Southern Living

by Ad Hudler

  “You know,” she said. “Maybe it’s time for a change.”

  “Just what I’ve been waiting to hear. You want to go full-time reporting? You’re more than ready.”

  “I was thinking of something else.”

  “What?”

  Margaret’s phone chirped. “Let me get this.”

  “No, wait. Tell me first.”

  “I have a job to do here, Randy. You’re interfering with it.” And then, into the phone: “This is Margaret Pinaldi.

  “Donna?… No, no, that’s okay.… Yeah, I’ve got Dewayne’s truck today; my car’s in the shop. Why?… Now?… So you specifically need the truck?… What’s happened?… Sure … Right now?… Okay.… At Suzanne’s house, right?… Okay.…

  Okay.… I’ll be right there.”

  Margaret hung up and reached for her Kermit the Frog purse beneath the desk.

  “What was that all about?” Randy asked.

  “I have to go help a friend.”

  “Do you need some more help? Want me to come?”

  Margaret thought for a few seconds, calculating in her mind: Three women … six hands … the innate ability women had to cleverly use laws of physics to their advantage … What could be so heavy and big that three women could not handle it?

  “No,” she said. “I’m sure we’ll manage.”

  ***

  Though Suzanne’s antifreeze-tainted portions of Alpo had killed sixteen dogs in Red Hill Plantation, none of them, fortunately, had taken their last steps on the Parley property. On the Saturday of the Dogwood party, however, Suzanne awoke to find Sonna, the Bentleys’ ten-year-old golden retriever, its hair streaked with the white of age, lying dead on her flagstone patio behind the house.

  With Boone at his golf game, Suzanne donned her velour navy tracksuit, retrieved a Hefty lawn-and-leaf bag from the kitchen pantry and went out to the patio. Arms akimbo, she stood looking at the dog whose tongue hung out over the moist black gums like an unfurled, pink-red carpet.

  She pressed the corpse with the toe of her tennis shoe. It was firm and ungiving, like a newly upholstered leather ottoman. And heavy, very heavy, too heavy for a Hefty, she realized. Suzanne returned inside and came back with the never-worn $1,600 plastic Prada raincoat, which she shook open with a snap and spread on the flagstone beside the corpse.

  She went into the garage and looked over the tool rack on the far, inside wall, finally spotting a shovel, which she carried with her back to the patio. Scanning the yard—thank you, Lord, for that new fence!—she then wedged the shovel between the flagstone and the stomach of the animal, pushing and scraping inch by inch until it was well beneath the body of the dog. Using the shovel as a lever, she pushed down on the handle, slowly raising the animal until the handle touched the ground. And then, sitting on the wooden handle to keep it and the dog in place, Suzanne slipped her forearms under the hairy body, leaned into the beast, and rolled her over, onto the raincoat.

  “Dear God in heaven!” she exclaimed, breathing heavily and feeling her pulse pounding in her temples and neck. With her clothed forearm, Suzanne wiped the sweat from her forehead. “Lord, tell me,” she said to herself. “What have I done to deserve all this?”

  Suzanne sat there, catching her breath and plotting what to do next. After a few minutes, she went inside to the master bedroom, rolled up her new gold-and-red Kirman rug, then dragged it outside to the patio.

  The doorbell rang; Suzanne could hear it through the open door to the dining room. She looked at her watch. “Donna!” she said to herself between breaths, and she went to let her in.

  “Have you got a truck, Donna?” she asked. “You know someone who’s got a truck?”

  “John David does.”

  “John David’s at the merchandise mart in Atlanta till this afternoon.”

  “Dewayne has a truck.”

  “Dewayne?”

  “Margaret’s boyfriend.”

  Knowing that Margaret worked at the newspaper, Suzanne was reluctant for Donna to make the call, but she looked up at the sun as it was climbing higher in the morning sky … and there were floral centerpieces to pick up and erection of a white tent to supervise and very soon the breeze would conspire with the swelling heat of the day, and the presence of this dog would be broadcast to all beyond the fence.

  Within fifteen minutes, the three women were standing before the dog and the carpet on the patio.

  “We should call animal control,” Margaret said.

