And One Last Thing... (4 page)

I didn’t break anything. I didn’t even throw anything out of place. I thought about leaving my vibrator in the middle of the bed, because Beebee was going to need it. As pointed and clever as that would have been, I’d worked too hard to get that thing to leave it behind.

Did you know that because Aphrodite’s Palace has a strict no return policy, they give the merchandise a test buzz before you leave the store? I didn’t.

I threw the vibrator, or as I’d come to think of it, Old Reliable, into the last of my boxes and toted them to the car. The locksmith was waiting for me at the front door, new keys in hand. “Ma’am, I know this is none of my business, but we see a lot of this sort of thing in my line of work,” he said, accepting my check. “I’m sorry you’re going through a rough patch, but it’s company policy to tell you that unless you can show us a court order barring another occupant of this home from the premises, we will provide them with a key if they can show current picture ID listing this address as their residence.”

“That’s fine with me,” I said, looking across the street to Mrs. Revell’s front window, which was empty. “I can’t lock him out of the house, but I can make it more difficult for him to get in.”

Roy did not smile as he extended a clipboard toward me. “Can you sign this release stating that I have informed you of this policy?”

“You’ve had to give that speech a couple of times, huh?”

Roy nodded and handed me a copy of my receipt. He gave me a fatherly, somewhat condescending smile. “Whatever he did, I’m sure he’s sorry”

I handed Roy a twenty-dollar bill as a tip for speedy service. “Urn, no, but thanks for playing.”

You know that feeling you got when you had a bad report card and you were waiting for your parents to come home to sign it? Time seems to go by too quickly, but drag on interminably at the same time? Well, waiting for your husband to come home so you can tell him you’re leaving his cheating ass works pretty much the same way. I just sat on the couch and watched the minute hands move. Around six, I was sitting in the kitchen picking at a sandwich when Mike called and told our answering machine that he had to work late to prepare a proposal for a new client.

By eleven, I’d figured out that he wasn’t coming home for the night. He’d had to work through the night several times in the last year, what with being so busy and all. But I stupidly had believed he was actually working. I’d felt sorry for him, packing him little care packages with clean shirts and a little shaving kit and Tupperwared meals. Mike was so touched he actually sent me (correctly addressed) flowers. White tulips, my favorite. Of course, now I suspected that they were guilty “You made me dinner while I was boning my secretary at a cheap motel” flowers. And the fact that I would question every single nice thing Mike had done for me over the last few years was not exactly conducive to sleep.

I was exhausted, but I couldn’t bring myself to climb into our bed. I had no place there anymore. And I wouldn’t lower myself to sleeping on the couch. It’s hard to be a vengeful warrior woman when your husband comes home to find you cuddled up under an afghan watching infomericals.

Bored and restless, I sat down at the computer, fired up the internet browser, opened up E-mail Expo… and we all know how that turned out.

I was never going to sleep now. My house felt like a tomb, which was oddly appropriate because when Mike came home, he might actually murder me. So I drove to my parents’ place. Never mind that it was 2:00 a.m. Never mind that it was highly likely that Mrs. Ferrell next door would call the cops and tell them someone was breaking into my parents’ house. (The woman believed television was evil, but watching her neighbors through binoculars was perfectly okay.) Never mind that when Mike eventually did arrive home, he wouldn’t be able to get into the house and the angry phone calls would begin. I wanted to be somewhere I could sleep, somewhere I could hide.

After climbing up the darkened stairs, I dropped my bag in my old bedroom and flopped back on the white canopied bed Mama couldn’t bear to replace. With my shoes and clothes still on, I pulled the old pink sheets back and pulled the covers over my head. Unwilling to think about what the morning would bring, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to sleep.

5 • The Shoe Drops

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I woke just before noon feeling oddly hungover. For a second, I wondered why I was in my old room at my parents’ house before it all rushed back.

It wasn’t a nightmare. I’d actually sent the thing.

I sat up and winced at the pain in my neck from sleeping in a nonorthopedic twin bed. If memory served, I had given up on sleeping around 4:00 a.m. and spent the wee hours of the morning signing Mike up for magazine subscriptions ranging from Hustler to Knitters’ Digest. I called telemarketing agencies and left them messages to call Mike’s number. Under a slightly less legal heading, I placed classified ads on Craigslist, Freecycle, the Pennysaver, and the Singletree Messenger offering Mike’s brandnew bass boat for a rock-bottom price of zero dollars. He was going to be getting a lot of phone calls. A lot of phone calls.

