finds what she needs, and by the time seventh grade is over, Bertha has an acceptance letter and a complete free ride to Ivy Ridge until she graduates so long as she maintains a high GPA.
It’s the hardest her father ever hits her, the night he learns what she’s done. Later, she’ll lie in her bed, tongue probing the throbbing place in her mouth where her teeth feel loose, but the pain is nothing. The pain is worth it because she’s built herself a life raft away from the sinking ship of her family.
It’s really what starts it all, changes everything—Ivy Ridge introduces her to a new life, introduces her to Blanche, but more importantly, it introduces her to a new version of herself. The one she didn’t know was there, the one who can make things happen.
The first day is so hot she can feel sweat pooling in her bra, slipping in a slimy trail down her back. Already, she can smell the powdery scent of her deodorant, and she suddenly has the horrible image of wet, yellowed spots under the arms of her brand-new white blouse.
She wants to check, but then what if someone sees her? And then she’s not only carrying the heavy weight of being named Bertha, she’s also the Bertha Who Looks at Her Own Armpits.
No, better to be sweaty than to be that freak.
The campus is gorgeous: brick buildings, violently green lawn, and even though her room isn’t quite as fancy—lots of linoleum, plain twin beds with scarred wooden frames—it still feels like paradise, being away from home, being away from them, and she never wants to leave.
She meets Blanche that first day. They’re not roommates—that comes later—but they live in the same dorm building, and Blanche has assigned herself as the unofficial greeter.
Blanche has the softest hair, and it falls down her back in a perfect smooth and shiny river, the color of coffee. Bertha’s own hair is brown, too, but not this kind of brown, not this deep shade that makes you want to reach out and touch it.
“Bertha?” she asks, wrinkling her nose, and Bertha feels herself curl inward, shoulders rolling in, spine folding. It’s a pose she’s taken a thousand times. If she could just shrink into herself enough, her parents wouldn’t notice her at all.
But Blanche puts a hand on her shoulder, keeping her from cringing. “No,” she says. “That’s not gonna fly. Don’t you have a nickname?”
Bertha has never had a nickname because she’s never had the kind of friends in her life who would give her one, and her parents barely call her anything at all.
Blanche smiles, teeth blindingly white in her tan face. “Bea,” she proclaims. “That sounds better.”
Bea.
It does sound better. It fits.
Bea. She sits up a little straighter, tries tucking her hair behind her ear with the same casual gesture she’d seen Blanche use earlier.
“Perfect.”
And it is.
That spring break, Blanche invites Bea to her family’s house in Orange Beach. Bea had actually never been to the beach before, but as soon as she sinks her toes into the sugar-white sands, she is in love, and this is the only place she ever wants to be, wind in her hair, salt water brushing her ankles.
Blanche laughs at her, wrapping an arm around Bea’s waist. “Okay, it’s pretty here, but it’s just Orange Beach,” she says, and suddenly Bea worries that she’s been too effusive, gushing too much. Country come to town and all that.
But then Blanche splashes her and dashes off into the surf, leaving Bea standing alone.
Her father dies her junior year.
She doesn’t go back for the funeral.
Later, there’s a voice mail from her mother, and it’s the most lucid she’s ever sounded. Bea had braced herself for screaming, for slurred recriminations, but instead, her mother is kind. Sweet, even. Calls her “Bertha-Bear,” a nickname Bea hates, but hasn’t heard since she was a little girl. Wants her to come home for the summer. Wants to try to fix things now that Daddy is gone.
And she’s shockingly tempted.
It’s Blanche, though, who reminds her she doesn’t owe Mama anything.
Bea hasn’t told Blanche everything about her past, not wanting her friend to know just how shameful it all is, how dark. But Blanche isn’t stupid, and Bea knows she’s picked up some things. “You don’t have to go,” she tells Bea, and Bea sits on her bed, absentmindedly pulling at the loose plastic on her phone case.
“I have to go somewhere for the summer,” Bea replies, and Blanche smiles, plucking the phone out of Bea’s hand.
“Come home with me, then. We have the space, and it’ll be fun!”
It’s amazing to Bea that Blanche can make that offer, that she doesn’t see it as the huge thing that it so clearly is. For Blanche, it’s that easy. She can take Bea under her wing for an entire summer, and no one will mind, no one will think Bea takes up too much space.
So Bea says yes, and it’s the best summer of her life.
Later, when her mother leaves her a voice mail, drunk and screeching about ungrateful daughters, Bea knows she made the right choice.
And if she hadn’t known it then, she would have at the end of the summer, sitting on Blanche’s massive canopy bed, the one with the lace trim and the pillows in all different shades of green.
Blanche is smiling as she fastens the necklace around Bea’s neck. It’s a sterling silver initial, a B on a delicate chain, and Blanche holds up her own identical charm to Bea’s face.
“We match,” she says, and Bea doesn’t know why she suddenly feels like crying.
They’re together their entire high school career, Bea and Blanche, Blanche and Bea.
Even “the Bs” occasionally. Bea loves that.
She sometimes thinks Blanche doesn’t.
Bea’s acceptance letter comes just a few days after Blanche’s, and she’s so excited that she can’t help but leap off her bed as soon as Blanche comes in after class, squealing, “I got in!”
Blanche smiles at her, but her expression is a little confused and she asks, “Got in where?”
Bea laughs, nudging Blanche’s shoulder. “Um, Birmingham-Southern, obvi,” she says, and it actually takes her a moment to realize that Blanche’s smile has slipped.
“Oh, wow,” Blanche says, but it’s faint, and suddenly Bea knows she’s made a mistake, fucked this up somehow, but she’s not sure how.
