“But I don’t. I can’t lie to them.”
Rachel rolled her eyes. “Gah! Don’t be so nervous. Of course you can.” She started sorting through a box filled with lipstick tubes. “Everybody in show business lies about their skills; it’s practically part of the code. When I auditioned for my first movie, that Broadway biopic, the casting director asked if I could tap-dance. I looked right into her eyes and said, ‘Yes. Absolutely. Started in the chorus.’ ” Rachel chuckled, enjoying the memory of her own audacity.
“By the time they figured out I couldn’t dance, we were so far into filming that they couldn’t afford to fire me. Instead, they added a subplot about a country girl who comes to New York, gets hired for a show because of her looks, sleeps with the director because she knows she’s a terrible dancer and hopes that’ll keep her from getting fired, then gets fired anyway.”
Rachel turned back toward the mirror, traced a thin line of red on her lower lip, and then filled it in.
“That little lie got me twelve extra lines and a chance to cry on-camera. And that got me a mention in two reviews and a bigger part the next time.”
Holly already knew this story, but since she’d read every magazine profile and feature ever written about her mother, she also knew this wasn’t the whole story. Like the character she ended up playing, Rachel had also slept with her director, who was more humane than his celluloid counterpart. It was his humanity and not the cost of reshooting her scenes that kept her from getting fired after her lack of dance skills was revealed, and it was Rachel’s ability to bewitch men—at least in the short term—that caused him to create a bigger role for her.
Rachel’s tendency to cast herself as the heroine of every story and completely believe these myths of her own making was irritating but also impressive in its own way. Holly wished she could erase the memory of her own failures as easily.
“Remember that guest appearance I made on Baywatch?” Rachel asked as she blotted her lipstick. “When they asked me if I knew how to scuba dive and I—”
“You said, ‘Yes. Absolutely.’ Then you almost drowned. I remember.”
“I didn’t almost drown. The dive master got me out of the water about ten seconds after I lost consciousness. Everything worked out.”
Rachel tossed a tissue into the wastepaper basket and looked toward her daughter once again.
“This could be such a big break for you. Don’t take yourself out of the running before you even start. Oh, punkin. Life is so short. One minute you’re twenty-two and beautiful, full of promise, impatient for your real life to begin. Then you blink and it’s over. Or might as well be. AARP is sending you their magazine and the people who used to fight for a piece of you have suddenly lost your number.”
Rachel stopped speaking and just sat there, staring vacantly at a spot somewhere over Holly’s shoulder. A moment of silence stretched to two, then three.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
“What? Oh, yes. I’m fine. I was just thinking.”
“About?”
“Missed opportunities.” Her gaze met Holly’s. “So listen to me, because nobody has missed more of them than me. When you get a chance to do what you really want to do, grab it! Don’t let fear hold you back. Because those chances don’t come around very often.”
Holly knew it was true, especially in the entertainment industry.
When Holly had dropped out of college and announced her desire to act, it was Rachel’s influence that got her the part of the daughter in a new sitcom. But her mother’s influence didn’t stretch far enough to keep her from being fired after the pilot aired. Without her, the show ran for four successful seasons.
Holly realized she wasn’t an actress. Her agent, Amanda, insisted that with a face like hers, she didn’t have to act, that they just needed to take another tack. The game show paid the bills, but it didn’t exactly stretch her. She was a hanger, an object used to display other objects. But hosting a show would be different. It would give her a voice, a chance to share information and inspiration with the audience—that is, assuming she had any clue about what she was talking about.
Rachel was right. Her fear was holding her back. But it wasn’t the only thing.
“Mom?” Holly looked down at her hands, clenched tight in her lap. “The network is headquartered in Texas. Nearly all of their programming is filmed there.” She lifted her gaze again. “If I get the job, I’m pretty sure I’ll have to move there.”
For a moment, Rachel looked a little stunned, but she recovered quickly.
“Oh? Well . . . what’s wrong with that? Remember when we went to Houston that time? It was nice. Good weather.”
