by Jane Green
“I’d love to go to a dude ranch!” Kirsty sits up. “I’ve always wanted to go! Can we come?”
“We should all go!” Angie says. “The problem is finding the right place.”
“Right place?” Simon shakes his head in exasperation. “It’s a dude ranch, my love. Not a Four Seasons. The whole point is to be rustic.”
“You can do rustic,” Angie says, “and we’ll do luxury. I know there’s somewhere out there where we’ll all be happy.”
“We should go to the ranch and let you guys go to a spa,” Simon says. “We’re not going to find a Four Seasons dude ranch. Hey, Mark!” He calls him over. “Dude ranch. What words come to mind?”
Mark wanders over. “Horses. Cowboys. Long days. Fun nights. Drinking. Great sleep. Good honest work.” He grins, leaning down to kiss Sylvie.
“Beans!” Donald calls from the other side of the room.
“Wieners!” adds Jon as they both crack up.
“Right.” Angie sits forward. “I agree. Horses. Cowboys. Cowboys. Cowboys. Hey, did I mention the cowboys? And chaps … mmm God, I find those things sexy.…”
“Really?” Simon’s face lights up. “I never knew that.”
She gives him a withering look. “Not on you, babe. No offense. But the point is, horses and all the good stuff, plus massages, facials, hot tubs, and I’m sorry, but no beans and wieners. There has to be great food, right, Sylvie?” She looks at Sylvie for support, but Sylvie winces.
“I’m sorry.” She grimaces. “I want to agree with you, but I kind of think a dude ranch should be basic. I think it would do us all good to get back to nature and spend all day on a horse. I like the idea of pushing ourselves in that way.”
“I knew there was a reason I married you!” Mark nods approvingly. “Low maintenance,” he mutters to Simon out of the corner of his mouth. “It’s all about low maintenance.”
“Sweetie.” Angie lays a beautifully manicured hand on Simon’s arm. “I can be low maintenance. I can do hippie skirts and Birkenstocks. I can even do no makeup and frizzy hair. Would you like that, sweetie? You know how I look first thing in the morning? I can look like that all the time if it would make you happy.”
“God no!” Simon shouts in horror as everyone laughs.
“Don’t say I didn’t try.” Angie turns to Mark with a shrug. “Simon, can you just go and do your manly stuff. We have more important things to take care of,” and she reaches for the package closest to her as the men disappear.
* * *
“You can always return it,” Ginny Meyer, an old friend of Angie’s whom she hasn’t seen in years, winces as Angie turns the box in her hands, trying to figure out what it is. “In fact”—she reaches over to try to take it—“it’s completely wrong for you. I want to take it back and change it for something you’ll really love.”
“Don’t worry,” Angie laughs. “Whatever you’ve got, I know I’m going to love. The fact that you and Harold actually live here is gift enough.
Sylvie snorts. “Your e-mail had the words, ‘all gifts welcome’ printed at the bottom. I suppose Simon snuck in to write that?”
“How awful! He must have.” Angie’s hand flies up to her mouth in shock. “I would never do anything so rude.” She winks, pulling the paper off to reveal a box, which she first lifts and shakes slightly.
“Careful,” warns Ginny. “It’s fragile.”
“Ooh. I love guessing. Is it shoes?”
Ginny smiles. “No, as much as we both love shoes, it’s not. It’s something else you used to like, and the only clue is you can’t wear it.”
Angie opens the box, pushing the tissue paper aside to draw out a huge white porcelain mushroom.
Silence descends as everyone stares at the mushroom.
“It’s a mushroom!” Angie bursts out.
“A mushroom?” questions Laura.
“No, you don’t understand!” Angie is wide-eyed with excitement. “I’m obsessed! I’m seriously totally obsessed with mushrooms! This is amazing! You remembered!”
“As if I could forget!” Ginny laughs. “She came out sailing with us one time—”
“You should see their boat,” Angie bursts in. “Sole Power. It’s beautiful.”
“Thank you, but Angie spent the whole time engrossed in some book about mushrooms.”
