The Red Hat Society's Queens of Woodlawn Avenue Read online

  “Seven o’clock?” I said weakly, and Jane beamed.

  “Good girl. You’re going to be okay.”

  I wanted to believe her, but reason and hard truth were not on her side. I was a fifty-year-old broke divorcee, living in a run-down, eighty-year-old house and wondering how I was going to pay next month’s electric bill. But even at my lowest, I still had my pride. It was about all I had, but for the time being, it was going to have to be enough.

  Jane waved good-bye and disappeared through the front door, leaving me alone with the pound cake. I straightened my spine, walked to the coffee table, and scooped up the Twinkie wrappers and Coke cans. Whether I wanted it or not, two things were apparently going to happen.

  With or without Jim, life was going to go on.

  And much to my consternation, I was going to learn to play bridge.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Declarer and the Dummy

  I had heard about those Red Hat Society ladies, had seen them at tea rooms around Nashville and traveling in flocks through the lobby of the Opryland Hotel. I just never envisioned a scenario where I would actually contemplate becoming one. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and, after all, the women I’d seen looked pretty normal, despite the purple outfits and feather boas that went with the hats.

  Surely it was just a harmless pastime. But as I discovered promptly at seven o’clock that evening, the petite Jane Mansfield’s red hat collection made the number of shoes in Imelda Marcos’s closet look paltry.

  “Veil? No veil?” Jane asked over her shoulder as she opened one large hat box after another. “Or flowers, maybe?”

  They had their own room, her hats. She had not been kidding when she said the Woodlawn Avenue Bridge Club only took two things seriously: their food and their headgear.

  “A veil,” I murmured. “The better to hide behind.” That afternoon, I had girded my loins with crisp capri pants and gone on an expedition to Harris-Teeter, the nearby grocery store. At first I’d been tempted to stock up on Hershey’s miniatures and potato chips, but self-preservation had reared its head and forced me to spend some quality time in the produce aisle. I now had enough fruits and vegetables to open my own stand. Way too much for one person, and I’d spent more than I should have, but it had felt good to do something positive for a change.

  “Voilà!” With a rustle of tissue paper, Jane pulled a red monstrosity from its nesting place. “Now this is a birthday hat.” She swooped over and plopped it atop my head before spinning me around to look in the mirror. “You can’t help but celebrate when you’re wearing this.”

  From beneath the numerous plumes, I nodded my agreement. Weird as it might be, I did feel marginally better with the thing on my head. I felt a bit regal and, well, a little more powerful. But did I really have the panache to carry off meeting two total strangers while wearing it?

  “Don’t worry,” Jane said, as if reading my thoughts. “If anything, you’ll be the tame one in the crowd.”

  And as it turned out, I was.

  The other two women arrived in a flurry of red hats and hot dishes. Jane introduced me as she tended to the arrangement of the food on the sideboard in her dining room.

  “This is Grace, our Queen of Spades,” Jane said, deftly sliding hot pads under the dishes that required them. Grace had to be eighty if she was a day and her towering confection of a hat would have been right at home in Marie Antoinette’s court.

  “I buried three husbands,” she said as we hovered around the dining room table. “And every one of them died with a smile on his face.”

  “And this, of course, is Linda, our Queen of Clubs.”

  Even with her hat’s full portrait brim dipped low over one green eye, I recognized Linda St. James. As always, her hair shone like polished mahogany and her smile appeared gracious. We’d worked on several fund-raisers together through the years, and were slated to be on the planning committee for the Cannon Ball, Nashville’s most prestigious charity event. Or should I say had been slated. The first meeting of the planning committee was in a few days, and my invitation must have been lost in the mail, because I hadn’t heard a word about it.

  “Yes, we’ve met.” I tried to smile graciously, too, but fear churned through my stomach. I hadn’t counted on one of the Queens of Woodlawn Avenue being someone I knew. Nashville society could be as cutthroat as it could be caring, and I didn’t know Linda well enough to determine which of the two she might be. I’d been deserted by enough of my so-called friends over the last nine months that I’d grown wary.

