Ladies' Night

by Andrews, Mary Kay

  “My regulars don’t know what a fork tine is,” Rochelle said.

  Maybe, Grace wanted to tell her, if we clean this place up, change the menu, and raise our standards a little, maybe we’ll attract a clientele that actually will pay $15 for a decent dinner entrée.

  But before she could lob another useless argument into Rochelle’s court, she happened to glance up at the television and stopped, midsentence.

  Rochelle followed her gaze. “Aw shit. Here we go again.”

  The morning news hour had segued into Sunrise Sarasota, one of those chatty, morning-magazine-format shows. The cohosts, an unbearably perky husband-and-wife team named Charley and Joe, were doing an “In the Kitchen” segment that had the wife, Charley, attempting to crack a Florida lobster shell while the husband, Joe, was being tutored in the finer points of crafting a table setting.

  When Grace heard an all-too-familiar voice, a high-pitched nasal twang, she turned around to stare at the wall-mounted television above the bar.

  The guest coaching Charley and Joe through their cooking segment was none other than J’Aimee. Her J’Aimee, or rather, Ben’s J’Aimee.

  Rochelle grabbed for the remote to change the channel, but Grace was faster, snatching it up from beneath her mother’s fingers, then staring, dumbfounded, at the television.

  “Don’t go away!” Charley was saying. “We’ll be right back with Gracenotes-style blogger J’Aimee.

  “What?” Grace shrieked. “Gracenotes-style blogger? Seriously?”

  “Just turn it off,” Rochelle said soothingly. “Tune it out. This means nothing. You’re just going to get yourself all worked up for nothing.”

  “It’s not for nothing,” Grace said, still staring up at the television. “This is all Ben’s doing.” She scrabbled around on the bar, looking for her phone.

  “I’m calling my lawyer,” Grace said, scrolling through the numbers on her contact list. “He can’t do this. He can’t promote her as a Gracenotes blogger. He can’t turn her into me!”

  “Looks like he already did,” Rochelle said, under her breath.

  Grace got Mitzi Stillwell’s voice mail. “Mitzi! This is Grace. Turn on Sunrise Sarasota right now! Ben has J’Aimee on there, promoting herself as the Gracenotes-style blogger. You’ve got to do something, Mitzi. Call the judge, get an injunction or something. Call me back, okay?”

  The commercial break was over, and Charley and Joe were back with their guest.

  “Look at that whore!” Grace ranted. “See how good she looks? I swear, Ben’s gotten her a makeover. She looks almost classy.”

  J’Aimee was wearing a sleeveless hot-pink dress, her newly dyed dark locks worn in a simple upsweep.

  “They must have put some kind of concealer on that barbed-wire tattoo she has on her right bicep,” Grace muttered. “And I think maybe she got Botox on her lips. You see how full they are now?”

  Rochelle shrugged. “I never paid that much attention to the girl, to tell you the truth.”

  J’Aimee was now openly flirting with Joe, batting her artificial lashes at him, giggling and playfully flicking a dinner napkin at him …

  “Hey! That’s my damned napkin.” Grace scrambled up on one of the barstools to get a closer look at the television. She pointed at the screen. “Those are my hand-blown Mexican wineglasses.” She felt tears welling up in her eyes. “I carried those all the way back from Puerto Vallarta on my lap.

  “And look. She’s using that fugly damned pottery from my Gracenotes sponsor. That’s strictly a Ben move.”

  She sank back down on the barstool, unable to take her eyes off the television. Now J’Aimee was placing a centerpiece in the middle of the table. It was a large, shallow glass bowl, heaped with shiny green Haas avocados.

  “I always like to use fresh local fruits and vegetables in my table settings,” she told Charley, adjusting one of the avocados. “It gives a party a sense of authenticity, don’t you think?”

  “Authenticity?” Grace howled. “She didn’t know an avocado from an orange before I hired her.”

  Rochelle quietly removed the remote control from Grace’s clutch. She aimed it at the television and clicked.

  “You’re getting yourself all worked up for nothing,” she said. “So what if she’s on television? So what if Ben has her writing a blog with your name on it? She’s not you. She’s just a cheap little floozie. You are the real thing. You’re butter and she’s … she’s not even Parkay. Ben will figure that out soon enough. Your readers will figure it out. Everything will work itself out.”

