Sharp_Objects

she’s dead.” He let out a quiet wail, and Meredith wrapped her arms grudgingly around him. “Someone killed my sister.”

    T here would be no formal dinner that night, as Miss Adora wasn’t feeling well, Gayla informed me. I assume it was my mother’s affectation to request the Miss in front of her name, and I tried to imagine how the conversation might go. Gayla, the best servants in the best households call their mistresses by their formal names. We want to be the best, don’t we? Something like that.
    Whether it was my argument with my mother or Amma’s that was the cause of the trouble, I wasn’t sure. I could hear them bickering like pretty birds in my mother’s room, Adora accusing Amma, correctly, of having driven the golf cart without permission. Like all rural towns, Wind Gap has an obsession with machinery. Most homes own a car and a half for every occupant (the half being an antique collectible, or an old piece of crap on blocks, depending on the income bracket), plus boats, Jet Skis, scooters, tractors, and, among the elite of Wind Gap, golf carts, which younger kids without licenses use to whip around town. Technically illegal, but no one ever stops them. I guessed my mother had tried to withhold this bit of freedom from Amma after the murders. I would have. Their fight squeaked on like an old seesaw for nearly half an hour. Don’t lie to me, little girl…. The warning was so familiar it gave me an old feeling of unease. So Amma did occasionally get caught.
    When the phone rang, I picked up, just so Amma wouldn’t lose her momentum, and was surprised to hear the cheerleader staccato of my old friend Katie Lacey. Angie Papermaker was having the girls over for a Pity Party. Drink a bunch of wine, watch a sad movie, cry, gossip. I should come. Angie lived in the New Rich part of town—huge mansions at the outskirts of Wind Gap. Practically Tennessee. I couldn’t tell from Katie’s voice if that made her jealous or smug. Knowing her, probably a bit of both. She’d always been one of those girls who wanted what anyone else had, even if she didn’t want it.
    I knew when I saw Katie and her friends at the Keenes’ home that I’d have to submit to at least one evening out. It was this or finish transcribing my talk with John, which was making me dangerously sad. Plus, like Annabelle, Jackie, and that catty group of my mother’s friends, this gathering was likely to yield more information than I’d get through a dozen formal interviews.
    As soon as she pulled up in front of the house I realized that Katie Lacey, now Katie Brucker, had, predictably, done well for herself. I knew this both from the fact it took her just five minutes to pick me up (turns out her home was but a block away) and what she picked me up in: one of those huge, stupid SUVs that cost more than some people’s homes and provide just as many comforts. Behind my head, I could hear the DVD player tittering with some kids’ show, despite the absence of kids. In front of me, the dashboard navigator was providing unnecessary play-by-play directions.
    Her husband, Brad Brucker, was studying at her father’s feet, and when Daddy retired, he’d take over the business himself. They peddled a controversial hormone used to bulk up chickens with horrific rapidity. My mother always sniffed at this—she’d never use anything that put such a stunning rush on the growing process. That didn’t mean she eschewed hormones: My mother’s pigs were pricked with chemicals till they plumped and reddened like squirting cherries, till their legs couldn’t support their juicy girth. But it was done at a more leisurely pace.
    Brad Brucker was the type of husband to live where Katie said, impregnate Katie when she asked, buy Katie the Pottery Barn sofa she wanted, and otherwise shut up. He was good-looking if you looked at him long enough, and he had a dick the size of my ring finger. This I knew firsthand, thanks to a slightly mechanical exchange my freshman year. But apparently the tiny thing worked fine: Katie was at the end of her first trimester for her third kid. They were going to keep trying till she had a boy. We really want a little rascal running around.
    Talk of me, Chicago, no husband yet but fingers crossed! Talk of her, her hair, her new vitamin program, Brad, her two girls, Emma and Mackenzie, Wind Gap ladies’ auxiliary, and the horrible job they did with the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Then sigh: those poor little girls.