Unbreakable (34 page)

Only 20 years of etiquette learned at the knee of the most demanding mother-in-law on the planet kept her from swilling her drink directly from the bottle.

Katherine and Jacie were playing a rousing game of cards on the coffee table, laughing and arguing over their favorite sports team. Katherine's cell phone rang in the middle of a sentence, and she shot Jacie an apologetic smile. Absently, she dug through her handbag, sitting on the floor at her feet, and answered the phone without bothering to look at who was calling. "Hello."

Katherine felt the blood drain from her face. She winced inwardly, aware that Jacie and even Gwen had noticed her reaction to the call. "Hi," she said tightly, easing out of her seat and excusing herself from the room, very aware of Jacie's concerned eyes on her back.

"What are you doing?" she ground out as soon as she rounded the corner and stepped into the hall. "We agreed that I would call you when I was alone tonight."

Her features softened as she listened to the voice on the other end of the phone. "Yes, of course I missed you." A small smile appeared. "I love you, too." She leaned against the wall, making sure that her voice was low. "This is going to be the first weekend we haven't spent together in months." Her cheeks turned pink at her lover's racy comment. "Ooo… I like that sound of that. Okay, well–of course not!" she screeched, clamping her hand over her mouth when she realized what she'd done. "Of course I haven't told her," she repeated, this time more softly. "I promised that I wouldn't. Though I have to tell you, I feel shitty about it." She sighed. "Something is up with her, but I don't think she knows what's going on."

Katherine closed her eyes guiltily, thinking of Gwen as she listened. "Relax, I'll keep my promise," she finally said. "But when I get back we're going to talk about this. I was wrong. I can't keep doing this. Things have gone too far." She rubbed her temples as her boyfriend tried to convince her otherwise. "Bullshit," she broke in angrily. "I shouldn't have agreed to this in the first place. You said that she deserved it and that nobody would get hurt, but being here with her today has shown me that that's not true. Christ, I feel like pond scum!"

Just then, Katherine looked up to see Jacie standing uneasily at the end of the short hallway. She swallowed hard as her friend cocked her head to the side and regarded her with a mixture of curiosity and worry. "Uh… are you okay?" Jacie mouthed silently.

Katherine nodded quickly before turning her back on her friend. "Call me later tonight, okay? And I'll tell you about my visit so far." A pause. "I love you, too."

Jacie could hear the smile in her words.

"Bye." Katherine squared her shoulders and turned back, pressing the 'off' button on her cell phone. She tried not to look as ashamed as she felt. For few seconds, she didn't say anything, unsure of what the other woman had heard. "Jacie–"

Reddish-brown eyebrows lifted in question. "Yeah."

Katherine's words came out in a tumble. "Everything is fine. It's just one of those relationship issues." She shrugged. "You know how it is. No big deal."

Jacie looked visibly relieved. Katherine having man troubles was nothing new. "Men are pigs?" she offered gamely, hoping to lighten the awkward moment.

A bubble of laughter erupted from Katherine. Tentatively, she smiled and stepped closer to Jacie. "Normally, I'd agree with you. But this guy's special, so he's worth the trouble." She let out a slightly shaky breath. Jacie hadn't heard enough to know what was going on.
Thank God.

Katherine scrambled for something neutral to talk about. "So tell me what's up with you and Nina?"

Even though she was filled with hope for the future, things still felt too raw between her and Nina to even consider discussing it. At least this soon. "No."

Katherine took the refusal in stride, expecting nothing less from Jacie than blunt honesty. "So, tell me more about your business then?"

The lame change of subjects was painfully obvious, but Jacie let it pass, deciding that whatever Katherine was dealing with wasn't really any of her business anyway. "Are you sure you want to hear about small business entrepreneurship and the exciting world of tiling?"

Katherine smiled wryly. "Of course not. But since that's the world you live in, I'm willing to give it a try. Just lie to make it more interesting if you have to. I'm not getting any younger, ya know."

Jacie chuckled. "You're on."

Back in the parlor, Nina and Audrey were discussing Nina's recent move back to St. Louis, while Gwen was staring into the fireplace, not even trying to join in the discussion.

Nina leaned closer to Audrey and whispered, "What's wrong with her?"

