Campbell rolled his tongue along the inside of his cheek, casting Mr. Herrera a disappointed expression. The lines on either side of his full mouth deepening when he pursed his lips. “Wow. That sucks. I was so up for a Cluck-Cluck chicken patty melt with curly fries, too. Love those fries. But seeing as you discriminate against the elderly here, I think I’ll take my business to, say, The Beef Barn. C’mon, Max. There’s a cattle combo with my name on it. Bet they’d hire an old lady like you there.” He nodded to Mr. Herrera and Phillip. “You two have a good day, you senior-citizen haters.”
She couldn’t help it. Her head fell back on her shoulders with a long snort of laughter as she let Campbell lead her down the stretch of sidewalk toward the parking lot and away from, by far, the most humiliating display of disgruntled, unemployed ex-trophy wife ever.
With his hand at the small of her back, he paused when they were out of Mr. Herrera’s sight. This time, when he looked down at her, his deep blue eyes held amusement. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Not even a little. Maxine wiped her wispy bangs out of her face, now stuck to her forehead with perspiration. “Of course I do.”
His chuckle was resonant and deep. “Nah. You have no clue who I am. But if it helps at all, I was the one who kept you from setting yourself on fire in chemistry with Mr. McGillicuddy. We were lab partners for a semester our senior year.”
Her eyes opened wide. Shut. Up. This was that Campbell Barker? Tall and lanky with an Adam’s apple so pronounced you would’ve sworn he’d swallowed a golf ball Campbell Barker?
He grinned, showing a flash of white teeth that sported neither braces nor the once huge gap in the front of his smile. “It’s my hair, right? But the feathered look was so eighties. It had to go. Otherwise, I’m confident you would have recognized me. I was too cute to be that forgettable,” he joked.
Holy to the outermost limits in makeovers. She was speechless. This couldn’t be the Campbell she remembered from high school. He was too thickly muscled, his waist was too lean, and his stomach was too ripply. Really ripply, if the way the cotton of his shirt clung to his mid-section was any indication.
And Shazam, his badonkadonk hadn’t filled out a pair of jeans then like it did now. Neither had his long legs with thighs that had their own ripple effect. She was stunned.
Campbell gave his flat abs a smack with a full palm when her eyes found his again and nodded with a knowing grin. “Growth spurt. A big one.”
Indeed. “You look . . . so . . .”
“Big and manly?”
A giggle spilled from her lips. “Yeah. That and completely different.”
“Twenty years’ll do that. So what brings Max Henderson, er, Cambridge to the Cluck-Cluck Palace for a job?”
Poverty.
That was when shame set in. The shame that forced her to look anywhere but at him. Of all the places and all the times to reunite with someone you’d gone to high school with. When you were applying for a job at the Cluck-Cluck Palace, while destitution nipped at your heels.
Oh, how far the once vibrant, fun-loving Maxine Henderson had fallen. She wasn’t Miss Riverbend Auto and Glass anymore. There were so many things she wasn’t anymore; it hurt her head to ponder it. Exiting stage left before the questions got too deep was prudent. “Long story, and I don’t have time to tell it.” Glancing at her watch, Maxine made like she had somewhere important to get to. “It was really nice seeing you again, Campbell, but I have to run. And thanks for saving my hide back there.” Shooting him a distracted smile, she hooded her eyes, trying to locate her car.
“Bet it’s that one,” Campbell said, leaning over her shoulder, his hair tickling her cheek. His finger pointed out her son’s car. A Lotus Elise in a sea of practical SUVs and compact cars.
Her head moved just enough that his breath, minty-fresh and warm, caressed her cheek. His reassuring presence behind her back, the shelter of his wide chest, left her stomach weak with an emotion she couldn’t describe, but was probably closely related to the now extinct dinosaur known as “Male Attention.” “How’d you know?”
“Cambridge Automobiles—‘Put your seat in something sweet.’ You did the commercials, I heard. Besides, it says it on the license plate.”
Fuckall if she wasn’t tired of being remembered for a series of badly written, even more badly acted commercials for a car dealership.
