Good Christian Bitches (4 page)

“Was this something just recent?” Amanda asked sympathetically.

“Oh, no, no,” Heather said dismissively. “Norm and I broke it off, like, more than two years ago.”

“Norm?” Amanda asked. “Norm who?”

“Norm Hunter,” Heather said, surprised that Norm needed a last name to be identified. He was only one of the leading cosmetic surgeons in the Dallas–Fort Worth area.

“Norm Hunter?” Amanda asked, shocked. “I didn’t even know he was divorced!”

Now Heather shrugged. “He wasn’t exactly
divorced
divorced,” she admitted. “But he and Jane were separated, and it didn’t look like their marriage was going to survive, and he proposed to me.”

“While he was still married to Jane?” Amanda asked, not getting it.

“They hadn’t been living together for more than a year,” Heather said defensively. “I didn’t, like, bust up that marriage, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Amanda put a hand up. Hold it right there.

“Whoa,” she began. “I wasn’t accusing you of anything like that. It’s just a lot to take in all at once. I had no idea Norm was even divorced.”

Heather, calming down, studied her. “You sure have been out of the loop for a while,” she said.

Amanda nodded. “You’ve got that right,” she said. “I’m sure I’ve missed a lot.”

“No doubt.”

“You never gave the ring back? I don’t mean to be rude, but . . .”

Heather grinned. She held up her hand for Amanda to admire. “Ten carats,” she said proudly. “I call it Ira, like I-R-A—get it?” She giggled. “An engagement ring’s a gift, right? Why should anybody have to give back a gift? After all, he broke off the engagement.”

“I always thought . . .” Amanda began, but she bit her tongue.

Suddenly she vaguely recalled hearing that Heather had been through three such engagements/near misses, and come to think of it, Heather had kept the rings on those occasions as well. The saddest thing was, she remembered hearing that with all three men, Heather might as well have had a tag in her ear. They were men who would have settled for anybody—they just couldn’t stand to be alone—and yet they still passed on Heather.

“But enough about me,” Heather said with a wicked grin. Clearly, she didn’t see her situation as so pathetic and proudly felt that if getting over highly successful ex-fiancés were an Olympic sport, she would have had a host of gold medals to go with those diamond rings. She fancied herself a regular Hall of Famer.

“Don’t you just look amazing, and after all you’ve been through!” she gushed, turning the conversation back to Amanda.

Amanda thought she detected a trace of envy embedded in the compliment. They stood for a moment in awkward silence.

Finally, Heather sighed. “I’ve really got to go—I have a doctor’s appointment in ten minutes. I’ve got the keys on my desk. I’ll be right back.” And with that, she went slinking back down the hallway, in a curve-hugging dress that looked better suited for dinner than office attire. But then again, Heather was always in audition mode for her next engagement ring. Amanda was about to ask her whether Ann had known all along that she wouldn’t be able to be at the office to meet her, but suddenly it didn’t matter. She just stood there and waited for Heather to come back and give her the keys.

T
en minutes later, with the keys to her temporary new home in hand, Amanda pulled up to the sweeping circular drive in front of her parents’ house. She cut the motor and paused a moment to take in the magnificent, seven-bedroom house where she had grown up. She thought for a moment about the limousine that had taken her from the house to Hillside Park Presbyterian on the day of her wedding. She felt like something of a failure to be coming home now, after a failed marriage, to start her life over again.

There was something inside of her that had always hoped the damage in her marriage, great as it was, could have somehow been repaired. Of course, Bill wasn’t interested in healing. It was going to be his way or the highway. He also knew he had enough money to find someone who was willing to live like that in exchange for his lifestyle—someone who would simply turn a blind eye to his bad behavior in exchange for his charity. And it wasn’t going to be Amanda, that was for sure. No way.

Now, taking possession of the keys to her new place somehow made the whole thing more real. Gotta make the best of it, Amanda told herself. This is a much better place for the children anyway.

And with that, she got out of her SUV and headed into the house. Parked next to the front door was a new black Mercedes Maybach with paper license plates—a car that cost at least three hundred thousand dollars. Amanda had always had a thing for black Mercedeses. She’d asked for one for her high school graduation gift and had fully expected to get one. When her parents presented her with an eighteen-carat gold Rolex, complete with diamond face and diamond bezel, she threw the watch at her father and stormed out of her graduation dinner. But Amanda was a different person back then, and after all, it was the 1980s.

“Mom didn’t tell me she was buying a new car,” Amanda said to herself, admiring the vehicle. “Ooh, I love it!”

Amanda headed inside, where she was immediately greeted by her two children, Will, twelve, and Sarah, nine. Will was his father, Bill, reincarnated as a sixth grader—the same shaggy blond hair, the same mischievous eyes, the same half smile that gave people the sense that father and son alike were somehow getting something over on an unsuspecting world—which, half the time, they were. The resemblance between father and son was so uncanny that Amanda frequently had to remind herself not to take out her anger and frustration over her husband’s bad behavior on her son. Will had just discovered the skateboarding and surfing culture of Southern California, and leaving it behind for landlocked, uncool Dallas was, to his young mind, nearly a mortal blow.

