Mallory hesitated. At least Maybelle hadn't offered her a controlled substance. "Do you have decaffeinated?"
Maybelle sighed. "Another one of them. Honest to gosh, you young folks," she said, then screamed, "Dickie!" Mallory levitated straight up out of her chair, but Maybelle went on in her normal nasal twang. "Y'all stay up all night, but you're scared to death of caffeine."
Richard reappeared. "You rang?" he said eloquently.
"Got another one of them decaf drinkers. Perk us up a pot, will ya, sugar?"
"It's already brewing," Richard, or Dickie, replied. He gave Mallory a look that said, "Isn't she something?" over the top of Maybelle's head. "Maybelle, I told you she wouldn't want your fully leaded stuff."
Maybelle looked discontentedly after him as he vanished, his big frame silent as a cat's. "Nobody wants real coffee anymore," she said. "The kind that's perked on the stove and reheated 'til it's like axle grease. Now that's coffee you can sink your teeth into."
Mallory began to worry again. Her good manners told her she had to stay long enough for the cup of coffee she'd just custom-ordered, but no longer than that, and there were a couple of things she had to get straight before she revealed anything about herself to this supposed imagemaker, who looked and sounded as if she could use one of her own. "What do you charge for your services?"
"We don' need to tawk about that jes' yet," Maybelle said with a wave of a diamond-studded hand.
Mallory heard a loud throat-clearing sound, then Richard reappeared, positioning himself behind Maybelle like a bodyguard. "Ms. Ewing charges one hundred dollars an hour and prefers to see new clients daily for the first week, tapering off in subsequent weeks," he intoned, sounding like a recording. "She'll see you each evening at seven and at four on weekends until further notice. A typical client can expect a fee of about two thousand dollars. Cream and sugar?" he added, circling the desk with the silver tray he'd been holding while he did his piece.
"Black, thanks."
Maybelle smiled. "Way-ell, there's some hope for ya."
Mallory frowned back. There was one more thing she had to know. "What sort of training did you have for this business?" she said, trying hard to say it nicely, as if she were merely interested in Maybelle's background.
"Training?" Maybelle cackled. "No need to worry yourself about that, hon. I got me plenty of trainin' in all kinds of things. Look at them diplomas." She cocked a thumb over her shoulder as Richard drifted out of the room.
Mallory gripped the handle of an exquisite bone china teacup as if it were the only piece of debris at hand after a shipwreck, and she directed her gaze to the wall behind Maybelle. It was papered with diplomas in gilded frames.
She narrowed her eyes. Diplomas could easily be faked. She had a strong feeling that the woman behind the desk wouldn't hesitate to buy diplomas by the square foot.
"And besides," Maybelle was saying, "look at me." She stood up.
That was the problem. Mallory was looking at her. The woman topped out at five feet, and below the elegant black jacket Mallory saw pressed light blue jeans and a pair of heeled boots that upped the definition of cowboy boots by a quantum leap. They were black, tooled in yellow and purple pansies.
Mallory blinked, hesitated, left her saucer on the edge of the desk and stood, still holding the cup by its delicate handle. She carefully walked around the desk, narrowly avoiding being gored by a protruding horn, to join Maybelle at the wall.
Many of the diplomas were from correspondence schools and announced Maybelle's successful completion of courses in an amazing variety of fields, from mathematics to pottery-making. "Don't pay them no mind," Maybelle said, dismissing them with a wave. The enormous diamonds in her rings sent rainbows across the high ceiling of the room. "I took them courses to inner-tain and edgy-cate myself after Hadley died. My husband," she explained.
"I'm sorry," Mallory said.
"I was, too," Maybelle said, "and real bored without him around to fight with." She moved on down the wall and so did Mallory.
Here there were diplomas written in Chinese characters and a diploma from the Parsons School of Design. "You were an interior designer?" Mallory said, casting a glance back at the desk.
"Oh, my, yeah," Maybelle said. "That was the most fun I ever had."
"And lucrative," Mallory murmured, trying to imagine a house this woman had had a hand in decorating, trying to imagine her on the loose in China. She couldn't even speak English.
"Way-ell, no." Maybelle looked reflective. "The money never interested me very much. But I do get bored real easy, so next I got me a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology-"
The coffee sloshed onto Mallory's only pair of black trousers.
"-then an MBA, so's I'd know what y'all young folks was up against in the business world. What line of work did you say you was in?"
The psychology degree was from Johns Hopkins and the MBA from New YorkUniversity. "I'm a lawyer," Mallory said, feeling humbled.
