CONTENTS
Also by Susan Reinhardt
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Final Chapter
Author’s Note
About the Author
Advance Praise for
Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle
“Using humor and a cast of zany characters, Reinhardt’s book will have you laughing out loud and scratching your head, wondering what in the world could happen next!
I’m not a Southerner, but believe me when I tell you, Susan Reinhardt (bless her heart) has written the funniest damn novel about life in the South since Gone with the Wind. Wait, that wasn’t supposed to be funny? Well, this book is. You’ll laugh so hard you’ll spit your grits out reading it.
In the Southern-fried voice we’ve come to love from her memoirs, humor columnist Susan Reinhardt goes for the jugular with hilarity and a touch of key lime pie sweetness in her first novel, Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle.”
– Tracy Beckerman, syndicated humor columnist and author, Lost in Suburbia: A Momoir. How I Got Pregnant, Lost Myself, and Got My Cool Back in the New Jersey Suburbs
“Reinhardt creates such colorful, loveable and familiar characters. . . . She draws you into the narrative by scribbling the funniest lines outside the box, in a tapestry of a story that can only be woven with her passion for telling it, a deft wit and a true understanding of the outrageous co-existences of family relationships. The mystery of her impish magic rivals Rumpelstiltskin. Reinhardt has spun a new color of gold with this one.”
– D.C. Stanfa, author of the award-winning The Art of Table Dancing, and co-editor of Fifty Shades of Funny: Hook-ups, Break-ups and Crack-ups.
“Susan Reinhardt’s Southern roots show in her debut novel. Reinhardt can pass my personal litmus test for humorists—crying so hard you can barely breathe, then laughing so hard you blow a snot bubble with your nose.”
– Robin O’Bryant, author of best-selling Ketchup is a Vegetable and other Lies Moms Tell Themselves.
“If you don’t laugh out loud when you read about monkey shines and resuscitating squirrels, see your therapist imme-diately. Your sense of humor needs repair.”
– JC Walkup, Publisher/Editor, Fresh Literary Magazine
Praise for Susan Reinhardt’s
Other Books
Not Tonight, Honey: Wait ’til I’m a size 6
“Susan Reinhardt takes the naked, honest truth and sets it on fire in a blaze of laughter . . .”
– Laurie Notaro, New York Times best-selling author, The Potty Mouth at the Table and other books
“She’s like a modern-day, Southern-fried Erma Bombeck or Dave Barry.”
– Booklist
Don’t Sleep with a Bubba:
Unless Your Eggs are in Wheelchairs
“Susan Reinhardt is a riot!”
– Jill Conner Browne, New York Times best-selling author of the Sweet Potato Queens series
“Like hanging out with your bluntest, most mischievous friend, the one who never fails to crack you up.”
– Chicago Sun-Times
Acknowledgments
This wouldn’t be possible without the entire staff of Grateful Steps Publishing, the expert editing and devotion of Micki Cabaniss Eutsler, Lindy Gibson and the wonderful copy editors and designers for the skills and time they spent seeing this book come to light.
Thanks to past agents in New York for pulling for this novel during the time the Great Recession hit us all.
I’d also like to thank my children, Niles and Lindsey, and my wonderful husband for letting me talk about this novel for the many years it took me to labor and deliver the final product. Props to Randy Whittington who shot the photos and designed the cover. Thanks to Albemarle Inn for allowing us to shoot the cover photo there. Heartfelt appreciation to Joyce Dixon, my bookclub and friends. Finally, I couldn’t do any of this without the generous support of my parents, Sam and Peggy Gambrell, who always root for me and slip me cash when the accounts are low.
Grateful Steps Foundation
159 South Lexington Avenue
Asheville, North Carolina 28801
Copyright © 2013 by Susan Reinhardt
Library of Congress Control Number 2001012345
Reinhardt, Susan
Chimes from a Cracked Southern Belle
Cover photographs and design by Randy Whittington.
Cover photo location: Albemarle Inn, Asheville, North Carolina
ISBN 978-1-935130-62-8 Paperback
Printed in the United States of America
at Versa Press, East Peoria, Illinois
FIRST EDITION
All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission from the author.
www.gratefulsteps.org
To my mother, Peggy
Also by Susan Reinhardt
NONFICTION
Not Tonight, Honey: Wait ‘Til I’m a Size 6
Don’t Sleep with a Bubba: Unless Your Eggs are in Wheelchairs
Dishing with the Kitchen Virgin
Only Hussies Wear Blue Eye Shadow
SERIAL NOVEL
Contributor to Naked Came the Leaf Peeper
ANTHOLOGIES
Fifty Shades of Funny: Hook-Ups, Break-Ups and Crack-Ups
edited by DC Stanfa and Susan Reinhardt
More Sand in My Bra: Funny Women
Write from the Road, Again!