Holly rolled her eyes and groaned. “Stop acting, okay. You know I’m not worried about the weather. I just . . . I don’t want to leave you all alone in LA.”
“All alone in LA?” Rachel laughed. “What are you talking about? I have a life, you know. I have friends. Things to do.”
There was a knock on the door. A voice on the other side said, “Five minutes, Miss McEnroe!”
“Thank you!” Rachel got up from the table, turned her backside toward the mirror, and looked over her shoulder at her reflection. “I don’t know about this dress. All those bugle beads across the butt . . .”
“You look great,” Holly said automatically, then got to her feet and raised the last half inch of Rachel’s zipper. “What things?”
“Hmm?” Rachel murmured, still examining her posterior.
“These things you have to do? What are they?”
Rachel turned back toward the mirror, twisting her head from left to right, examining her profile from each side.
“I’m up for a part in some spy picture,” she said absently and ran her hand over her hair. “If I get it, I’ll be out of the country for at least a couple of months. Russia. Didn’t I tell you? My agent called yesterday.”
Holly wanted to believe her but didn’t know if she should.
“Are you sure? Because you don’t have to. . . .”
Rachel put a hand on her hip. “Punkin, can we possibly talk about this later? Because right now, Mommy has got to go to work!”
She opened her arms and gave Holly a very quick but very tight hug.
“And you,” she said with a smile, cupping Holly’s chin in her hand, “have got to fly to Texas. So you’d better go home and pack. Call me when you get there, okay?”
“I will. Knock ’em dead, Mom.”
Rachel tossed her hair over her shoulder.
“I plan to,” she said, and swept out the door.
CHAPTER 4
Monday was a perfect Texas fall day. The sun was warm but not hot, and the sky was a clear bright blue.
Mary Dell put the convertible top down and drove out to the airport to pick up Gary Beatty. Walking to the baggage claim, she noticed a striking young woman with long blond hair and surprisingly dark eyebrows, the same deep brown as her eyes, standing near the door with a suitcase in her hand, frowning up at the array of directional signs.
Mary Dell approached and touched her lightly on the shoulder. “You look a little lost. Can I help you find something?”
“I was just trying to figure out where the taxis are.”
“Lower level. Take a right at the bottom of the escalator.”
The woman thanked her, turning to give Mary Dell a smile and a wave before stepping onto the escalator. Mary Dell waved back and then gasped, realizing why that woman’s pretty face had seemed so familiar. She was a model on that game show Howard liked so much. Mary Dell didn’t know her name, but she recognized her face.
For a moment, she thought about following her downstairs and asking for an autograph but decided against it. She didn’t want to keep Gary waiting.
Today of all days, she needed to get on his good side. She wasn’t entirely sure Gary had a good side. But if he did, she’d find it.
Having woken at four-thirty A.M. in order to catch his flight, Gary was far from cheerful when Mary Dell greeted him. But
he perked up considerably once he got to the parking lot and saw their ride.
“My dad drove an Eldorado, a ’fifty-nine! What year is this?”
“A ’seventy-six. Isn’t it cute?” Mary Dell grinned and took her place behind the wheel. “I thought about painting it pink—this ivory color, Phoenician I think they called it, is a little dull—but the dealer said that with the original paint in such good shape, it’d be a crime to cover it up. I just settled on new upholstery. Like it?”
Gary looked down at the seat. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen cheetah-print upholstery in a car before.”
“Oh, you have to order it special,” she said solemnly.
Mary Dell chattered cheerfully as she drove, complimenting Gary’s recent change of hairstyle, saying the gray at his temples brought out the blue in his eyes, admiring the cowboy boots he had worn for the occasion, doing her best to get him to loosen up. It worked. By the time they merged onto Highway 35W, Gary was telling her about the time he and his brother skipped class, “borrowed” their dad’s convertible, drove it to Malibu, and picked up some off-duty flight attendants.
“They were gorgeous girls, absolute stunners,” he said. “But there were three of them. That was where we made our mistake. I mean, I was barely eighteen and Billy was even younger. The odd number confused us, you know? We had no idea what to do with three beautiful women.”
