at me? I’m not a well woman.” She clutched her silk blouse where the material draped across her breasts. “Sometimes I don’t know why the good Lord sees fit to let me go on living. I suppose I haven’t suffered enough.”
Nadine stood on wobbly legs and made a valiant—if somewhat overly dramatic—effort to walk toward the door. Halfway there, she stumbled. Maddie rushed to her mother’s side, slid her arm around Nadine’s waist and sighed deeply.
“Let me drive you home,” Maddie said. “A nice, long drive in the fresh air will be good for both of us.”
“Yes, dear, that would be lovely.” Nadine patted Maddie’s cheek. “You can be such a good daughter…when you want to be.”
Maddie sat her mother back on the sofa until she could clear off her desk and retrieve her handbag. On the way out, she instructed Alicia to forward any important calls to her cell phone and take messages about anything that could be handled tomorrow.
Ten minutes later, with Nadine secured by the seat belt in Maddie’s white Mercedes-Benz convertible, they headed down Gulf Road, past County General Hospital. With wind humming around her, her hair flying like a bright red flag, Maddie shut out the sound of her mother’s droning whine. Complain, complain, complain. Was there never any end to it? Why couldn’t her mother be content? Sometimes Nadine didn’t care that no one responded to her incessant chatter; all she seemed to require was an audience to listen.
Still tuned out to everything except her private thoughts about the upcoming gala at the club, Maddie whipped the convertible off the road and into her mother’s private drive. After their divorce, Jock had generously given Nadine the home they had shared for nearly twenty years, and Maddie now paid for the upkeep as her father had once done. The palatial Georgian sat on twenty acres, all immaculately groomed.
Maddie parked, helped Nadine from the car and to the front door. Instead of bothering with trying to unlock the door, she simply rang the bell. Ernesta Sanchez, her mother’s longtime housekeeper, opened the door.
“Oh, my, Señora Delarue, are you all right?” The short, squat Ernesta’s concern was genuine. Maddie knew, even though her mother would never admit being fond of a servant, that Ernesta was probably her mother’s best friend.
“Mother’s had a busy day.” Maddie escorted Nadine past Ernesta and into the huge marble-floored foyer. “She had lunch with the girls at the club.” Maddie and Ernesta exchanged so-she-had-too-much-to-drink glances. “I’ll have one of the valets bring her car home later. She didn’t feel quite up to driving herself.”
“Let me help you.” Ernesta took Nadine over completely, her big arm securely circling her employer’s waist. “What you need is a nice, long afternoon nap.”
“Yes, you’re probably right,” Nadine said, smiling forlornly at her housekeeper. “I am a bit tired.” Nadine glanced at Maddie. “Do you mind terribly, dear? I’m sure you’d hoped we could spend the afternoon together. But I’m afraid I suddenly have a horrific headache.”
“I don’t mind,” Maddie said. “Let Ernesta help you up to your room. I’ll run along, but I’ll phone later this evening to check on you.”
“Yes, do that. Please. I do so look forward to your calls.” Nadine allowed Ernesta to lead her toward the massive staircase. “You should phone more often. I get terribly lonely.”
“I promise that I’ll do better in the future.”
While Nadine leaned on Ernesta as the two walked up the stairs, Maddie let herself out and rushed to her car. She sat behind the wheel for a couple of minutes, contemplating her mother’s life and their relationship. She had been trying—unsuccessfully—for the past ten years to get her mother to see a psychiatrist, to seek professional help for her depression, but Nadine adamantly refused.
“I’m perfectly sane,” she’d said. “As sane as any woman could be whose husband humiliated her in front of the whole world. The man promised to love and honor me, to be faithful to me until death. Whatever you do, Maddie, never trust any man. They’re all alike. They’ll break your heart.”
Snap out of it, Maddie told herself. If you let yourself, you could wallow so deeply in your mother’s self-pity that you might wind up drowning in it the way she has.
Twenty minutes later, Maddie parked in the garage in the basement of her condo. After college, her mother had insisted she move home with her, but Maddie had struck a blow for independence then and there. And she’d never regretted having moved into the condo and separating herself from her mother. If she hadn’t done that, she doubted she would have survived without psychiatric help of her own.
As she unlocked the door of her three-thousand-square-foot, two-story home, she heard music playing. That could mean only one thing. Thelma was here. Thelma Hewitt was her personal maid, a five-foot-tall ball of fire, with gray-streaked, short black hair and keen brown eyes that saw straight through most people and especially Maddie. Highly efficient, but a notorious busybody, Thelma had worked for Maddie for twelve years. Maddie hadn’t wanted a live-in maid, having grown up with a house full of servants. Being a daily maid had suited Thelma just fine. After all, she needed time for her husband, five children and fifteen grandchildren.
After tossing her handbag and keys on the velvet Louis XIV chair in the foyer, Maddie followed the sound of the country-western music, which led her into the kitchen. There stood Thelma, singing along with an old Eddy Arnold tune, peeling apples and dropping the slices directly into an uncooked pie shell.
“You look busy,” Maddie said.
Thelma gasped, dropped her knife and the half-peeled apple onto the granite countertop. “Good Lord, gal, you scared the bejesus out of me!”
“Sorry, I thought you heard me walk in.”
Thelma wiped her hands on her apron, reached over to turn off the radio, then looked Maddie up and down. “What are you doing home at three o’clock?”
Maddie eased up and onto a stool at the bar area that ran behind the work center. “I had to drive Mother home from the club.”
Thelma raised her eyebrows. “How is Nadine?”
“The same.”
“Are you okay?”
“Sure, I’m fine.” Thelma was a mother-to-the-world type of woman and she’d been mothering Maddie since the first day she came to work for her. “I just wish there was something I could do for Mother, some way I could help her.”
“Nadine doesn’t want to be helped. She wants to be pitied. So you just go on pitying her and doing what you can. Can’t nobody help that woman but herself. You should be concentrating on your own life a bit more.”
“Is this the get-married-and-have-babies talk that we’ve had on numerous occasions?”
Thelma picked up the apple and the paring knife. “I know you modern girls think you don’t need a man to complete your life or kids of your own to give you a reason to live, but—”
“But you think I’m the kind of woman who needs to have a husband and children.” Maddie reached over and picked up an apple slice from inside the pie pan. “On that one subject, you and Mother agree totally.” Maddie popped the apple bite into her mouth.
“There’s
