by Laney Kay
We ate and drank margaritas, hung out on Lola’s patio, and by that evening, I was relaxed and happy. Mo was checking to see if there were any pregame shows for college football the next day. As she flipped through the news channels, there I was. On ABC. On FOX. On NBC. On CBS. I turned to look at them. “Please tell me this is the local news.”
They all looked at me, and they all shook their heads wordlessly.
“Shit. Shit. Shit. National news?” I looked at them. They all nodded their heads.
Then Sara started to laugh. Then Lola. Then Mo. Then finally I started to laugh. “Holy shit! I’m on the national news for flattening my husband’s testicle with my car.” We were laughing so hard we were crying. “Her name is Barbie, she’s twenty years old, and I think her mom has to take her and pick her up whenever they want to have sex because she still just has her learner’s permit.”
By this time we were collapsed on the floor. My dogs were leaping around us trying to lick our faces and we’re rolling around laughing like idiots with tears pouring down our faces. It was so ridiculous, it really was hilarious.
Sara sat up and grabbed her margarita. “Hey ladies, check it out. Instead of having a glass jaw, Bobby has a crystal ball—all it took was one shot with Daisy’s Volkswagen and he was down for the count, pieces of testicle all over the place.”
That made us laugh harder. I grabbed my margarita. “Too bad we couldn’t use that crystal ball to see my future, because mine is looking a little uncertain right now.”
Sara shook her head. “Once you get past all this shit, your future is going to be awesome.” Sara raised her glass. “I’m pretty sure I can’t say the same about Bobby. But here’s a toast to Bobby and his crystal ball. May the future he deserves be exactly the future he gets.” We all laughed and nodded, clinked our glasses and took a huge drink.
I knew it was going to be fine. Eventually. Just fine. Once the rest of this stupid crap died down, we could all get back to our regular lives and I could start getting through and over all this.
2
The thing was, it didn’t go away. Bobby and Lola talked to the police and everyone agreed it was an accident and the charges against me were officially dropped first thing Monday morning. But, everything else took on a life of its own. Somehow, my stupid accident had become some sort of rallying cry for women who’d been wronged everywhere, and then the other side came out saying that it was some kind of attack on family values, although Sara pointed out it was really more an attack on family jewels, and it just went downhill from there.
Two weeks later, my dogs and I were still camped at Lola’s because every time I tried to get near my house I was mobbed by reporters. Now don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of room at Lola’s but I needed things to get back to some kind of normal so I could start moving on with my life. Bobby had texted me that he got an apartment, and Mo and Sara said the skank was living with him. Apparently, they were bored one night after their respective husbands got home so they made a pitcher of margaritas, paid one of Sara’s kids to drive them around, and then followed Bobby home after work. Then, they hung around to see who else showed up. About 10 minutes after Bobby went inside, some young pregnant chick who, they pointed out, looked a lot like I did at that age, pulled into a parking space and went inside.
I felt a little relieved. At first, I had wanted us to get together and talk about it and maybe we could stay together and work things out, but every time I started to call him to discuss it, I just couldn’t do it. All I could think about was that he was a liar. Every time he was late or he told me something about where he was and it didn’t quite make sense, he was with her and obviously he could look me straight in the face and lie without a bit of problem. I don’t see any way to come back after something like that.
And he had unprotected sex with some slut at the same time he was sleeping with me. Every time one of those cheating scandals break, I’m always infuriated on the wife’s behalf. Really? These guys have unprotected sex with one skank after another and then they’d have sex with their wives? Endanger your own health if you want, but how can you do that to your wife who did nothing wrong but be loyal to your cheating ass? I’ll bet every one of those women did the same thing I did after they found out, which was to run to the doctor and get tested for every skank disease you could get. Every STD I could think of, HIV, HPV, Hepatitis, herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea, crabs, hell everything but Ebola, you name it, I was checked for it.