Angie shrugs. “It’s my secret shame. I find the whole underside of the mushroom, the gills, fascinating, but, Ginny! I can’t believe you remembered!” She stands up and flings her arms around Ginny, who is now flushed with joy. “I’m putting this with my collection.”
“Are you kidding me?” Sylvie’s mouth is open. “How do I not know you have a mushroom collection?”
“I told you. It’s my secret shame. Secret’s out now. Come with me.” She beckons them to follow her up the open glass staircase to the master bedroom, where on a shelf is, indeed, a collection of mushrooms. They all start laughing as Angie lovingly places the mushroom in the center before turning to take in the view.
“Don’t you get freaked out with all that glass?” asks Laura.
Angie shrugs. “Let them watch. I’m a forty-something mother with spider veins and saggy boobs. Enjoy.”
“I couldn’t do it.” Kirsty shakes her head. “Caroline had the same windows, but she covered the whole thing up with shutters. Gotta tell you, I’d do the same. Particularly after the latest…” she stops.
The women all turn to her. “What? There’s more? No! What happened?”
Kirsty groans. “I’m not supposed to say anything.”
“Oh, please.” Angie grabs her and pulls her down to sit on the bed. “You can trust us.”
“I know, but we all had that talk about how we wouldn’t gossip.”
“I wasn’t there, but I agree,” says Sylvie. “It’s bad karma.”
“Only if you’re telling everyone,” insists Angie. “There’s a difference between random gossiping and gossiping with your closest friends. Okay, so I know we’re not all each other’s closest friends, but you three girls are my closest friends, so if we all swear never to repeat, then it’s sacred, right?”
Kirsty leans forward, a flush to her cheeks with the excitement of repeating the tidbit she had been so desperate to share. “So you know Caroline and Bill split up last week?”
“What?” Sylvie is shocked. “I didn’t know!” She turns to Angie. “Did you know?” Angie looks guilty. “Why wouldn’t you tell me something like that?”
“Because”—Angie puts her hands on her hips—“I was trying to do what you told me to do and not pass on gossip. Furthermore, given how much I can’t stand her, I was trying to pray for her and bathe her in healing white light instead of cackling with joy over karma being a beautiful thing.”
“Point taken. So what happened? I thought she had the perfect marriage?”
“So did everyone, until Bill was caught not just having an affair, but”—Kirsty pauses for dramatic effect—“sexting!”
“What?” They all gasp excitedly. “What does that even mean?”
“Where to start?” Kirsty sighs. “He’s been sleeping with a ton of women, and”—she looks from one to the other—“most of them are pretty … let’s just say … skanky.”
“No one we know, then,” Angie says. “I swear”—she solemnly holds her hand to her heart, looking at each woman—“on Simon’s life, I was not one of the skanky ho’s.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but we’re all way too old. He’s been picking up all these twenty-something ‘dancers,’ and yes, there are quote marks around that word.”
“Strippers?” Sylvie asks as Kirsty nods. “Nothing’s more elegant than a man’s midlife crisis,” Sylvie sighs.
“Especially when said party girls slash strippers are dumped by wealthy married banker boyfriend who they think is about to leave his wife and kids for her.”
“Hell hath no fury.…”
“Exactly. So current party girl—who, by the way, looks more like a h
ooker as far as I’m concerned, and please, what kind of man must Bill be to find straw-bleached hair and huge fake tits attractive—?”
“A normal man,” Angie says dejectedly.
“Point taken. Party girl, Tara-Jo, has been tweeting her fury, all the details of their sexual escapades, and explicit pictures and texts that Bill had ‘sexted’ her. Gone viral. All over Twitter.”
Sylvie’s eyes are wide. “Are you serious? That’s horrific.”
“I know! But these pictures are unbelievable.”
“You’ve seen them?”
Kirsty grimaces. “I know. I’m a horrible person. But everyone at tennis was talking about it and I couldn’t not look. It’s like a car crash. You know it’s horrible, but a part of you can’t tear your eyes away.”
“What are the pictures?”
“Bill’s … you know. Huge.”
“Erect?”
Lara nods.
