by Joan Rylen
Vivian had known Lucy since sixth grade where they met in band. They were band dorks but cool band dorks, or at least that’s what they told themselves. Lucy and Vivian hit it off instantly and have had some kind of cosmic connection ever since. They could finish each other’s sentences, knew what the other was thinking, and shared all the same interests; well, except Lucy was a neat-freak and Vivian was not. As roommates at the University of Texas at Austin they got along great, never had typical roommate issues. Vivian kept the living room as neat and tidy as her messy brain could. Lucy accepted it, didn’t go into Vivian’s bathroom, and it worked.
Vivian met Kate in the ninth grade, also in band. Though a complete brainiac, she was lots of fun and that was Vivian’s style. She, too, went to UT Austin, and they would see each other from time to time, usually at parties or on Sixth Street.
The girls waited for Vivian’s bag to emerge from the chute and laughed about Lucy wearing her high-heeled, sling-back slutty shoes that were way too much for an airport outing.
Lucy looked at Vivian and said, “This coming from Ms. Naturalizer slip-on clogs.”
“I’m traveling, my feet swell, and I can easily get these off at security. Besides, they’re comfortable, and I can walk in them without fear of breaking an ankle. Or my neck.”
Lucy harrumphed and grabbed Vivian’s giant burnt-orange bag off the conveyor belt, almost losing her balance on her stilettos.
Wendy, Kate and Vivian couldn’t help but laugh. At least she didn’t fall on the floor like she had at the Purple Peacock in Playa del Carmen.
“Damn, girl,” Vivian said to Lucy. “You’re looking even better than you did a few months ago. And I’m lovin’ the hair.”
“Thanks, I’ve been training for a triathlon, and the Colorado air does wonders for my curls.” Lucy fluffed the auburn curls that cascaded over her shoulders and down her back. Her flawless, fair skin made her green eyes pop, and her muscular physique turned heads.
The girls stilettoed, clogged, tennis-shoed and flip-flopped out to Lucy’s four-wheel drive SUV and loaded their stuff in the back. Vivian’s grandiose bag went in first. Everything fit except the cooler, which they put in the back seat between Wendy and Kate, who were dubbed the “Back Seat Bar Babes.”
Getting in the passenger seat, Vivian thought, Nothing’s gonna go wrong on this trip. I just know it!
2
VIVIAN took her shoes off and put her feet up on the dash as Lucy drove away from the airport, toward I-70. Living in Boulder the past three years, Lucy made regular treks into Denver for work and into the mountains to hike, bike and ski. She was designated navigator on this trip, and all were glad they had Lucy’s SUV and not a P.O.S. rent car like they did in Mexico.
Turning in her seat, Vivian tapped on the cooler lid, and her green eyes flashed with anticipation. “Whatcha got back there?”
“Let’s see.” Wendy opened the lid. Her long, silky brown hair fell across her face. “I can tell Lucy packed this and I appreciate the organization, but it looks like an assortment of cerveza, soda, water and…what’s this?” She pulled out a bottle and read the label. “Fancy shmancy champagne.”
“That’s to celebrate with at the hotel,” Lucy said. “We have to toast to our second girls’ getaway. Don’t you mess up my perfectly packed cooler, there’s a system.”
“Aye, aye, cap’n.”
“Check out the seat-back pocket in front of you, Wendy.”
Wendy stuck her hand in the pocket and pulled out their four “Life’s a beach” koozies they had used in Playa.
“Woo-hoo!” Wendy squealed and handed them out. “I’m all about the koozie!”
Vivian examined hers. “Boy, this is looking ratty. It still has lime grime and sand stuck on it.”
“I thought we needed a remembrance and didn’t wash them,” Lucy said.
“Aw, that was a great trip,” Kate said. “Except for the Jon dying and you being accused of murder thing, Viv.”
“I’ll cheers to that,” Wendy said and laughed. “So what’ll it be for now?”
“Beer me,” Vivian said. “Wait!”
“What?”
“Are there limes?”
