She smiled and dusted off her hands. There. Took care of that. And she couldn't believe how empowered she felt by that one small victory.
Jazzed, she got out her Aretha Franklin CD. She put it on full blast and started dancing. Gus wagged his tail and gave her an encouraging bark.
She was still dancing when Lionel came home. “Check it out,” he said. “It's a party.”
He sidled up to her and started dancing, too. “What are we celebrating, Kizzy girl?”
“Feelin' good,” she said, still grooving.
“Yeah?” Now he was in back of her, running his hands up her arms. “You should feel good more often. Were you thinking about your daddy coming home?”
“No, I was thinking about that ice cream sitting in the garbage instead of on my waist.”
Lionel stopped dancing. “In the garbage? You threw out the ice cream?”
“There wasn't much left.” She kept rotating her hips and smiled at him over her shoulder. “Come on, Lion, celebrate with me.” She bumped him with her hip.
“That stuff ain't cheap, you know.”
She turned around and faced him and did a little bump and grind against him. “Do you really want to talk about ice cream right now?”
He didn't, and half an hour later they both went to bed feeling good.
Yeah, but can you keep it up?
taunted a new little devil.
Kizzy folded her pillow over her ears. She was going to win the battle of the bulge or die trying.
Die. She sobered. She had to stay serious about this if she wanted to live a long, healthy life. Her kids weren't even married yet. She
wanted to stick around to meet her future son- and daughter-in-law and her grandbabies. Oh, yes. She could keep it up.
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Angela returned home stoked. She was going to be so hot that the office hottie would look like warm leftovers compared to her. She would be beautiful ⦠bella, bellisimaâworthy of the long line of Italian beauties in her family. Of course, she'd have to e-mail Oprah about their diet club. Maybe they'd all get flown to Chicago to go on
Oprah.
That would be so awesome.
The kids were in bed when she came in and the house was quiet, all except for the sound of laughter coming from their home office. She wondered how long Brad had been in there working. The poor guy worked a ton of overtime, both at work and at home, but being salaried, he never got paid for it. Which was totally unfair if you asked her. Not that he ever asked her, but she told him anyway.
She kicked off her shoes and padded down the hall. She'd sneak up on him and surprise him with a kiss on the back of the neck, remind him what a happily married man he was.
“No, she doesn't suspect a thing.”
Her husband's words floated out into the hallway like some evil genie, stopping Angela in her tracks and squeezing her heart. Hard. This wasn't right. She had to have heard wrong, or walked into the wrong house.
But no, that was Brad's voice saying, “You're the best.”
Who was the best? She'd always thought it was her.
“Ang'll be home any minute. I'd better get off.”
Well, he wasn't going to get off with her!
She marched into the office. “What don't I suspect? Who were you talking to just now, Bradley?”
He jumped at least two feet off his chair. “Ang. You scared the shit out of me.”
She crossed her arms in front of her and drummed her fingertips. “What don't I suspect?”
“What makes you think I was even talking about you?”
“Woman's intuition. And you said you had to get off because I'd be home any minute.”
“You misheard.”
There was nothing wrong with her hearing. She pointed a finger at him. “You're having an affair. Right in front of my back.”
He looked like she'd just accused him of being an axe murderer. “What? How can you even think a thing like that?”
She glared at him. “Easy after hearing what you just said.”
He left the desk and came and put his arms around her. “Look, I wasn't even talking about you. We're planning a surprise party for someone at work who's retiring. That's all.”
“Then why did you have to get off the phone because I was coming home?”
“When you're planning a surprise, the less people who know the better. I thought you might accidentally let something slip.”
How dumb did he think she was? “If you don't want me to know, why aren't you doing all your planning at work?”
“We just had something come up that needed to be dealt with tonight. No big deal.”
She narrowed her eyes. “We who?”
Brad's face got red.
She pulled out of his arms. “Ha! It's Rachel. I knew it. You were talking to Rachel.”
He threw up his arms. “Okay, I was talking to Rachel. So what?”
So that was the end of their marriage. She didn't even have time to get skinny because the other woman had already won. She burst into tears. “You're having an affair. With Rachel!”
“Oh, baby.” He drew her back to him and cradled her head against his chest and started stroking her hair and she tried not to think about how good it felt. “I'm not having an affair. I promise.”
Angela was really crying now. “That's what every man says when he's lying.”
He cupped her chin, forcing her to look at him. “When have I ever lied to you?”
