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  The Latons are waiting for us in the sitting area off the viewing room. The rowdy Mims teenagers are lined up like bowling pins behind their daddy, Bradford, the middle-aged jock type, who has his hand on his wife’s shoulder. Janice Laton Mims showed more emotion over her defaced Prada purse than she’s showing over her deceased daddy. Of course, it could be her face-lift. Her skin’s stretched so tight she can hardly blink, let alone move her mouth.

  Mellie, too, is composed—her patent leather purse clutched in her lap, lips and legs pressed tightly together. Wearing glasses that went out of style with Herbert Hoover, she looks like she wouldn’t say boo to a fence post.

  And I won’t even comment on the doctor’s adopted son, Kevin. A hunk, granted. Lovie naturally gravitates toward brawn.

  Uncle Charlie seats Lovie and me in two wingback chairs, then moves to the front of the room.

  “Dr. Leonard Laton was a brilliant man and an asset to our town. It’s an honor to assist you in making his journey to the hereafter memorable.”

  Leading us into the viewing room, Uncle Charlie sweeps open the casket to display the late doctor in his final splendor.

  Janice screams, Mellie faints, and Kevin says, “I didn’t know the old boy still had it in him.”

  In plain view on Dr. Laton’s chest is a pair of red sequined pasties.

  Uncle Charlie slams the lid shut. While I fan Mellie, Lovie plucks the pasties out of the casket.

  “I was wondering where I left those.” Any fool can see she’s lying. These pasties wouldn’t fit Lovie’s fist, let alone the ballistic missiles she likes to show off with low-cut blouses. “I was in the casket trying it out for size.”

  “Kinky,” Kevin says, and Janice whacks him with her Prada purse.

  “I’m sure Uncle Charlie will get to the bottom of this,” I say. “Meanwhile, the powder rooms are right down the hall. After we freshen up we’ll retire to the reception room for some of Lovie’s good food.”

  Janice perks up at this information. No self-respecting survivor would put Kentucky Fried chicken and potato salad featuring mustard on the table when they can have shrimp jambalaya, grits soufflé, and Prohibition punch made by the most famous caterer in Tupelo, if not the whole state of Mississippi.

  I leave the Laton sisters in the powder room pressing wet handkerchiefs to their foreheads and putting on hot-pink lipstick that doesn’t match a thing they’re wearing. Then I race toward the kitchen.

  Lovie tosses me a bottle of bourbon. “Quick, Callie, dump some in.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere.” She’s emptying a vodka bottle into the punch and I pour in the bourbon.

  If we’re lucky the Latons won’t even remember their names tonight, let alone that the late Dr. Laton was in possession of a set of red pasties complete with tassels.

  Dr. Laton’s funeral will be memorable, all right. But for all the wrong reasons.

  Chapter 2

  Hairdos, Body Heat, and Bubbles Malone

  After yesterday’s fracas at the funeral home, it’s a relief to go to work.

  I never meant to settle here in spite of the local saying, “When you die, if you’re lucky you go to Mooreville, Mississippi.” After college I was going to move to Atlanta, make a life for myself as wife, mother, and pillar of the community, and a name for myself as a hairstylist.

  But Mama had to have knee surgery, and my best friend and cohort in crime (as Lovie and I call ourselves) had started a catering business she didn’t want to leave. Plus, this great little shop came up for sale.

  This is my domain, the one little segment of my life that’s completely manageable. I renamed the shop Hair.Net and installed a manicurist’s station (sans manicurist, which I can never afford until I pay off my mortgage and my credit card bill at Lucky’s Designer Shoes).

  Mama’s Everlasting Monuments is conveniently located next door (or inconveniently, depending on the day).

  Now I’m here rolling the hair of one of my regulars, while Elvis snoozes nearby.

  Personally I’d prefer to be giving Bitsy a modern cut and a blow-dry, but I pride myself on three things: keeping my mouth shut, satisfying my customers, and wearing cute shoes.

  This is life as I know and love it. Outside, a Peterbilt rig puts on air brakes at Mooreville’s one and only four-way stop, the King’s hit “All Shook Up” blares from the video store next door on my right, and Elvis rouses from his nap in the sunshine by the front door to howl.