Sylvie snorts and shakes her head. “You know what? I don’t believe it’s him. There’s no way Bill would do something like that. He’s the straightest person we know.” She thinks of Bill—big, bluff, and hearty. A former baseball star, he’s a family man through and through. He coaches Little League. He has three small sons and an uppity blond wife with a superiority complex. “No way,” Sylvie says. “It’s a mistake.”
“Mistake this.” Kirsty slides her iPhone over to Sylvie, whose eyes widen again as she finds herself looking at a picture that is very definitely Bill, and very definitely not what he would want his family to see.
Or anyone else, for that matter.
“That’s horrible.” Sylvie places the phone on the table, screen down, but not before catching a glimpse. “What a stupid, stupid man. How could he have sent pictures like that to anyone? What’s the matter with people? You think it’s just kids who don’t realize the implications of sending out an explicit photograph. How could a grown man be so stupid? What was he thinking?”
“The little head was clearly doing the thinking.” Angie raises an eyebrow.
“Not so little,” adds Kirsty. “I can’t believe it’s all over Twitter. I swear, if anything like that happened to me, I’d never show my face again. Caroline is so humiliated, she’s talking about moving. Can you imagine? She only found out when she got some anonymous note in her mailbox saying there was something about her husband on Twitter she may not know about.”
“Who the hell would do that?”
“Probably this girl. Rough, huh?”
Sylvie shakes her head once more. “It’s worse than rough. It’s tragic. I’ve never liked Caroline, but nobody deserves this.”
The others go quiet.
“I know what you mean,” murmurs Kirsty. “She’s snotty as hell, but I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”
“I agree,” sighs Angie. “I never thought I’d say this about her, but my heart is going out to her right now.”
“So where’s Bill?”
“Moved into a hotel. Some of the guys have seen him, but not Jon.” She looks at Sylvie. “I bet he’ll call Mark. Don’t they hang out together?”
“Occasionally,” Sylvie says. “Mark travels so much, it’s hard. I’ll ask him, but I don’t think he knows anything or he would have told me.”
“You know what’s truly amazing about all this?” muses Kirsty. “You think you know people, you think you know a marriage, but none of us ever knows what goes on behind closed doors.”
A shout comes from downstairs. “Angie? What the hell are you all doing in our bedroom?”
“Don’t get excited!” Angie yells back. “We’re coming down now.”
* * *
Ten people is the perfect number, thinks Sylvie, sitting quietly for a minute as the group talks animatedly across the table.
More guests, and dinner parties become a series of individual conversations, small talk, the reason that Sylvie invariably turns the invitations down when Mark is not around, for small talk is something she has never been good at.
Tonight, the group has bonded, and she does not remember the last time she had so much fun. Mark is home, they are a couple, doing what regular couples do. Instead of surreptitiously looking at her watch and wondering how they can orchestrate an escape, Sylvie hasn’t looked at her watch once, could stay for hours more.
“I’m telling you.” Kirsty, slightly fuzzy with wine, leans forward to make a pronouncement. “You need to be checking their Facebook and texts. Seriously. I check Abigail’s all the time.”
Jon shrugs helplessly at his wife’s admission, which clearly embarrasses him. “I keep telling her she shouldn’t. Abigail would go nuts if she knew.”
Kirsty turns to him defensively. “If our daughter gets into trouble, how are we supposed to find out?”
“Um … she tells us?” Jon spells it out slowly.
“Right,” she snorts. “Because all seventeen-year-old girls go straight to their parents when they get into trouble. This way we know.”
“But you don’t know,” Jon argues. “You think you know, and even if you find something out, how are you going to explain it? ‘I just happened to be reading your texts’? That’ll be successful.”
“Our parents didn’t know anything we did,” Angie says. “At seventeen, I was a party girl, and my parents had no idea. I turned out okay, right?” She looks over at Simon, at the other head of the table, for validation, and he grins and blows her a kiss. “You have to let them learn their own lessons. You can’t protect them from all that’s out there, nor should you.”