“Hello!” Lucy said. “You’re dealing with an expert here. They’re cut up and in a baggie, ready to go.” Since Lucy had the conveniences of home, she had run to the store and bought an assortment of snacks and beverages for the trip and cut up limes for Vivian’s Dos Equis.
“I never should have doubted you.”
A look of satisfaction crossed Lucy’s face. “No, you shouldn’t have.” She then added, “Bottle of water for me, please!”
“You got it,” Wendy replied as she got herself a beer. “And Kate, what are you having?”
“I’ll stick with water for now, too.”
“What?” Vivian said. “You pregnant?”
“I don’t know, I could be,” Kate replied. “We’ve been working on it. Hard.”
This brought on laughter and woo-hoos.
Vivian offered a toast. “Here’s to working it hard!”
More woo-hoos as they squished their koozied beer and water bottles together.
“So how’s the separation… reversal?” Vivian asked Lucy. “It’s been, what, a month now since you moved back in?”
“Viv!” Wendy laughed. “You make it sound like a vasectomy reversal.”
“I didn’t know what to call it.”
“Well, I moved back in. We got back together.”
“And?”
Lucy sighed. “No sex.”
Groans all around.
“I’m working up the courage to, um…”
“To what, Lucy?” Vivian asked. “Why go back if there’s no intimacy? Isn’t that one of the main reasons why y’all separated in the first place?”
“Yeah, but there are good things in our relationship, and I just want to get settled back in before I push the issue.”
“Well I think I’d push that. Hard.” Vivian giggled. The girls in the back uh-hummed.
Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” sprung into Vivian’s head, and she sang a few lines.
Changing the subject, Vivian turned to Kate. “So y’all are working hard on a baby. How’s everything else going?”
“We’ve settled into a good rhythm, ha ha, and everything else is good. Work is fine, busy, building a children’s museum in San Antonio. Y’all should come down for the opening in a couple of months.”
“How’s your brother, Horny Huey?”
“Hugh’s fine. Still single.” Kate nudged Vivian’s arm.
“Oh, no. Negatory. It’d be like having sex with you, and although I love you, I don’t ‘love’ you.”
“Just thought I’d mention it. He’s successful, single and lives 25 miles from you. And he loves children.”
“Thanks for that, but no.”
They’d made it out of the city and were headed into the mountains. Kate pulled out her camera and snapped a few pictures, then said, “Wendy, catch us up,” Kate said. “How’s your niece doing with her cancer treatment?”
“Lizzy is just over 2 years old now and doing remarkably well,” Wendy said. “Better than I had thought possible. Dr. Burzynski is a miracle worker as far as I’m concerned. The tumors on her liver are gone, and there’s only one left in her lungs and it’s shrinking. She’s going to make it.”
Vivian offered another toast. “To Lizzy!”
“So how are you and Jake?” Lucy asked. “What’s the latest?”
“It might be over,” Wendy sighed. “He moved back to North Carolina a few months ago.”
“You didn’t tell us he moved,” Kate said. “Did y’all break up?”
“No, we’ve been doing the long distance thing. He comes back to Houston at least twice a month and I went up there once, and although we’ve talked about me moving, it’s a big commitment without a commitment.”
“Don’t forget Lucy’s words of wisdom when she had on her beachin’ bucket,” Vivian remind
ed.
“What?” Lucy asked. “What advice did I have?”
“You said, ‘Girl, don’t move until there’s a ring on your finger.’ Those were your exact words,” Wendy said.
“I said that?”
“Yes, ma’am, you did, wearing an ice bucket on your head and after several tequila shots, I might add,” Vivian said. “We were shocked by your inebriated clarity.”
“I do love Jake, but I can’t wait forever. I’m getting old!” Wendy said.
“Tick tock, tick tock,” Vivian said, tapping her wrist.
“Well, heck, Vivian, not everyone pops out two at a time,” Kate said.
“What can I say? My ovaries are on overdrive. I would be a surrogate for any of you, by the way. But I’m not having sex with your boyfriends or husbands. They’ll have to turkey baste me!”
They all agreed and clinked to that.
