“Doesn't the horseshoe opening down let the luck run out?” I asked.
“The horseshoe has always pointed down on the Derby trophy,” Lee said. “And no one gets a Derby trophy without a little luck.” He predicted even then, though, that Churchill Downs would eventually buckle to convention and flip the Derby horseshoe ends up, the only change ever made to the trophy.
The doorbell rang and soon all ten of us were in the kitchen, comparing the five ladies' hats. Ally wore a red one with extravagant blue flowers, Brett a stovepipe with a pink velvet band and black feathers, much prettier than it sounds. Linda came in a wide-brimmed to-do with a sheer flowered scarf wrapped around it and tied in a bow under her neck; and mine was a simple straw hat with a band of tiny daisies wrapped around a flat crown. It was Kath—more practiced in the art than the rest of us—who showed us what a Derby hat should be: a frothy concoction of sheer silk and linen with a soft navy brim, an ivory crown, and navy netting—“veiling,” she called it—draped high over the top, all finished with three huge red roses. Real roses that smelled wonderful.
“It is the Run for the Roses, don't you forget it,” she said.
Her pearl necklace was real, too—a different strand than she'd worn at Halloween, with a beautiful clasp that matched her earrings. “My mama always says if you aren't the prettiest girl at the party,” she said, “then you just pretend you are.”
Lee handed her the last silver julep cup, grinning. “She also says, ‘You've got to go lightly with the vices.’”
Kath took a big slug of her drink. “With Mama, you've got to pick and choose which advice to listen to.”
Kath hung back as Lee shepherded everyone out to the patio, and I stayed with her.
“This hat fell out of the ugly tree, didn't it?” she whispered. “I should've stuck with the one I wear every year, I know I should have.” She grabbed a tissue and blotted her eyes before her mascara could run. “I'm sorry, it's just that she called this morning, that awful slut called. The phone rang and Lee said he'd call back and he shut himself up in the bedroom and I couldn't even get dressed because he'd—”
Lee was at the kitchen door, then, reminding Kath to bring the pitcher.
I whispered that she looked lovely in her hat, and followed her out to the patio, where brunch was set out on a long, smoothly polished wood table: ham with red-eye gravy, made with Kentucky bourbon and coffee, shrimp-and-crabmeat-stuffed tomatoes, piles of eggs and biscuits, casseroles, and coffee cake and lemon bars both garnished with powdered sugar and mint. “There's a sort of theme that runs through a proper Derby brunch,” Kath said. “Bourbon and mint.” Even the pie, a “Horse-Racing Pie” that looked like a walnut-and-chocolate version of pecan pie, had bourbon in it. “Which maybe I shouldn't tell y'all,” she said, “because it's my great-grandmama's secret recipe—every family in Louisville has its own secret recipe, and you're banished from the clan if you spill a word of it. Except it wouldn't be Horse-Racing Pie without bourbon, now, would it? So I'm not really giving out any secrets.”
“And that?” I asked, indicating a creamy-looking dish in the middle.
“That? That's just cheese grits, honey. You can't tell me you don't know cheese grits.”
“Kath's cheese grits will make you wanna hit your mama,” Lee said.
“Don't go bragging on me,” Kath said. “It's just the recipe on the box.”
“It ain't bragging if you can do it, Kath,” Lee said.
While we ate—far too much—Lee and Kath talked about Churchill Downs and its twin hexagonal spires. About the new fellow, Lynn Stone, who'd taken over when Wathen Knebelkamp retired. About Diane Crump, who would ride that day, the first woman jockey ever to compete in the Derby.
“You know your ol' buddy Kath here is a big gambler, don't you?” Lee said. “Plunked down the entire one thousand dollars her daddy gave her for her eighteenth birthday on a horse named Iron Liege. This li'l girl here walked away with almost ten thousand dollars! And the next year, she plunked half of those winnings down again on Tim Tam and walked away with another fifteen grand.”
I fingered the five-dollar bill in my pocket. A thousand dollars? That was Danny's take-home pay for an entire month.
“You could do worse than to follow her bets. She hasn't won every year I've known her, but she's never once failed at least to show,” Lee said, this so clearly a side of Kath he adored that I wondered if maybe he did still love her after all. Maybe she wasn't being foolish to wait around for his affair to blow over, I thought, imagining a smitten young Lee courting a teenaged Kath, this pretty girl from a proper family who'd gone wild, who drank bourbon and bet outrageously and slept with him when she'd barely finished her debutante season. And I remembered what Linda had said about that whole Myrtle Wilson thing, that maybe Lee liked girls he wasn't sure he could control.