“Yes, I did.” There was pride in Kathy’s voice. “Both my father and Ray dump clients’ social lives onto me. If some guy who owns half of Iowa comes to New York and wants Dad’s agency to advertise whatever it is he sells, I am delegated to show the wife around. Whatever she wants to do, I’m told to fulfill her wishes. One wife wanted me to hire a Magic Mike–type dancer to visit her in her hotel room. She seemed to think I’d know how to arrange that. ‘You live in New York, don’t you?’ she said.”
Kathy took a breath. “Anyway, I’d had enough of all of it. I was married to Ray but I didn’t feel like his wife. We were to the point where he’d pat me on the shoulder and say, ‘Good job.’ Like I was one of his colleagues. I wanted out. But you’ve met Ray. It was just like with Dolores. It had to be Ray’s decision to end it. I knew that the only way he was going to let me go—I mean really and truly release me—was if he had someone else.”
“So you set out to find her,” Olivia said.
“When Ray’s original secretary retired, I coaxed him into letting me find someone to replace her. I treated it like a beauty pageant. I don’t know Ray’s sexual preference except that he doesn’t like big, healthy, curvy women like me, so I went for a variety.”
Smiling broadly, Kathy took a drink of her mimosa. “I found a Scandinavian blonde who had the men in the office running into glass doors. But Ray never looked at her. Next came a cute little Latin girl who married another guy in the office. Then there was a buxom redhead.”
Kathy laughed. “I nearly drove my husband crazy for over two years. Every time a girl learned how to run his office, I’d make up an excuse to get her another job.”
“And you were trying to find a wife for your husband.” Elise sounded as though she couldn’t quite believe it.
“Yes. Ray may wear a suit to the office, and he can sit down to dinner with men who play polo, but scratch the surface and he’s the guy from the streets of Brooklyn.”
“And that’s where Rita is from,” Olivia said.
“Oh yes! She was a godsend. The answer to all my prayers. I was to the point where I thought I was going to have to ask Ray for a divorce.”
“And if you did, he’d dig in his heels and say no,” Olivia said. “He had to make the decision and no one else. If you asked, out of principle he’d wage a war—and everyone would lose. You, your father, Ray, the company, your clients.”
“I think you understand my husband completely—and so did Carl’s mother. When Rita needed a job, she sent her to me, not to Ray. I think she figured that after years with him, I probably knew him pretty well. I had Rita come to the house for lunch and right away I saw that she was reserved enough for him in public, but underneath, she still had that street flair. I thought they’d make a perfect couple. I hired her to work for Ray.” Kathy grinned. “I am very proud of myself!”
“What about Dr. Hightower?” Olivia asked.
“That was another gift out of the blue. Totally unexpected,” Kathy said. “When Ray told me he was going to see a therapist, I think he expected me to talk him out of it, to say that nothing could be wrong with a great guy like him. But I didn’t. I was hoping with all my might that he was trying to get up the courage to ask me for a divorce. The man has the strange belief that my entire life is him. It almost is, but not by choice!” Kathy poured herself more champagne, minus the orange juice.
Olivia picked up the card and looked at it. “Now that you have what you want, you probably wouldn’t want to change anything.”
“You can get your New York apartment and maybe you can make your father listen to you,” Elise said.
Kathy thought about that for a moment. “I think that in this case it’s like a prisoner who’s released after being found innocent. All his life he would have people saying, ‘Weren’t you in jail? What was it like?’ In the advertising world, I will always be known as ‘Ray’s first wife.’ The one he dumped. As it is, women ask me what it’s like being married to him. They sense that he’s only half a step away from being some street gangster and it excites them.”
“But not you,” Elise said.
Kathy rolled her eyes. “When we got married, he was barely civilized. I taught him table manners, gave him ballroom dancing lessons. You know what he got me for our first anniversary? A handbag with a lizard on it. A real lizard that had once been alive. He said his mother had always wanted one of those bags.”
Olivia was the first to laugh.
“He gave me so many weird gifts that a condition I put on his secretary was that she had to do whatever was necessary to keep him from buying me anything. And I opened an account at Chanel.”
Olivia was laughing harder. “He told me that Elise was all Chanel and Cartier.”
“And who do you think taught him that?” Kathy drained her glass and leaned forward. “This thing—” she nodded at the card “—is a scam. Whoever it is will want lots of money, but I say let’s go anyway. I haven’t had so much fun in years. Just thinking about rewriting my past and not marrying Ray Hanran is making me feel like dancing.”
“Me too!” Elise said. “Imagining running down the aisle in my wedding dress—away from Kent—is a great fantasy.”
“No dancing for me,” Olivia said. “It’s making me feel like driving—not that it’ll do any good. There is no Everlasting Street anywhere in Summer Hill and there’s nothing on FM 77 but a few old houses. One of them was abandoned years ago.”
“I vote for anything that might help me with my current situation. Or at least give me some hope of a solution.” Elise stood up.
“I second that,” Kathy said.
“Put everything in the sink and let’s get in Kathy’s car,” Olivia said. “Mine might be recognized. Anyone have some big sunglasses and some scarves?”
“Prada and Hermès do for you two?” Kathy asked.
“No dead lizards?” Elise said. “Darn!”
They laughed.
*
Olivia drove, Kathy beside her, and Elise got in the back. Olivia was glad the two of them were chatting, bonding. They each had body hang-ups. Kathy obsessed about her weight, and eyed every morsel of food as though weighing it for calories and nutrition.
Whenever Kathy moved, Elise looked at her, assessing every curve. She seemed to be wondering whether being more voluptuous would help her capture love.
Olivia had to fight the urge to lecture both of them. It wasn’t their body types that won or lost a man. It was him. The man. The women had chosen wrong—and Olivia was an expert on that. The things Kit liked about her were what Alan had abhorred. Olivia’s competence, her ability to get a job done, had made Alan feel useless, had taken away his essential feeling of being a man.
It was after Kit returned to her life that she thought about the differences in personalities.
Kit didn’t know it, but she’d asked his son about his mother.
Rowan’s usually serious face softened. “Mom is lovely. She’s related to Italian nobility and she’s quite beautiful. She’s well educated, well traveled, and can talk to anyone about anything.”
“Oh.” Olivia’s eyes showed her disappointment. How could she compete with “Italian nobility”? And she had never been out of the US.
“What Mother couldn’t do was deal with Dad’s peripatetic life. He’d get a call from some government and we were to be gone in twenty-four hours. He expected Mother to organize the move and to take care of everything. But she couldn’t do it. She was used to being taken care of, not the other way around.”
Olivia’s eyes brightened at his words. Moving, organizing, managing people were all things she could do. And more importantly, she would have loved it.
Rowan’s handsome face hardened. “Dad wanted Mother to be something she wasn’t, and when she couldn’t be that person, he got angry.”
Olivia had just nodded. She’d understood well. But understanding didn’t take away the pain.
She drove past Mr. Ellis’s farm. Long ago it had been sold to a developer and a few little houses had been built, with many more planned. If she could go back in time, she’d buy the land with the rocks where she and Kit had sat and talked. Someone told her that the new owner was going to blast them out of the ground. Boring houses needed boring, flat tracts of land to be built on.