“I thought you’d be excited,” she says. “I mean, it’s not like we have to room together there, too.”
Bea laughs to show how stupid that idea would be even though it’s exactly what she’d been thinking they’d do.
Blanche laughs, too, but just like her smile, it’s not real, and when she sits down on the edge of her bed, she says, “I guess I just thought you’d want to go to Randolph-Macon since you got in. And, like, hardly anyone here did. I didn’t.”
Which had been exactly why Bea didn’t want to go to Randolph-Macon. She’d applied because Blanche had, but she hadn’t thought she’d get in, and when she had and Blanche hadn’t, Bea had dismissed it altogether.
But now she stares at Blanche and says, “So … you want me to go to Randolph-Macon?”
Sighing, Blanche starts brushing her hair. It’s shorter now, just below her earlobes, and she’s lightened it. It doesn’t suit her as well as her dark hair did, but Bea had told her she loved it anyway.
“I just think maybe we should each have our own … things, you know?” Blanche says, and then she meets Bea’s eyes in the mirror. “We can’t be ‘the Bs’ forever.”
For the first time, Bea realizes that Blanche isn’t wearing her B necklace. Probably hasn’t worn it in weeks, and Bea just hasn’t noticed.
She feels her own pendant practically burning against her skin.
“Right,” she says with a little laugh. “You’re right. That would be stupid.”
Blanche is clearly relieved, her smile brightening into something genuine as she puts her brush down and turns around.
“I knew you’d get it,” she says.
So Blanche goes off to Birmingham-Southern, and Bea heads to Randolph-Macon, and they keep up on Facebook, through texts, but Bea doesn’t go back to Birmingham. She gets an internship with an interior design firm her junior year, and then she’s in Atlanta, and just two years after college, thanks to the contacts she’s made, she’s launching Southern Manors.
She doesn’t see Blanche again until they’re twenty-six, and finally, finally, Bea makes the trek back to Alabama, not even bothering to let her mother know she’s there.
There’s a mini-reunion in Five Points, some bar that’s too loud, the drinks too expensive, but it’s fun, being back in Birmingham, seeing the Ivy Ridge girls again. Seeing Blanche.
Whatever weirdness there’s been between the two of them vanishes the second they see each other, Blanche squealing and throwing her arms out to hug Bea.
Her hair is shorter, almost severe, but it’s pretty with her slightly elfin features, and Bea has a brief moment of wondering if she should try something similar. But no, what looks good on Blanche won’t always look good on Bea, and besides, Bea is looking pretty good herself these days as Blanche immediately points out with a shrieked, “You bitch, look at you!”
The other girls also want to know what Bea’s secret is, how she looks so great, who cuts her hair, all of that. The truth is so simple, though.
She’s rich now.
When they’d known her at Ivy, she was lacking their patina of wealth and class, so of course she seems different to them now, of course she now looks prettier and better.
But Blanche is the real star of the show because she’s getting married.
Blanche’s engagement ring is huge, an emerald-cut diamond on a platinum band, and Bea has seen pictures of Blanche’s fiancé on social media. He’s blond and tall, and reminds Bea of the boys she’d met going to parties at Hampden-Sydney, the boys’ college near Randolph-Macon. He looks older than twenty-eight and has probably looked like that since he was a teenager, earlier even. There’s a certain type of boy who seems to be born with a golf club in his hand, and that’s Tripp Ingraham.
“Richard Ingraham the Third,” Blanche tells them, and Bea hides a smile behind her drink because of course Blanche is marrying a “the third,” who’s called Tripp.
The wedding is in the spring, and they’re building a house, a big one, in a new neighborhood called Thornfield Estates.
Bea looks it up.
There’s nothing to it, really. It’s mostly a bunch of drawings of what it will look like one day, all manicured lawns and houses that are ostentatiously huge, but built like older, more modest houses. No white stucco here, just brick and tasteful navy shutters.
Houses start in the seven figures, but Bea is rich now, and why not settle in Birmingham again? Her business can be run from anywhere, and while she likes Atlanta, she hasn’t really made a life there.
But buying a house that big in a neighborhood clearly meant for families feels silly and … obvious.
So she gets a town house in Mountain Brook, then an office in Homewood, and Southern Manors keeps growing even as she helps Blanche with her wedding plans.
“It’s so good to have you back,” Blanche says one night as they sit in Blanche and Tripp’s living room, a bottle of white wine on the coffee table in front of them, their shoes off, bridal magazines all around them. “I’ve missed you.”
Bea knows that she means it, and smiling, she reaches into her purse. “I’m glad you said that.”
The necklace is silver, a little bee dangling from the chain, and Blanche laughs delightedly, clapping her hands. “Omigod,” she says all in a rush. “The cutest!”
This time, Bea puts the necklace on Blanche, and later, when she asks if she can donate Southern Manors’ décor for the reception, Blanche says yes easily, just like Bea had known she would.
It’s good exposure for the company, which already does great business, but that’s not enough for Bea. She wants it to matter here, in Birmingham.
She wants it to matter to Blanche.
And it does, in the end, but not in the way Bea had wanted.
The night of the benefit, of Bea’s biggest triumph, Blanche rides with Bea and her mother in the car on the way over, and when they first get into the ballroom, once they’ve shown Bea’s mother to her table, Blanche looks around at everything Bea has made.
“You know, I never realized how much of this stuff looks like it came straight from my house,” Blanche says.
She’s smiling when she says it, her fingers going to the little bee around her neck, but Bea sees her eyes.
Sees what she’s thinking.
“Does it?” Bea says. “I never noticed.”