Good Christian Bitches (6 page)

“Hmmm. You sure this is such a good idea?” Sharon asked, sounding doubtful for the first time.

“It’s an awesome idea,” Heather replied confidently. “But let’s think for a minute. How can we get her to say yes?”

A
t a quarter to seven that evening, Elizabeth came downstairs from her bedroom and found, to her great surprise, Amanda making hamburgers for the children, who were watching music videos in the living room.

“You’re still here!” Elizabeth exclaimed. Amanda glanced at her, as if to say, “You got that right.” Elizabeth eyed her daughter, who was wearing the same outfit as earlier in the day.

“Surely you’re not going to Al’s dressed like that?” she asked, putting her hands on her hips in emphasis of her surprise and disapproval over her daughter’s wardrobe choice.

Amanda said nothing, continuing to focus her attention on dinner for the children.

“Don’t you realize what time it is? If you’re getting to the restaurant on time, or even fashionably late, you better get moving.”

“I’m not going,” Amanda said quietly, aware of the fact that her decision would set off shock, even outrage, in her mother’s mind.

Predictably, Elizabeth exploded. “Are you crazy?” Her voice was loud enough for both children to hear.

Will and Sarah glanced up from the television screen. Will had little interest in a brewing argument between his mother and grandmother, but Sarah was all ears. Quietly, she crept from the living room couch where she had been sitting to the doorway leading into the kitchen, hoping to eavesdrop.

“Young lady,” Elizabeth continued, in a tone of voice that instantly reminded Amanda of how happy she had been to leave Dallas with Bill; it brought back the hundreds of run-ins she had had with her mother while growing up. “Do you realize what an opportunity this is? Somebody obviously thinks the world of you! Somebody—and we don’t know who it is—is clearly very financially secure and is clearly very interested in you! And you’re not even going to bother?”

“Mom, not in front of the children,” Amanda replied wearily. She peeked around the kitchen doorway into the living room, where Sarah stood, listening attentively, not surprising her mother.

“Okay, guys, why don’t you watch in the media room until your grandmother and I have had . . . had a chance to talk?”

Will gave a resigned, uncaring look. “Whatever,” he muttered, turning off the TV and ambling out of the room. His sister gave her mother a pleading look, begging permission to stay for the fireworks, but Amanda would have none of it.

“Hit the trail, young lady,” Amanda heard herself saying, a phrase that her mother had said to her countless times. That was alarming.

Reluctantly, Sarah tore herself away from the controversy and followed her brother to the media room.

Now that the children were out of earshot, at least in theory, Elizabeth cut loose. “Are you insane?” she hissed. “A guy sends you a car—a Mercedes—a black Maybach, your favorite color for a car, and you won’t even go meet him to say thank you? Is that how I raised you?”

Amanda, about to respond, first marveled at the way her mother could globalize an issue, turning it from simply a matter under discussion into a referendum on her entire career as a parent. She checked on her hamburgers before she spoke. The last thing she wanted was to get into an argument with her mother, especially about her personal life. She knew it would be only a few moments before the subject would turn from the mysterious suitor with the black Mercedes to why she left Bill in the first place.

“Mom,” she finally said quietly, “doesn’t it seem a little over-the-top to you to give somebody a three-hundred-thousand-dollar car as a way of inviting them out to dinner?”

Her mother shook her head. “When your father was trying to get my attention, he used to fly me in a helicopter, which he landed at Vanderbilt Stadium, on the fifty-yard line, to take me to dinner with him in Knoxville, where he was working on a project. I was just a college student, but that’s how he did it.” Elizabeth angrily plucked a crumb off the kitchen table and tossed it into the trash can. “What’s wrong with a man trying to impress you or show you how interested he is?”

“If he’s so interested,” Amanda countered, immediately regretting that she was getting drawn into a discussion she did not want to have, “why is he so interested in keeping his identity a mystery?”

“You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out how men think, and you’ll always be wrong. That’s because they’re so much simpler than we are. They don’t think half the time. They just want what they want and then they go for it. And this guy obviously wants you.”

“This is too strange,” Amanda said, genuinely perplexed. “Unless he’s been going to women’s Bible study, he has no idea what’s going on in my life. And even if he did, who would want a woman coming off a divorce with two children and a crazy ex-husband? Who’d want to get involved with someone like that?”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to get involved. Maybe he just wants to . . . spend some time with you.” She smiled and winked at her daughter.

Amanda shrugged as she flipped the hamburgers. “If you want to spend time with a woman, you can generally do that for a lot less than the price of a Maybach. Appearances can be deceiving. I think we’ve all learned that the hard way.” She gave her mother that knowing look.

