The Sassy Belles

“Harry, I’m drivin’ and I don’t have a destination,” Vivi said in her thick-as-molasses Southern voice. This wasn’t the typical Vivi call for help.

“Vivi, where are you?” he said.

“I don’t know. I’m just drivin’. When can I talk to Blake? When will she be there?”

Harry was having trouble making sense of her words between her frantic nonsense and the god-awful cell reception.

“Vivi, just tell me where you are and Blake and I will meet you,” Harry said.

There was no response.

“Vivi! Vivi! Can you hear me?” Harry shouted. By this time, he’d stepped outside onto the courtyard for a little more privacy once he realized everyone in the lobby was staring at him for all the wrong reasons.

Vivi answered slow and sober. “Harry…I think I’ve just killed Lewis.”

Silence followed.

“Harry? Did you hear me? Lewis is layin’ dead in the bed, buck naked and blue, at the Fountain Mist on I20!” Vivi screamed.

Harry Heart came from a long line of legal counsel—defense attorneys to be exact. Generations upon generations of Hearts were all University of Alabama Law School graduates.

All except for Lewis. Lewis was Harry’s younger brother. He was the wayward son who wound up on the radio. He was the play-by-play announcer for the University of Alabama Crimson Tide; a partygoer so popular with the women, he never married—never had to. All of his needs were met nightly by the groupies, from cheerleaders to professors to coach’s wives. Lewis Heart was at your service, so to speak.

Harry stood among the gardenia blossoms in the Tutwiler courtyard, dumbfounded, wanting to utter something, but unable to make a sound. Finally, he managed to ask, “Vivi, are you talkin’ ’bout my Lewis?”

“Yes, dammit, Harry,” Vivi said. “Who the hell else? Oh, my God, he’s dead. He’s dead, Harry! And I’ve killed him, I know it!”

“Stop, Vivi. Slow down,” Harry said. “Okay. Let me get Blake. We’ll meet you at Mother’s.”

“I’m sittin’ in front of her house right now, Harry. I didn’t know where else to go.”

* * *

Meredith Blakely Fletcher is my maternal grandmother and the matriarch of everything. She is known affectionately as “Mother” to everyone who knows her. Her house has always been the command center. At one time or another it had been home to all of us, both friends and family alike. It became known as “Mother’s” decades before I was even born.

Mother has a real rags-to-riches story. A young woman during World War Two, she was born in the mud of the Mississippi Delta, surrounded by money and old plantations, but never quite able to grasp it herself. She was absolutely gorgeous, a movie-star type of beauty with dark, wavy hair and eyes as blue-green as the Gulf. She worked at a five-and-dime during the war as a cosmetic sales­person. One day a handsome young law student by the name of Frank Fletcher came into the store and approached the lunch counter. Her Southern beauty caught his Yankee eye and they were together for 41 years, until his death twenty-one years ago. My New York­–born grandfather always bragged that he found a million-dollar baby in the five- and ten-cent store, just like the song says.

Frank gave Meridee, as he affectionately called her, everything: a big Southern home and the exciting life of a wealthy lawyer’s wife in the late forties and fifties. Frank set up his practice and Meridee gave birth to three children. She entertained with lavish parties for Frank’s clients and two maids helped her care for her home and children. Meridee was the epitome of a Southern blue blood, even though her blood had originally run plain ole red.

Eventually, after much success on his own, Frank Fletcher and Hank Heart set up practice together. Yes, Hank is my Harry’s grandfather and, no, mine was not an arranged marriage. They were affectionately known in Tuscaloosa as Hank-n-Frank, Attorneys-at-Law. Go ahead and laugh now and get that out of the way.

I remember as a child, Mother’s house was my favorite place to be. Her bedroom was so full of the thick scent of perfumes that I can’t think of her and not recall those fragrances. Her dressing table was a place of pure fascination to a little girl. The French pink glass bottles and the powder she had custom mixed to match her delicate skin tone made that table an island of enchantment to me. And the silver makeup brushes were the wands of magical transformations. Meridee wore black transparent stockings with seams running up the back. Her long nails were always perfectly manicured and always matched her endless array of bloodred lipsticks. I wanted to grow up to be just like her.

Mother’s was a stone’s throw from the law school, so it made for a very convenient hangout. Frank was a huge success as an attorney, but on Saturdays in the fall, you’d find him in the broadcast booth of the Alabama Crimson Tide. Frank was the play-by-play announcer for the famous football team. He was so proud of that. Our blood runs perfectly Crimson in my family. Their house was a place for everyone, and Meridee made sure that all felt welcome. All my life, in any moment of crisis or excitement, we always wound up at Mother’s. No surprise, it’s where we all wound up on that day.

* * *

Harry drove like a bat out of hell over to Mother’s. He later told me he knew it would be bad for his Senatorial run if he had gotten a speeding ticket, but for once he didn’t think about the political dreams first. Amazing.

When Harry got to Mother’s, he found Vivi sitting in her car, gripping the steering wheel and staring straight ahead in a dazed stupor.

Harry had called me as he was driving to Mother’s. When I found the ringing cell in my red leather Gucci bag and saw the caller ID announcing it was Harry, I don’t know why, but I instantly suspected something awful. Harry never sounds hurried or breathless. He is the consummate lawyer, always in control. So when I answered the phone and heard his voice, I knew it was something awful.

“Blake!” Harry sounded like he had been jogging. “Meet me at Mother’s—now!”