“I hate this place!” he shouted, enraged, by way of greeting. “There’s nothing to do! Dallas sucks!”

Here we go again, Amanda told herself.

“I’ve asked you never to use that word, Will,” she said calmly. She simply didn’t have the energy for a struggle. It never went well under the best of circumstances. And besides, today it was just too hot.

“Dad uses it all the time,” her son countered. His father was his hero and he worshipped the ground he walked on.

“I’m not Dad,” Amanda said, trying unsuccessfully not to raise her voice. Sarah approached and gave her a waist-high hug.

“Why’d’ja have to take us away from Dad anyway?” Will asked, obviously ready for battle.

Amanda was exasperated. If your father hadn’t had the morals of an alley cat, she wanted to tell him, you’d be skateboarding this very minute on Balboa Island. But she wanted to be extremely careful not to say or do anything that could affect Will’s relationship with his father. It was bad enough that the boy was going to be fifteen hundred miles away from his dad, unable to see him on a regular basis. The last thing Amanda wanted was to be accused of poisoning the relationship between the two of them.

“We’ve been over this a thousand times,” Amanda said wearily. “It just didn’t work out between Daddy—your daddy and me. I wish the truth were otherwise, but it’s not.”

“Well then, let’s make it a thousand and one times,” Will sassed back. “Dallas sucks. This house sucks. I hate it here.”

“You haven’t even given it a chance,” Amanda said mechanically, but she just didn’t have the energy to match his anger. She tousled his hair. “You’ll see.”

The boy recoiled from his mother’s touch. “I hate when you touch my hair like that.”

“Okay, Will,” Amanda said, trying not to let the thing escalate. But with Will, as with his father, escalating anger could happen in an instant.

“Did you get the keys, Mommy?” Sarah asked. She was nine years old going on twenty-five, physically a mix of Amanda and Bill, with long, straight blond hair and Amanda’s green eyes and warm, self-deprecating smile. It broke Amanda’s heart that Sarah didn’t have a daddy to live with, and Amanda had given over many hours in a therapist’s office discussing whether it might be better to keep the marriage intact for the sake of the children. Ultimately, Amanda had decided that a precocious child like Sarah, who heard everything and missed nothing, would be far more confused—even damaged—by her father’s philandering if she had to witness it up close. Amanda couldn’t have Sarah growing up thinking that this was what a happy, healthy marriage looked like. That was the final straw in making the decision to get the divorce and move back home.

“I got ’em,” Amanda said.

“That’s so great!” Sarah exclaimed with an excitement that Amanda didn’t understand, but for which she was grateful. At least someone was happy about their new life. “When are we moving in?”

“It all depends on the movers,” Amanda said. “They’re supposed to be here in the morning. We could realistically be in the house by tomorrow night.”

“And none too soon,” came a voice from the hallway. It was Amanda’s mom, Elizabeth Smith. “These kids are more than I can bear,” she said as she strode into the room. “Well, just Mister Tough Guy over there.”

Will gave a half smile. Nothing could make his day like proof from adults that he was driving them crazy.

“Hi, Mom,” Amanda said. “It’s just for one more day.”

“I know,” Elizabeth said, waving a hand dramatically at her grandchildren. “It’s just not something I’m used to. Especially not in this heat. It’s so hot and dry the trees are whistlin’ for the dogs.”

Elizabeth was a tall, thin, graceful sixty-two-year-old from one of Dallas’s leading banking families, and she had married into one of Dallas’s leading oil families. For forty-one years, she had been the dutiful CEO’s wife, traveling with her husband, Ed, to far-flung locales in the Middle East and South America, as Ed oversaw both his family’s oil interests and her family’s banking interests. Elizabeth’s priorities had always been marriage and family, church, community service and philanthropy, and golf. She had played to a two handicap since college and the first floor of her home was practically littered with trophies and other testaments to the championship nature of her golf game. Ed had died three years earlier while piloting his private plane on a mission trip in Mexico; due to mechanical failure, the plane had crashed into the side of a mountain and Ed’s body had never been recovered.

Elizabeth had never quite been the same since the loss of her beloved husband. She was a member of the generation that put sacrifice and marriage above all else, and that included ignoring the rumors, mostly substantiated, of Ed’s wandering eye. To his credit, Ed never became involved, even in passing, with any woman in their social circle. He had the decency to keep his philandering a relatively private matter, and out of their own backyard—commendable, as many men weren’t that discreet. Elizabeth was the kind of woman who assumed that this was something all men did, and there was no point throwing a hissy fit about it. For this reason, she had a hard time understanding why her own daughter would have ended a marriage to an otherwise perfectly nice man simply because of this one manageable issue. This was an unspoken—or at least mostly unspoken—argument between the two of them.

Since Ed’s sudden passing, Elizabeth had found herself on the receiving end of the attentions of half a dozen or more Hillside Park millionaires and even billionaires, some of whom were married, some of whom were not, who offered to take her anywhere from dinner at the Mansion on Turtle Creek to fabulous faraway places.