“That’s just negative thinking,” Elizabeth replied, her tone dismissive. “I’ll finish the hamburgers. Just throw something on, do something with your face and hair, and get your butt on over there.” A crafty smile suddenly broke out on her face. “Unless you’re just playing hard to get.”

“I’m not playing, and I can’t be gotten,” Amanda said flatly. “I’ve got no interest in this guy, or any other guy. I just want to get my life back together. Why is that so hard for you to understand?”

Elizabeth’s smile slowly faded as she realized that her daughter truly wasn’t going out to meet the mysterious car-giver, whoever he might be.

“You don’t have to have dinner with the guy,” Elizabeth said, exasperated, making one last run at getting her daughter to rethink her position. “Just have a drink. Thank him for the car. See who it is. Aren’t you dying to find out?”

“Honestly, Mother, no,” Amanda said, sliding the burgers off the grill and onto buns. “I don’t even want to know who it is. I just don’t want anything to do with the whole subject of men right now.”

“Well, you’ll have to start thinking about it eventually,” Elizabeth said. “It’s not like you’re getting any younger,” she continued, unwilling to quit. “And, who knows, by the time you decide you are ready, this great catch could be long gone.”

Amanda was incredulous. By her mother’s standards, all a man needed to qualify as a great catch was that he could afford to give away a Maybach!

“That may be, but who says it has to be tonight? I’m moving in the morning—assuming that truck shows up. Don’t you think I’ve got enough on my mind without starting a social life? I’m not even legally divorced.”

“In this town, that’s never stopped anybody.”

“Mom, I’m not going, and that’s that. And the car is going back to the dealership in the morning. I don’t need anybody’s charity.”

“I’m not talking about charity—” Elizabeth began, but Amanda cut her off.

“I seriously can’t believe you,” she said heatedly. “My whole life, I’ve listened to you and your friends gossip about women who accepted or even solicited extravagant gifts from men. You always deemed it inappropriate to accept certain gifts from any man who wasn’t your husband.

“Whether it was over-the-top jewelry, boob jobs, furs, cars, homes—whatever—you used to say there was a name for girls like that, and it wasn’t ‘sweetheart.’ I remember when Nancy McRae was engaged to, what was his name . . . Derek Tarver. And he bought her a new Mercedes as a wedding gift, but he gave it to her a month before the wedding. And when she called the wedding off at the last minute, her daddy called Derek to ask what he’d paid for that car and then he sent him a check. You and all your friends hailed that as the right thing to do!

“Now you want me to accept a car even more expensive than that from a complete stranger? I don’t understand what has happened to you since Dad died. You would have never encouraged this behavior before.”

Elizabeth’s eyes widened. “Stay out of my damn business! And are you kidding? You’re not keeping the car?” she asked, stunned.

“Why should I?” Amanda asked, going to the refrigerator and taking out a head of lettuce and a couple of tomatoes for a salad. “I don’t even like sedans. I like the SUV I’m driving right now. Even if it is a gas guzzler,” she added, mostly to herself. “In Newport Beach you’d have thought I was a heretic for not having a hybrid.”

“Trade it in,” Elizabeth implored. “An SUV’s a lot cheaper than the car he gave you, so you could make a few bucks on the deal.”

“Mom, I’m not looking to make a few bucks.”

“Well, between the trust your daddy gave you and other investments he made on your behalf, plus the fact that you’re certainly going to make enough off your divorce, it’s not exactly like you’re unwilling to take money from a man.”

For Amanda, that did it. “Okay, that’s it, Mom. I’ve had it! This discussion is over! I don’t need this aggravation from you! It’s not like you didn’t inherit a ton of money from
your
father and you never worked a day in your life while you were married to Dad!! And we’re talking about my father and my soon-to-be ex-husband here—this guy’s just some random stranger with an inappropriate way of showing he has a crush on me! I don’t know who gave me that car. I don’t care who gave me that car. I’m not trading it in for an SUV, and what I do in my private life is none of your damned business.”

A thin smile played at the corner of Elizabeth’s lips. She had gotten to her daughter, which, in some ways, was her whole point in having this conversation.

“You sure you’re not going?” she asked, knowing exactly what the answer would be.

“Of course I’m not going,” Amanda said, tired of the whole discussion.

“Well,” Elizabeth said mischievously, “I am.” She scooped the Maybach keys off the kitchen table, picked up her purse, and marched out of the kitchen.

