Good Christian Bitches Read Online Free PDF Page A

like their past, create a new one, or at least a more respectable one. In Hillside Park, renting implied a lack of seriousness of purpose about life. If you were renting, could you really be trusted? People would even sometimes say, “Well, she’s renting,” as if to summarize in a single word the lack of financial stability of the individual under discussion.
    Nevertheless, it made no sense for Amanda to buy right away, and she knew it. She had plenty of money, thanks to her late father; that wasn’t an issue. She had her own family money from oil, gas, and banking interests, and would have whatever the lawyers worked out for her with Bill (and that would be substantial). But she wanted to get reacquainted with the neighborhood before she made a purchase of any kind, since she’d been away for so long. She couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Dallas, and within Dallas anywhere but Hillside Park, so it wasn’t a question of whether or not the neighborhood appealed to her. Of course it did. It was still Mayberry—okay, Mayberry with a lot of zeroes after it. It was a place where kids rode their bikes to public school, and public schools were so well-funded that the Texas legislature, led by that socialist Ann Richards after she talked her way into the Texas governor’s mansion—God rest her soul—had actually passed a Robin Hood–style luxury tax on the community, forcing it to share its wealth with impoverished school districts throughout the state. Indeed, Texas was dotted with small towns where the public schools, paid for with hard-earned (or easily clipped, it didn’t matter) Hillside Park dollars, were frequently much newer and nicer than the homes that surrounded them.
    It was actually hard to figure out a good reason to leave Hillside Park. At any time, for any purpose. The community certainly had all the churches anybody could ask for, as well as three country clubs—the second and third of which had been founded by individuals blackballed at the first and then the second—three shopping areas with all the high-end stores to which anyone could aspire, office buildings (so that the professionals in its midst could have commutes only as long as it took them to jog to their offices), a movie theater, and one of the finest universities in the Southwest, all within its fabled borders. It was said that the two most popular sports in Hillside Park were golf and illegally subsidizing the university football team.
    Amanda crossed the street, got back in her car, and headed for the real estate office of Ann Anderson, located across from the Starbucks in Hillside Park Village. Ann Anderson’s grandfather had started the agency in the early 1920s, when Hillside Park was little more than lot lines and a huckster’s dream. The original Anderson, Dan, had settled in Dallas after having been railroaded out of half a dozen towns from Indiana to Kansas, where his rampant real estate speculation had ended up taking serious money out of the pockets of the locals while leaving nothing but plot lines and sticks in the ground. Dan Anderson was planning on the same activity in Hillside Park, but then he realized that in a city like Dallas, in the midst of its oil boom, there was more money to be made legitimately in real estate than fraudulently. So Dan actually stuck around long enough not only to create a consortium to develop Hillside Park, but also to reap the financial and social rewards that came to those in Dallas, or those anywhere, who somehow managed to turn a little bit of money into a whole lot of it. Dan Anderson married a daughter of one of his first home buyers, a roughneck-turned-oil-gazillionaire also named Anderson. The “double Andersons” and their progeny had dominated the Hillside Park social hierarchy ever since, to the point where the daughters of the family kept their own names when they married, long before movie stars and television anchorwomen adopted the same habit. It was a short drive from