Back when Woodrow "Woody" Woods, Sr. was around to call the shots, attendance at Middlington Country Club's post-church Sunday brunch was mandatory for anyone with Woods blood coursing through his or her veins (people who had married someone with Woods blood coursing through his or her veins were sometimes excused, albeit with great disapproval). In the family's most financially and reproductively prosperous years—years when Woody, Sr. was in his empire-building prime—the Woods' private room in the northwest corner of the clubhouse's main dining hall positively brimmed with Woodses: old and young, indicted and unindicted, rich and richer.
The room, with its glowering portrait of Woody, Sr. watching over everything like some sort of sour guardian angel, is still reserved for the family every Sunday, but the number of Woodses in attendance each week has, like so much else since the patriarch's demise, greatly diminished. Of the six offspring sired by Woody, Sr., only the eldest, Woody, Jr., faithfully brings his family to the club every single Sunday. The remaining five siblings show up with varying degrees of regularity—except for the youngest, Josh, who doesn't show up at all because he severed ties with the family some time ago.
Today's Sunday brunch has one of the lowest turn-outs in Woods family history: just Woody, Jr., his wife Charlotte, their kids Kristin and Woody III (who goes by Trey), Woody's prehistoric mother Olive, Woody Sr.'s washout kid brother Ezra whom everyone calls Uncle Zeke for some reason, and Grace, a niece who is usually described as "sweet but sort of slow." A poor showing indeed. Woody's sister Edith and her daughter Lana promised they would also try to make it, but odds are good that they will be late, seeing as how Edith is a drunk and Lana is dead.
But Woody doesn't know about that last part yet, of course. When--halfway through his French dip--his cell phone begins to beep and the little screen tells him that his sister is calling, Woody assumes that Edith wants to offer some characteristically outlandish excuse for why she is running late. Instead, the voice he hears is so small and frightened that he hardly recognizes it.
“Edith, is that you?” he says into the phone, plugging his other ear with an index finger.
“Woody? Wood?”
“I’m right here for heaven’s sake, Edith. What’s wrong with you?”
“She’s . . . you have to come quick, Wood—she’s . . . he’s killed her.”
Comments