Audrey shook her head. "I have no idea. She was fine until she went up to her room a little while ago."

"Hm." Nina's brow furrowed, and she dropped her voice even lower. "What happened between you two back in school? There must have been something because you were always trying to get us to patch things up, even after what she did to Jacie. I always figured that you two would be the only ones of us to work things out eventually."

Audrey took a slow sip of her drink, feeling the tingle of alcohol all the way down to her toes. She opened her mouth to tell Nina what happened, but stopped when she again caught sight of Gwen's gloomy profile. For the first time in years, all she felt when she saw or even thought of Gwen was pity and loss. "It was nothing, Nina," she brushed off, not wanting to give Nina another reason to resent their host. "We just lost touch."

"Tell her." Gwen's unexpected voice startled them. She turned her chair, flung her legs over one arm, said a mental "fuck you" to her mother-in-law and took a swig right from the bottle. "Go on, Audrey. Nina knows my worst. Why not talk about another one of my sins?" She hiccupped. "I have a
heaping
pile of them, you know."

Audrey shifted uncomfortably. "Gwen, I don't–"

"Fine," Gwen said easily, brushing off Audrey's reservations with a wave of her hand. "I'll tell her."

Jacie and Katherine entered the room just as Gwen began.

"It was 1985, right?" Gwen glanced at Audrey, who nodded, an unhappy expression on her face. "Right."

"What's going on?" Jacie whispered as she sat down next to Nina.

Craving the physical contact, Nina laid her hand on Jacie's leg and gave it a gentle squeeze. "I think Gwen's a little drunk and she's going to tell us what happened between her and Audrey."

"Gwen screwed with somebody else?"

"I dunno." She squeezed Jacie's leg affectionately. "Shh."

Gwen filled her glass several fingers high and drained it. She lifted her chin and her voice held just a hint of a slur. "There was a new show opening at the Blagbrough Galleries downtown. Malcolm's parents drove us over because anyone who was anyone was going to be there. They wanted to show off Malcolm, who was graduating that year. I remember wishing I could just stay home and sleep that evening. Tucker had an ear infection and had been awake for two days straight." Despite telling what was obviously going to be an unhappy tale, she smiled a little at the mention of her son's name. "And I was dead tired. But my father-in-law insisted that we attend because he knew the gallery owner." She sneered a little, her resentment showing. "So that was the end of the discussion."

"Malcolm never stood up to his parents?" Katherine asked, keenly interested in what Gwen was saying.

"Oh, he did," Gwen assured her. "We both did. But that would take years and years. In the beginning… well, we were both so young and we wanted to show his family that our marriage wasn't a mistake, despite the hurried circumstances." She gazed enviously at her friends. "Neither Malcolm nor I were ever the rebels that you girls were and more than anything I wanted to fit in." She lowered her gaze. "No matter the cost."

Smelling like dish soap, Frances Artiste entered the room with her apron draped over her shoulder. She breathed a sigh of relief. No one was arguing. "Can I get you ladies anything?"

"Is there more of this in the refrigerator?" Gwen held up an empty bottle of champagne.

Dumbly, Frances nodded and made a mental note to head to the liquor store in the morning.

Mollified, Gwen nodded. "Please, Mrs. Artiste, call it a night. We're all fine here, right?" She glanced questioningly at the other women.

"Fine," Nina agreed. "Have a good night."

"Dinner was great," Jacie chimed in. "Thanks."

The other women murmured their agreement.

"Where was I?" Gwen began, letting one leg fall limply off the chair.

Frances took this chance to flee the room.

"You were nowhere, Gwen." Audrey suddenly stood and faced the fire, the flickering light reflecting off glassy, honey-brown eyes. "Except drunk." She felt a little tipsy herself and was angry that Gwen's story was affecting her so. "Can't we find something better to talk about? The past is dead. Let's leave it buried."

Gwen blinked with exaggerated slowness. "The past always comes home to roost," she said seriously, looking hard at Audrey. "It's not dead at all. It's alive and it's an octopus with slimy, slithering tentacles that go on forever. And one day," Gwen put her hands around her own throat, "when you're going along happy as can be, one of those putrid tentacles sneaks up on you from behind and wraps around your throat and…." She began to squeeze her neck, causing her face to turn bright red.

