by Wendy Wax
Nobody was.
The waiter scurried off and the three of them looked at each other expectantly. They knew each other, but didn’t, and as far as Brooke could tell, they didn’t have anything in common. Still she wanted to help Amanda if possible and she could tell that Candace did too. It was a place to start.
“OK, Amanda,” Candace said. “I think you need to tell us what happened today. We are taking an absolute vow of silence, a pledge of confidentiality.” She looked to Brooke who nodded in agreement.
“This”—she motioned to the table at which they sat—“will be your confessional in the Temporary Church of Chili’s. And you can think of me as your…sister confessor…one of the few Jewish women to ever hold this position.”
Even Amanda smiled at that.
The waiter arrived and set the frosty glasses in front of them then poured Amanda and Candace a drink. “Thank you, Sister Candace, for the offer of spiritual guidance,” Amanda said. “And for these margaritas which we are about to consume.”
Amanda and Candace drank their margaritas down and slammed the empty glasses onto the table. Candace poured a second round.
“I can’t go into the details right now,” Amanda said licking the froth from the corner of her mouth, “but the bottom line is Rob doesn’t have a bottom line.”
“Has he managed to hide it all?” Candace asked, her eyes narrowing. “One of my husbands tried to take two of his companies offshore, but Anne Justiss headed him off.”
“I wouldn’t exactly call the money…hidden,” Amanda said, sipping on her margarita. “But I’m going to be lucky to get the house. And even if I get the house, I’m not sure how I’m going to be able to afford to hold on to it.”
Amanda turned her glass up and emptied the rest of it in one long gulp. Candace followed suit.
That was, Brooke noticed, two down in about as many minutes.
“Well that sucks.” Candace picked up the pitcher and held it out toward Brooke. “Are you sure you don’t want a taste? I really don’t think half a glass is going to impair your driving.”
“No thanks. I don’t drink,” Brooke said.
“At all?” Candace’s surprise was evident. Amanda’s attention was pretty much fixed on her empty glass.
“No,” Brooke repeated. And if their mothers had climbed into a bottle each night after getting home from cleaning houses, they wouldn’t either.
The waiter came back to suggest chips and salsa. “Food might be a good idea,” Brooke pointed out. “It can’t hurt to soak up a little of that alcohol.” Neither Candace or Amanda were interested, but Brooke ordered for them anyway.
While they waited, Amanda finished her third margarita. Her eyes were starting to look glassy and her words came out more slowly than usual. “Candace is right. Everything sucks big time.”
The near profanity sounded strange coming from Amanda’s lips. She took another drink and once again, tipped her glass up and drained it.
At this rate, Brooke thought, the two of them were going to be under the table before the chips even arrived. She wondered how she’d get them back into her car.
“I feel so helpless. All these horrible things keep happening and I never get to strike back.” Amanda hiccupped then giggled in surprise. “Rob just keeps dishing it out and I just keep taking it.” She shot a look of longing at the now empty pitcher. “That doesn’t seem at all equitable.” She turned to Brooke, her gaze unfocused. “Do you think it’s equita…babble? Equita…bubble?” She shook her head as if trying to figure out what was wrong with her lips. “Fair?”
“No, it’s not,” Brooke conceded. “And if you’re not safe from this kind of thing, I don’t know who is. I mean you must be pretty close to forty and all, but it’s not like you’ve totally let yourself go or anything.”
“Gee, thanks.” Amanda tried to roll her unfocused eyes.
“What I mean is,” Brooke amended, “at what point is a woman safe? Now that I’m a wife, how do I keep someone like me from coming along?”
“If you can figure that one out, I’ll bankroll your run for president.” Candace ran a finger over the remaining salt on the rim of her glass and licked it off. She sounded just as forceful as she had earlier but her words seemed to be coming out more slowly too. “I personally think that striking back is very important,” she said. “It cleanses the soul and helps you blow off some of the anger. It can help you move forward.” Candace took another sip of her drink. “In fact, now that I think of it, I’m a big proponent of revenge as a self-help tool.” She sat up and set down her glass. “I’ve always been attracted to monetary punishment, but I think any form of revenge would probably help.”
Brooke thought food would help even more. Lots of food to soak up the alcohol they’d consumed.
“Well, I’d like some revenge right now,” Amanda said. “And I don’t even care in what form I get it.” She waved to their waiter. When he arrived, finally bearing the chips and dip, she leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “I don’t think we need those chips after all. We just need the check. I have to go punish somebody. And my two new friends are going to help me.”
They piled into Brooke’s car. Well, actually Candace and Brooke piled, Amanda sort of oozed in. She wanted to come up with something scathingly brilliant that Rob would never forget, but she had neither the resources nor, at the moment, the mental abilities required. She knew she should be worried about her lack of mental acuity, but the alcoholic fog that now enveloped her was too comforting to object to. It was warm and fuzzy inside there, like being in a big protective bubble. Amanda didn’t want to come out any time soon.
“OK, so what do we have in mind for Rob? Should we slash his tires? E-mail naked photos of him to his clients?” Candace asked.