She let her head hang lower, stepping off the curb to leave Campbell Barker’s beefcakeyness and the reminders he stirred up about the innocent, naïve path she’d taken. Those tears, tears that threatened to fall far too often these days, reared their salty heads.
But Campbell caught up with her, gripping her arm with non-threatening fingers. “You know, I was serious about lunch. Let me buy you some, and you can catch me up on what Max Henderson’s doing these days.”
Max—Maxine Henderson is a Cambridge now, but she won’t be for much longer, and she’s buck-assed broke, living with her son and her mother in a senior citizens’ retirement village.
And she isn’t doing a whole lot more than she was doing twenty years ago. Her pom-poms have long since frayed, and her tiaras aren’t so shiny these days. What she thought was once a perfect world is now a beautiful disaster.
Squeezing the bridge of her nose, Maxine hoped it would keep the tears at bay long enough for her to make a dignified exit. “I can’t, but thanks anyway. I have to pick up my son. But really, it was nice seeing you.”
“Here.” He shoved a business card at her. “Call me—maybe we could grab some coffee. I’m a good listener.”
Maxine reached out to take it from him, more politeness than anything else. When their fingers grazed, a weird assault of sensations traveled along her arm. “Thanks, Campbell. Maybe I will.”
Stuffing the card in her purse, she knew she wouldn’t.
Maxine Lou Anne Henderson Cambridge wasn’t anything like the girl her old lab partner had once known.
Catching up with Campbell, who was astonishingly different than he’d once been in the best of ways, would only be like opening her wounds of regret with a dull butter knife and dumping vinegar on them.
It would only remind her of the other path she hadn’t taken.
The path of self-sufficiency and independence.
The path that would have left her with a career that would have provided for her and Connor during a shitwreck of a divorce.
The path where she could tell Finley Cambridge and all of his lovely moolah to kiss her still untouched by a plastic surgeon’s knife ass.
The path that had led her to become Maxine—because Finley had said her full name was much less garish—instead of just staying plain old Max.
CHAPTER TWO
Note from Maxine Cambridge to all ex-trophy wives on the business of sucking it up, divorce, and sparing the children the gory details of poverty and infidelity: While divorcing the sugar daddy who left your bucket bone-dry, try not to allow your resentments to become an issue with your kid. Be the better person. Instead, to release pent-up rage, seek out a hunky man-boy and wonk him until your eyeballs roll and he slams the rage right outta ya. That was a joke. Don’t really do that. Chew gum. Or your tongue. Whatever’s easier on your fillings.
Maxine pushed her way through the screen door to her mother’s retirement-village one-level ranch in Leisure Village South, where the motto was “the end of your life is just the beginning.” It was a great place for her mother to live out her retirement years while she aged with more grace and agility at seventy than Maxine felt at almost forty-one. Her mother’d found a circle of friends in the ten years since she’d moved in. They had tons of activities in the village to keep her motivated. Most importantly, she had her own little space and her own things surrounding her.
Mona Henderson was big on her tchotchkes. There wasn’t a bird-house or garden gnome her mother didn’t love.
Maxine threw her purse on the speckled counter in disgust. Jesus Christ in a miniskirt, her behavior had been beyond deplorable to
day.
She’d forgotten what boundaries were. Boundaries sucked.
Publicly beating down a teenager because he’d joined the land of the employed was heinously unforgivable.
A teenager.
And she’d done it in front of a former classmate who’d probably yuck the experience up at the next reunion at the Holiday Inn Express with everyone who thought Max Henderson would make it big—or at least end up Miss Universe. Today, it was going to take a lot more than reminding herself there was no shame in clawing your way out of unemployment to keep from pitching herself off the roof of her mother’s house.
Her mother looked at her over the top of her magnifying reading glasses. “So how goes the chicken business?”
Maxine kissed her on the top of her dyed strawberry blonde head before slinking down into a chair at the kitchen table. “It doesn’t.”
“Doesn’t what?”
“Doesn’t go. They hired someone else.” Instead of looking directly at her mother, she allowed her humiliation to drive her eyes to the rooster clock on the wall above her mother’s head. “But before I found that out, I shared every pathetic detail of my life with the poor manager. And I babbled . . . endlessly.”
