of the clip-on earring, she hadn’t thought she’d be that much older. She’d pictured someone pushing forty who’d never pierced her ears. An eight-year age difference, max.
But still…a pearl ring.
“Honey.” Kevin entered the room and put his arm around his wife again. “I think that’s enough for one day.”
Rigid in his arms, Barbara stared at the casket.
Lola murmured her agreement and then reassured Barbara that she’d get the paperwork started and call about casket availability. They rarely sold stock off the showroom floor, and Barbara probably wouldn’t accept it if they did.
With fits and starts and soft reassurances, Kevin managed to escort Barbara out.
Lola shut the front door behind them and then sat on the green burlap couch in the lobby, staring at the blue velvet bag.
When he was younger, Randy had slept with two knockouts—Avery and Mary Margaret. And Lola wasn’t exactly chopped liver in the looks department either. By comparison, Marcia was…not bland, but a different cup of tea. And older.
Randy and Marcia?
There was no way that was true.
Yet there was only one way to find out.
She opened the drawstring bag and dumped the contents onto the couch cushion. Simple clip-on pearl earrings. A simple diamond band. And a simple ring with a fleur-de-lis to either side of the pearl. A pretty ring. A familiar ring.
Nana’s ring.
Lola fell forward onto her knees, trying to breathe, trying to pretend she was wrong.
Randy and Marcia had been lovers.
She’d prefer to believe he’d had a deep friendship with Marcia, like Mims claimed to have had with Charlie. But Randy hadn’t had female friends.
Things Barbara had said about her mother swam through the muck in Lola’s head. “She was depressed…She had a special someone for years. He gave it to her two Christmases ago…He made her so happy.” And the depression had started about a year ago, around the time Randy had died. Randy, whose favorite color was blue, the color Marcia liked to put in her hair. When combined with the pearl ring, the pieces fit.
“Oh, Randy.”
Now Lola knew why Marcia had avoided talking to her, why Marcia turned the other way when she saw Lola. It had nothing to do with Barbara and everything to do with Lola being married to Randy.
Lola felt so inadequate. Her husband had been having an affair with an older woman.
Her insides twisted. She could understand Randy falling for a beautiful woman. She could understand him falling for a woman who stocked the contents of the garage-apartment bureau. But the age difference…
How could this have happened? They’d been newlyweds. He’d seemed so happy.
Unless Drew was right and Randy’s affair with Marcia pre-dated her marriage. In which case Lola had been the other woman, and Marcia had been wronged.
Chest on her thighs, Lola stared at a small dust bunny behind her heels. Maybe it was Randy who’d had the midlife crisis and wanted to settle down, have a few kids, be more traditional.
What if, after she and Randy arrived in Sunshine married, Marcia had wanted to take their clandestine relationship public? Would Randy have divorced Lola if Marcia had said the word? Or had he married Lola to spite Marcia because she wouldn’t marry a younger man? That kind of thing would put a kink in Barbara’s White House plans.
Lola had too many unanswered questions, more now than before.
She was falling apart inside. Chunk by chunk, her heart was breaking away. If she discovered one more of Randy’s illusions, one more piece of his past, she’d shatter.
She sat with her head between her legs for several minutes, feeling nauseated and breathless and more than a bit used. Finally, she recovered enough to look at Marcia’s pictures.
The first photograph was professionally done, a picture of Barbara sitting and Marcia standing behind her. Marcia’s hands were on Barbara’s shoulders. The neck of Marcia’s baby-blue sweater was decorated with shiny blue beads. Her white-blond hair had a bright-blue streak. She wore the small pearl ear studs and was smiling broadly without a bevy of wrinkles. She could afford Botox when Lola could barely afford new brakes for her car.
The others were candid shots. Marcia wearing a leather jacket and sitting behind the wheel of an impractical convertible with the top down and zebra glasses on. Marcia in a yoga pose on a ledge beneath the Saddle Horn mountaintop. Marcia wearing an evening gown with cleavage Pris would envy.
Marcia didn’t just dress like she was in her thirties. She’d lived like she was in her thirties. Emotionally, she and Randy