Amanda didn’t really care what she did to him as long as she did something. For at least one moment in the midst of all this mess, she wanted to be the one acting rather than the one being acted upon. No matter how small the gesture, she simply had to make one.
Brooke put on the brakes at a stoplight and a small drugstore bag sitting on the seat beside Amanda slid to the floor. Its contents spilled out and as she picked them up, she noticed the word Trojan. “What have we here?” She giggled—her, Amanda Sheridan, who had not giggled for at least a dozen years. “We have condoms.” She stopped laughing as the realization hit her. “But I don’t need condoms.” Stricken, she held the box aloft and slid forward in her seat so that she could talk to Brooke and Candace. “I may never need condoms again.” Her eyes teared up.
“Amanda, there are plenty of other men out there. I know. I’ve been out with what feels like millions of them.” Candace’s words were slightly slurred, but they were still reassuring. “I’ll buy you some condoms for your birthday if you want. We’ll get you a whole truckload of them.” Candace smiled crookedly at her. “Because that’s what friends are for.”
Amanda smiled through her tears. “That’s one of the sweetest things anyone’s ever said to me.”
“Good grief,” Brooke said. “You two are completely wasted.”
“But I don’t need anyone to buy me condoms,” Amanda continued. “I’m not officially poor yet. I can buy my own condoms. And I can buy as many as I want.”
She opened the box in her hands and took one out. “I’ve always thought they looked kind of like balloons. Do you think they look like balloons, Candace?”
“Nope.”
“I wonder if they blow up like balloons.” Amanda stretched the condom several times. Drawing in a deep breath, she brought the rubber to her mouth, placed her lips over the rolled edge, and blew mightily. Only the tip expanded.
“You’re right.” She expelled the words along with the air she’d been holding. “They don’t inflate.”
“They’re thicker than balloons,” Candace said. “And, of course, they are designed for a slightly different purpose. I don’t suppose you have a bicycle pump in your car do you, Brooke?”
E
ven Brooke giggled. “I can’t believe you’re sitting in my backseat trying to blow up prophylactics. Which I can’t believe I left sitting where you two nutcases could play with them.”
Amanda raised the condom to her lips and made one last futile attempt to inflate the thing.
“What size are they?” Candace asked. “Not that it probably matters.”
The condom flew out of Amanda’s mouth with her laughter. “So you’re saying size is a factor?”
Candace’s tone was droll—drunk, but droll. “Well, you can bet they don’t come in small. I’ve never met a man who would admit to needing anything less than an extra large.”
“Oh God, now I’m picturing a whole row of cocktail wieners stuffed into oversized buns,” Brooke groaned.
There was more laughter.
It was then that the synapses in Amanda’s brain fired and made the connection. Or at least something did. Later she wouldn’t know what possessed her, but at the moment the thought seemed a completely logical progression of everything that had come before. “Pull into that Kroger,” she directed Brooke, “and let me run in. I think Rob deserves to see at least one of the things he’s taken away from me. I’m going to buy every single condom I can get my hands on and whether they inflate or not, I’m going to hang them on the tree in front of his town house. It’ll be a little reminder gift from me to him.”
chapter 7
T rying not to weave too noticeably, Amanda walked through the grocery store past the office supplies to the pharmacy and closed in on the rack of condoms. Without stopping to analyze their features or to contemplate whether ribbing and/or mint flavoring, did, in fact, increase pleasure, she pulled all thirty-odd boxes from their holders and dropped them into her basket.
Buoyed by the soft haze of alcohol, she pushed her booty back to the front of the store and wheeled into the checkout lane. A few moments later, she’d piled the lot of them onto the conveyor.
“Wow.” The male voice behind her was deep and laced with laughter. “It looks like you’re taking the ‘be prepared’ credo awfully seriously.”
Amanda turned and looked up into a pair of clearly amused green eyes.
“Think you have enough there?”
Amanda contemplated the man in front of her. He was well over six feet and had an interestingly craggy face. It took her alcohol-deadened brain a little longer than it might have otherwise to register the wide shoulders and rock-hard build.
Normally, she would have blushed and stammered and searched for some sort of plausible explanation like a children’s science project or some novel cleaning technique.
But he was looking at her in a way she hadn’t been looked at in years and it was a balm to her unappreciated and completely rejected soul.
“Gee.” She found herself teasing back. “I don’t know. Maybe I should run and pick up a few more.”
His smile grew wider.
She smiled back. “Unfortunately this purchase is not exactly what it seems.”
“No, I’m sure it’s not.” He was clearly trying not to laugh. “Because that would be way too good to be true.”
He winked at her then. God, he was yummy. And she was fairly certain it wasn’t just the alcohol that was saying so.
“Are you ready, ma’am?”
With real regret, Amanda turned her back on the stranger and stepped up to the register.
The checkout girl blushed as she scanned each box of condoms and slid it down to the bag boy who also blushed each time he dropped a box into the waiting grocery sack.
Amanda barely noticed. She was much too busy basking in the green-eyed stranger’s attention and congratulating herself on her boldness so far.
She wished she had the nerve to give him her name and number. Or at least the wit to exit with a truly racy comment that he’d remember long after she’d gone.