Twenty-Seven Views of Asheville
Southern Fried Farce: A Buffet of Down-Home Humor from the Best of Southern Writers
Writers include Celia Rivenbark, Susan Reinhardt,
Clyde Edgerton and Roy Blount, Jr.
Women on Love, Sex and Work in our 40s
All proceeds go to breast cancer education,
research and access to care.
CHIMES
from a Cracked Southern Belle
A Novel
Susan Reinhardt
Grateful Steps
Prologue
Most often, people think the reason I married the best looking man in both Carolinas who turned out to be a complete psycho and near-murderer was because I was raised all wrong. The psychiatrists tried to mine the depths of a disorder that doesn’t exist, thinking there must be some long-buried secret from my seemingly unblemished All-American past catapulting a girl from homecoming queen to intensive care via her husband.
Nothing could be further from the truth. A fairly normal woman can ignore the gigantic red warning flags if the evil of her choosing shows up wrapped pretty as a Christmas package and is so gorgeous on the outside she forgets to lift the lid.
“I’m saying this is the South. And we’re proud of our crazy people. We don’t hide them up in the attic. We bring ‘em right down to the livi
ng room and show ‘em off. No one in the South ever asks if you have crazy people in your family. They just ask what side they’re on.”
– Dixie Carter, better known as Julia Sugarbaker
of Designing Women.
Chapter One
Wake up, Prudy. Rise and Shine: A man’s courage can sustain his broken body, but when courage dies, what hope is left? Proverbs 18:14
Mama’s Moral: You may be living in an ugly apartment, but you have courage. And that in itself will bring you hope.
Every morning of this unsure existence begins with a phone call and a proverb from Mama, a moral always attached. I am not supposed to answer the phone when it rings, generally at seven o’clock, even on Saturdays, but instead wait and allow the machine to record it. That way, she says, I can replay wisdom throughout the day “on an as-needed basis.”
Women like me need a lot of wisdom, she figures. Women like me who married hastily and poorly, extremely poorly, then ended up not just alone with two kids and no money—but alone and almost dead. Technically dead at least twice, according to several sets of official records and court testimony.
I wouldn’t know. My mind chose not to remember most of the details, which infuriates counselors and doctors. The events of that premurderous day come to me in flashes, like strobe lights, and I’ve learned to effectively block them. Why remember something so horrific?
It wasn’t even noon and already my mother was in my newly leased fixer-upper apartment, having written a check for the first month’s rent, just to get me out of her hair and home.
“No more checks until you get yourself a job,” she said, treating me as if I were still in college. “It’s high time you secured honest and decent employment. This world stops for no one, sugar pie, and that includes women like you.”
Like me. Lumped in a category and separate from the regular women who marry well—at least well enough to stay alive or unmaimed.
“They need makeup girls at Estée Lauder,” she said, opening the curtains, a defeated gray material, once white, trimmed in a blue ruffle and torn on both ends.
I pointed to my scars, courtesy of Bryce Jeter, his church van and the tools in his glove box. “It pays minimum wage and you have to be pretty,” I said. “These scars aren’t going to lure many women into a vat of mineral makeup, now are they?”
“You’re a beautiful woman. You could wear a scarf to cover that up—and nothing’s wrong with minimum wage. This ugly old apartment isn’t going to cost much anyway.” She removed a curtain rod and snatched the frail cloth from the metal, wadding it up and stuffing the fabric in a huge trash bag she’d brought along. “These old things could be harboring insect eggs and all sorts of petulance.”
“Pestilence,” I corrected, accustomed to her mispronunciations. “I don’t like the attitude of the makeup women.” I rolled over and turned face up on my rented bed, which sagged on the left side. I wondered about the people who’d slept on this mattress before me. Were they happy? Did they believe the exchange of vows would bring them a strength and peace nothing could rip open?
The ceiling fan above clicked with the effort of old fixtures, trying to stir the musty air of this apartment, finally leased after two years of sitting empty while collecting dust and bug carcasses. “The makeup ladies are always talking about your big pores or ruddy complexion. They’ll insult the hell out of you just to get you to buy a $70 jar of fortified mineral oil.”
