by Jean Stone
Elaine didn’t know if protocol was the same for lying receptionists as for domestic staff, which undoubtedly had been Lily’s only experience with such matters.
“No,” Jo said. “If we get rid of Andrew, we will lose the Bensons. Everyone is excited about what the wedding means to the town: the money, the prestige, the media hype. Without the buzz the wedding’s going to bring, we can kiss Second Chances good-bye.”
“You’re right,” Sarah said, then looked at the others. “She’s right,” she repeated.
“Oh,” Lily moaned.
Still Elaine said nothing. If they knew that she knew . . . if they knew everything that she knew . . . they’d be angry with her, wouldn’t they? They’d be angry that she hadn’t called them last night, that instead she’d been online trying to find a new man, when she should have been warning the others what she’d learned. Shouldn’t she have?
She slid down in the deep navy chair.
“I do, however, have a plan,” Jo said. “We need the Benson wedding. So let’s take advantage of it—of the opportunity, the publicity, the money. Once the wedding’s over—and we’ve been paid in full—we’ll tell the worldwide media what a lowlife ‘A.K.’ really is. He wants to know about real women? We’ll show him the wrath of real women when they’ve been betrayed.”
“He’ll be stunned,” Sarah said.
“As was I,” Jo replied. She held up the magazine. Her cheeks were as pink as the brightest shade on the palette that belonged to the makeup lady at Laurel Lake Spa. Jo looked at Elaine. “You need to read this,” she said. “I’m going online to read every damn back issue where this column appears. We need to know exactly what Mr. Andrew Kennedy—whoever he is—has shared with the world.”
Lily stood up and went to the window. She looked out onto Main Street; she played with the gold tassel that softly bunched the elegant drapes. Then she turned back to the others. “I suppose there’s also a good chance our Andrew isn’t gay.”
Well, Elaine couldn’t stand it another minute. Maybe she’d promised Andrew, maybe she’d promised Cassie, but Elaine had to leak something to her friends. After all, they’d been there for her first, long before Andrew. “I bet he isn’t, too,” she said. “I bet he made that up, so we’d trust him with our secrets and our thoughts—especially about our relationships with men.” They had been his words, so she knew they were true.
The others gaped as if she were brilliant.
“Well, if that’s the case,” Lily said with a mischievous twinkle of her impish blue eyes, “our Andrew is in for a surprise.”
Women call it a makeover.
I call it an act of not-so-divine desperation, a misguided adventure destined for chaos.
Elaine sucked in her breath. She’d carried the magazine over to her corner where her small desk sat apart from the others. She’d been the last to join them, after all. The last, the least important. The one no one would expect to know the things that she knew.
She wondered if she should warn Andrew.
But Jo had called him “bastard,” so Elaine decided she’d better not say anything to anyone, not until she’d read the column for herself, not until she’d judged and juried him, too.
She held the magazine close to her eyes.
Guys, after all, don’t do makeovers, he’d written. When a guy wants to change his life, he buys a new car or a Harley, or changes from beer to vodka martinis, extra dry.
Her eyes scanned the rest of the not-so-clever disguise: he mentioned a “women’s shop,” not a second-wedding planning business; he said that the women had been childhood friends, not college roommates; he claimed they lived “somewhere in the country,” not in West Hope, Massachusetts.
And then there were the names:
Olivia.
Eileen.
Sadie.
Jacquelin.
Well, of course Jo had figured out it was about them, and that the makeover was about Elaine.
She twisted in her chair. It wasn’t an ache that she felt, or even a gut-wrenching pain. Instead, tiny, needlelike pricks perforated her skin as if she’d become the pincushion in her mother’s old sewing basket, sentenced to endure a thousand small hurts.
Oh, Andrew, she thought, did you ridicule us to the whole world?
She forced herself to keep reading.
Four middle-aged women, Andrew—A.K.—had written, only two of whom once were married, now all of whom are single.
Elaine knew, of course, that they all were single. But somehow seeing it in print was jarring, as if they were second class, as if they were losers.
She didn’t know if she was more upset by that or by the fact he’d called them “middle-aged.”
As I’ve said in earlier columns, the women are very different. Interestingly, not one of them appears to have her life driven by a man. Not even Olivia, who is enamored by romantic notions, but no doubt holds her own.
Jacquelin’s lovers have offered little and taken much; Sadie’s have remained as mysterious as she has, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
They are all doing well, hanging in, building new goals and new dreams.
Which apparently has been the stimulus for Eileen’s sudden need for a makeover.
There they were again, the thousand tiny needles. “Andrew, you scoundrel,” she said under her breath. Would his next column be about her father and Mrs. Tuttle?
Between her teeth she sucked in a narrow strip of air.
Eileen is the typical divorcée, Andrew continued. Not quite sure what has happened to her life, not quite sure where to go from here, though it’s been two or three years. She has a few kids, so that must add to her confusion.
Ha! Elaine thought, as if he knew the half of it.
She almost got married again.
If train tracks traveled through the middle of Second Chances, surely one had just arrived and knocked her flat down. She looked around the shop to see if there was any evidence that she’d uttered a deep and woeful cry. Then she turned back to the magazine, masochist that she was.
