The Darling Dahlias and the Texas Star

“Oh, Mildred, I’m so sorry,” Lizzy began, but Mildred had gulped a breath and was going on, her voice ragged and desperate, out of control.

“And now I find out that he’s been writing checks to her out of the dealership bank accounts. I have to stop that horrible woman, Liz. I simply have to, or I’ll lose it all! This house, the business, my husband—they’re all I have!” Her voice thinned to a wail, like a trapped animal. “When they’re gone, there’ll be nothing left of me. Nothing!”

Lizzy stared at her, suddenly thinking that perhaps the big plantation-style house and the servants and the chrome-trimmed roadster and the stunning collection of camellias and, yes, even Roger and Melody—they were all one and the very same thing to Mildred, and all of them like the Bergdorf Goodman dress she’d bought for the party and the other expensive clothes she wore. They were ways of covering up and disguising an emptiness inside. But perhaps she was overreacting. Maybe it wasn’t like that at all. Maybe—

“Yoo-hoo,” a high, light voice called. “Oh, Mildred, Liz, it’s me!”

A gate at the back of the garden had opened and Aunt Hetty Little was coming down the path toward the house. She wore a flowered print dress and carried a pot containing the Hibiscus coccineus, the plant that Liz was supposed to present to the Texas Star at the party.

“Oh, dear,” Mildred said, very low. “If it isn’t old Aunt Nosy.” She sighed heavily. “Sorry. I don’t mean to complain. Aunt Hetty is a sweet old thing, and rather pitifully lonely. I just wish she didn’t live quite so close.”

In the early 1920s, the Cypress Country Club and the properties on Country Club Drive had been carved out of the large Little cotton plantation, which at one time was one of the most beautiful and substantial plantations in the area. The Little plantation house had burned down the year before President Wilson dragged the country into the Great War, and all the servants had been let go. Since then, Aunt Hetty—the last surviving Little—lived by herself in a cottage on the other side of Mildred’s back garden hedge. She was a congenial neighbor, although (as Mildred frequently complained) an irritatingly nosy one, who liked to know everything that was going on.

Mildred turned to Lizzy. “Now that she’s here, Liz, we can’t talk anymore. I’m sure I’ve said far too much, anyway—about those letters, and about everyone else. You must promise me not to say anything to anybody about them.”

“I promise,” Lizzy said. “Not a single word. To anyone.”

She didn’t imagine that she might come to regret that promise—and to break it.





SEVEN




Some Unexpected Magic



By the noon hour on Wednesday, Myra May and Violet were feeling the pinch at the Darling Diner. Ophelia’s story and the ad for cooking auditions would run in Thursday’s Dispatch. But that wasn’t helping them get through the middle of the week. Business had fallen off dramatically as the news got around that Euphoria had abandoned the diner for the Red Dog. (“Like a rat from a sinkin’ ship,” Mr. Mann had been heard to mutter.) And the regular customers were beginning to grumble.

“Meat loaf again?” Mr. Musgrove from the hardware store asked. “Didn’t we have it yestiddy? And the day before?” Suspiciously, he poked his food with his fork. “This ain’t left over, is it?”

“No, it’s not left over,” Myra May snapped. She turned down the volume on the Chicago farm commodities market report on the radio and picked up the flyswatter. She had to admit that the meat loaf wasn’t her best. She’d been rushed when she made it and she was pretty sure she’d left out the salt. But she wasn’t about to tell Mr. Musgrove that.

“There’s liver and onions,” she added crossly. She whacked a fly on the counter. “You could’ve ordered that, if you didn’t want the meat loaf.”

A few seats down the counter, Mr. Dunlap from the Five and Dime spoke up. “It’s good liver and onions, Myra May. The liver’s maybe a mite overcooked, but it’s tasty.” He glanced over his shoulder at the empty tables. “I’m surprised you ain’t got more traffic today.”

“It’s still early,” Myra May replied defensively, hanging up the flyswatter and giving the counter a swipe with her cloth. “They’ll be along.”

But it wasn’t that early. The tables should have been filled by now, with secretaries from the county offices in the courthouse, clerks from Mann’s Mercantile, and the men from the repair shop at Kilgore’s Dodge dealership. Obviously, news of Euphoria’s defection was making the rounds. Of course, people didn’t have a lot of choices when it came to eating out in Darling. But they could be going home for the noon meal, or packing a sandwich. Or going across the tracks to the Red Dog.