Kill the Competition (3 page)

Carole sniffed. "Something smells brilliant."

Libby offered them a bear claw. Carole, who was a veritable bag of bones, took two. Rosemary looked tempted but declined. She was the one who had talked Belinda into pumping iron Friday. Apparently Rosemary had slid past forty without acknowledging the milestone and now approached fifty with a similar disregard. The woman smoothed a hand over her hair and fastened her seat belt, seemingly lost in thought. Her cheeks were pinker, her eyes evasive. Either Rosemary was nervous at the prospect of seeing her long-lost boss, or she, too, had a crush on the man.

Belinda steered back toward the parkway. The good news—it was daylight, so she could see where she was going. The bad news—it was daylight, so she could see just how many cars were trying to get where she was going. "Is Mr. Archer single?"

"Widower," Rosemary said. "His wife died two years ago, but she was sick a long time before that. Like Stanley."

"Rosemary's last husband," Libby murmured behind a paper napkin. "Cancer. Took a while."

Belinda glanced at Rosemary, but the woman was staring out the window. Belinda swallowed a swell of emotion. The previous generation knew the true meaning of loyalty. No six-hour marriages for them, no ma'am.

"Wow, traffic looks even worse than usual," Libby said to change the subject as they approached the bulging lanes.

"There's a crash on Georgia 400, so we're the detour." Belinda put on her signal.

"Smile, girls," Libby said. "We don't want Belinda to be late for her meeting."

Belinda's three passengers pressed pleading faces to the window, and a few seconds later, a man in a late model BMW slowed and yielded magnanimously. She eased into the opening. "So that's the secret, huh?"

"Yeah," Carole said. "We prostitute ourselves every day to get a break in traffic."

Libby flipped down the visor mirror and began teasing her hair with a fine-toothed comb. "Shoot—we made that man's day."

Carole laughed. "You're probably right, men are such suckers. Guess what Gustav said over the weekend?" She smacked the back of the seat. "No, you'll never guess, so I'll tell you. He said that after he gets his green card, maybe we should just stay married." She scoffed. "As if he's in love with me or something. And as if I'm going to walk away from that twenty thousand sitting in escrow."

Belinda kept her eyes on the brake lights of the car in front of her. The girl had entered a green card marriage for money? Belinda knew there were people out there who did things like that, i.e., but she'd never met one.
criminals
,

Carole licked each finger. "Stay married, what a joke. I've got my eye on a brand-new Thunderbird, and then—no offense, girls—I won't need to carpool."

"Yeah, right," Libby said. "Then who on earth would you talk to?"

Rosemary laughed her agreement, and Carole leaned forward. "Oh, that reminds me! Did anyone watch
The Single Files
last night?"

"I watched a movie on the other channel," Rosemary said, covering a yawn.

"My set is on the blink," Belinda said.

Libby sighed. "We found pot in Glen, Jr.'s backpack, so we had a marathon family conference. What did I miss?"

"Oh, it was
so
good," Carole said, bouncing up and down. "Remember last week Tandy and Nicholas broke up? Well, this week they both had dates at the same restaurant—it was hysterical! Meanwhile, Indigo tried to be the last person leaving the gym so she could flirt with the hunky personal trainer."

"The guy with the codpiece?" Libby asked.

"Right. But instead, Indigo got locked inside the gym, and had to call Jill to come and get her out."

"Jill?" Rosemary asked, apparently interested after all. "What could she do?"

"Remember the cute locksmith from a few episodes back?"

"The one who got Jill out of the car trunk she accidentally locked herself into?"

"Right. Jill's been trying to think of a reason to call him, so this was her chance."

Rosemary frowned. "What could a man possibly find attractive about a woman who wants him to commit breaking and entering?"

"It was for a good cause," Carole insisted.

"I forget I'm talking to the woman who earns spending money by marrying immigrants."

