The Liar

“I’m Viola MacNee Donahue, and this is my place. I’ll speak to you just as you deserve, and the good Lord knows somebody should’ve spoken to you long before this. I’m going to tell you, tell you both, to get your lazy, spiteful asses out of my chairs and out of my place. You get up and you get out, and you don’t come back in here.”

“We haven’t finished yet,” Melody began.

“You’re finished, done and finished altogether. No charge for today. Now get the hell out of my salon. Neither of you are going to walk in that door again.”

“Oh, but Miz Vi! Crystal’s doing my hair for my wedding.” Tears spurted into Jolene’s eyes. “I’ve got the whole day before booked here.”

“Not anymore.”

“Don’t worry about it, Jolene.” Melody grabbed the magazine forgotten in Jolene’s lap, tossed it across the room. “You can just pay Crystal to come to you.”

“She couldn’t pay me enough,” Crystal piped up.

“Oh, but Crystal—”

“Shame on you, Jolene.” Crystal bent down, picked up the magazine. “We’ve come to expect that kind of ugly from Melody, but shame on you.”

“We don’t need you,” Melody snapped at Crystal as Jolene blubbered. “Barely a step up from the trailer trash in the holler. We don’t need this place, either. I only come in here to be civic-minded and support local businesses. There are plenty of other places to go with more class.”

“You never did learn class,” Viola commented as Melody grabbed up her shoes. “That’s a shame, considering your grandmother. She’s going to be awful disappointed in you when I call her and tell her how you behaved in my place, what you said to my own granddaughter. What you said about my great-granddaughter. That takes you back a peg,” she added when some of the angry color faded from Melody’s cheeks. “You must’ve forgotten I’ve known your grandmother for over forty years. We’ve got a lot of respect for each other.”

“Tell her what you want.”

“Oh, I will. Now get your second-runner-up’s ass out of my salon.”

Melody sailed out while Jolene scrambled up. “Oh, Melody, wait! Oh, Miz Vi!”

“She’s your choice of companion, Jolene. Maybe it’s time you grew up some. Go on now, get.”

She ran sobbing out the door.

After one still moment, several people—staff and customers—began to applaud.

“I swear, Vi.” The woman in Viola’s chair gave herself a half spin in it. “I’ve always said coming to Vi’s is more entertaining than watching the soap operas.”

Since it was there, Shelby took the water back, downed it. “I’m sorry, Granny. I wasn’t going to slap her. I was going to haul her out of the chair and punch her right in the face. Nobody talks that way about my baby.”

“Or mine.” Viola gave Shelby a one-armed hug.

“Are you really going to call her grandmother?”

“I won’t have to. You better believe she’s calling Flo right now, giving her an earful. Flo loves that girl, but she knows her, too. I’ll be getting a call inside the next half hour. Maybeline, Lorilee, you take your usual commission for the pedis out of the till.”

“No, ma’am,” they said, almost in unison.

“There’s no need for it,” Maybeline added. “Viola, don’t you make me mad and say another word about it. That girl’s lucky I didn’t stab her with the cuticle scissors. Shelby, she was talking trash about you for the last half hour. I’m not sorry to see the last of her in here. She always shorts my tip.”

“Jolene’s not so bad when she comes in on her own,” Lorilee put in. “But together they’re downright mean.”

“All right, then.” With a glint of pride along with the dregs of temper, she nodded. “I’m treating everybody to lunch.”

“Lunch!” Shelby checked the time, sighed in relief. “I’ve got to go down to the Pizzateria, get a customer a salad and sneak out a glass of wine. I can get the rest if y’all put an order together.”

“We’ll have ourselves a party,” Crystal declared. “Second-runner-up’s ass.” She hooted out a laugh. “Miz Vi, I swear I love you to distraction and back again. Twice.”

“Me, too.” Shelby pressed her cheek to Viola’s. “Me, too.”

•   •   •

THE MURDER and Melody’s eviction from Viola’s competed for the richest juice squeezed from the local grapevine. While it was true there hadn’t been a murder in the Ridge for three years, coming up on four, when Barlow Keith shot his brother-in-law—and winged two bystanders—in a dispute over a pool game at Shady’s Bar, nobody knew the woman currently in a cold drawer at the annex of the funeral parlor that served as the coroner’s office.

Everybody knew Melody and Viola, so that story took the lead with most.

The incident got a fresh boost on Tuesday morning, when the word went around that Florence Piedmont had dressed her granddaughter down and ordered her to apologize to both Shelby and Viola.

The Ridge waited with bated breath to see if Melody complied.

“I don’t want her apology.” Shelby stacked fresh towels at the shampoo stations. “She wouldn’t mean it, so what’s the point?”

“Her offering, meaning it or not, and you accepting it, makes her grandmother feel better.” For once Viola sat in the chair while Crystal touched up her roots.