seems she was all alone at the end.”
Wanda took a dish out of the drainer and began to dry it as naturally as if she did it every day. “You grow up, you think you just make enough friends, marry the right man, you’ll end up with people all around you. Then things happen, and suddenly, you’re more alone than you imagined you could be.”
“Yes, when you think of your future, you do not expect to be living thousands of miles from everyone you loved,” Janya said.
Tracy had noticed that Janya was not her serene self. She had attributed it to the fight with Wanda, even though the two women had obviously reconciled. Now she wondered if Janya was homesick. And why wouldn’t she be? Maybe Louise had been lonely and maybe she hadn’t, but the women in the room understood the word all too well.
“I’m not that many miles away,” Wanda said. “I can drive back to Miami when I need old friends or my children. But I never expected the man I married to start acting like he was thousands of miles away.”
“You grow old….” Alice put more dishes in the drainer before she finished. “Those friends? Gone, just like that. They die, or go off to live with children or move…into retirement communities.”
Janya was wrapping the cake. Tracy began to wipe the counter with a sponge. She found it odd that they all seemed so at home here, doing jobs women had done for centuries and chatting about themselves as they did.
“I know you don’t think I have anything in common with you,” she said, “but you’d be wrong there. I lost my husband, my home, my security, my friends and my family right before I moved here. Bummer, huh?”
“What happened to your family?” Wanda asked.
“Well, CJ was a crook, and not above taking money from anybody to shore up bad business decisions. He was also a man who could look you in the eye, tell you he could make the sun come up an hour earlier, and you would believe him. In a place like Bel Air, my father’s not what they call rich, but by most standards he made a great living, and he had lots socked away for retirement. He planned to retire by sixty, even though my mother laid claim to her share of his investments during their divorce.”
“I might know where this is going,” Wanda said. “I can smell it.”
“You got it. CJ talked Daddy into investing in his companies. On paper it looked like Daddy would do so well he’d be able to retire on time without worrying about anybody or anyone, old wife, new wife. So he talked my mother into going along with CJ’s plan. No problem there. She thought CJ was the sun. Only in the end, she got burned like everybody else. Because when CJ went down, he took them right down with him. Now Daddy’s going to be straightening teeth until he’s eighty, and my mother had to sell the house I grew up in, ten thousand square feet with a prime view of Catalina Island, and move to a bungalow in Del Rey. And this is my fault, you understand. Because it was my idea to marry a crook.”
She hadn’t realized how worked up she had gotten, but by the time she finished, she’d been clipping her words as closely as a Disneyland topiary.
“And so they more or less kissed you off,” Wanda said.
“My father’s second wife has given orders that I’m never to cross their threshold. My mother is slightly kinder. She met me for lunch the day before I flew here. Of course, I paid and she ordered lobster salad.”
Wanda sputtered. Tracy glared at her; then she snorted. In a minute they were both laughing.
“How can you laugh at such a thing?” Janya asked.
“Because…” Tracy wiped her eyes. “Because they aren’t worth crying over. I was just something to barter with. Right from the beginning. I never realized it until my whole life turned to sh—” She looked at Alice, and changed her mind. “I went along with it all. I guess I deserved what I got.”
“This is like an arranged marriage,” Janya said. “Your parents steered you to this man? The way mine steered me where they thought I should go?”
“Your marriage was arranged? No way! Really?”
Janya lifted one elegant brow. “And yours? Was it not arranged? Only subtly? You were to marry a rich man who would please your parents. Did