“C’est la vie.”
“Too true. By the by, now that everyone’s vaccinated, we’re doing a ladies’ Bunco night at Cynthia’s house this Thursday at seven, if you’d like to join. Just bring a bottle of wine or some charcuterie.”
There’s no way in hell Patricia would join; Marion and her cronies are the C-level players in the neighborhood dynamic, whereas Patricia is in the top rung. But part of her status is that she never lets on that she’s too good to rub elbows and throw dice.
“That sounds delightful. I’ll see if I can squeeze it in. The auction is heating up, you know.”
Marion smirks. “Ah, yes. Your auction. I’m surprised there are enough people left at the club to hold it.”
“We need open hearts and wallets more than ever,” Patricia reminds her. “We have this clever little setup this year where everyone can bid electronically. Email me if you’d like a link. I know you enjoy signed guitars, and we have one from Aerosmith.”
Marion’s eyes flash; she’s not good at hiding anything.
“That does sound juicy. I’ll let you know. Ta.”
And with that, she floors it, screeching away as if she could ever impress someone like Patricia, someone who obviously finds loud noises, gas fumes, and black streaks on the neighborhood streets distasteful.
“Grotesque,” she mutters to herself.
It’s one of her favorite words, and she remembers perfectly the moment she discovered it while taking a break at the diner. Her last customers had left a battered copy of Reader’s Digest in the booth along with a huge tip, and young Patty slid the book and the bills into her apron to enjoy later. Sitting in an alley on an overturned bucket, she sipped black coffee and flipped through the book, landing on a section called “Word Power.” It offered a selection of fifty-cent words that looked impressive and elegant, and she realized that this, perhaps, was the first step in becoming a classy lady like the ones who’d left the book behind.
Grotesque, alcove, julep, damask, lapis lazuli, umbrage, pique.
Before then, Patricia hadn’t known words like that existed. They tasted rich and complex in her mouth, and she set herself a goal of using one big word a day. Sometimes it went badly, like when she told a friendly customer that he was very lugubrious and he called the manager over because he thought it was an insult. But sometimes it was exceptionally rewarding, like the time she correctly identified a man’s malachite tie pin and he tipped her an extra fiver because he said he liked smart girls.
In hindsight, that book—and that word—were the first steps on her journey from Patty to Patricia, from a scrawny single mother barely scraping by to a wealthy, powerful woman whose closet is bigger than most of her previous apartments.
She hates to admit it, but perhaps Randall was a mistake. She never hoped to find a love match—her own mother had fallen for too many terrible men, and Patricia herself had fallen for one and didn’t want to be that captive and beholden again, so she’d locked up her heart like a poorly behaved dog. Things were good with Terry because he looked at her like the sun shone out of her eyes and never suspected her own feelings were far more tepid. But she sees now that the arrangement with Randall faltered because he wasn’t in thrall to her, because there were too few feelings instead of too many. For her next husband, she’ll have to be more careful. She’ll have to make him fall in love with her.
But enough about that. She has to survive this hurdle, first.
Randall has left her with nothing but a house with an expiration date, and she has two mouths to feed—three, if Ella has the good sense to come back—so she has to soldier on, as she always has. She’s at the O’Malley house now, and, yes, there are the packages Barbara’s expecting. Patricia uses the code—1111? Honestly?—and the garage door rumbles up, revealing Barbara’s Infiniti, a six-seater golf cart, and that awful tricycle motorcycle thing they use for bopping up and down the coast. Patricia drags in the packages, closes the garage door, and opens the house up.
Her first thought is that Barbara leans awfully hard into lavender as a decorating choice and a signature scent, and her second is that the O’Malleys are exactly her kind of idiot. Their pantry shelves are full to bursting, and their fridge is freshly stocked as if they just woke up today and decided to move to Canada on a whim without any preparation. Seeing such bounty, it’s like Patricia’s brain switches channels and she’s no longer an elegant woman eating for antioxidants and weight management but a starving woman with a baby who knows to an ounce which cheap foods will give her the most bang for the buck. She’s only brought the one tote bag, so she doesn’t feel bad at all as she pulls a few garbage bags out from under the kitchen sink and stuffs them full of soft things that can’t break. Chips and puffs and the sorts of snacky things Brooklyn will like—because the O’Malleys have noisy grandchildren who show up every week like locusts. Of course she wouldn’t try to walk through the neighborhood carrying garbage bags—so gauche and attention-grabbing—so she opens the patio doors, navigates around the trampoline and custom tree house, and tosses them over their shared fence into her own yard.
She finds reusable shopping bags under a different counter and begins carefully adding pasta boxes, rice, beans, cans. There’s actual fruit in the crisper, so she takes all that; Brooklyn may crave jelly beans, but she needs real food. Cheese, salami, nuts, a gigantic frozen lasagna—it all gets tucked into her handbag or tote or the O’Malleys’ bags. It’s going to be heavy going, carrying them all home, but it would be too obvious, driving someone else’s golf cart, and the fence is too high to toss a frozen twelve-person lasagna overhead. It was hard enough getting the garbage bags of fluffy things slung over.