Elizabeth had turned down all of these invitations. After forty-one years of marriage and putting up with one man, she was not about to begin putting up with another. She loved knowing she had the security and flexibility to make that decision.

“Children, go play,” Amanda said. “I’ve got to talk to Gigi.”

“Gigi” was a name Elizabeth had chosen for herself while Amanda was still pregnant with Will. She couldn’t stand the thought of being stuck for life with one of those “old lady” sounding grandmother names, so she had quickly chosen her own. She worked hard at staying as beautiful as she’d always been famous for being, and Gigi was the only name that really fit her.

“Can I stay and listen?” Sarah asked. “I’ll be quiet.”

“That’ll be a first,” Will said with a sneer.

“That’s enough,” Amanda said firmly. “Will, I don’t want you teasing your sister. And Sarah, no, you can’t listen. This is a conversation for grown-ups.”

“Awwww!” There was nothing better in Sarah’s world than listening to a conversation between grown-ups. It was better than TV.

“If you’re going back into the media room,” Elizabeth told her grandchildren in a tone that brooked no snappy comebacks, “you’d better keep your food and drinks off the furniture! You hear me?”

The children dutifully nodded and ran off toward the media room, which featured a wide-screen TV almost as large as a screen at the local multiplex.

“I just had the most bizarre day, Mom,” Amanda said. “You got any coffee on?”

Elizabeth studied her daughter, ushering her toward the massive kitchen. “I might. You weren’t gone more than a couple of hours. What happened?”

“What didn’t happen?” Amanda said, shaking her head slightly as they reached the kitchen.

Elizabeth poured coffee. “Oh, by the way. A couple of your girlfriends called. They heard you were back in town and wanted to get together with you, take you to dinner. Nancy McRae and Diane Taylor.”

Nancy and Diane. These were two of Amanda’s friends from grade school. They had even come out to California to visit. They had both been dear friends and confidantes through the whole divorce struggle.

“I’d love to see them,” Amanda said with a sigh. “I just need a couple of days to get my head on straight. There’s so much insanity in my life right now.”

“I’ll put them off for a few days,” her mother said, using her thumb to work out an impertinent smudge that had mysteriously appeared on the glossy granite countertop. “So what kind of insanity are you talking about?”

Amanda was extremely grateful for the opportunity to unload. “I stopped in at Hillside Park Presbyterian,” she began, her voice rising at the end of the sentence as if she were asking a question, “just to look around? And the girls there in the Bible study—they were actually praying for me.”

“They were praying for you?” Elizabeth poured two cups of coffee into the china pattern she had discovered on a business trip with Ed to Paris. “Did I ever tell you the story about how your father and I got this china out of the country?”

“Half a dozen times,” Amanda answered. The last thing she wanted to do right now was to hear the story of how her parents had bribed a French official and given a box of Cuban cigars to a French customs officer to get this eighteenth-century coffee set out of a dusty, dingy museum and into their Dallas home. It was a great story, but not one that bore repeating right now, at least not in Amanda’s mind.

“Somehow, somebody got ahold of everything going on in my life, and I couldn’t believe it, but I swear those women were praying for me. I don’t know how sincere it was, but they certainly did a great job of letting everybody in Hillside Park know all about my dirty laundry.”

“Lettin’ the cat outta the bag is a whole lot easier than puttin’ it back in,” Elizabeth quipped, adding unhelpfully, “You know, if you’d stayed married, they wouldn’t have had anything to talk about.” She leaned against the counter with her arms folded. “If I told you once, I told you a thousand times—never leave a provider.”

Amanda rolled her eyes. “Thanks, Mom. I knew I could count on you for support.”

“I’m sorry. I guess you and I are never going to see eye to eye on this whole thing. Is that all that happened? Some of the women were praying for you?”

“There’s more. I was stepping out of the church and I looked across the street, over to where the Longhorn Ball offices are? And I saw Susie Caruth, in handcuffs. Two Hillside Park police officers were taking her away.”

“That doesn’t surprise me in the least,” Elizabeth said matter-of-factly, picking an invisible speck of dust from her spotless white blouse before carrying the coffee cups to the huge kitchen table. “Did I ever tell you how your father and I brought this table back from Borneo?”

“Only one hundred times,” Amanda said drily. Was her mother just as self-obsessed as always, or was Elizabeth starting to lose it? Amanda felt a chill as she envisioned a future in which her mother would tell her repeatedly of the origins of every stick of furniture in their homes here in Hillside Park and at the ranch. But then Amanda realized that’s pretty much all her mother had talked about for the last twenty years. It would be pointless to fear she’d ever be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s—little would change.

“I had a feeling they would have Susie arrested,” Elizabeth said.

“What do you mean?” Amanda asked, surprised that her mother would find it so normal that one of the leading socialites was in police custody.

“You’ve been away,” Elizabeth said, as if that represented some sort of mortal failing on Amanda’s part. Amanda knew that her mother had never been happy that she had forsaken Dallas for the wilds of California. In some sense, Amanda suspected, Elizabeth believed that her daughter had gotten exactly what she deserved for making so rash a move.