She must have thought that getting married was what she was supposed to do. Lucky for her, she came to her senses before the damage had been done, before she’d learned that too many women—and, yes, too many men—marry again too quickly because single life is so damn awkward, especially in a town and a society where couples rule.
She stared at the page. Was he now praising her?
She took another breath, this one bigger than the last.
And now, Eileen wants to change it all.
Across the room, Jo uttered something unpleasant. She must have found more of Andrew’s writing.
Elaine went back to Buzz. And then she read:
I applaud Eileen for her heroic attempt to make her life over.
She read the last sentence again. And again. Then she went on. A small, shy smile grew on the right side of her mouth.
I applaud any woman for not settling for a new car or a Harley, but for standing up and saying, “I hate my life, but I’m not going to sit around and whine. I’m going to do something about it. Something constructive. Something fun.”
So, Andrew concluded, these women-friends of mine continue to amaze me. And I, as a man, can sheepishly admit I wish I could be more like them.
Smarter.
Stronger.
Less afraid of life.
The initials—A.K.—signified the end.
Less afraid of life, he’d written, and he had been right. Smarter. Stronger. He’d said those things about her.
A small tear slid down her cheek and landed on the page that was opened on her lap. She wanted to tell Jo that Andrew wasn’t their enemy, that he truly was their friend. But Elaine didn’t know how to do that without wrecking everything, without having them think that she’d betrayed them, too.
29
Jo found several months of “Real Women” columns, proof that the one lousy man she’d let herself trust had turned out to be no better than the rest.
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She hated to think she’d become one of those women who hated men, and yet, there she was.
Men lie, Andrew had written.
In another column: Never underestimate the mood swings of a woman.
Other comments were equally insulting: Women have no penises with which to think.
I’ve found the perfect ruse that will let us go behind the scenes.
Don’t play games . . . at least, not with a woman you might care about. What did that mean?
Then there was the big one: Why . . . do I have to pretend that I am gay? Lily would love that one.
While she read, Jo realized it wasn’t Andrew’s words that had fueled her anger. It was his deception. Plain-and-simple deception.
She tried to imagine how he had landed such a journalistic coup. Oh, he was good-looking and smart, but he and Cassie had been in West Hope for years. What was his connection to John Benson? Not that it mattered. Not that anything to do with Andrew Kennedy mattered.
She rubbed the muscles that climbed from her shoulders to her neck. They felt like rubber bands, pulled too taut, ready to snap. It occurred to her that not even Brian had made her feel so incensed. Perhaps because, with Andrew, it was such a shock.
“All set,” Lily said as she came back into the shop, though Jo hadn’t realized she’d left.
“What’s ‘all set’?” Jo had seen that cocky little grin on Lily before, like when they went looking for the U.S. Men’s Olympic Hockey Team when they’d been in college.
“Friday we’ll be going to lunch. You. Me. Elaine. Sarah. And Andrew.”
“And?”
“We’ll be trying a new place called The Bear Claw Tavern, outside of town. Don’t ask any questions. Just put it on the calendar.”
Jo leaned back in her chair. “Lily, what are you up to?”
The cocky little grin faded to a sad smile. “You’re right that we can’t fire Andrew. But we can damn well make him regret that he underestimated us.”
30
Monday morning Elaine carried the binders with her father’s recipes into the shop, hoping to get right to work, hoping Andrew would be there so the others wouldn’t start bitching again, wouldn’t waste more time and energy cooking up a scheme to get back at him.
It had bothered Elaine all day yesterday. She knew that Andrew had lied, but she worried that the payback would be too uncomfortable. Elaine hated conflict and the dis-ease it often wrought.
Juggling the binders from one hip to the other, she let herself in the back door of the shop. She wondered if she should tell them her exciting bit of news—the fact that Elaine McNulty Thomas was going to have a date Saturday night. She decided it was doubtful that today they’d be happy about anything positive if it involved a man, Sarah’s Jason or Lily’s Frank notwithstanding.
But, gee, she was feeling kind of giddy about the prospect.
GrnHnt62. His e-mail had been there yesterday when she’d arrived home from the anti-Andrew madness at Second Chances.
She’d answered the message quickly, not wanting to criticize men too readily. “Saturday is fine,” she typed.
About an hour later, up popped the logistics: Seven o’clock? Geraldine’s?
Seven o’clock was fine, too, but Elaine hesitated about Geraldine’s. She didn’t do bars, and Geraldine’s was notorious.
After about two seconds of contemplation, she decided what the heck. If Lloyd ever found out, maybe he’d have a stroke.
“Elaine,” Andrew said now as he jumped from his chair and took a carton from her arms. “Irene Benson just called. She’ll be here next week.”
“Oh,” Elaine said. “That’s great.” She wanted to give him a huge heads-up. She wanted to hug him and say, “Oh, Andrew, I don’t care what the others say. Those were beautiful things you wrote about me—about all of us.” But Jo, Lily, and Sarah were all standing in the showroom. Plotting their next move, Elaine feared.