Loyalty is a huge deal with me, and he proved he can’t be trusted, plus I no longer respected him, so the decision was clear. I was done.
So, thanks to my two personal drunken private investigators, I now realize he’s also done. Now, I just needed to decide what my personal vision of divorce looks like. And I need to stop crying. The way I have coped with the idea of divorce so far is to cry, then drink and/or eat, then work out, then sleep, watch bad TV, then cry some more. Sometimes I changed the order. My boss at the paper has been very understanding about the whole situation and he’s reassigned a couple of stories that have come up. Fortunately, I had about three months’ worth of columns already written, so I don’t really have to do any work on those for at least another two months, which is a gift. If I had to try to write while this is going on, I’d also have to look for another job.
I made Lola’s favorite meal for dinner, baked scallops and shrimp with an heirloom tomato salad and some grilled zucchini, and waited for her to get home. She changed clothes, I served dinner, and we sat down to eat.
Midway through, I put down my water. “Lola, I’ve got to do something with my life. You know I love living with you, but my pups need a place to run and I’ve got to get back to a normal life.”
Lola nodded. “You’re right. It’s time. So let’s figure this out. First thing, do you want the house?”
I had thought about it and kept going back and forth about it, but I had finally made some decisions in the past couple of days. “I don’t think so. We lived in that house together for twenty plus years, and I think it’s a better idea for me to start over somewhere else.” I looked at Lola. “But I don’t know anything about the market right now. Is this a good time to sell? I’m not sure what I should do.”
Lola jumped up, excited. “I know exactly what you should do! I have a friend at the courthouse who is desperate to find a place in your school district and your house would be perfect.” Lola picked up the phone, called her friend, and set up a time to show her the house the next morning. We polished off dinner and went to bed.
It turned out Lola’s friend loved the house. Best of all, she was willing to pay full pop, and had cash up front, so we didn’t have to wait for a mortgage approval. Bobby immediately agreed to the deal, so Lola put one of her real estate lawyer friends on it and they had the whole deal wrapped up in a red-hot minute. By the time the house was sold a month later, Bobby and I each cleared about a hundred grand on the deal.
Then, also thanks to Lola, I ended up in the most adorable bungalow in the heart of Virginia Highlands, five minutes from her front door. Lola said that she had just closed on a house that she planned to flip, and it was perfect for me. It turns out that some local contractor had been renovating a bungalow, but he ran out of money and then he pissed off the bank. The bank foreclosed on the loan, and a friend of Lola’s from the bank told her about the deal. Lola got it for the remaining amount of the loan, which was fifty thousand dollars, then she paid to have the renovations completed, which cost about ten thousand dollars more, and she let me have it for what she had in it. Sixty thousand dollars.
When I asked her how she managed to find ridiculous deals like that, she said that when you have a bazillion dollars, every banker in town wants to kiss your ass. Good point.
Seriously, though, it was insane. My sixty thousand dollars shouldn’t have been able to buy the front door of this house, the most beautiful, cozy little bungalow I’d ever seen. Lola could’ve made a huge profit if she had sold it on the open ma
rket. When I told her that, she looked at me like I was crazy. “Really, Daisy, like I need more money?” She winked. “I’d much rather have you at my beck and call right down the street.” She then grabbed my face in both hands and stared into my eyes. “Seriously. I want you to hear me. The first time I saw this house I thought of you, but you didn’t need a house then. Now you do. I really want you to have it.”
The day after I agreed to buy it, Lola told me to go over and see if I wanted any changes made before the construction guys left. I harnessed the dogs and walked over, went inside and just sat there, soaking it in, loving that this beautiful house would be my new home. That night, I told her that it was perfect, I wouldn’t change a thing.
