Secrets of a Shoe Addict (19 page)

That was why she didn’t mind reading to Andy as she had tonight, even if it was for the thousandth time.

Now as she looked down at her boy by the light of his Thomas the Tank Engine night-light, his face so soft and cheeks so pink with lingering babyhood, she was overwhelmed with regret for the passing time and how much more she should have been doing with him.

When she’d first found out she was pregnant, after trying for six years, she’d been overjoyed. Suddenly the baby aisle at the grocery store—which had made her feel melancholy before—seemed to sing with the possibility and promise of the future.

It was a promise Tiffany should have kept, but so far she hadn’t.

So far she’d spent most of his young life tense and overwhelmed, jumping when Charlie spoke, and putting the best of her energy into quelling her husband’s moods instead of into nurturing her children’s needs.

If Charlie had been home tonight, he probably would have started calling for her around halfway through the first reading of
Goodnight Moon.

And she would have gone because that would have been the path of least resistance.

“I’m sorry you don’t have the happy family you deserve,” she whispered, running her knuckle along his cheek and trying to keep the tears from coming. “Mommy loves you.”

Then she sat down on the floor by his bedside and cried.

Chapter
      
12
  

B
rian had turned in early, and Abbey couldn’t sleep. After tossing and turning in bed for a couple of hours, she finally gave up and went downstairs to have a cup of tea.

She turned on the TV to an old rerun of
The Dick Van Dyke Show.
In it, Laura didn’t want Rob to know she’d lied about her age on their marriage license years back. She didn’t want him to find out the terrible secret of her past, which was that she was a year younger than her husband believed her to be.

If only Abbey’s problems were so simple.

She put a cup of water in the microwave and leaned on the counter, watching the show while the water heated. It was a nice little moment of escape, here in the quiet house, with her boy sleeping soundly, safely upstairs.

The microwave beeped and she dropped a chamomile tea bag into it, and took it over to the sofa with her.

It was a beautiful balmy night and the windows were open. She could hear the crickets outside, mingling with the laugh track of the TV show. It wasn’t quite heaven, but it was the most peaceful she’d felt in a long time.

And it stayed that way, through the rest of the show and halfway through
The Brady Bunch
.

Then she smelled smoke.

It wasn’t the house. Nothing was on fire. It was cigarette smoke, and the scent was strong.

Someone was standing right outside her open window, smoking a cigarette. And she was pretty sure she knew who it was.

For a long moment, Abbey sat frozen. She’d never felt more vulnerable. If Damon had a gun trained on her, he could get a clear shot right through her head right now. But that wasn’t Damon’s style. At least it hadn’t been more than a decade ago. Who knew how his time in prison had changed him? Who knew how desperate he was to get revenge on Abbey?

No, she was being paranoid. Damon was acting 100 percent true to form, trying to scare her into giving him what he really wanted, what he’d always want more than revenge: money.

She set her cup down with a shaking hand, hoping he couldn’t see that. Then she turned the TV and light off so she was in the dark. It took a couple of moments for her eyes to adjust, but when they did, she stood up and walked to the window and looked out.

“Hello?” she called softly, on the off chance it was just a neighbor and not Damon at all.

But there was no answer, just the pale orange glow of a cigarette being tossed through the air into her backyard.

She felt sick. The son of a bitch was trying to gaslight her, to make
her so paranoid that she spent her whole life in fear that he was there. Well, she wasn’t going to do it. She wasn’t going to live like that.

“Next time I’ll call the police!” she shouted.

The only answer was the sound of someone whistling as they retreated into the distance.

It was the theme to
The Brady Bunch
.

Loreen, who was now in Mimi mode, finished with a late appointment on Wednesday, picked Jacob up from his friend Austin’s, took him home for a quick crap dinner of frozen pizza, then let him watch TV while she went to Gregslist.biz to place the ad for Happy Housewives employees.

Phone actresses needed. Excellent phone voice and manner necessary. Must be uninhibited. Experience with telephone counseling helpful. Discretion required. Contact
Happyhousewives.com
for more details or click here.

“Mom?”

Loreen jumped. “Shit!” She’d forgotten Jacob was up. She’d been concentrating so hard on the ad that she hadn’t even heard him come in.

“I heard that!”

She grimaced and shut down the computer page she was working on. “I know. I shouldn’t have said that. You startled me.”

“So I can say that if I’m startled.”

She leveled a look on her son. “I didn’t
mean
to say it. And anyway, no, you can’t.”

Jacob shrugged. “You shouldn’t either.”

“I know. I shouldn’t. I’m sorry.”

“Dad called.”

“He did?” She looked at the clock. It was a little after ten. “When?”

“Just now. Didn’t you hear the phone?”

