Personally, I was keeping mine exactly as it was. If I ever got married. I had to go on a date first for that to happen.
“How long has Hyacinth been married? My invitation must have gotten lost in the mail.”
Dorothy set down a stem and picked up another, unhurried. "Three years ago. That’s when things cooled between Evelyn and Hyacinth."
"What happened?"
"Nobody quite knows." Dorothy's shears paused, just for a second, which told me she knew more than nothing. "Something shifted, a few years back now. More like the temperature just dropped between them, gradually, and then all at once. One spring Hyacinth was co-chairing the auction with Evelyn's blessing, practically heir apparent, and the next spring she'd been quietly moved off every committee that mattered and nobody would say why. Evelyn never explained it. Hyacinth never explained it. Which, in this town, is its own kind of confession, if you think about it. If it was nothing, somebody would've explained it by now, just to get everyone to stop speculating. The silence is doing a lot of work."
I filed that away, that phrase, the silence doing a lot of work, because it was exactly the kind of thing I said on the podcast when I wanted to sound wise. "Any theories floating around? Even bad ones?"
"Every theory you can imagine. Some folks say it was about the Maxwell-McClintock marriage starting to come apart and Evelyn taking sides she shouldn't have. Some say Hyacinth got too big for her britches and Evelyn didn't care for being upstaged by her own protégée. I heard once it was over something Hyacinth said about Belle Rêve's history at a luncheon, something that annoyed Evelyn no end, though I never got the particulars." She shrugged. "Whatever it was, it never thawed. Hyacinth stayed on the committee anyway. Demoted, sidelined, whatever you want to call it, but she stayed put, right there under Evelyn's nose, for the last two years, being pleasant about it but I imagine seething inside."
"That does seem odd," I agreed, working very hard to decide if this was relevant or just two catty queens fighting for dominance. "Especially if Evelyn had frozen her out that thoroughly."
"Well, and here's the other odd thing, now that you mention it, and I probably shouldn't say this, but you're not the type to run and repeat things, are you?"
This was not, strictly speaking, an accurate assessment of me, but I was not about to correct her. “No, of course not. You can tell me anything.”
"Hyacinth's had a rough go of it financially, since the divorce. Robert did not leave her in good shape, is the polite way to put it. There was a house that had to be sold, and not for what they'd hoped, and I know for a fact her dues to the committee were behind for two years running, because I do the books alongside the treasurer and I saw the ledger myself."
"Behind, like, unpaid?" These Society dues were nothing to scoff at. Fortunately—or unfortunately?— for me, Odette had paid my dues for the next ten years.
"Unpaid, and then, this past year, paid." Dorothy set her shears down entirely now, which felt significant, like she'd finally decided the ranunculus could wait for this. "Paid in full, right on time, and I remember being surprised, because I'd fully expected to have the same conversation with her I'd had the two years prior, the gentle reminder, the little grace period we extend to members who are struggling. And instead the balance just cleared. I didn't think much of it at the time. People's circumstances change. Maybe the divorce settlement finally came through, or a relative passed, or who knows."
Hyacinth married and divorced and I had known nothing about it. We really didn’t run in the same circles. Or hadn’t.
"Interesting." Was Hyacinth a jewel thief? A hired hit woman? My imagination ran wild.
"I think," Dorothy said slowly, choosing the words the way she chose stems, testing each one before she committed to it, "that Evelyn Carrington told me, at the spring planning luncheon, not to worry about following up with Hyacinth on her balance, because it had been taken care of. I assumed she meant Hyacinth had finally paid up herself, and I never had a reason to look closer, because why would I. But I do the books, Harper, and I know what came in from Hyacinth's account, and it wasn't the full amount. It was a partial payment. The rest of that balance got covered from somewhere else entirely, and it wasn't ever formally logged as a donation, which is the kind of thing that would normally make my accountant's heart very unhappy, except Evelyn ran that committee like her own personal fiefdom and nobody argued with how she chose to keep the books balanced."
The shop was quiet except for the hum of the cooler case.
"So Evelyn paid Hyacinth's dues," I said slowly, "for a woman she'd frozen out for years. Quietly. Off the books."
"That's what it looks like, yes."
"That's generous," I said, and even as the word left my mouth it sat wrong. Generosity, in my experience, usually came with some acknowledgment attached, a plaque, a mention in the newsletter, a hug at the gala. Evelyn Carrington, from everything I'd gathered about her in the last two days, did not strike me as a woman who gave anything away quietly, without making sure everyone in a three-block radius understood exactly how generous she was being. Evelyn was a woman who'd say something loaded about truth coming to light while lifting a mint julep in front of two hundred people. Quiet generosity toward a protégée she'd spent years icing out didn't fit the shape of her at all, and things that didn't fit the shape of a person were usually the things worth looking at twice.
"That's what I thought too, at first," Dorothy said. "Now I don't know what I think. You start turning a thing over enough times, generous starts to look like a lot of other things, depending on the light."
"I definitely agree with that.”
Dorothy picked her shears back up and went back to the ranunculus, and I recognized the gesture for what it was, a door closing. Dorothy had already said more than she'd meant to, and now she was retreating to the safety of her flowers, and pushing harder would only make her clam up entirely.
I’d learned that the hard way with Hollis.
"Anyway," Dorothy said, brisk now, "I'm sure it's nothing. People help each other out. Maybe Evelyn felt guilty about however things went sideways between them, and this was her way of making amends without having to actually say the words. Some people are like that. They'd rather pull out their pocketbook than say I'm sorry."
"Maybe," I said, though I didn't believe it, and I don't think Dorothy fully believed it either, based on the way she wouldn't quite meet my eyes when she said it.
“What should we do for Evelyn’s service?” she asked, suddenly all business.
“Something that you think my Aunt Odette would have picked out.”
“Aw, that’s a lovely gesture, Harper. Your aunt would be proud.”
After we handled business, I left with a bouquet of ranunculus she pressed on me that I hadn't asked for and definitely hadn't paid for, and the uneasy, restless feeling I got whenever a situation handed me a fact that fit two completely different stories depending on which way you turned it.
