And One Last Thing... (2 page)

In my weaker moments, I considered forgetting this whole thing and staying with him. For one thing, you can’t discount eight years of history. My parents were very fond of him. My parents and his parents seemed to enjoy spending time together, a rare and precious coincidence that meant I never had to split my holidays. And Mike was safe. He was stable. Apart from the receptionist-screwing, he had been a decent husband to me. I didn’t have to worry about bills being paid or him drinking too much or watching an alarming amount of SportsCenter.

We’d made a life together. It wasn’t perfect, but I was proud of what we’d built. Even if he’d smashed it all to hell by betraying the unspoken rule I thought we’d both agreed to - don’t have sex with other people.

And at other, angrier moments, I found my hands gripping the edge of the kitchen table as I stared at my husband. Mike had retained the blond, boyish good looks that had drawn me to him when we were seniors in high school. The sun-streaked sandy blond hair that curled just at the ends. The guileless brown eyes that crinkled when he smiled. The little cleft in his chin that his mama called “God’s thumbprint.”

Mike was equally tense. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. His knee was bouncing steadily under the table, a sure sign he was nervous about something. He didn’t even complain about our dinner menu of blackened catfish and Mama’s “Light Your Fire” cheese grits. Mike hated spicy food with a passion. He treated Taco Bell like exotic third-world cuisine.

I said I was trying to behave as normally as possible. I didn’t say I was a saint.

Finally, he cleared his throat and asked, “Honey, did Cherry Click stop by here with some flowers a few days ago?”

So that’s why he was wound so tight, I mused. He’d been stewing for days, wondering where Beebee’s anniversary flowers had ended up. “No.” I said, concentrating on every muscle and nerve in my face to keep it a pleasant, blank mask. “You sweet thing, did you order me flowers?”

He paled ever so slightly as he stammered, “N - no, one of my clients lost his mama. I sent an arrangement, but I don’t think it arrived at the funeral service in time.”

Well, that was a far more interesting lie than I would have previously given him credit for. I gave a breathy little gasp. “Oh, no, whose mother died?”

I watched him squirm as he searched for the right answer. “Oh, nobody you know,” he said, picking at his plate. “It’s a client over in Quincy.”

“Oh, well, it was so thoughtful of you to send something. I can call Cherry and double-check whether it arrived.”

“No! No, I’ll take care of it,” he said, far too quickly.

“I don’t mind,” I told him, willing my lips not to curve upward.

“It’s okay, really. Don’t worry about it,” he assured me.

“All right,” I said, shrugging blithely.

His shoulders relaxed and the tense little lines around his mouth disappeared. He was comfortable again, sure that I was still in the dark. My fingers gripped my fork, my teeth grinding ever so slightly as I imagined jabbing the tines right into his forehead.

“So, um, how’s the old monthly report coming?” he asked around a mouthful of catfish. “Remember, we have to get it out by next week. You only have a few days left to mail it out.”

I hadn’t looked at it in a week. And somehow I just didn’t think descriptions of Mike’s golf game and repainting the office were going to cut it this month.

“It’s fine,” I lied.

“Be sure to mention the condo. And call down to the office and talk to Beebee,” he added before downing half of his glass of water.

I dropped my fork. But considering my usual level of clumsiness, he didn’t notice. “What?”

“It might be nice to put sort of a getting to know you interview thing in this month’s letter,” he told me. “She’s been with us for a while, but some of the clients haven’t met her yet.”

My mouth dried up. He actually wanted me to talk to the woman he was screwing behind my back? Did he have no shame? Didn’t that make him the least bit nervous at all? Apparently he trusted Beebee enough not to spill everything to me. Or he trusted me to be dumb enough not to pick up on any hints Beebee might drop.

“What do you want me to ask her?”

“Oh, the usual stuff,” he said, shrugging and returning his attention to his food. “You’ll figure it out.”

I smiled, my lips stretched so tight, I sensed the coppery sting of blood welling up into my mouth. “Oh, sure, just let us girls sort it out.”

3 • The Magic and Mystery of Beebee Baumgardner

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I sat in the lobby of Mike’s office, peering over the top of a year-old copy of Redbook and watching Beebee make appointments over the phone. And trying to make her head explode though telekinesis.

