The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

Myra May Mosswell reached up and switched off the Philco radio on the shelf behind the counter in the Darling Diner. “In a Shanty in Old Shanty Town,” performed by Ted Lewis and his band, had been at the top of the charts for several weeks and it seemed like WODX, down in Mobile, was playing it every fifteen minutes or so. Every time she heard it, she wondered just what kind of silly fool would actually be ready to give up his palace and go back to that old tumbledown shack next to the railroad track, even if his silver-crowned queen—presumably his mother—was waiting for him. And what kind of man who lived like a king would let his gray-haired old mother live in a little old shack with a roof that slanted down to the ground? It didn’t make a lick of sense.

Myra May herself had been lucky enough not to grow up in a shanty. Her daddy had been a prosperous Darling doctor and they had lived in a very nice house. Her mother, Ina Ray, had died when Myra May wasn’t any bigger than a minute—and she hadn’t died at home, either. She had been taken sick on a visit to her parents in Montgomery, where she was buried. Myra May had never even seen her mother’s grave.

Dr. Mosswell, who felt his young wife’s loss very keenly, adamantly refused to speak of her, so Myra May had no secondhand recollections of her mother to comfort her. Nothing except for the gold-framed photograph she kept on the dresser upstairs, a striking young woman in the lacy white shirtwaist and ankle-length gored skirt of the prewar era, holding her baby girl in her arms. Every time Myra May looked at the photograph, she felt an aching emptiness in her heart. Her life would have been so different if her mother had lived to love her, laugh with her, and take care of her. Instead . . .

Instead, Myra May had been brought up like a very proper young Southern lady by her very prim and proper Aunt Belle (whom Myra May irreverently called Auntie Bellum). In spite of this smothery upbringing, she certainly knew what a shanty looked like and smelled like, because there were plenty of them on the other side of the L&N railroad tracks. She also knew that every person of her acquaintance—that is, every man, woman, and child in Darling—would a darn sight rather live in a palace, although in these hard times, they would be happy if they had electricity and indoor plumbing and the rent paid up for the next month.

Myra May glanced around, checking to be sure that everything was in order. It was a half hour past closing time on a Monday evening, and the front door was securely locked. The diner’s lights were off, except for the flickering red neon Coca-Cola sign on the wall over the Dr Pepper clock, which cast moving red shadows across the oilcloth-covered tables. The red-checked curtains had been pulled neatly across the lower half of the front window, the red and gray linoleum was swept clean (and mopped, where Mr. Musgrove, from the hardware store next door, had dropped the catsup bottle), and the red-topped, chrome-plated counter stools were wiped and stowed neatly under the long red linoleum-topped counter. Behind the counter, the coffee urn was waiting for its next-day job. And on the other side of the pass-through window to the kitchen, the cookstove top was clean and ready for Myra May to start the bacon and eggs and fried potatoes at six the next morning, and for Euphoria to come in at nine and start baking her Pie of the Day. Since tomorrow was Tuesday, that would be peanut butter meringue pie, which was a favorite among the noon crowd.

Myra May sighed. That is, if Euphoria came in tomorrow, which she might not. She had taken off her apron and gone home sick after this morning’s breakfast—at least, that’s what she’d said, although she didn’t look sick to Myra May. Which left Myra May, Violet, and Earlynne Biddle’s boy Bennie to handle the noon crowd and the supper crowd by themselves. Again.

At the back of the diner, the door to the telephone exchange was open and Myra May could hear the low murmur of Nancy Lee McDaniel’s voice as she worked the switchboard. There was a cot with a pillow and a blanket back there, so Nancy Lee or Rona Jean Hancock or Henrietta Conrad—whoever was on overnight duty—could catch forty winks between calls. All three were light sleepers, which was good, because they had to wake up fast when somebody rang the switchboard. After midnight, calls were usually emergencies, either for Doc Roberts (somebody having a baby or one of the old folks sick) or for Sheriff Roy Burns (somebody getting liquored up and using his neighbor’s cow for target practice). And just last Friday, Nancy Lee had fielded a call for Chief Pete Tate of the Darling Volunteer Fire Department. Mr. Looper’s barn was on fire. Resourcefully, Nancy Lee had remembered that Friday night was Chief Tate’s poker night and had overheard (on the exchange, where else?) that this week’s game was in the back room at Musgrove’s Hardware. The chief got the word and Mr. Looper’s barn was saved.