“Mom, you most certainly are not! And not in his car!” Then Amanda saw Sarah, who had crept back into the living room and who had obviously overheard the entire conversation.

“Sarah, didn’t I ask you for a moment with your grandmother?” she asked her daughter, irritated.

Then, to the receding figure of her mother, “Mom, don’t you dare go!”

“Try and stop me,” Elizabeth said with a laugh. She was out the front door before Amanda could move.

A moment later, Sarah, Will—who had wandered into the living room to see what all the commotion was about—and Amanda heard the sound of the Mercedes engine starting up. They looked out the window. Elizabeth was on her way. As sweet Mimi used to say, “If the people who love us didn’t love us when we were bad, nobody would ever love us.” She had to have been referring to her own daughter.

A
t eight o’clock that evening, Sharon Peavy and Heather Sappington arrived at the doorstep of Darlene Cockburn, widely considered one of the most powerful women in Hillside Park. At sixty-seven, Darlene had changed husbands over the previous three decades approximately as many times as the United States had changed presidents, and, just as many Americans had little good to say about their succession of presidents, neither Darlene nor people in her social circle had all that much good to say about her various husbands.

The best thing that Darlene, or anyone, could say about her first four husbands was that they either died (the first and the third), or were deported because of tax and fraud matters (number two), or went to prison (number four). Before their demise, disappearance, or loss of freedom, each had managed to enrich Darlene’s personal fortune by anywhere from tens to hundreds of millions of dollars, giving her the financial wherewithal to become one of the community’s leading philanthropists and power brokers. A word from Darlene was all it took for an individual to become socially prominent or a social pariah.

Her fifth husband, a retired admiral with a background in engineering, maintained a separate residence in Fairfax, Virginia, close to his lobbying interests, his fox-hunting farm, and a wide variety of mistresses, whom Darlene monitored by means of various private security agencies, with the thoroughness and at times the ruthlessness of the KGB.

Darlene knew at all times what her husband was doing and, for that matter, whom her husband was doing. She stored all this information in a file in a wall safe in her living room, behind a Matisse abandoned by the husband who had been deported. He had been an art collector of note before most of his collection was seized by U.S. Treasury agents in partial satisfaction of a tax debt—and it didn’t help that he was in the country illegally, of course. Darlene considered the documentary material in the wall safe a retirement plan that more than offset the prenuptial agreement husband number five had made her sign, although she had need of one worse than he did. The home was a 1930s stone Normandy Tudor with arched stone walls and an entry foyer leading to a main foyer and then to an expansive living room with an eight-foot-high wood-burning fireplace. Another fireplace, almost as high, dominated the vast dining room. The kitchen and the adjacent full-service butler’s pantry were enormous, very catering friendly, and looked as though they had the capacity to feed a small army. The floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on two of the living room walls—complete with removable staircase on a rack—contained thousands upon thousands of books, none of which had ever been opened. They were strictly for show, of course.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Sharon, sounding shaky, asked Heather as they lurked on Darlene’s porch.

“Making Amanda Chair of the Longhorn Ball? I think it’s a fabulous idea. Don’t you?” Heather responded.

Sharon, still harboring a measure of doubt, rang the doorbell. A moment later, a liveried manservant, a hot, blond-haired young man in his late twenties, opened the door. Recognizing the ladies, he ushered them in.

“Miss Darlene is upstairs,” he said, pointing them toward the cavernous living room filled with incredibly valuable, and incredibly uncomfortable, eighteenth-century French furniture. “I’ll let her know you’re here.”

The women seated themselves on silk-covered sofas and waited. Heather crossed her legs, which was somewhat difficult in her skin-tight dress. Sharon tapped her foot against Darlene’s absurdly expensive antique rug. She still had misgivings about the whole thing.

“This is nuts!” she finally exclaimed. “What if she does a good job? Then everybody’ll love her. Not just the men.”

Heather shook her head. “No, no. It’s impossible. Susie screwed up that Longhorn Ball to the point where nobody will walk away from that thing in one piece. Not only will Amanda be jammed from sunup to sundown, she’ll get complete credit for the thing failing for a second year in a row. It will be an absolute wrist-slitting experience for her, and it might completely do her in. Not that we really want to, like, kill her,” she added quickly. “Still, on the heels of her other recent failures—it’s brilliant.” They heard a noise on the stairs. “Okay, here’s Darlene. We’ve got to sell her on this!”

