BOOK REVIEW : A Witty Take on a Texas Affair : HUG DANCING, <i> by Shelby Hearon</i> Knopf, $20; 246 pages

Although Shelby Hearon lives in Westchester County, N.Y., at least 2,500 Texas miles from the setting of her newest novel, “Hug Dancing” is a Lone Star story, written to the rhythm of the cowboy two-step and the sound of George Strait on the Mighty Wurlitzer.

Waco, where the hailstones come in graded sizes--mothball, Ping-Pong ball, golf ball and sometimes tennis ball, is home to the narrator, Cile Tait). She’s the wife of Eben Tait, the parson of Grace Presbyterian Church, and the mother of Martha and Ruth, big for their ages and obsessed with animal husbandry and saving the planet, respectively.

Cile is a terrific mom, but the role of parson’s wife has never quite suited her, partly because she’s an atheist but mostly because she’s never fallen out of love with her high-school sweetheart, Andrew Williams.

Even without her old flame as a criterion, Eben Tait would leave a lot to be desired in the romance department.

His ordinary conversation seems indistinguishable from his sermons, and although he entered the ministry expecting to “battle crises of faith,” he’s ended up planning ecumenical wedding receptions, which in Waco means Dr. Pepper instead of champagne if the groom’s family is Baptist, and just one quick waltz with her daddy if the bride happens to be Presbyterian.

Life in the parsonage is not quite what either Eben or Cile envisioned when they married, although until Drew Williams resurfaced, they were managing, at least in the eyes of the congregation.

The mild mystery of why Williams disappeared from Cile’s life just as their attachment was becoming serious lends a touch of suspense to the story, but the focus is on the events that follow immediately upon his return to Waco 12 years later. By then Drew is married to a Dallas heiress and the father of two winsome boys, and Cile has just begun to feel the strain of playing a part clearly written for someone else.

At that point, divorce seems out of the question, while a love affair is just barely do-able. Cile and Drew settle for that, meeting secretly at the old Williams ranch and biding their time until all four tots are grown up. These circumstances not only permit us to see Drew and Cile as they were and as they are but also make us appreciate the need for a pair of divorces.

Events may move in a zig-zag pattern, but they zip right along, and by page 37, Cile is trying to figure out how to tell “someone you shared a double bed with that you were no longer going to be the wife you were right that minute being.”

All the children are in high school by this time, and Drew has promised to inform his glamorous Mary Virginia that he and Cile are through pretending. The job is complicated by the fact that the dearest person in the world to Cile is Drew’s aristocratic mother Lila Beth, and to make matters even more difficult, Cile and Mary Virginia had once been the best of friends. Amazingly, the news is greeted with far less consternation than one might expect either from the parson or from the heiress.

As calmly as if he were announcing a new Sunday School schedule, Eben tells his flock that his wife is leaving. After some token resistance, Mary Virginia also seems to accept the announcement, and even the children greet the news with amazing equanimity.

When Cile finally tells Drew’s mother, Lila Beth, she’s rewarded with the solution to a puzzle that’s troubled her since girlhood, when her own mother was drowned in a flash flood.

The only person disconcerted by the turn of events is Drew himself. Unaccountably, he seems curiously reluctant to proceed with the double divorce plan he had initiated. Summarily ejected from the parsonage, Cile rents a ramshackle house in downtown Waco, an act that quickly brings matters to a head.

Because Hearon’s command of Texas idiom is flawless and her prose as tangy as Waco barbecue, she turns what could have been a too-familiar story into a witty comedy of manners set in a place with some surprising ones. As they sometimes say down there, the result is up to snazzy.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Family Money” by Nina Bawden (St. Martin’s Press).