CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Kibitzers

That Saturday night at the regular Queens of Woodlawn Avenue meeting, we had a surprise guest. We met at Jane’s house, and her sister was visiting from out of town. Which wouldn’t have been a problem, except that her sister—when she wasn’t one of the foursome—liked to sit beside me and give me helpful advice.

“No, that’s not what you should say to your partner’s short club.” Elaine was as tiny as Jane, but her hair was jet black rather than blonde and she wore an excessive amount of red lipstick.

“Short club?”

“A 1? opening bid means that your partner has a really strong hand, but it’s spread over several suits. She has a lot of strength, but no length.”

“What am I supposed to do?” The more I learned about bridge, the less I felt like I knew. It was a pretty good metaphor for my life at that moment, actually.

By this point, Grace and Linda were frowning deeply, clearly disturbed to have the bidding process—which was supposed to be entirely neutral—laid out in such explicit terms now that I’d passed the rudimentary stage.

I heard Jane mumble something under her breath. Her sister’s spine went ramrod straight. “Did you have something to say, Jane?”

Growing up as an only child, I’d often wished for a sister. But since the tension between these two sisters could be cut with a fairly dull butter knife, my lone child status didn’t seem so bad at the moment.

Jane just glared at her. “I said that we don’t need a kibitzer.”

You’d have thought that Jane had called her a name not used in polite circles.

“Fine.” Elaine leaped to her feet and stalked from the dining room through the diamond-shaped arch. A moment later, I heard a door in the back of the house slam.

“Thank heavens,” Grace said. “I thought I was going to have to whack her on the head with something.”

Jane and Linda laughed, and I pretended to. Because Officer McFarland and his suspicions about Grace were never far from my thoughts.

“So, really, what do I do about the short club?”

Jane arched an eyebrow. “Use it on my sister?”

I didn’t have time to see Henri all weekend due to the demands of my other clients—the elderly matron and the professor—as well as citing my standing Saturday night Red Hat commitment. He hadn’t taken it well, but then, he was French. He should be used to disappointment. Weren’t they always losing every war they fought?

To tell the truth, I was still struggling with the remnants of my feelings for Jim. And I didn’t want to go any further with Henri until I resolved them. So I hadn’t made the extra effort to see him that I might have even a week earlier.

By Monday night, though, I couldn’t avoid Henri any longer. I was preparing dinner for him and a client at his apartment, and he had asked me to stay and play hostess. I’d have been more enthusiastic about the additional billable hours if even one of the invoices I’d sent to The Triumph Group so far had been paid. Maybe that was another reason I’d been avoiding him. I was going to have to confront Henri about the unpaid bills after dinner, and I was looking forward to that experience even less than to telling him I wasn’t spending the night. Jane had advised me to address it directly, without emotion, but then Jane didn’t know how many nights I’d been spending in Henri’s bed.

Dinner was simmering on the stove when Henri arrived, half an hour earlier than I’d expected. He rarely made it home before six o’clock, and it was barely half past five.

“Henri? Is that you?”

“Yes, Ellie. It’s me.” He sounded tired. Since the last time we’d made love, he was using fewer and fewer of the French endearments that had so captivated me when I’d first met him.

“What time is your client coming?”

He frowned. “Actually, there is no client.”

My stomach sank to the cold Mexican tile beneath my feet. “No client?”

“I wanted to see you, and since you’ve been avoiding me…

He’d lied to manipulate me. Of course, my passive-aggressive approach of telling him I was too busy to go out to dinner or a movie over the weekend wasn’t much of an improvement on his plain, old-fashioned untruth.

“Well, then, we can have a lovely, quiet dinner,” I said with an enthusiasm I was far from feeling.

“I’d like that.” He looked so vulnerable at that moment that guilt yanked my stomach back up to its normal resting place and squeezed it tight.

“Can I get you a glass of wine?”

“Yes, please.”

The habit of fussing over an exhausted man who had just come from the office was as inbred in me as not wearing white shoes after Labor Day or throwing my arm across the chest of the child in the passenger seat of my car when I had to slam on the breaks. I poured Henri a glass of an impeccable chardonnay, and then I poured an even bigger one for myself. Because although he might be exhausted, I still had to ask him when my invoices were going to get paid. I’d been living on credit in anticipation of that income, and the limit on my Visa was fast approaching. I hadn’t even bought a dress for the Cannon Ball. I hadn’t really allowed myself to think about how I was going to swing that.