"Holy shit," Jacie exclaimed, giving Gwen a look that screamed 'keep the hell away from me.' "You are one creepy-ass drunk."

But Gwen took the comment in stride. "I'm just heading this off at the pass in case any of you get any bright ideas and try to bleed me dry."

"What are you talking about?" Katherine made a face. "You're making no sense. Bleed you dry?"

"Nuh huh," Gwen said in a singsong voice. She shook her head wildly, then shook a chastising finger at Katherine. "I'm not telling yet."

Nina and Jacie looked at each other and shrugged.

Then Gwen snapped her fingers. "Oh yes, we were at the Blagbrough Galleries."

"I'd barely gotten inside when I spotted Audrey. She must have just arrived because she still had her coat thrown over her arm." Gwen recalled the moment their gazes met, the warmth that entered Audrey's eyes upon seeing her and the overwhelming sense of anxiety that she felt when she came face-to-face with her not so distant past. A past she was supposed to have thoroughly outgrown.

Gwen laughed, but there was no humor in the gesture. "It all seems simple now, what I should have done. I was happy to see Audrey. My first reaction was to give her a big hug. But my second reaction, the overpowering one, was to panic. Here was someone who knew all my secrets. Who knew the real me. Not the me I spent my days pretending to be."

She stopped speaking for a moment, seemingly lost in her memories. Just when the other women were about to say something, she started again. "Audrey hurried over me, all smiles and excitement. And she started asking me how I was doing and all about the baby and if I was taking classes again." Gwen drew in a steadying breath and lifted her eyes from the bottom of her glass to met Audrey's intent stare. "And then I promptly acted as though I didn't know you at all. I even tried to walk away from you while you were still talking to me."

For a few seconds the room was still, the silence broken only by the sounds of five women breathing and the occasional pop and hiss of the fire.

Audrey looked away, feeling a stab of pain and remembering the confusion and anger she'd felt at Gwen's snubbing.

"Jesus, Gwen," Nina moaned, her heart going out to Audrey.

"But Malcolm, who didn't need to earn his place in the family the way I did, remembered Audrey and used her name when saying hello," Gwen continued. "He didn't understand the way I was acting or how I could forget a friend and so I changed my story on the spot and told my in-laws that Audrey was an acquaintance from school."

Jacie's lips twisted. "An acquaintance?"

"It was the level of contact I thought my mother-in-law would find acceptable, and by this time the gallery owner and the artist himself had all joined us. I felt like I was in a pressure cooker." Gwen rubbed her temples with an irritated hand and forced herself onward. "Audrey was wearing a red vest and black slacks and Malcolm's mother looked down her nose at her and gave her our drink order, thinking she was one of the waitresses." She bit her lip for a second before admitting in a soft voice, "I was horrified, but I didn't have the nerve to correct her."

The women shot Gwen varying degrees of disgusted looks, and Katy leaned forward in her seat, seething inside over her cousin's humiliation.

Gwen wished she could stop here, but that night things had simply gone from bad to worse with no stops in between. "Then Vice Principal Rodriguez showed up and–"

"For God's sake, Gwen," Audrey snapped. "I wish you all would stop calling him that. We're all adults now. Not to mention that I've been sleeping with the man for nearly 20 years. His name is Enrique."

"Okay, okay," Gwen replied, concerned and a little wide-eyed over Audrey's outburst over something so seemingly benign. "Enrique started making doe eyes at Audrey and I just about wet my pants on the spot. I didn't know they were…" She gestured aimlessly. "Together. Then he gave her a little bow and gallantly took her coat." This time even Gwen herself winced. "And Malcolm's father promptly gathered all our coats and handed them to," she glanced sideways at Audrey, "Enrique, along with a five-dollar tip."

Nina lifted an eyebrow and sneered. "Let me guess the rest of story. You didn't speak up then either. And you blew off Audrey for the rest of the night to suck up to your in-laws."

Gwen just studied her hands.

"Enrique was angry, but didn't want to cause a scene," Audrey inserted, causing all eyes to shift to her. "We hadn't been dating long and he was there to keep me company while I did a write-up on the show for the school newspaper." She closed her eyes. "As we were walking away, I heard Mrs. Langtree ask Gwen if the Mexican was the same sort of acquaintance that that chubby girl was."