  “No, it won’t,” Grace said tearfully. “She’s stolen everything from me. My house, my husband, my napkins. That was my wedding silver she was setting the table with. My Repoussé silver, Mom.”

  Rochelle sighed and folded her weeping daughter into her arms. “It’ll be okay, Grace. Really it will. I know it hurts right now, but you’ll get through this. You will. I’ll help you.”

  Grace looked up at her. Tears streamed down her face. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her nose was snotty. She sniffed loudly. “How, Mom?”

  “I just will,” Rochelle vowed. She grabbed the bottle of spray cleaner Grace had left behind the bar. “Look. I’ll let you clean the office next, okay? You can throw out whatever you want, and I won’t say a word.”

  * * *

  After the judge refused to give her back her blog, Grace promised herself she would not look at Gracenotes. But that afternoon, once she’d filled the Sandbox’s Dumpster with dusty files and years’ and years’ worth of old Sports Illustrated and Florida Sportsman magazines, Grace opened her laptop and clicked on the icon for her blog.

  “Oh no she didn’t,” she murmured, looking at the home page. Everything had changed. Including the name. It was now Gracenotes for Living, with J’Aimee! The new banner was in a nearly unreadable font, in a garish orange and teal color combination. The rails on both sides of the page were filled with tiny, one-inch squares advertising everything from New Unbelievable Anti-Aging Serum! to bank credit cards to cruise ship vacations to Pet Meds by Mail!

  “Horrible,” Grace said, shaking her head. “Heinous.” She counted three dozen ads on the home page. Ben must have been having a field day, she decided, maximizing and monetizing to his greedy heart’s content.

  She read the previous day’s post. It was titled “How to Buy Furniture.”

  “Hmm. Scintillating,” Grace said. As she read, she felt sick. The entire blog was really a thinly veiled advertorial for Room in a Box, a wholesale furniture company with franchise operations all over central Florida. The same furniture company whose banner ad now took up the entire top of the home page.

  Room in a Box’s marketing people had been pestering Grace for more than a year to write about their furniture. They’d even had the nerve to ship a faux-leather recliner chair to the house—as an inducement/bribery for Grace to write testimonials about their product line.

  “No way,” Grace had said, as Ben cut the cardboard crate away from the chair—which actually came with a remote control allowing it to recline, vibrate, and even play music. “Pack that thing up and tell UPS to come back and get it. I don’t even want it to stay here overnight.”

  Ben knew it was useless to argue with her. Obviously he’d waited until he no longer had to argue with her. Grace was gone, and with her had gone any hint of editorial standards.

  She couldn’t read any more of this drivel. She closed out the blog, opened a file, and began to type, her fingers flying over the keyboard.

  By four that afternoon, she’d registered a new domain name for herself, TrueGrace. Maybe not the most original name, she admitted, but it would serve its purpose, hopefully letting her readers know this blog was the real thing.

  This time around, she promised herself, the blog would be all hers. And for her first post, she decided to go public with what had happened in her life and to her old world.

  No more prettying things up, Grace decided. She was still writing, deleting
, revising, when she looked down at her watch and realized it was nearly 7:00 P.M. She hit the SAVE button, closed her laptop, and reluctantly went downstairs.

  Rochelle was behind the bar, pouring a beer for an older woman Grace didn’t recognize. She looked up in time to see Grace heading for the Sandbox’s front door.

  “Where are you headed?” Rochelle called.

  Grace grimaced. “To my so-called therapy group.”

  “Looking like that?”

  Grace looked down at herself. She was wearing a faded lime-green Sandbox T-shirt, white shorts, and flip-flops, the same outfit she’d changed into after her morning run. Her hair was knotted in a limp ponytail and she wore no makeup.

  “The judge said I had to go,” she said, her chin jutting out defiantly. “He didn’t say I had to dress to impress.”

  Rochelle handed the beer to her customer and hurried around the bar to her daughter’s side. “Honey, you don’t want to go in there with an attitude,” she said, her voice low. “Maybe these sessions will actually be helpful. Maybe you should keep an open mind. Or at least do something about your hair.”