  “No,” Suzanne replied. “It’ll take them three hours to get out here, and I don’t have time to spare.”

  “We should bury it or somethin’,” Donna said.

  “Don’t have time for that either. Please, y’all—I just want some help gettin’ this dog to the dump. Y’all gotta put yourselves in my shoes.”

  Her voice had grown louder, and Donna and Margaret looked at each other.

  “I’m puttin’ on the biggest party of the year tonight, and then I find out my husband’s fixin’ to leave me, and this just might be my last chance to show him and the rest of this stupid town that they really do need me!”

  “So what do you want us to do?” Donna asked.

  Suzanne looked at Margaret. “I want you to go back up that truck of yours into the garage so we can drag this thing through the house and no one sees us loadin’ it up. Donna, I need you to help me roll this old dog up in this carpet.”

  Soon, the three of them were dragging it through the house. Once in the garage, Margaret and Suzanne each took an end of the rug, and Donna got beneath the sagging, heavy middle, and they lugged it into the bed of the truck. “Donna,” Margaret said. “You’ve got muscles, girl.”

  It was true—Donna was strong. Her trapezius and latissi-mus dorsi had grown enough that she’d had to move up to a size-eight blouse. Her biceps and deltoids were now full and round, and other young women would sometimes ask her where she worked out. Donna would smile and say, “It’s just on-the-job training.” Outside of work, she started wearing sleeveless shirts when weather permitted. Even the regional perishables manager, who had misgivings about a woman working in such a physically demanding job, recanted his doubt and sent a letter of praise after coming down from Atlanta one day to watch her work.

  The three of them in the cab, they drove the expensively packaged corpse out to the Perry County landfill.

  “I just can’t believe someone would wanna kill all these dogs,” Suzanne said. “Antifreeze. Who would of thought of usin’ antifreeze?”

  At the intersection of Bradley Street and Parley Road, they passed two black men arguing out loud as they sold watermelons and sweet corn from the trunk of their old Buick. Margaret turned on the radio, which Dewayne had tuned to Cat County 108.5, and as they listened to some song about a woman who couldn’t keep secrets from her man Margaret suddenly realized there was no way Suzanne could have known how the dogs had died—unless, of course, she had done the deed herself.

  Thirty-five

  Dear Chatter: The difference between margarine and Crisco is that margarine’s yellow and has salt. You can always add yellow food coloring to Crisco. And why, pray tell, would we want to dye our Crisco?—Editors

  The hospitality of north Selby did not extend to rain. Though the red clay could absorb the first half-inch or so, it soon became as welcoming to moisture as a wet sponge sitting atop cellophane. And the rain, rejected by the roots and soil and now homeless, would hit the ground running, sheeting off the soggy yards, down the sidewalks, into the gutters, gaining in mass and speed until it dropped through stormwater grates and roared through the round, concrete tunnels beneath the city, cleansing the city of errant cigarette butts and the yellow tree pollen that blanketed Selby like snow this time each year.

  The forecast, thanks to an unseasonable tropical storm that had meandered inland, called for two inches, a large amount for this time of year, but by four o’clock more than three had fallen. And with just two hours remaining before her first guests were due
to arrive, Suzanne looked out her living room window to see if Red Hill Drive had returned to the landscape. She was pleased to note that the water had receded enough that a single car could now creep down the very middle of the asphalt. Unfortunately, however, as the high waters retreated they left behind a zigzag line of suburban jetsam along the entire length of her property—grass clippings, dog turds, decaying red camellia blossoms, cellophane from packs of cigarettes, last year’s obstinate oak leaves that had finally been pushed from their spots by impetuous, green newcomers. Suzanne quickly asked Josephine to call Virgil and ask him to come over and rake it all up before the guests arrived.

  In the kitchen, Margaret and Donna toiled over their largest catering job yet, heavy hors d’oeuvres for three hundred and fifty-nine people, including sliced roast beef with mini biscuits and a creamy horseradish sauce, chunks of cantaloupe wrapped in pro-sciutto, bow-tie pasta tossed in pesto sauce, smothered meatballs made from a recipe served in the Parley family for five generations (which, to Margaret’s surprise, called for two cups of sugar), and crudités that Margaret poached so they would better absorb the flavors from her homemade Caesar dip.

