The Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes

by Cathy Holton

  “It's a long story. I'll tell you when I get home.”

  “Y'all didn't go up there to hire a hit man did you?” Loretta said.

  “Listen, do you know a family named Grantham?”

  “ 'Cause I told you I'd do it for free.”

  “From Vienna, Georgia. Do you know the Granthams?”

  “Of course I do. I went to school with Pinky Grantham and Vera, too. She was a Ledford before she married Pinky and her mother was a Ham- bright from over by—”

  “And they had a daughter? The Granthams, I mean.”

  “Say, what's this all about? Does this have something to do with getting Whitney back?”

  “Mama, just answer my questions! I'll tell you all about it when I get home.”

  “Sure,” Loretta said. “Pinky and Vera had a daughter. An only child they adopted after Vera kept having miscarriages. They never had any other kids, which is a shame because they were both from big farming families and they are the nicest people you could ever meet.”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Who?”

  “Goddamn it, Mama. The daughter. Do you know the Grantham daughter?”

  “Juanita Sue, you watch your language. Of course I know the Grantham daughter and you do too. Pearson.”

  Nita said stupidly, “Pearson?”

  “That's her married name. You know who I'm talking about, I must be getting the Alzheimer's, I can't believe I've forgotten her first name. The newspaper woman. That was at your wedding.”

  Nita said, “Grace?”

  “That's it,” Loretta said. “Grace. Grace Pearson.”

  “THE WHOLE TOWN'S A GODDAMN DICKENS NOVEL,” EADIE SAID later that night, on the ride home. The moon hung over the expressway like a golden Ferris wheel. The lights of faraway farmhouses twinkled in the darkness. “I mean, think about it. Virginia gets pregnant with Hampton Boone's child, goes up to Chattanooga to deliver it, and the baby gets adopted and winds up growing up fifteen miles from where Virginia lives now. Grace is Trevor's half-sister. She's Nita's ex-half-sister-in-law. She's my half-sister-in-law. I mean, goddamn. Trevor's wasting his time writing all those legal thrillers. He should be writing about his dysfunctional family and their sad heritage in this crossbred little backwoods place that is Ithaca, Georgia.”

  Nita was still in shock. Not about Virginia having an out-of-wedlock baby, but the fact that the baby was Grace Pearson. “Do you think Grace knows? I mean, she must know she's adopted, if my mother knows, everybody knows, but do you think she knows about Virginia?”

  “No way,” Eadie said. “Have you seen the way those two look at each other? The last time they ran into each other, I thought we were fixing to have a catfight right there in the middle of Nita's wedding reception.”

  Nita laughed quietly. “I can't wait to see Virginia's face when she finds out the woman who wrote all those articles exposing Judge Broadwell is her daughter. Her own flesh and blood. I can't wait to see her face when she realizes her own long-lost daughter is this year's Kudzu Queen.”

  Lavonne was quiet, studying the road in the headlights. She was sitting in the passenger seat beside Nita. “Who do you think it'll upset more, Grace or Virginia?”

  “I'll tell you who it won't upset,” Eadie said, “and that's Trevor Boone. He's always loved Grace.”

  Nita gripped the steering wheel. She shook her head slowly. “We can't tell Trevor unless we tell Grace.” She looked at Lavonne. “Can we?”

  Eadie said, “Look, y'all, I like Grace too much to tell her that Virginia's her birth mother.”

  “That's the kind of news that might make someone suicidal,” Lavonne said.

  Eadie said, “Let's don't tell Grace. If Virginia wants to tell her, fine. If Trevor wants to tell her, fine. But I don't want to be the one to ruin Grace's life by telling her that her birth mother is actually Virginia Redmon.”

  Lavonne watched the moon through the trees. Van Morrison sang softly on the radio. “Now that that's settled, how are we going to tell Virginia?”

  “I've been thinking about that,” Nita said. “Charles told me his mother is having a big pre-Thanksgiving dinner party and, get this, Gracious Southern Living is coming to televise the whole affair for their ‘Holidays in the South’ program.”

  “Oh my God,” Eadie said. “Virginia must be in heaven.”

  Lavonne stopped looking at the moon. She turned slightly with her back to the door. “But how does that help us?” she said.