“Next week is practically tomorrow,” Jo replied. “We have a ton of work to do before Irene arrives. And the phone keeps ringing with other brides-to-be wanting other bookings.”
It was what Elaine had been missing from her life: the crazy chaos, the nonstop spin-cycle of working with her friends. Second Chances was on its way to becoming a success and Elaine was now part of it. As long as the business didn’t lose its luster. As long as the others didn’t ruin everything.
“These are my father’s recipes,” she said, patting the carton as Andrew set it on the desk. “I’ll start going through them this morning.”
“Sorry,” Sarah said, “but I need your help today. We have to go to The Stone Castle and measure for table centerpieces and room decorations. Lily is bringing my concepts to florists for price quotes, Jo’s covering the phone, and Andrew’s working the media. Jo’s right: Next week leaves us no time. We have to do this fast.”
Elaine stopped herself from saluting. Instead, she turned to Andrew and said almost apologetically, “We can get the other cartons later.”
The next thing Elaine knew, she was off in Sarah’s truck and Monday had started and she needed to pretend that nothing was amuck.
Besides, she had a date for Saturday night. She’d concentrate on that and forget about Andrew and all the things she wished she didn’t know.
Of the four of them, Elaine had been the one who’d had the normal family when they were young: the mother who stayed at home and took care of their needs, the father who went off to work each day and came home every night.
Jo had been envious.
In the house where she’d slept (or tried to sleep) for several nights, where in between naps she’d wandered from room to room, she now foraged through the kitchen cabinets, sorting her mother’s old yellow plates, trying to make herself useful, when all she really wanted was to call Elaine and say, “For godssake, be good to your father. Be grateful you have him.”
It saddened Jo that Elaine had grown so detached from her father when he’d been such a nice man.
Sometimes the girls had piled into Lily’s new Camaro and gone to Saratoga for a weekend. They went shopping and took long walks and went to the empty racetrack where they shared a pack of cigarettes and a six-pack of beer.
At night, tucked into an old twin bed in Elaine’s house, sharing a room with Lily or with Sarah, Jo lay awake and pretended that this big place was hers, that she and Brian were married and they lived there with their half a dozen kids. It didn’t matter that Jo was in college and should be too old for make-believe.
In the spring before graduation, they went for the last time.
“Jo.” Elaine’s father had greeted them one Saturday when they returned with shopping bags and smoky breaths. “Your mother called this afternoon,” he said. “Please, come into the music room. Elaine, take Lily and Sarah upstairs to your room.”
Jo went into the music room with Mr. McNulty, where a grand piano was covered with a golden, velvet shawl.
“My wife is out doing errands,” Mr. McNulty said, “or she would join us.”
“Something’s wrong,” Jo said, and Elaine’s father asked her to sit down.
She sat on a sofa that had curly legs. Mr. McNulty sat on a needlepointed footstool in front of the sofa.
“It’s your father,” he said.
“My father?”
“I’m so sorry to tell you, Jo, but your mother called to say she heard that he has died.”
Jo stood up. “You must mean my grandfather. Oh no. I must get home.”
But Bob McNulty shook his head and touched her hand. “No, dear, your grandfather is fine. It’s your father, Sam Lyons, who has died.”
Jo sat back down and stared at Mr. McNulty.
Her father died? How had her mother found out, and why should she really care? It had been a dozen or more years since he’d abandoned them. Even when she tried, Jo could not recall his face.
“Am I supposed to do anything?” she asked. “I mean, is there a funeral?”
Mr. McNulty shrugge
d. “I think your mother only wanted you to know.” He was trying to be so nice, like the kind of father Jo would have wanted. Not like the father that now was dead.
She stood up again. “Thank you for the information,” she said. “I guess I’ll go find the others.”
“Would you like to call your mother?”
Jo said, no, that she’d stop by when they returned to West Hope.
Mr. McNulty stood up, too. “Will you be staying for dinner?” he asked.
Jo remembered that she’d frowned and said, yes, of course. Why would she go home just because her father died? And why had her mother called and left the message, anyway?
Yes, Jo thought now, as she packed the butter dish into a box because no one in the family used butter anymore, it really was a shame that Elaine had grown detached from her father when he’d been such a nice man.
Elaine held out until Thursday before she told Sarah about her date. They were driving from the florist to the fabric shop so Sarah could buy white velvet to line the bridal sleigh.
She said Elaine was nuts—certifiable. “Who is this man?” she asked.
Elaine ran through the bio.
“He’s into antiquing?” Sarah continued. “Are you sure he isn’t Lily’s boyfriend? How do you know you can trust him?” “Trust,” of course, was the word du jour, what with Andrew’s deceit foremost in their thoughts.
“He isn’t Lily’s boyfriend. And he must be trustworthy. He works in a bank.”
“Ha!” Sarah chuckled, then asked, “What’s his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“Well. No.”
Sarah hissed. “Come on, Elaine. Are you really that desperate?”
Elaine felt she’d been pinched. She didn’t mention that no one had thought Jo had been desperate when she’d met that man in her garage. That man who ended up being married. “I’m not desperate, Sarah. I decided it’s time for some fun. For the new me.”
“The world is different now than when we were in college.”
“I know that.”