had the feeling she had stepped inside an Ayn Rand novel, from the murals on the walls to the way her high heels cracked like gun shots on the marble as she walked down the empty halls to those smooth, brass elevators that shot her up twenty-six floors in five seconds. The only side effect of her lost weekend was that her eyes were puffy from so much sleep but Magda, the Yugoslavian makeup woman, would fix that as she always did, making her sit for ten minutes with tea bags on her eyes.
Her interview with Helen Gurley Brown went very well. It was supposed to have been a fluff piece on the
Cosmopolitan
editor but it turned out to be sharp, funny, and just spicy enough, so Dena was in a good mood when she got to her office and found a beautiful bouquet of flowers and a huge fruit basket from Julian Amsley, the president of the network, that said,
Heard you wowed them at the luncheon. Thanks from your network family.
She had almost forgotten the last, long evening until she started going through her messages and saw one that had come in while she was on the air:
Baby Girl, we are thrilled you are coming home! Please don’t forget to call and let us know what flight you will be on so we can pick you up at the airport.
Your Elmwood Springs family
,
Norma, Macky, and Aunt Elner
The people standing outside her door at the water fountain heard a loud “Oh, God.” Dena leaned over her desk with her head in her hands wondering what in the world had possessed her to call and tell them she was coming to Missouri, of all places! Elmwood Springs was nothing more than the name of a town she had lived in for a short time as a child. Her father and grandparents were buried there, but other than that it was nothing more to her than some vague memory. She didn’t even know where it was. And why Norma and Macky? Not only did she not know them well, she had not even
thought
of them in years. She couldn’t even remember how they were related. She knew that Norma was her third or fourth cousin, or something. But they might as well be perfect strangers. Sure, they always sent her birthday cards, Easter cards, and some kind of preserves at Christmas, and for years, no matter where she moved, they always found her and sent her a subscription to a religious magazine, some
Daily Word
thing that she promptly discarded along with the weird brown preserves. Norma and Macky were sweet people but she hadn’t even seen them but once and that was years before when they had come to New York for a few days. As nice as they were, it had been a strain. They had stayed at the Hilton and J.C., as a favor, had taken them to see the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building. All she did was get them tickets to Radio City and the
Tonight Show
and go to dinner with them and all they had talked about was meeting Wayne Newton, who had been a guest that night on the
Tonight Show
, and how really friendly he was. A friend of hers had arranged for them to go backstage after the show and meet him and get an autographed picture.
Dena was baffled. Why, of
all
the people in her address book, had she picked them to call? Maybe it was because she had been having that dream about her mother and that house again; maybe it had been the aquavit. Whatever the reason, she wondered how she was going to get out of this one.
This is
not
my fault
, she thought.
I’m going to kill J.C. He’s the one who ordered all those drinks in the first place.
Going to Siberia
Elmwood Springs, Missouri
April 3, 1973
For dinner, Norma had tested several recipes out of
The Neighbor Dorothy Cookbook.
She had told Macky that she just felt like trying something new for a change, no big deal, but he knew she was trying out dishes to fix when Baby Girl came home. She knew he knew but they both played along. He had been served: Minnie Dell Crower’s “Meatloaf Delight,” Leota Kling’s “Lima Bean and Cheese Casserole,” Virginia Mae’s “Scalloped Turnips,” John and Susan
Cari Quinn, Taryn Elliott