Hostile Makeover (22 page)

“He said he couldn’t pick up Sammy from practice or Jason from his friend’s because he was tied up. Even though he promised he would. He also told me that that was my job.” Her eyes snapped with hurt and indignation. “And I still have work to do.”

“I’m sure you can finish it later or at home if you want to.”

“But I don’t
want
to.” Judy looked ready to cry or strike out; it wasn’t clear which. “I want to finish my work
here,
like I’d planned. And I want him to take what I’m doing seriously.” Her eyes glistened. “But he just talks to me as if I’m some child playing at having a job or gets mad that I’m not there to wait on him.”

She jumped up and began to pace in front of Shelley’s desk. “I’m tired of waiting on everyone and doing everything for everybody else. I’m a person, too!”

Shelley watched the emotions wash across her sister’s face. Perfectly buttoned-down Judy Schwartz Blumfeld had popped a few of those buttons. “Have you tried telling him what you’re telling me?”

Judy looked her in the eye. “He doesn’t want to hear it. We barely talk to each other anymore anyway.” She flailed at the air dismissively. “He just wants things the way he wants them—which is exactly the way they’ve always been. He won’t even consider what I want. And this project? Pfft!” Judy made the sound their mother made when she was upset, which Shelley was very careful not to point out. “You’d think I decided to take on this grand opening just to inconvenience him.”

Shelley didn’t know how to respond. If this had been Nina or another friend of hers, she’d be advising her to dump the guy, let him know in no uncertain terms that she wouldn’t put up with this kind of bullshit. But this was Judy, happily married Judy—a ray of hope on the marital horizon that Shelley now realized she had somehow been clinging to.

And then there was Craig, who might be a little stodgy and apparently averse to change, but whom Judy had always treated like the grand prize. Not to mention Jason and Sammy, who had always made Judy
kvell
—to use the Yiddish term—with pride.

“Dump the guy” was not going to cut it.

“OK.” She eyed Judy carefully. “Maybe the two of you need to take a weekend off somewhere to reconnect. Or if you can’t get all the way out of town, why not spend a night or two at the Ritz?” The Ritz was great as long as one wasn’t pressed for time or late for a meeting.

“Pfft!” This time Judy noticed her word choice. A look of horror washed over her face. “Oh, my God, I’m starting to sound like Mom!”

Shelley winced.

“I do, don’t I? I sound just like her!” Judy clasped her hands together. “I am not our mother. I refuse to be. And he can’t make me.” She paced a few steps to the right, then turned and headed back in the other direction.

“Judy, just calm down. I have to leave now for an appointment, but we could go out for a drink afterward.”

OK, so she was supposed to be getting ready for her evening with Trey after she finished at Dr. Mellnick’s. But blood was thicker than . . . dating. “We’ll have a couple of glasses of wine and consume a large quantity of hors d’oeuvres. I promise you’ll feel much better.”

“I can’t go for a drink,” Judy bit out, “because my husband is not available to pick up our children. If he won’t help me get my work done, you can bet your ass he’s not going to drop what he’s doing so I can go out and have a drink!”

Once again, Shelley didn’t know what to say. She’d never heard the word “ass,” or anything remotely like it, come out of her sister’s mouth.

“Jude . . .”

“No, don’t worry about it!” Judy reached down to retrieve her purse. “I’ve got to go.”

“Judy, just let me—”

Her sister reached the doorway, then whirled back around. “It’s OK, Shelley. I’ll be fine. Really. I’m not completely sure I can say the same for Craig.”

Shelley arrived at her appointment with her sister’s words reverberating in her head. When Dr. Mellnick motioned her to her usual chair, she sat slowly, trying to figure out how much to say. It wasn’t really her place to discuss Judy’s problems with her therapist. But then, it hadn’t been her place to discuss Nina’s, either, yet she’d given her friend part of her session.

“What’s wrong?” Dr. Mellnick asked.

“With me?” Shelley stalled. She’d already decided not to bring up her unwelcome attraction to Ross Morgan or her lack of one for Trey. If she put her feelings into words, she was afraid she’d have to act on them. And she was nowhere near ready for that. “Nothing.”