  Grace sighed. She reached into the glass display case where they kept the Sandbox-branded merchandise, the koozies, tees, bumper stickers, and key chains. She grabbed a baseball cap with the Sandbox logo embroidered on the bill, jammed it on her head, and looped her ponytail through the opening in the back of the hatband.

  “Better?” She didn’t wait to hear Rochelle’s answer.

  11

  Grace had to check the street address on the therapist’s door to make sure she’d arrived at the right place. This was a shrink’s office? It was a drab one-story stucco storefront occupying the end slot in a strip shopping center that also boasted a Vietnamese nail salon, a hearing aid salesroom, a business called the Diaper Depot, and a tattoo parlor. The dusty plate glass window was boldly lettered in gilt-edged black letters; PAULA TALBOTT-SINCLAIR, L.S.W. FAMILY AND MARITAL COACHING, DIVORCE DIVERSION, EMOTIONAL HEALING.

  “Emotional healing,” she muttered to herself, taking a last sip of lukewarm coffee before getting out of her car. “Right. Like that’s going to happen.” There were four other cars in the otherwise empty parking lot. One of them, a shiny black VW bug, boasted a yellow smiley-face bumper sticker with the motto “Change Happens.” Had to be the therapist’s car, she decided, hating her on the spot.

  Paula Talbott-Sinclair’s reception area wasn’t much more impressive than her storefront. Worn and faded brown indoor-outdoor carpet, a low-slung olive-green pleather sofa, and a couple of armless chairs. There was a receptionist’s desk, with a computer terminal and telephone, but no sign of a receptionist. Only a clipboard with a hand-lettered sign on the desktop: DIVORCE RECOVERY GROUP MEMBERS, PLEASE SIGN IN HERE. There were three other names on the sign-in sheet, all women, Grace noted.

  The door on the wall opposite the front door was slightly ajar, and Grace heard the low hum of voices. She wrote her name on the sign-in sheet, hesitating a moment, before jotting down Grace Davenport.

  “Hello?” she said softly, approaching the door. A woman popped her head out. Grace guessed she must be in her midforties. Her heart-shaped face was framed with a cascade of sandy-blond curls, and she had startlingly blue eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. She was dressed in a figure-hugging sleeveless black tank top and tight black yoga pants, with a gauzy black shawl draped around her bony shoulders. And she was barefoot.

  “Oh hi,” she said brightly, looking Grace up and down. She grasped both of Grace’s hands in hers and squeezed. “I’m Dr. Talbott-Sinclair, although in group, we all just use first names. So I’m Paula. And you must be Grace Stanton?”

  “Actually, it’s Davenport,” Grace said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I see,” Paula said, pursing her lips. “Well, that’s something we’re going to want to talk about, isn’t it?”

  “Taking back my maiden name?” Grace asked. “Does the judge have a problem with that?”

  Paula cocked her head and blinked. “The question is, Grace, do you have a problem with it? Is this something you’re doing out of anger? Because we can’t have a healing when our hearts and minds are full of bitterness. You’ll come to see that, I think, eventually, in group.”

  “It’s my name,” Grace said, feeling unusually obstinate. “I was a Davenport for way longer than I was in Stanton.

  “All right,” Paula said, pushing the door open. “Let’s hold that thought. For now, come on in and meet the other members of group.”

  The inner office consisted of a large glass-topped desk and a swivel chair, in the corner of the room. It had the same brown carpet as the outer office and a pair of smallish windows that were covered with a set of shiny bronze drapes in a cheesy sheer fabric. Five folding chairs were arranged in a semicircle around a high-backed brown leather chair. A row of framed diplomas was stretched across the wall above the desk, and three women, all of them looking ill at ease, were clustered around a small wooden table that held a coffeepot and a stack of Styrofoam cups, talking in subdued voices.

  “Ladies,” Paula said, her voice rising to let them know she had an important announcement. “Ladies!”

  The women turned their attention to the newcomer. If Grace had any expectations about what her divorce recovery group would look like, this wasn’t it.

