The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove

perch, he bows at me and opens the carriage door.

Surprising myself, I begin to run. And in the dream, my white stiletto heels don’t sink into the green of the golf course. My ladies-in-waiting don’t disdain my public display of emotion. I run toward Mike, toward the celebration of our future. This carriage ride will be the one on which all future Palmetto Court carriage rides are based.

“M’lady.” The jockey beams at me, kissing my white-gloved hand.

“Thank you.” I smile demurely, nod my head, and let him hoist me up to my seat.

Poof.

A waft of smoke obscures my vision of the carriage’s interior. And then I hear a voice:

“Change of plans, Princess.”

Coughing, I wave my hands through the mist, and when the air inside the carriage clears, my jaw drops. Justin Balmer is sitting next to me where Mike is supposed to be.

Oh, it had been such a good dream until now. His black tux and emerald-green bowtie feel like they’re filling up the bulk of the carriage, making me choke and making him seem bigger than life.

When he smiles at me, his green eyes bore into mine.

“Didn’t I leave you at the church?” I ask, gripping the seat.

“Oh, you’ll find me there again.” J.B. smiles cryptically. “But I was too tied up to be much fun, and I wanted to give you some advice.”

I shake my head. “News flash: We won Palmetto, and you lost. Try offering up your words of wisdom to those more pitiful than you — if you can find anyone.”

“Nope,” he says. “This message is for you.”

His tone makes me look up at him. His mouth is set in a straight line, but his eyes are lighter, almost laughing. In a strange way, they seem to be the only thing alive about his face. They’re mesmerizing and familiar at the same time.

“What are you doing? ” I ask.

“Smiling,” he says, “with my eyes. Remember?”

Even in the dream, my mind rolls back in time. Something about his face jars an early memory: J.B. lining up all the freshman girls before our first cotillion. He was flirtatious, trying to get everyone’s eyes to “pop” seductively while our mouths were closed politely. As he moved along the row, all the other girls were giggling. I was sweating through my high-necked oxford dress. Justin stopped in front of me, and then he was the one who froze. You look familiar. Have we met?

“You still need to learn how to do it,” J.B. says, holding my stare. His green eyes are potent, even as his skin goes pale and his lips turn blue.

“You can’t be here,” I say finally, pulling aside the white drape curtain to look out the carriage window. I am getting claustrophobic in my carriage. “You have to go. Mike’s going to show up any minute.”

J.B. shakes his head, looking tired all of a sudden. And then I feel another draft of air — this time, it’s freezing cold — when Justin breaks our gaze. I shiver and my skin breaks out in goose bumps.

“Like I said,” he almost whispers, “there’s been a change of plans.”

Then he leans back in his seat and slowly closes his eyes.

“Natalie Carolina Hargrove!”

My own eyes shot open at the sound of my mom hollering up from the kitchen the next morning. I shook my head to loosen — no, to banish — the dream from my mind, but I was alarmed to find my skin still flecked with goose bumps. I pulled the covers up over my head and burrowed back into the pillow, just as my mom yelled:

“The Dukes are here. Get downstairs and eat breakfast with your future family.”

Kill me now. My future family? That was a stretch, even for Mom. Maybe she was going to insist on going through with this unfortunate engagement, but there was no way I was ever going to consider Richard Duke or his porcine daughter Darla any kin of mine.

“Not hungry,” I hollered back at my mom. If I had to be dragged to church with the Dukes and held under Palmetto-wide scrutiny, there was a limit to the additional amount of QT that I could sanely agree to spend with them. I knew breakfast with Mom’s latest capital venture would mentally bankrupt me, and I needed to be on today when we pulled up to the church.

“Not good enough,” my mom answered. She’d cracked open my bedroom door and poked her curler-set auburn head inside. “Can’t you make the littlest effort?” she asked. “For me? ” Mom turned down her bottom lip, an overdone pout made worse by the mauve matte lipstick she’d slathered on.

“I thought you said we were going to church,” I said, taking in the rest of my mom’s costume. Her highlighted bangs had been swept up, up, and up a little more in a bouffant that displayed her mastery of the tease ’n’ spray, a favorite style technique among Mom’s white-zin-drinking circle. Her blue eyes were lined with a silvery shadow that extended into graceful — if gaudy — cat eyes. And her red-and-white polka-dot dress hugged her curves so snugly that I could see her doing that special breathing (short quick puffs of air, a la days of corset-wearing) that she thought no one could notice. She looked great — for a Vaudeville number. But poor, sweet, trailer-transplanted Mom was still worlds away from being Palmetto pew-appropriate.

“Of course, we’re going to church, honey,” Mom drawled, not surprisingly oblivious. “Right after you drag your hungover self down to a nice healthy breakfast with the Dukes.”

I groaned. Since I hadn’t yet moved from the bed, I wasn’t sure about the degree to which my hangover was going to debilitate me — and I did not want my mother to witness that dreaded roll out of bed. After we tucked J.B. into his own rendition of a nativity scene at the church last night, Mike and I had swung by the Pitch ’n’ Putt to pick up one more bottle of bubbly on the ride home. The image of J.B. waking up smothered by his boa was just too toast-worthy to go uncelebrated. But now, with Mom hovering over me, I got the feeling I was about to pay a high price for ending the night with such low-cost champagne.

I hobbled over to my mirror to survey the damage.

Ohhh, it hurt. My hair carried the distant memory of last night’s ringlets, but now they were splayed in tangled chunks around my head. The glue from my fake eyelashes had left sticky blobs along my eyelids, and my lips were puffy and cracking.

“Well, you certainly smell like you had a good time last night,” my mom said, holding her nose faux daintily. She sighed. “Guess your momma taught you something right.”

Mom was a former Cawdor County beauty queen and a real-life beauty-school dropout. When she finally got the nerve to quit her waitressing job, Mom started working part-time at the Charleston morgue, where she made up corpses whose families were too despondent to put up a fight. But in the past few weeks, her man-du-month had filled her head with the idea to expand her market to the living. She’d even gone as far as running business cards bearing her maiden name with the ingenious, and likely unintentionally, backhanded slogan:

Dotty Perch: You’ll never look better.

Suffice it to say, Mom’s little entrepreneurship had yet to really take off, but after seventeen years of being the only living recipient of her advice on how to doll-yourself-up-proper-so-you-can-get-a-man, I fully supported Mom’s quest for a more receptive clientele.

Life with my kind of single mother — that is, the kind who’s never actually single for long — is one unending flip-flop between parent/child and BFF. When I got my first kiss — age twelve, back corner of the bait-and-tackle shop, and yes, right next to the worms — Mom wanted to hear more dirty details than any of my friends at school.

Unfortunately, she assumed my interest in her sex life was mutual. There was a stretch of time when Mom never failed to climb into bed with me when she got dropped off the morning after a date. She’d snuggle close and fall asleep, saying she was so glad we were besties. Smoothing out the eye shadow gathered in a wet crease above her eye, I never had the heart to groan audibly enough to wake her up.

This is all to say that whenever Mom actually shifted into stern parent mode and tried, for example, to