She’s back in her affluent hometown for the first time in years and determined to unravel the secrets of her mother’s death hidden in the unpublished memoir she left behind…even if it kills her…
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from May Cobb’s A Likeable Woman, which is out July 11th!
After her troublemaker mother’s mysterious death, Kira fled her wealthy Texas town and never looked back. Now, decades later, Kira is invited to an old frenemy’s vow renewal party. Though she is reluctant to go, there are things calling her back . . . like chilled wine and days spent by the pool . . . like her sexy childhood crush, Jack. But, more importantly, it’s the urgent texts from her grandmother who says she has something to give Kira. Something about her mother’s death, something that looks an awful lot like murder.
When her grandmother gives Kira a memoir that her mother had been working on before she died, she is pulled into the past and all of the sizzling secrets that come along with it. With few allies left in her gossipy, country club town, Kira turns to Jack for help. As she gets closer to what–and who–might have brought about her mother’s end, it becomes clear that someone wants the past to stay buried.
And Kira might be next.
I’m waiting in the baggage terminal at Dallas Fort Worth Airport, sheets of hot wind slapping my back every time the sliding glass doors open.
It’s mid‑October, but sometimes fall doesn’t arrive in Texas until Halloween. I’ve packed hot‑weather clothes, but because a cold snap is forecast for tomorrow, I’ve also tossed in my puffer jacket, a knit sweater, and boots.
My flight was due to arrive ten minutes after Jack and Melanie’s, but he texted me a little while ago to say that theirs is delayed by half an hour, so I’m sitting on a low bench, watching suitcases tumble from the mouth of the baggage carousel.
I send Katie a simple Landed! text. She replies with the thumbs‑ up emoji. Typically cool and short.
Before I popped my RSVP in the mail last week, I called Katie. We haven’t talked over the phone in years—there have been only the obligatory texts: for her kids’ birthdays, holidays, etc.
But I knew I needed to let her know ASAP that I was coming back before she heard it from someone else, and simply texting her felt too casual for something this big.
When she answered the phone, she sounded annoyed, just as she has for the past twenty plus years. Longer than that, actually. She had been annoyed with both Mom and me ever since she turned thirteen. That age was when the curtain dropped for her on any closeness or warmth she’d shown either of us.
Blame it on hormones, blame it on the fact that she had out‑ grown Mom’s eccentricities—whatever the reason, she’d drifted away from us.
I’ve often wondered if part of the closeness between Mom and me was because we looked so similar. When I was a little girl, my hair was the same blinding shade of platinum as hers. And we both wore it down to our waists, our curls frizzed by the damp East Texas heat.
My hair has now faded to a darker blond—dishwater blond they call it, such an unflattering term—but when Mom’s started to dull, she turned to the box and kept hers bleached.
“Women should be allowed to do whatever they want with their hair or their bodies,” she once told me while taking a slow drag off her cigarette. A habit she’d kept secret from everyone but me. “We have it hard enough in this world.” Her glass‑green eyes were focused on guiding the wax across her latest batik while her lips worked the cigarette.
I was twelve and didn’t fully grasp what she was getting at, but I nodded as if I understood exactly what she meant. I couldn’t let on that I was in the dark, wanting to feel relevant and like her confidante. So I learned to nod in the right places, learned to keep certain things just between us. Like the smoking and, later, the feminist content of the batiks she was making for a museum show she was supposed to have; a show that was on the books but never happened because she died right before it.
I sensed early on that there was one version of Sadie in the shed with me: the real version, or what she referred to as “the transparent self,” a term taken from a book by the same title that she became obsessed with in my teenage years—and the Sadie she showed my father and sister and the rest of the neighborhood.
There was the housewife who made us grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner and kept her trap shut about anything edgy or controversial, then the Sadie who would talk to me in a stream of consciousness, unguarded, her mask down.
I loved being in the shed with her, loved working next to her, the smell of simmering wax mingling with the sharp scent of the acrylics and oil paints she bought for me.
Batiking was far too complex; she tried to teach me the technique, but I had no patience for it, so eventually she set up a little desk in the corner, creating for me a workspace all my own, complete with an old easel she’d picked up at a yard sale.
I can remember my first real painting, the one that went beyond just smearing paint on canvas or poster board. I was six. Sadie and I sat elbow to elbow at her art table, her long hair tickling my forearm as she instructed me on technique. How to layer colors together, how to move the brush across the thick ivory page. Once we finished creating a rainbow of color—teals and ruby reds and cerulean blues—she had me paint over that with a coat of white. Then, with her thin hand over mine, we guided a sharp tool across the overlaid paint, and with it drew an elaborate underwater scene of mermaids, turtles, fish, and oceanic plants. It was as if I were in a trance. She left my side, left me to it, and resumed her own work. The brilliant colors underneath bled through and I was awed by the results.
