She felt her daughter begin to glow, and as they drove over the West Ashley Bridge, Korey explained to her mom about all the different kind of cleats the other girls had and why she needed bladed cleats and they had to be hard ground cleats and not soft ground cleats even though they played on grass because hard ground cleats were faster. When she stopped for breath, Patricia said, “I heard about what happened at recess.”
All the light went out inside Korey, and Patricia immediately regretted saying anything, but she had to say something because isn’t that what mothers did?
“I don’t know why Chelsea pulled your pants down in front of the class,” Patricia said. “But it was an ugly, mean thing to do. As soon as we get home, I’m calling her mother.”
“No!” Korey said. “Please, please, please, nothing happened. It wasn’t a big deal. Please, Mom.”
Patricia’s own mother had never taken her side in anything, and Patricia wanted Korey to understand that this wasn’t a punishment, this was a good thing, but Korey refused to go into Foot Locker, and mumbled that she didn’t want any frozen yogurt, and Patricia felt like it was deeply unfair when all she’d tried to do was be a good mother and somehow that made her the Wicked Witch of the West. By the time she pulled into their driveway, steering wheel clenched in a death grip, she was not in the mood to see a white Cadillac the size of a small boat blocking her drive and Kitty Scruggs standing on her front steps.
“Hellooooo,” Kitty called in a way that immediately set Patricia’s teeth on edge.
“Korey, this is Mrs. Scruggs,” Patricia said, smiling too hard.
“Pleased to meet you,” Korey mumbled.
“You’re Korey?” Kitty asked. “Listen, I heard what Donna Phelps’s little girl did to you today at school.”
Korey looked at the ground, hair hanging over her face. Patricia wanted to tell Kitty she was only making it worse.
“The next time Chelsea Phelps does something like that,” Kitty said, barreling ahead, “you tell everyone at the top of your lungs, ‘Chelsea Phelps spent the night at Merit Scruggs’s house last month and she wet her sleeping bag and blamed it on the dog.’”
Patricia couldn’t believe it. Parents didn’t say things like that about other people’s children. She turned to tell Korey not to listen but saw her daughter staring at Kitty in awe, eyes round, mouth open.
“Really?” Korey asked.
“She tooted at the table, too,” Kitty said. “And tried to blame that on my four-year-old.”
For a long, frozen moment, Patricia didn’t know what to say, and then Korey burst into giggles. She laughed so hard she sat down on the front steps, fell over sideways, and gasped until she started to hiccup.
“Go inside and say hello to your grandmother,” Patricia said, feeling suddenly grateful to Kitty.
“Aren’t they such little pills at that age?” Kitty said, watching Korey go.
“They are peculiar,” Patricia said.
“They’re pills,” Kitty said. “Bitter little pills who ought to be tied up in a sack and let out when they’re eighteen. Here, I brought you this.”
She handed Patricia a glossy new paperback copy of Evidence of Love.
“I know you think it’s trash,” Kitty said. “But it has passion, love, hate, romance, violence, excitement. It’s just like Thomas Hardy, only in paperback and with eight pages of photos in the middle.”
“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “I don’t have a lot of time…”
But Kitty was already retreating to her car. Patricia decided that this mystery should be called Patricia Campbell and the Inability to Say No.
To her surprise, she tore through the book in three days.
* * *
—
Patricia almost didn’t make the meeting. Right before she left, Korey washed her face in lemon juice to get rid of her freckles and wound up getting it in both eyes, sending her shrieking into the hall, where she ran face-first into a doorknob. Patricia flushed her eyes with water, put a bag of frozen peas on her goose egg, told Korey she’d had just as many, if not more, freckles when she was her age, and got her settled on the sofa with Miss Mary to watch The Cosby Show. She made it to the meeting ten minutes late.
Kitty lived on Seewee Farms, a two-hundred-acre chunk of Boone Hall Plantation that had been parceled off a long time ago as a wedding present to some Lord Proprietor or other. Through misadventure and poor decision making it had come to Kitty’s grandmother-in-law, and when that eminent old lady had declined elegantly into her grave, she’d passed it on to her favorite grandson, Kitty’s husband, Horse.
Way out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by flooded rice fields and tangled pine forest, dotted with broken-backed outbuildings inhabited solely by snakes, it was anchored by a hideously ugly main house painted chocolate brown and wrapped in sagging porches and rotting columns with raccoons in the attic and opossums in the walls. It was exactly the kind of grand home, suspended in a state of gracious decay, Patricia thought all the best Charlestonians owned.
Now she stood before the massive double doors on the sprawling front porch and pressed the bell and nothing happened. She tried again.
“Patricia!” Kitty called.
Patricia looked around, then up. Kitty leaned out the second-floor window.
“Go around to the side,” Kitty hollered. “We haven’t been able to find the key to that door in forever.”
She met Kitty by her kitchen door.
“Come on in,” Kitty said. “Don’t mind the cat.”
Patricia didn’t see a cat anywhere, but she did see something that thrilled her: Kitty’s kitchen was a disaster. Empty pizza boxes, schoolbooks, junk mail, and wet bathing suits crowded every flat surface. Back issues of Southern Living slid off chairs. A disassembled engine covered the kitchen table. By comparison, Patricia’s house looked magazine perfect.
“This is what five kids looks like,” Kitty said over her shoulder. “Stay smart, Patricia. Stop at two.”
The front hall looked like something out of Gone with the Wind except its swooping staircase and oak floor were buried beneath a mudslide of violin cases, balled-up gym socks, taxidermied squirrels, glow-in-the-dark Frisbees, sheaves of parking tickets, collapsible music stands, soccer balls, lacrosse sticks, an umbrella stand full of baseball bats, and a dead, five-foot-tall rubber tree stuck inside a planter made of an amputated elephant’s foot.
Kitty picked her way through the carnage, leading Patricia to a front room where Slick Paley and Maryellen Whatever-Her-Name-Was perched on the lip of a sofa covered with approximately five hundred throw pillows. Across from them, Grace Cavanaugh sat ramrod straight on a piano bench. Patricia didn’t see a piano.