“So why the face?”

Howard Mellnick was nothing if not patient; she knew this from experience. If she didn’t respond in some way, he’d just wait until she couldn’t take the silence anymore and started spilling her guts. For a moment she considered denying she was making a face, except, of course, she’d been gnawing at her bottom lip all the way over here and it felt like she’d drawn blood.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” she began, still stalling, still trying to decide whether to confess to her own conflicted feelings or offer up her sister’s as a distraction. “I, um . . .” She paused, unsure, but unable to push away the mental picture of Judy headed home for certain confrontation with Craig.

She’d come to know Judy better in the weeks they’d been working together than she had in a lifetime. If Howard Mellnick could give her some insights that might help Judy, then surely that would be a good thing. Besides, the Mellnick was sworn to secrecy as surely as a priest in a confessional; whatever she said to him would never leave this room.

She met Howard Mellnick’s gaze and gnawed once more on her already raw lip. This was not an attempt to avoid dealing with her own problems; for once her sister’s problems loomed much larger than her own.

“The thing is,” she said quietly, “I’m a little bit worried about my sister, Judy.”

chapter
21

J
udy picked Sammy up at practice and Jason from his friend Joey’s, and drove them home spoiling for a fight. The boys were smart enough to disappear into the basement the minute they reached the house. Craig wasn’t home yet, so Judy stomped around the kitchen preparing dinner and venting her fury on the cans she slammed onto the can opener, and on the roast she yanked out of the freezer, defrosted in the microwave, and slapped into the oven.

Unfortunately, none of these things helped her chill out to any noticeable degree.

By the time Craig got home an hour and a half later, she was too mad to make small talk or pretend that she was anything short of furious. She’d been nursing her hurt and anger since their phone conversation that afternoon and there was no way she could have acted as if things were normal. Even if she’d wanted to.

She finished the dinner preparations in silence, too angry even to try to harangue one of the boys into setting the table.

“What’s for dinner?” Craig asked.

Judy looked at her husband, the one who had graduated with honors from Emory University Law School, but didn’t seem to realize how close to the precipice he was standing. “Food.”

She picked up the glass of Merlot she’d just poured and rammed it toward him, taking real satisfaction from the sight of it sloshing down his coat sleeve and onto the cuff of his crisply starched white shirt. “Maybe you’d like some wine while you’re waiting.”

Leaving him in the kitchen, Judy stalked to their bedroom suite and slammed the door behind her. There, she paced the perimeter of the room and tried to redirect her thoughts, but there was no room in her brain for anything other than anger and unhappiness. In the bathroom she splashed cold water on her flushed face and told herself to calm down. Unfortunately, her self didn’t seem to be listening.

“Judy, the bell’s going off on the oven,” Craig shouted through the locked bedroom door. She was beginning to think the man had a death wish.

Steaming, she threw the door open, brushed past Craig, and marched into the kitchen to pull the roast out of the oven. Craig followed a few steps behind her and stopped on the other side of the kitchen island, his silence indicating that he had finally noticed that something was amiss.

She set the sizzling pan with its unintentionally blackened hunk of meat on a trivet and pulled the instant mashed potatoes out of the microwave. The peas were boiling madly on the stove. She shoved the cutting board and a meat fork and knife toward him then rummaged in the cupboard for a platter. “Please cut the meat” was all she could manage.

The four of them sat at the table staring at what was supposed to be dinner. The roast looked like leather. The peas were shriveled beyond recognition, and the mashed potatoes had coalesced into one large lump.

“I had a snack at Joey’s, and I’m not hungry.” Jason scraped his chair back. “May I be excused?”

“I don’t feel so good.” Sammy stood, too. “I think I might have that stomach thing that’s going around.”

The boys hotfooted it back down to the basement.

Judy filled Craig’s plate with slabs of shoe-leather meat, a mound of ceramic-strength peas, and several golf balls of potato. With a direct challenge in her eyes, she sat back in her chair and waited for Craig to make an excuse and flee, but he surprised her by picking up his fork and beginning to eat.

