Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Every Dixie Belle Knows:When loved ones overstep bounds or your ego needs a little oomph, nothing flat out puts the frosting on the cake and says you mean business like a four-inch-high glittering headpiece of gold and rhinestone.
"No, no, no, no, no." Rita pushed past Jillie. They were standing in the kitchenette -- kitchen-not was more like it -- but it was all the cramped apartment over Pernel's Pig Rib Palace had to offer.
"What are you trying to tell us, sugar?" Cozette's words dripped like honey from her smiling lips, but her eyes shimmered with tart mischief.
Rita went on tiptoe to reach to the back comer of her top cupboard and hauled out a big red-and-white mixing bowl. She clunked it down on the table. "I'm saying no. No, no, and no."' Cozette and Jillie exchanged disbelieving glances.
Rita huffed and reached inside the bowl to fish out the dazzling object she kept hidden there. Gently, she placed it on her head. Then she grabbed up her best wooden spoon and pointed it directly at Cozie, who had sprawled her long body over the sagging green couch in the other half of the room. "And in case you think that's the least bit ambiguous, let me say it again. No!"
"You know when she says it like that?" Jillie leaned back against the baby blue fridge, ruffling the clippings and photos of Rita's daughter covering the door. "You can almost believe she means what she's saying."
"It's that...that...thing on her head," Cozie said.
Rita touched the Dixie Belle Duchess crown she had just perched precariously over what she felt sure was an adorablymessy topknot. She'd seen a lot of years and a lot of pounds since it was first placed on her head. She didn't put the thing on every day -- not every day. But it still held magic for her. Wearing it, even as a gesture of pure smart-assness for her friends, never failed to remind her that she still had dreams and life still held possibilities.
Besides in times like these, when loved ones overstepped their bounds nothing flat-out puts the frosting on the cake and said she meant business like this four-inch-high glittering headpiece of gold and rhinestones.
"That crown and the way she waves that spoon around." Cozie twirled her hand in the air. "Gives her the illusion of authority."
"It gives her the illusion of insanity."
"That's no illusion." Rita tugged at the strings of the old hospital gown she wore as a light weight robe. "My so-called friends have driven me stark raving mad."
"Then our work is done." Cozie rolled her eyes.
"Oh, no." Jillie wagged a manicured finger. "Our work here has not even begun."
"Heaven help me!" Rita hiked her sagging pajama pants up by the broken elastic waistband. "How could I be this big a peanut brain? Stupid, stupid!"
"Don't talk like that, Rita!" Cozette sat bolt upright, her long black braid flipping down to rest on the soft slope of her breast. "The things you repeat to yourself silently and outwardly to the world become your reality. If you want to change your reality, you have to change the way you speak to and about yourself."
"That is my reality." Rita shook her head.
"Stop it," Cozie demanded.
"Rita, really..."
"Well, I must be thicker than molasses in January, right?" She wiped the mixing bowl out with a soft cotton hand towel. "Here I am, a grown woman who doesn't know whom to trust and believe in anymore."
Even Cozie didn't dare deny that one.
"Who, according to you two, cannot figure out how to get her life back on its safe, reasonable track without your intervention."
Jillie had the good form to look sheepish.
"And most importantly someone who, despite far too many intrusions by well-intentioned friends, has still not learned to keep the door leading from the restaurant to my apartment locked if I want to be left alone."
"Being left alone is the worst thing that could happen to you, Rita." Jillie spoke with a conviction that told more of her own fears than of her concern for her friend.
"Well, I don't know about the worst." Cozie's warm maternal expression changed as she looked from Jillie to Rita and narrowed her eyes. "But it certainly is the least likely."
Rita thought of throwing a house shoe at her, but the way this day had begun she'd probably hit her friend smack in the head. Then Rita would feel sorry and need to fix things, to put any bad feelings right before they threw the friendship off-balance. Then Cozette would start with the touchy-feely stuff about only having the power to forgive yourself and the need to embrace life where you are at while you can.
And then Rita would have to kill her.
Rita clucked her tongue.
"How a fiftysomething woman who only wears scratchy, voluminous, hand-loomed clothes and has not shaved her legs or armpits for twenty years could pull. off an attitude worthy of one of Miss Peggy West's country-club cronies, I cannot understand."
"You don't shave?" jillie paled.
"We're not talking about me, here, we're talking about Rita." Cozie shifted her weight and visibly sank a little lower into the sad old sofa.
"Sorry, were we talking about me?" Rita pointed the spoon at her chest. "I thought we were talking about you two and your harebrained idea to barge into my life and run roughshod over my careful, considered plans."
Rita grabbed the handle of the refrigerator door.
"What plans?" Jillie stepped out of Rita's way. "You don't have any plans."
Rita took out a carton of eggs and set them on the table by the large mixing bowl, humming nothing in particular...
The Dixie Belle's Guide to Love. Copyright © by Luanne Jones. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