Darlene Cockburn flitted down the plantation-like grand staircase robed in Oscar de la Renta’s finest, a flowing cerulean shantung dress. There was something dramatic and yet earthy about Darlene, as if she understood that her whole over-the-top house, five marriages, and vast fortune were all somehow part of a grand private joke that only you and she shared. She was nobody’s idea of beautiful, and her addiction to cosmetic surgery had made her eyes look like she was in a catatonic state, her lips looked like a baboon’s ass, and her breast augmentation had been so overdone, she looked like there was a butt on her chest.

In Dallas, plastic surgery is considered nothing more than good grooming. Women who don’t have the funds to have a little work done now and then, or those whose need for surgery is so great that their tabs at the surgeon might resemble the national debt, are considered the “unfortunates.” Those girls were forced to play it off like they don’t understand why women do those things. They pretend to be superconfident in their looks, acting as if they don’t feel the need for surgery. Everyone jokes about the fun-house mirrors the unfortunates must have in their homes—the ones that tell them how beautiful they are, although compared to the ones with a maintenance budget, they’re virtually invisible. Most Hillside Park women managed to stay in the well-maintained, aging-well zone. The opposite extremes—the unfortunates and the over-fortunates—were, fortunately, few and far between, but Darlene was definitely one of them.

Despite Darlene’s overdone face, there was something undeniably sexy about her, even at age sixty-seven, and if her ex-admiral husband ever decided to remain permanently in Virginia with his harem of spied-upon girlfriends, neither Darlene nor any other woman in town doubted that she would very quickly line up husband number six.

“To what . . . do I owe the unequivocal pleasure?” she asked in her studiously breathy voice, which most people referred to as her “Sunday school voice.” Darlene had a way of melding words together to invent her own language, while punctuating her speech with arduous breaths and silences.

She wafted into the room on Alexander McQueen stilettos with pencil-thin heels. Immersed as she was in perfecting her ethereal entrance, she narrowly avoided missing the final step. Undaunted, she glanced at her guests to make sure that they were sufficiently impressed with their surroundings—which, to be fair, they were—air kissed them both, and seated herself on a yellow divan.

“Good Lord, Darlene. You’re more beautiful than ever,” Heather gushed. Flattery had definitely always gotten Heather everywhere.

“Mmm-hmm,” Sharon concurred, fidgeting with her faux Hermès bracelet.

“We both know that better not be true,” Darlene said, casting a majestic smile on her subjects. “But as you know . . .” She exhaled deeply for one of her dramatic pauses. “I do so love to hear the expression of it, however erronical.”

Away from Darlene, Sharon liked to tell other women that Darlene’s vocabulary and syntax made her sound as if she were trying out for a road company of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
, but there was something so endearing about Darlene’s affectations that, as the expression went, even people who didn’t like her . . . liked her. Not everybody could pull off the five husbands, the house, and the liveried houseman—and rumors involving him and Darlene were rampant—but somehow, she did. Her many husbands were always age appropriate—but when it came to trainers, chefs, and house managers, she was a regular cougar.

“Darlene, you know Amanda Vaughn is back in town,” Heather stated.

Darlene nodded. “So I’ve heard. And I also heard that somebody gave her a brand-new Maybach,” she noted with a breathy sigh, extending an arm as if she were introducing a famed performer on the red carpet. “As a welcome-home gift, or a ‘please, date me first’ gift. As of yet, we haven’t quite decided.”

“You’re kidding!” Sharon was beside herself with jealousy. “A Maybach? Who in their right mind would do a thing like that?”

Heather swallowed hard. A man with his mind already set on Amanda, she thought. This was just the kind of thing she had been afraid of. Men were already competing for Amanda’s affection, and she hadn’t even moved into her rental home.

“How . . . how does she get men to do that?” Heather asked, amazed. “I’ve never had a guy buy me a car.”

Sharon threw her a patronizing look. “I’ve had guys get me cars,” she said, a trace of pride in her voice.

“Yeah,” Heather cracked, “and you had to spend more time in the backseat than in the driver’s seat in order to keep it.”

“That’s not true,” Sharon replied, stung. Then she smiled. “Look, if a gentleman opens a car door for you, the least you can do is get in. Whether it’s the front seat or the backseat. Right, girls?”

They all snickered.

Then Heather became earnest, getting down to business. “But that’s exactly why we’re here. Amanda just got here. If a guy is already buying her a Mercedes, where’s it going to stop? I mean, there are so many great girls in this town who are having a hard enough time finding someone. If the men’re all gonna be focused on Amanda to the exclusion of all other women, what are the rest of us supposed to do?”

