Wife for Hire - By Janet Evanovich Page 0,52

Now that it was finished she was bereft.

She had to start a new project, she told herself, but nothing appealed to her. She looked down at herself and knew she’d lost weight.

“Pathetic,” she said to Fluffy, curled in a ball on the corner of the desk.

Elsie knocked on the door and walked in. “Pathetic,” she said. “Everyone’s downstairs trimming the tree, and you’re up here looking like death warmed over.”

Maggie smiled. She could always count on Elsie to jolt her out of self-pity. Elsie was brutal but effective. And there’d been a lot of times in the past months when Elsie had kept her going with scoldings and hugs and hot soup.

“To night’s the Christmas party,” Elsie said. “Does your dress need pressing?”

Maggie shook her head. Her dress was fine. It was a little big on her, but the style allowed for that. She wasn’t sure she cared anyway.

Laughter carried up the stairs with the smell of pine and spicy cider. Hank’s parents, his Aunt Tootie, Slick, Ox, Ed, Vern, Bubba, and their wives and girlfriends were downstairs, helping with the tree.

If she were a good wife, she’d be down there too. She’d used the same tired excuse of working on her book to steal away to her room. No one knew the book was done, much less sold.

Lord, what had become of her? She was a coward, she thought. She wasn’t able to face other people’s happiness. Especially now that it was the Christmas season. This was a time for family. A time for love—and Maggie was loveless. Tears trickled down her throat. Hormones, she told herself, swallowing hard.

Elsie shook her head and sighed. “You’re so hard on yourself,” she said. “Why don’t you let yourself have some fun?”

Because if she gave in just a tiny bit, her resolve to leave would crumble like a house of cards, Maggie thought. Skogen wasn’t going to change. Hank’s father wasn’t going to change. Bubba wasn’t going to change. Just as her mother and Aunt Marvina weren’t going to change. And the most painful truth was that Maggie wasn’t going to change.

She didn’t belong in Riverside and she didn’t belong in Skogen. If she wanted happiness, she was going to have to go searching for it. Surely there was a place where she would be accepted and feel comfortable. Surely there was a town out there that offered a compromise between dumpsters and apple trees.

“I’ll have fun to night,” Maggie lied. “I’ll just work a little bit more, and then I’ll quit for the day.”

“Everyone misses you,” Elsie insisted.

They didn’t miss her. Maggie knew that for a fact. She could hear the laughter. She could hear the conversation that bubbled between old friends and family and never included her. For months now life had gone on in the farm house, and she hadn’t been a part of it. Hank had gone from the baseball team to the football team to the hockey team. The cider press had been delivered and was operating, and the pie factory was close to becoming a reality.

“No one misses me,” Maggie said. “They’re having a perfectly wonderful time without me.”

“Hank misses you,” Elsie said. “He looks almost as bad as you do. He laughs, but his eyes don’t mean it. You’d see it too if you weren’t so stuck on your own misery.”

Maggie wondered if what Elsie said was true. She knew part of her wanted it to be so. She knew that there was a scrap of hope she hadn’t been able to completely smother. Her love for Hank smoldered deep inside her. She couldn’t extinguish it no matter how hard she tried. It burned constantly and painfully. Every day she faced the unpleasant realities of her predicament and exerted every ounce of discipline she possessed to do what she felt was best for herself and for Hank, but the dream remained.

Deep in her heart she knew she hadn’t held to the agreed-upon six months through any sense of honor. It had been that damn dream that had kept her in Vermont.

For weeks she’d been dreading the Christmas party at the grange hall. It was the one social event she couldn’t possibly avoid. Now that it was at hand she felt numb and exhausted even before the ordeal began.

She sat on the edge of her bed with her bathrobe wrapped tightly around her. Her hair was still damp from the shower; her toes were pink from the hot water. A depressing lethargy had taken hold of