"I may get me one of them degrees next," Maybelle declared. "Dickie's significant other? He's involved in this lawsuit with a whole bunch of other people, and I want to tell you, that lawyer's gonna make out good."
Mallory tensed up. "Ah, what kind of lawsuit?"
Maybelle stepped toward her desk and Mallory followed. "The craziest thing happened," Maybelle said as she settled herself down. "He's got the show biz bug, and he was going to audition for this part where they wanted a redhead-"
It couldn't be. It just couldn't.
"Now that we've gotten to know each other, mind if I take off this jacket?" Maybelle interrupted herself, taking it off without waiting for Mallory to answer.
"Of course-" she looked down at the T-shirt beneath the jacket "-not." The T-shirt wasn't your customary snakeskin print. It depicted a python wrapped around Maybelle's skinny body, its head curling down over one shoulder.
"-and the stuff dyed his hair green."
"No!" Mallory said, breaking eye contact with the python as she realized she had something worse than snakes to worry about.
"Oh, yes," Maybelle said, misunderstanding Mallory's explosive response. "And he's real thorough about his character development, y'know? So he didn't just dye the hair on his head, nosirree. He dyed everything, if y'all get my drift."
Mallory, perched at the very edge of her chair, said, "You mean-"
"I mean for a while there even his little tallywhacker was green," Maybelle said. "And I want to tell y'all he was mighty put out." She paused for a moment. "They have an apartment here in the house. The tawk gets kindly personal sometimes."
"Maybelle, there's something I have to tell you," Mallory began. How could Maybelle help her if she had a conflict of interests?
Maybelle leaned forward. "Well, of course you do, and here I am chattering on about stuff. Y'all came here for help. Help gettin' your man, a little bird told me. Sounds to me like a real intrestin' project."
Silently Mallory weighed her choices. This woman might be crazy as a cat on uppers, but she did have all those degrees and all those diamonds, and she did have intelligent eyes. Why did she have to know that Mallory was on the opposite side of her housemate's lawsuit? Only because Mallory felt morally obligated to tell her. But why? If Maybelle herself were involved in the case, that would be different, but-
While her mind went around in circles, Maybelle rattled on. "I don't know what you're so worried about. You're purty. You seem smart. Whatcha want to change?"
Locations? Go back to the hotel and remember this experience as nothing more than a very interesting evening? The conclusion she came to, after weighing all the evidence, was that in the course of one momentous day she'd sat on Santa's lap, she'd made herself come here, she'd faced up to a doorknocker that looked like Andre the Giant naked and she hadn't run away. She might never have this much courage again. It's now or never. "Me," Mallory whispered. "I want to change me, from the inside out."
5
"The wedding was a hoot," Athena said. "I had to compete with all that Eurotrash the princess runs around with and I knew there wasn't a designer on the face of this earth who would impress them, so I went down to the West Forties and bought just tons and tons of silk chiffon in a bunch of colors, and then I-"
Maybe she's had lipo and they accidentally suctioned out her brain along with the fat. Carter forced a smile toward the gorgeous creature sitting opposite him at Le Bernardin. Athena was six feet tall and even skinnier than she'd been the last time he saw her, when she'd weighed maybe ninety-six pounds. The dinner she wasn't eating would cost him $250, easy.
"-Fashion Institute, and he just swirled it all around me like a toga." Athena paused briefly. "Sort of like a toga, because togas are usually white, aren't they? But this wasn't-this was all those colors I picked out, so-"
Thank you for clarifying. He tried to imagine having a conversation like this with Mallory, but he couldn't. Wonder who Mallory's going out with. Somebody she's known a long time? A family friend? A relative?
It was true that he and Mallory had had a conversation about socks. What had that scene in the sock department been all about? She'd come prissing over to interfere in his sock purchase-like she knew better than he did how many socks he needed-and standing there, feeling pretty annoyed by her know-it-all attitude, he'd had the strangest urge to kiss her. The closer he'd gotten to her, the stronger the urge had become. He'd had to get a firm grip on himself to keep from giving her a sizzling one right there in the store.
Then he'd gotten all upset again when she and Santa Claus had done all that whispering to each other. What, he wanted to know, were they whispering about? Did Santa Claus ask her for a date? Carter had been slouching, but this thought bolted him upright in his chair. The way the guy had come on to her-it didn't seem ethical. Santa Claus was supposed to be faithful to Mrs. Claus. Carter drew his eyebrows together.