Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes by Cathy Holton Read Free Book Online Page A

think so.” Lavonne lifted her glass and sipped her tea. “It’s just you and me.”
    Nita thought,
Well, not exactly.
She didn’t have the courage to tell Lavonne that Charles had insisted she invite her mother-in-law to the meeting. Lavonne would find out soon enough and in the meantime, maybe she’d be able to eat a little something before Virginia arrived.
             
    T HEY HAD JUST ordered lunch when Eadie Boone showed up. She swept into the restaurant wearing dark sunglasses and a long white knit dress with high-heeled sandals. Over in the corner a group of tourists quit looking at glossy brochures of Ithaca and looked instead at Eadie. She stood by the hostess desk waiting for everyone to get a good look at her. Eadie was aware that the entire town had been gossiping about her and expecting her to do something desperate after Trevor’s latest infidelity. It was hard to be confident when the whole town was against you, but Eadie was used to it by now. She liked a challenge. She had spent her whole life proving that she was up to any obstacle fate could throw in her path. So far she had overcome poverty, a tragic childhood, and loneliness. Handling a wayward husband was nothing compared to all that. She saw Lavonne and Nita and waved.
    Lavonne was glad to see her. Eadie looked pretty good considering her husband had left her and her life was rumored to be in ruins. Lavonne had always assumed the Boones would make it, they’d been so crazy about each other, and their marriage, although unconventional, had seemed to work for them.
    “I didn’t think you’d come,” she said to Eadie as she sat down.
    “You sounded desperate on the phone,” Eadie said, grinning. Now that she had decided to crash the firm’s party, she felt helping Lavonne plan the fiasco was the least she could do. Not that she had any intention of telling Lavonne about her party-crashing scheme. Lavonne would just try and talk her out of it, and Eadie was too far along to change her plans now. She knew this party might be the last chance she had of convincing Trevor Boone that he still loved her, before he made the mistake of his life and filed for divorce.
    “I guess I am pretty desperate,” Lavonne said, thankful that Eadie had shown up. No one knew how to plan a party better than Eadie Boone.
    Lavonne had been going to Boone parties for years. The first Boone party she’d attended had been a “get acquainted throw down” the Boones had hosted to welcome the Zibolskys to town. Lavonne had thought Eadie the most beautiful woman she’d ever seen, and the most genuine. She had thought Eadie was wasting her time in Ithaca, Georgia, when she could be out in Hollywood making movies. In those days Eadie and Trevor had a lot of bohemian friends from Athens and they’d come down on the weekends for wild parties that kept the rest of the town scandalized. It was only the fact that Trevor was a Boone, and that still meant something in this town, that kept Eadie and Trevor from becoming social outcasts.
    “Hi Nita,” Eadie said, settling her purse under the table.
    Nita gave her a little smile. She was playing with her fork, tapping it against the table like she was sending a telegraph, some kind of frantic S.O.S.
    Eadie leaned forward and peered intently into Nita’s face. “Honey, I’m worried about you,” she said. “Are you feeling okay?”
    Nita stopped telegraphing with her fork. She plucked idly at her hair. She had decided last night that she would stop reading romance novels, and she had awakened this morning to a feeling of hopelessness and pessimism about the future. Where once there had been color, now there was only drab black and white, and without her rousing adventures of love and sex on the high seas, in castles, in teepees, in harem tents, to distract her, Nita was being forced to take a good hard look at her real life. And she didn’t much like what she saw. “I’m just tired is all,” she