“Really, Catherine, you should keep this animal in a crate. Dogs are not to have free rein of a house. Louie and Martine are always kenneled.”
I rolled my eyes and bent to receive the balm of true love from the only creature who loved me no matter what. Louie and Martine were ridiculous teacup poodles who my mother kept on pillows next to her velvet settee, where she plotted her Machiavellian takeover of my life. Being an only child wasn’t for the faint of heart. My friends used to be jealous. They hadn’t thought about what all that single-minded attention did to an awkward girl. My father had vamoosed with Crystalle, leaving me the sole target of Marguerite. Only my grandmother had been able to take my mother down a peg. She’d taught me some of her tricks (ignore her and do what you want), but not enough to give me much peace.
“Pippa is fine as she is,” I said, looking down at the adorable, slim face. Pippa’s chocolate-brown eyes radiated such love that my heart may have knitted together a centimeter or so.
I turned, entered the kitchen, and set the bag on the granite, withdrawing the vodka. Maybe I needed a martini or twelve myself. Mother glided behind me, secretly petting my dog. I knew this because I caught her kissing and doting on Pippa when she thought I wasn’t looking. My mother said a lot of things—the kinds of things she thought she should say because she seemed to enjoy being self-righteous, but she also didn’t always do what she said. She kept Snickers in the drawer under the oven beneath the cookie sheets, she watched The Bachelor (even though publicly she called it trash), and she let her dogs sleep with her (although she told everyone she would never allow a dog to sleep on her expensive sheets). Also, if Marguerite knew that Scott had cheated on me, she would fillet him with the skill of a bayou fisherman.
“Don’t skimp on the vodka,” Mother said as she settled on the couch in the hearth room, turning on the urn table lamp and lifting a copy of Architectural Digest into her lap. She sent me that subscription every year on my birthday . . . for herself.
I shoved the wine into the fridge to chill and grabbed the cocktail shaker. Usually, Scott made the drinks, but even a novice like me could pour vodka and vermouth and add olives. I grabbed proper martini glasses because my mother would expect as much, and I wished for the umpteenth time in an hour that I had not tried to make a utility closet my office. Because then I wouldn’t know about my husband. Then I wouldn’t be wishing my mother would leave so I could poke through Scott’s office to see if I could figure out who he might be doing. Or maybe I should be looking elsewhere. He had a fireproof safe where he kept important documents. And a gun safe. Where else might he—
“Any day now, Catherine. I’m parched.”
I poured the martini in the glasses and made my way to the hearth room, tossing Pippa a biscuit and letting her outside en route.
“Here you go,” I said, wagging the drink in front of my mother.
She took it, sipped, lifted an eyebrow that could mean anything from Acceptable to Pour it in the toilet, and sighed. “We need to talk about the gala in a few weeks. Your father is supposed to be bringing his trollop to the event. He said Scott invited him to sit at your table, and I find that unacceptable.”
This was news to me. I had talked to Dad last week, and he hadn’t said anything about it. Scott liked my dad, but he’d never invited him to visit. We always went to Florida, mostly because the golfing was better, and it generated no talk about my father’s midlife crisis over drinks at the club. “I didn’t know.”
“How do you not know?”
I shrugged. “I haven’t really had the chance to speak to Scott much. He had a tennis tournament at the club this past weekend.”
I nearly choked over those words. For years, he’d asked me to take up tennis. To do something together as a couple. I had always hedged. Running an antique store took up a lot of my time, as did mothering my daughter. Sitting on PTA committees, helping to chair the silent auction for the St. Jude golf tournament, and teaching confirmation at church kept me running in circles. My intentions had been good. I figured that once Julia Kate started driving, I could do more with Scott. Maybe I had done this to us. Maybe my lack of knowing anything about the bank and his hobbies had sent him into the arms of another woman.
“Junie Minter told me that Scott has been drumming up business for Donner Walker. You know anything about that? Maybe that’s why he wants your father to come to the gala. Your father and his trashy wife have obviously made a lot of money with that storage business of theirs.”
That was an understatement. My father may not have been smart about where he dipped his stick and had lost quite a dime in the divorce settlement, but he wasn’t dumb. He’d invested in storage facilities and a string of car washes in Florida, making back what he’d been forced to give my mother by her sharky lawyer several times over. I knew Scott had been having drinks and dinner with Donner Walker, an investment guy who’d moved to Shreveport a few years back. The man was the older brother of Scott’s best friend from college who had died in a tragic car accident, but I didn’t know Scott had been helping him with clients. Scott was always careful about crossing boundaries as a banker, taking pride in being ethical, but then again, he had promised to cleave to me until death do us part. Did cleaving mean being faithful? I wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know, Mother. I can ask him when he gets home.”
My mother shook her head, and her hair didn’t move an inch. “No. Just do not allow Bernard to sit at the bank’s tables. Make sure he’s in the back. Behind a fern.”
To say there was no love lost between my mother and father was obvious. My mother loathed my dad, but she still missed him. I heard the longing in her voice. Once when she’d had too much bourbon on Christmas Eve, she’d cried over him. I had never seen her cry before, and it had been somewhat horrifying and frankly a relief. Because I had always wondered if she missed him . . . or if she’d even loved him. Always hard to know with my mother. “I’ll talk to Melissa Peete, who’s in charge of corporate sponsorships. And you know Daddy. He probably won’t come anyway. He hates coming to Shreveport.”
I could make no promises. If Scott insisted, I would relent. The bank had two tables. I would ask that my mother be seated far from my father and Crystalle if they did, indeed, show.
My mother flinched before taking another sip. “Better he stay away.”
An hour later, I waved as my mother drove away, hoping she’d be okay to drive. The martini hadn’t been strong, and she lived two streets over in a huge colonial house with a pool that had been featured in NWLA Columns last year. The title had been “Backyard Oasis,” and my mother had bought and mailed copies to all our cousins in Baton Rouge.