I’d waited until Mike had gone to lunch to come by the office for her “interview.” Oh, I had a whole list of questions for her, like, “Who the hell do you think you are?” and “Do you have a history of sexually transmitted diseases?” But I doubted I would be able to use the newsletter as an excuse for those.

Watching her, I bounced between wondering how I was expected to compete with someone as outrageously sexy as Mike’s secretary and thrilling at every little fault I could find, like a weirdly shaped mole at the base of her neck or the fact that one of her eyebrows was slightly longer than the other. How could Mike cheat on me with someone who drew her eyebrows on and still got them asymmetrical? I knew that when it came down to it, a man didn’t give a damn about eyebrows when you had a butt they could bounce a quarter off of, but it helped me cling to a shred of superiority.

Beebee had caused quite the stir when she arrived in town. The fact that Mike had hired an unknown was highly unusual in the first place, as knowing someone who knows someone is half the battle of the Singletree employment market. The only reason Singletree parents joined churches and bridge clubs was to guarantee that their children could move out of the house one day.

Beebee had charisma, this aura of intimidation that had the local women talking about her at the gym, at the grocery, at our club meetings. Because, basically, the people I know never left high school and Beebee was the cool new girl that scared us. At the office she dressed in pencil skirts, leopard prints, and Mamie Van Doren sweaters. It was edgy and sexy but managed to keep her just outside kissing distance of tacky. It was like someone had told her “Leave them wanting more.” Tragically, that person failed to tell her “less is more” when it came to tanning and tooth whitening.

My first face-to-face interaction with Beebee was about two weeks after Mike hired her. I finally worked up the nerve to see if she lived up to the hype and made an excuse to visit Mike at the office. When I walked in the front door, she was facing away from me and she was lecturing someone named Leslie about dating the wrong kind of man.

“Sweetie, you’re never going to move out of that double-wide if you don’t start thinking with parts of your body above the waist,” Beebee snorted as I walked through the door. Her back was turned to me as she twisted the phone cord around her fingers. It was the first time I’d heard Beebee’s real accent, a far cry from the melted sugar tones she used when I called the office. Her natural voice was lower and sort of harsh, like crinkling aluminum foil. “You can’t keep dating these guys. They’re no good for you. They don’t take you any place nice and then they always expect you to put out at the end of the night… I don’t care that you would do that anyway. You could at least go after someone with a nice clean office job. Someone who will spring for a place with cloth napkins. I mean, at the rate you’re going, why not just marry a carny and be done with it?”

“No. No, you can’t date both.” She grunted. “That’s the thing with these white-collar, middle-class guys, they need to think that they’re the only ones or it’s no fun for them. And if you’re going to get knocked up -”

Unfortunately, this was the moment Beebee checked over her shoulder and saw me standing there listening. She dropped the phone in the cradle and greeted me in that sweet, fake voice. That was the first time I realized Beebee was not nearly as dumb as she looked.

What really killed me about this whole situation is that the affair was the second thing Mike and Beebee had pulled over on me. On August 23 of the previous year, I’d turned thirty. When Mike asked what kind of party I wanted, I suggested something low-key; maybe going up to our little cabin at Lake Lockwood with friends and family and having a nice weekend together. But while my brother sent a dozen candy-pink roses and a gift certificate for a seaweed wrap, my birthday came and went without so much as a card from my husband.

So I held a twenty-minute pity party, ate half a fat-free cheesecake, and allowed spa technicians to wrap me in a detoxifying kelp burrito. That Friday, Mike said he wanted to take me out to a nice dinner to make up for not having time to get me a present.

He took me to the Singletree Country Club, where about one hundred fifty people jumped out at me and yelled “Surprise!” I was surprised, all right. I didn’t know who the hell these people were. I recognized my parents and Mike’s parents, and that was about it.

“Happy birthday, honey!” Mike yelled, kissing me on the cheek with a loud smack.

Through a tight smile, I asked, “Mike, what is this?”

