“You’re a terrible liar.”
I stuffed my pockets back in and kept my hands there. I looked at the door again. I wanted to run, not just from the room, but out the door and down the driveway and onto Belle Meade Boulevard to Harding Pike and all the way across the river.
“Not a very flattering picture,” she said.
She held it out to me.
“Here,” she said. “You can have it.”
I kept my hands in my pockets.
“Go ahead, take it,” she said. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell her. Run along, now, Romeo.”
Later that night, back home, I took the picture out and placed it on the desk in front of me, reliving the shame I’d felt when Mrs. Haltom ordered me to empty my pockets. I put the picture into a shoebox filled with baseball cards and swore I’d never look at it again.
five
The week before Thanksgiving, my mother announced that Nancy had phoned and invited both of us to the annual “leftovers party” the Haltoms held on the Friday after the holiday.
“That’s nice,” my mother said. “Don’t you think?”
Every time Sunny or my mother picked me up from the Haltoms’ or the Creighs’, I ran out the door, anxious to leave before anyone could see my aunt with her bottle-blond bouffant in her mustard-yellow ’73 Cutlass Supreme or my mother behind the wheel of her old Chevy Cavalier.
“You have to work, right?” I asked.
“I have the night off,” she said.
“But you have plans,” I said. “Don’t you?”
She glanced over at me with a purse-lipped smile.
“If you’re going to spend so much time with these people,” my mother said, “I ought to get to know them a little bit.”
I held my breath as we rolled through the Haltoms’ gate. Cars were parked along the driveway. In front of the house stood two valets in red windbreakers. To my relief, my mother parked her Cavalier behind the last car down the hill and out of the reach of the floodlight mounted atop the garage.
As we approached the house, I led my mother to the kitchen door, where I always entered with Jamie when we arrived after school. But before we reached it, I heard Jim Haltom’s voice.
“Charlie!” he cried, his voice sharp, almost angry.
We rounded the corner to find him standing on the porch, Arch behind him, holding the door open.
“Y’all come on in the front,” he said, a tad out of breath. “Please.”
Later, Arch explained to me why Mr. Haltom had made such a fuss. To people of Mr. Haltom’s generation, Arch said, the kitchen door was for servants.
The party turned out to be a larger gathering than I’d expected. There were at least twenty people milling around in the entrance hall underneath the big chandelier, even more in the drawing room.
“Would you like a drink, Bonnie?” Mr. Haltom said. “There are cocktails and wine. And we’ve just opened some nice champagne.”
“Champagne sounds lovely,” my mother said.
I never quite got used to watching my mother transform herself back into the debutante-in-waiting she’d once been. Then again, I, too, had become adept at dissembling. Perhaps it was an inherited trait.
“Hello, Miss Boykin,” Arch said.
Arch asked my mother about our Thanksgiving. He commented on the weather, complimented me on how well I was doing at Yeatman. Mr. Haltom handed my mother a flute of champagne. My mother thanked him and took a dainty sip.
“Come on,” Arch said. “Everybody’s in the pool house.”
I glanced over at my mother, now surrounded by both Mr. and Mrs. Haltom and Mrs. Creigh. She looked both elated and a bit helpless.
“I should probably stay with my mom,” I said. “She doesn’t know anybody.”
“She’ll be fine,” Arch said. “Come on.”
In the pool house, we found Jamie and Vanessa, along with the Barfield sisters, Alice Hudson, a few kids from Arch’s class, and maybe half a dozen other kids I didn’t recognize. A football game was on the television.
“I thought you’d never get here,” Jamie said. “Vanessa keeps trying to leave me alone with Alice Hudson.”
I looked over my shoulder at sweet Alice, who had long been branded as disagreeable by Jamie and the rest of the Yeatman boys, for reasons I could not discern but did not contradict. Vanessa had persuaded me to ask Alice to the homecoming dance a few weeks prior. We’d had a fine time. Alice was gracious and funny and clever, easy to talk to, amiable, and apparently sincere. Furthermore, her father was a radiologist, her mother was heiress to a substantial insurance company fortune, and her grandmother was board chair at Steptoe. But no one pointed this out to me until much later; hence, to me, she was just poor Alice, a “good girl,” pretty enough in most company but plain when compared to the likes of Vanessa.
“Come on,” Jamie said. “I’m dying for a smoke.”
I followed him around the pool and back into the woods, where he had found a tree with a knot that curved down into a bowl shape, into which he deposited his butts.
“Behold,” he said. “My ash tree.”
He lit up, while I glanced around to see if anyone might notice us there.
“There are a lot of people here,” I said.
“It was bigger last year. This time, Mother wanted something more—what was the word she used? Intimate.”
I gazed back through the woods at the amber rectangles of the pool house windows. Vanessa was chatting with a tall boy, distinguished by his coat and tie (everyone else wore sweaters or button-downs) and a prominent Adam’s apple.
“Who’s that talking to Vanessa?” I asked.
“Rhys Portis. He goes to Deerfield. It’s a boarding school.”
“Is he from Nashville?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Jamie says. “He lives right down the block, in the yellow house with the fountain in front.”
“Why doesn’t he go to Yeatman?” I asked.
“Believe it or not, there are people who think they’re too good for Yeatman.”
I watched Rhys Portis’s arm extend out onto the back of the couch, inching closer to where Vanessa’s pale-blond hair met her white sweater.
“I think he’s after your sister,” I said.
“Rhys Portis has been in love with Vanessa for forever. Even back when she wasn’t so much to look at.”
“Should Arch be worried?”
“Well, it would serve him right if she did make it with Rhys Portis. But get real,” Jamie said. “Would any girl in the world take a douche like Portis over Arch? Look at him. Overdressed for the occasion, as usual. Like he thinks only boarding school kids ever wear neckties. You want a drink?”
Jamie reached behind his “ash tree” and pulled out a half-full fifth of Jack Daniel’s. I shook my head.
Jamie unscrewed the bottle and turned it up. He winced and gasped.
“Where’d you get that?”
“From the catering table,” he said.
He took another pull.
“I better check on my mom,” I said.
“What, you’re going to make me drink alone?”
“She doesn’t know anybody,” I said. “I just want to make sure she’s okay.”