  “Welcome, Ellie,” she said, her eyes soft with compassion, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

  “We’re glad you’re here,” Grace said, patting my hand. “ Now our Red Hat chapter is complete. Come on, girls. Time to get started.” She shooed us into our chairs.

  How long had it been since I’d been surrounded by three people so determined to be kind to me? Jane sat across from me and shuffled the cards while Linda, on my right, wrote something on the score sheet. I started to get nervous. Should I confess my complete ineptitude with cards up front, or let them discover for themselves what they’d done by inviting me to join them?

  “I’m afraid I’ve never played before,” I said.

  Jane set the cards in front of Linda, who simply tapped the top of the deck. “Cut the cards and you cut your luck,” she advised me.

  “I’m going to deal this first time,” Jane said to me, “but we’re going to let you be the declarer and play the hand.” With practiced movements, she picked up the cards and began distributing them with the efficiency of a Vegas pit boss. If her real estate business ever went sour, she definitely had a skill to fall back on.

  “We each get thirteen cards,” Linda advised me. “Sort them by suit, and then arrange them from highest to lowest. Ace is high.”

  Okay, well that I could probably manage. I reached for the growing pile in front of me, but Grace stopped me with a wrinkled hand. “Good bridge etiquette means waiting until all the cards have been dealt, honey.”

  I flushed as red as my hat. And then I got a little mad. Because it’s not fair when people expect you to know the rules before they’ve told you what they are. Sort of like how my husband told me he was leaving before he ever mentioned anything about being unhappy.

  “We won’t worry about bidding tonight,” Jane said as she flicked the last card onto my pile. She sat across from me. “That can come later. Right now, we’ll just concentrate on the play of the cards.”

  The other two nodded their hats in agreement.

  “Grace will lead,” Jane continued. “All we have to do is follow suit. If she plays a spade, we play a spade and so forth. The one who plays the highest card takes the trick.”

  Well, that seemed pretty straightforward. Surely I could do at least that much.

  Grace laid a jack of spades in the middle of the table. “Shouldn’t we start with a dummy?” she asked. “Let her learn to play the dummy from the start.”

  I snorted. Too late. I had recently acquired a great deal of experience in that area.

  Jane must have seen my thoughts in my expression, or at least heard them in my snort, because she laughed and shot me a reassuring smile. “In bridge, whoever wins the bidding is called the declarer. That’s you for now. Their partner, the person across from them, becomes the dummy. The dummy—me—lays her cards down, and the declarer ends up playing both hands.”

  I sighed and put my cards down. After two weeks alone in my house, I still wasn’t ready to face the world. People meant well, but even the kindest of them wanted me to buck up and do better. “Look, ladies, I’m just not up to this. You should find another fourth.”

  Grace tut-tutted. “We can’t do that, Ellie. You live in the house. You have to be the Queen of Hearts.”

  Tears welled in my eyes. This was just too bizarre and I didn’t have the emotional energy left to deal with it. I was also tired of being told what I had to do. I’d listened to enough
admonitions and lectures over the last nine months from my children, from my lawyer, from the judge. When was it going to be my turn to decide what I wanted to do?

  “I just can’t,” I managed to gasp as the tears overflowed, and everyone at the table knew I wasn’t referring to the card game. “I’m not the woman I used to be.” There, I’d said it. Named the fear that had taken up residence in my head and heart. Again, I was a walking cliché, because somewhere along the journey of marriage and motherhood, I’d lost myself.

  Grace reached over to pat me again. “There, there, honey. It’s going to be okay.”

  Linda was more straightforward. “Crying will get you nowhere, Ellie. Relationships are like bridge. You can be the one who plays the cards, or you can be the one that gets played. In a good relationship, it goes back and forth. But in a bad relationship…”

  “Never the declarer, always the dummy,” I said through my sniffles.

  Jane passed me a handkerchief across the table. “Here. This will help.”

  I smiled a watery thanks and lifted it to my nose for a good blow.

