“Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. I wouldn’t be moving in with you permanently, but I couldn’t really do this for him from this island, now could I? And we need to find him a wig maker. Farrah Fawcett he isn’t, with all those wings and wisps. He looks like a refugee from the 1980s.”

Okay, it wasn’t lost on me that my mother now fancied herself to be a fashion maven. And she expected us to believe her.

Leslie did.

“Oh, Momma! That would be so wonderful! Charlie will be so thrilled! The thing is, the gowns have to be custom! Oh! I can’t wait to tell him!”

She ran from the room to call him.

“Let me get this straight. You’re going to get on a plane and fly to Las Vegas and live with Leslie while you sew for Charlie.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Okay,” I said and thought, Now I’ve heard it all.

“Don’t ever eat bananas around a beehive,” I said.

“Why not?” they said.

“Because the smell of them might cause the bees to swarm.”

Chapter Twenty-One

Splash!

Momma was out shopping for luxury fabrics with Leslie. That whole situation still boggled my mind. If you’d told me a year ago my momma would get out of bed, I’d have said, fat chance. And if you’d told me she’d be designing and making evening gowns for her son-in-law’s lip-sync competitions, I’d have thought you’d lost your damn mind. But then, Momma would do anything for Leslie. And it turned out that Leslie would do just about anything for Charlie.

So I was on my own to take up a small problem with Archie. His car was in the driveway. He must not have had classes that afternoon. I walked across the street and rang their doorbell.

Archie answered after a few moments.

“Hi, Holly! What’s going on?”

“Archie? Is there a place we can talk without being overheard?”

“Sure,” he said and stepped out onto the porch, closing the door behind him quietly. “Is something wrong?”

“I’m not sure where to start. Tyler is a popular kid, but I assume you know that. Hunter is as well.”

“I assume they have friends at school,” he said.

I thought, The thing to say would’ve been, I know they have a lot of nice friends. They used to come here all the time. But the waters had been sullied and all the rules had changed. Now, maybe they had friends at school. And they were no longer welcome.