Unable to do either, she reached for her bags and prepared to depart. Once again, his voice reached her from behind. It was deep and casually masculine with that truly attractive hint of laughter.
“You’re not going to leave without telling me what they’re for?” he asked.
She turned then and smiled—a full wattage affair that showed each and every one of her pearly whites to full advantage. And then, because she’d definitely had too much to drink and because the occasion seemed to demand it, she turned her voice all husky and growly, like a modern day Mae West. “I am stunned that you don’t know what they’re for by now, big boy,” she purred as she turned to leave. “I only wish I had the time tonight to show you.”
Amanda woke Saturday morning to complete quiet. Slightly, but not unbearably hungover due, she was sure, to the two aspirin Brooke had forced her to swallow before she dropped her at home, she lay in bed reliving last night’s margarita-fueled evening.
She, Amanda Sheridan, had not only flirted with an incredibly attractive man she’d never seen before, she’d tied three hundred plus condoms to the branches of Rob’s Bradford pear tree.
She smiled as she remembered Candace and Brooke’s whispered words of encouragement and the muffled laughter that had accompanied them. It had, of course, been a totally stupid and futile gesture, but even now with her head throbbing and her financial future still bleak, she was glad that she’d made it.
Pulling on a robe, she put on a pot of coffee and went outside to retrieve the morning paper. Around her, the neighborhood slept. Garage doors remained down. Houses were shuttered, drapes still drawn across windows. The sun was up, but not yet making much of a statement.
Barefoot, Amanda walked gingerly down the driveway and out onto the dew-draped grass to pick up the paper. The only sounds cutting the silence were the occasional chirp of a bird and the honk of a duck from the nearby pond.
The phone was ringing as she entered the kitchen and she didn’t need the caller ID to tell her who it was.
“Whoever tied all those condoms on my tree needs to have their head examined. There must be two hundred of them.” Rob sounded a lot less mellow than usual.
“Three hundred and twenty-five, actually,” she said. “And I think you’ve got bigger problems than a condom cleanup.”
“What does that mean?”
“That means your attorney will be hearing from mine on Monday. She found the trust account fraud, Rob. You’re in serious trouble.”
“Shit.” He sounded as deflated as the condoms currently dangling from his tree.
“Is that all you have to say?” she asked. “What happened, Rob? What’s going on? The man I married would never have treated his family or his clients this way.”
Amanda stared out the kitchen window of the house they’d shared and which she now had to find a way to hold on to. “And what are we supposed to do now? Did you give any thought at all to us when you were stealing from your clients and throwing away everything we had together?”
“It wasn’t like that, Amanda. I didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”
She waited in silence, her anger building.
“I had an investment go south and I had to cover the debt. But I put the money back in the account and swore I’d never do it again. Then I was short again, I was always short somehow, and I just couldn’t see any other way out.”
“Why didn’t you say something? I thought we were supposed to be in this together.” She could hear the hurt in her voice and hated it. She preferred the anger that accompanied it, so hot and fluid.
“Jesus,” he said, and she could picture him raking his hand through his hair. “I’m so completely screwed.”
Amanda couldn’t believe it. He’d trashed all of their lives and jeopardized his children’s futures and still he was thinking of himself. The only one who might walk away unscathed was Tiffany.
“We’re all screwed, Rob,” she said, struggling to keep her voice even when all she wanted to do was shriek out her rage and fear. “And I’m just curious what you would suggest I do about this? How am I supposed to support Meghan and Wyatt when I’
ve been a stay-at-home mom for fifteen years? What kind of job do you think I’m going to be able to get that doesn’t require me to say ‘do you want fries with that?’”
There was no answer from Rob and she realized as she slammed down the phone, there wasn’t going to be. She was on her own whether she wanted to be or not. And she was going to have to find a way to accept that.
Acceptance might have come more easily if the Sunday classifieds contained even a single salaried position for an exceptionally experienced multitasking carpool driver. Or if Meghan hadn’t presented herself dressed and ready, wanting to know when they could leave to go shopping for her prom dress.
By two that afternoon, she and Meghan were picking their way through the throng of Sunday shoppers at the mall. Meghan was practically vibrating with excitement as they moved through the crowds. Amanda was expending most of her energy trying to squash down her panic; the last thing she should be doing right now was spending money they didn’t have.
“So, what kind of dress do you have in mind?” Amanda asked. It was hard to get in the proper acquisitional mood when her biggest concern wasn’t style, but price. Clearance priced would be good. Drastically reduced even better.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Meghan said. “I kind of figured I’d know it when I saw it.”
Amanda looked at her daughter. Meghan rarely talked about the coming divorce, but her moods had begun to change with the unpredictability and intensity of a super-cell thunderstorm. Not for the first time, Amanda wished there was some manual for divorce: a set of guidelines for navigating the uncharted waters.
“Let’s start at Nordstrom and then move on to Parisian and Macy’s.” Amanda considered her daughter’s tall, lithe body. “I see you in something simple and classic that screams good taste.” She couldn’t help adding, “And doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.”
Meghan stiffened. “Lucy Simmons got a designer gown from a trunk show at Saks.” Meghan’s tone swelled with envy. “Her mother said it was worth every penny.”