  “Good Lord.” Bitsy covers her ears, and Elvis, sniffing with disdain, sashays toward the break room and the comfort of his duck-down doggie bed.

  In this lazy ebb and flow of my days I can almost forget that I lost Jack Jones to a Harley, my prospects of children and financial solvency get dimmer every day, and the California Latons are sleeping off Lovie’s punch in my upstairs guest bedroom.

  Mama breezes in with a five-hundred-dollar plate of brownies. That’s the way I’ve learned to look at the loans I make to subsidize her predilection for poker chips.

  I give her the cash and she gives me a hug. Plus, unsolicited advice.

  “Honey, now that you’ve cut Jack loose, women are drooling all over him.”

  She worships the quicksand he walks on.

  “Mama, I don’t care.” Unfortunately, this is not true. “Don’t forget to shut the back door on your way out.”

  By the time Mama and my last morning customer leave I’m four hundred and twenty dollars in the hole.

  On the bright side, I don’t have anybody to answer to and so far Elvis hasn’t peed on my favorite shoes, a cute little bronze and silver pair of Salvatore Ferragamo sandals that lace around my ankles and make my legs look longer than Julia Roberts’.

  “Elvis? Are you ready for lunch?”

  Usually the mention of food brings him running.

  A quick check shows his bed empty, his second-favorite spot under the washbasin vacant, and the back door wide open. Running around the small yard yelling for my dog, I see my custody battle turning in favor of Jack.

  Panicked, I race inside and dial his cell phone. He answers on the first ring and I don’t know whether to come clean about Elvis or cry.

  I do both.

  “Sit tight, I’m on the way.”

  Holy cow! Now here I am, my good intentions and my willpower taking a powder while the man who knows how to turn every surface in my beauty parlor into a pleasure playground roars this way with eight hundred pounds of horsepower between his legs. I might as well strip and throw myself across the pink vinyl cushions on my love seat.

  With the distant roar of his Screamin’ Eagle putting goose bumps the size of hen eggs all over me, I make a mental list of every reason I should hate him.

  There are about eight hundred and seventy-five, so this could take a while. Topping the list is that I don’t even know who he is. Sure, he says he’s an international business consultant named Jack Jones, but he also said—in French, mind you—that his parents were diplomats in Paris and couldn’t come to the wedding, which proved to be a big fat lie. Turns out he’s an orphan who was such a hell-raiser, nobody would adopt him. And I didn’t find that out until three years after I’d said I do.

  On the eve of my thirtieth birthday, just when I despaired of ever finding a hero, Jack Jones rolled into Mooreville in a silver Jag and started spreading money and charm like it was oil and he was a rich Texan. Which is one of the many states he claims to hail from. Texas. Idaho. New Hampshire. North Dakota. Georgia. Maine. And he can speak in every one of the accents. Plus Spanish, Italian, German, and Japanese in addition to French.

  He seduced me in six languages, then tied me in a knot and delivered me to the altar with the promise of house, dog, and family. He delivered the house (my current abode, which, thank goodness, he’s not fighting for) and the dog (Elvis, whom he’ll get over my dead body).

  “When I can settle down we’ll have kids,” he kept telling me. Then he proceeded to run all over the country doing Lord
knows what.

  “You look good enough to eat,” he says, and I nearly jump out of my skin.

  There he stands—Jack Jones in the tightest black jeans I’ve ever seen, a black T-shirt that shows every muscle he’s got and a bulge in his pants that’s either “happy to see me” or his Colt .45.

  “Don’t you even try.”

  He bends me backward over the love seat, then runs his left hand over my lips, down my neck, and into the front of my blouse while I’m trying to decide whether to slap his face or unzip his pants.

  “As tempting as you are, I have other things on my mind today, Callie. Finding my dog, for one.” He releases me and I land in a heap on the love seat. “How did you lose him?”

  “That’s just like you, Jack. Standing there making accusations instead of finding Elvis. He could be in Timbuktu by now.”

  “Not the way he moves. Come on.” We head outside and he tosses me a helmet. “Put that on.”

  “I’m not getting on that Harley.”