Carole stuck out her tongue, and Belinda observed, with no small amount of curiosity, the playful push-pull of the motherless young woman and the daughterless older woman. While she had always enjoyed pleasant female acquaintances, the mystique of true female solidarity had always eluded her. Perhaps estrogenic compatibility had something to do with sharing a childhood bathroom with sisters, an experience she had missed out on as an only child.

"Incoming spray," Libby announced.

Slow to recognize the signal, Belinda zoomed her window down a few seconds behind everyone else, just as a cloud of Aqua Net filled the car. Libby wielded the can like a graffiti artist, shellacking each teased hank of hair.

Rosemary's tongue darted out, and she grimaced. "Christ, Libby, you make a case for flavored hairspray."

Libby ignored her and commenced round two of her coiffure—coaxing the shoulder-length strands downward while preserving the "lift." "So how did the show end, Carole?"

"I was hoping you could tell
me.
My psychic, Ricky, called, so I missed the last ten minutes."

"Oh, not Ricky again," Rosemary muttered.

Libby angled the visor mirror so she could smirk at Carole. "Why didn't you ask your psychic what was going to happen on the show?"

"Very funny. He and I had more important things to discuss. Ricky had a vision about my future as a single woman."

She paused for effect, but the women were apparently used to her drama, and they waited her out. Belinda glanced from woman to woman, wondering who would give in first. At least their teasing camaraderie kept her mind off the crawling traffic, which seemed to be reproducing.

Carole emitted an exasperated sigh. "Ricky says the love of my life is right under my nose—I think he means at the office!"

Libby cackled. "At Archer? Is it one of the gay designers, or one of the gay salesmen?"

"They're not
all
gay."

"Other than Mr. Archer, name one straight, single male at the office."

"Martin Derlinger," Rosemary offered.

Carole winced. "Ewww, the copy machine guy? He sniffs his fingers."

Rosemary made a rueful noise. "You can't fight destiny."

Belinda laughed under her breath, while making impossible promises to God in exchange for green lights.

Libby turned around in her seat. "If Ricky is such a powerful psychic, why didn't he tell you the guy's name?"

"Because," Rosemary said, "if he told her everything at once, he wouldn't be able to collect a hundred bucks every week."

"He only gets so many visions at a time," Carole said in a huff.

"Yeah, well next time ask him for the winning Lotto South numbers," Libby said. She played the lotto religiously.

"Ricky won't use his powers for financial gain."

Libby and Rosemary hooted, then proclaimed the psychic a scam artist and Carole a fool with her money, but Belinda only half-listened, nervously drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. She pressed the gas pedal in preparation for merging onto Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, a larger highway with fewer stoplights. Cars surged forward en masse, zooming from forty to sixty miles an hour in one elevated heartbeat. The fact that people weren't killed every day in this enormous, throbbing network of machines and asphalt was a miracle to her. And the meeting...

Her boss was not going to like what she had to say about Payton Manufacturing. In the bleary hours after midnight, she'd begun to suspect Payton of inflating its profits by underreporting debt. She needed more proof, but since Margo had made it clear that Archer had to beef up its manufacturing segment before their company could be taken public, she would not be happy about a delay in acquiring Payton, good reason or no. In fact, Margo's e-mail message last night had hinted that "raises would abound" if Belinda "impressed the CEO in the meeting" and "facilitated the decision to proceed with the acquisition." But was her boss trying to rally an ally, or set up a scapegoat?

"Shouldn't we, Belinda?"

She turned her head toward Libby. "Hm?"

"I was saying that since we've all been married at least once, we should be writing down all this stuff."

"What stuff?"

"Men stuff. Sex stuff. Marriage stuff."

The Berry Bonanza with calcium had a metallic aftertaste. "Why?"

"To pass on to our daughters, and to women everywhere." She tucked a curl in place. "Incoming."

Belinda groped for the button in the armrest and zoomed down her window. At least the aerosol fog dispersed quickly at seventy miles an hour. When they zoomed up the windows, Belinda pushed her scattered bangs out of her eyes. Libby would arrive looking great, and she would arrive looking like a haystack.

"You mean, like, us write a sex book?" Carole asked.

