Queen Mom Rules novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Founders Dinner

The Lakeshore Club holds its Founders Dinner on the third Saturday of every October.

Two hundred members sit at round tables under paper lanterns and eat salmon.

Then they clap for the same awards they gave the year before.

My father had called me on Thursday.

"Come with me," he said. "Please. I'd like to walk in with my daughter."

So I walked in on his arm, in a dark green dress, with my grandmother's necklace in its velvet box inside my clutch.

Junie stayed home with my neighbor and a bowl of popcorn.

"Rule Three," she had told me at the door. "If Grandma is mean, you can leave."

"Is that a rule?"

"It's a suggestion."

The room went quiet as we crossed it.

By now everyone in the club knew about the necklace.

Nobody knew how, of course.

A week earlier I had been the girl who took phone calls.

Now they stared at me.

Women I had known since childhood smiled with their teeth.

A man who had once told my father I would never amount to anything clapped him on the shoulder and said, "Albert, my friend."

My father did not return the smile.

At the head table my mother sat in a navy silk gown with the ruby necklace at her throat.

It was the glass one.

I knew it from forty feet away, because the stones were too bright.

"She wore it," my father said under his breath. "After everything. She's wearing it."

"She doesn't know how to stop."

"Do you want to go home?"

"No. I want to see how this goes."

We sat at a table near the front.

My mother saw us and her smile slipped, then came back, harder.

After the salmon, the club president, a silver-haired woman, introduced the evening's honored guest.

"Our chair of the women's committee for twenty-two years," she said warmly. "Mrs. Geraldine Kettering."

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