one had any doubt the Lutherans would hear all about the whole debacle.
Veronica slid her glass of iced tea, untouched since Erma Mae brought it to her, a few inches further away from her so she could rest her elbow on the table as she presented her back to Odette. To Clarice, she said, “I was thinking you could come with me tomorrow to look at invitations and some swatches for the girls’ dresses.”
Clarice didn’t want to spend an extra minute with Veronica. The holidays weren’t that far off and she would be stuck with her at family gatherings soon enough. But she also had an awful feeling that this was a little taste of justice coming her way. She had sought Odette’s counsel when helping to put together Carolyn’s wedding, and she had initially been sincere in asking for it. Denise’s ceremony, which Odette had helped to plan, had been lovely. But once Clarice got going, she hadn’t been able to stop herself from taking note of each detail of Denise’s wedding and then doing her best to ostentatiously outdo them all. Now Veronica was asking for advice, and Clarice knew without a doubt that her cousin would one-up everything Clarice had done for her Carolyn’s nuptials.
Clarice was reminded then of what she found most insufferable about Veronica. Her cousin had an awful way of making her look at her own worst traits just when she didn’t want to see them. Whenever Clarice was around Veronica, she had to acknowledge that in Veronica she saw herself. It frightened her a little to think that the primary difference between them was the moderating influence of Odette and Barbara Jean.
Thanks to Odette stepping in again, Clarice didn’t have to commit to helping her cousin that afternoon. “Veronica,” Odette said, “I think maybe Sharon’s ready to get back to her run.” They looked outside and saw that Sharon had left the car behind and was moving down the block with renewed determination in her stride.
Veronica said, “You can’t keep that girl away from her jogging. I had some trouble persuading her to get with the program at first, but now she’s devoted.”
Not a second later, Sharon veered off the street and straight into the front door of Donut Heaven bakery.
Veronica grumbled, “That girl,” and ran out of the restaurant. She hopped into her new car and drove a third of a block up the street to the donut shop. She dashed inside and came out seconds later, dragging Sharon with her. As her mother wrestled her into the car, Sharon cradled one of Donut Heaven’s bright pink boxes against her chest as if it were a newborn baby.
Odette cleaned the last bit of gravy from her plate with a dinner roll and said, “That woman ruins my appetite.” Then she gnawed the gristle from the end of a pork chop bone.
They left the All-You-Can-Eat earlier than usual that day, all of them pleading fatigue. For the rest of the evening Clarice thought about Minnie’s vision. She wasn’t becoming a convert or anything like that. She knew that it took no psychic ability to envision Richmond with another woman. Hell, it didn’t even take a good pair of eyes. What she thought about was how peculiar it was that having that nasty woman rub Richmond’s behavior in her face in public had hardly had any effect on her. If such an incident had occurred a few months earlier, she’d have taken to her bed for days. But, even as it happened, the only sensation Clarice had been aware of was a fierce desire to be alone with her piano.
Chapter 13
After Lester’s business was sold and all of the money issues had been seen to, Barbara Jean decided that she needed some sort of regular activity to give shape to her days. So she found a job. Then she found another. And another. All three were volunteer positions; still, it was the first time she’d had to report to work since she’d polished nails and administered shampoos at a hair salon when she was a teenager. On Mondays and Wednesdays, she delivered flowers to patients at University Hospital. Out of respect for her recent loss, the volunteer coordinator assigned her to the maternity ward, where she mostly encountered happy new parents and avoided the terminally ill. It wouldn’t have mattered, though. They could have thrown death in her face all day and Barbara Jean wouldn’t have blinked. With the help of an occasional sip