him.”
Unusual for me, I kept my thoughts to myself, that one day Willa McFee would have to get a life and stop her selfless caregiving. She’d nursed her mama through Alzheimer’s for years; she lived with a sorry alcoholic man, and now was taking on a stroke victim. Even so, I was overjoyed that she’d agreed to help us with Linc. The end of the summer would be plenty of time for Willa to find herself. To Noel I said, “Oh, yeah, forgot that I talked with Kit briefly. She won’t be around till Memorial Day. How about you? Heard from Emmet or the Bride?”
“Dammit, Tansy, would you stop calling her that?” And just like that, Noel had done it again, gone from being warm and friendly to turning his wrath on me. “Give the poor girl a break, would you? I can only imagine what a formidable bunch we must be, and she’s going to be slammed with all of us at once.”
I responded to that ridiculous statement with the scorn it warranted. “Us formidable? That ‘poor’ girl, as you so gallantly call her, married Emmet Justice, the most formidable man who’s ever drawn a breath. Compared to him, the rest of us are pussycats.”
Noel’s response had been a soft chuckle. “You and Kit might have claws, but no one would call you pussycats. The true softies are me and Linc. It’s you girls that Helen had better watch out for.”
“Oh, please,” I shot back. “I don’t care what you say, I will never understand why Emmet had to up and marry like he did. Whatever happened to a proper period of mourning? And if he was so dead set on marrying again, why couldn’t it have been to one of his own? I don’t like the sound of this woman, Helen. She’s a nitwit on the phone. So eager to please it takes all I can do not to retch into the receiver.”
“Tansy—” Noel’s voice turned to ice, but I cut him off, waving my finger in the air as though he could see me.
“She’s a dietician, Noel. How many dieticians do you know, pray tell? What kind of prissy, pious occupation is that? She’s not going to fit in with us, you wait and see. She’ll turn out to be sanctimonious and uptight, someone who uses every dinner party as an excuse to lecture us on trans fat and cholesterol. And she’ll only allow us to have one glass of wine—red wine, of course—before dinner. If she allows anything at all. For all we know, she’s already made Emmet quit drinking.”
“If Rosalyn couldn’t make him quit, no one can,” Noel reminded me, but I ignored that.
“To top it off, her name is Helen. Helen Honeycutt!” I mocked. “What a stuffy, old-lady-sounding name that is.”
Infuriating me even further, Noel had laughed. “You’re just jealous because she’s so cute. When I showed you her website, remember, you admitted that she was.”
“I did not!” Before he could argue further, I conceded. “Well, maybe I said something like that, trying to be nice. You know me, ever the sweet Southern belle. The truth is, I thought she looked rather mousy, like a dietician named Helen ought to look. And, Noel? If anyone ever calls me cute, just shoot me, okay?”
With another laugh, he said, “No one would ever call you that, my dear.” I didn’t rise to the bait, but he couldn’t let it go. “You can think what you want, Tansy old girl. Both Linc and I think that the new Mrs. Justice is quite a looker.”
“Oh, she won’t be called Mrs. Justice, remember?”
Noel sighed in exasperation. “Surely you’re not going to hold that against her, too. She took her maiden name back after her divorce, Emmet told me, and now she’s keeping it for professional reasons.”
“Yeah, he told me, too. And I wanted to say, ‘Well, la-di-da.’ She has a cooking spot on a noon show in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for God’s sake. We’re not talking Julia Child.”
“That’s for sure,” he snorted. “She’s a hell of a lot better looking than Julia Child ever was.”
“She has bouncy hair,” I said peevishly. “I’ve never liked women with bouncy hair.”
“Maybe that’s what Linc likes about her. Bouncy hair.”
With a dismissive wave of my hand, I’d said, “Linc doesn’t count. Any woman would look good compared to that wife of his, the skinny bitch.”
Noel tried not to laugh, but couldn’t help himself. It’s what I love best about Noel. Although he’s one of the movers and shakers of a very hoity-toity Atlanta society, and looks like he stepped off the cover of Town & Country magazine, the man has a truly wicked sense of humor. He would not have laughed, though, if I’d told him how I really felt after seeing the Bride’s website. He would’ve scolded me instead, and sworn that I was neurotic about growing old. I catch enough flak about being the oldest in our group—well, except for Emmet, that is. The truth is, it shocked me to see how young Helen looked, even though there’s only twelve or thirteen years difference in our ages. Her smooth, pink-cheeked face, the perky butt and bouncy hair—they reminded me of how much I resent younger women. Doesn’t matter if they’re pretty or plain, fat or skinny; in my present state I hate every woman in the world who’s younger than me.
Noel startled me out of my reverie by asking if I was still there, and I’d blurted out, “The thing is, I will never understand Emmet, and this surprise marriage of his. After Rosalyn—” My voice caught in my throat and my eyes filled, but Noel wasn’t having it.
“Stop it, Tansy,” he’d said harshly. “You’re not the only one who’s still grieving for Rosalyn, you know. All of us are.”
That was when I went too far. It’s what I’ve been doing lately, pushing him to the limit. I know I do it, but can’t seem to stop myself. With a snarl, I said, “Oh, yeah, right. Grief sure didn’t stop Emmet from finding someone else, did it?”
With a sharp intake of breath, Noel’d hung up on me before I could retract my hateful words. I’m not sure I would have, anyway. Until this sudden marriage of his, Emmet—the grieving widower—had my unwavering sympathy. Kit and I had worried about him for months after Rosalyn died, and we’d made a point of checking on him every day. The three of us would cling to one another for comfort when he broke down. And break down he did, in the worst kind of way. Only a few days after Rosalyn’s funeral, Emmet had ended up in Emory University Hospital with some pretty scary symptoms. Then a few months later, he’d worked himself into such a state of exhaustion that he landed in the hospital yet again. Following that had been the nights—and yes, days—of heavy drinking, the most destructive of all. We were actually relieved when Emmet decided his only hope was a change of scenery. First he sold the fabulous home that Rosalyn’s parents had given them as a wedding gift, then he decided to relocate. Although none of us wanted Emmet to move from Atlanta, or to leave CNN where he’d made such a name for himself, we had no choice but to support his decision to do so. Otherwise, our group seemed to be in danger of losing him and Rosalyn both.
God, that was such an awful period of time, those first weeks after the accident! Looking back, I’m not sure that any of us handled it well. Sudden deaths, I think, are the hardest. As difficult as it is to see a loved one suffer from some horrible disease, at least we have time to prepare ourselves for losing them. And we can accept the loss better, I think. Both my mother and Noel’s had died of cancer, and our fathers of heart failure, but they were older, their deaths more in the natural order of things. Rosalyn had only been fifty-five when her car skidded on ice and plunged down a mountain. It’s been over a year ago now, yet I still can’t believe that she’s gone. I’m always reaching for the phone to call her, to tell her some stupid
