The Lone Star Lonely Hearts Club Read Online Free PDF Page A

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    Obviously, I wasn’t going to Bubba’s, not unless I aimed to drag her. “All right. I give. Go with you where?”
    She sighed. “I explained it on the phone.”
    “No, you didn’t.”
    “Don’t be obstinate, Andrea.”
    Obstinate?
    The “bonding moment” I’d alluded to earlier? Scratch that.
    “What are you talking about, Mother?” My eyelid twitched. “I’m completely clueless.”
    As I was so often when it came to our relationship.
    “Let’s not discuss it here.” She glanced at the street, where Fredrik continued to hold up traffic. He gestured to her through the opened window, begging her to hurry. “We can talk in the car, on the way.”
    “On the way to where?”
    Embrace your high anxiety moments with a wide grin or belly laugh , I reminded myself, before I thought, “Screw that.”
    Why did she always do this? Rope me into things without explaining them, so that I was too befuddled to protest?
    Wherever it was she meant to take me, it wasn’t to Bebe’s interment. I knew the burial had been private, for family only (meaning, the pair of English cousins) and longtime staff, held the previous morning at the Sparkman Hillcrest Memorial Park where Bebe would slumber forever beside her beloved Homer and at least several generations of Kents before them. That’s where my daddy had been buried, along with most of Dallas’s favorite sons and daughters: Greer Garson, Mary Kay Ash, Mo Connolly, Mickey Mantle, and, may he rest in peace, Tom Landry (who, it was rumored, went to heaven with his hat on).
    “Mother, spill ,” I begged, putting my foot down, literally, and nearly stepped on her Chanel-shod toes. “Or I’m catching the van to my Jeep right this minute.”
    “There’s a special reception, and the Wednesday bridge girls will be there. I’m sure I mentioned it.” She frowned, and I noticed her brow didn’t crease. Not a single tiny wrinkle. “Didn’t I?”
    “Um, no.”
    I would’ve made a crack about Old Timer’s Disease, but après Bebe’s service didn’t seem an appropriate moment.
    On any other day, I would’ve assumed Cissy was playing innocent; but she did appear genuinely baffled, which raised my guilt to another level entirely (sort of like the terror alert going from orange to red—or was it red to orange?). One of her best friends had just gone boots up, and she probably felt as though the Grim Reaper was stalking her like the paparazzi after J-Lo. She had every excuse to be absentminded.
    Geez , Louise , I chastised, giving myself twenty lashes. When had I become so cynical? Where was my compassion?
    I reached deep down to unearth the kinder, gentler me. It had to be there, somewhere, lodged between my usual extremes of “I’m a happy camper” to “you’re on my last nerve, jerk!”
    “Er, you know, maybe I did forget,” I volunteered, and her face softened, looking almost grateful. “Can you tell me the plans again?”
    “There’s a small reception at Belle Meade immediately following the memorial at the church,” she said, as if that would clear things up. “I promised to be there, and I hoped you’d come, too.”
    I had never even heard of Belle Meade, but then I was constantly out of the social loop. It sounded like a swanky country club where four hundred mourners could comfortably mingle, eating cucumber sandwiches and drinking sweet tea while everyone chatted about how beautiful the service had been and how much they’d miss Bebe.
    My nose felt raw from blowing it into Cissy’s linen kerchief, and my stomach cried for Bubba’s. My feet barked, and I wanted out of this dress (it was starting to itch).
    As hard as it was to say no to Mother sometimes, I’d done my duty. It was time for an honorable discharge. I didn’t want to go anywhere but home.
    “I wish I could, really,” I lied and wrenched my arm free of hers so I could dig for my keys in my purse. “But I’ve got, er, plans.”
    Before she asked why—and because my only