  Nita's face was lit by the dim light from the dashboard. “I'm thinking that would be a perfect time to spring the news about Virginia's past. I'm thinking that might be the perfect time to bargain for my child's release. If we threaten to go public, she's sure to drop the custody suit. Especially in front of all those TV cameras.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Eadie said, warming to the idea. “That we crash the party?”

  “Charles invited me,” Nita said. “But that shouldn't stop y'all from crashing if you want to.”

  Lavonne thought about it for a moment, and then she said, “Of course the other, less dramatic thing we could do is just call Virginia on the phone and tell her the jig is up. It might be more effective if we threaten her in private.”

  Nita and Eadie looked at each other in the rearview mirror. “Naw,” they both said simultaneously.

  “There's something about crashing a Gracious Southern Living television event that appeals to me,” Eadie said. “I like the potential drama of the situation. Virginia will be on her best behavior in front of the cameras. The hostage family will be gathered together in a false gesture of togetherness and communion. The guests will be dressed in their most extravagant finery trying to prove to the viewing audience that they're not a bunch of red- neck losers. There's a certain train-wreck quality to the scene that I find appealing.”

  “Besides,” Nita said, “if we give her a private warning, I'm afraid Virginia will figure out some way to turn this situation to her advantage.”

  Lavonne said, “That's settled then.” She said to Eadie, “What're you going to wear?”

  Nita adjusted the rearview mirror. “Charles said we're all supposed to wear dark sedate colors. Nothing too showy or over the top.”

  “Isn't that just like Virginia to give everyone a dress code.” Eadie sat up suddenly and leaned into the space between the two front seats. She put her hands on each of their shoulders. “I'm thinking my Kudzu Ball gown might be just the thing,” she said. “I'll bet Gracious Southern Living's never done a spread with real Kudzu Debutantes in attendance.” Her teeth gleamed in the darkness. “I'm thinking Aneeda Mann and Ima Badass might be just the thing to liven up Thanksgiving dinner at the Redmon house.” She pumped Lavonne on the shoulder. “What do you think, Ima?”

  “I'll dust off my tiara,” Lavonne said.

  EADIE HADN'T MEANT TO FIGHT WITH TREVOR WHEN SHE called him to tell him about Grace Pearson. She'd meant to surprise him. She'd expected to find him excited and eager to learn he had a long- lost sister. She'd expected them to share a good laugh together about the unpredictability of life, in general, and the irony of fate, in particular. What she hadn't expected was to call his cell phone and then his hotel room, repeatedly, over a six-hour period and get no answer. What she hadn't expected was the blind rage that welled up inside her around three o'clock in the morning when she realized that her husband wasn't where he was supposed to be.

  He was supposed to be on a solitary book tour through the Midwest. He was supposed to be in a lonely hotel room in Dubuque, Iowa. She left a message with the front desk of the Hyatt Regency.

  “Tell him his wife called. Tell him his wife says he's an asshole. Did you get that? Yes, asshole. Okay good.” Eadie hung up and tried, unsuccessfully, to get some sleep. She lay awake watching the clock as it ticked steadily toward dawn, imagining Trevor drinking in a bar with a gorgeous young blonde, Trevor wrapped in the arms of a leggy brunette, Trevor rolling around in the sheets with a buxom redhead. Somewhere a
round five-thirty Eadie fell asleep and dreamed of Trevor having sex with her mother. Every time they climaxed, Reba would shout Order up!, and she would lean over and slap her palm against the top of a strange-looking alarm clock that rang like the starting bell at Pimlico. This went on incessantly until the ringing sound in Eadie's head felt like an electrical current vibrating against her skull.

  She awoke to the sound of her cell phone vibrating against the hardwood floor. It was clear across the room where she had thrown it last night after talking to the lonely desk clerk in Dubuque. Eadie clicked on the phone and said, “Of course I'll marry you, Richard. I'll tell my deadbeat husband about us tonight.”

  Trevor said, “Very funny. Now listen, Eadie, before you get all bent out of shape about last night …”

  Eadie hung up, turned off the phone, and went back to sleep.

