“Lucky you! All that and your period, too!”
Loreen took another bite and nodded. “It’s due any second now.” She hesitated. Seemed like she’d been thinking her period would start “any minute now” for a long time.
Oh, well, that’s how it was lately. Her cycle was less predictable. Suddenly it was like she was in seventh grade again, never knowing when Aunt Flo was going to show up unexpectedly and embarrass her to death with some public appearance.
“I tell you,” Tiffany was saying, “I’m thinking about taking my pills for three months at a time nonstop so I don’t get it so often. They say you can do that now, you know.” She sipped her beer. “I seem to get it at the worst time every single month. Last month it was while we were in Vegas, and this month it was over Memorial Day weekend when, of course, Kate wanted to spend the entire weekend at the pool.”
Last weekend was Memorial Day. So Tiffany had gotten a period twice since Vegas, and Loreen hadn’t had it since . . . when was it? Before Las Vegas. Like, well before Las Vegas. A couple of weeks.
“What’s wrong?” Tiffany asked.
Loreen put her pizza down. She was losing her appetite. “I think I missed a month.”
“What do you mean?”
“My period. I think I missed an entire month, and with everything that’s going on, I didn’t realize it.”
“Are you worried? I mean, it’s not like you’re pregnant or anything.”
Loreen didn’t answer.
She just sat there, feeling her skin prickle all over.
“Loreen.” Tiffany looked concerned now. “What’s the matter? You look like a ghost.”
“What if I am pregnant?”
“You said you hadn’t done anything since you and Robert split up.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “So how could you possibly be pregnant?”
“Oh, God.” Loreen pushed the plate of pizza away from her. Then she took her napkin and twisted it in her lap. “You don’t want to know. I don’t want to tell you.”
“What? Is it something to do with Robert?”
Robert. No. This was feeling worse by the second. She swallowed, but her mouth was as dry as cotton. “Yes. Well, we’ve been talking about getting back together, but nothing’s for sure.” If her hunch was right, he wasn’t going to be too eager to resume relations now.
“Loreen Murphy, I cannot believe you’ve been holding out on me!” Tiffany raised her beer bottle in a mock toast. “I had no idea you guys were getting back together. And had been back together. Wow, can you imagine if you are pregnant, after everything you two went through? It would be like kismet.”
“It would be something, all right.”
“So why don’t you look happier?” Tiffany’s smile was broad. “It’s fate!”
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Loreen said. She felt a surge of adrenaline run through her veins like ice water. “I’ve got to get a test. I have to know.”
“Okay, okay, calm down. Look, you go next door to CVS and get a test. I’ll pay up here and meet you at the car.”
Loreen nodded convulsively. She couldn’t speak.
Walking through the aisles of the drugstore was like something from a dream. Or, rather, a bad dream.
A hideous nightmare.
The fluorescent lights overhead were a little too bright, lending a disturbing hypnotic quality to the five minutes she spent finding the pregnancy tests (next to the condoms, all of which she eyed with skepticism now), paying, and wandering into an oncoming car in the parking lot.
The car stopped before hitting her, and she was almost sorry.
Tiffany saw the whole thing and came running. “Look, Loreen, you’re scaring the bejeezus out of me. One minute we’re having a perfectly nice little meal—then, within the span of two minutes, all the blood leaves your face and you’re a walking zombie now, carrying a pregnancy test in a plastic bag. Why has this got you so freaked out?”
“Because something tells me I am pregnant.”
“Okay. But is that really so bad? You’ve been there before.” They stopped in front of Tiffany’s minivan. “You used to want this so bad, remember? And you know you won’t be on your own. You know you’d have Robert, and you’d have me, and Abbey, and Sandra.”
Loreen closed her eyes against the horror of it and said, “But . . . Robert wouldn’t be the dad.”
There was silence and Loreen opened her eyes to see Tiffany looking at her, stunned.
“Are you serious?”
Loreen nodded miserably. “Unfortunately.”
“Then who would?” Tiffany asked. It was clear she was trying not to look shocked, but she looked like she’d just swallowed a bug. “You didn’t tell me you’d met someone.”
“Oh, I met someone. Let’s get in.” Loreen opened the passenger door and got into the car.
Tiffany did the same. “Okay, who? And where? And how on earth did I miss all of this?”
Loreen took a long breath and said, “Suffice it to say that I’m afraid what happens in Vegas doesn’t necessarily stay in Vegas.”
“Huh?”
Loreen shook her head. “I don’t want to be mysterious about this, but can we just run back to your place so I can do the test before I go insane? I can’t concentrate until I know what’s going on.” She tried to keep her voice from wavering, but the fear was clutching her esophagus.
“Of course.” Tiffany turned the key in the ignition and left it at that.
Loreen knew the curiosity had to be killing Tiffany, but she just couldn’t tell her the whole ugly truth unless she knew she had to. If she didn’t, well, she’d just make something up.
They got to Tiffany’s house within about seven minutes, and as Loreen approached the front door, the smell of Bounce, coming from the dryer duct under the front window, nearly knocked her over.
Normally she adored the smell of Bounce.
This didn’t bode well.
