The Improper Life of Bezillia Grove Read Online Free PDF

happened on the steps of his childhood home. I wondered if he hated my mother as much as I did.
    After school the next day, I asked Nathaniel to drive me to my cousin’s house. He looked at me through the rearview mirror. His eyes were open so wide with surprise and concern they looked like two small saucers placed side by side. I quickly shook my head and told him not to worry. I just needed to return something. I’d only be a minute.
    Uncle Thad greeted me at the front door and said that Cornelia wasn’t home but that I was welcome to wait in her room and listen to records till she got back. Then he lightly stroked his forefinger against my cheek.
    “What happened, Bezellia?”
    I mumbled something that not even I fully understood and then ran up the stairs. I should have known my uncle would never have been satisfied with such a cryptic answer, and by the time I got to the top step, he was already walking to the car, motioning to Nathaniel.
    Cornelia’s bedroom door was wide open, and I could see the pink plastic mirror resting on the top of her vanity. I slowly walked across the room and picked it up, carefully turning it over as if it was a piece of my mother’s fine crystal. The impression of my lips was still on the glass, smudged but still there. I dropped the lipstick on Cornelia’s bed and then ran back to the car, knowing that Tommy’s kisses would soon be nothing more than a precious, well-kept memory.

chapter two
    T he day the Women’s Volunteer League appointed my mother cochair of the symphony’s first formal gala was the same day she told her parents to be expecting their granddaughters for the entire summer. She said the Iris Ball, named at my mother’s suggestion for the Tennessee state flower, was destined to be the city’s premier social event. And since she was creating a legacy for herself and the Grove family, she could not be bothered by anyone or anything until the end of September—unless of course it was her cochair, Mrs. George Madison Longfellow Hunt V, known to my mother simply as Evelyn.
    Mother reminded me almost every day that working with Mrs. Hunt was a great privilege and that she was certainly the envy of every woman in town. The Hunts had, after all, lived in Nashville as long as the Groves, but they had invested their money in steel throughout the South, not horses, and now their name was on everything and ours was not—the Hunt Museum of Fine Arts, the Hunt Historical Collection, and the Hunt Botanical Gardens, not to mention Hunt Boulevard, Hunt Valley Road, and Hunt Ridge Lane.
    Adelaide always burst into tears when Mother told her she would be spending any time at the lake. She would fall on the floor and cry till she turned a light shade of blue. I, on the other hand, relished the thought of being far from my mother and all the rules involved with being a Grove. There weren’t really any rules to speak of at my grandparents’ house. Nana didn’t care if our shorts and shirts matched or if we brushed our hair in the mornings. She barely brushed her own thin gray hair, let alone noticed if we had taken care of ours.
    I spent most of my days fishing for crappie, chasing lightning bugs, and watching a little television while I painted my chigger bites with clear nail polish and drank Coca-Colas right out of the bottle. Adelaide usually calmed down after a day or two. Maybe it was the water that soothed her as Mother said it would, or the special vitamins Nana insisted she take, or the fresh country air that calmed her. I really don’t know for sure, but I think it had more to do with Adelaide taking Baby Stella in the lake for a daily swim and making mud pies from dawn to dusk, no one caring whether the mud got caked in her hair or in her ears.
    Right before dinner, my grandmother would undress my little sister in the front yard and then soap her down for anyone to see. She’d even wash Baby Stella, scrub her head like she was cleaning a real live human baby. Every