Lola is really more like a fairy godmother sometimes than my best friend. Every time I try to thank her for another wonderful thing she does for me, she just waves me away and says, “Oh please, it’s just money.” Money to her doesn’t really mean anything because she has so much of it, so I’m very careful not to take advantage of our relationship. Most importantly, I do things for her that aren’t money related. I bought her a Kindle reader and put her on my Amazon account so every time I see a book I know that she’d like I buy it and we both can read it. She’s a great bartender, and she can have food delivered like a champ, but she is a truly crappy cook. Since she doesn’t cook and I love it, when I lived with Bobby, I doubled the amount of whatever I cooked and I packed it up in a cooler for her to take home every week. She’s completely computer illiterate, so periodically I’ll update her computer and scan it for bugs, update her i-Tunes, and load new music into her iphone so she always has the latest workout music. Whenever she needs new equipment like a computer, or a phone, or a tablet, I’ll do the research and order it for her and then hook everything up. If we’re going somewhere, I research everything and make all the travel arrangements, I order her anything she needs on Amazon, and I periodically help her clean out her closets.
The truth is, more than the money aspect of this new house, I really appreciate the fact that Lola saw it and knew it was for me. If I had built it, I couldn’t have made it more suitable for me and what I want in a house. It’s cozy, it’s colorful, it’s full of light, and I love all the little touches like the stained glass around the door and the little doggie footprints in the terracotta kitchen tile. I love everything about it, and the fact that Lola would do what she did to make it happen for me just makes me happy.
That, and the fact there’s no big shoes to trip over, and no underwear on the floor. There’s no clutter, there’s no stacks of paper and newspapers. It’s always clean and neat. I just love it. I love the way it looks and feels and smells and the way it feels so comfortable to me. Whatever happens down the road, the one thing I can assure you is that I will not be looking for a man. I might eventually want some kind of friends-with-benefits kind of guy, but I see no reason for him to be living with me.
3
Once I started the process of selling my house and buying another one, I realized I needed to get control of the rest of my life. Monday afternoon, I checked the phone messages from my house. It was still full of messages from a few local magazines, every local TV channel, and holy shit, People. Monday night, Jimmy Kimmel actually made a joke about me. Lola was thrilled. She’s a huge Kimmel fan and she figures that all she needs is a chance to meet him and he’ll come to his senses and realize that she is the woman of his dreams. Well, if he wasn’t already happily married with kids.
I turned on the TV the next night and two women had deliberately run their husbands down after finding out they had been unfaithful. One died, and they think one will be paralyzed from the waist down. I was so horrified I immediately turned the channel, just in time to see some late night talk show host say something about that “crazy Southern nutcracker” and that I was an assault against family values. What the hell? How does my husband screwing his assistant and knocking her up make me some kind of assault on family values?
That was it. I went out in the living room where Lola was lying on her sofa in a white silk nightgown, drinking champagne out of a Waterford crystal flute, and eating generic cheese puffs out of a bag. I couldn’t help it, I started to laugh.
“Lola, what the hell? You look like some kind of ad for The Ritz-Carlton, or something. Except for the cheese puffs, of course. Beautiful nightgown, delicious champagne, redneck snack. Hilarious.”
She laughed. “I love the feel of this nightgown and I love Cheetos. Bite me if you don’t like the combo.” She tilted the bag up to get the last cheesy crumbs and they rained all over her white nightgown. Unconcerned, Lola brushed off the remnants and smiled at me. “What’s up that you’re in such a hurry?”
I stared at her. What did I want? Shit. I hate walking into a room and forgetting why I went there in the first place. Oh yeah, the asshole talk show guy. “So, I just saw on TV that two women had killed and maimed their cheating husbands with some sort of vehicle and some jackass TV guy said that somehow I was an assault on family values. I’m tired of being the butt of late night jokes. Somehow this shit is getting twisted around so that now I’m the bad guy? What the hell? I want to set the record straight so everyone will leave me the hell alone.”
“So go on TV and tell your story. Once everyone hears your version, maybe this will finally die down.” Lola yawned. “Everyone has been given my number as your contact, so my phone’s still been ringing off the hook with different folks who want to talk to you about it. The Today Show, Good Morning America, you name it. Just tell me what you want to do, and we’ll set it up.”