  Two hours later, Lavonne stuck her head in the door. “Eadie, wake up. And talk to your husband. He's called about twenty times on my house phone and he's threatening to get on a plane and come down here if you don't talk to him. I'm meeting Joe at the park and I'm not going to be here to take messages, so for Christsake get your ass out of bed and talk to the man.”

  Eadie got up and made herself a pot of coffee. The phone rang twice while she was in the kitchen, and she went over to the check the caller ID. It was Trevor. She called him back about thirty minutes later.

  “Goddamn it, Eadie, I'm getting real sick of the drama.” He sounded like he had a cold. “My plane got delayed in Phoenix and then I missed my flight in Denver so I spent the night at the airport.”

  “Why didn't you call?”

  “There's something wrong with my goddamned cell phone. The battery keeps dying on me.”

  “Well, it sounds like you have an excuse for everything. It sounds like your alibis are airtight.”

  Trevor sighed. “Don't do this, Eadie,” he said.

  “I called because I had something to tell you,” she said. “Something I thought you might find interesting.” She told him about Virginia and Grace Pearson. When she finished, he was quiet. She could hear him breathing, slow and heavy.

  “That is unbelievable,” he said finally. “I guess I'd have to see a DNA test to believe it completely, but that is fucking unbelievable. Grace Pearson is my half-sister. No wonder I always liked her.”

  “You both laugh the same,” Eadie said. “You have the same laugh.”

  “And I guess that would make my father a lying, cheating scoundrel. Or at least it would make him an unprincipled Don Juan.”

  “The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.”

  “Oh, come on, Eadie,” he said. “I'm happy. Try not to ruin my happiness.”

  “I'm your wife. That's my job.” She thought of the first time he cheated on her, with that waitress out at the Thirsty Dog. She remembered how she had felt, seeing them together, like someone had driven a spike through her chest. And years later, when he left her for Tonya, his legal secretary, she had covered her pain and despair with anger and alcohol. And Denton Swafford, her personal trainer.

  “I can't wait to see you in Chicago,” he said.

  She didn't want to see him. She realized this suddenly. Her anger went beyond a missed plane flight to Dubuque, it went deeper than his earlier infidelities. It was something more painful and infinitely more humiliating than all of that.

  “I can't make Chicago,” she said. “Something's come up.”

  She could hear him breathing. His voice, when he finally spoke, had a hard metallic ring. “Don't do this, Eadie,” he said.

  “I'm glad about Grace. I'm glad you have a sister. A family.”

  “You're my family. I need to see you. I'm tired of living like this.”

  She was alone. Her mother was dead, her father was gone, and for all Eadie knew she didn't share a single blood tie with any other human being on the planet. It was a desolate feeling, realizing this for the first time.

  “I've been lonely my whole life,” she said.

  “I know, baby.”

  “Everyone I've ever loved, let me down. Even you.”

  “I know. I'm sorry. I love you.”

  “Talk is cheap. Words don't mean a thing.”

  “Forgive me, Eadie.”

  “I'm trying,” she said, and hung up.

  LATER, SHE TOOK HER SKETCHBOOK AND WENT DOWN TO THE creek bank behind the Shangri-La Trailer Park and sat where she used to sit as a child, dreaming of a life better than this one. She sat quietly beneath the slim sheltering branches of a willow tree, sketching, filling page after page. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The sky darkened. A breeze, heavy with the scent of fish and fermenting apples, blew across the creek. Her drawings looked like something out of a nightmare. She drew a succubus sitting on the chest of a dreaming woman. She drew a mermaid becoming a tree, becoming a butterfly. She drew a whale with a harpoon quivering in its flesh and she thought suddenly of Frank Plumlee exposing himself to her in the darkened kitchen all those years ago. She remembered how she had tried to tell her mother but all Reba did was look around wildly and say in a panicked voice, What are you saying, Eadie? What are you saying? when Eadie thought it was pretty clear what she was saying and any mother worth her salt would have known, too. She thought of all the times in her life when people had been willing to think the worst of her, just because she grew up without a father in a trailer on the wrong side of town. She thought of all the ways they had misunderstood her rebellious nature, not understanding it was the only way she had of protecting herself. She remembered how Principal Sully had looked at her that day in his office after the home ec fire when Lee Anne Bales had blamed her and cried like a baby and Eadie, too proud to explain it had been an accident, stared fixedly at the wall just beyond his shoulder.