“So what did you do?”
“Spent my last thirty dollars buying them cheeseburgers and then dropped them off at their hotel.” He laughed. “They kissed us good-bye, on the cheek, but that was it. Dad grounded us for a month. But you know something? It was worth it. I felt like a king, driving that car. It was a perfect day, just like this one.”
He was quiet, smiling at the memory, but after a moment his smile faded. He swiveled his head from left to right and frowned.
“Where the hell are we? I thought we were going to the office.”
“Nope. I’m kidnapping you.”
“What?”
Mary Dell laughed. “Oh, relax. It’s just for a day. I’m taking you out to see where I grew up. You’ve been to Texas on business—I don’t know how many times—but I bet you’ve never set foot outside of Dallas. Honey, it is time you saw the real Texas. We’ll see the town and ranch. My momma’s going to make us chicken-fried steak for supper, and then later, we’ll go out to the Ice House. Gary, I’m gonna take you honky-tonkin’,” she declared, her Texas twang twanging a little more deeply than usual.
“Yeah, but our meeting . . .”
“We’ll have it,” she assured him. “Just not in the office.”
“My flight . . .”
“Leaves at one-fifteen tomorrow,” she interrupted again. “I know. I’ll have you back in plenty of time. Too Much is less than a hundred miles from the airport.”
Gary said nothing. Glancing to her right, Mary Dell saw his frown softening to a mixture of indecision and suspicion.
She grinned and punched him playfully in the shoulder. “Oh, come on, Gary. It’s a perfect day! You don’t want to be cooped up in an office on a day like this, do you? How long has it been since you played hooky?”
Gary’s mouth bowed at the corners. He rested his arm on the door, put his hand out into the warm wind, and opened his fingers. “Too long,” he said, and let his head drop back against the seat, staring up at the bluebonnet sky. “Way too long.”
Like a lot of small towns in Texas, Too Much was anchored by a large central block, the Square, which marked the location of the town’s municipal building and was surrounded by a small park, one of the few green patches in town. Most of the town’s commercial activity radiated outward from the Square, extending three blocks in all directions, everything from gift shops and auto repair joints to insurance brokers and dentist offices. But the busiest and most successful enterprises, including the Patchwork Palace, occupied the four blocks directly adjacent to the Square.
Mary Dell found two empty parking spots and pulled the Eldorado into the middle of them.
“I don’t want anybody scratching the paint job,” she explained as she turned off the ignition. “Come on. I’ll give you the nickel tour.”
They climbed out of the car and walked across the grass toward a bronze statue of a woman, a little bigger than life-sized, standing on a pedestal. She was dressed in pioneer garb, her feet wide under her skirts and her arms crossed defiantly over her bosom as her bronze visage scowled toward the horizon.
“Who’s that?”
“Flagadine Tudmore, my great-great-great-grandmother. She founded the town.”
“No kidding.”
“No kidding,” Mary Dell replied proudly, and proceeded to tell him the history of Flagadine Tudmore and Too Much, Texas, just the way her aunt Velvet had told it to her when she was a little girl.
“So you see,” Mary Dell said as she finished, “I come from a very distinguished lineage.” She stood at the base of the statue and struck a pose, crossing her arms over her chest and scowling toward the horizon.
Gary grinned. “Definitely a family resemblance.”
Leaving Flagadine behind, they approached the courthouse, a two-and-a-half-story structure of red brick with tall, arched windows and wide granite steps. The basement, Mary Dell informed him, housed the Too Much, Texas, Historical Society.
“My aunt Velvet was the executive director here for over sixty years. Later in life, she had a beau, but she never married. Lived until she was ninety-one and went out with her boots on,” Mary Dell said. “On the day she died, she worked a full day at the historical society, walked home, ate supper with my grandma Silky—they shared a little shotgun cottage in town—then went to bed and just never woke up. Grandma Silky passed two weeks later and just the same way. She was ninety-four.”
Mary Dell smiled, remembering the two eccentric old women who had loved her so much and helped mold her into who she was. “They were a couple of characters. It was Aunt Velvet who came up with the theory of the Fatal Flaw.”