“Why don’t you go on up to the bathroom in my room?” Tiffany suggested. “I’ll make some herbal tea. Does that sound good?”
“Do you have something like ginger ale?”
“Always.” Tiffany nodded. “You never know when someone’s going to puke. I’ll pour a glass.”
Loreen went upstairs into the large master bathroom and took the pregnancy test sticks out of their wrappers. Then she sat down on the toilet with them both and had the stray thought that she wished she had a separate soaking tub, too.
She also wished she had a stable marriage, and home, and her period.
But when she peed on the sticks—both of them—things didn’t really become more clear.
“What did it say?” Tiffany asked, taking the glass of ginger ale to Loreen. Her expression changed when she got closer. “Positive?”
Loreen shook her head.
Tiffany set the glass down and pulled Loreen into a strong, comforting hug. “Oh, honey. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Loreen sniffed. “Of course it is, but some part of me . . .” She shook her head. She couldn’t finish.
“I know,” Tiffany soothed. “There’s something really incredible about getting that positive result. Knowing, all in that moment, that there are two of you, not one. It’s a rush, even if you don’t know what to do next.” Tiffany guided her to a seat on the couch in the great room and sat down next to her, taking her hand. “Do you want to talk about what led up to this?”
Loreen looked at Tiffany, so earnest, so nonjudgmental, and the whole story spilled out of her. Meeting Rod, the way she’d felt when he’d paid special attention to her, how incredible it was to throw caution to the wind and have a one-night stand for the first time in her life, and how completely, utterly humiliating it was when he’d given her a bill at the end of it.
“That’s how it happened,” Loreen said. She was cried out. Her voice was now just a thin blade of shame. “I got all those cash advances on what I thought was my card in a pathetic, unstoppable attempt to come ou
t of it even.”
“I totally understand that,” Tiffany said, to Loreen’s surprise.
Loreen gave a humorless laugh. “Come on. You’re way too perfect for that.”
“I am not perfect,” Tiffany said. “Far, far from it. And I absolutely see how this happened. You weren’t just trying to even out your finances, you were trying to even out your self-esteem. Give yourself something to feel okay about at the end of an evening that had made you feel terrible about yourself.”
Loreen closed her eyes against a fresh onslaught of tears, but it didn’t do any good. They seeped through her lashes and burned down her cheeks anyway. “That’s it.” She nodded and put her hands up to her face.
Tiffany took her hands and held them in hers, looking straight into Loreen’s eyes. “As crazy as it is, it could have happened to anyone. The weirdness wasn’t yours; it was his. You’re a normal woman who assumed the guy she was talking to in a bar was a normal man.”
“But I told him to tell the other women he was taken. That was, like, code for turn off the red light for now, in retrospect.”
“Well—” Tiffany gave a laugh. “—it was a poor choice of wording.”
Loreen joined in the laughter. “You know, I might even have come close to joking, How much do you charge?”
Tiffany laughed harder. “Oh, no, did you say that?”
“I might have—I don’t remember anymore!” Loreen’s laughter was bubbling into hysteria.
Now tears were streaming from Tiffany’s eyes. “Oh, my God, and he would have said a thousand dollars . . . and you . . .” She was having trouble catching her breath. “. . . would no doubt have said—”
“You’re hired!” they both said at the same time, and dissolved into fits of giggles.
“It could have been me,” Tiffany assured her, sobering at last. “I mean, if I weren’t married.”
“Do you really think so?” Loreen wanted to believe it. “Tell me the truth.”
“I am! Look, if I’d been with you, I wouldn’t have thought one thing about the exchange. You would have gone off with him, and I would have thought go for it.”
“You wouldn’t have said that at the cash-advance window, though.”
“Only because I was too busy buying thousands of dollars’ worth of impractical clothes I couldn’t return later.” She cocked her head and looked earnestly into Loreen’s eyes. “Honestly, I don’t know who Deb Leventer would judge more harshly in this situation, you or me.”
“Me,” Loreen said definitively. “What if I’d been pregnant by some ho boy in Vegas that I’d never see again? Imagine the possibilities for complications. Health background, the child’s right to know his biological history . . . It would have been a mess. But now, finding out I’m not . . .” Loreen’s voice broke. “It’s almost worse.”
Tiffany nodded. “I understand. It would have been a baby.”
“No, it’s not that.” Tears flowed; Loreen barely had enough Kleenex to stanch them.
Tiffany looked surprised. “No?”
Loreen shook her head. “The hormonal fluctuations, the sore boobs, the late period . . . This probably means I’m already going into . . .” The tears came harder. “Menopause!”
Now that Loreen had decided that time was marching on and that this must be perimenopause and she was a whisper away from death, she decided it was time for her to stop keeping secrets like a child. Things had been getting better with Robert; she hoped they were headed toward a reconciliation. Now that she was staring down the barrel of old maidness, she decided that she was going to come clean, lay her cards on the table, so to speak, and let the chips fall where they may.
So Loreen told Robert the truth, albeit the bare bones. Met a guy, thought he was cute, knew nothing would come of it, had been drinking champagne and feeling lonely, went back to his hotel room with him, and one thing led to another. . . .