  “Stop!” Linda cried. “That’s not what it’s for.”

  “Take off your hat,” Jane instructed, “and put the handkerchief on your head.”

  My disbelief was obviously reflected on my face.

  “Really,” Linda said. “It’s a bridge tradition. To change your luck.”

  She had to be kidding.

  Feeling foolish, a state with which I had become de-pressingly familiar, I pulled off the hat and draped the handkerchief over my head. If nothing else, it was cooler than the hat, which had started to itch.

  “That very handkerchief brought me Charles, my second husband,” Grace said with a smile and a wink.

  The last thing I needed was another husband. The first one had proven to be more trouble than he was worth. The fact that I still loved him made it even more irritating.

  “Okay,” I said, picking my cards back up. Jane was right. I could spend weeks on end moping around my house, feeling sorry for myself, or I could try to move forward with my life. “Teach me how to be the declarer.”

  Linda clapped her hands together. “Bravo, Ellie. All right, now you have to play for me since I’m the dummy. I’ll lay my cards down like this, so you can see what you’ve got to work with.”

  “You mean everyone gets to see them?” I didn’t see much advantage in being the declarer if the other team got to look at the dummy’s cards, too.

  “Yes, everyone sees them,” Linda said, “but only you know how these cards do or don’t complement the ones you’re holding. Only you know what they’re worth to you.”

  To my novice eye, the dummy hand didn’t look like much to work with at all, but it was better than nothing. So was my ramshackle house, and this odd assortment of new friends. After all, I had no place to go but up, and I couldn’t afford to turn down help wherever it was offered.

  Or maybe I was just so unused to it being offered that it was hard to accept it when it finally showed up.

  We played three more hands of bridge that night before stopping to eat, and for an hour I had the pleasure of thinking about something besides the upheaval in my life. I had grasped the basic concept of following suit and taking tricks. I’d even mastered learning to count the high card points in my hand. Aces were worth four. Kings, three. Queens two, and jacks one. Jane said I’d need to know how to count my hand when it came time to learn about bidding. The enormous task of retaining all this new information overwhelmed me, so I consoled myself with generous helpings from Jane’s sideboard.

  I also quickly learned why Jane had seemed so at home in my house. Her floor plan was identical to mine, although her immaculately decorated home looked like something out of Veranda while my décor was more Goodwill Weekly. I asked her about the similarities in the layout as we worked our way through Linda’s poppy seed chicken and Grace’s mouthwatering squash casserole.

  “Flossie Etherington, the original Queen of Hearts, built your house,” Jane said, eager to talk about her first love, real estate. “Joyce, her best friend, was the Queen of Diamonds. She built mine.”

  “They played bridge back then? In the twenties?” The ladies would have been from my grandmother’s generation.

  “At the time, bridge was the most popular game in America,” Grace said. “My mother taught me to play when I was barely old enough to hold the cards. She was the first Queen of Spades.”

  “And the club has been around that long? Since the houses were built?”

  “In one form or another. Flossie was the last of the founding members.” Jane’s smile spoke of fond remembrance. “She suggested the red hats when we needed something to revitalize us, so we formed our own chapter—the Queens of Woodlawn Avenue. Flossie played bridge right until the end. We had our last foursome in the hospital. Whoever was the dummy played her cards for her.”

  “I’m surprised I’ve never heard of the group.” I’d have thought the Tennessean or Southern Living would have done a feature on the houses and their connection.

  “We don’t want publicity,” Jane replied, and Grace and Linda nodded in agreement. “Not beyond Red Hat circles. If everyone knew about us, it wouldn’t be the same.”

  I could see her point. Sometimes women needed a little something for themselves that wasn’t subject to the scrutiny of the outside world.

  “All right, you two. Time to get back to work.” Grace tapped the table top. “Ellie’s got a lot more to learn.”

  Truer words had never been spoken, and when Grace winked at me, I knew she was talking about a lot more than bridge.

