Ladies' Night (22 page)

Grace clamped her lips together to keep her jaw from dropping. She hoped Ben wasn’t close enough to detect the sense of defeat that swept over her, threatened to knock her off her feet and destroy her hard-won equilibrium.

Ben towered over her—intimidation through proximity was his motto. “Don’t fuck with me, Grace,” he said, his voice light and even. “You’ll get mowed down every time. Know this. If you send out any more of those incendiary e-mails, I’ll haul your ass back to court in a New York second. And that judge will be only too happy to shut you down for good.”

She took two steps backward, nearly tripping over the damned broom. “Get out,” she said, recovering quickly. She poked the broom at his spotless two-toned golf shoes. “OUT!”

He stood his ground. She jabbed at his ankles. “I said out!” He chuckled, shook his head, and strolled for the door, with Grace right on his heels. He’d left the door open, and now she saw an unfamiliar car in the driveway, a gleaming ebony Porsche Pantera.

“Nice car,” she spat.

He gave her a mock bow. “Glad you like it, since I have you to thank for it. And you know? I actually like this one much better. It handles so much smoother.”

*   *   *

She finished ripping out the rest of the carpet, without the music, now that Ben had managed to poison that source of joy. Slowly, she swept the living room and dining room floors, taking grim satisfaction from the cockroach body count.

Grace retrieved her cleaning supplies—bucket, mop, sponge, and spray cleaners—from her car and attacked the filthy windows, using an entire roll of paper towels on the front room. Logistically, it made no sense to spend so much time cleaning a house that still had so far to go in the rehab process, but she did it anyway, inhaling the scent of the strong pine cleaner as she filled her bucket with hot water.

When she found herself humming as she mopped, she got her iPod and turned it on again. The music filled her head and helped erase, temporarily, the image of Ben, smug, self-important, all-powerful Ben. “Gonna wash that man right out of my hair,” she muttered, dumping the gray mop water down the toilet and flushing it with a flourish.

Finally, satisfied that the surface layers of crud had been eradicated, along with Ben’s overpowering cologne, she set down her mop and picked up her camera again.

She photographed the front rooms, pleased with the way the afternoon sunlight slanted in, leaving atmospheric shadows on the old oak floors. She was so absorbed in her work she was startled at the sudden rattle of rain on the tin roof of the porch.

Time to go, she thought. She had to pick up Sweetie at the vet’s office, get cleaned up before her Wednesday-night “therapy” session, and, in the meantime, figure out how to hide a dog from her mother.

23

Wyatt Keeler stood in front of the tiny closet he shared with Bo, barefoot and dressed only in his cotton boxers, and felt gloom. He walked over to the closet, opened the door, and his mood did not improve. He hadn’t thought about clothes in months, not since the breakup with Callie. Okay, maybe even before that. His style guidelines in adulthood had gotten simple; he liked clean, and he liked cool. As in temperature, not trendiness.

At one time, he’d prided himself on being a sharp dresser. Just the right label jeans, good-quality classic shirts, ties and jackets. Nothing too flashy or outrageous. He’d learned a lot from his fraternity brothers in college. He’d been, like the ZZ Top song, a sharp-dressed man.

No more. Now, he idly plucked at the meager assortment of shirts and pants hanging limply on the wire hangers. “Dude,” he muttered under his breath, “you are really, really lame.” Finally, he found a pair of presentable navy blue Dockers and a short-sleeved plaid dress shirt that had been a Father’s Day gift from Callie. The J.C. Penney price tag still hung from the sleeve.

The pants fit reasonably well, but they were wrinkled. He put on the shirt, then padded out to the living area, where Nelson was eating a chicken potpie at the dinette and reading the sports section. “Dad, do we own an iron?”

“Dunno,” Nelson mumbled, his fingers poised over the box scores. “Your mother always handled that.” He glanced up, looked surprised. “Since when do you iron?”

“Since now,” Wyatt said. He checked under the kitchen sink, then on the top shelf of the hall closet, to no avail. “Screw it,” he said, tossing the pants into the dryer.

While he was waiting for his pants, Wyatt went back to the bathroom. Feeling foolish, but somehow lighthearted, he brushed his teeth, again, and flossed. Back in the bedroom, with the door closed, he checked himself out in the cloudy mirror on the back of the closet door.