  Disappointed by Suzanne’s reluctance to try anything interesting or different from the normal Selby-black-tie fare, and wanting to put her trademark of creativity on the meal in some way, Margaret took the risk of laying out the smoked salmon, capers, onions, and crackers directly onto the glass of a large mirror with a baroque, gilt frame that she’d found leaning against the wall in the kitchen pantry. When she suggested they use it as a centerpiece, Suzanne was thrilled with the idea, even though she had planned on returning it to Vivian Vaughan’s Interiors that next Monday.

  Suddenly, John David burst through the kitchen door, holding in his left hand a tinkling crystal tumbler of Knob Creek bourbon on the rocks. His face was flushed, and Margaret wondered if it was alcohol or the neck of his too-small tuxedo shirt. Just as a set designer would for a play on opening night, John David had arrived at two-thirty for three hours of moving and removing and switching and tweaking.

  “What did y’all do with that throw rug at the garage door?” he asked.

  “We had to move it,” Donna answered. “We kept trippin’ over it when we went out to the fridge in the garage.”

  “Well be sure to put it back. That whole entryway looks washed out without that little Oriental.”

  Boone, as he did in the few hours before every one of Suzanne’s parties, had fled the house to the safety of the men’s locker room at Sugar Day, where he watched ESPN as he reviewed membership applications for the upcoming year. For the first time ever, there were more names he did not recognize than those he did.

  Suzanne, already dressed in her Dogwood-ivory, beaded Badg-ley Mischka gown, which had been let out to accommodate her third-month prosthesis, walked the house from room to room, praising or condemning herself for improvements she’d made or forgotten to make. In the east guest room, the one in which Boone was sleeping, she admired the mimosa linens with delicate flower sprays and scalloped borders, ordered from Carolina Con’s Gracious Style catalog. In the foyer, Suzanne straightened one of the four botanical prints she’d had specially commissioned, all of them roses that would match colors in her reproduction of an early-eighteenth-century Star Ushak rug, including a scarlet Dortmund, a dogwood-colored Alberic Barbier, a chiffon-yellow Climbing Arthur Bell and the white-dipped-in-red Handel.

  From there she breezed into the main living room and stopped to look at her new portrait suspended over the mantel, the only portrait in Selby to be painted by Mary Robbins-Hart of Washington, D.C. And on a long, thin table hugging the wall, John David had placed the new basketball-sized Waterford crystal orb, filled three-quarters with water and dogwood blossoms floating on top. For St. Patrick’s Day, she would tint the water green. At Easter, pink. For Fourth of July, red or blue. For Christmas, fake snow. “And for baby showers,” John David had joked, “y’all can fill it with condoms.”

  ***

  6:20: Ten minutes to party time, as if the sky above were a gray washcloth that had finally been wrung dry, the rain stopped. Neighbors began to arrive. With a string quartet of students from Carollton College playing in the foyer, Boone and Suzanne greeted their guests, though he had not spoken to her since his revelation four days earlier.

  “Did y’all swim over here?”

  “Come on in and dry off.… Josephine, take these umbrellas.”

  “Well we sure do know who our real friends are, don’t we?”

  “Motherhood becomes you, Suzanne, you look so pretty.”

  After welcoming the first wave, fifteen in all, Suzanne stepped out onto the porch and looked over at Jodi and Marc Armbusters’ house. She counted three cars, none of which she recognized. Then she turned and went inside, closing the newly varnished door, and again the rain began to fall.

  7:30: Josephine walked by with a sterling-silver tray, balancing fresh cocktails and glasses of chardonnay.

  “Josephine … wait.” Suzanne walked up, looked at the contents of the tray and quickly grabbed the pile of pink napkins.

  “Where’d you get these?”

  “The pantry.”

  “Well they’re the wrong napkins, Josephine! Use the ivory napkins on the kitchen counter. The ones that say ‘Dogwood … A Parley Tradition.’ ”

  “Those ones with the gold letterin’?”

  “Yes.”

  John David, on his fourth bourbon, stepped up beside Suzanne. “How many are here now?” he asked.

