It was the perfect spot for a hair salon, right in the center of New Falls, right on Main Street where she could keep an eye on everyone and everything. It even had a perfect apartment on the second floor, where she would raise her baby—a girl! she had learned.
Three months had passed since Vincent died. Yolanda wondered if she would ever stop missing him.
The baby, of course, was his. Kitty seemed to really believe he’d had a vasectomy; Yolanda was pretty sure it wasn’t the first or only time Vincent had lied to Kitty. He’d told her once how Kitty made him crazy with her nonstop nitpicking. In the end, even Paul Tobin didn’t want to handle Kitty’s case, which wasn’t really a case, because she’d confessed. “Shot her big mouth off,” Tobin had said, then disappeared, probably fearful that the others would come looking for him, would have him arrested for the way he had tried to cash in on Vincent’s misdeeds.
“Would you like to make an offer?” the real estate agent who stood beside her asked.
“Yes,” Yolanda said, “I’ll pay the asking price. It’s exactly what I want.” She had decided to stay in town. It was what Vincent would have wanted for her, and for their daughter.
Money would be easier now that Marvin and Elise had given her half of the two-million-dollar insurance, now that Kitty no longer “qualified” as the beneficiary. They said they still had plenty to keep their grandmother well-cared for upstate.
Of course, even with a million, Yolanda didn’t have a New Falls fortune left, now that she’d sold the house, paid the taxes, and returned the blackmail money:
Two hundred thousand dollars to Lauren Halliday, who was working in a flip-flop shop on Nantucket, dating a scallop fisherman, and planning to buy a cottage so Dory and Jeffrey and little Liam—and any of her stepchildren, if they so desired—could visit from time to time;
Two hundred thousand dollars to Bridget Haynes, whose hair had fallen out and now grown back, who said she’d use the money for something other than lunches and wine, that perhaps she’d do some good in the world, because, mon dieu, the world surely could use it;
And two hundred thousand to Caroline’s daughter, Chloe, who needed every cent she could get now that her mother was dead and her father, like Kitty, was going to prison for the rest of his life. The Meacham family assets had been frozen, like Chloe, pending settlements from attorneys and business partners and who knew who else. So Chloe had hawked the diamond Lee Sato had given her and had reclused herself somewhere in South Hadley, Massachusetts, where she’d gone to college and apparently felt safe.
Dana Fulton didn’t get any money because Vincent hadn’t blackmailed her, though the town was buzzing now that her long-lost father had moved into their house. Rumor had it that Dana and Steven paid for Caroline Meacham’s headstone and her funeral, though few people attended. If Dana or anyone else knew who brought the yellow tulips to the gravesite each week, no one was saying, no one was gossiping about that, at least not out loud.
Yolanda, of course, knew. Just as she knew that if she didn’t make trouble, the women in town would eventually come to her shop, would share their stories, would, in time, forget all that had happened.
It was funny, Yolanda thought, as she looked around at her new beginning, but aside from the jewels and the houses and the cars and the clothes and the silly facelifts, well, the wives of New Falls weren’t a whole lot different than those in the Bronx.
Mais oui, as Bridget would say.