to know what went down?’
25
Steffy
Slick as a scam artist, Steffy springs her friend Dan from Mom’s lair, a.k.a. the flowered sofa, before the woman can weight him down with a ton of cookies and talk him to death. The way Nenna scowls, you’d think Steffy was running off with her new boyfriend, not saving a helpless stranger from Death by Monologue. When her mom sucks a person into those soft pillows and starts, you can practically see the cobwebs form. Usually it’s one of the hags she hangs out with, but even though the big party was last night, not one of her Lunch Bunch phoned and nobody came by. It’s weird. Unless it’s sad.
Steffy might stop to feel sorry, if she wasn’t in such a rush. Poor Mom was spilling her troubles to a stranger because her friends don’t call and she’s had a shitty week. God, how embarrassing! She probably went off on Dad in gross detail, up to and including the humiliating fact that he has to drag his pillow downstairs after Steffy goes to bed, like they don’t think she knows that he’s slept on the rollaway ever since the fight.
Please God, don’t let her complain about the sex. Mom is so pissed off right now that she doesn’t care what comes out of her mouth. Right now it looks like she’s quit caring what she does. The woman is flat-out flirting, when she needs to get her ass to a marriage counselor and buy lessons in putting everything back where it belongs. She can vent for $150 an hour and do something useful at the same time and, boy, does her mother love to vent. Steffy read a book once that had a whole chapter called ‘The Human Swamp.’ Well, that’s Mom.
‘Hey, Dude!’ She storms the room and Dan lights up.
‘Steffy. Hey!’
‘So, Mom,’ Steffy calls, releasing him from the sofa. ‘Dan and I have a Thing we have to do.’
‘Wait! Oatmeal cookies!’
Steffy nudges Dan through the door with a bright, ‘He’s going, Mom.’
Behind them, Mom bulks up like Swamp Thing, all waving tendrils and mournful eyes. ‘Where?’
‘Emergency,’ he chokes, clicking his cellphone open and shut to prove it. ‘I’m sorry, and thanks.’
Bingo, zot, it’s like magic. They’re out the door.
26
Jessie
Out of nowhere, Sallie Bellinger says, ‘If you want to know the truth, I always thought it was a gang bang.’
Oh shit, Jessie thinks. Just when she was getting comfortable, chattering over coffee with the Lunch Bunch. Let’s don’t go there. ‘I thought we were talking about . . .’
Sallie’s voice drops. ‘Shhh! Here she comes.’
Rounding up the usual suspects at the club’s beachfront annex, they’d agreed to skip Nenna this time because she, and not Brad Kalen, was topic A. That dress! The way she ricocheted from man to man, making all those desperate ex-wife moves, they should warn her, but her best friends can’t say anything or ask her about it because she hasn’t told them. And here she is, coming in all la-la-la, like Davis isn’t a philanderer and everything’s just fine. Like every woman at this table but Jessie, she’s practiced at glossing over life’s dirty parts.
Entitled insider that she is, Nenna nudges Kara aside and slides into the banquette. Jessie’s pleased to be included, but, wow. Last night’s party lies like a patient etherized upon a table, but this patient is kicking and screaming because the anesthetist didn’t show up and the dissection is well under way. The sunlight is dazzling even through layers of tinted glass. The water glistens and from here swimmers bob like lazy ants in the gentle swells. Dolphins and egrets and gulls wheel against the cloudless backdrop, but given all they have to talk about, nobody but Jessie sees.
‘Jessie?’ Sallie Bellinger elbows her. You’re on. ‘You were saying what he’s like.’
‘Who?’
Betsy does that thing with her eyebrows. ‘You know. Lucy’s son.’
Sallie serves a hard ball. ‘If he really is her son.’
Cathy Rhue enters the game. ‘Is Carteret really his name, or is it some kind of scam?’
‘It was on his credit card, Cathy.’
‘Not to put too fine a point on it, but. Does he look like her?’
‘Yes.’ Jessie’s uncomfortable with this, but if she wants to stay, she has to play. ‘Same hair, just a little darker. Green eyes.’
Sallie serves. ‘Wonder who that comes from.’
‘Oh, the father, I suppose.’
Betsy hits it over the net. ‘Whoever that is.’
‘As a matter of fact, he looks a lot like Lucy. I should know.’ Heads whip around. Nenna! Jessie has