“Harry, what’s wrong?” I asked.

“Blake, just come now.” A silence. Then, “Lewis might be dead and Vivi’s involved.”

“What? I’m on my way.” He explained all the details as I sped through town.

I don’t remember the drive over there. I don’t think I breathed even once in the five minutes it took me to arrive at the familiar cracked driveway. You had to angle your car just right to get in and out of it so as not to bottom out. I wasn’t thinking of any angling as I ripped right in behind Harry’s Mercedes and Vivi’s powder-blue convertible Thunderbird. Harry was standing beside her car. The shock of what I’d just heard was stealing my breath, but I knew they both needed me. I opened my car door and turned and touched my high heels to the cement.

“Tell me again—what the hell happened?” I heard Harry say to Vivi. “Go slow this time. I need every detail.”

The consummate lawyer. Even when his own brother could be dead, Harry was in full lawyer mode.

“For God’s sake, Harry, you aren’t takin’ a freakin’ deposition are you?” Vivi reacted in pure Vivi form. “Your damn brother, my lover, is dead, Harry! Dead! Dead! Dead!”

Vivi is a tactless wonder. “I did it, but it was an accident! I thought he was enjoying it. He was yellin’ and moanin’ and…Harry, he just stopped,” she said. “I don’t know if I suffocated him or what, but oh, my God, he’s dead!” She was crying and trembling, pushing the red, wiry frizz away from her eyes.

By now, Harry was visibly shaken. He pulled off his wire-framed glasses and dragged his long fingers through his thick salt-and-pepper hair. He was in his late thirties, but if you keep yourself so bottled up all the time you go gray before you know it. Harry was bottled and corked.

“Vivi,” he said slow and steady, “is Lewis still at the Fountain Mist?”

“Well, Harry,” Vivi answered with as much sarcasm as she could muster, “unless you believe in the walkin’ dead, he’s still right there where I left him, buck naked.”

“Vivi, if Lewis is actually dead, you need an attorney,” I interjected. “My God, we need to call an ambulance! The police.”

“Well, y’all,” Vivi said, “aren’t I lookin’ at two lawyers right now?”

Harry and I stood, looking dumb and stupid, first at each other, then at Vivi. Still, Harry looked the most confused. The most disoriented. I could tell he was trying to process how this little development might impact that precious blossoming political career.

He and his brother, Lewis, had never been close and Harry had spent a lifetime bailing Lewis out of one mess after the next. Lewis was the baby of the family. He was good-looking, but in a Field and Stream sort of way. He was the polar opposite of Harry. Harry was prep-school gorgeous. Straight out of GQ. Lewis was two years younger, with a loud, center-of-attention boom of a voice that could really get irritating. Actually, overall, Lewis was quite irritating. Why in the world Vivi would shack up with him was beyond me. I looked at her and, despite her mascara-stained eyes, her sheet-white skin and runny nose, well—honestly, my thought was that Vivi could do better than Lewis. But what I loved in Vivi was her wild streak. She was one of the few people who really lived in the moment. Hell, Vivi lived for the moment. And I was sure that’s what attracted Lewis.

After a long, awkward silence in the warmth of the late morning sun, Vivi spoke. “Well,” she said, as if she had been picked last to play kickball, “since I don’t really have a turkey wishbone handy for y’all, somebody be my damn lawyer already! Do we need to play eeny meeny miny moe or what?”

Harry answered first. “No matter what, not reporting a death in a timely manner is a real crime, so if we don’t call the police and an ambulance, we will all need lawyers.”

I took out my cell.

“Here, honey, let’s get this over with. You need to call the ambulance first, even if you think he’s dead.”

I handed the phone to her as I rubbed her shoulder and then looked over at Harry. He had turned around and was leaning against Vivi’s car, running his fingers through his hair over and over—his nervous tic. He looked lost in thought—as though floods of terrible memories were coming back, like waves crashing a shoreline. I wanted to say something, but had no good words at the moment. My thoughts turned back to Vivi. She was waiting for the 911 operator to answer.

Vivi had been through this before. No, she hadn’t ever killed anyone, but short, steamy love affairs were basically on par for her. At one point, she’d been married to a congressman who lived full-time in Washington. He was twenty years older than Vivi and totally unattractive, but another blue blood just the same. The marriage didn’t last too long, though no one ever thought it would. Vivi would never leave the South. That would be like asking cotton to grow up North. Vivi just couldn’t be planted anywhere else. But the congressman had to live in D.C. With all that time apart everyone knew it would just grow stale. And it did after just a few short years. Besides, Vivi loved to be…well, let’s call it social. Yes, social was a perfect word for Vivi Ann McFadden. I’m not saying that she was a party girl, but she loved, thrived actually, on social interaction. Okay, Vivi was a party girl. She was an only child of wealth and privilege and most of the time she took the privilege part too far.

She never gave anything much thought. She just flew by the seat of her pants, or anyone else’s pants. Her free spirit was enviable. She swore like a sailor, even during high school, and had the reputation as a bit of the wild child of Tuscaloosa. She was popular and, no, not just with the men. Everyone loved her because she was so damn funny. The only little problem was that if Vivi thought it, it popped right out of her mouth before it ever stopped to register at her brain. Vivi never learned that some things should be thought but not actually said. Sometimes that got her into trouble. But she had such a hilarious personality she stayed at the center of the most sought-after social circles.