“It’s your birthday party, silly,” he whispered under the guise of kissing my cheek again. His voice rose as he said, “I bet you thought I forgot, didn’t you? I know you said you didn’t want a big fuss, but you only turn thirty once. And I thought a surprise party would be fun.”

I looked around the room at the smiling, expectant faces. You couldn’t really tell this was a birthday party. The reception room, one social step down from the sacrosanct “for weddings only” banquet room, was tastefully decorated with votive arrangements of white roses. A piano player played low jazz tunes from the corner. There was an open bar and a beautiful buffet set up with seven different kinds of shellfish, all of which would make me break out in hives as I was allergic. It looked like a really nice cocktail party for a humane society or something.

“Mike, who are all of these people?” I asked quietly.

“Our friends.” Mike shrugged, sipping champagne.

“None of our friends are here,” I said through my smile, waving at an elderly woman in the back of the room who seemed to recognize me. Or she could have been trying to flag down a waiter. “In fact, I don’t recognize anybody. How did you manage to host a party in this town without inviting a single person I know?”

“They’re clients, Lacey,” he said in a low tone. “And potential clients. I thought this would be a good opportunity for us to get to know them on a personal level, to show them that we appreciate their friendship.”

“What about Scott and Allison? Or Charlie and Brandi?” I asked, naming two of Mike’s best friends and their wives, both of whom were our designated weekend barbecue buddies.

“There wasn’t room on the guest list.”

“Okay, where’s Emmett?” I asked, looking around the room. My brother loved all birthdays, though the roses and spa certificate were among his tamer offerings. On my twenty-eighth, he had his friend, Tony, the only working drag queen in the county, dress up like Marilyn Monroe and sing “Happy Birthday” to me. While Mike’s grandma told Tony he was a very talented girl, Wynnie and Jim Terwilliger sat there stone-faced and left right after cake.

Mike shrugged. “Beebee said he didn’t RSVP.”

“You didn’t call him?” I asked.

“I just figured he knew he would be uncomfortable and didn’t want to come,” he said. “Besides, I don’t think he’d make a great impression on the guests.”

My eyes narrowed at Mike. He had never been comfortable around my brother. He always tried to make conditions and restrictions on the time we spent with my family because he didn’t think he should have to put up with Emmett. He would go to Easter at my parents’ house as long as Emmett didn’t bring a date. He would go on a golfing weekend with my dad as long as Emmett wasn’t invited. It was like he thought the “gay” could rub off or something. “I thought that this was a birthday party for me. I told you I just wanted something small, something with my family -”

“Why would we want something small, when I’ve given you all this? Why can’t you just say thank you?” he said, gesturing across the room to his scantily clad secretary. Stunning in an off-the-shoulder black cocktail dress, Beebee was carrying a clipboard and intently instructing the waitstaff on the placement of an ice sculpture swan. “Beebee and I worked really hard to set this whole thing up and it wasn’t easy after just coming off the end of the fiscal year. Why can’t you just enjoy this?”

“Because I didn’t ask for it.” I poked my finger into Mike’s chest. “As usual, you just -”

I felt my mother’s arm slide around my waist and heard her tinkling laugh as she announced she was taking me to the ladies’ room to “freshen my lipstick.” Apparently, I’d chewed all of mine off.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I demanded the moment Mama shut the door behind us. She waited until she checked under the stall doors for feet to answer me.

“I thought you knew!” Mama exclaimed.

“But I told you about the lake thing; I even asked which weekend would work for you.”

“I thought you were trying to get information out of me,” Mama said, tutting sympathetically as she dabbed my lips with one of the dozens of lipsticks she kept in her handbag, organized by time of day and occasion. My brother and I were younger reflections of our mother. Age hadn’t dulled the china doll blue eyes, but careful maintenance had kept the thunder out of her thighs and the gray out of her wavy blond bob. She said she’d give up and go “scary and natural” after her sixtieth birthday. Until then, she was coiffed, calorie-conscious, and carried an emergency makeup kit in her purse. “I thought you were playing dumb.”

“Obviously it wasn’t an act!” I hissed, blotting dutifully when she held a tissue to my mouth.