Phone calls. I pressed my hand to my grainy, tired eyes. Mike had no idea where I was. He probably came home this morning to an empty, locked house and reported me as a missing person. I was going to end up another missing blond, white woman on the news.

I ran to the dresser for my cell phone and checked my voice mail. There was one message: “Hi, honey, it’s me. I’m still at the office. Thank God for those clean shirts you sent me, huh? I’m sorry -”

A bubble of hope slipped up from my stomach to my spine. There was the voice of the man I married. He still cared. He was grateful for something I’d done. He was sorry. Maybe I could send a follow-up message to everyone on the mailing list asking them to delete the first message without reading it. Maybe -…

“I’m sorry to do this to you twice in a row, but I’m not going to be home tomorrow night either. I’ve got to go to a Lions Club thing and then I’m supposed to meet Brent Loudermilk about some Little League thing he wants the firm to cosponsor. Who knows how late that could go? See you later.”

The bubble burst.

Mike was so disconnected from me, from our home, that he hadn’t even realized that he’d been locked out of it. He hadn’t spoken to me in almost forty-eight hours and he still had plans to go out. And I sincerely doubted it was to a Lions Club dinner. I could have been actually missing and he wouldn’t have noticed.

I went into my parents’ bathroom and ran a scalding hot tub. They had the only updated bathroom in the house and I was in dire need of a bath that didn’t involve rubber duckie non-slip decals. Peeling off my grimy, long-past-their-prime khakis and T-shirt, I slipped into the tub. The nip of the water felt good, a connection back to the reality I’d only kept casual contact with over the last few days. I sank to my chin, then my nose, letting my breath make little ripples across the surface of the water.

Now that the initial shock had worn off, I kept expecting this wave of depression to overtake me, a heavy weight in my chest that would pull me under and crush me with its force. But that precious bubble of hope had popped and I didn’t feel anything: nothing good, nothing bad. Nothing. I think I was more depressed when George Clooney left ER. It felt like I was rooting around in my brain, probing it like a sore tooth, trying to find some hidden abscess of misery. Surely a normal person wouldn’t feel like this at the end of a marriage, the destruction of a life. A normal person would feel something -…

I heard my cell phone ring from my room.

Uh-oh.

I let the phone ring until it sent the call to voice mail. Then Mama’s phone rang from her nightstand and Daddy’s private office line down the hall jangled to life. Apparently the e-mails had landed.

Well, if I couldn’t feel depressed, dread would have to do.

******

My voice mails were an odd and interesting mix that morning.

“Lacey, this is Jim Moffitt,” was the first message on my voice mail. “I think we need to talk. I know you’re going through an emotional time right now. Just call me.”

Damn it. I forgot Reverend Moffitt was on the mailing list. He was a nice man and wonderful pastor, but we hadn’t gotten particularly close in his two years at the church. And I was pretty sure Mike and I were well beyond a good old-fashioned pastoral counseling session at this point.

The next message was from Mike. “Lacey, baby, my mom just called. She mumbled something about the newsletter and then she was crying so hard that I couldn’t understand what she was saying. I didn’t see a receipt for postage. Did you mail something out without showing it to me? What’s going on?”

Double damn it. I forgot to take Mike’s parents off the list.

“Lacey, it’s Mama, Norma Willet just called us in Hilton Head and told me I needed to call you right away. Is everything okay?”

I really should have called my mama before I did this. Well, the next time I find out my husband is cheating on me, she’ll be first on my emergency contact list.

“Lacey, it’s Jeanie Crawford, I just got your e-mail, and I wanted you to know that I’m so sorry for what’s happening to you. I gotta tell you, I laughed my head off at what you wrote.”

Well, that was just strange.

Mike, again. “Lacey, baby, it’s me. Bob Martin just called and said I need to get a tighter rein on you. What does that mean? Call me.”

So apparently people were calling Mike about the newsletter but were too embarrassed to give him details. Good, let him squirm.

“Lacey, you need to call me, right now. Right now.” That was the last of Mike’s messages.

