The Bette Davis Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

“It was your mother’s.”
    “God, here we go!” Charlotte says. Discussion of Charlotte’s mother has never been a pleasant topic between the two of us. “That was years ago,” she says. “We were children. If you’re going to start . . . well, you’re just wasting time!”
    “Wasting time?” I say. “If your mother had done the decent thing and divorced Daddy, my mother might still be alive today. My whole life would have turned out differently.”
    Silence.
    I take out a cigarette and light it, not bothering to ask Charlotte if she minds. She is, after all, the person who gave me my first smoke, back when I was nine years old. I put the pack down on the table.
    “Pall Malls!” she says. She picks up the pack and studies it. “I thought you kicked these years ago.”
    “Did,” I say, taking a deep drag off my cigarette. “Started up again.”
    “When?”
    I let out a curl of smoke. “Last year.”
    “Oh. You mean because . . .” She clears her throat. “But even so, it’s incredibly unhealthy. It’s practically illegal, isn’t it?”
    I don’t answer. I tilt my head back and blow three perfect smoke rings. Something else she taught me to do.

    Charlotte puts down the cigarette pack, gets up, and walks over to the globe. She positions herself there, spreading both hands over the Arctic Ocean and patting the world with her fingertips, its cocaine-filled interior no doubt calling to her. Charlotte may have given up smoking, but she’s retained other vices.
    “All I’m asking you to do is find Georgia,” she says. “Find her and talk to her. Talk to her kindly, sympathetically—then ask her what the hell she thinks she’s doing!”
    “What if I fail?” I say. “What if I get to Palm Springs and I can’t find her or something goes wrong?”
    “Half.”
    “Just for trying?”
    “Yes.”
    “Plus expenses?”
    “Yes.”
    I think about the money Charlotte’s offering. It’s really all I can think about. Fifty thousand dollars disappears surprisingly fast in Manhattan. But it would buy me time. I could pay my creditors. And I’d have a month or two of not worrying about my shop or what to do with it. There’d be time to sort out my life, time to have drinks with Dottie. My treat.
    It’s in thinking about the money, picturing what it would be like to have that much ready cash, that I feel myself tumble down the rabbit hole. Charlotte, standing there, watches me fall, wills me to fall.
    I put down my glass of port. “Let’s say I do this.”
    “You will, won’t you?” she asks. She leans forward over the globe.
    “Let’s say I do. You know I don’t fly, so the fastest way for me to get to Palm Springs is by automobile. Which means I’ll need a car.”
    I watch Charlotte for her reaction to this statement. I’m worried she might challenge me on it. My driving record is a joke. Surely, my own half sister is aware of my reputation behind the wheel. She must know I no longer possess a valid driver’s license. A minor detail, but some people take these things seriously.
    “ Can you loan me a car?” I press.
    “Yes. You can use Daddy’s.” She looks away. She’s embarrassed, I know. Though not about the car.
    “I don’t understand,” I say. For the first time today, I’m genuinely taken aback. “You can’t . . . you don’t mean the MG?”
    “I do,” Charlotte says. “Ha-ha. Poor word choice again. I should have said, Yes, the MG is exactly the car I mean.”
    Toward the end of his life, our father drove a red sports car, a classic 1955 MG TF. But when I was ten and Charlotte fifteen, our dad died from a heart attack. Since my own mum had passed on two years earlier, I was officially an orphan. Charlotte’s mother wanted nothing to do with the daughter of her dead husband’s dead mistress. So she sent me to live with my great-aunt Fiona, in England.
    Only Aunt Fiona and I did not get on. I was packed off again, this time to St. Verbian’s School for Girls,