Off the top of her head she couldn't remember any specific time. But that didn't mean he hadn't. She caught up a sob and wiped her eyes.
“I'm not cheating,” he repeated. “I don't even know what would put that idea in your head.”
That picture of Rachel that he'd brought home, for starters.
“And frankly, it pisses me off that you'd think I am. I have never cheated on you.”
That was a long time to be faithful considering they'd been together since high school. She bit her lower lip and dropped her gaze. She hadn't meant to insult him. Still. “Well, what was I supposed to think when I heard you telling Rachel the puttana that I don't suspect a thing?” she demanded.
He made a face. “That I'm talking about someone else.”
“Oh.” Well, that was a possibility.
He smiled that tender Brad smile that always made her go gooey inside. “I love you, Ang. You've got to know that.” He gave her a long, sexy kiss, sliding his hands down her back to her bottom. Her big, fat bottom.
“Even though I'm a porco?”
“I don't think you're a porco,” he said, and kissed her again. This time his hands wandered up to her breasts. “I think you're hot,” he whispered, and pulled her snugly against him.
And there was the physical evidence. Hmmm. Maybe she'd been wrong.
Next thing she knew they were in the desk chair naked and Brad was gladly showing her just how much he wanted her.
Okay, she thought later as she went upstairs while he checked to make sure the doors were locked, maybe she had jumped to conclusions. In the bedroom mirror she gave herself a serious examination. Brown eyes. They were okay. But her nose was too turned up. It made her look like she was twelve. Her lips were
great, though. She knew that. The neighborhood kids had teased her about them when she was little, calling her monkey lips, but those monkey lips became an asset after puberty hit. Angelina Jolie had nothing on her.
She made a face. Monkey lips were okay. A gorilla body wasn't. She'd always been a little on the curvy sideâwhen you grew up in a family that celebrated its Italian roots that was bound to happen. But now she had about as much shape as a pile of pasta.
Rachel had a perfect body.
Angela suddenly remembered Brad's guilt-red face when she asked him who he'd been talking to. Why would he go all red like that if he had nothing to hide?
She doesn't suspect a thing.
Angela's postsex feeling of security vanished, stolen by a hottie with red hair. Now she wanted to cry all over again.
She doesn't suspect a thing because she's a stupido porco
.
No, don't go there, she told herself. Brad was still only on the edge of that slippery slope that led to the No-tell Motel. She had time to pull him back. And maybe he really was planning a surprise party for someone.
Don't go loaning trouble. Have a little faith in your husband. Have a little faith in yourself.
She'd have a lot more faith in herself once she'd lost some weight.
M
egan had managed a carb-free weekend, and she'd joined Femme Fit, a girls-only gym. Monday morning she arrived at the firm feeling like a woman who had just won the case of her lifeâon the inside, at least. But the day had gone steadily downhill from there. She spent the whole morning toiling away in her windowless office, reviewing a new stack of paperwork in search of that one important bit of information Tanner Hyde needed for
Newton
v.
Owens
and had gotten nowhere. She hated discovery. It was the bane of her existence.
No, Tanner Hyde was the bane of her existence. He reminded her of her stepfather: impossible to please, rarely smiling. And when he did smile, it was sardonic. Of all the partners to be assigned to work under! Why was he so damned hard on her, anyway? Maybe he was resentful that he hadn't been given one of the pencils. Well, she'd like to see Pamela come up with anything.
She dug out the little plastic bag she'd filled with carrot sticks from her lunch sack, removed one and bit down violently. No one
told you when you were in prelaw, dreaming of living a
Law & Order
life, that you would grow up to get buried in a windowless office with a pile of paperwork and told to spin straw into gold. And even if she managed that feat, it probably wouldn't help her make partner. She needed to prove she could bring in clients. She needed to turn herself into a rainmaker. How was she ever going to do that cooped up here? How was she ever going to make partner? She closed her eyes and saw herself winding up working for someone like Vernon Black and Associates, the ambulance chasers who advertised on late-night TV. Her life couldn't come down to that. It just couldn't.
A knock on her door made her jump. She didn't even have time to call “come in” before Tanner stepped into the room and started sucking out all the oxygen. He had the kind of body that could model suits in a catalogue, and a perfect, adversarial lawyer's face, with sharp features and eyes like a hawk. And he had an air about him that just automatically made criminals squirm and lawyers bristle. He was in his middle forties and rumor had it he'd gone through two wives. He'd probably scared them to death.