Henri sank onto the leather sofa and I followed him, but I left a cushion between us whereas before I would have cuddled up right beside him. The way his eyes nar- rowed told me he noticed the difference. Funny, that had happened with me and Jim, too, although over a longer period of time and in that instance, I’m not sure either of us noticed when it started to happen.

“I want you to tell me the truth,” Henri said, twisting the wineglass stem between his fingers. “What’s his name?”

“Whose name?” I decided to take the coy approach. Answer a question with a question.

“The other man. There must be someone, because suddenly I am like…,” he paused, “…a burden to you.”

He sounded like a hurt little boy. His pride was obviously wounded. I wondered if it made me a bad person if his jealousy secretly thrilled me, even if I wasn’t sure I wanted to be involved with him any longer.

“There’s no other man.”

“No? Impossible. There must be someone.”

“There’s no one.” The lie fell so easily from my lips.

“Then what has happened?”

What had happened? I still thought he was incredibly sexy and charming, when he wanted to be. And then it hit me. My feelings for Henri had started to change the moment I’d started to feel like his wife instead of his lover. And the fact that he hadn’t paid me for my work had only contributed to my sense of being taken for granted. I felt like I was still married to Jim, only with a French accent and without the foundation of a shared history.

I gulped my wine in three substantial swallows, and then coughed when everything from my eyes to my throat burned like fire.

“It’s…well, it’s…complicated.” I mangled the words, but the sentiment was clear. Henri’s eyes widened.

“There is someone else.”

“No, there’s not. There used to be someone else—”

“Used to be?”

“My husband. I mean, my ex-husband.”

“He wants you back?”

“No. Maybe. I’m not sure. He keeps calling.”

“And you would go crawling back to him like a dog?” He sniffed with Gallic disdain.

“No!” I snapped. “I’m not crawling back to anyone. But maybe I’m not ready yet for this.” I waved my hand back and forth between us. “Maybe it’s too soon.” Although even as I said the words, I was pretty sure that wasn’t the real reason at all.

“Then you will not need me to escort you to your party at the end of the month?” In a moment of post-coital bliss, I had asked Henri to be my date for the Cannon Ball.

“No, I’d still like you to go with me.”

He set his wineglass down on the coffee table with a snap. “I am not here for your convenience.”

Now that made me angry, because if anything, I had been the one to be there for his convenience over the last month. “I never said you were.” I was going to have to placate him, because, frankly, the prospect of trying to find another date for the Cannon Ball was far more wearying than humoring Henri. “Please don’t be angry.”

And now I couldn’t even ask him about the unpaid invoices, at least not right then. I’d thought the divorce had complicated my life, but that was nothing compared to what I’d done to it myself in the last six weeks.

“You can make it up to me,” he said, and now he was smiling his charming smile once again.

“Oh?” If he tried to lead me toward the bedroom, I was going to develop a splitting headache.

“You can feed me some of that delicious dinner I smell.”

Whew. I felt like I’d dodged a bullet. “Sure. Just give me a minute to finish it up.”

I unfolded myself from the couch and escaped to the kitchen, feeling like I had perhaps won the battle, but the outcome of the war was definitely in doubt.

Henri’s cell phone rang in the middle of dinner, and for once I didn’t resent the interruption. In fact, the phone call gave me the excuse to clean up the kitchen, kiss his cheek good-bye since he was still talking on the phone, and escape to my house for the remainder of the evening.

Once I arrived home, though, I received a phone call of my own. I had just slid my nightgown over my head when the phone rang. Hoping it wasn’t Henri, I sat down on the bed and gingerly picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“It’s me.” Well, of course it was. With a frustrated “omph,” I punched the pillow next to me and plopped it against the headboard. Might as well get comfortable for the duration.

“Yes, I remember your voice.” Mine dripped with sarcasm.

“I know, I know. But this is a real thing.”

As opposed to all the unreal—or surreal—things Jim had been calling me about since I’d moved into the house on Woodlawn Avenue?

“What do you need?” I swung my legs onto the bed and leaned back, exhausted.

“It’s about Courtney’s horse.”

When she was six years old, my daughter had developed an undying love for anything with hooves, a mane, and a tail. Jim had indulged her by buying her a pony which we had paid a fortune to board at a local riding school. The pony had been followed by a succession of horses, each more expensive than the last. What we spent on feed could have been used to pay my utilities, phone, and Internet in one fell swoop. Now that Courtney had gone off to college, we’d dithered about what to do with Cupcake, the aging bay that apparently ate his weight in oats on a weekly basis.