“Well, it explains your outfit,” she said, peering down her nose at my peridot-colored cotton sundress and high-heeled sandals. While bright and breezy, the ensemble was not exactly country-club caliber. My hair was in a ponytail, for God’s sake.

“He said a ‘nice dinner.’ For Mike, that means D’Angelo’s, for which this outfit is perfectly appropriate. And of course he didn’t think to warn me that I might want to dress up a little.”

“Still,” she said, tsking gently. “This green is not your color -”

“Mama! Focus!”

“Right, I’m sorry, baby. I thought you would like a surprise party,” Mama said, wrapping her arms around me and squeezing me tight, but somehow managing not to wrinkle her beaded peach suit. “A little bit of fuss over a girl’s birthday never hurts.”

“It’s not what I asked for,” I said, grinding my teeth as I leaned against the wall. “As usual, Mike didn’t listen to me. He didn’t really care about what I wanted. He’s using my birthday as an excuse to schmooze clients. He’s going to write my birthday party off as a business expense.”

Mama gasped. “Is that who all those people are?”

“And why isn’t Emmett here?”

“I don’t know,” Mama said, her own coral-coated lips thinning. “I thought it was strange that he didn’t mention anything about it, but I thought that was because Mike was throwing the party and he couldn’t find anything nice to say about it.”

My parents were as politically conservative as the next Southern Baptists, but woe to the person who teased the gay cub in front of my Mama Bear. Carla Gibson still avoids Mama at the Piggly Wiggly after trying to ban Emmett’s “Salute to Cher” from the senior talent show when we were in high school. Mama never complained about Mike or his family or how they treated Emmett. Well, she never complained directly… she did, however, wonder aloud why Mike couldn’t try a little harder with Emmett, why his parents always clammed up whenever Emmett was around. This was, of course, a hint for me to do something about their behavior. But I’d never figured out what that was supposed to be.

“He’ll be sorry to have missed the chance to make fun of the outfits in there.” Mama smirked, dusting powder across her nose. “Did you see that blue thing Penny Frensley is wearing? What was she thinking?”

“This is just so typical of Mike,” I groused. “And he didn’t even plan the damn thing. He let his secretary do it.”

“Well, she did a good job; it’s a perfectly nice party,” Mama conceded. When she saw the glare I was giving her, she added, “Which is entirely beside the point. You’re absolutely right. Mike was wrong, wrong, wrong.”

“Thank you.”

Mama gently brushed powder across the bridge of my nose. “You might want to do something about your jaw, honey. It’s clenched awfully tight.”

“Because I’m planning on chewing on Mike’s ass when I go back out there.”

“Lacey, I know that I taught you better than to have a tantrum in public,” she said, patting her hair purely for dramatic affect. “It reflects badly on me as a mama. Of course, I also taught you when somebody screws you over, even when that someone is your husband, you don’t just lie back and think of England.”

“I haven’t done anything irrevocable yet, have I?” I asked.

“No,” she assured me. “It was a very quiet hissy fit, barely noticeable. I only swooped in because you were doing that frozen beauty queen smile and that means you’re about five seconds from Chernobyl territory.” I laughed. She squeezed my shoulders. “I know my baby.”

She turned me toward the mirror to show me she’d painted my mouth a bloody-murder red. “The question is, what do you do from here?”

With what Mama called my “scary-pleasant hostess face” on, I floated across the room and very loudly, very sweetly thanked Beebee for putting together such a wonderful party for Mike.

“Oh, don’t think anything of it,” Beebee said, blushing to the roots of her hair. She kept looking over my shoulder for some sort of escape route. At the time I thought she was just uncomfortable being caught between her boss and his pissed-off wife. Now I think she was nervous that I’d figured them out and was about to smack her. “Mike - Mr. Terwilliger - just wanted to make sure you had a nice birthday.”

“Well, aren’t I the lucky girl?” I asked, my smile stretched tightly across my face.

Beebee didn’t answer, instead waving at the caterer to begin the circulation of canapes.

After Mike spent most of my birthday toast talking about the new online debt-tracking packages available through Terwilliger and Associates, I went around and introduced myself to nearly everyone in the room and asked them how they knew Mike. Including Mike’s parents.