Grace Cavanaugh stood, hitching her purse over one shoulder.

“Grace?” Marjorie asked. “Are you not staying?”

“I just remembered an appointment,” Grace said. “It entirely slipped my mind.”

“Well,” Marjorie said, her momentum undermined. “Don’t let me keep you.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Grace said.

And with that, the tall, elegant, prematurely gray Grace floated out of the room.

Robbed of its velocity, the meeting dissolved. Marjorie retreated to the kitchen, followed by a concerned Sadie Funche. A dispirited clump of women lingered around the dessert table making chitchat. Patricia lurked in her chair until no one seemed to be watching, then darted out of the house.

As she cut across Marjorie’s front yard, she heard a noise that sounded like Hey. She stopped and looked for the source.

“Hey,” Kitty Scruggs repeated.

Kitty lurked behind the line of parked cars in Marjorie’s driveway, a cloud of blue smoke hovering over her head, a long thin cigarette between her fingers. Next to her stood Maryellen something-or-other, also smoking. Kitty waved Patricia over with one hand.

Patricia knew that Maryellen was a Yankee from Massachusetts who told everyone that she was a feminist. And Kitty was one of those big women who wore the kind of clothes people charitably referred to as “fun”—baggy sweaters with multicolored handprints on them, chunky plastic jewelry. Patricia suspected that getting entangled with women like this was the first step on a slippery slope that ended with her wearing felt reindeer antlers at Christmas, or standing outside Citadel Mall asking people to sign a petition, so she approached them with caution.

“I liked what you did in there,” Kitty said.

“I should have found time to read the book,” Patricia told her.

“Why?” Kitty asked. “It was boring. I couldn’t make it past the first chapter.”

“I need to write Marjorie a note,” Patricia said. “To apologize.”

Maryellen squinted against the smoke and sucked on her cigarette.

“Marjorie got what she deserved,” she said, exhaling.

“Listen.” Kitty placed her body between the two of them and Marjorie’s front door, just in case Marjorie was watching and could read lips. “I’m having some people read a book and come over to my house next month to talk about it. Maryellen’ll be there.”

“I couldn’t possibly find the time to belong to two book clubs,” Patricia said.

“Trust me,” Kitty said. “After today, Marjorie’s book club is done.”

“What book are you reading?” Patricia asked, groping for reasons to say no.

Kitty reached into her denim shoulder bag and pulled out the kind of cheap paperback they sold at the drugstore.

“Evidence of Love: A True Story of Passion and Death in the Suburbs,” she said.

It took Patricia aback. This was one of those trashy true crime books. But clearly Kitty was reading it and you couldn’t call someone else’s taste in books trashy, even if it was.

“I’m not sure that’s my kind of book,” Patricia said.

“These two women were best friends and they chopped each other up with axes,” Kitty said. “Don’t pretend you don’t want to know what happened.”

“Jude is obscure for a reason,” Maryellen growled.

“Is it just the two of you?” Patricia asked.

A voice piped up behind her.

“Hey, everyone,” Slick Paley said. “What’re y’all talking about over here?”

CHAPTER 2

The last bell of the day rang somewhere deep inside the bowels of Albemarle Academy and the double doors opened and disgorged a mob of small children strapped beneath bulging, spine-bending book bags. They hobbled to the car pool area like elderly gnomes, bent double beneath three-ring binders and social studies books. Patricia saw Korey and pecked at the horn. Korey looked up and broke into a loping run that made Patricia’s heart hurt. Her daughter slid into the passenger seat, hauling her book bag onto her lap.

“Seat belts,” Patricia said, and Korey clicked hers in.

“Why’re you picking me up?” Korey asked.

“I thought we could stop by the Foot Locker and look at cleats,” Patricia said. “Didn’t you say you needed new ones? Then I was in the mood for TCBY.”

She felt her daughter begin to glow, and as they drove over the West Ashley Bridge, Korey explained to her mom about all the different kind of cleats the other girls had and why she needed bladed cleats and they had to be hard ground cleats and not soft ground cleats even though they played on grass because hard ground cleats were faster. When she stopped for breath, Patricia said, “I heard about what happened at recess.”

All the light went out inside Korey, and Patricia immediately regretted saying anything, but she had to say something because isn’t that what mothers did?

“I don’t know why Chelsea pulled your pants down in front of the class,” Patricia said. “But it was an ugly, mean thing to do. As soon as we get home, I’m calling her mother.”

“No!” Korey said. “Please, please, please, nothing happened. It wasn’t a big deal. Please, Mom.”

Patricia’s own mother had never taken her side in anything, and Patricia wanted Korey to understand that this wasn’t a punishment, this was a good thing, but Korey refused to go into Foot Locker, and mumbled that she didn’t want any frozen yogurt, and Patricia felt like it was deeply unfair when all she’d tried to do was be a good mother and somehow that made her the Wicked Witch of the West. By the time she pulled into their driveway, steering wheel clenched in a death grip, she was not in the mood to see a white Cadillac the size of a small boat blocking her drive and Kitty Scruggs standing on her front steps.

“Hellooooo,” Kitty called in a way that immediately set Patricia’s teeth on edge.

“Korey, this is Mrs. Scruggs,” Patricia said, smiling too hard.

“Pleased to meet you,” Korey mumbled.

“You’re Korey?” Kitty asked. “Listen, I heard what Donna Phelps’s little girl did to you today at school.”

Korey looked at the ground, hair hanging over her face. Patricia wanted to tell Kitty she was only making it worse.

“The next time Chelsea Phelps does something like that,” Kitty said, barreling ahead, “you tell everyone at the top of your lungs, ‘Chelsea Phelps spent the night at Merit Scruggs’s house last month and she wet her sleeping bag and blamed it on the dog.’”

Patricia couldn’t believe it. Parents didn’t say things like that about other people’s children. She turned to tell Korey not to listen but saw her daughter staring at Kitty in awe, eyes round, mouth open.

“Really?” Korey asked.

“She tooted at the table, too,” Kitty said. “And tried to blame that on my four-year-old.”

For a long, frozen moment, Patricia didn’t know what to say, and then Korey burst into giggles. She laughed so hard she sat down on the front steps, fell over sideways, and gasped until she started to hiccup.

“Go inside and say hello to your grandmother,” Patricia said, feeling suddenly grateful to Kitty.

“Aren’t they such little pills at that age?” Kitty said, watching Korey go.

“They are peculiar,” Patricia said.

“They’re pills,” Kitty said. “Bitter little pills who ought to be tied up in a sack and let out when they’re eighteen. Here, I brought you this.”

She handed Patricia a glossy new paperback copy of Evidence of Love.

“I know you think it’s trash,” Kitty said. “But it has passion, love, hate, romance, violence, excitement. It’s just like Thomas Hardy, only in paperback and with eight pages of photos in the middle.”

“I don’t know,” Patricia said. “I don’t have a lot of time…”

But Kitty was already retreating to her car. Patricia decided that this mystery should be called Patricia Campbell and the Inability to Say No.

To her surprise, she tore through the book in three days.

* * *

—

Patricia almost didn’t make the meeting. Right before she left, Korey washed her face in lemon juice to get rid of her freckles and wound up getting it in both eyes, sending her shrieking into the hall, where she ran face-first into a doorknob. Patricia flushed her eyes with water, put a bag of frozen peas on her goose egg, told Korey she’d had just as many, if not more, freckles when she was her age, and got her settled on the sofa with Miss Mary to watch The Cosby Show. She made it to the meeting ten minutes late.