She really
was
out of it. “No, I didn’t. Is everything okay?”

“Guess so. He just told me to tell you to call him.”

“Okay.”

“Can I watch TV some more?”

“No.”

“Come on,
please
?”

“It’s way past your bedtime.”

“But there’s no school tomorrow!”

“There isn’t?” Loreen clicked on the calendar on her computer. Professional Day for teachers, no school. “Oh, yeah. Well, then, I guess you can. For half an hour. No more than that, you understand?”

“All right, all right.” Jacob was only nine, but he’d already perfected the art of male glumness.

Loreen tried to keep from laughing as he schlumped off, looking for all the world like a miniature version of his father. It gave her a strange combination of pride and melancholy to see that.

Then she took a minute to steel herself to call Robert—these days she never knew if a conversation with him was going to be tense because of their new separation or comfortable because they both remembered what it felt like to be in love with each other.

She tried not to think about that too much, because it only hurt. There was no redeeming value to the sadness at all.

“I was wondering if you’d mind if I got Jacob tonight,” Robert
said, and again Loreen marveled at how sad it was that they had to talk to each other in this formal way. Would she ever get used to it?

“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s pretty late.”

“But there’s no school tomorrow, right?”

Jeez, Jacob had
just
reminded her of that! “Right, but like I said, it’s late. Why do you want to get him tonight?”

“There’s a meteor shower. With all the rain this afternoon, I didn’t think it was going to clear up, but it has, and I’d really like to take him up to Little Bennett Park to see it.”

“That sounds great,” Loreen said, wishing she was, at least occasionally, the one who came up with this sort of thing. How could she refuse? “Of course I don’t mind.”

They hung up and Loreen went upstairs to tell Jacob to pack his things. He was thrilled to be going on an adventure like this in the middle of the night.

Thank goodness Robert was always on top of this stuff. If anyone was the June Cleaver in their fractured family, it was him. He found the Halloween events—like the Sea Witch Festival in Rehoboth Beach last year; he took Jacob to the Christmas concerts and light displays, like at the Mormon Temple in Kensington.

Yes, Loreen kept Jacob clean, fed, and healthy, but there were many occasions on which she thought she could, and should, do better. In her lower moods, usually right before her period, Loreen worried that she’d failed her son since becoming a single mother, because now she wasn’t always able to be the mom who took him strawberry picking, pumpkin carving, Christmas caroling, and so on.

But she was so harried all the time, what with her real estate business—such as it was—and her PTA work that she rarely had a spare moment to do something purely recreational.

Even if it was for her child.

But that had to change, she decided.

After tonight, that was. Tonight wasn’t going to win her any Mother of the Year awards. While Robert was taking Jacob out to do wholesome educational activities, she’d be home performing phone sex for money in order to pay off her male prostitute and gambling debt.

Though, actually, if this phone sex thing worked out the way Tiffany thought it might, maybe Loreen
would
be able to relax enough to do those things with her son that now seemed like such luxuries. This was no justification, the Happy Housewives business was a means to an end, and as long as no one got hurt, what was the harm?

Robert picked Jacob up twenty minutes after they spoke, and Loreen watched them both walk off into the night, and into Robert’s dark sports car, with a sense of loss and longing she couldn’t quite understand.

Why was she so melancholy lately? Everything made her feel like crying. Life was one big long-distance phone commercial, with one maudlin moment after another.

Good thing she had enough to keep her busy tonight.

Loreen spent the next two and a half hours carefully piecing new images together out of movie stars and models, careful not to use enough of any one person to make them recognizable and therefore actionable. She wanted to have a good stable of characters in Happy Housewives, even if there weren’t really that many of them yet. There would be, she hoped. The sooner their overflow and off-duty calls stopped going to the relay company for
them
to make the money, the better.

She wasn’t sure how many guys would be calling during any given
time period, but Sandra had cautioned them that the callers were likely to comprise everyone from the family man who was calling from the broom closet at 2
A.M.
to the slacker who was sitting in front of
Wheel of Fortune
and paying for his calls with his unemployment check.

But she had to be glad for all of them, because each of them was helping pay off her debt.

Yes, it was a little unorthodox. And no, she’d never been the type to talk dirty in—or out of—bed, so this wasn’t exactly going to come naturally to her. She was actually a little bit afraid that she’d freak out in the middle of a call and hang up, getting a bad reputation for the Happy Housewives and screwing things up for everyone.

But . . . could she do it?

Suddenly she missed Robert.

She missed the family life she would have had with Jacob and Robert. Maybe
they
would have been home watching TV together, or playing Uno. Maybe she and Robert would have read Jacob a story, tucked him in, and gone downstairs to have a glass of wine and relax together. Maybe she would have the peace and security she was suddenly lacking.