6 • Bagels and Bitchery

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I turned all phones off that afternoon after my voice mail and Mama’s answering machine filled up. The one person who’d stopped calling me was Mike, whose divorce lawyer, Bill Bodine, had left a message stating that all future communications from Mike would come through him.

In retrospect, it would have been wiser to leave the phones on as that might have given me some warning that my mother-in-law would be dropping by for a visit. Instead, picking at a bagel, I opened up my mother’s front door to find Wynnie Terwilliger, standing there, twitching.

This wasn’t good.

While Mike claimed to be a modern man, his mom pretty much ruined him for women born after 1952. His mom didn’t work as he grew up, so he was used to coming home to an immaculately clean house, hot meals, and pressed shirts. Wynnie considered dust bunnies to be an insidious threat against democracy and the sanctity of the American home

Wynnie never missed an appointment with the colorist that had kept her pageboy the same shade of dark honey blond since the late 1970s. Today she was wearing teal pants and a jacket set off with the silver dragonfly pin she considered her “signature piece.” That was strangely appropriate as Wynnie was also stick thin and had no measurable sense of humor.

We’d never had any real problems, because, in general, I met her standards for a good daughter-in-law. I came from a good family, kept a nice home, entertained beautifully, and made the family look good. In general, I did what I was told when it came to holidays and family events because I just didn’t have a reason not to. It’s hard to object to spending every Christmas with your husband’s parents when your parents were going to be there anyway.

This didn’t necessarily mean I enjoyed spending time with my mother-in-law. If passive aggression were an Olympic sport, Wynnie would have her own Wheaties box. She couldn’t seem to get through a conversation without lovingly correcting me, whether it was the way I fried chicken or showing the proper reverence for the roof “her boy” put over my head. Every Christmas, she gave me clothes at least one size too small and reminded me that “Mikey has always liked his girls thin.”

Wynnie honestly believed Mike was perfect in every conceivable way. So telling her that her precious baby boy suffered from cranial-rectal inversion would have done little to improve her disposition. The general lack of acrimony in our relationship left me unprepared for the venom in her eyes when I opened the door.

“Well, Lacey?” she demanded. “What do you have to say?”

I offered her a bite of my breakfast. “Bagel?”

Wynnie stuck her hands on her hips and shouted, “Are you going to stand there and act like you haven’t shamed the whole family? That you haven’t made a fool out of yourself in front of the entire town?”

I swallowed. “No.”

She sighed, staring at me for a long moment, and tapped her foot. “Well, we can’t dwell on what’s been done. We just have to fix it. I think you and Mike need to go away on a long vacation. Get to know each other again. Maybe go on a cruise.”

“You completely misinterpreted that ‘no,” I told her as she marched past me, into the house. “I’m divorcing him. Wynnie, it’s over.”

“Oh, don’t be silly.” Wynnie waved aside my announcement with a flick of her wrist. She pulled her cell phone out of her purse. “We just need to get the two of you out of town for a while, away from all this fuss, to give your mama and me time to smooth this all over. We’ll tell people that you were playing around with a new way to send the newsletter, wrote up a funny gag version of your e-mail and accidentally sent that out to the mailing list instead of the real one. And that you’re very sorry for the misunderstanding. And now you two are on a second honeymoon to try to forget the whole thing.” She flipped her phone open. “I’ll just call my travel agent and set this whole thing up. Do you want Jamaica or Nassau?”

“Wynnie, a cruise isn’t going to fix this. The only way Mike would get on a boat with me is if I were being used as an anchor. Your son obviously doesn’t want to be married to me anymore and I definitely don’t want to be married to your son.”

“All my boy did was play the field a little bit. Why’d you have to make such a fuss? He’s just a man, Lacey. They’re all just men. You’re a big girl. You know what men are like. You’ve seen other women go through this. But what you did, Lacey, how could you? This could have been handled quietly, within the family.”

“Within the family. I was supposed to tell on him? What were you going to do? Send him to time-out?”