"Why not?" Libby flipped up the visor mirror. "A book of advice on men and marriage from women who've been around the block."

Rosemary's laugh was sandpapery. "Relationship advice for grown-up women? That would certainly be a departure from everything else on the market. If I see another book on 'how to please your man,' I'm going to be violently ill."

"Exactly," Libby said, shoving the hairspray into her bag and whipping out a legal pad. "Ladies, we can do this. Tentative title—" She scribbled furiously. "A Postscript to Nine Marriages. How does that sound?"

"Immoral," Rosemary said.

"Wow," Carole said. "We really have nine marriages between us?"

Libby counted on her beringed fingers. "I'm on my second, you're on your third, Rosemary was married three times, and Belinda—you were married just once, right?"

Belinda's neck grew warm. "Um... right. But I don't think I'll be able to contribute much to this project. I... wouldn't feel comfortable giving relationship advice to other women."

"How long were you married?" Carole asked.

"Not long."

"Is he why you moved to Atlanta?"

"Leave Belinda alone," Rosemary chided. "She's not used to us yet."

"Right," Libby said. "We don't want to scare her out of the carpool. If she wants us to know whether the man broke her heart, she'll tell us."

She felt their curious gazes latch on. Belinda wet her lips and tasted Aqua Net. She barely knew these women—she couldn't divulge the extent of that day's profound humiliation. Hadn't she left Cincinnati to escape the pitying air?

Yet these women were inviting her to unburden her misery. Was that how sisterhood worked—women bonded by having emotional "goods" on each other? The urge to wallow tugged at her again. The women would almost certainly shower her with sympathy and call Vince vile names... at first. But how long before the sympathy gave way to the suspicion that she must be unlovable for a man to behave so abominably?

The flush climbed Belinda's face in the ensuing silence. She wavered.
He didn't break my heart, he drained it. Left it intact, only smaller.
She inhaled deeply, visualizing her lungs expanding into the relative emptiness of her chest. When her brain began to tingle, she exhaled. "I'd rather not talk about it."

She could almost hear them bristle. "Okay," Libby chirped in a voice that said they really didn't want to know anyway.

Stinging from the awkward turn of events, Belinda cast about for a diversion. "So no one ever said what happened to your last fourth in the carpool. Did she move on to a better job, or simply move to a better location?"

In a blink, the mood went from taut to tense. Gazes met, then averted.

Libby toyed with her pen. "Her name was Jeanie Lawford. She died."

Belinda's throat constricted. "I'm so sorry. What happened?"

"She fell down an elevator shaft at work," Carole said. "The one that's sealed."

"About six months ago," Rosemary added quietly.

Belinda's mouth opened and closed as she tried to absorb the awfulness of such an abrupt, unnecessary death. "No one told me."

"We'd rather not talk about it," Libby murmured, then looked away.

A finger of disquiet traced Belinda's spine. A retaliatory cold shoulder notwithstanding, why wouldn't the women want to talk about the death of a close friend? Had the woman committed suicide? A blaring horn behind her brought her back to the traffic and to the fact that she had inadvertently decreased her speed. She swallowed and pressed the gas pedal. Maybe this carpooling thing wasn't such a good idea after all. Belinda leaned forward and turned up the radio volume.

"Good news for folks on I-85 southbound—the accident blockin' the right lane below the I-285 junction has been cleared. You folks on 285 eastbound, stay with me, and I'll get you where you're goin'. This is Talkin' Tom Trainer."

"Thank you, Tom," she breathed, feeling as if he were speaking to her. The man with the anesthetic voice would never know what a comfort he was to a new driver like her, who was still trying to sort out Peachtree Street, Peachtree Court, Peachtree Lane, Peachtree Circle, Peachtree Way, Peachtree Place, Peachtree Trace, Peachtree Avenue, Peachtree Corners, Peachtree Commons, Peachtree Run, West Peachtree and Old Peachtree. She was beginning to think Atlanta's population surge could be explained by the fact that once people were lured into the city, no one could find their way out.