I was confused. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did tell you. About a million times. Every time I said I got another call, you put your fingers in your ears and make that stupid “la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you-la-la-la” noise and told me to tell them to kiss your ass. So I did. I told David Lawson, the host from The Today Show, that you said to kiss your ass, I told some chick from Good Morning America to kiss your ass, and I even told that annoyingly perky chick on freaking Great Day Atlanta, or whatever the hell it’s called, to kiss your ass. It’s really been exhausting, but a little fun.”
I couldn’t believe that Lola had told David Lawson I said to kiss his ass. “So I guess I burned all of those bridges, huh?”
She rolled her eyes. “Of course not. Are you kidding, some famous moron and his big ass mouth just said you’re a walking attack on family values. They’ll want you even more now. You tell me what you want me to do, and I’ll take care of it.”
I thought about it for a minute. What the hell. “Give me the numbers and I’ll give them a call tomorrow. Maybe if I tell my story and people realize it was just some stupid accident, they’ll lose interest and they’ll leave me the hell alone and even the talk show guys will shut the hell up.”
When I got up the next morning, Lola was already gone. She left me a stack of messages on the counter with a note that said she would be in court all day and would see me tonight.
This was it. I was going to make some breakfast, walk the dogs, maybe make a mimosa for breakfast so I can efficiently combine the drinking and the crying all at once, then I’m going to call all these TV folks. I’m going to tell my side of the story.
After breakfast, (just coffee, no mimosas, but no crying either—yay, progress!), and a quick walk, I sat down at Lola’s desk and picked up the pile of messages. Where do you even start with something like this? So I grabbed the one from The Today Show and dialed. Holy shit, it really was David Lawson’s voice on the message. It freaked me out so bad, I hung up and then I was embarrassed because I was so stupid. Before I lost my nerve I called back and left a message, “Hey, David Lawson, Daisy Monroe here. Just returning your call. Sorry about the whole ‘kiss my ass’ thing, I was having a bad few, okay several, bad days, and you happened to catch me on one. Anyway, I saw some talk show jackass on late night TV and I really would like to tell him to kiss my ass, so if you don’t mind, could I come on TV and tell you my
side of the story? Oh, and it really was an accident, so you might not even think it’s that interesting, but if you do, could you call me back? Thanks. Oh yeah, and in case you don’t remember calling me, I’m the one who squished her cheating bastard of a husband’s testicle and leg with the car. Thanks, and hope to hear from you.”
I left my number and hung up and heard a snort of laughter behind me. Sara was leaning in the door frame holding her hand like a phone receiver next to her ear and imitating me in a high, annoying voice. “Okay, so in case you don’t remember me, I’m the one who squished her cheating bastard of a husband’s testicle…Love you, mean it, bye…” She bent over in the doorway laughing. “That’s how you describe yourself now? The one who squished her husband’s testicle? So what’s on your agenda today, besides harassing David Lawson?”
Before I can say a word, the cell phone rings. There’s no name on my caller ID, so I pick it up and say hello and a voice on the other end says it’s David Lawson. I just stand there, stunned. Sara mouths, “Who is it?” and I mouth back, “David Lawson” and I’m still standing there.
I can hear him saying hello, hello, Daisy are you there? and finally I have the presence of mind to say something. “Uh, hello, yes this is Daisy.”
He was unbelievably nice. I told him I was sorry about the whole kiss my ass thing, and he says he’s been told worse than that, and he told me they were still interested in my story, even though it was an accident, and that no, I couldn’t actually use the words “kiss my ass” to that annoying talk show host. I said, even if I’m on the section with Hoda and Jenna? He said well, maybe then. We both laughed, and he said a producer would be calling me to set up my appearance. I told him thanks, it was really nice to talk to him, and that I’d see him soon.