Wild Orchids Read online

  I’d been told how he was great at making people angry. “Pure, unadulterated rage,” a friend of mine said while four of us were having lunch together at the local fry place—fried meat, fried onions, fried potatoes. The waitress didn’t appreciate my humor when I asked her not to let the cook fry my salad. She walked away in a snit and kept it up for the whole meal.

  But I was used to my humor getting me into trouble. My father used to say that I did it so no one would see me cry. That puzzled me because I never cry and I told him so. “That’s just what I said,” he answered, then walked away.

  So, anyway, this big-time, super-duper, best-selling writer asked me to work for him because I made him laugh. And because I told my ghost story. Well, actually, only sort of told my ghost story. As Heather pointed out, I’d told it better. But, gee, it takes a bigger ego than mine to think she can tell a story to a master storyteller. I had visions of his saying that my “syntax” was wrong.

  But before the ghost story—or devil story, as Autumn calls it—I made him laugh about the Pulitzer prize.

  I was at a party and Autumn—poor dear, lots of hair but no brain—was in tears because her future mother-in-law had yet again been looking down her nose at my friend. We all knew why Cord Handley was marrying the girl, and it certainly wasn’t for her intellectual ability. She had a mass of thick auburn hair and a set of knockers that kept her from seeing her feet. Autumn complained that she couldn’t find lacy bras in her size. I said, “All I need is lace,” and that made everyone laugh.

  We knew there was no real future for Autumn and Cord; eventually, his mother would break them up. Cord’s family was the closest the town had to “old money.” Cord wasn’t all that bright himself, but his mother was and she ran things. Unfortunately, her three children had inherited her husband’s brain and her looks. It made sense that she was trying to improve the line by getting her three kids to marry brains, but her grown children were having none of it. Her youngest son wanted to marry the beautiful, sweet-tempered, but stupid, Autumn.

  Poor Autumn left her future mother-in-law’s house every Thursday afternoon in tears because every time Autumn saw her she was quizzed. A sort of verbal SAT test. Tea and stumpers, I called it.

  One day when some of my women friends and I were having lunch together, I made the mistake of asking Autumn what she was going to do after the wedding. Since she and Cord were moving into the family mansion after they were married, Autumn would be seeing the old battle-ax every day.

  Maybe it’s because I grew up without a mother, but I seemed to have missed out on some being-a-girl education. I merely pointed out what I thought was an obvious problem and all hell broke loose. Autumn burst into tears, and Heather and Ashley put their arms around her, looking at me in disbelief.

  My “What did I do?” look was familiar to them.

  “Jackie, how could you?” Jennifer said.

  I didn’t ask what I’d said that was so horrible. Years before I’d given up trying to answer the question “What have I done this time?”

  As far as I can tell, women put most things under the category of “being supportive.” Pointing out that Autumn was probably going to be crying every day instead of just once a week after she moved in with her mother-in-law was, probably, not “being supportive.”

  In this instance, I was apparently also being insensitive to the fact that my friend was “in love.” As in, Autumn couldn’t tell her future mother-in-law to go screw herself because Autumn and Cord were “in love.”

  “You know about that, don’t you, Jackie? You’re in love, too.”

  True, I was engaged and about to be married, but I think I was doing it for some solid reasons. Kirk and I had the same goals and wanted the same things. And, okay, I was sick of living alone since Dad died. Maybe because I’d grown up with only one parent empty houses are not something I’ve ever liked much. I was always afraid that my beloved father would disappear and I’d be left totally alone.

  So, anyway, we were at a party and Autumn was gently, prettily, weeping about the latest hateful thing her future mother-in-law had said to her. Since she couldn’t belittle Autumn’s looks, it was about her reading matter. “My dear,” the old woman had said, “the only fiction worth reading is what has won the Pulitzer prize.” I’d learned my lesson and I was trying to “be supportive” so I didn’t advise Autumn to tell the old bat to go to hell.

  “I don’t even know what the Pulitzer prize is,” Autumn was saying, sobbing into a lace-edged hanky—no used, frayed tissues for our Autumn!

  I knew—bless her pretty little head—that Autumn thought that Teen People magazine was intellectual.

  “Look,” I said, stepping closer to Autumn and getting her attention, “you should learn to defend yourself against her. Tell her you always buy the Pulitzer prize-winning novels, but you, like every one else on earth, can’t get through them.”

  “I know I can’t read well, Jackie. I’m not smart like you,” Autumn wailed.

  The others gave me that look. I wasn’t “being supportive.”

  Squatting down in front of Autumn, I took her damp hands in mine. Heaven help me but crying made her prettier. “Autumn, your future mother-in-law is a snob. She thinks that because a book has ‘Pulitzer prize winner’ on the cover that reading it makes her an intellectual. But it doesn’t.”

  I wanted to cheer her up but I knew I couldn’t do that by telling her that I read the fiction winner every year, so I decided to elaborate on a pet theory of mine. “You want me to tell you how to write a Pulitzer prize-winning book?” I asked, but didn’t give her time to answer. “First you come up with a love story. That’s right, just like all the gaudy romance novels in the grocery, Pulitzer prize novels are pretty much all love stories, but they’re in disguise. Sort of like buried treasure. And like finding buried treasure, you have to go through a lot of stuff that isn’t treasure to find it. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Sort of,” she said, her tears slowing. She wasn’t smart but she was one of the nicest people I ever met.

  “Okay, so the author comes up with a teeny, tiny love story, just something as simple as two people meeting and falling in love.”

  “That’s what the books I read are about,” Autumn said.

  “Yes, but we’re talking about the ol’ prize novels here so those books are different. First of all, the main characters can’t be beautiful. In fact, they need to be homely. No smoldering eyes or raven tresses as those traits would disqualify the book.”

  At that I got a tiny smile from Autumn. “I understand. Ugly people.”

  “Not ugly and not grotesque. Maybe they have something like big ears. The next thing you have to do is start hiding the treasure. Bury it so the reader can’t find it easily. This means you can’t have the lovers together very often. They can’t be like in a romance novel where the hero and heroine are together on nearly every page. In fact, you can’t even call them a hero and heroine. You have to call them ‘protagonists.’”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just one of those little rules of literary life. People who think they’re smart like to use words other people don’t use.”

  “But Jackie—” she began, but stopped and waited for me to go on.

  I didn’t believe she’d remember any of this, but I was indeed cheering her up. And besides, even though I didn’t look up, I could feel that I was drawing an audience, and I can be an awful ham.

  Autumn nodded, still holding my hand, and waited for me to continue.

  “Okay,” I said, “you start burying your treasure of a love story underneath lots of quirky characters with funny names. You name them Sunshine or Rosehips or Monkeywrench, whatever, just so they get odd names.”

  “Why would they do that? Who’s named Monkeywrench?”

  “No one, but that’s the point. The judges probably have names like John and Catherine so they dream of being name Carburetor.”

  Autumn smiled. “I see. Like Emerald.”