“You two haven’t been excluding me because of...” She motioned to her body.
“Of course not,” Olivia said. “What a dreadful thought.”
“But I ought to,” Elise said. “You look like a taller version of Carmen. But your face is prettier and what do you use on your hair? It looks great. Oh, and Carmen is the woman my husband dumped me for. They have a little girl. He didn’t want to start a family with me.”
As Kathy sat down on the couch, she named a salon shampoo. She was staring at Elise. “I’m not understanding this. Your husband...?”
“Had a second family,” Elise said.
“And so did mine,” Olivia added.
They looked at Kathy—and waited. They knew that her husband was on the verge of starting a new family, but they didn’t tell her that. And if Kathy knew, she gave no indication of it.
Elise broke the silence as she looked at Olivia. “Do you think Jeanne put us together because you and I have the same problem?”
“I have no idea, but it makes sense,” Olivia said. “I have come to believe that this is supposed to be a therapy weekend.”
“We spill our guts, that sort of thing?” Elise asked. “Actually, I’d love to tell my whole story. As long as no one even mentions suicide.”
The two women turned to Kathy, silently asking if she’d like to hear of Elise’s problems.
Kathy could just blink. Maybe it was all the zillions of diet programs she’d been on in her adult life, but they made a person feel that if you just lost weight everything would be perfect. If you had marriage problems, thinner thighs would resolve the issues. And a skinny you would stand up to the Mean Girls of the world. Hey! You might even be asked to join them.
But that didn’t seem to be true. Tall, model-thin Elise’s husband preferred a woman with meat on her bones. “Please,” Kathy said, “I’d like to hear whatever you want to tell.”
“But wait!” Olivia said. “I have to get sandwich makings and wine. That all right with you two?”
“Perfect,” Elise said. “I think maybe I should start at the end and go backward. I want you to know what was actually going on while I was so innocently frolicking in the dirt with Alejandro.”
“Alejandro?” Kathy asked.
“Our family’s gardener’s little brother. The most beautiful man on earth.”
“I have another candidate for that title,” Olivia said, and they looked at Kathy.
“Still looking for mine.”
“What about—?” Olivia began, but stopped herself and looked at Elise. “Please begin.”
“When I look back on it,” Elise began, “it seems that everything—Kent, Alejandro, Carmen—were all caused by Tara. I knew her in school and she was an absolute bitch. About two months ago, on a lazy afternoon, she showed up at my house, uninvited. I could tell by the wild look in her eyes that she had something dreadful to tell me. It was always some gossip about someone we both knew. It would be a divorce, or that she’d seen a husband with a pretty girl. Something salacious and mean.”
“What does she do?” Olivia was on a pillow on the floor on the far side of the coffee table. She began slathering bread with mayonnaise and loading it with cold cuts and lettuce.
“She’s a lawyer—which she loves to rub in my face.” Elise’s voice changed to falsetto. “‘How I wish I could be like you, Elise, and spend my days doing nothing but enjoying myself. A stress-free life.”
“Zinger there,” Kathy said.
“Jealousy is what that is.” Olivia handed Kathy a plate with a thick sandwich. “Did she make a pass at your husband and get turned down?”
Elise gave a little smile. “Not that I know of, but two times she told me she was expecting an engagement ring from a guy she was dating. But it never happened. That day, I could tell that she had Big News. She didn’t say a word, just handed me her cell phone. It was a photo of Kent out shopping with a pretty woman and a little girl. I handed her phone back and said that was Carmen, our gardener’s sister. Mostly, I was annoyed that Kent was at a mall when he was always telling me that he never had time to leave work.”
Elise took a breath. “Tara opened her briefcase and pulled out a thick folder. It was full of photos and documents—all of them about my husband. It looked like she’d been working on it for quite a while. She left it all with me and scurried away.”
Olivia reached out and took Elise’s hand.
“I sat on the couch and went through the papers. Over and over. At first, all I could see was the money. Somehow, Tara had tapped into a bank account that I didn’t know Kent had. He was always on me to save money. His favorite words were ‘How much did it cost?’ But his secret account showed that he earned more than he said he did, and he was spending a lot on...on...them.”
Elise was trying to get her emotions under control. “It was a while before I saw that there was a birth certificate listing Kent as the father of Carmen’s daughter. I remembered the week she was born. It was just a few months after our wedding, and Kent had to go away to a two-week conference. He didn’t call me while he was away because he said his phone broke and he didn’t have time to fix it or get a new one.”
She paused. “After a while, I realized that the money put into the account was direct deposit. That meant his boss, my father, had to know about Kent’s other family.”
“You were being betrayed by everyone,” Olivia said.
“Yes, I was.”
“What did you do?” Kathy asked.
“That night when Kent came home—it was after eleven—I was still sitting on the couch with the papers on my lap. I hadn’t moved in hours. I got up and handed him the folder. You know what he said?”
Both Olivia and Kathy shook their heads.
“I can quote him as it’s burned into my memory. He said, ‘I bet Tara did this. She’s always liked sticking her nose into other people’s business. Elise, baby, you ought to stay away from her.’”
“Yeow,” Kathy said. “That was cruel.”
“That’s the voice of a man who is scared.” Olivia was frowning. “And what did you reply to that?”
“I lost it,” Elise said. “I started screaming. By that time Alejandro and I were...” She stopped talking.
“You told him about Alejandro?” Olivia asked.
“No. I had enough sense not to mention Carmen’s brother.”
“Ah,” Olivia said. “But part of you wondered if Alejandro was a decoy.”
Elise took a drink of her soda. “It certainly did seem to be a huge coincidence that he and Carmen were together, and that Alejandro and I were...were friends.”
“How was Kent during all this?” Kathy asked.
“He seemed calm, but he wasn’t. He made me a drink and he was shaking so much that he spilled half of it.”
“And he put pills in it,” Olivia said softly.
Kathy gasped.
“He did.” For a moment, Elise’s jaw clamped shut. “I was pacing back and forth and yelling so I didn’t see him do it. I wanted to grab something and hit him with it. He had no idea how much I was planning to give up for him! I had such a deep sense of loyalty that I hadn’t... I never...” She swallowed. “Anyway, I was so angry that I couldn’t see or hear much. When he handed me a drink, I gulped it. It was almost straight vodka and I hadn’t eaten all day. It went straight to my head. I was so dizzy that Kent pushed me toward the bedroom and I fell down on the bed. He left the room.”
Elise stood up, paced for a moment, then looked back at them.
“As soon as my head stopped whirling, I got up, went to the door, and opened it. Kent was on the phone. I heard him say, ‘She knows.’”
“And that’s when reality hit you,” Olivia said.
Elise nodded. “I finally, at last, saw that my husband was never going to really love me.”
“It was about love,” Kathy said. “You weren’t angry about money or even another woman, but about love.”
“Yes. That’s true.”
Again, Olivia squeezed Elise’s hand. “That’s when you wanted oblivion, so you took a pill.”