Robert went silent.
And stayed like that for a long, long time.
“Please say something,” Loreen said. “Tell me I’m stupid, tell me you never want to see me again, tell me everything’s off and I’m on my own with this, but please don’t just look at me like that.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Robert managed at last. His voice was that of someone who had been clocked in the head with a baseball bat and was dazed.
“Say something.”
He flattened his lips into a tight line, and appeared to think for a moment before shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Loreen. I’ve got nothing other than the fact that our marriage split up because you didn’t have time for anything but Jacob, and now I have to understand how somehow you managed to leave him with a stranger in a Las Vegas hotel room so you could have sex with a stranger.”
She winced, over and over, at his words. But she couldn’t argue with any of them.
“In fact—” He stood up and shoved his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. “—I think I’m going to just go. I need to think.”
“I’ll get Jacob from the Dreyers’ house,” Loreen said.
Tiffany had taken Jacob so that Loreen and Robert could have this talk, though the plan had originally been that Robert would pick him up.
Robert looked grateful to be relieved of that duty. Or at least as grateful as he could, given that most of his facial expression was still devoted to shock and horror.
He left, and Loreen waited until his car had disappeared down the street before she allowed herself a good, long cry.
So she was going to have to give up the idea of getting back together with Robert, and she hadn’t even realized that she’d allowed herself to think it was going to happen. And she had to accept that it was the natural consequence of what she’d done.
There was a price for everything, and in this case it was even more than five thousand dollars.
Chapter
21
This is Crystal.”
“Spread your thighs,” Tiffany’s caller said without preamble. “I’m gonna finger-bang your pussy.”
“Do it,” she said, turning off the lights in her bedroom and leaning back on the bed to relax. Charlie was gone again, and—again—she didn’t mind it. Particularly since the private investigator, Gerald Parks, was following him. “Do it hard, baby.”
“Call me by my name,” he growled. “You should know it by now. This is Mick.”
“Mick.” She let the word roll off her tongue like warm caramel. “It’s nice to hear from you again, Mick.” She had a regular! This was his third call. This was a very good sign that she was a success.
“I want to pull your panties off with my teeth and bite your clit until you scream with ecstasy.”
It didn’t sound all that ecstasy inducing to her, but Tiffany was surprised to feel a little tingle anyway. “I’m waiting for you,” she said. “I’ve been waiting all day for you.”
“How many fingers can you handle?”
How on earth was she supposed to answer that? “Try me,” seemed like the most diplomatic response she could come up with. “I love your hands. Your long, strong fingers.” She found herself picturing Jude Law. He probably had nice hands.
She was a hands girl.
The call went on for perhaps fifteen minutes, during which time Tiffany got more and more into it. She lost track of the fact that she was getting paid, and dived straight into the thrill of it.
Mick, if that truly was his real name, was unlike any man she would ever be attracted to in real life. He was blunt, his attitude toward women was Edwardian, but something about the anonymity turned Tiffany on.
So much so, in fact, that she didn’t hear Kate until she was right outside the door. “Mommy? Are you talking to Daddy?”
Tiffany scrambled off the bed and pulled her rumpled clothes together. The back of her hair was a rat’s nest from moving against the pillow, but she couldn’t fix that, finish the call, and distract Kate all at the same time.
“Mick! I have to go. My husband is here!”
“Call me again? . . .”
“You know it.”
She clipped the phone shut just as Kate tried the locked doorknob.
“Mommy, why is the door locked?”
“Is it?” Tiffany tried to sound surprised, but guilt and annoyance at the interruption mingled in her voice. Why was it that the kids always popped out of bed at the worst possible time? Tiffany reached for the door and opened it, unlocking it at the same time in one smooth move. “It wasn’t locked.”
“Yes, it was,” Kate insisted.
“No, it was just jammed. Now, why are you out of bed?”
Kate shrugged her narrow shoulders. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“No?” Tiffany ran her hand through her daughter’s long, soft hair. “Why not? Did you have a bad dream?”
Kate shook her head. “I had a fight with Poppy Leventer and Lucy Titus today. They said you weren’t really the PTA president.”
Tiffany rolled her eyes. “That’s just nonsense.”
“They said if you were a good PTA president, you’d put the band’s big trophy in a trophy case.”
“Hmm. Think about that. What’s better for all the kids in the school? Seeing your trophy in a big, expensive case every time they walk in, or taking part in fun learning activities, like when you had the Spanish breakfast?”
“I loved the breakfast!”
“And I love the trophy, but it isn’t something all the students got to take part in, so I think it’s better to concentrate PTA funds on things that everyone can enjoy. Don’t you think so?”
Kate nodded solemnly. “Yes. I do.”
Tiffany smiled at her daughter’s maturity. “That makes me proud of you.”
“I’m proud of you, too, Mommy.” Kate wrapped her arms around Tiffany and squeezed. “You’re the best PTA president there could ever be. Way better than that mean old witch Mrs. Leventer.” She then made a p-tuey sound that Tiffany totally agreed with.
Secrets of a Shoe Addict Page 22