“Fatal Flaw?”
Mary Dell nodded soberly. “It runs all through our family. On the female side, that is. Under normal circumstances, you won’t find a more sensible, feet-on-the ground group of women in the world. But, every now and then, in the presence of a certain kind of man, we display an unfortunate tendency to let lust and biology trump morality and good sense.
“Laugh if you want,” Mary Dell said in response to Gary’s guffaw. “But Aunt Velvet was on to something. When the full moon sits just so in the sky, the Fatal Flaw can be a powerful thing. I should know. That’s how I ended up marrying Donny.”
“Your ex-husband? The one who left after Howard was born?”
“That’s the fatal flaw of the Bebee men. When things get rough, they run.” Mary Dell shrugged. “But I don’t blame Donny. Not anymore. He just wasn’t as strong as me; that’s all.”
“I doubt many men are,” Gary said.
They crossed the street, returning to the commercial side, passing the Primp ’n’ Perm Beauty Salon, Hilda’s House of Pie, and Antoinette’s Uptown Dress Shop. As they walked, Mary Dell told Gary more about the history of Too Much as well as the revitalization it had seen since Quintessential Quilting had come on the air, but they kept getting interrupted by people who stopped her, wanting to chat.
“You’re quite the celebrity around here,” Gary observed.
“What? You mean that?” Mary Dell asked, looking over her shoulder and waving good-bye to Pauline Dingus and her sister, Pearl, who had made a point of saying how happy she was to see Mary Dell had come home, repeating it several times during their brief conversation. “This is my hometown. They’re just being neighborly. When you go for a walk in your neighborhood, don’t people stop to talk?”
“I live in Beverly Hills,” Gary replied.
Mary Dell gave him a pitying look.
A silver charter bus with red stripes pulled to a stop in front of the Patchwork Palace and let out a whooshing sigh as the dr
iver opened the doors. Two score of excited, chattering women spilled onto the pavement.
Seeing them, Mary Dell let out a joyous whoop. “Well, well, well! What do we have here?” she shouted. “Quilters coming out to feed the habit! How you doin’, girls? Welcome to Too Much!”
The gaggle of women let out a nearly simultaneous gasp, then started to hoot and clap. Within seconds, Mary Dell was surrounded.
She shook hands, gave hugs, and signed well-worn copies of Family Ties that some of the ladies pulled from their tote bags. She posed patiently for photos taken by older ladies who weren’t quite sure how their cell phone cameras worked and took time to listen to their stories and admire fabric they purchased from other shops at earlier stops and to give advice on quilt projects in progress.
When everyone had been accommodated, she called out, “All right, girls. Y’all better get inside and get to shopping. There’s only five hours till closing time.”
The women laughed, then poured through the double doors and into the shop, with Mary Dell and Gary taking up the rear.
“Did you plan that?” Gary asked.
Mary Dell grinned. “No. But I should have.”
The Patchwork Palace was housed in a historic, two-story wooden building that would have fit in on the set of any Western ever filmed.
Two big windows filled with an ever-changing display of the latest fabric flanked the double doors. Four rocking chairs arranged on the sidewalk provided a welcoming spot for customers to relax after the exertions of shopping. The top floor of the shop was divided into classrooms and storage rooms, but the bottom floor, the retail space, was one big, open room.
The oak floors, original to the building, were beautiful, darkened by age and scarred by the scuffling of centuries of feet. Most of the bolts of fabric were arranged by color and stored in simple white wall shelves, but some of the fabric, ribbons, and trim was displayed in or on pieces of antique furniture that Mary Dell had picked up at yard sales and thrift shops over the years, including an open-front china cabinet, an old wooden crib painted with soft blue and green pastels, a weathered white pine pie safe with tin door panels punched with a star design, and even an 1890s cast-iron stove with four black burners. The shop was charming and homey, with a touch of the Old West everywhere you looked, right down to the swinging saloon doors leading to a back office and an inoperable antique cash register with shining brass keys.
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