“So,” he said tentatively. “How was your day?”

He swallowed a piece of meat—a feat that took several minutes and half a glass of water—and eyed the mashed potatoes and peas, evidently trying to determine which to attempt first.

She waited, eyes narrowed, while he opted for the peas. It crossed her mind that if he kept eating the garbage she’d placed before him, she might have to perform the Heimlich maneuver or call 911, but, frankly, she wanted him to suffer.

He raised a golf ball of potato to his mouth, hesitated briefly, and then slipped it between his lips.

“Are we talking
before
you called and reneged on your promise to pick up the boys, or after?”

He choked on the mashed potatoes and reached for his glass of water. Convulsive swallowing followed.

“I told you I was sorry, but I had to take care of something for a client.”

“Well, I have news for you,” Judy replied. “I have a client now, too. And an apology doesn’t just make your . . . breach of promise go away.”

“Breach of promise?” He stopped pretending to eat and pushed his plate away. “What about your breach of promise? You promised to love and honor. You promised to stay home and raise our sons and run our house. I don’t see any of those things happening anymore.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin and crumpled it onto his plate.

“I signed on to a partnership, not a lifetime employment contract. My terms have changed. It’s time to renegotiate.”

“You can’t just change the terms of an agreement, even an unwritten one, without discussion. You’ve turned all of our lives totally upside down without even asking how we feel about it. I don’t
want
to negotiate.”

He scraped his chair back and stood so that he towered over her. His even features were sharpened by anger, while his clear brown eyes were clouded with—she didn’t know what.

Judy stood to face him. She had to tilt her head back a bit and look up at him, but she met him glare for glare. She’d never seen Craig this angry or unsettled, and she was a bit surprised that she’d been able to rock his world so completely. She’d been raised to give in, concede the point, smooth things over, but deep down where she rarely delved, she knew that she couldn’t back down now. She was just starting to get a sense of what she was capable of. Who knew what she might accomplish now that she’d set out on this new path? If she gave it up now she’d never forgive herself. Or him.

“You are not going to keep me locked in this box,” she said.

Craig looked around the state-of-the-art kitchen then gestured toward the rest of the house. “You’re calling a three-quarter-of-a-million-dollar home in a gated community a box?” His features hardened until she barely recognized him. “I’ve lost count of how many times you’ve redecorated this . . . box. Have I ever once said no to you, or stood in your way?”

She was too mad and too hurt to come up with a response. He was turning this all around, making her out to be the guilty one, when all she wanted was a chance to find out what she was made of. Leave it to a lawyer to go on the offensive and argue it until the other person threw up her hands and quit. But she was not going to surrender to Craig Blumfeld; she was not going to give up the work that gave her so much pleasure just because he missed having the little woman at his beck and call.

“I think I need to go somewhere and cool off for a while.”

A look of relief flickered across his face; it was brief, but she saw it.

Judy left the table and, once again, brushed past him. In the bedroom she retrieved a suitcase from the closet and laid it on her side of the king-size bed. Then she went and got her makeup case and set it on the bathroom vanity. Her mind began racing through her wardrobe, considering what she would take, but her brain was all muddled with the need to escape.

Unable to make specific choices, she pulled her lingerie drawer out of the chest of drawers and dumped it into the suitcase.

“What are you doing?” Craig leaned against the bedroom doorjamb. His tone was casual, but his body language was too taut to pull it off.

“Putting a few things together to take with me.”

“To take with you?”

“Yes.” Returning to the closet, she retrieved a drawer of exercise clothes, which she also dumped into her suitcase. “I told you I needed some time to cool off and think things out.”

“Cooling off is a walk around the block, maybe a long drive. This is,” he watched her walk back into the closet and return clutching her favorite dress and casual shoes, which she zipped into a second suitcase, “leaving.”

“A walk’s not going to cut it. I’m too upset to think that quickly. I need some time away to . . . evaluate . . . our relationship.”

“Evaluate? What is there to evaluate?”

Two drawers later, Judy zipped the bulging suitcase and then rummaged in the closet for the matching garment bag. It took several trips back into the closet to fill it.