  To my surprise, and not a little delight, I began to get the hang of simply playing out a hand. I made mistakes, true, but the other ladies were patient. Sometimes, they’d take back their cards and let me try again. Little by little, my confidence grew. By the time Jane went to turn on the coffee pot, the hour was growing late and my head was spinning as I tried to remember what they’d taught me. After Jane handed around the delicate china cups steaming with decaf, she put the cards away.

  “Ladies, as another duty of our chapter, I think it’s time for us to help Ellie develop some goals for her new life.”

  My head popped up, at least as much as it could in its exhausted state. A mixture of embarrassment and apprehension settled in my very full stomach. “Really, you don’t need to…” I never got to finish the sentence.

  “But, dear,” Grace interrupted, “it’s what we’re here for. That’s why we’re the Queens of Woodlawn Avenue.”

  I refrained from uttering an undignified “Huh?”

  “I’m assuming you need to earn a living.” Jane didn’t mince words. “Alimony’s not what it used to be. So we need a financial goal.”

  The truth was that even though Jim made a very good living as a surgeon, we had always seemed to spend as much as he brought home. A well-appointed house in Belle Meade, private school tuition, Jim’s love of all forms of transportation—cars, a boat, a Harley. And now, with two kids in college, we were really strapped for cash. He could hardly have paid me much alimony in any event, but I’d been too proud to ask for it.

  “I was going to start looking for a job. I just haven’t….” My voice trailed off, because I didn’t want to lie nor did I want to be honest. Since I’d never dreamed I would need it again, I let my nursing license lapse long ago. Jim and the kids had been my full-time job for more than twenty-five years.

  Jane’s look sized me up. “Do you really want to work for someone else, after all the years of setting your own schedule?”

  “Well, no,” I answered honestly, having never thought of it quite that way before. “But I don’t have much choice.”

  Jane smiled. “The one thing you do have, Ellie, is a choice. Maybe not an easy one, but a choice nonetheless.”

  I had no idea what she was talking about.

  Jane pulled the score pad from our bridge game toward her, ripped off the top sheet, and wrote Elite’s
Goals on the fresh page. All the hairs on my neck stood on end.

  “Okay, first item: develop a business plan for Ellie. As Queen of Diamonds, that’s my job. I deal with money—how to make it and how to keep it.” She wrote down Business Plan on the pad and drew a diamond next to it.

  “A plan? What do I need a plan for?” I hated the feeling of not being in control. I’d experienced it far too often in the last nine months, and to have this enjoyable evening suddenly turn from a friendly game of cards to an “analyze Ellie” session was disquieting, to say the least.

  Jane’s brow remained calmly smooth beneath her blonde hair and red hat. “A plan for establishing your own business. We’ll get together, talk about your interests, your passions, and figure out how to turn them into a positive cash flow. Trust me, that’s the way to go.”

  The only way I wanted to go was across the lawn to my house, but I refrained from saying so. After all, Jane was only trying to help.

  “I’m next,” Linda said, reaching for the pad. “We need to resurrect your social standing.” She made a face. “Why is it that when the man bails out of the marriage, he doesn’t have to give up the club or his friends? But the wife, well, she might as well have been swallowed by a black hole.” Linda scribbled something on the pad, and then drew a club beside it. I leaned over to read what she’d written.

  It said Ellie to chair next year’s Cannon Ball

  I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it.

  Because she was from an old Nashville family, Linda might be the Queen of Clubs in the literal sense of the word, a bastion of Nashville society events despite her Woodlawn Avenue address, but she might as well have written Ellie to land on the moon. The unfortunately named Cannon Ball, a fund-raiser for the local children’s hospital, was the most prestigious occasion on Nashville society’s competitive calendar. It was named for General Conrad Cannon, a Confederate leader who had spent his dotage in Nashville. With Jim’s full support—because it was a heavy time commitment—I’d worked my way onto the planning committee over the last few years. I had thought that this year, finally, might be the year I was named chair-elect. The moment Jim announced he was walking out, though, all my hard work began to circle the drain.