Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes by Cathy Holton

Author:Cathy Holton
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780345493705
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2006-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

TWO MONTHS LATER Eadie entered her first beauty contest. She did it to please her mother, who had grown increasingly despondent after Frank Plumlee’s hurried departure. It seemed Reba could not be happy without a man around to make her miserable. She threw the ironing board out in the woods behind the trailer, she quit cooking, and she cut back on her hours at Eula’s House of Hair. Nothing Eadie did cheered her up. Finally, on a hot humid day in June, Eadie came into Eula’s to find her mother and the other beauticians bent over a printed flyer that read in giant letters across the top Little Miss Mag Wheels Beauty Pageant! Sponsored by Clyde Purvis Auto! $50 in Cash to the Winner! Free Tires! Free Lube and Oil Change! Free MoonPie with Every Fill-up! Come on down to Clyde Purvis Auto for Details!

“Who-ee,” Martha Agnes said. “I sure could use them tires.”

“You’re a little old for a beauty pageant, ain’t you?” Thelma said.

“Shut up,” Martha Agnes said.

“You know who’s pretty enough to win one of them pageants is your little girl,” Betty Lee said to Reba, who was picking despondently at a hairbrush.

“You think so?” Reba said doubtfully.

“Shit yeah,” Betty Lee said. “She don’t never come in here when one of my customers don’t say ‘My goodness Betty Lee, who is that beautiful child?’ ”

“Miz Eva Bedwell noticed her yestiddy,” Martha Agnes said.

“Miz Hampton said she was pretty enough to be out in Hollywood in one of them Hollywood pictures,” Thelma said.

“You think so?” Reba said, frowning.

“Let’s go ahead and enter her in old Clyde Purvis’s contest,” Thelma said.

“I don’t know,” Reba said. Eadie stood quietly just inside the door watching them. The ceiling fans hummed and clanked, stirring tiny clumps of hair that littered the floor. Over in the corner the icebox whirred.

“I can do her hair,” Martha Agnes said.

“I can do her face,” Thelma said.

“She’ll need one of them pageant dresses,” Betty Lee said.

“I don’t have no money for a pageant dress,” Reba said.

“Hell, maybe we can sponsor her,” Miss Eula said, leaning against Thelma’s chair and idly scratching at her monstrous hip. “She’d be good advertising for the shop. A girl that pretty’s bound to attract attention even if she don’t win the damn contest.”

But Eadie did win the Little Miss Mag Wheels Beauty Pageant. And she won or at least placed in the top three spots for most of the pageants her mother entered her in thereafter. For the next six years she and Reba toured the South, pulling Eadie out of school when necessary and driving everywhere in a beat-up old Ford Mustang. In between beauty contests, she made TV commercials. By the time she was sixteen, Eadie had made enough money to buy her mother a little house over on the south side of town, and by the time she was eighteen, Eadie had won a scholarship and set aside enough money to get through the University of Georgia without ever having to enter another damn beauty contest.

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