  He picks me up, tosses me aboard, then roars off while I hang on. If I could hit the side of a barn, I’d shoot him. With my blue jean skirt hiked up past decency, I look like a gun moll. And I don’t even want to think about my Ferragamo sandals. The left one has come untied. It’ll probably catch in the wheels, jerk me off, and smash me against the highway. I’ll look like roadkill. Even Uncle Charlie won’t be able to repair the damage.

  I don’t have much time to worry because Jack comes to a screeching halt at one of Elvis’ favorite haunts, Fayrene’s convenience store, Gas, Grits, and Guts. (She added the Guts part after she started selling fish bait.) Usually she has a flea market going in the parking lot and kids hanging around, happy to share a hot dog and scratch behind the ears of a dog who thinks he’s famous.

  “Nope,” Fayrene tells us after we inquire about Elvis. “I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him. But I’ve been so torn up I wouldn’t have noticed a herd of elephants. I’m suffering from acid reflex and fireballs in my useless.”

  Translated, that’s acid reflux and fibroids in the uterus. Fayrene is Mama’s best friend and the queen of malapropisms and green polyester. I’ve tried to steer her to a more flattering color but she says she likes green because it’s the color of money.

  I console her over her imaginary ailments and she says, “I’m glad to see you’re back with Jack.”

  Jack winks at her. “So am I.”

  I flounce out and straddle the hated Harley. “I’m not back with you.”

  “Not yet.”

  He revs up and we check the rest of Elvis’ stomping ground: the Mooreville High School ball field where he loves to sit on the sidelines and howl along with the band or watch ball practice, the barbershop that features a red-and-white-striped pole he regularly anoints, and the used car lot whose owner has a big black 1960s Cadillac that Elvis considers his.

  All these places are within easy walking distance of Hair.Net. Mooreville is not much more than a wide place in the road. Two roads, actually. The four-way stop in the heart of things is at the intersection of Highways 178 and 371. That’s not saying much because both are two-lane roads.

  If the state ever adds more lanes I’ll be too worried to buy shoes. My dog is an escape artist. If a hound dog wants to wander, even my almost-ex can’t keep it fenced in.

  “We might as well go back,” I say.

  “There’s another place I want to check out.”

  We peel out of the used car lot, race four miles south on 371, and hang a hard right on the narrow lane across from Wildwood Chapel Cemetery, dominated by Daddy’s black African marble obelisk, Aunt Minrose’s (Lovie’s mom) soaring pink Italian marble angel, and our Valentine grandparents’ replica of the Pearly Gates.

  Jack screeches to a halt in a wooded glade overlooking Mama’s lake on the hundred-and-sixty-acre farm where I grew up.

  Dreams gestate in the beauty of this land. When we were sixteen Lovie and I sat side by side on an overhanging limb of the massive blackjack oak and planned our futures. At the age of eighty, she was to be an even more famous musician than her mother, while I was going to be in my own house surrounded by sixteen great-grandchildren, an adoring husband, and a faithful dog.

  At the rate I’m going, the only part I’m going to end up with is a faithful dog.

  Now I’m telling Jack, “Oh no, you don’t,” but he just grins and plucks me off the Harley.

  The minute my feet touch that beloved, almost sacred ground, I’m a goner. And I can’t say I’m all that sorry, either.

  Much, much later, as I brush grass off my skirt I tell Jack, “Don’t think this means you’re going to get custody of Elvis.”

  He swats me on the butt, tosses me onto his Harley, and roars off.

  But I’m not fixing to start feeling guilty. Love makes fools of us all, and that’s all I’m saying on that subject. Besides, dallying with my ex is better than being roadkill.

  “Callie, you have grass in your hair.” Lovie’s sharp blue eyes never miss a thing.

  “Oh, shoot.” I reach up and brush the bits and pieces out, hopefully before Uncle Charlie or any of the Latons notice.

  We’re in the boardroom at Eternal Rest where Grover Grimsley, who happens to be my divorce lawyer, is setting up a screen so we can watch Dr. Laton deliver funeral instructions as well as his last will and testament.

  “Jack?” Lovie asks.

  “How’d you know?”

  “You’re predictable. And he’s just downright dangerous, which is why he still rings every one of your chimes.”