  “Don’t I know you?” A tall, elegantly dressed black woman approached Grace, hands on her hips, studying the newcomer intently. She wore her hair in a sleek bobbed cut, and the first thing Grace noticed about her were her almond-shaped eyes and her luxuriously thick fringe of eyelashes. Fakes?

  “I, I’m not sure,” Grace said, stuttering a little. Wasn’t group therapy supposed to be anonymous? Wasn’t Paula Talbott-Sinclair supposed to protect her identity?

  “Wait, I’ve got it,” the woman snapped her fingers. “Gracenotes! Am I right? You’re the lifestyle blogger who drowned her husband’s 175,000-dollar ride. Damn! I covered that story, and it got picked up by all the networks.” She patted Grace’s shoulder. “Nice goin’, girlfriend.”

  Grace felt her face flame with embarrassment. So much for anonymity.

  “You! You’re that reporter! Camryn. Camryn … something. You snuck into our subdivision, trespassed, talked to all my neighbors.” She lowered her voice. “Did you follow me here today? Don’t you people have any sense of decency?” She looked around for the therapist, ready to chew her out.

  “Relax,” Camryn said, chuckling. “Me, follow you here? Don’t flatter yourself. I’m here for the same reason you are.”

  Grace narrowed her eyes. “You drove your husband’s car into a pool?”

  “Not quite,” Camryn said. “Let’s just say what I did do didn’t set well with some parties.”

  Another woman walked up to join them. She was younger than Camryn Nobles but older than Grace, petite and slender, with sun-streaked shoulder-length blond hair pushed back from her forehead by a pair of designer sunglasses. Her skin was flawless, and she was dressed casually, in white capris and a flowery pink and orange tunic top and gold sandals. She wore a fine gold chain around her neck, and dangling from it was a whopper of a diamond, three carats, at least, Grace estimated.

  “Hey, y’all,” she said, in a honey-dipped drawl. She glanced over her shoulder at Paula Talbott-Sinclair, who had seated herself in the swivel chair and was looking expectantly at the door. “Are you thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?”

  “What’s that?” Camryn said.

  “Well, I’m just wondering what kind of dog-and-pony show we’ve lucked into here. I mean, did you get a look at this shopping center? I’ve been living in Sarasota all my life, and I have never, and I mean ever, stepped foot in a place like this. What kind of a therapist has her offices between a tattoo artist and a diaper store?”

  “The kind who charges three hundred dollars a session,” Camryn said. “Obviously she’s not spending what she makes on overhead.”

  “For real,” the blonde said
. “And the thing is, my lawyer says I probably can’t make my ex pay for these sessions. Even though I’m not the one who was fuckin’ around on the side. I’ll tell you, that damned Stackpole has my lawyer runnin’ scared.”

  “Stackpole!” Camryn said with a snort. “He’s the judge hearing your divorce?”

  “That’s the one,” the blonde said. “You too?”

  “Unfortunately,” Camryn said. She looked at Grace. “How about you?”

  “Afraid so,” Grace said. “My lawyer says he hates women. Especially women lawyers.”

  “My lawyer’s a man, and I still got the shaft,” Camryn pointed out.

  “Me too,” the blonde said. “Well, I guess we’re in this together, huh? By the way, I’m Ashleigh. Hartounian.”

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to tell our last names,” Grace said.

  “Why not?” Camryn shot. “I got nuthin’ to hide. Anyway, y’all both know my name, so why shouldn’t I know yours?”

  Grace sighed. “Whatever. I’m Grace Davenport.”

  “I thought your name was Stanton,” Camryn said.

  “It was. I’m taking back my maiden name.”

  Camryn rolled her eyes. “I’ll bet the judge is gonna love that.” She turned toward Ashleigh. “So, is your ex Boyce Hartounian? The plastic surgeon?”

  “You know him?”

  “Only his reputation,” Camryn said. “He did an eye lift for one of my girlfriends at the station. I swear, she looks ten years younger.”

  “Boyce is good, all right,” Ashleigh admitted.

  Camryn took a step closer and examined the younger woman’s face. “How ’bout you? Did he do some work on you?”

  “Some,” Ashleigh admitted. She lifted her shoulders. “He gave me these boobs, not long after we started dating. And for our first anniversary, he gave me Reese Witherspoon’s nose.”