“I agree,” Mark says. “Our job as parents is to raise them to be good people in the world, and to make the right choices. You can’t stop bad stuff from happening, but you have to give them freedom in order to teach them to recognize what the best choice for them would be.”
“Mark!” Angie berates him. “You’re the dad who won’t let Eve post anything on Facebook! How is that giving her freedom?”
“I let her post!” Mark is embarrassed. “I just won’t let her post anything personal.” The others shout him down. “Whatever your settings, people have ways of accessing your site,” he insists. “You can’t even believe how much they can find out about you from a photograph or where you live. Eve is responsible in many ways, but she doesn’t understand the risk.”
“The risk really isn’t that big.” Harold shrugs skeptically. “We’ve all read stories and seen movies, but honestly, I really don’t think abductors are going to show up on the doorstep after targeting your kids on Facebook.”
“Really?” Mark says. “Did you see the movie Trust?”
“Oh my God!” The women all gasp. “That movie was terrifying!”
“He has a point,” Ginny says. “It was so realistic.” They explain the plot to Harold, that a grown man posed as a teenage boy to instigate a relationship with an innocent young girl, but Harold refuses to back down.
“It’s a movie,” he says. “That’s the point. Movies dramatize real life. Facebook has changed the world, and you can’t do things the way they were done before. You have to move on and accept the changes.”
“I kind of think he’s right.” Sylvie looks at Mark.
“He may be,” Mark says. “But I’ve had the bad stuff happen.” He looks around the table. “Years ago, my identity was stolen. I didn’t just lose money, I nearly lost my entire life.”
Everyone sits forward, rapt.
“You have to tell us what happened,” Laura says.
“I was sitting with a loan officer discussing a mortgage, and he asked me what I thought of the Escalade. I had no idea what he was talking about. He looked at me like I was an idiot and ‘reminded’ me I’d just bought a brand-new Escalade.”
“You’d remember something like that, right?” Angie laughs.
“You’d think. So it turns out I’d thrown away my expired credit card, and my identity had been stolen by someone Dumpster-diving. They had opened a ton of credit cards in my name, all maxed out. It was a nightmare.”
“Did they catch them?”
Mark nods. “But it took me almost two years to get my life back. I had no credit rating. It was a disaster. Not to mention I had some guy posing as me.”
“Was he caught?” asks Jon.
“Yes. Straight to jail.”
“Was he, at least, handsome?” Kirsty asks.
“He was a kid,” Mark says. “Twenty-three. His life ruined. But you know what, he almost ruined mine. I was stuck for two years. So … that’s why I’m paranoid. I have reason to be. I know that people aren’t necessarily who they say they are.”
“Oh, that we know,” Angie says. “Poor Bill.” Her hands fly to her lips. “Oops!” She grimaces. “Does it count if we tell our husbands?”
“We already know,” says Simon. “We were talking about it in the wine cellar.”
Sylvie waits a few minutes before turning to Mark, her voice dropped low so the others don’t hear. “You knew and didn’t tell me?” She is shocked and upset. Even when sworn to secrecy, she knows the unspoken part of that is that husbands don’t count. She trusts him implicitly, and there is nothing she wouldn’t tell him, presuming that this went both ways.
“Bill swore me to secrecy,” Mark says. “This was before everyone found out, after Caroline first got the call. He was trying to stop the worst from happening, and he was desperate. Sylvie, he specifically asked me to promise not to tell you. I tell you everything, but I couldn’t tell you this.”
“But I’m your wife. Even if you promise, you know spouses don’t count. And you know I would never talk about it with anyone.”
“I do, but I couldn’t go back on a promise. Once I’d said those words to him, I would have felt like I was committing a crime by repeating it. Even to you. I’m sorry.”
Sylvie nods. “It’s okay. I don’t like it, but I get it. I just feel kind of stupid, being the last to know. How is he?”
“Desperate. And Caroline’s getting ready to move. She doesn’t want to face anyone in this town ever again.”
Sylvie closes her eyes for a second as she shakes her head, unable to get the unfortunate image of Bill, naked and at full mast, out of her head. “That poor woman,” she says. “I can’t think of anything worse.”