I didn’t think it was possible, but Wynnie’s lips thinned even more. “You think I didn’t know it when Jim took up with that waitress from the club? You think I didn’t hear people suddenly stop talking when I came into church? You think going to the beauty parlor was easy when I knew they’d been talking about ‘poor Wynnie Terwilliger’ the second before I walked in? But I held my head high. I didn’t roll around in the mud, making a fool of myself. I never even told Jim that I knew. Because at the end of the day, he came home to me, to our family, and that’s what mattered.” She sniffed. “And before you climb up on that high horse, I think there’s something you should consider, that maybe if you’d kept Mike a little more occupied at home, he wouldn’t have strayed.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “I think there’s something you should consider. Beebee could be your next daughter-in-law. She and her cleavage will make a lovely addition to the family Christmas card photo.”

Wynnie turned an exquisite shade of tomato red. “There’s no reason this has to come to divorce. That won’t improve anything. My boy knows the difference between the kind of girl you bring home and the kind of girl you just play around with. He wasn’t thinking of marrying her. He was just thinking…”

“With Little Mike,” I suggested.

Wynnie glared at me. “If you would just be reasonable, talk to him. A good Christian wife would know how to look past this and forgive him.”

“Well, I will start looking into Buddhism as soon as possible.”

“This isn’t the time for your inappropriate jokes. I don’t think you appreciate your position here, Lacey,” she said, her tone sweetening to a wheedle. “When I was your age, Jim had no idea whether I knew about his little dalliances. He was always so guilty, so nervous that he’d be caught, that I had whatever I wanted without even asking for it. I always knew when he’d been with her because he’d bring me home flowers, a sweet little piece of jewelry, or he’d take me on some wonderful trip to make up for it. For my fiftieth birthday, he took me to New York City to see Cats. Do you think he would have done that if he wasn’t cheating on me? And Mike’s already been caught! He’s got that much more to make up for. You could end up with an entirely new wedding set or maybe even a car!”

I stared at her. “Are you on medications that I’m unaware of?”

“Are you listening to anything I’m saying?”

“Yes, you think I should let Mike humiliate and betray me repeatedly for the sake of the presents.”

“Well, if you’re going to think about it that way, I’m not going to be able to help you,” she grumbled.

“I think you need to leave now,” I told her.

Wynnie could whip up tears in a second’s notice. Her eyes glistened. Her lip trembled. She fished around in her enormous teal handbag for a monogrammed hanky. “I can’t believe you. I can’t believe how ungrateful, how unfeeling you’re being after all these years. I can’t believe you’re being so hard-hearted. This isn’t the Lacey I know. I’m ashamed of you. You’re not the girl I welcomed into my family.”

Under normal circumstances, that kind of disapproval would have sent me scrambling to make up for whatever I’d done. I would have apologized automatically. Wynnie was looking at me with the kind of contempt my father reserved for straight-ticket voters. She was probably angrier with me than, well, arguably anyone, had ever been in my life. And the world wasn’t ending.

I was fine. My stomach wasn’t churning. I wasn’t tearing up. My hands weren’t even shaking.

I’d spent so much of my time worrying about whether I was liked, whether other people were happy with me. I took stupid, mind-numbingly tedious assignments at club meetings because women with bigger shoulder pads told me gathering twelve different kinds of coleslaw recipes would be “just perfect” for me. I let Wynnie keep a key to our house, because Mike said it would hurt her feelings if she didn’t feel free to let herself in, even if we weren’t home. People had certain expectations of me and I rushed to meet them, because if I didn’t… Well, I didn’t know. I never figured out that it wasn’t the end of the world if I disappointed someone or made someone angry.

Honestly, how much worse could it get? What was Wynnie going to do? Ground me? It’s not like I was going to be married to her son for long. I didn’t have to worry about getting her approval or making sure Thanksgiving went smoothly. I didn’t have to swallow “that’s just the way she is” because that made Mike’s life easier.

I was free. So I shrugged and said, “Okay.”

“I don’t ever want to see you again,” she said, obviously confused when her proclamation of shame failed to induce wailing and gnashing of teeth on my part.

“I understand.”

Wynnie stared at me, bewildered. Finally she flushed red and ground out, “When you can stop being hateful - when you can find it in your heart to be a good and forgiving wife to my son, I’ll be willing to talk to you.”

Wynnie stormed out of the house. It would have been a much more effective exit if she hadn’t slammed the door on her purse strap, forcing her to open it to extract herself. She scowled at me as I struggled to keep a straight face. “You just stay here and think about what you’ve done!”