  The rain came suddenly, splattering the dense canopy above her. It drummed against the hard-packed ground but could not reach her beneath the sheltering willow. Thunder rattled the sky. Lightning flashed. A blustery wind blew from the east, swaying the trees. Gradually the rain subsided to a gentle drumming, and then stopped.

  After a while Eadie began to cry, softly at first, so softly she wasn't even aware she was doing it until the tears began to flow down her cheeks and wet the pages of her sketchbook. And then loud sobs that came from somewhere deep inside herself, heavy sobs that splintered her chest the way lightning had splintered the sky. She cried for the time she missed the bus after kindergarten and waited for three hours outside the school for her mother, who never came. She cried for the time she overheard Worland Peet telling a group of girls that Eadie Wilkens's mother was trash and her daddy was a drunk who left home before Eadie was even born and might not be her daddy anyway. And she cried for her mother, too, for the loneliness and longing that had permeated their sad lives like a bad smell they could not wash away no matter how hard they tried.

  Eadie held herself and cried. She cried until her throat felt grainy and her heart felt sore and swollen in her chest.

  Later, she rose and walked around the place where their trailer had once stood. The sun peeped from behind a line of ragged clouds like a shy child. A mockingbird sang in the top of a walnut tree, its song sweet and tender as a lullaby. Eadie sat on the stump of a fallen cottonwood rocking herself back and forth. After a while she opened the sketchbook on her lap. She felt weightless. Drained. She sat for a while and sketched until the sun dropped below the tops of the pines and the air turned cool and it was too dark to see.

  When she got home, she showed Lavonne her sketches.

  “Hey, those look like mandelas,” Lavonne said, pointing to the pages she had finished last. “Are those mandelas?”

  “Yes,” Eadie said, and hugged her. “They are.”

  Lavonne hugged her back, patting her with the palm of her hand. “I love you, Eadie.”

  Eadie didn't have blood sisters but she had Lavonne and Nita, and that was good enough. “I love you, too,” she said.

  “Everything's going to be all right.” />
  “I know.”

  Lavonne let go of her and stepped back. “I thought I'd make fettuccine for supper.”

  “That sounds good.” Eadie closed up her sketchbook. She felt different. She felt like a woman without a past, only a future. Anything was possible. She might even have a child. It wasn't so far-fetched now. Somehow she could imagine her and Trevor counting out change and holding a little one's hand on the way to the St. Charles streetcar, or tucking a blanket around a small sleepy face.

  “Why don't you go pour us a couple of glasses of red wine and then you can make a salad while I fix supper.”

  Eadie smiled, sliding her sketchbook into her bag. “I will in a minute,” she said. “But first, I have to call my husband.”

  IT TOOK HIM TWO DAYS TO CALL HER BACK AND THAT'S HOW SHE knew how pissed off he was. She left him two messages. When he finally called, he sounded angry and distrustful.

  “You make it hard to love you, Eadie,” he said.

  “The greater the hardship, the greater the reward.” What else could she say? He was right.

  “That sounds like a promise. Are you promising me something?”

  She went into the bedroom and closed the door. “I'm promising you a new beginning.”

  He was quiet. He said, “Just like that.” He said, “What made you change your mind?”

  She told him everything. She told him about Luther Birdsong and Frank Plumlee. She told him about Reba and her lost childhood. And finally she told him about her breakdown in the Shangri-La Trailer Park, how she had confronted the old ghosts and demons and wept herself clean of the regret and despair of forty years of living. She described to him the spirit of forgiveness that had flowed through her like clear, sweet music. When she finished, he was quiet.

  Finally he said, “You could have told me. You could have told me about your stepfathers. You could have told me about your shitty childhood. I wouldn't have judged you. I wouldn't have blamed you.”

  “I know,” she said simply. “But you have to understand, Trevor. A lot of this stuff just came up. I'm not even sure where it came from. And just so you know,” she said. “I don't blame you, either. I don't blame you for my sleeping all day, or the Mondo Logs, or my not being able to work.”