Megan took a deep breath and raised her chin. She refused to be intimidated by this man.
“How are you coming?” he asked.
“Rotten, thank you.” She shouldn't have said that. What a non-team-player thing to say!
Half his mouth lifted. Only Tanner could manage to smile in a way that made a person not want to smile back. “This is called paying your dues, so don't bitch. I'm sure I don't need to remind you that we go to trial in sixty days.” And with that, he turned and left her office, shutting her prison door with a snick.
Who did he think she was, Criss Angel in drag? Was she supposed to say, “Abracadabra,” and make something appear out of nothing? Damn the man!
She threw a carrot stick after him in a postencounter fit of rebellion and it hit the door and bounced down onto the carpet with
a soft plop. “No problem,” she grumbled. “I have no life. Maybe I'll get a sleeping bag and move in here.” She laid her head on her desk and blinked back tears of frustration. What she needed now was a little man to suddenly appear and promise to help her turn this crap into gold. She'd gladly promise him her firstborn child in exchange for the help, just like the woman in the old fairy tale had done. That would be a contract she'd never have to honor since she'd never have a child. She was never going to get married anyway. Who'd want a whale?
“Stop that,” she ordered herself. She sat up, rubbed her eyes, and put an end to the pity party. Then she dug out another carrot stick and got back to work. There was gold in here somewhere and she was going to find it.
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By Sunday night Angela had convinced herself that she was being silly. Of course Brad wouldn't cheat on her. But then this morning she'd called the office just because, well, maybe she needed to pick up a gift.
She'd gotten Marion the receptionist. “Brad asked me to get a present for the big surprise party coming up,” Angela had told her. “What would the guest of honor like?”
“What big surprise party?” Marion had asked.
Dread unfurled itself inside Angela's chest, pushing hard against her heart, but she gamely soldiered on. “You know, the office surprise party? Brad was talking about planning one for someone, but he didn't give me very many details.”
“Oh,” Marion had said. And that was all she said.
“You don't know about any surprise party?”
“No, but that doesn't mean anything. If it's a surprise, there are probably just a few people planning it.”
Yes, of course, that made sense.
Almost. Except if anyone would know about a surprise party it would be Marion. She knew everything that went on at the office.
Angela's woman's intuition went on red alert. Someone was being very sneaky, and it wasn't her.
“Want me to ask him?” Marion offered.
So he could make up another lie? “No, that's okay. I'll ask him when he comes home tonight.” Or maybe she'd just kill him when he came home.
Anger stewed inside Angela the rest of the day. She helped at Gabriella's preschool, which involved dropping Mandy at her mom's, then picking Mandy up at her mom's, which meant staying for a quick lunch at Mom's and acting as if everything was fine. And the pressure built. In the afternoon she hosted a scrapbooking party and sat around pretending everything was fine while she and five other preschool moms turned pages with family pictures into works of art as their children ran around the living room in dress-up clothes. She found an old picture of herself and Brad in her overflowing shoebox. They were at a Halloween party, all dressed up like Batman and Catwoman. There they stood, fake cartoon characters, posing and yucking it up. They'd long since lost the costumes but they were still fakes, pretending to be a happily married couple, solid and devoted. Well, one of them was devoted. The other was a no-good bastardo. Anger possessed her hands and she began cutting the picture into tiny pieces, starting with a strong snip right up the middle of Brad's crotch. And all the while Josh Groban warbled “You Raise Me Up” in the background.
“Oh, that was a cute picture,” chided one of her guests, bringing her back to the moment at hand.
Of a stupido wife and her bastardo husband. Cute. “It was a bad one of me,” she lied, too embarrassed to confess the real reason behind her scissor mania to women she was just getting to know.
After the party ended it was time to pick up the house and start dinner, although she wasn't all that hungry after spending the afternoon noshing on cheese and grapes and veggies with dip. She'd originally planned to serve tiramisu cake, but now that she had to get hot, tiramisu had to be a thing of the past.
As she worked, she kept thinking about the picture she'd destroyed. Their life had been fine when she'd been skinny. All she had to do to put it back together again was to look good. She could do this. She could get her husband back.
But maybe she didn't want him back, she thought after he came home from work that night and gave her a big, old sloppy kiss like he was the world's most loyal husband. He clowned around for the girls at dinner as though they were one big, happy family. This, she'd heard, was how it was in Italy. The men had their family and then their mistress on the side. The tangy sauce from her chicken parmesan (the diet version, no breadcrumbs) suddenly felt like acid on her tongue. Why did she want to go to Italy anyway? Why was she learning Italian? So she could commiserate with other women whose husbands were cheating bastardos?