I watched her stomp out to her town car and screech out of my parents’ driveway. I sighed. “I’m going to miss her most of all.”

******

A half hour later, the doorbell rang again. I jerked the front door open, yelling, “Wynnie, I told you I’m not going on any damned cruise!”

“Well, that’s good to know,” Mama deadpanned, her arms full of luggage, her elbow firmly planted against the doorbell. “Because given the circumstances, I don’t think you deserve a cruise.”

“Mama.” I laughed. My mother set her bags on the floor and held out her arms. I folded into them and for the first time since sending the e-mail, cried in earnest.

“Baby,” she murmured against my hair. “I’m so sorry.”

I sniffled, my tears forming a seal between my cheek and her neck.

“I’m going to strangle that little -” Mama grunted, patting my back. “I knew I should have said something earlier, but I thought you knew about Mike and Beebee.”

“You knew? You knew?” I cried, pulling away from her.

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I didn’t know anything,” Mama said, throwing up her hands. “I heard rumors. I suspected something was going on, but I thought after that birthday party, so would you. I thought you were just trying to put on a brave face. To keep your head up while you sussed out how to hit him where it hurts.”

Mama led me into the kitchen and poured me a cup of coffee. She forced me to sit at the breakfast bar, searched in the cabinet for Bisquick. “So when you finally figured out you were married to a clichéd little man, you didn’t think to call me?” she asked, her tone mildly exasperated. “Instead, I get phone calls in Hilton Head telling me to come home as my youngest child has clearly lost her mind.”

And suddenly I was four years old again, with her pinking shears in one hand and the remains of my curls in the other.

“I may have sent out a little divorce notice,” I said, measuring “little” with my fingers.

“In the form of a brag letter?” Mama asked, beating Toll House chips into pancake batter a little harder than was necessary. “Lacey, I’m all for healthy expressions of your feelings, journaling, creative ceramics -… If you’d wanted to, we could have made a Mike - piñata and beaten the living hell out of it. But we probably wouldn’t have sent pictures of the piñata party out to every person we know.”

“I know, I know. It was a crazy thing to do. But I just - it was the only way I knew how to hit back. To hurt him as much as he hurt me.”

“Well, Rissy called me in Florida and read it to me. I’d say you did a good job of it. I know I’m wired to think anything you write is fabulous, but after I got over the initial shock, I laughed my butt off.”

“Wynnie says that all men stray and I should suck it up and stick around for the fabulous prizes,” I said, sipping my coffee.

Mama slapped a ladleful of batter on a heated griddle. “Honey, I’ve kept my mouth shut for years, but now that divorce is on the horizon, I feel perfectly comfortable in telling you that Wynnie Terwilliger is an idiot.”

“But I thought you two always got along! You did all those walkathons together and the bridge club and the holidays.”

“Well, what was I supposed to say, ‘No, I don’t want to spend the holidays with your husband’s family’? That would have seemed unfriendly.”

“You should have told me this years ago, a fat lot of good that will do us now. I did the right thing, didn’t I?” I asked. Mama winced. “The newsletter aside, I did the right thing. I couldn’t stay with Mike.”

Mama flipped a pancake without even looking. “I can’t judge. How could I tell you what to do in this situation until I’d lived through it?”

“So you never had to worry about this with Daddy?’ I asked, not quite sure if I wanted to hear the answer.

“Oh, honey, no!” Mama laughed, wrapping her arms around me and holding me tight. Unfortunately, she had the batter ladle in her hand and there was now unfinished chocolate chip pancake dripping down my back. “No, I never had to worry about this with Daddy. Haven’t you ever wondered why I le Daddy drag me along with him on these silly fraternity trips?’

I nodded. “Every time you go.”

“Well, if I learned anything from my mama, it was that if you don’t want to be with your man, there will always be another woman willing to take your place,” she said. “So I go on these trips and I watch your daddy make a complete fool of himself, because, for one thing, it’s funny, and because there are plenty of miserable Phi Rho wives there who would be more than happy to upgrade to your daddy if they had the chance. I’ve said the thought of having an affair probably wouldn’t occur to Daddy, but I really don’t give him a chance to think of it.”