The Ladies Farm Read Free Page B

the hysterical phone call from Barbara. As if Della were her closest friend and she had no one else to turn to. Then the whole maddening mess at the house, while she helped Barbara track her son Dickie down at the hospital where he was a resident and then, as Barbara sobbed wrenchingly, taking the phone and telling poor Dickie that his mother couldn’t talk because his father had had a stroke on his way to meet her plane and had run the car into a ditch.
    It had been hours before Dickie had appeared and she could escape to Sydonia to confess it all to Pauline. And what was there to do, then, but wail her regrets that she had let him leave early that morning because Barbara was expected back from Chicago? Della didn’t want to relive it now. Stay buried! she ordered the resentment she had felt as she had comforted Barbara. Stay buried with the guilt that her final night with Richard had not been particularly meaningful, that she had been just a little short with him that morning because she knew he was anxious about picking up Barbara. And stay buried, Della demanded of the teeth-gnashing frustration that when she had returned to Fort Worth, she had had no role at the funeral other than that of sympathetic friend to Richard’s grieving widow.
    The present needs your attention now, Della scolded herself. Worry about what’s gnawing at Pauline.
    It was too much to ask, I should never have confided in her, Della thought, but she knew it was bogus. She could not imagine keeping it all to herself; she would have died of grief.
    No one dies of grief, she lectured herself. That’s the hell of it.
    Della dumped the rolls into the warming drawer. “I’m checking on Kat,” she announced, and headed out to the living room.
    It was actually their lobby, with the desk at one end in front of a pegboard with room keys. Kat stood in front of the bookcase where they kept the CD player. She was holding the plastic case bearing the close-up of Dolly Parton and she was staring at it and, without making any sound at all, she was sobbing.
    “Kat?” Della hurried across the room and put a hand around her shoulder. “Katherine? What’s the matter?”
    The hand holding the CD case rose and fell with the futility of the effort, and Kat let herself be led to the sofa where they sank down together. “He loved Dolly Parton,” she whispered, her voice shaking with her sharp intake of breath. “It was his secret, he said. He loved her for those big tits of hers and he loved to listen to her.” Kat wiped at her cheeks with the palm of her free hand and shook her head. “I was so stupid,” she whispered. “I thought if we played it while we were in bed then he’d think of me whenever he heard Dolly Parton. But all he ever thought about were those big tits.”

    Della closed her eyes a second as she pulled Kat close to her. A mild, citrus scent rose from Kat’s hair, and Della inhaled deeply as she felt Kat’s shoulders shaking. You must not be angry at Kat, she lectured herself. You must not be ugly to Kat. And you must not tell Kat.
    But Kat, of course, could not wait to tell Della. She choked out the whole predictable tale in a few minutes. How she met Richard at a Texas Medical Association meeting. How he convinced her to move her office from Dallas to Fort Worth because Fort Worth was ripe forpractice management consultants. How she recommended his software and he recommended her services. “It was just business, and then it wasn’t. I was so young then. It was before I got married.”
    “And it didn’t start again?” Della fought the anxiety in her voice. “After you and Grant split up?”
    “No.” Kat shook her head, puzzling at what seemed to be a fresh question. “I don’t know why, neither one of us seemed interested.”
    Della tried hard not to sound relieved. “It must have been hard to keep secret all this time.”
    “Oh, yes,” Kat resumed.
    This is how you comfort a friend, Della thought as Kat poured out the