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ultimately she couldn’t bear to leave. “Too many memories,” she’d told me, ones she wasn’t ready to relinquish.
    A part of me was relieved.
    There was still so much of my father there, especially in his book-lined study that Mother hadn’t touched except to allow for weekly cleanings. The leather of his desk chair smelled of his Cuban cigars and of the Old Spice he used to wear because I’d given it to him for Christmas so often when I was a child.
    He’d hung several paintings I’d done in high school—Impressionist images of Mother’s garden—on the wall behind his desk, bookending an original John Singer Sargent landscape. That simple act had made me burst with love for him, thinking that my art had meant as much to him as it did to me. I would never, ever forget that or anything else about him.
    He’d been everything.
    “Follow your heart,” he used to tell me, so often that I repeated it in my head like a mantra whenever I needed a boost. “It’s your life, pumpkin, so live it. Don’t try to be someone you’re not.”
    Someone, he’d meant, like my mother.
    If I stood in his study, closed my eyes and breathed in, I could still imagine he hadn’t left my life so abruptly, that he was with me.
    I liked to believe that he was.
    I imagined, too, that his spirit watched over Cissy so she was never alone. Okay, I’ll admit that was one of the reasons I’d come home. Except for distant—and rarely discussed—family out of state, I was all she had left in the world. I worried about her, hated to imagine she felt lonely or neglected, regardless of how many people she surrounded herself with day to day.
    Mother kept a small staff on hand, only a few of whom lived in, like her social secretary, the indispensable Sandy Beck. Cissy’s dearest friend, if truth were told. Sandy was my fairy godmother and Mary Poppins rolled into one, having spent a good part of the thirty-odd years she’d been in Cissy’s employ watching over me.
    Beyond Sandy, there was the housekeeper, a part-time cook, the gardening and landscaping crew, and Cissy’s sometime-driver (when she didn’t feel like taking the wheel of her champagne-hued Lexus). Most came and went; keeping schedules that afforded them time to be with their own families.
    I remember Mother remarking that the world had gone to hell in a handbasket when her former staff had started retiring—or dying off—and she’d had to replace them with a younger generation of employees who weren’t about to give body and soul to tend to the needs of a widowed Dallas socialite.
    “It’s a different world,” she’d said to me, and I’d agreed that it was. Some of it for the better, some not.
    Occasionally, I found myself wondering if Mother and her ilk would ever completely adjust to the twenty-first century when they seemed so inclined to cling to a past where there weren’t so many gray areas, where men behaved like men and women like Southern belles who knew the importance of finger bowls and never wore white shoes after Labor Day. (Though a belle wearing white go-go boots on the Dallas Cowboys’ kick-line during football season was forgiven the faux pas.)
    In some ways, I likened Cissy and her posse to the incredibly resilient Texas tree roach. No matter how much time passed or how many superpowered bug sprays came on the market, the critters adapted. Though I doubt they’d appreciate the comparison (Mother’s friends, I mean, not the cockroaches).
    Regardless, it made me smile, and, momentarily, I forgot the soaring temperature and my damp T-shirt.
    The Jeep’s old AC started spewing cold air by the time I turned onto Beverly Drive, though, at that point, I was beyond redemption. My face was pink and slick, and my bangs stuck to my brow. I hoped that Sandy had a pitcher of fresh lemonade in the fridge. It would take at least two glasses to revive me.
    The thought made me want to move faster, but I found my progress impeded by a huge moving van that