She shoved aside her plate and watched Brad through narrowed eyes while dancing an angry staccato on the table with her fingernails.
He stopped in the middle of pretending to dangle broccoli spears from his ears like earrings and gave her a “what's wrong” look.
Oh, yes, she should have been playing along and smiling, saying things like, “Silly Daddy.” Well, excuse her if she didn't want to play. She pushed away from the table and took her plate to the sink.
“Baby?” Brad said from the table.
Baby. Did he call Miss Hottie “baby”?
“I'm not hungry,” she said, and left the kitchen.
Behind her she heard Brad say, “Finish your dinner, girls. Mommy and Daddy will be right back.” She was as far as the living room when he caught up to her. “Ang, what's wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said stiffly, and kept going.
He dogged her all the way through the room and up the stairs. “Well, something's wrong. What'd I do?”
What did he do? Was he serious? “What did you do? You have the nerve to ask me that, you big, fat liar?”
“Well, yeah, since I don't know. And I don't appreciate being called a liar.”
“And I don't appreciate being lied to,” she retorted, and stormed into the bedroom. She tried to slam the door after her, but that didn't work since Brad was right behind her, pushing it open. She turned and glared at him, putting a hand on her hip. “You can quit playing dumb. I called the office today.”
He threw up both hands. “And?”
“There is no surprise party for anyone.”
He looked at her like she was one of the girls and she'd just done something naughty.
He had a lot of nerve. She wasn't the one being naughty. “I was going to get a gift, so I called Marion. And guess what? She didn't know a thing about any party.” Angela stabbed a finger at him. “So, that means you're lying.”
His jaw began working the way it often did when he was ticked and trying hard not to blow up. “Well, guess what. Marion's the one the party is for.”
“Marion?” squeaked Angela. Oh, no. She plopped onto the bed.
Oh, boy.
Brad shook his head, looking thoroughly disgusted. “Ang, will you just trust me? Please?”
She bit her lip and nodded.
“Daddy,” Gabriella called from downstairs. “We're done.”
“Okay,” Brad called back, “I'm coming.” To Angela he said, “I'm going to go back downstairs to our daughters now. Then, after they're in bed, I'm going to go have a big friggin' affair with my damned La-Z-Boy.” With that he marched out of the bedroom.
Angela fell back on the bed. That had been bad. But at least she didn't have to worry about her husband. She let out a sigh of relief. Okay. She'd been silly and insecure all along. Brad loved her and she loved him and everything was fine.
Except, wait a minute. Friday night he'd told her he was planning
a party for someone who was retiring. Marion was forty. Who retired at forty?
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“Lion, I'm trying to finish making dinner here,” Kizzy said, and gave Lionel's hand a playful slap.
He unclamped his hands from her breasts, but continued to peer over her shoulder at the pots on the stove. “Okay, Kizzy girl, where are you hiding that fried chicken? I smelled it as soon as I came in the door. Got it stuck in the oven?”
“There is chicken in the oven,” Kizzy said.
“All right.” Lionel rubbed his hands together.
“But it's baked.”
Lionel made a face. “Baked? Baked?”
“And we're having acorn squash to go with it.”
“And garlic potatoes?” Lionel asked, lifting the lid on one of the pans. His frown got a little smaller. “Okra. Well, that's something good. What's over there?”
“Green beans with bacon bits.”
“That's okay. Except the bacon's probably fake.”
Kizzy made no comment.
“But where are the potatoes?” Lionel continued.
“No potatoes tonight.”
Lionel grunted. “Are we ever going to have mashed potatoes again? Or potato salad. Why can't we have potato salad?”
“Because I don't want to tempt myself,” Kizzy said simply.
Now Lionel was actually pouting. “Kiz, you're going way overboard with this thing.”
“Not really.”
He disappeared from the kitchen, then returned a minute later with a plate laden with â¦
“Cheesecake.” Kizzy's taste buds started doing the happy dance. She frowned at Lionel. “Now, what are you doing with that?”
“Carol brought it in to work today. I told her it was your favorite
and she insisted on me bringing it home. And it's a good thing I did,” he added, “since there's nothing good to eat around here.”
“There's plenty good to eat,” Kizzy informed him. “We're changing our definition of good, remember?”
“No, you're changing our definition of good. And girl, your definition stinks.”