Free The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove by Lauren Kate Page B

mastery of the tease ’n’ spray, a favorite style technique among Mom’s white-zin-drinking circle. Her blue eyes were lined with a silvery shadow that extended into graceful—if gaudy—cat eyes. And her red-and-white polka-dot dress hugged her curves so snugly that I could see her doing that special breathing (short quick puffs of air, à la days of corset-wearing) that she thought no one could notice. She looked great—for a Vaudeville number. But poor, sweet, trailer-transplanted Mom was still worlds away from being Palmetto pew-appropriate.
    “Of course, we’re going to church, honey,” Mom drawled, not surprisingly oblivious. “Right after you drag your hungover self down to a nice healthy breakfast with the Dukes.”
    I groaned. Since I hadn’t yet moved from the bed, I wasn’t sure about the degree to which my hangover was going to debilitate me—and I did not want my mother to witness that dreaded roll out of bed. After we tucked J.B. into his own rendition of a nativity scene at the church last night, Mike and I had swung by the Pitch ’n’ Putt to pick up one more bottle of bubbly on the ride home. The image of J.B. waking up smothered by his boa was just too toast-worthy to go uncelebrated. But now, with Mom hovering over me, I got the feeling I was about to pay a high price for ending the night with such low-cost champagne.
    I hobbled over to my mirror to survey the damage.
    Ohhh, it hurt. My hair carried the distant memory of last night’s ringlets, but now they were splayed in tangled chunks around my head. The glue from my fake eyelashes had left sticky blobs along my eyelids, and my lips were puffy and cracking.
    “Well, you certainly smell like you had a good time last night,” my mom said, holding her nose faux daintily. She sighed. “Guess your momma taught you something right.”
    Mom was a former Cawdor County beauty queen and a real-life beauty-school dropout. When she finally got the nerve to quit her waitressing job, Mom started working part-time at the Charleston morgue, where she made up corpses whose families were too despondent to put up a fight. But in the past few weeks, her man-du-month had filled her head with the idea to expand her market to the living. She’d even gone as far as running business cards bearing her maiden name with the ingenious, and likely unintentionally, backhanded slogan:
    Dotty Perch: You’ll never look better.
    Suffice it to say, Mom’s little entrepreneurship had yet to really take off, but after seventeen years of being the only living recipient of her advice on how to doll-yourself-up-proper-so-you-can-get-a-man, I fully supported Mom’s quest for a more receptive clientele.
    Life with my kind of single mother—that is, the kind who’s never actually single for long—is one unending flip-flop between parent/child and BFF. When I got my first kiss—age twelve, back corner of the bait-and-tackle shop, and yes, right next to the worms—Mom wanted to hear more dirty details than any of my friends at school.
    Unfortunately, she assumed my interest in her sex life was mutual. There was a stretch of time when Mom never failed to climb into bed with me when she got dropped off the morning after a date. She’d snuggle close and fall asleep, saying she was so glad we were besties. Smoothing out the eye shadow gathered in a wet crease above her eye, I never had the heart to groan audibly enough to wake her up.
    This is all to say that whenever Mom actually shifted into stern parent mode and tried, for example, to slave-drive me down to breakfast, it was hard for me to take her seriously. Sometimes I wished she could follow my philosophy about interacting with Binky. Just pick what side of the line you’re on and stick with it.
    Now Mom picked up a brush from my vanity and ran it through the rat’s nest on top of my head. “You want a spray ’n’ tease, baby? I always find that the smell of aerosol just zips the hangover right out of