“So what are you going to do, Wendy?” Kate asked. “Move? Break-up?”
“I don’t know. I’ll figure it out on this trip.”
“You gotta know when to—,” Vivian said.
“Ya, ya… Hold ’em.” Wendy said. “I got it.”
Everyone had a good laugh at Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler.”
“Look!” Kate pointed out the window to the left. “I can’t believe people are still skiing.”
“Loveland stays open later than most mountains,” Lucy told them.
“The aspen trees are beautiful,” Vivian said.
“Each grove shares a root system,” Kate informed them.
“You should see them in the fall when their leaves turn bright yellow. That’s one of the reasons I love living here,” Lucy said as she drove past the Continental Divide in the Eisenhower Tunnel.
“So, Viv, tell us. What’s the latest with Craig?” Wendy asked. “I haven’t seen any screw-you-Rick-look-at-the-hot-younger-guy-I’m-dating pictures lately on your Facebook page.”
“Well, lemme tell ya what happened with that. It’s quite the story.”
Kate rubbed her hands together in anticipation. “This sounds juicy.”
“Oh, it’s juicy, but not in a filet-mignon-wrapped-in-bacon kind of way.”
3
AS Lucy turned off I-70 onto Highway 91 toward the town of Climax, snowflakes began drifting over the SUV. Vivian felt her ears pop as she began to tell the girls about Craig.
“Y’all know I didn’t date during the whole divorce, wouldn’t even sleep with Jon, so I was ready to rumble after the papers were signed. My friend Monica introduced me to a coworker, Brandon, who is a perpetual bachelor but a great rebound, get-your-feet-wet kinda guy. He and I became friends, then friends with benefits. He’d fix my deck, I’d fix his—”
“Vivian!” Kate said.
“What! I’m recovering. I deserve to do whatever the hell I want. At least for a little while.”
“Okay, okay.”
“Anyway, he and I are friends first, and the rest is gravy. We’d text a lot, he’d come over when I didn’t have the kids, etc. It was a good, no-commitment, get back on the horse kinda thing.”
Snickers.
“About three months ago, I was pumpin’ gas and the guy on the pump across from me struck up a conversation. Oh, and he was cute. Beautiful green eyes, dark hair, nice shoulders.”
“How come I never meet a guy when I’m pumping gas?” Lucy said.
“He seemed normal enough, so we went out. It went well, and I started to see him just about any night I didn’t have the kids. The sex was the best I’d had since you-know-who in college.”
“Oh, I know who,” Lucy said. “Mr. Ride His Bike Over, Greek Godlike Guy.”
“Yep. Him.”
The snow had turned to sleet, pinging off the windshield. The temperature gauge on the console read 31 degrees.
“What about Brandon?” Wendy asked.
“Oh, he rocked in the sack, too,” Vivian laughed.
“No, what happened to him?”
“We had decided early on that we’d be supportive of one another’s relationships, should we have one. No interference.”
“That never works,” Kate tisk-tisked.
“It did for us. He was fine with me dating Craig. He pretty much just stayed out of the picture.”
“I’m surprised, but okay.”
The road became slushy, and Lucy backed off the accelerator.
“Things were good for almost three months. I was even considering letting Craig meet the kids. Then two weeks ago I was sitting at work and my phone rang. It was Brandon, and he had never called at work before. He apologized but then told me that he was on Facebook and instant messaging me at that very moment.”
“What do you mean?” Wendy asked.
“I mean, according to his computer he and I were having an instant message conversation, but he knew it wasn’t me. He kept apologizing, saying he felt like he had to call and tell me.”
“Someone had hacked into your Facebook page?” Lucy asked.
“Wow, I’m impressed Brandon could tell it wasn’t you,” Kate said.
“He said he knew it wasn’t me because of the spelling errors, lack of capitalization, short answers, etc. I’m a very proper instant messenger. We joke about it.”
“Oh no, was it Craig?” Kate asked.
“I thought it might be, so I fed Brandon a few questions. I told him to ask what I was doing that night, to which the fake me answered that I was going to a play. Which the real me was. With Craig.”