“Don’t be bitter, Prudy. It’s not becoming for ladies to say bad words and you know how I—”
“It’s Dee, Mama. I hate the name Prudy. From now on, it’s Dee, which is a form of Prudy when you think about it.”
“I knew a lesbian named Dee, but forget it. You never listen to me, and acting all ugly isn’t gonna get you a thing. So just quit cussing. It cheapens women. Just like putting a big cigarette in their mouths . . . or . . . I don’t know . . . one of those fanny tattoos.”
My mama walked back and forth like a frisky goat of sorts, her heels clacking against the worn hardwood floors. She was pumped with some kind of obvious mission, fueled with more caffeine than her doctor allowed. He had told her to cut the caffeine due to blood pressure and life pressure and all the pressures my bad choices had slammed her with the past couple of years.
Eleven months after she took the kids and me into my childhood home—this trio of disheveled and aimless people—the children and I had finally moved out of her lovely sprawling rancher with the giant American flag snapping in the front yard and a long rectangular swimming pool out back sparkling like a piece of the Caribbean Sea. These were to be my first steps toward independence. Renewed independence. Starting over again, not just from scratch but from near death and now, near poverty.
“I just don’t understand,” Mama was saying for the millionth time. “We were good parents. There’s no tragedy in our family tree. How could you have married this . . . this monster? Your sister’s husbands have all been fine men. I’m a good Christian woman and bake more macaroni pies for people with fallen bladders and whatnots, so why did this have to happen to—”
“Mama, I’m sorry but I really don’t want to go into this again. And Amber’s current husband has some issues in case you haven’t been paying attention.”
She shifted around, looking for a dirt-free place to sit. “He’s got medical problems. That’s different than mental problems. And he’s not but 32 and rich as Bill Gates on account of his family’s chicken franchises.”
“They’ve been married less than a year and already he’s had five surgeries.”
“That’s because he didn’t have insurance beforehand, and there you have it. Some men, in case you never gave this much thought, marry for money. Some marry for the health coverage,” Mama said.
“I just can’t believe he didn’t have coverage.”
“Probably some preexisting condition. But to be quite honest, this one is on the feminine side anyhow if you ask me.” Mama poked out her coral-frosted bottom lip, same trait my daughter inherited. “But even so, Amber’s husbands have all been mighty fine men. None of them ever so much as laid a finger on her in a mean way.”
I had tried to explain to everyone who questioned my marital choice since the incident, which shocked everyone because they’d bought into Bryce’s nice act, that there are women, and I swore I’d never become one, who are perfectly normal and self-assured people until one day they meet someone and a string pulls, rewinding them like fast tops on slick linoleum until they’ve spun back into a state of complete dependence and insecurity. I used to feel sorry for these women, thought of them as invertebrates who needed to get a firm grip on themselves while growing at least a rudimentary backbone.
Without knowing what or how it happened, other than pure physical attraction that drowned the one or two weak warning signs Bryce emitted, I’d become one of them, a process that was so slow I never saw it creeping up. It was kind of like being one of those test frogs they drop in cold water and increase the temperature so gradually the frog never realizes it’s being boiled alive.
Before Bryce Jeter I’d always had a man as a safety net, someone standing there and more than willing to catch the falling parts, make everything better with his gallant availability. But not now. The backbone I’d lost with him I aimed to grow back—one good choice after another—one vertebra at a time.
Mama began a slow pace, moving from one object to another and staring at my belongings with an unveiled disgust, with that expression telling a grown child she is teetering toward complete and total failure, a borderline embarrassment for a mother to bear.
She’s been popping in at my new place at least once a day, sometimes twice, since I moved in a couple of weeks ago. She is afraid I’m dwelling on the second anniversary of my would-be demise. She doesn’t say it in as many words, but I can tell by the way she ji
tters and huffs around the room that the anniversary of my ex’s evil deed is on her mind.
“I wish you’d at least looked at that other apartment,” she was saying, sitting along the bay window and scanning the older, charming homes of Maple Heights. This was a section of town in the center of Spartanburg, South Carolina, where each house, no matter its size, was an architectural blessing, not simply a box or rancher. Every dwelling in the Heights had character and style, and although some were getting older and run-down, they were affordable. And interesting. “You could have moved in The Oaks and the kids would’ve had a pool and central air.”
“But I’d have had to pay for that air and chlorine,” I said, rolling twice across my bed the way teenagers do when talking on the phone. “Here, the swirl of the fan is free. And heat in the winter is included in the rent. I like it.”
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