How could I resist?
Dixie invited me to spend the night, so I took the three of them out to dinner at Noble’s—a much less crowded Noble’s. The food was even more delicious when you didn’t feel as if you were in the middle of the conversation at the next table.
The changes in Savannah were astonishing. Her hair was still gray, but shingled to take advantage of its coarse texture. Gone were the layers of pastel chiffon, but she was not totally dressed in black either. Instead, she wore chic black pants with thin white pinstripes, a black short-sleeved silk sweater over a white cotton shirt, and shiny black patent high-heeled sandals.
“Maybe I’ll graduate to purple by next year,” she said sardonically when she caught me staring.
They brought me up to date on things that happened after my week of court was up last April. Some of it I already knew, of course. When I made my original deposition, Underwood admitted that he’d given me all that information for a reason. “From the things Major Bryant said, I figured you must be a pretty good catalyst.”
I also knew that Drew was out on a very high bond while her attorneys kept stalling the actual trial, that Dixie and Pell had “found” Chan’s signed and witnessed will, and that Lynnette was now living with the Ragsdales in Maryland—“But she and Shirley Jane are coming to spend a week here before school starts.”
“And you’re in Boston now?” I asked Savannah.
“Heather and her mother talked me into giving it a try,” she said.
“You should see the McKenzie homestead,” said Pell, who had visited when up on business a couple of weeks earlier. “You could fit my house and Dix’s, too, on the first floor alone, never mind the other two floors. It’s in a historical section that’s just ten minutes from the statehouse.”
I was surprised. “You’re living in the same house with Heather and her mother?”
“Old Home Week,” Savannah said dryly. “Caroline and I were roommates at a prep school in Atlanta when we were girls. That’s how the adoption was arranged in the first place. She has a tricky heart, which is why she sent Heather to find me—so the kid would have some family when she dies. Some family, huh? A mother dying of congestive heart failure, a mother living with a bipolar disorder, a father who wants nothing to do with her, and a half sister who’s ‘accidentally’ killed two people.”
“You can’t choose your relatives,” Pell said softly and I, who sometimes feel as if I’m drowning in family, wondered what it would feel like to have only one or two relatives.
Liberated or isolated?
Dixie’s eyes were shadowed with pain. “At least you got your real daughter back.”
Savannah shook her head. “No, I didn’t. Caroline is Heather’s mother, not me. And Heather herself is still the daughter of a childhood friend. We want to love each other and maybe we will… eventually. But feel for her what I felt for Drew all those years? I don’t count on it.”
“Give it some time,” said Pell. He brushed back that long strand of hair from his blue eyes. “At least you’re working again. What did you say your new project is? Redesigning a gourmet cookshop in Cambridge?”
It was as if Savannah didn’t hear him. “She’s a nice kid though, even if someone does need to wash her mouth out with soap. There’s a live-in nurse to take care of Caroline and she and Heather make sure I keep my medications balanced.”
She took a couple of pills from a little gold box in her purse and weighed them thoughtfully in her small hand.
I remembered the first time I met her and how she’d laid out a row of pills on the table beside her plate. “So you’re well now?”
She shrugged. “I’ll never be well. What I can be is sane.”
“But?”
“But I miss my manic highs. I miss feeling the energy of line and color in my fingertips, the dance of fabrics and textures in my brain, the—” She broke off with an ironic smile. “I’m a seventy-eight rpm record that knows it’s going to be played at thirty-three and a third the rest of its life and I’m not totally convinced that normal and sane is worth the trade-off.”
“Yes it is,” Pell said. He nudged her glass of water closer. ‘Take the damn pills.”
“You sound like Heather,” Savannah grumbled, but she swallowed them.
Later that night, Dixie changed into ice blue satin pajamas and I to a long white batiste nightgown. We curled toe-to-toe at opposite ends of her long comfy couch with a half-empty jug of white Zinfandel on the coffee table in front of us, talking girl talk.
I took a slow sip of wine and asked, “What made you decide to give up Lynnette?”
“No one thing,” Dixie said, stretching out a long leg. “More a combination. Millie and Shirley Jane, and even Quentin, I think, do love her and she loves them back. Pell convinced me that it was probably better for her to be in a young household rather than watching us dodder through middle age. And then there’s Tom. Did I tell you about Tom?”
“Tupelo Market? Thinks you’re special? Makes you laugh?”
She grinned and kicked me. “Did I say all that?”
“Yeah. So does he still?”
“Yeah,” she mimicked. “The thing is, it’s hard to be spontaneous and go flying off to Mississippi when you have a young child in the house. Besides—”
“Ah, here it comes. The real reason!”
“Is it?” Dixie’s slanted eyes grew thoughtful and her chestnut hair swung forward as she gazed down into her glass. Then she nodded. “You may be right. The truth is, even going to the gym three times a week, it’s hard to work all day and then come home and try to keep up with a seven-year-old.”
“You and Pell miss her though?”
“Oh, God, Deborah, you don’t know!” With her free hand, she gracefully tucked her hair behind her ears, making her look nearer twenty-five than forty-five. “But most of all, we miss Evelyn being over there in Lexington and dropping in with her a couple of times a week.”
I’d drunk just enough wine to loosen the restraints on my tongue. “Did Evelyn know?”
“Know what?”
“That Pell was her father?”
Dixie cut her brown eyes at me sharply. “Where on earth did you get that idea?”
“During Market. Lynnette was showing me the family albums and there was a picture of Pell with Evelyn and Lynnette and I realized that all three of them had the same lopsided smile and the same blue eyes even though both girls inherited the shape and tilt of your eyes. And once the idea was planted, everything fell into place. You two were so close all through childhood and high school—he said you were like his big sister—yet he didn’t know Evelyn existed till he bumped into you in Chapel Hill. After that though, he became the protector. Found you this house, found you a job—”
“Co-signed the mortgage. Helped me move. Was always there across the alley in any emergency.”
“But you never told Evelyn,” I said, guessing.
“No.” Her voice was sad. “Pell’s choice, not mine. He was so sure that a teenage girl would rather have no father than one who was gay. Then when she married Chan… Well, you’ve seen Quentin Ragsdale, you know the homophobic culture Chan came from. Not that he was ever snide to Pell’s face. Evelyn loved Pell too much to stand for anything like that, but he understood and again he didn’t want her to know, to risk Chan’s throwing it up to her.”
She took a swallow of wine and I followed suit.
“Obviously he wasn’t always so totally committed to same-sex sex,” I observed.
“Too bad I wasn’t Deborah Kerr,” she said wryly.
“Deborah Kerr?”
“As in Tea and Sympathy. Or is that before your time?”
I made a mental note to rent the video sometime.
“Under other circumstances, it would have been so funny that night when you were practically shrieking at Millie that no nineteen-year-old woman would make love to a seventeen-year-old kid. Yet that’s exactly what happened with us. He was late to mature and he wanted so desperately to be as straight as all his male friends. I was just as ignorant. I honestly thought that he could choose, that friendly sex with me would prove to him that he was as hetero as anybody else.”