Groans.
“Oh, it gets better. The fake me told Brandon that Craig and I were in love. That when you know, you know, and that I was hoping for a proposal.”
“What a jackass,” Wendy said.
Lucy changed lanes to skirt an 18-wheeler that had pulled over to the side of the road.
Vivian watched the trucker yank chains over a tire as she continued the story. “I fed Brandon a few more questions, then he emailed me the entire conversation, which I printed out and took home.” She then recounted the entire kitchen table scene.
“What happened next?” Kate asked.
“Craig went completely berserk. He ripped my phone out of the wall, smashed a picture, threw a lamp across the room. It was very Jerry Springer, but it wasn’t me being the super freak this time!”
“What’d you do?”
“Locked myself into my bedroom and used my cell to call the cops. I jumped out the window and Cooper held him back so I had time to run and hide in my neighbor’s bushes.”
“Yea, Cooper!” Wendy said.
“Did Craig get arrested?” Kate asked.
“No, he got away. He left before they got there.”
Wendy glanced out the window, then reached for her seatbelt, which wasn’t buckled. Click. “I can’t believe it. You’re first semi-boyfriend since Rick and he’s a total whackjob.”
“Yep, I know how to pick ’em. But there’s more.”
They rounded a corner and Lucy cut the wheel too sharply. The SUV went into a skid and fishtailed as it slid toward the guardrail.
“Ahhhhh!” they all screamed.
“I’ve got it. We’re okay,” Lucy said. “Sorry, that curve snuck up on me.”
“Holy crap!” Vivian yelled. “Just concentrate on driving. I’ll finish the story later.”
Lucy hunched over the wheel and focused on the road. The other girls were quiet. Eventually the sleet turned back to snow and lightened up.
“Pull over, Lucy!” Kate yelled.
“What? Jesus!” she said and hit the brakes.
“We’ve got to take a picture with the town sign.”
Vivian read the name, Climax. “Absolutely!”
“Dammit, don’t scare the crap out of me like that again!”
They piled out of the car and Kate balanced her camera on the hood, set the timer and ran into place.
“Smile,” she said, jumping into the shot with her arms stretched out above her head. “The Getaway Girlz have Climaxed!”
4
COMING off their Climax photo and down the mountain, Wendy picked back up on the Craig conversation. “Thank god you hadn’t introduced him to the kids. How are they?”
Vivian adjusted her air vent. “The kids are doing okay. Audrey’s had some counseling and seems to be opening up. The others are just too young to know what happened and why Daddy isn’t home. Hell, the twins’ll never know the difference.”
“It might be better that they don’t, Viv,” Lucy said, making the turn, slowly this time, onto Highway 24 heading west.
“How has the step-monster been treating the kiddos?” Kate asked.
Wendy opened the cooler and got another beer. “I still can’t believe he married her.”
“I know, me, neither,” Vivian said. “Y’all will never believe what his lame excuse for getting married was.”
“Oh god, she’s pregnant,” Lucy said.
“No, but that was the first thing I thought, too.”
“You should prepare yourself, because you know that’ll be next.”
“He had a vasectomy after I got pregnant with the twins, remember?”
“Still, just wait. It’ll happen.”
Kate leaned forward from the back seat. “So, if that wasn’t the reason, what is it, Viv?”
“He said they were getting married because ‘the kids needed a backyard.’”
“What kind of bullshit is that?” Wendy asked.
“Those are the words that came out of his mouth. Fuck him. The kids have a backyard. At my house. I told him, ‘Tell me she’s your soul mate, tell me she’s the love of your life, but don’t give me excuses about the kids needing a backyard.’ He had no response. And now that they’ve bought a house you should see their backyard. I caught a glimpse of it the other day when I dropped the kids off. It’s completely overgrown. The kids can’t even walk back there, much less play.”
“‘The kids need a backyard.’ Never heard that one before,” Kate said.
Lucy pounded on the wheel. “He’s a complete and utter asshole.”
“And an idiot,” Kate said.