As much as I liked Cricket, I didn’t have the same feelings for her husband. Of course, I’d only met him two or three times, but he’d always been dismissive. Cricket may carry expensive purses and slide on jewelry that cost a small fortune, but she was always considerate and treated everyone as if they were her friends. Happy puppy-dog eyes and quick smiles were her trademark, and though I still felt uncomfortable around her, she went out of her way to include me. Like inviting me to go to estate sales with her. Like we were friends.
We weren’t. But it was nice that she had asked me.
Her husband was the type I had never cared for—a little smirky, too comfortable in his surroundings, like he owned the world. He had a little of Ty’s charming swagger, but it was kind of icky on a late-forties guy who had thinning hair and sunspots and wore jeans that would look more appropriate on someone twenty years his junior.
“Maybe so,” Scott said, another feminine noise sounding before he huffed, “Shh!” at whoever was making it. But there had been giggling and then that shushing, and suddenly I felt a knowing tingle at the nape of my neck.
“Well, if she comes back or calls, tell her I’ll be late tonight. I’m taking Julia Kate to lessons, and then she wants to eat at the club with some of her friends,” he said.
“I’ll do that, but maybe you should text Cricket.” I wanted to add on “weirdo,” because who asked a person he barely knew to give a message to someone who wasn’t there?
“Oh. Yeah, of course. Sorry about that. I’ve been distracted, and I hate when she doesn’t answer the phone. You have a good day, Rosie.”
I blinked several times at those last words, and I was just about to mutter “You too” when I heard the click.
Setting the receiver back into its cradle, I tried to stop my mind from going where it shouldn’t. To the sounds in the background, to the woo-woo feeling that I’d had too many times, to Cricket’s face when she’d left earlier claiming bad chicken salad. Something was going on, and because my granny had said I was as sharp as a hedgehog cactus, I was certain that a certain skeevy husband was doing my sweet boss ten kinds of wrong.
I had that same feeling the night before my daddy joined the biker gang. Like things were about to change and not for the better.
Great.
CHAPTER THREE
CRICKET
I stared at the box in the bottom of the closet for a good ten seconds. Nothing about it seemed weird. Just a plain shipping box like something I received almost every day from Amazon. But Scott had hidden it in the back under the Peter Millar chukkas he’d bought on sale but never wore. He and I were the same in that regard. We loved a good bargain even when it sat in our closet untouched.
Glancing at my wrist, I noted the time.
Five fifty-five p.m.
Scott had texted that they were eating at the club and would be late. Still, Julia Kate had school the next morning, so they would be back soon. Poor Julia Kate. I had been thinking only of myself for the past few hours, but how would our daughter deal with the knowledge her father had cheated? That our family would be no more. The image of her tear-streaked face flashed before me. Maybe I should stop what I was doing. Maybe I should forget about what I had heard and just go along to get along.
Or maybe I should find out the truth before I decided anything.
I ran a finger along the cut tape of the box, wondering what Scott had been hiding.
When I had left the store that afternoon, I had driven aimlessly for a good thirty minutes before stopping at the liquor store that carried my favorite wine and nabbing two bottles. I saw the treasurer of the Caddo Magnet PTA buying vodka, chatted with her like my whole world wasn’t imploding, grabbed a bottle of Grey Goose just in case, and then drove home only to find my mother pulling weeds in my front flower bed. It was nearly cocktail hour when I pulled into our drive, which was why it startled me to see my mother bent over, fanny wagging as she jerked stringy growth from my pine-strawed beds. My mother adored a martini or a stout whiskey each afternoon.
I didn’t bother pulling the van into the garage. Instead I stopped on the flagstone drive with the thyme crisscrossing it and lowered the window. “What are you doing, Mother?”
She tilted the brim of her big floppy hat with a gloved hand and glanced toward me. “Pulling up this nut grass. Your beds look unseemly. The way you keep your house is a reflection of who you are.”
My mother found fault with almost everything I did, wore, or said. Let’s not even get into my hairstyle. I had become mostly impervious to her passive-aggressive digs. After all, ignoring my mother was the only sport in which I had ever excelled. Gold medal worthy. “Well, I appreciate the free labor.”
Her downturned mouth reminded me of the grumpy jack-o’-lantern Julia Kate and I had carved the previous fall for the annual Shine on Line. Not that my mother was round or orange. No, quite the opposite. My mother was country club thin with creamy skin she slathered with Pond’s cold cream every night of her life. She lived to seek and destroy age spots, and Dr. Feliz Miranda, plastic surgeon to south Shreveport, had been receiving holiday cards from my mother for well over thirty years.
My mother rose and arched her back. With a wince, she removed her gloves and eyed the small clumps of weeds dotting my walkway. “Get Scott to put those in the trash. Not the compost heap. They’ll spring back up next year like a bad penny if you don’t.”
Of all the people in the world who could be at my house an hour or so after I’d found out Scott might be having an affair—and with an attractive, fit former tennis star at that—my mother was the absolute worst. I would welcome a terrorist over her. Come to think on it, my mother was a terrorist. She knew exactly how to get me to do what she wanted, utilizing a network of intimidation, propaganda, and guilt. I loved her. I did. But she was a piece of work, as most would say.
“Okay, Mother.” I shut my van door, opened the vintage Louis Vuitton bag I carried, and used the key fob to lock the vehicle. “Would you care for a cup of coffee? Or tea?”
“You know I require a vodka martini,” my mother said, folding her gardening gloves and placing them in the Chanel tote she always carried with her in lieu of a purse. Inside the expensive canvas, the woman had everything from Xanax to an extra pair of underwear. Marguerite Sutton Quinney was never unprepared.
Juggling the brown bag from the liquor store, I punched in the code for the front door. “I got liquor right here.”
Pippa, our energetic Italian greyhound, skidded into the foyer with a low growl. Upon recognizing me, she ran elegant little circles, her tail whipping in a frenzy as she gave me the greeting she thought I deserved. Of course, Pippa nearly knocked my mother down. Maybe if the woman ate a few carbs, she would be more stalwart against my affectionate canine.