“Well done. Pity’s always a hallmark to every successful job interview. So we concur that the Cluck-Cluck Palace sucks weenies?”
God love her mother and her sharp tongue. Never afraid to say what she felt, it had sometimes embarrassed the shit out of Maxine, and sometimes it had been what kept her hanging on. She only wished she had at least half of the set of balls her mother did. “We concur.” Blowing out a puff of air, she rested her head in her hands. A loud clanging from the far end of the house made her head throb. The heat and Campbell Barker had left her with a headache.
Her mother pinched the back of her daughter’s hand with affection. “Doesn’t matter. That hat would have looked stupid on you anyway. Your neck’s not long enough for all that beak. You’ll find something, dear. I know it.”
Maxine’s laughter was colored with a million shades of bitter. “If only I had a hundred bucks for every time you’ve said that after another failed attempt to find some kind of employment, Mona Marie Henderson, I could at least afford to put some food on your table. Maybe buy toilet paper in bulk.”
Mona dropped her crocheting to the table, waving a hand at her daughter. “Don’t be silly. I don’t need your money, and I don’t need nearly the amount of toilet paper I once did before I started that bladder-control medication. Besides, we have plenty of food.”
Did creamed tuna on toast really constitute food? “Ma, you say that every time I don’t get the job, too. But Connor and I can’t keep sucking you dry. The money you keep spending on every little thing we need, not to mention feeding us, is trashing your retirement fund.”
Money she wouldn’t need if she hadn’t made the most naïve mistake of her life. That very mistake was at least on par with Chernobyl.
“Nonsense. I don’t feel sucked anywhere, and the only credit card you had when you left that egomaniac is maxed out on lawyer fees for that nimrod attorney who bills you for these imaginary hours he claims he’s worked. You have nothing, but I don’t have nothing. So stop worrying, Maxie. My finances are in fine shape.”
“Says who?”
“Says that Elmer Roy over there on Gladiola Avenue.”
Maxine’s head shot upward, hoping to catch a glimpse of the emotion her mother’s light blue eyes held when she spoke Elmer’s name, but she came up dry. Her mother remained a total rock of deadpan. But Maxine had seen her mother giggle like she was at the prom on more than one occasion where Elmer was concerned. “So when did you see Elmer?” She cooed his name, teasing and light.
Mona shot Maxine an exaggerated look of disinterest with a shrug of her slender shoulders. “Bingo—or was it Waltzing with Sherry on Wednesday? I can’t remember. So it couldn’t have been much of a hoopla. Doesn’t matter, he told me I’m solid. He should know, retired accountant that he is. Your father, God rest his cantankerous soul, left me in tip-top shape. Now stop worrying your pretty head about it. I won’t hear about sucking and things that’re dry. We’ll be fine.”
More tears stung her eyes. Her mother said that every time they had the unemployed conversation, too. If it hadn’t been for her mother on that long-ago, tear-filled, agonizingly ugly night when she’d left Fin, she and Connor really would be at the local homeless shelter.
Another loud clash of metal against metal reverberated through her mother’s small house. The humid air, combined with her lack of sustenance, left her feeling like whoever was swinging that tool was all up in her head, knocking around her brain matter. “What do you have against an air conditioner, Mom? It’s eight billion degrees outside, and what is going on back there?”
“But there’s a nice breeze coming in from the shore, and that noise is me finally getting that leaky pipe fixed in the guest bathroom. ’Bout time, too. Only took three phone calls and an association meeting to get it done. Though I hear poor Garner’s been backed up since his valve replacement. But he got himself some help this week.” Her mother frowned. “There was something I was supposed to tell you . . . Oh, I know. The Talleywhacker called. Wants to see Connor.”
The Talleywhacker, aka Finley. Connor’s age didn’t help in trying to keep Finley’s infidelity a secret. Neither had the leak in the society pages. Connor understood far more than she would have liked him to. As a result, he not only got the ugliness that had gone down between his parents, but he was so angry with his father, he refused to see him.