He wasn’t a bad-looking guy. His teeth were straight, he was clean-shaven. After that crack Callie had made about his baldness he’d thought about letting his hair grow out again, just to prove he had plenty, but later he’d changed his mind. Screw Callie. He worked outside in the blazing Florida sun all day, and it was just much cooler without hair. Obviously, she liked a guy with hair. Luke wore his hair deliberately shaggy, like a surfer dude, although the guy had clearly never been anywhere near a surfboard. And Wyatt had always secretly suspected Luke of being a bottle blond.

Luke, Wyatt thought, had a body like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Big, pillowy hips, blobby butt. He was a desk jockey and looked it. But a successful desk jockey.

Now Wyatt turned and surveyed his own body, sucking in his gut—okay, just a little. He had wide shoulders, and all those years of hard labor at the park left him with the pects and abs to prove it. He was just a shade over six feet tall.

Callie’d always claimed his eyes were what made her start flirting with him at that bar back in Clemson, all those years ago. That and the dimples. His eyes were a mud color, he’d always thought, but he had his mother’s eyelashes, thick, black, Bambi lashes, as she called them.

A lot of good they’d done him lately.

What the hell. He fetched the pants, got dressed, put on his grandfather’s gold watch. For maybe the millionth time, he looked at the plain gold wedding band on the ring finger of his left hand. He’d taken it off dozens of times, put it back on again the same number of times. He couldn’t say why. Callie had replaced her wedding rings with the flashy diamond “engagement” ring Luke had bought her. Was it technically possible to be engaged while you were still married? Maybe he’d remove his own ring once the divorce was final. He only knew it wasn’t time. Yet. Probably this made him a double loser. He took a deep breath and picked up the truck keys from the dresser.

“You goin’ to church?” Nelson asked. He’d moved to the recliner in front of the television and found the Braves game. He was dressed in an old T-shirt and a pair of faded pajama bottoms.
Geezus H.
, Wyatt thought.
Save me from ever wearing pajama bottoms
.

“Church? No. Remember, Dad? I told you. I’ve got to go to that divorce therapy session.”

“Oh, right,” Nelson said vaguely. “And Bo’s at his mom’s?”

“Yes,” Wyatt said patiently. “Bo is with Callie tonight. “I’ll pick him up Thursday. Remember?”

Every night he replayed this same scene. Nelson would ask where Bo was, and Wyatt would tell him. Most of the time, his father seemed perfectly with it, lucid, same old Nelson. But in the evenings, he got … vague. Wyatt told himself his father was fine. He was still physically fit, strong as an ox. He ran the concession stand in the park, took tickets, helped out with the never-ending landscaping and maintenance. But in the past year, Nelson had begun a slow, almost indefinable slide. Sometimes, he needed help with the bank deposits. He got aggravated if there was even the slightest deviation in his carefully mapped daily routine.

Wyatt worried. But hell, he worried about everything. Like now. He doubled back to the bedroom, hung up the dress pants and the plaid shirt. He rolled up the sleeves of the white dress shirt he’d worn to court and put on his nicest pair of shorts. And what he thought of as his dress shoes, a pair of leather flip-flops. At least he felt like some version of himself.

*   *   *

Paula Talbott-Sinclair greeted them all in the reception area. Her usually flyaway hair had been tamed and twisted into a sleek, artful chignon. She wore a long wispy yellow and green flowered dress with bell sleeves that made her look like a butterfly, bright coral lipstick, and her usual dozen or so bracelets. She wore gold gladiator-style sandals, and tonight she seemed lucid and bright-eyed. She was, Grace thought, a woman transformed. Which made Grace immediately suspicious.

“Hello, friends,” she said, grasping the hand of each group member as they arrived at the office. She made a show of having them all sign in, inviting them to have coffee, asking them how their week had gone.

Grace was surprised when the first person she saw was Wyatt. He’d obviously taken pains with his appearance tonight. “Hey,” she said, sidling over to him at the coffee machine. “You look nice tonight.”

“No parrot poop, right?” He looked embarrassed. “You look nice, too. But unlike me, you always look good.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen me a couple hours ago,” Grace assured him. But she was glad he’d noticed. On her last thrifting excursion, she’d found a pair of nearly new black DKNY capris at the Junior League for three dollars and a simple acid-green polished cotton wrap blouse, which set her back ninety-nine cents at the hospice shop. The blouse was sleeveless, and she thought it was flattering to the new tan she’d acquired from all that running. With the black ballet flats from Target and a wide gold bangle bracelet she’d borrowed from Rochelle, this was the nicest outfit she owned, and she’d spent less buying it than she had a tube of lipstick in her old life.

