That night I dragged myself, in noose and shroud, out of my dusty white pickup in front of the Wheatley mansion. I put the keys into the hands of a disgusted-looking man who waited to park it, or hide it, behind all the shiny brand-new pickups covered with chrome and expensive gun racks, and all the big Cadillac Escalades parked on a fitful lawn, back toward a wall of low, honey mesquite trees.
It wasn't because I expected a murder at the party that I looked the way I did. My costume was a protest because I didn't want to go to Elizabeth and Eugene Wheatley's gala to begin with. They were throwing it to introduce Eugene's new wife, Jeannie, to the "elite" of Riverville, Texas—or at least to a good number of the best and oldest citizens. I didn’t want to be one of those citizens. My friend Deputy Hunter Austen of the Riverville Police Department, a man who protected all those rich people, wasn’t invited, and if he wasn’t good enough to be asked to their costume party, then I wasn’t either.
I was mad at the Wheatleys and all my family, the Blanchards, and just about anybody who might get in my way that night.
“COME AS A FAMOUS TEXAN,” the invitation shouted, and I knew it was all Elizabeth Wheatley’s idea, owing to her expertise in Texas history, as she was eager to tell anybody and everybody since I first knew her back when I was in high school and she was already in college. She was Eugene’s sister, so I put up with her bragging and strutting and putting on airs because, after all, they were Wheatleys of the oil Wheatleys of Dallas, but living in Riverville for no good reason I ever got out of Eugene.
It was no skin off my nose if she wanted to play lady of the manor. Yet . . .
“I’m not going,” was what I first told Mama and Miss Amelia, my grandmother, the day before the party.
“The hell you’re not going,” Mama said and finished off her breakfast of scrambled eggs and Texas toast, picked up her coffee cup, and gave me one of those long stares that told me I was going to lose this battle.
My meemaw was saying, “Watch your mouth, Emma,” to Mama, which made Mama get red in the face and steam the way I was steaming. My younger sister, Bethany, saw what was coming and got up, dumped her dishes in the sink, and headed out to the event tent, where she saw to weddings and showers and graduation parties under our tall, old pecan trees. Justin, my older brother, who took care of Rancho en el Colorado, the pecan farm we lived on, grunted something about meeting up with his men for spraying and was out of there.
I liked Mama’s steaming because she was wrong, and it felt good puffing up like a pigeon because I was right. “I’m a grown woman and I can decide for myself whether I want to go to some awful costume party. You know Hunter’s my best friend. They could’ve asked him.”
“There’s always somebody has to be left out, Lindy. A house can only hold so many people.”
“Then let it be me. Anyway I feel cramps coming on. And I don’t have a costume. And some man from some European lab is coming to look at my trees. And . . . I just don’t want to go if they snub Hunter.”