He’d left his Xbox 360, among other things, behind to prove his point, too. She couldn’t decide whether to beat her chest with pride that she’d managed to instill morals in him or give him a good spanking for being so frickin’ difficult. Maxine sighed, knowing the answer and the sneer that would follow, but asking because it was her job as Connor’s parent to do it. “Did you tell him he’d have to talk to Connor?”
“I told him I’d have Connor call him back from the pay phone down at the 7-Eleven, seeing as you can’t afford a cell phone for him. I also told him he’d better hope we could take the drunk homeless guy who sleeps on the side of the building, because we’ll have to steal his change to make the call.”
Sneer on cue. Unbuttoning her jacket, Maxine laughed. “Don’t taunt Finley, Mom. It’ll only result in me maybe losing my kidneys in the next round of this reincarnation of World War Two.”
“Finley Cambridge can bite my old, wrinkled ass. He’s a deadbeat, and don’t think, unlike you, I’m afraid to say so. If my memory serves me, that’s what I called him just before I threw the phone at the wall.” She tilted her sharp jaw upward. Her hair, fresh from cushioned pink curlers, shook when she gave Maxine a defiant flash of her eyes.
Maxine slid closer to the wall, fiddling with the rip in the fading flowered wallpaper of her mother’s kitchen. “Ma, there has to come a time when Connor sees his father again. Fin cheating on me doesn’t mean he cheated on Connor.” Sooooo PC. Sooooo much bullshit. Fin may not have fornicated around on Connor, but he’d definitely cheated him.
Connor should be planning his graduation next year, attending the college he’d dreamed about since he was little, hanging out with his friends. Instead, he was living in a retirement village, driving twenty minutes each way to school five days a week so he could graduate with the same classmates he’d had since kindergarten, and walking little old ladies’ dogs night after night to afford the gas money to do it.
Her mother grunted, smoothing a hand down the front of her Day-Glo green, nylon sweat suit. “Really? I disagree, Missy. When Fin decided to take his crotch elsewhere, he also took his money, and his son’s home, and left you with nothing. I say that’s cheating his kid out of all the things he deserves just so he can stick it to you. Is Finley going to raise him?” Mona scowled. “Not likely. All the things that boy had before Finley went off and did the humpty-hump with that tramp, and now he has nothing? That’s che
ating by proxy, girlie.”
Technically, that wasn’t totally true. “Fin did give Connor the option to come back and live with him and Lacey.” Maxine cringed. It tore a hole in her heart just thinking of not having Connor with her. Almost as bad, when she said her husband’s new fiancée’s name, even eight months later, it still gouged another hole in her heart—albeit a much smaller one than possibly losing Connor. They weren’t even divorced yet and Fin already had a fiancée.
Lacey, Lacey, Lacey. The pain of Fin’s infidelity didn’t hurt nearly as much as it had at the start of this, but what did hurt was the idea that now Lacey was sleeping in Maxine’s California King, eating her freshly flown-in lobster, and didn’t have a single care in the world, while Maxine and Connor lived near impoverishment.
And all because she was a total fuckwit.
Yet none of the outrageous luxuries or lack thereof mattered much anymore. They were all like a hazy dream. What mattered was survival. Something she had no clue how to go about, but strived for every waking moment anyway.
“Yeahhhh—big of him to offer his son a place to live. Connor’s a smart boy. Too smart for his own good sometimes. He knows what Fin’s doing to you by hiding all of his money, and swindling you out of his millions. Like that jackass would miss a couple million, never mind a couple hundred bucks. He had some kinda gall, leaving you a buck ninety-nine in your joint accounts and canceling all those credit cards just before you found out about that Jezebel. He knew damned well what he was doing, and he didn’t leave you any ammunition to fight back. Finley didn’t get where he is by not knowing how to protect himself.”
Maxine’s nod was a tired one. That much was true. The very second Finley got wind of the fact that she’d found out about Lacey, he’d cleaned out their joint accounts and canceled their credit cards, leaving her with just one with an eight-thousand-dollar limit to pay a lawyer who did nothing but collect a twenty-five-hundred-dollar retainer, ignore her pleading phone calls, and stall.
You Dropped a Blonde on Me Page 3