“See, it’s like my batiks but a bit easier,” she said, giving me a light nudge with her elbow. She clicked her tongue in admiration of my handiwork and hung it on the wall. I was hooked from that moment on. But wanting to copy her style as closely as I could, I soon moved on to collage—the medium I would use all through college—using found objects and trinkets of nature we collected on our long, meandering walks through the woods together.
Back then, when we were still young, Katie would wander into the shed with her sketch pad and join us. She’d sit on the red beanbag chair and sketch a portrait of Mom at work on her batiks. She was actually pretty talented, and Mom encouraged her, praised her, but she would get fidgety after a while and head inside to play Barbies or go around the corner to meet up with friends.
By the time puberty hit, Katie had abandoned Mom’s art shed altogether, sneaking in only to use Mom’s new typewriter for school assignments, rolling her eyes at us if we happened to be in there, engrossed in our projects. We learned to tiptoe around her, cut a wide berth.
Katie favors our father, her hair a deep shade of chestnut, luscious and shiny, her skin tone olive, and her eyes a toffee brown. Dad’s hair turned silver early, but they shared the same tanned coloring, and when Katie turned on Mom and me, she also adopted our father’s frosty disposition.
When she hit her teens and we lost her, the secrets started. Katie’s new clique of catty friends. The string of boyfriends, each relationship more tortured than the last. Her embarrassment and never‑masked repulsion toward Mom.
She’d been like a different person before that—open and affectionate and prone to making me laugh. I remember, when I was six and Katie was eight, riding in the back seat of Mom’s cherry‑red Oldsmobile while Katie rode shotgun, both of us headed to elementary school, with the windows lowered and Mom blasting Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls” from her eight‑track. The trio of us shimmying in our seats, singing along with Donna.
We knew Mom was different then, that not everybody’s mother carpooled them to school while blaring disco. But unlike Katie, I never stopped thinking Mom was cool.
After she died, and I became unhinged, Katie pulled even further away from me. She was angry that I wouldn’t fall in line with the family consensus that Mom had killed herself. Our relationship has been on razor‑thin ice ever since.
The few times I tried to call her to mend things, she never failed to take a shot at Mom. You make her into a saint, but believe me, she wasn’t. There are things you don’t know.
There was a period after Mom died, and I was away at boarding school, when Katie spiraled. I heard a little bit about it from Gran, but mostly all the nitty‑gritty came from Meredith, my one real friend from back home other than Jack.
Katie started drinking more. Staying out later. Broke it off for a spell with Ethan Hayes, the coolest guy she’d ever been with. Fell in with a sketchier crowd. One night she and a few guys even broke into the high school and vandalized the locker banks, spray‑ painting profanities and denting the metal with hammers. Gran even let it slip that Katie got caught shoplifting a designer handbag at the mall and that Gran and her old money had to come to her rescue.
I was worried about her then and tried to call, but every time she heard my voice on the other end, she’d sigh and snap at me; she’s always been a genius at shutting me down. And after a while, I stopped checking on her.
After college, she returned to Longview and married Ethan. He’s tall, good‑looking, with sandy‑blond hair and beach‑water‑blue eyes, and like Katie, he had a bit of a wild side in high school—though he never got into the trouble that she got into—but he still has a chill boyish vibe to him.
They have two daughters, Eva and Shelby, eight and five, respectively, who call me Aunt Kira but will most likely not recognize me if I’m lucky enough to see them. We’ve only ever seen each other via FaceTime, and very few FaceTimes at that.
“They’ll be at the thingy Friday night—the bowling alley—so you should see them there,” Katie said when I called her. Making it clear that she was not inviting me over to their home. If she was shocked that I was coming back, she didn’t show it. She only sounded disinterested. When she first answered and I told her my plans, all she said was, “Okay, cool. I wasn’t going to hit all the events, but I’ll try since you’re coming.”
I sat on the other end of the line, anxiety needling my chest, on the verge of apologizing for returning, for being me.
Now I flick my eyes to the bank of monitors displaying the various flight statuses and see that Jack’s plane has landed. Sweat pricks my armpits; suddenly, I’m overly aware of my appearance, smoothingdown my shirt, fluffing up my hair, glossing my lips with my berry‑tinted lip balm. I can’t believe I’m about to see him, and Melanie, after all these years.
My cell chimes. I dig it out of my bag, assuming it’s Jack or even Katie, but it’s from an anonymous number. And when I swipe and read the message, the blood drains from my face and my mouth goes dry as paper.
You’re making a very big mistake. You’ll be sorry.
Excerpted from A LIKEABLE WOMAN by May Cobb published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023 by May Cobb