  “I want a steady man with a decent nine-to-five job.”

  “I’d amputate my G-spot with a shish kebab stick before I’d have a man that boring. And so would you.”

  “Hush up, Lovie. Grover will hear you.”

  “I wonder if he’s partial to cream puffs.”

  Lovie and I slide into seats at the back so we can spy.

  When I arrived at Eternal Rest with a beard burn located where I’ll never tell and a nagging fear about Elvis, Uncle Charlie told me, “I want you and Lovie to observe everybody. It had to be one of the Latons who surprised us with the pasties, because they were the only ones here besides us.”

  Now Uncle Charlie’s up front saying, “It looks like everybody is here.”

  “Not quite.” Grover looks at his watch, then at the back door.

  As if she’s been waiting for her cue, an aging Amazonian peroxided blonde strolls in wearing widow’s weeds that show enough bare leg and cleavage to scandalize everybody in the Bible Belt. Lifting the veil of her sassy sequined hat with one black-gloved hand, she winks at me, which is a pure miracle. She’s wearing so much mascara it’s a wonder she can move her eyes.

  “Do you mind?” the woman asks, then sits beside me, crosses her legs, and proceeds to dangle a sling-backed shoe with killer stiletto heels. Her fragrance wafts over me in a nauseating wave—Poison.

  Lovie punches me in the ribs and I punch her back while Grover says, “Let’s proceed.”

  He dims the lights and switches on the DVD video player and up pops a larger-than-life image of Dr. Leonard Laton.

  “Well, I guess you’re all here except Bevvie, who is probably off shooting something, which means I’m dead and all of you can breathe a sigh of relief. Janice, stop your silly histrionics, and, Mellie, you never did give a damn about me, so don’t start pretending now.”

  Janice leans on her husband’s shoulder in a fake swoon I can spot a mile away while Mellie sits stiff-backed. The woman beside me takes a man’s handkerchief with a monogrammed M out of a black sequined evening bag.

  “You’re in good hands with my buddy Charlie Valentine, who’s not only the best undertaker in Mississippi but the best fisherman. Much as it will pain all of you to hang around and look at my carcass, I’m not fixing to be put in the ground till every one of you is here. And I don’t want a single one of you crying at my funeral.”

  “How could he?” Janice yells, but when her hu
sband rises to escort her from the room, she jerks his coattail, and he plops back into his chair.

  As if he had anticipated her reaction, Dr. Laton says, “You didn’t shed a tear nor lift a hand while I wasted away at Peaceful Pines Nursing Home. For that reason and many more that are none of your damned business, I leave my house in Tupelo, my condo in Key West, three million dollars in stocks and mutual funds, and my Mercedes Benz to Bubbles Malone.”

  The woman beside me smothers a sound with her handkerchief that might be mistaken for grief if you weren’t sitting elbow to elbow.

  “Bubbles, strut your stuff, honey, and finish scandalizing this greedy bunch.” Dr. Laton laughs before he fades to silence.

  Bubbles rises on a wave of Poison and takes a turn around the room that makes Gypsy Rose Lee look like Mary Poppins. She stops in front of Bradford, strips off one of her long black gloves, and playfully pops him on the leg.

  “This is an outrage.” Janice lunges out of her seat, and I’ll swear if Bradford hadn’t restrained his wife, she might have clawed six inches of pancake makeup off Bubbles’ face.

  “Janice, what are we going to do?” Mellie asks.

  “Break the will, you fool.”

  As Bubbles settles back beside me, the image of Dr. Laton flickers, then becomes clear again. “Did I say being of sound mind? If not, put it in your pipe and smoke it. There’s not a lawyer in the U.S. who can prove me mentally incompetent. Kevin, you’re the only member of my family who didn’t act like I was some kind of horse’s ass. I know you’ll probably squander it, but I’m leaving you a million dollars.”

  Kevin surprises me by taking the news without revealing a single emotion.

  “The rest of my estate is to be equally divided between Peaceful Pines and whatever charities Grover Grimsley sees fit. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an appointment with the devil.”

  As Dr. Laton vanishes from the screen, the Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes cartoon logo comes up. For a while the only sound we hear is the raucous laughter of Woody Woodpecker.