“Well,” Darlene replied, stroking the edge of the divan, “what can you do about it? She’s young, she’s pretty, she looks great—”

“Have you seen her?” Heather asked, surprised. “How do you know all that?”

“I’ve heard it from a cavalcadium of different people,” Darlene wheezed, making a sweeping gesture with her hand to indicate her vast social network. “She looks fantastic, none the worse for wear, considering what she’s been through. I’d have presumed that, after a nasty divorce, she’d come plodding back into town looking rougher than a night in jail.” Darlene chuckled at her clever use of cowboy slang before growing serious again. “But au contraire, mon petite amours.” She sighed, unaware that she had just addressed her two guests as lovers. “Sounds like she’s managed just fine.”

“Mmm-hmm. That’s exactly what we’re talking about,” Sharon said, pressing her fingertips tensely against her thighs. “If she’s already doing so well without even trying, what’s it gonna be like once she’s back to feeling like her old self again?”

“Wait a minute, girls . . . hold on,” Darlene said. “She won’t be interested in a relationship for a while. She’s just been through a horrifically ugly situation and an even uglier divorce. Maybe she’s gonna want to stay on the sidelines for a while. Regroup. Put herself back together emotionally, instead of just . . . throwing herself into another relationship.”

“I don’t remember you ever doing anything like that,” Heather noted tartly.

“That’s true, darlin’,” Darlene replied with a grin, “but not everybody is like me. Some gals can stand those empty-bed blues.”

“Where’s Rick?” Sharon asked, remembering her manners. “Virginia?”

“Alas, my dear . . . Rick was number four,” Darlene gently corrected. “Greg is number five. And yes, he’s up in Virginia. What he’s doing is his business. And what I do . . . is mine.” She shot a wicked glance toward her manservant, who, embarrassed, quickly looked away. The exchange was not lost on either guest.

“We have an idea for Miss Amanda,” Heather said.

“But I don’t think it’s a great idea,” Sharon said, backpedaling. “I think we’re just borrowing trouble.”

“Sharon!” Heather said, annoyed. “We agreed we were gonna present a united front.”

“What is this all about?” Darlene asked, very much amused. “What are you two plotting, and what is it that you can’t agree on doing to Amanda?” She threw her hands out and held them at an awkward angle, waiting for a response.

Heather cleared her throat. It was now or never. “We thought that maybe, maybe Amanda should be, ought to be . . .” She swallowed hard. “The next Chair of the Longhorn Ball.”

Darlene looked puzzled. “What?” she asked, in a booming vibrato that belied her usual studied breathiness. “She hasn’t lived in Dallas in ages! How would she know whom to ask for what and why?”

“Mmm,” Sharon said, trying to follow Darlene’s muddled syntax. “That’s just the point—she wouldn’t know what to do.”

“Exactly!” Heather exclaimed. “It’s a full-time job anyway. And this year, whoever takes over has to dig out from the mess Susie made. And then on top of that, since Amanda’s a total outsider at this point, it’ll take her even more time to figure out who’s who and what’s what in Hillside Park these days. It’s just perfect.”

“Perfect for what?” Darlene asked, not getting it. “What exactly is to be gained by putting Amanda in charge of the Longhorn Ball? Judging from the way you two are talking about this . . . mendaciousative scheme,” she intoned, silently congratulating herself on such an excellent word choice, “it sounds as if you want to cast a net of troubles in her wake, not give her social life a boost.”

“Oh, it’s a boost, all right,” Heather said quickly. “Let me explain. If she’s Ball Chair, especially this year, when there’s such a messy mess to clean up, it’s gonna take every working minute of every working day. Sharon and I were thinking that there’s no way Amanda would have time for a social life on top of raising her kids, fighting Bill in court, and running the Ball, blah-blah-blah. And if she doesn’t have time for a social life, then men’ll quit showing up at her doorstep with new cars or jewelry or airline tickets or who knows what else they’ll throw at her, just to get a little attention from her. It’s the best way to keep her occupied and unavailable, don’t you think?”

Darlene looked lost in thought, then finally nodded. “I sure wish I had thought of a similar strategy back when I was married to Sidney,” she said, referring to hubby number two. “If he’d been distracted with something, maybe some charitable thing, he wouldn’t have had time to get all mixed up in that tax shelter thing, whatever it was. He was cute. Crooked as a dog’s hind leg, and a convicted felon to boot . . .” Darlene paused to heave a laborious sigh. “. . . but cute. Whenever Greg neglects me, which is eighty-five percent of the time, I always have half a mind to just get on a plane and go down to Costa Rica and see how Sidney’s doing.”