Wyatt nodded his head in Paula’s direction. “Obviously, she found her way home last week.”

“Look. She’s even wearing shoes. Maybe she’s got a hot date afterward,” Grace murmured.

At the stroke of 7:00
P.M.
, Paula began herding them to their seats. “Please be seated,” she said, clapping her hands. Paula looked around the room, taking a silent body count. Grace prayed she would overlook the oversized totebag she’d stowed under her folding chair.

“So,” Paula began, her voice in a slightly higher-than-normal pitch. “We’ve completed two weeks of recovery therapy. At this stage of your process, I hope you’re beginning to feel a little more comfortable in your own skin. We’ve talked a little bit about how you see yourselves, following the breakup of your marriage. And I’d like to continue that discussion this week, with having you share from your journals.”

Paula’s cell phone was in her lap, and while she spoke, her eyes continually watched it.

She gazed around the room. “Who haven’t we heard from?”

Wyatt and Suzanne slumped down in their chairs, ducked their heads, hoping they wouldn’t be noticed. It was painfully clear the therapist had no memory of what had transpired in their previous session.

“I don’t think Suzanne has shared with us yet,” Ashleigh volunteered.

“I’ll just bet you were that kid in elementary school who always reminded the teacher she hadn’t assigned homework, just before the bell rang,” Camyrn said, giving Ashleigh the evil eye.

Suzanne’s olive skin flushed.

“That’s right,” Paula said. “Thank you, Ashleigh. Suzanne?”

*   *   *

Grace felt a sharp pang of sympathy for Suzanne, hunched down in her chair, eyes glued to her journal. Her face was pale, with two bright spots of pink on her cheeks, but her face was beaded with a fine sheen of perspiration.

Suzanne was dressed in a dull, unflattering beige dress and scuffed brown leather sandals. It was as if she was wearing her own brand of camouflage, to blend into the surroundings.

“Uh, well,” Suzanne stuttered and blinked rapidly. Grace noticed that the damp palms of her hands had begun to make the ink on Suzanne’s journal run.

Suzanne’s voice was low.

“Once, I was a wife
,” she began, reading in a stilted monotone.

“I was a lover, a mother, a teacher, a mentor. I had value, to others as well as myself. And then I discovered my husband’s treachery. He was cheating on me, with one of my coworkers. I didn’t confront him. I kept telling myself it might not be true. I became obsessed with checking on him, on her, confirming my worst suspicions. I figured out where they were having their trysts. I followed him. I checked into the same cheap motel room after they’d left, and I told myself I would take some pills and kill myself, in that same bed, and it would be the perfect, poetic justice. Just another Shakespearean tragedy. But I couldn’t even do that. Even after I knew, I did nothing. I was paralyzed. He loved someone else. She was younger, prettier, cleverer, sexier. How could I compete with her? I was a failure, at everything, especially marriage. If I couldn’t keep Eric, how could I be a success at my job? How could I be a good mother to my daughter Darby? So I have stopped trying, because if I don’t try, I can’t fail. Every day I shrink a little more. Soon I’ll be invisible. Will anybody notice? Will Eric?”

Suzanne closed her notebook, but didn’t look up.

“Oh, wow,” Ashleigh breathed, breaking the silence. “You actually slept in the same motel room they’d just screwed in? That is all kinds of crazy.”

“Ashleigh!” Camryn’s eyes blazed. “Will you please shut the
fuck
up?”

Paula didn’t appear to have heard Ashleigh’s comment. She was staring down at her cell phone, reading something on the screen.

Now, she looked up, realized the group was expecting some comment from their therapist.

“That was very powerful, Suzanne,” she said, beaming, and then looking around at the others. “Any comments? Thoughts?”

Wyatt twisted his wedding band. “I’ve been there,” he said, finally. “I couldn’t put it in words like you just did, Suzanne. But yeah, every day, when I think about it, letting some other guy just take my wife, just stepping aside and letting her leave? What a loser I am. So who could blame her for leaving me for him?”

“You’re not a loser,” Grace said fiercely. “None of us are losers. Just because my husband didn’t value me—all the things I am? That doesn’t change who I am. But it changes who he is. Somebody who lies. Somebody who cheats.” She sat up. “My ex came to see me today. And I finally saw him for what he is.”