“I can’t keep paying for the horse, Ellie.” This time Jim didn’t sound angry or defiant. Instead, his voice held a note of despair I hadn’t heard since those exhausting twenty-hour days of his residency.

“I know it’s expensive, but it means a lot to Courtney.” I studied my bare bedroom walls, wondering when I’d ever get around to hanging pictures.

“Let’s face it, Ellie. Courtney will probably never come back to Nashville to live. We need to sell him. He’d make a good horse for a little girl just learning to ride.”

“Have you asked Courtney about this?”

He was quiet for a moment.

I sighed. “I can’t do that for you, Jim. If you want to sell the horse, then you need to talk to her about it.”

“Well, there’s one alternative.”

“What’s that?”

“I was telling Greta about your new company.” Greta Price owned and operated Cumberland Farms & Stables, Cupcake’s official residence.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood up against the pillow. “And?”

“She thought we could work out some sort of barter system.”

“We? Would that be the royal ‘we’, Jim? Or do you mean that l could work out a trade with her?”

“Well, she’s not currently in need of any thoracic surgery.”

Okay, I did smile at his joke, but I was still peeved.

“If you want me to take on that responsibility, then just ask me to do it. Don’t try to sneak it by me like I’m too stupid to notice what you’re doing.” I might be tired, but I wasn’t that tired.

“I’m sorry, Ellie. I know you’re not stupid. I guess I just feel guilty about the whole thing.”

I wanted to tell him that he darn well should feel guilty, but what would that help? I knew that Jim loved Connor and Courtney and had always worked hard to give them the best of everything. I couldn’t fault him on that score.

I heard a tinkling sound over the phone line, like ice cubes clinking in a glass. Drinking and dialing yet again. That wasn’t something he’d ever done when we were married.

His voice softened. “Remember when we gave her that first pony?”

“We? That was all your doing.” But I smiled in spite of myself as the image of a tiny Courtney sitting tall in the saddle sprang into my mind. It had been one of those few moments in life when I was privileged to see sheer, unadulterated joy on my child’s face. That joy, and not her begging and pleading, were what had compelled us to continue to underwrite her equine addiction.

“We were toast from that moment on,” I said, relaxing into the memory.

He laughed. “Yeah. Once your child’s discovered her drug of choice, you’re compelled to keep supplying her with her fix.”

Jim and I had spent a lot of time sitting together in the bleachers at horse shows all over the Southeast, proud and anxious and hopeful and fearful just like all the other parents who watched their children compete in any sport.

“Remember when she fell?” My fingers tightened around the phone cord. That had been one of the most harrowing moments of my life. At eleven, she’d broken her collarbone when she’d been thrown by her horse when it balked at a water jump. Jim might be the physician in the family, but he’d turned a ripe shade of green when we saw the paramedics load her onto that stretcher.

“I wanted to shoot that horse,” he said.

“She wouldn’t let you.”

He chuckled. “Always was a tough kid.”

I sighed. “Jim, I’ll work something out with Greta. Courtney’s lost enough this year, with the divorce and everything. I’m sure we can figure something out.”

“No, Ellie. I won’t let you do it. I was wrong to even call and ask. It’s just that…”

“That what?” My knuckles had gone white. Slowly, I unwrapped the phone cord that bound them.

“I didn’t think it would be like this.”

“What wouldn’t be like this?” But I knew what he meant, even if he couldn’t quite articulate it.

“A new start. Tiffany.”

I winced when he said her name.

“I thought I’d found the way to get out from under all the pressure,” he said, “but instead it’s twice as strong.”

It was a rare but important moment of insight for a man who preferred action to reflection, so I kept my mouth shut, merely murmuring in agreement. I’d learned a little something about unwanted advice from Jane’s kibitzing sister last Saturday night.

“I’ll talk to Greta,” I said, getting up from the bed to pull back the covers, “and see how much of the slack I can pick up. Maybe between the two of us we can manage.” For the first time since the divorce, Jim and I were cooperating and it felt much better than all those months of acrimony.

“That would be great.”

“Okay. I’ll let you know what she says.” I got back in the bed, still tired but somehow less exhausted.

“Ellie?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome, Jim. Good night.”

“Good night.”

This time I didn’t need to slam down the receiver. I slipped it gently into its cradle and slid down in the bed, pulling the covers up to my chin.