Killer Market

“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—”