  “Thirty-one,” she answered. “No. Thirty-three. Jimmy and Reeney Foshay got here.”

  “And how many are supposed to come?”

  “I sent out a hundred and eighty-six invitations. All but ten RSVP’d yes.”

  “Well looky there,” John David said, walking toward the den window that faced the Armbusters’ house. “Was the Ivory Princess one of ’em?”

  Suzanne joined him at the window and saw two ivory-colored Cadillac sedans at curbside, their wheels completely submerged in water, giving the cars the appearance of small pleasure boats. One by one, the Cadillacs disgorged a collection of people who were greeted with opened, ivory umbrellas imprinted with the International Dogwood Festival logo. Joining Madeline VanDermeter were this year’s distinguished guests of the festival, including Ed Nwasu of Botswana, whom Suzanne had decided not to house for the festival after all; Lord Benjamin of Great Britain; Lonnie Nuckadue, a Perry County commissioner; Hinckley Nasher, the owner of Nasher-Williamson Funeral Home and president of the festival board, who, as all civic and business leaders did for the entire festival week, wore a dogwood-ivory sports jacket with the festival logo on the right breast; and someone Suzanne and John David did not recognize, a woman in a lavender cocktail dress.

  “They’ll be comin’ over,” Suzanne assured him. “Her secretary told me to expect ’em.… They’re just savin’ the best for last.”

  8:30: In the lower, southern half of Selby, rainwater had begun to consume the landscape in a way that had not been seen in ninety-three years. Downtown, the Muscogee River swelled beyond its banks, swallowing every lane of I-75 and creating a backup of cars that stretched for more than thirty miles in each direction.

  The bronze statue of Robert E. Lee had been lifted by the waters from its redbrick foundation in Tattnall Park and carried a mile and a half downstream, where it now lay on its side in front of the chained gate of the abandoned Cherokee brick factory.

  Sheriff’s deputies patrolled neighborhoods in sputtering dinghies, throwing ham sandwiches and bottles of water to those who had sought refuge on their roofs.

  Half of the riverside Rosemont Cemetery was submerged. Its resident pack of wild dogs had been chased by water up to the highest point, the Fornley family mausoleum, which they occupied like displaced, defeated gargoyles, lying in the rain on the various, gray-granite terraces.

  Not wanting to shatter the buzzing ambience of a perfect party, Suzanne had shut off the ringers on
all her telephones, thus unaware of the deluge of regrets that were filling her voice mail every minute.

  9:45: Again, the rain stopped. The thirty-five guests at Suzanne and Boone’s party lingered because they felt badly about the turnout, and they did not want to further empty a home that already felt cavernous.

  Barely touched tray after tray of food had taken on a patina of neglect and decay. The dollops of horseradish sauce no longer shimmered beneath the halogen lights. The heated, brown gravy that once harbored meatballs had evaporated to the point that the orbs of beef were now resting on the bottom of the chrome pan, like the last, dying fish in a desert lake that has all but dried up. Not wanting the caterers and Suzanne to feel badly, some of the women surreptitiously moved the food around so it appeared that more had been eaten. Two different guests found a discreet way to sneak some of the tenderloin into the trash can and toilet.

  As the evening progressed, Suzanne seemed to grow increasingly manic, flitting from guest to guest as if to distract them from the emptiness of the party. She’d not had plans to drink that night, but the tensions grew too great, and Suzanne needed help escaping the failure she was watching before her very eyes. So, with help from John David, Suzanne would slip into the butler’s pantry, off the dining room, where she quaffed chardonnay like water.

  Finally, at ten thirty-five, Madeline VanDermeter and her Dogwood Blossom entourage dashed from the house next door when the downpour subsided for a moment.

  Her voice resounded in the marble-floored foyer. “I am so, so sorry, Suzanne … Boone. We’ve been fixin’ to come over for an hour now but couldn’t because of that awful rain. There will not be a blossom left for all those tour buses comin’ in this weekend. This is just a darn shame.”

  Boone and Josephine took their coats and their dripping umbrellas. “Y’all come on in now and dry off,” Boone said. “I was just fixin’ to drop that wine and go and get me some bourbon. Any takers here?”